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Desert Rage

Page 21

by Betty Webb


  The sixth was the most interesting: Detective Pete Halliwell, from Scottsdale PD, informing me that a Ms. Terry Jardine had been arrested early that morning as a suspect in the Desert Investigations arson. I returned the call immediately, only to reach Halliwell’s voice mail. Disappointment led to disappointment as I responded to the client calls, only to wind up in their voice mail systems, too. Irritated, I turned my attention to my enchiladas and forgot everything else.

  Thirty minutes later I was on the Black Canyon Freeway, headed toward the I-10 interchange. Several more minutes later, I glommed onto Loop 202 east until it dumped me out in Queen Creek, almost fifty miles away. Good thing I like to drive, even though the Jeep was becoming increasingly testy. Not as testy as some of the drivers I encountered on the way, though. In summer, road rage is the price you pay for living in Arizona.

  The family of Sidney Hoyt, who had burned his wife and three children alive to collect on their insurance, lived in a once-quiet farming community that had now been gobbled up by suburbs. My seventh foster home, or was it my eighth, had been in Queen Creek, and it had been one of CPS’ better placements. The Stearson family owned a dairy farm, and I had helped them out by attaching automatic milking machines to placid cows’ udders. As a reward, I’d been allowed to ride Sparkle, the family’s just-as-placid old quarter horse mare, and by the time I’d been yanked away from the Stearsons—I forget why—I’d become a passable rider.

  The minute I hopped off the 202 at the San Tan Village Parkway exit ramp, I realized that the Stearsons’ farm was only a memory. The drive down Greenfield Road toward Queen Creek showcased housing development after housing development, broken up every now and then by bustling shopping centers. The fact that the smell of cow manure no longer hung in the air came as no comfort. Then, after turning east at the new, stop-lighted intersection of Greenfield and Herford roads, I got a fresh surprise. While the Stearsons’ dairy acreage had vanished, the farmhouse—the one I’d once lived in—remained. But something terrible had happened to it.

  The clapboard siding the Stearsons had kept a pure white was now almost stripped of paint, all shutters but one were hanging askew, and the roof appeared beyond repair. Next to a cyclone-fenced lot with a sign FOR SALE, was a slapped-together chicken coop that boasted no chickens. In the front yard, two eucalyptus trees were in the process of dying from lack of care, and in the back, the dairy barns were gone. Bewildered, I double-checked the address Jimmy had given me. 37567 E. Keltie Lane. This was the place where the baby-burner’s family lived, all right, only when I lived there with the Stearsons, the address had been Rural Route 37. No wonder I hadn’t recognized it.

  I parked my Jeep on the rutted drive behind two pickup trucks that looked like they’d been abandoned sometime during the Reagan administration, and picked my way up the path to the house. The snarls of several huge dogs chained to metal stakes near the front steps accompanied me on my trek. By the time I arrived at the stairs, burrs clung to my black jeans. Jimmy must have made one of his rare mistakes; surely no one lived here. They only dropped by every now and then to throw trespassers to the hounds.

  Before I could mount the stairs, the front door flew open and an elderly woman hobbled out. She wore a printed housedress as faded as she was.

  “What you want?” she yelled, in a voice harsh enough to finish stripping the paint off the house.

  I flashed my ID but she didn’t even look at it. Maybe she couldn’t read.

  “I said, what you want?”

  Just what I needed, another hostile interview.

  “Ma’am, I’m here to…”

  Suddenly two men, both at least six-three, loomed up behind her. Middle-aged, red-faced, and dentally challenged, they looked enough alike to be twins, but only one brandished a baseball bat.

  Bat Boy yelled, “Fucking reporters, think you can come ’round here botherin’ us! Well, we got us some advice for you! Get the hell off our property!”

  “But I’m not a…”

  Bat Boy shoved past the old woman and started across the porch, accompanied by frantic snarls and barks from the hounds.

  I like to think of myself as brave, but I’m also smart.

  So I got the hell out of there.

  ***

  Regardless of the distance between them, I had meant to visit all five families on Jimmy’s list today, since on Sundays most people are home, but after my unsettling morning I decided to return to the office instead. Well, Jimmy’s office, the situation at Desert Investigations being what it was. While fighting the freeways back to Scottsdale, I mulled over what I had already learned.

  Unless Felix Phelps had enough money to hire a hit man, which I doubted, he hadn’t killed the Camerons, and he was physically incapable of carrying out the crime himself. But the family of Kenny Dean Hopper harbored at least one individual who—half-mad with grief—appeared to possess the will and ability to kill for revenge. Ditto for the Neanderthal-ish Hoyts.

  Grief does odd things to people. Whether a dull pain or a sharp knife, grief is a wound that never heals, no matter how or by whom it is inflicted. With these people it wasn’t as if their loved ones had died of natural causes—they’d been purposely put to death by the state of Arizona. It might seem odd that innocent families grieved over the execution of a conscienceless killer, but in reality, such sorrow was the most natural thing in the world. After all, the survivors bore wounds, too. Kin was kin, regardless of what crimes had been committed. Some survivors were able to pretend they felt nothing, but the majority of the wounded limped along, dealing with what had to be dealt with as well as they could, day after sad day.

  Thinking about the various ways of handling grief made me wonder how Ali was doing. Since I couldn’t call her from my Jeep, I did the next best thing: called her attorney.

  “It is Sunday,” Stephen Zellar grumped, after picking up before the second ring had finished. “You think I don’t deserve time off?”

  I could barely hear him over the road noise, which even this far away from Phoenix proper, was considerable as a caravan of RVs, moving vans, and even a boat on a flatbed roared by. “I called your office number,” I yelled over the din, “so apparently you don’t think you deserve time off, either.”

  “That is not my point.”

  “How’s Ali? Has she been released into her uncle’s custody yet?”

  A sigh. “There appears to be a problem.”

  “What?” Damned traffic.

  “I said, there appears to be a problem.”

  Despite the new hands-free apparatus in my Jeep, Zellar’s statement alarmed me enough that I nearly swerved out of my lane and into the ’72 Cadillac convertible next to me. My inattention was rewarded by frantic honking.

  “Don’t tell me Ali decided not to withdraw her confession!” I said, steering the Jeep back into its own lane. As the Cadillac sped away, its driver, a silver-haired granny, flipped me the bird.

  “Ali did exactly what she promised she would do and signed the appropriate papers to that effect. But we are faced with one more obstacle.”

  “Which is?”

  “She will not disclose what she was doing the day of the, ah, incident.”

  Incident. An interesting word to describe charnel-house slaughter. “Why not?”

  “I certainly wish I knew, Ms. Jones. As it stands now, our client has little chance of being released on bond. Or at least, not until we can prove she was elsewhere during the, ah, incident, and thus can satisfy the judge that she poses no threat to society. We need to remember that three people are dead, one of them a child, and Ali’s retracted confession alone does not allay the seriousness of those charges.”

  No mention of Kyle there, not that I should have expected it, coming from the by-the-book Zellar, but still. Didn’t he care about the boy? Not that I didn’t already know the answer. I did, though, remind him of one thing. “
The funeral is Tuesday. Were you able to get the go-ahead for her to attend?”

  “With some difficulty I did, yes. Ali will be allowed to attend the memorial and the funeral both, albeit heavily guarded. And she’ll be in shackles, which I find quite abhorrent.”

  “What?” A semi had taken up position on my left, and hung there belching fumes and noise.

  Zellar raised his voice to a shout. “I said, she’ll be there! In shackles! Guarded!”

  The image of Ali in chains, standing over her family’s graves, was so distressing that I would have wrung my hands, but I wasn’t certain that the driver of the rig next to me even saw my Jeep. Attention was required.

  Then Zellar surprised me. Still shouting, he said, “Perhaps you, being a woman and all, can talk some sense into the child’s head. I’ve begun to suspect the reason she will not tell me where she was during the, ah, incident, is because she might have been involved in something that had an, ah, sexual component. With her so-called partner in crime.”

  Could this case get any messier? But it was the twenty-first century, and girls will be girls. I checked my rearview mirror. No tailgaters, and the ramp leading to Loop 202 lay less than a quarter mile ahead. I put on my retrofitted turn signal.

  “I’m headed for juvie now!” I screamed to Zellar. “As soon as I find out what’s going on, I’ll let you know. “

  He screamed back. “Be sure and do that, Ms. Jones. If I don’t hear from you by then, I’ll see you at the funeral. Wear black. Not that you ever wear anything else.”

  He ended the call as the Jeep cruised up the exit ramp.

  ***

  “On Monday, July 8, where were you between noon and three p.m., when you showed up at the vet’s office with Misty?” I asked Ali.

  We were in a new interview room, this one, for some indecipherable reason, painted such a bright chartreuse I was tempted to put on my sunglasses.

  Ali scowled, as usual. “None of your business.”

  “Didn’t your attorney explain that merely retracting your confession isn’t enough, that you need to provide an alibi, too?”

  “I don’t have to talk to you.” Arms crossed, chin thrust forward.

  “What’d you have for lunch today? Bile?”

  “Bitch.”

  God, I loved this kid. “Back at ya.”

  My chipper tone must have disconcerted her, because her lower lip began to wobble. “You…you…”

  “Me, what?”

  “You promised you’d get us out of here, me and Kyle!”

  “I said that if you retracted your confession, your attorney could start the necessary work to get you out. But when I talked to him a little while ago, he said you wouldn’t tell him where you and Kyle were when—sorry, but I have to be blunt here—when your family was murdered, so there’s nothing he can do unless you change your mind and open up. You need an alibi, Ali. Kyle’s miserable, by the way. He doesn’t have a high-powered attorney like yours, or a well-off uncle, either. All he has is you, so since you don’t want to do what it takes to help him…” Guilt card duly played, I let my sentence trail off.

  She looked down at the floor. Nothing there but a drain and our shadows, cast by yellowish overhead lighting. “I can’t.”

  “Any day now, you realize, some banger or other punk might decide to make an example of Kyle. He’s not locked up with a bunch of primped and powdered Valley girls.”

  “Neither am I,” she muttered.

  “Oh, kiddo, it’s not the same.”

  I began counting through the ensuing silence, deciding that when I reached one hundred, I would get up and leave.

  On the eighty-four count, she gave in. “Kyle and I, we weren’t supposed to be there.”

  “Where?”

  “At the party house.”

  “What house is that?”

  Still addressing the floor drain, she said, “You know, the house where we, you know, were. We, we were kinda breaking the law, which is why I didn’t want to say. We were, like, trespassing, and that could get us in big trouble.”

  Trust a fourteen-year-old to think that trespassing was worse than a triple murder charge. But the teenage years are the time of magical thinking, aren’t they? Such as: I’m going to marry Justin Bieber; all I have to do is meet him. Or: If I admit we trespassed, me and my boyfriend will be locked up forever and ever, so I’d better keep my mouth shut.

  I leaned forward. “Was anyone else there, Ali? Anyone who could testify they saw you both during the time of the murder?”

  She still wouldn’t look at me, just shook her head. “We were there all day, well, I’d left my house real, real early, like nine or something to meet him, but there was nobody else around, just me and Kyle.” She finally raised her head, and stared me straight in the eye. “I swear.”

  Ordinarily I don’t trust people who swear to something while looking you straight in the eye, but for Ali I made an exception. “Where is this house?”

  “Maybe about a mile from mine, something like that, anyway. Takes around thirty minutes to walk there. There’s signs on the door saying the bank owns it, and the windows are, like, boarded up. All the kids use it. There’s a couple of sleeping bags, a camp stove, lots of neat stuff.”

  Graffiti on the walls, too, I bet. “Give me the address.”

  I finally got to see her eyes again. “I don’t know it. Thing’s just some old, boarded-up place. The owners probably lost their jobs and couldn’t keep it. Lots of that going around.”

  “Old, you say?”

  “Yeah.”

  In Scottsdale, the term “old” is relative. The house could have been anywhere from ten to forty years old, but since it was located near Ali’s, I could estimate its age. The original Arabian horse farms had disappeared twenty years earlier, when subdivisions gobbled up the north end of the Valley. This meant the house could be no more than twenty years old, a spring chicken by most estimates in the U.S.

  “You say the house is boarded up?”

  “Yeah. Front and back.”

  “Is it east or west of your own place?”

  She raised her hand to her mouth and chewed on a knuckle. It was all I could do not to move her hand away. “Toward the rez.”

  East, then. “Color?”

  Some teenage eye-rolling. “Kind of a beigey-pink.”

  I made a mental note to find the house and give the address to Zellar. “What were you and Kyle doing in that house?”

  A flush, followed by a silence that proved Zellar’s dirty mind was right on.

  “Okay, Ali, let’s see if I can guess. You and Kyle were having sex.”

  The flush deepened. “Not totally. He, uh, when he got the condom on, I’d only brought one, and it split and it was like, so we, well, you know.”

  “So you did something else.”

  “Yeah.” She was looking at the drain again, her long hair parted to uncover one stoplight-red ear.

  “Ali, where’d you get the condom? Did you shoplift it?”

  “I don’t shoplift!” The genuine outrage in her voice convinced me she was telling the truth.

  “Then where’d it come from? You told me you were the one who brought it to your little love tryst, not Kyle.”

  Ali’s earlier embarrassment returned, this time tinged with sadness. “You won’t tell on me?”

  “I promise from the heart.”

  A long sigh. “I swiped it from my mother’s chest of drawers, where she keeps her sweaters. She has lots of them, all cashmere, really beautiful. Anyway, I knew she wouldn’t miss just one. Condom, I mean, not sweater. She’d miss a cashmere sweater big-time.”

  A warning flag went up, but I let it go. For now, anyway. “One more thing. Give me the name of your mother’s closest friend, someone she might confide in.” It was probably Margie Newberry, but I wanted t
o make sure before I accused Geronimo’s great-great-granddaughter of holding out on me.

  “Close? You mean like Kyle and me?”

  “Exactly. Like you and Kyle.”

  She thought for a moment, then smiled for the first time during the interview. “Margie.”

  “Your next-door neighbor.”

  “Yeah. She and Mom were, like, besties.”

  “Good. I’ll be talking to her later today. Um, in the meantime, Ali, when exactly did you get to the party house and how long did you stay there?”

  Relieved that I wasn’t going to cross-examine her about the ways and means of safe sex, she answered without thinking. “Like I said, I left my house around nine that morning. I told my mom I’d be back for lunch, but what with Kyle and everything, uh, you know, I forgot.”

  And a good thing, too, otherwise there would have been four bodies in the Camerons’ living room. I didn’t mention that, though. She had enough to deal with.

  “So you were at this party house from around nine-thirty to around two or two-thirty? That’s a long time to play around.”

  “We ate some Fritos. And drank some Mountain Dew. And I slept for a while.”

  Uh oh. “How long did you sleep?”

  Ali shrugged, unaware of what she’d let slip. “An hour. Maybe two. Dunno.”

  “What was Kyle doing while you were sleeping? Did he go somewhere?”

  Her head snapped up. “He was right there! With me! He didn’t go anywhere! Not anywhere!”

  Methought the lady doth protest too much. “Stop lying, Ali.”

  “I…I…” She swallowed. “You won’t understand.”

  “Try me.”

  When her shoulders slumped I knew I was about to get the truth. She didn’t disappoint.

  “We’d planned the whole day so we could be, like, together, and Kyle got to the house real early, even before, like, me, and we were, um, kinda fooling around for a…uh, for a long while, like, at least a couple of hours, maybe more, and then later we heard this dog whining, and we shouldn’t have, been able to hear a dog, I mean, because nobody around there had one, so Kyle went out to look.”

 

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