The Desert Waits

by J. Carson Black

  “Fundraiser? For what?”

  “For me. I’m running for sheriff.”

  She was aware her mouth had dropped open. So the deputy had ambitions after all. “I’d like that.”

  He was still scrutinizing the view in the mirror. “I’ll pick you up at seven thirty, if that’s all right with you.”

  “Great.”

  The radio crackled. Nick picked up the mouthpiece and spoke into it. “On my way,” he said. “Gotta go. A couple of unfriendly neighbors are squaring off and I’ve got to keep them from taking potshots at each other.”

  Alex opened the passenger door and got out.

  “Friday night, don’t forget,” Nick said.

  “I won’t.” She started around the Bronco to her Jeep.

  “Alex? Who else knows Caroline had HIV?”

  Alex walked over to his window. “Luther, a couple of other people in the cast. Ted, of course.”

  “I’m surprised they were able to keep it a secret.”

  “It doesn’t look like it’ll be one much longer. I suppose you’ll have to report it to the press.”

  “We won’t lie, but we won’t volunteer either. She didn’t die of AIDS, so there’s no reason for anyone to know. Unless ...”

  “Unless?”

  “There’s another possibility. She might have committed suicide.”

  On the way to the neighbor-dispute call, Nick McCutcheon’s mind lingered on Alex Cafarelli. He probably shouldn’t have asked her out. Even in warning her, he was stepping over the line.

  In his press conference today. Sheriff Johnson had executed a complete about-face. The case had never really been closed, he’d explained. They were just trying to avoid a media circus which might have forced the killer to ground.

  Nick had to admit that Johnson made the most of his day in the sun. A sheriff from a small county in Arizona had cracked the crime of the century. He forgot to mention that the perpetrator had done them all a big favor by taking himself out of the equation.

  If Nick pursued it, he’d be in trouble again. Doug Childers was looking over his shoulder, and the little bastard didn’t miss a trick. Nick had no doubt Deputy Doug was running to the sheriff about Nick’s preoccupation with the case.

  Sheriff Johnson had already reprimanded him for looking at Caroline’s effects.

  Nick couldn’t stop thinking about it, though. Particularly after reading some of Booker Purlie’s diary this morning.

  Booker Purlie had written some pretty off-the-wall things. In addition to filling the skies over Mexico with gyrocopters, he compared himself to every leading man from Sean Connery to Brad Pitt. He was convinced Caroline would cast him as her leading man in her next film. Why he thought that, Nick couldn’t imagine. But there was no hint of an attraction to Caroline, only that she’d recognized his “star quality.” They would be the reigning king and queen of Hollywood.

  His fantasies had ranged far and wide. The compound would be a “safe house” for all the poor young people who were “swallowed up and spat out by the movie industry”—the prostitutes, druggies, the bit-part players.

  It would be like Robert Redford’s Sundance Institute, Nick thought, only for losers. As a superstar, Booker would have the clout to help those kids make it in the movies.

  The compound itself would be a studio lot of sorts; there would be a western town for shooting cowboy movies, soundstages, even a haunted house. Every young actor and actress would have his own gyrocopter to fly back and forth to LA for auditions.

  Nice and neat, all tied up with a pretty little bow, but Nick didn’t see any evidence of Booker’s purported obsession with Caroline. He supposed anything was possible in that crazy video-game world inside Booker’s head. Nick couldn’t follow Booker’s thought processes any more than Booker could follow a normal person’s logic.

  But it didn’t make sense that Booker would kill his golden goose. In his mind, Caroline had already agreed to give him the part that would make all his dreams come true. Why kill her?

  He reached the Jenkins’ olive-green mobile home surrounded by junked cars. An irate woman in dungarees and a baseball cap was yelling at a skinny little man in camo pants. The woman held a dead rooster in her hand and was screaming so loud she was frothing at the mouth.

  Nick shut his mind to the Caroline Arnet case and went to work.

  Seventeen

  “Caroline and I on the set of Sasquatch! If you look closely, you can see her tracheotomy scar from a childhood illness.”

  —text accompanying photograph from FALLEN ANGEL: THE CAROLINE ARNET STORY, by Ted Lang

  By five o’clock the following evening, Alex was installed inside the blind. She sat on a camp chair before a tiny window in the blind which had been covered with camo netting. She’d set her camera, a Nikon F3 fitted with a 300 millimeter lens, on a tripod in front of her. The camera lens poked through a slot in the netting directly opposite the sycamore trunk fifty feet away.

  She’d had to make two trips. One for the equipment and one to carry the two-gallon water jug and a backpack full of Fig Newtons and peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches she’d prepared in her room. Beside the camp chair rested Carl Hiaasen’s Double Whammy and Ted’s book. Fine for now, but after dark she wouldn’t dare turn on a flashlight.

  This was the hardest part of her job. Waiting. Sitting in one place, trying not to make any noise. One wrong move—a metal chair leg banging against the tripod, for instance—and it would be all over. Animals in the wild were very sensitive to metallic noises. Fortunately, one of the benefits of her unconventional childhood was her exposure to yoga and meditation. They came in handy now.

  Three cheers for Rainbow Cafarelli.

  Alex shifted quietly in the chair and stretched her legs.

  Yesterday after her meeting with Nick McCutcheon, she’d gone back to the hotel and tried to sleep, managing a couple of catnaps and then forcing herself to stay up late watching old movies. She’d dropped off to sleep around two in the morning and slept until late morning. Tonight would be an all-nighter, and she needed to be fresh.

  She’d bought one of those automatic feeders for Lady—the cat’s nom du jour. Hopefully, the cat box could stand two full days of neglect without bothering the guests in the adjoining rooms. Alex would spend a couple of nights in the blind, and if nothing happened, she’d return to the hotel and start over. That meant lugging the camera, auxiliary flashes, tripods, cables, and battery back and forth, so she would appreciate a dip in the pool afterward. Too bad they didn’t have a jacuzzi.

  She reviewed all her preparations mentally. The flashes which would illuminate the tree trunk had been mounted onto the tripods she’d set up earlier. The connecting cables ran back to the battery and were camouflaged by dirt and leaves. The log had been prepared with fresh cat scent. For good measure, Alex had taken some of Lady’s dry cat food and sprinkled it on a crack in the log, making sure the food was out of view. It wouldn’t look good to have a picture of a wild cat eating Purina Cat Chow. She found it ironic that if Game & Fish discovered that she’d put out food for wild animals, she’d get a fine. But any idiot could come out here at certain times of the year and blow the same animal to smithereens.

  A Coleman lantern hung on a tree—close enough to shed enough light for her to see any movement, but far enough away that if she was lucky, it wouldn’t spook the cat.

  Alex picked up Ted’s book and leafed through the photographs depicting Ted and Caroline on the set of various films, relaxing on their sailboat, at Cannes, arm in arm at the Oscars and the after-Oscars parties—all “A-List,” according to Ted.

  Here were Caroline and Ted with her agent, her personal manager, her business manager, her entertainment attorney, and her publicist, all yucking it up over Evian water and fruit plates at her Malibu beach house. Pictures at restaurants scrupulously labeled: The Palm, The Ivy, Jimmy’s, The Polo Lounge. Alex noticed that many of the photographs in Caroline Arnet’s biography didn’t even include her. He
re was Ted with Charlton Heston, Ted with Tom and Roseanne before the breakup, Ted with Kevin, Ted with Julia. The accompanying text was peppered with terms foreign to Alex: “relationship meetings,” “short lists,” “flavor of the month,” “packaging elements,” “heat,” “buzz.” One photograph featured a full-page Variety ad for a movie called Down and Dirty. Ted Lang produced, directed, and starred in the film. Caroline Arnet’s name loomed large as associate producer, but Alex noticed she didn’t take an acting credit.

  Married to the biggest female star in the world, and Ted Lang was still a name-dropper. Pathetic.

  Not that he ignored Caroline, although the majority of his tribute to her was limited to “brilliant” and “wonderful.” In Ted’s lexicon, Caroline was at turns remarkable, supremely talented, awe-inspiring, troubled, and ill-starred.

  Alex set the book down, feeling a little down and dirty herself. She almost expected some of Ted’s oily obsequiousness to rub off on her. If she wanted to learn anything about what had been going on in Caroline’s life these past fifteen years, she wouldn’t learn it from FALLEN ANGEL.

  She cleaned her palate with Carl Hiaasen until the light faded.

  As the night closed in, Alex had plenty of time to meditate and was surprised at how Caroline dominated her thoughts. The void returned, deeper and more disturbing than ever before. Perhaps the shock was finally wearing off and the grief process had begun.

  She had the vague feeling that she had forgotten something important about Caroline, something that left her in her friend’s debt.

  Unconsciously, her hand reached for the shell necklace, and she was jolted by the realization that she had not taken it off since the desk clerk gave it to her. Not even to shower.

  As she touched the shell, Alex remembered what Luther had said about Caroline saving her life.

  No. That had not happened. Her childhood had been a safe harbor, if a bit out of the ordinary. Despite the fact that her parents’ lifestyle made things difficult for her at school, she knew they loved her, that they were a family in the old-fashioned sense with all the stability and security the word implied. That was not the case with Caroline, whose father was absent and whose mother didn’t pay much attention to her brood once they were born. Even if Alex didn’t take into account the messy house, the car up on blocks in the weedy front yard, the way those kids all shifted for themselves, decanting beans, and cooking instant macaroni for dinner, Alex had known the difference in their lives. It wasn’t only that her parents, both professors at the university, had more money.

  There was that basic knowledge, that pedal point, of support. She could always count on them.

  Alex noticed the mantles on the lantern were growing dimmer. She crept noiselessly from the tent and pumped more air into the fuel tank before returning to the blind.

  At any rate, Caroline had not saved her life in any literal sense. She’d been mentor, counselor, friend, even sister—not savior.

  So why did she feel so guilty? Why did she feel on some deeper level she owed Caroline much more than just thanks for helping her through a stressful adolescence? Why did it seem that she’d left some debt unpaid?

  She’d thought that with Booker dead, at least Caroline’s death would be avenged, and cosmically, she’d be off the hook. But Nick McCutcheon had sewn a seed of doubt that was more than a little unsettling.

  That doubt grew with the darkness. She was alone out here with only a nylon tent between her and anyone who might come by.

  The moon wouldn’t be out for hours. Alex unwrapped a sandwich, more for something to do than out of hunger. She had been out in the wilderness so many nights before; the night was often spooky, but a sort of delicious, ghost-stories-around-the-camp-fire sort of spooky. This was different. She’d never felt as vulnerable as she did tonight.

  Deputy McCutcheon thought the stalker might still be out there, and he was no alarmist. Alex kept the pepper Mace on her lap.

  Something rustled. Alex froze, the sandwich halfway to her lips, then realized it must be a night bird. She squinted through the gap in the blind, through and around the mottled camo netting.

  The lantern hissed, coloring everything in its radius like tarnished brass. If she strained, she could see the stars above the canyon wall. Millions of them. The back of her neck ached from holding it in one position. As she eased back, she fell the muscles in her shoulders protest. Every hour she needed to roll her head, her shoulders, bend her spine backward. Every two hours or so she needed to tend to the lantern. It wasn’t the optimum situation, but it couldn’t be helped.

  Crickets chirped. A wind sprang up, shuttling dirt and leaves down the canyon.

  Every sound was magnified. Alex would find herself growing dull, staring at the same spot, praying for something to happen. She felt her eyelids get heavy, her mind grow numb, and then there would be a sound and she’d jump, her heart picking up speed like a runaway train.

  An owl hooted. Just past midnight.

  Alex slipped deeper into the trance, staring at the spot on the sycamore trunk until her vision blurred softly at the edges.

  Around three in the morning she caught herself dozing. Jerking herself awake, she stared at the clearing, muzzy-headed. The lantern was out.

  Feeling cramped and incredibly tired, she crawled out of the blind and tended to the lantern.

  The cat food on the sycamore trunk was gone. Alex spotted one clear track in the dirt near the tall grass. The cat had been here!

  “Dammit!” she muttered. She’d been so close. It had been here, and she’d chosen that time to fall asleep!

  Anger boiled up inside, so noxious it threatened to choke her. She felt like kicking something. Of all the stupid—

  There was a rustle in the brush. Alex froze. Every sense alert, she stared at the clearing. Could be, the cat would come back if there were any food left.

  This time, she’d damn well make sure she was awake to catch it!

  But the cat didn’t reappear. Just as the tent began to get warm, she fell asleep. In her dreams she was being stalked and was dogged by the grim certainty that if she turned around to face it, the evil she saw would destroy her.

  Rollie Watkins realized he was still wearing his night-vision goggles, even though the sun was up. He pulled them off and set them down on his sleeping bag, stretched aching muscles, and sipped from his canteen. The water was warm. Even though the sun had just pierced the cliff, the day was already heating up. He decided now was the time to take a leak. She wouldn’t be going anywhere for a while. Still, he was careful not to make any noise. He’d gotten the definite impression she was spooked last night.

  As he relieved his aching bladder, Rollie Watkins grinned. This was what he liked best, moving through the desert like a hunting cat, stalking his prey. It required finesse, a patience he’d cultivated for years.

  Everything was under control—another thing Rollie liked. Alex Cafarelli wasn’t going anywhere.

  This was the place.

  Now it was just a matter of waiting and making the right move at the right time.

  Eighteen

  WHO IS TED LANG?

  Caroline Arnet’s husband 74%

  The guy who starred on The Love Boat 26%

  —from an audience poll on Politically Incorrect

  As Nick McCutcheon drove his newly assigned service vehicle toward Palo Duro, he pondered the state of affairs in Gilpin County and his own redefined role.

  The county was vast in area and sparsely populated; there wasn’t enough manpower in any of the law enforcement agencies to patrol the border adequately. Sheriff Kyle Johnson believed in a lean, mean department, a popular notion in these days of slashing budgets to the bone. He supported the usual get-tough tactics: chain gangs, tent cities for inmates, and armed volunteer citizens to patrol the streets. Fertile ground, but already plowed, planted and harvested by Maricopa County’s macho cop of TV-tabloid fame, Sheriff Joe Arpaio. Johnson needed something sensational to top Arpaio’s pa
tented pink underwear for inmates, and he’d found it in his call to reopen the Yuma Territorial Prison—the oven-like dungeon of Wild West days—and shackle the inmates to the walls. Even though Yuma Prison belonged to another county, the idea went over big with the local populace. Money poured in, along with an increase in illegal aliens and drug runners who found the widening holes in the border too attractive to pass up. Sheriff Kyle Johnson was too busy hogging photo ops with chain gangs to notice that drug runners didn’t even bother to hide anymore. Why should they? They had automatic assault weapons and bulletproof vest-piercing bullets while the deputies had service pistols that had not been upgraded in years because of budget constraints.

  The rest of this week Sheriff Johnson would be up at the capital, lobbying for his pet project, which gave Nick some time to think about Caroline Arnet. Her personality, he was convinced, would tell him a lot about who her killer was.

  Who was she? Had she known anyone named Uncle Wiggly? Had she known who her stalker was, and if so, why hadn’t she said anything?

  He was becoming more and more certain the stalker wasn’t Booker Purlie.

  This morning he’d lined up all the cards Caroline and Alex had received. At first sight, the handwriting on the cards looked just like the writing in Booker’s diary. But after wading through Booker’s two-hundred-and-fifty-page diary, Nick had noticed something interesting. Booker’s penmanship changed from day to day, according to his moods and whether or not he took his medication. Sometimes the writing slanted forward, sometimes back. The letters were all childishly round, but sometimes they ran across the page in an illegible scribble.

  But the handwriting in the first two greeting cards—”I’m the luckiest guy in the world”—was the same as in the angry note Caroline had received the night he’d broken into her room: “I could tell you thought I was repulsive.” That didn’t make sense.