Desert Rage

by Betty Webb

  This section of Scottsdale was perfect for a leisurely walk.

  More than fifty art galleries were located within a twenty-block radius, and their windows showcased everything from impressionism to photo realism, to post modernism, to downright kitsch. Interspersed among the galleries were jewelry stores, most of them offering Native American work, Navajo turquoise and silver being the big thing at the moment. For a while, Dr. Teague seemed content to amble along like the other tourists, the flashy window displays working to take the edge off his earlier edginess. Eventually he stopped in front of one of Scottsdale’s less prestigious galleries. The painting in the window featured a large oil of three dolphins frisking with a mermaid. They glowed in the roseate light angling through a pyramid hovering above the waves.

  “Thomas Kinkaid goes to sea,” he said.

  “All it needs is a unicorn.”

  Still staring at the painting, he asked, “Do you think she was telling the truth?”

  I knew he wasn’t talking about the fakey mermaid. “Teenage girls have done crazier things. But the part about hiring a hit man with her allowance money, I’m doubtful about that. Kyle seems the more likely suspect.” Not that the thought made me any happier. The grudging pity I felt for the boy kept nagging at me.

  Ali’s legal situation having been fully covered over the last hour, it was time to ask the question we’d been dancing around since leaving the hotel. “Dr. Teague, you said a couple of times you and your half-brother weren’t close, but did you know the, ah, details about Ali’s birth?”

  He grabbed at his crucifix, then let go as his shoulders tensed and his hands began to twitch. It took him a few moments to answer. “Of course. We, ah…that IVF business, then the…Well, siblings don’t always see eye to eye, do they? Do you have a sister?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  The dolphins lost his interest. When he turned around to face me, I could see a vein throbbing on his temple. “What an odd answer.”

  I gave him the thirty-second version of my childhood.

  Fresh from the horrors of Kenya, he wasn’t all that shocked. “I’m sorry about the foster homes, but adopting a child with your background would have been risky.”

  “Agreed.”

  “Even adopting a newborn, if you don’t know the parents’ background and genetic makeup, that can be risky, too. All sorts of problems are inheritable, say, from paranoid schizophrenia to amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. That’s…”

  “Lou Gehrig’s disease, yes, I know. Is that why your brother opted for IVF rather than adoption?”

  He wiped his brow, where a line of sweat had formed and threatened to run into his eyes. “Arthur discussed it with me before he and Alexandra had the procedure done, not that anything I said swayed his decision.”

  “Did you try?”

  “Once Arthur makes, made, I mean, made up his mind to do something, he became obsessed with it. It’s what made him an excellent physician, but a difficult person to talk to. Asperger’s people are like that.”

  I looked at him in surprise. “Asperger’s?”

  “Sorry. You’re probably not familiar with it.”

  Actually, I knew a little about the syndrome. It was at the high end of the autism spectrum, frequently characterized by obsessive behavior. People suffering from it—although suffering probably wasn’t the right word to use—can function quite well, frequently at the genius level. But because their brains do work differently than the average person’s, they can have trouble with social interactions, coming across as aloof or remote. And they don’t like to be touched.

  “I’ve heard of Asperger’s,” was all I said.

  “Good, then I don’t have to explain it. Well, Arthur had it in spades. For instance, I learned never to bring up the subject of cars, because if I did, he’d talk for hours obsessing about the things. He was always emailing me pictures of some classic car or other, as if I cared, out there in the bush where so many kids were dying. He should have stopped…” Another grab at his crucifix. “Anyway, you couldn’t turn him off once he got started, and it drove Alexandra crazy. She finally had to tell him if he mentioned any car of any kind in her presence, she’d leave him, although I don’t think she really meant it.

  “Alexandra wasn’t only beautiful, she was a good and decent woman. She had a job when they met, but she quit it when they got married to make a home for him. Not that Arthur ever appreciated it. That thing about children, for instance. When Arthur realized she couldn’t get pregnant, he started obsessing about IVF like he obsessed about cars. Being a good Christian, Alexandra didn’t want to undergo the treatments at first, but the son of a bitch kept on and on at her until the poor woman finally gave in.” He heaved a big sigh. “Oh, well, what difference does it make now? What’s done is done, and now Alexandra is with the angels.”

  When he said the name Alexandra, his voice sounded tender. It made me suspect that he harbored something other than Christian love for his brother’s wife. “But now there’s Ali,” I said. And there used to be Alec. I touched him on the arm, only to have him flinch away. Also interesting, since Asperger’s was believed to have a genetic component.

  Dr. Teague shook himself, as if to rid himself of my touch. “Oh. Ali. Right. If you must know, as a practicing Catholic I refuse to have anything to do with artificial means to end pregnancy, prevent pregnancy, or even encourage pregnancy through drugs or any other procedure which attempts to circumvent natural law, so when Arthur brought it up, of course I argued against it.”

  “Really? I know plenty of Catholics who don’t agree with you on the IVF business, priests among them.”

  “Apostates!” When he turned to me, his eyes glittered with religious fervor, and for a moment I feared I would be on the receiving end of a sermon about the evils of free thought. It didn’t happen, though. He grunted, stroked his crucifix, and turned back to the dolphins.

  Only by reminding myself that this man had risked his life to inoculate Kenyan children was I able to temper my next remark. “Apostates? That’s rather a harsh judgment, don’t you think?’

  He looked at me again. “God is sometimes harsh, but we must submit to his will.”

  I studied his crucifix. It was larger than the usual cross, almost aggressively so. Had a touch of Asperger’s caused him to obsess about God instead of collectible cars? “Using your own logic, then, wouldn’t it follow that the Kenyan children you inoculated against polio should be left to contract the disease?”

  “Don’t play word games with me, Ms. Jones. The situations are nothing alike. Anyway, you have your beliefs—perhaps—and I have mine. Suffice it to say my brother and I clashed over the IVF issue, much as we clashed on others. Arthur was always a hardhead, so he paid no attention to me, just maintained that the Camerons had never displayed any genetic problems, none that we knew about, anyway. And since extensive DNA and psychological testing is required of any prospective egg donor, he believed the procedure was the next best thing to having children with Alexandra.”

  He paused, sighed. “Talk about a beautiful woman. And such a good one, too.”

  Yes, she’d been beautiful, but I’d seen Alexandra Cameron’s before and after pictures and it was the after that haunted me.

  Before he became mired in his memories, I said, “By the way, Dr. Teague, a large sum of money, eighteen thousand dollars, to be exact, was found hidden in your brother’s house. Do you know anything about that?”

  A vein throbbed in his forehead. A tell? “There’s nothing I can tell you about that.”

  I tried again. “Is there anything you can tell me, anything, that could have led to Ali’s problems with your brother? Or his murder? ”

  “How would I know? Other than a phone call now and again and the obligatory holiday cards and presents, like I’ve explained, we didn’t keep in close contact. Looking back, I wish it could have b
een different, but we were on separate life paths.”

  “Not so much. Both doctors, both…” I paused, belatedly realizing how little I knew about Bradley Teague’s personal life. “Do you have children?”

  He gave me a wintry smile. “Not that I know of.”

  “Touché, Dr. Teague, but considering the situation, my question is relevant. Despite your different philosophies, your brother named you as his children’s guardian if something happened to him or Alexandra. Zellar mentioned in passing that you’re a widower. Any future marital prospects? Someone who might serve as a mother figure for Ali?”

  The vein in his temple throbbed even harder. “No. My marriage wasn’t happy. When Jeanette contracted a particularly aggressive form of pancreatic cancer, we’d been contemplating a legal separation, but of course after her diagnosis…” He let the sentence trail off, cleared his throat and began again. “After my wife died, I confronted the fact that our problems were due mainly to my inability to, as Jeanette put it, maintain close human contact.” He sighed. “That appears to be a family trait.”

  Like Asperger’s.

  Unaware of the way my mind was working, he continued, “Catholicism aside, I didn’t go to Kenya and similar hellholes because I’m some walk-on-water saint. The unvarnished truth is that, other than a brief infatuation with my brother’s wife, I’ve never really cared much for people. Just their symptoms.”

  Despite the day’s heat, I felt a chill. How would the troubled Ali fare under the guardianship of this man? And, come to think of it, how had she really fared under the guardianship of her own father? Had Alexandra been warm enough, empathic enough, to make up for her husband’s remoteness?

  As if he’d read my mind, he said, “My niece will receive good care, Ms. Jones, I assure you of that. As for the rest of it, what you’d probably call the ‘emotional’ part…” He shrugged. “Well, I’ll try. You see, working with Doctors Without Borders has more to do with the expiation of guilt than anything else, and I certainly do not want to accumulate more. So Ali will want for nothing. Now please excuse me, but I need time to myself.”

  Dismissal delivered, he clutched at his crucifix again, then left me with the capering dolphins and moved on down the street.

  Alone.

  Chapter Nine

  Kyle

  I need to see Ali.

  Need to see her.

  But they’re keeping Ali from me, telling me I’ll never see her again except maybe in court but probably not even then because we’re going to have different trials.

  Why can’t I see her?

  I need to see her, need to talk to her, need to tell her to stop saying the things everybody tells me she’s saying, crazy stuff like she planned it and stuff.

  She’s got to stop saying that, needs to tell them it was all me, that I did it all, did it, did it, did it.

  She’s got to shut up.

  When I told the guard the other day that I wanted to tell Ali something, he just laughed and laughed, said he knew what I wanted to do, tell her what to say and what not to say. He said Ali and me should’ve got our stories straight right off the bat instead of making it up as we went along. He also said we were mean-stupid to kill her mom and dad and brother, mean to kill them in the first place, stupid to believe we could run away to Hollywood and get jobs in the movies, buy a big house with a big pool, and throw big expensive parties and stuff. He kept calling us mean-stupid, mean-stupid like all the other kids in this place.

  Ali’s not mean, except to people she thinks might hurt me. And she is so not stupid. She’s smart, real smart. She knows all about things I never even heard of. She reads books on medicine and stuff, knows the names of all the bones in the human body, can recite them all by heart.

  That’s smart!

  Me, though? Compared to Ali, no way, and compared to maybe the guard and everyone else I’ve ever known, maybe I am stupid.

  A real no-hoper.

  But Ali keeps on reminding me that I get B’s and C’s on my report cards. Okay, so maybe there was that D in algebra, but I didn’t fail, did I? Ali said that what with all that moving around from place to place I had to do, I never failed any class, which she thinks is pretty good. Most of the kids in here got moved around all the time like me, but they don’t get B’s and C’s, just mainly D’s and E’s.

  She told me to remember I even got an A in English once! We was supposed to write one of those dumb “What I Did On My Summer Vacation” essays, so I did and the teacher said it made her cry, that she’d been going to give me a B in the class but that after reading my essay she changed her mind and gave me an A.

  When I took it home and showed it to Mom Fi, she cried, too.

  So did Ali. After she read it she put her arms around me and hugged and hugged, crying like a baby.

  Not that Ali’s a crier. I only saw her cry that once, and it was for somebody else, me, not for herself.

  Maybe Ali’s right, maybe I’m not as stupid as everyone says I am. Well, everyone except her and Mom Fi and Dad Glen. They don’t think I’m stupid at all. They think I’m smart, they say it all the time, they tell me I just missed a lot of school and most of the time there was nobody around who made me do my homework.

  I miss them, even though they made me do my homework.

  I especially miss Mom Fi. Almost as much as I miss Ali.

  I hear Mom Fi was awful mad when she found out I took off to Hollywood with Ali, but I left a note, didn’t I? I asked her to please feed Chester, Wendy, Alice, Veronica, and Archie, that I’d call her collect as soon as me and Ali got to California, so not to worry, we were fine, and when we got our jobs in the movies I’d send money home so she and Dad Glen could fix up the house and buy toys for the twins.

  I miss the twins, too.

  Crazy screaming little monsters but so cute you can’t get mad at them. Besides, they’re really only babies, aren’t they? Babies don’t know nothing yet, don’t know about…

  No, not going to think about all that stuff.

  Have to see Ali.

  Have to tell her to tell them I did it.

  Did everything.

  Thought about it. Planned it.

  Did it!

  Chapter Ten

  Lena

  After watching Dr. Teague disappear into a gallery that specialized in Navajo silverwork, I continued my way to Desert Investigations. The Valley Ho being so close to my office, I’d left my Jeep in its designated covered parking spot, but as I passed by the private parking lot next to our building, I saw Big Black Hummer hunkered down in Jimmy’s spot again. A glance along the street revealed Jimmy’s Toyota pickup, sitting in the soon-to-be-broiling sun.

  Patience at end, I called the tow company.

  Stepping out of the blazing Arizona sunshine, the office looked dark in comparison. I could smell coffee, but something seemed off about it.

  “Top o’ the morning to you, kemo sabe,” Jimmy quipped, staring at his computer screen. He had to have been in the office for at least an hour, because his desk swam in a sea of paper.

  “How could you tell it was me? You didn’t even turn around. It could have been a client.”

  “Yardley’s lemon verbena soap. You’re the only person I know who uses it.”

  I segued away from the intimate subject of my bath soap. “I called the tow truck on the Hummer.”

  He made a face. “You sure that was necessary?”

  “Positive. I’m surprised you didn’t.”

  He shrugged. “I’ve learned to pick my battles.”

  Irritated by his lack of irritation, I changed the subject. “Whatever happened to the theory of the paperless office?”

  “Like most theories, it didn’t pan out.” When Jimmy spun around in his chair, his long black hair swept several papers off his desk. He ignored them. “So how’d things go with Ali’s un
cle this morning?”

  While pouring myself a cup of coffee, I summed up the conversation. “Dr. Teague is handling the situation as well as anyone could, I guess, and appeared open enough during our interview. He even displayed a not-too-secret love for his brother’s wife. Oh. And he’s religious.”

  “But?”

  I took a sip of the coffee. Some sort of frou-frou vanilla/hazelnut blend, not my type of thing, but what the heck. It was caffeinated. “What makes you think there’s a ‘but’?”

  “Because I know you.”

  “I wish you’d go back to Blue Mountain. This crap tastes like candy.”

  “There’s an unopened bag of Blue Mountain beans in the cupboard, and the grinder’s clean. Have at it.”

  “I hate the noise the grinder makes.”

  “Poor you. Tell me why you’re not comfortable about the interview. It’s all over your face.”

  “That’s disgust at the coffee.”

  “If you don’t tell me, then I won’t tell you what I’ve found out about Dr. Cameron’s bank account.”

  “All right, all right. Here’s what I think. For all Teague’s supposed openness, I could tell he was holding something back. He admitted he and his brother weren’t close, but put it down to Asperger’s behavior on his brother’s part. After sounding a bit disapproving over the egg donor situation, he started to add something, then changed his mind and just said that siblings don’t always see eye to eye. There’s more there, I can feel it. From the way he talked about his brother’s wife—he even commissioned a painting of her, pretending it was a wedding present—maybe there was tension between them over Alexandra. Still, he seemed forthright enough, accent on the word seemed, so maybe it was something other than unrequited love. I’ll have another go at him before he leaves town, which will probably be right after the funeral.”

  “Back to Kenya? But Lena, now that he’s Ali’s designated guardian, I don’t see how that’s possible.”

  “Not much guardianship involved if the girl remains in juvenile detention until she’s eighteen.”