Desert Rage

by Betty Webb

  Grumbling, I agreed to meet him at “two thirty or thereabouts,” and hung up. When I checked my watch, I saw it was almost seven. I could call Jimmy without getting him out of bed, so I hit speed dial. He picked up right away.

  “I’m shocked,” he said. “I expected your call long before this.”

  “Every now and then I do try to be considerate.”

  I interrupted his laughter with another bad thought from my sleepless night. “The Cameron case file was in the office.”

  A long silence, then, “It’s toast, then. But it was just a copy of the original, wasn’t it?”

  “A copy of a copy. I’ll have to ask Ali’s attorney for another one, or have his office email me what they can. That’s probably what I should’ve done in the first place. You know how…”

  “It’s Saturday, Lena.”

  “So?”

  “Zellar’s office won’t be open.”

  “Since attorneys bill by the hour, I’m betting you’re wrong. By the way, have you had time to check out the owner of Big Black Hummer?”

  “Where are you calling from? Not your motel. I hear birds.”

  “I’m in front of what’s left of Desert Investigations. Well, did you?”

  A grumbling noise. “Take me more for granted, why don’t you? Okay, if you must know, I ran a quick check of the plate and found the vehicle registered to a Terry Jardine, who lives at a south Scottsdale resident address, which comes as a surprise, since a Hummer’s a pretty pricey vehicle. I would have done more checking, grabbed his driver’s license and other info, but I’m still busy working on the Cameron case. Just please don’t tell me you want to go talk to Hummer Guy.”

  “So what if I do?”

  “Bad idea. Regardless of the suspicious timing, Hummer Guy might not be the guilty party. We’ve irritated enough people over the years, and given all this heat lately, one of them might have snapped. Ray Bradbury wrote a story about something like that once, the effect of hot weather on crime. ‘Touched with Fire,’ I think it was called. Anyway, there’s no point in going off half-cocked with Mr. Jardine, whose vehicle might simply have been in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

  “In other words, you think I should just sit around and wait for the cops to do something? Given their backlogged caseload?”

  “Arson is a felony. They’ll get to it.”

  “Yeah, sometime next month, maybe. I just got off the phone with the fire marshal. He can’t check out the building until around three. Or thereabouts.”

  “Lena…”

  One of the cactus wrens found a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup wrapper. After much cheeping and cawing, the crow wrestled the wrapper away and flew off with it to one of the tall palm trees lining Main Street. For a moment the wrens looked like they were considering a pursuit, but then changed their minds and resumed pecking through the rubble.

  “Lena, don’t…”

  “Don’t worry, I won’t do anything rash. Now give me Mr. Jardine’s address, then you can get back to finding out where Dr. Cameron was getting all that cash.”

  Amid much grumbling, Jimmy gave me the information.

  Despite Jimmy’s belief, I seldom go off half-cocked, but as an ex-cop I disliked coincidence. Desert Investigations had been firebombed the same day I’d had Big Black Hummer towed. Cliffie had described the vehicle that delivered the firebomb as loud, something Hummers tend to be. Ergo, its owner was Suspect No. 1.

  And I had every intention of checking him out.

  ***

  Terry Jardine lived in a tidy south Scottsdale neighborhood near the intersection of Miller Road and McKellips. Basically blue-collar, most of the small ranch homes that lined Buena Vista Drive were immaculate, with groomed desert landscaping, well-trimmed palm trees, and here and there, a decorative fence painted the same color as the trim on the house.

  The Jardine house wasn’t so well-kept. Its weedy lawn, crumbling stucco, and disintegrating sun screens screamed cheap rental, and as I drove my Jeep by to hide it on a different side street, I wondered how Mr. Jardine afforded his expensive Hummer. Drug sales? Possibly. Many street-corner hustlers had flashy cars but lived in non-flashy housing. Unless they were higher end dealers, that was, which didn’t appear to be the case here.

  Once I found a parking spot between a perfectly restored ’76 Camaro and a nearly new Toyota 4Runner, I strolled casually toward the house. Jardine might recognize my Jeep, but probably not me, so I felt safe. As I drew near the house, I saw a big BEWARE OF DOG sign on the tall wooden gate to the backyard. The sign was punctuated by the sound of frantic barking. From the bass timbre of the woofs, I envisioned a large dog. Shepherd? Pit bull? Rottweiler? That meant no in-place reconnoitering.

  I’d just reached the far end of the yard when Big Black Hummer, bailed out of the impound lot, growled its way up the street and into the drive. A night-shift worker? A playa back from a night on the town?

  I bent down and fumbled with my shoelaces as the Hummer came to rest. Jardine didn’t get out right away. I could barely see him through the dark-tinted windows, but I could tell he was fussing around with something next to him.

  Then the Hummer’s door opened and out stepped Monster Woman.

  Shouldering her gym bag.

  The air surrounding her thrummed with adrenaline, steroids, and rage. Huffing like an out-of-breath Clydesdale, she stomped up to the front door, her hands clenching and unclenching, readying themselves for whatever adversary might present itself. Because of her dark sunglasses—even darker than the Hummer’s tinted windows—I couldn’t see her eyes but could imagine them. Ice blue, black pinpricks for pupils, focused on individual pieces of her body, never once seeing the whole.

  Fascinated, I continued to study her through the corner of my eye as she stuck her key into the front door, her glutes bunching as she did so. When she disappeared into the house, I hurried back to my Jeep and drove away.

  ***

  Later, in a very different neighborhood, I caught up with Tiffany Browning-Meyers, my mini-Goth Facebook friend, a block away from her house. She was headed in the direction of Four Palms Middle School.

  “School on a weekend?” I asked, pulling over to the curb.

  The little tween recognized me at once. “Yeah, if your parents pay extra. The class is going to visit some old Hohokam ruins.”

  “Have time for a short ride first?”

  She checked her watch, which I could have sworn was a four thousand dollar Clerc. I consoled myself by pretending it was a knockoff.

  Oblivious to my watch envy, the little tween’s face broke into a big smile. “Majorly. But I have to be on the bus in a half hour.”

  “No prob. Hop in.”

  The girl was as smart as she was Goth, so once she had settled herself, she said, “So what do you want to grill me about this time? Ali or Kyle?”

  “You like Kyle, right?” I pulled away from the curb and headed toward the school.

  “Yeah, but not in that way.” She shot me a look from kohl-rimmed eyes.

  “Something about him worry you?”

  She tossed her head, creating a waterfall of long black hair. “As if. Nah, Kyle’s great-looking and all, even with all those scars on his arms he got from his bio-parents, but he’s too much wanksta for me.”

  “Wanksta?”

  “You know, somebody who tries to act tough but is just the opposite. Anyway, Jacob Finn and me, he’s my only, and still will be when he gets back from Denmark. Unlike certain people I could mention, we don’t step out on each other.” She then proceeded to give me a comprehensive synopsis of the mating habits of fourteen-year-olds in the twenty-first century. It was terrifying.

  I cleared my throat. “Well, that’s, ah, nice to know, but unlike the others, Kyle and Ali were, um, true to each other?”

  She held up two fingers close t
ogether. “Siamese freaking twins.”

  “How did their parents feel about that? I’ve been told they were worried.”

  “Depends on who told you. At first Ali’s parents knew zip ’cause she didn’t tell them about him right away. When she finally did, they were okay at first, but after a while Ali’s mom started thinking they were too intense and should maybe cool it. But, like, who cares, ’cause her parents could be weird, okay, well, maybe just her father. Mrs. Cameron was okay. More or less, but, kinda like…” She frowned, creating a thin little line of black lipstick. “Oh, I dunno. As for Kyle’s folks—they’re just foster parents, you know—from what I hear, they were flat out trying to break them up.”

  “Are you sure of that?”

  She nodded that yes, she was.

  “But if Kyle’s foster parents were trying to break them up, what was their reasoning?”

  “Dunno. Better ask them.”

  “I will. In the meantime, what was so ‘weird’ about Ali’s parents?”

  She thought about that for a moment, then said, “Okay. Here’s the deal. Her mom was sweet, everyone liked her, mainly because she was so beautiful and always making things for us, like homemade trail mix, fancy little cut-out veggies, sometimes that Greek thing called hummus, dips, you know. With olives and some spicy stuff. Ground it up herself. At times she seemed so smart, but other times, she was kinda clueless, you know, like, walking around in a fog, knowing nothing about nothing, like, about Ali always sneaking out the window at night to see Kyle, stuff like that. But you just had to love her. My boyfriend was over there once, and he said she was like this beautiful lost princess, just waiting for someone to rescue her. But that’s guys for you, hopeless romantics, right?”

  “Uh, right.” Good grief, did this little girl already know things about men I still didn’t?

  Her next comment jerked me back from my self-questioning. “Ali’s dad, now there’s the weird one.”

  “Weird in what way?”

  An exaggerated shrug. “Creepy.”

  “‘Creepy,’ as in flirting with young girls, trying to touch them?”

  A laugh. “That’s so random! You’re a bit weird yourself, you know that? Nah, Dr. Cameron wasn’t into little girls, he was just, I don’t know, like I said, creepy. Like when he walked into a room he sometimes tried to act all jolly and stuff, but everybody else got real quiet, see what I mean?”

  Oddly enough, I did. She had just described someone with Asperger’s trying hard to fit in and not doing a very good job.

  “Because of him, none of us really liked going over there,” she continued. “That’s why when we all got together, it was always at somebody else’s house. Usually mine, because my mom…” She blinked, probably belatedly remembering the trouble her mother’s hair-dying, beer-supplying habits had caused.

  I rescued her from her embarrassment. “Did Ali ever show up at school with bruises?”

  “You mean, did her old man beat her, rape her, knock her up so she had to have an abortion? Hey, the dude was creepy, but not that kind of creepy. Ali never had a mark on her ’cept what she got playing soccer. You ought to see that girl on the field, competitive as hell, she’d plow through a line, like, like a tank or something. Talk about an animal!”

  I pulled up in front of the school, which, given what I’d just learned about tween romance, I now viewed with considerably more cynicism. “Have fun in summer school,” I said.

  Another head shake, another waterfall of black hair. “It’s not summer school, it’s a Special Projects semester, and I’m hoping mine gets me into Vassar. Know what it’s about?”

  “Lay it on me.”

  “Native American slavery in the Southwest. Did you know Spanish friars used Indian slaves to build their missions?”

  When I nodded, she looked disappointed. “Anyway, Special Projects ends next Friday. Then you can give me that Jeep ride you promised.”

  “You just had it.”

  “Five blocks? I don’t think so! You’re taking me off-road, somewhere in the Tonto National Forest, that’s what you’re doing. Just email me the day and time and I’ll make room for it in my calendar.”

  With a final toss of her black-dyed hair, she walked away, leaving me feeling very, very old.

  Still parked outside the school, I phoned Zellar’s office. I was right. He was in. When I informed him what had happened to Desert Investigations, he switched me over to Babette, his secretary.

  “Your boss makes you work on weekends?” I asked.

  “For double time-and-a-half I’d work on Christmas, too. He says you need another copy of the case file?”

  “Afraid so.”

  “It’ll take a while,” she said, sounding apologetic.

  “How long’s ‘a while’?”

  “Two or three hours, maybe.”

  Having expecting a couple of days’ wait at the very least, I could have kissed her. “Just give me a call the second you’re done, okay? One other thing, could you also copy everything on an attachment and email it to me at desertinvestigations.com?” In case the second file got firebombed, too.

  “Give me four hours, then. I’ll make so much money working today I won’t even know how to spend it.”

  Thank God for greed. After singing Babette’s praises to the skies, I hung up and pulled away from the curb.

  ***

  Fiona Etheridge, Kyle’s foster mother, was home but the twins weren’t.

  “CPS turned them over to their grandmother,” Fiona explained. Her eyes were red from weeping, but her voice was steady as she led me through a clean, toy-free living room into a spotless kitchen. I missed the mess.

  “Which grandmother? Paternal or maternal?” From my reading about the case, I remembered that both grandmothers had troubled backgrounds.

  “Paternal, although I’m not supposed to tell you. Apparently she’s been clean since her last stint in rehab.”

  “How long ago was that?”

  “Six months.”

  Not a decision I would have made, but Child Protective Services’ avowed mission was to “keep families together,” no matter how dangerous the practice. “How can you stand it?” I asked her.

  “I can’t.” As we settled ourselves on stools around the kitchen island, she poured me a cup of coffee and absentmindedly dumped in four teaspoons of sugar and enough milk to turn the liquid pale beige.

  I sipped at it and tried to keep from gagging. “Nice.”

  “Liar.” She made a similar face, having fixed the same concoction for herself and found it wanting. “Oh, hell. I hardly know what I’m doing today.” Grabbing both cups, she dumped the coffee-sugar-milk concoction down the sink. “How about a Diet Coke?”

  “That’ll work for me.”

  After she’d fetched two cold cans from the refrigerator, we sat quietly for a while, listening to the electronic hums of an empty house until she finally broke the silence. “I did get some good news yesterday. The judge in Kyle’s case vacated his earlier non-communication order and is allowing us to visit, so Glen and I are going over there this afternoon.”

  Next to finding out I’d get another copy of the Cameron case files, this was the best news I’d had all morning. “That’s great, Fiona. I’m sure it will be of immense help to him. Psychologically speaking, that is. But, ah, I came over to ask you a few questions, so if you’ll, ah, well…” Given her grief over losing the twins, I felt hesitant.

  She waved away my doubt. “What do you want to know?”

  “My sources tell me you didn’t approve of Kyle’s relationship with Ali.”

  “Who told you that?”

  “I never divulge my sources.” Especially when they’re fourteen-year-old Gothettes.

  Fiona shook her head. “Well, it’s not quite true. Glen and I, we both liked Ali, and we were happy Kyle found
someone he cared about and who seemed to care about him, but we didn’t want him to get hurt. Foster care kids…” It was her turn to stop and consider her words carefully. “Well, this is something you would know all about, isn’t it?” At my nod, she continued. “Foster kids tend to go one of two ways—either emotionally remote or overly attached. With Kyle it was the second. He attached himself to people immediately, which can lead to a lot of rejection. Since Glen and I got just as attached to him, it worked out well—on that front, at least—but with the Ali situation, apparently not so much.” She studied her Diet Coke. The bubbles had almost disappeared. “Considering everything that’s happened, you’ll find this hard to believe, but as far as Ali was concerned, we never saw any problems with her. It was Ali’s father we didn’t much like.”

  This, coming hard on the heels of the mini-Goth’s comment that Dr. Cameron was “creepy,” made me sit up straight. “Why?”

  She made a waving motion with her right hand, as if to brush something away. But there were no flies in the spotless kitchen, no motes of dust. Maybe she was just waving away the doubt in her own voice.

  “We ran into him a couple of times, once at Trader Joe’s, the other time at a PTA meeting, and, what can I say? There just seemed to be something…something lacking with him. Nothing I can exactly put my finger on, but, well, something. He acted friendly enough, but…” Her face changed. “That’s it! He acted friendly, but really wasn’t. Remembering back, I don’t think he would have noticed if I’d fallen over and died right in front of him, which is odd, him being a doctor and all.”