Desert Vengeance

by Betty Webb

  “Saw you coming up the walk,” a handsome man said. White teeth gleamed.

  With his extraordinarily sculpted face and body, Casey Starr could have wound up as a screen star, but instead he’d become intimate with computers and was thus set for life, even when his looks went south with age.

  “Hello, Miss Whoever-You-Are, your face looks familiar. Didn’t I see you on TV once? When you shot some guy?” He was still smiling.

  “He lived.”

  “And you were raised in foster homes, right?”

  “Right.”

  “And you’re still looking for your parents?”

  Casey Starr must have had one hell of a memory, because the interview in which I’d discussed that part of my life had taken place five years earlier. At the time I believed going public with my story would bring answers to so many questions, but I’d been wrong. It only added new ones.

  Producing my ID, I said, “I wanted to talk to you in private, if possible.”

  The smile left his face—funny how that happens—but after a brief pause, it returned. “Now that you’ve intrigued me, you might as well come on in since I’m the only one here. For now, anyway.”

  He led me through a nicely appointed, if rumpled, living room. Toss pillows on the floor, family photographs knocked over, torn pieces of paper littering the Saltillo tile. Four flame-point Siamese kittens and their mama smirked up at me, then resumed tearing up more paper.

  “Those are Kay’s. My wife’s.” The hint of a scowl marred his perfect face. “I’m not wild about the little vermin, but happy wife, happy life, right? Me, I want them out of the house as soon as possible, so she’s agreed to at least sell the kittens.”

  I looked at my watch. It was almost seven.

  “She’s working late?” I asked, as he took me into a mahogany-rich den and settled himself behind one of the facing twin desks. Unasked, I took the chair near the other one.

  “A department meeting. She’ll eventually come storming in here in a vile mood.” He smiled again, as if he found his wife’s bad temper amusing.

  From the photographs in the living room, I had already noticed that Mrs. Starr was a beauty, although the glint of steel in her eyes hinted at something more. Casey Starr hadn’t married for comfort, that was for sure.

  “This is about the Wycoffs, I presume.” He’d had no trouble putting two and two together.

  “You presume correctly.”

  “They were unpleasant people.”

  My turn to smile. “That’s one way of putting it.”

  Most child molesters have a gender preference. With Papa Brian, it was girls. However, he was capable of crossing gender lines when a girl wasn’t available, which is what had happened when Casey Starr was placed in his care. Judging from the grown man, Starr must have been a beautiful little boy.

  “Whoever offed the bastards deserves a medal,” he said, but with an odd lack of rancor behind the statement.

  “No argument there.”

  “So why do you care?”

  He listened as I discussed Debbie and the other women from Parents of Missing Children. When I finished, he said, “How unfortunate.”

  Unfortunate? What an inadequate word for tragedy.

  “Mr. Starr, may I ask you where you were last Tuesday morning and Saturday night?”

  “You can ask, Ms. Jones, but I decline to answer.” Now his smile looked a bit on the seductive side. This was a man who was used to dealing with people, especially females.

  “Why not? And you can call me Lena.”

  “On advice of my attorney, that’s why not. Would you like his number?”

  He reeled it off as I wrote it down, not that I’d bother to call. Attorneys being attorneys, he’d take up ten minutes of my time to tell me nothing, then bill his client for an hour.

  “That’s it, then?” I asked. “You’re going to say nothing?”

  The smile broadened just enough I could see a crooked incisor. The imperfection somehow made him even more seductive. “Wrong, Miss Lena Jones, the oh-so-beautiful private investigator. I’m going to invite you to have some iced tea, and then I’m going to ask if you’d like something else.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  “Why do you have little white hairs all over your black tee shirt?” Jimmy asked the next morning, while I stood in front of the coffee machine, waiting for my coffee mug to fill.

  “Came from a cat.”

  “You don’t have a cat.”

  “Yesterday I didn’t have a cat,” I grumped. “Today I do.”

  Jimmy tried hard not to snicker but couldn’t quite pull it off. “A white cat, I see.”

  “Flame-point Siamese, actually. White with peach points.”

  Another snicker. “Your entire wardrobe is black, so that’s going to work out well.”

  “No shit, Sherlock.”

  “What’s its name?”

  “Snowball.”

  This time he yelped out loud. When the yelps died down, he wheezed, “Oh, lord, Lena Jones has a cat named Snowball!”

  Stung, I growled, “Easier to remember than Siam Hanghal, the thing’s legal name.”

  He guffawed. “This is rich. Who pawned it off on you?”

  “Casey Starr.”

  More laughter. “Gotta watch those dotcom guys.”

  Jimmy wouldn’t shut up until I agreed to let him meet the cat. Well, kitten, since it was only twelve weeks old.

  Upstairs, my apartment looked like it had been tossed by the cops. Good thing I had tucked my personal files back into the bankers’ box. The kitchen garbage was overturned, used coffee filters and ramen bags were strewn around, and an entire roll of toilet paper had been dragged in from the bathroom and shredded into confetti.

  After rampaging all through the apartment last night and depositing its hair everywhere, I had thought the tiny demon would be sacked out in the expensive KittyKondo I’d purchased at PetSmart on the way home from Litchfield. But no, after making that aforesaid mess and clawing out the stuffing from one of my Navajo print toss pillows, it was now climbing the drapes.

  “That’s some cat,” Jimmy said.

  “Yeah.”

  “I see you bought a cat condo.”

  “Yeah.”

  “And three bags of kitten food.”

  “Yeah.”

  “And twenty pounds of kitty litter.”

  “Necessary, I was told.”

  “Would you look at that fancy cat carrier! And all those cat toys! Lena, you must have spent a bundle.”

  Embarrassed for some reason, I explained, “Cat toys aren’t cheap.”

  “I especially admire the fake fur catnip mouse, although he seems to prefer the toss pillows and drapes.”

  “Might be a she. On second thought, maybe not.”

  Having achieved the drapes’ summit, Snowball ran across the curtain rod, took a dive toward the sofa, continued across the sofa back, sprang onto the chair, and from the chair, leapt onto my shoulder where he/she dug in with his/her claws.

  “Athletic, too,” Jimmy said, admiringly.

  I removed his/her claws from my shoulder, hoping I wouldn’t bleed too much.

  “Bet that hurt.” Jimmy started laughing again.

  “Don’t start with me, or I’ll put him on your shoulder.”

  Snowball, who wasn’t much bigger than my palm, lay in my hand, purring. It was an oddly soothing sound, so soothing I could feel my usually high blood pressure dropping.

  “Now that you two have met, what say we go back to work?”

  “Gonna bring your cat?”

  “Too destructive. Or haven’t you noticed?”

  ***

  Once back in the office, Jimmy eased up on me out of pity, and we worked together without squabbling for the rest of the morning. At no
on, in celebration of my new role as a pet-owner, I walked across the street to the Thai restaurant and brought us back some Panang curry and chicken satay.

  “My turn to treat,” I said, refusing to take his money.

  When we were through eating, Jimmy looked at me with a serious expression and said, “I didn’t want to ruin your appetite, but while you were over there, we received another threatening phone call.”

  “So?” I gathered up the empty food cartons and put them in the trash.

  “Whoever it was said that if you didn’t watch your step, he was going to take you out, and I don’t think he meant on a date. Not a consensual one, anyway. Like before, he was trying to disguise his voice but I’m pretty sure it was Frank Gunnerston.”

  I sighed. “Him again.”

  “Like a bad penny.”

  For wife-beaters, pride is always more important than love, thus they can’t handle rejection, the ultimate blow to their pride. When I had discovered Gunnerston’s violent history and dropped him from our client list, he had taken that as a rejection, and he’d been right. His feeling of outraged pride had grown after showing up at Desert Investigations and I scared him off with my .38. That had only made it worse because another man—Jimmy—witnessed it. The fact that Gunnerston was still trying to find his wife, long after she escaped his reign of terror didn’t bode well for his ability to forgive and forget. If anything, it sounded like he’d transferred his hostility from her to me.

  “We need to keep a good lookout,” I told Jimmy. “He might show up here again, this time packing.”

  Jimmy nodded and I reminded myself to clean my revolver that night. How long had it been? Three weeks? Four? I hadn’t been to the firing range for two months, but what with the Valley’s dust and all…

  ***

  I was typing in the last of my notes on the Wycoff case when I noticed something missing from the interviews. I had talked to the women at Debbie’s Desert Oasis, to Mario and Grace Genovese, and to two of Wycoff’s victims, as well as their former social worker, but for some reason I’d never gotten around to interviewing Shana Genovese Ferris, Mario and Grace’s daughter. The mother of two children herself, she might have had a motive to kill her uncle if she had discovered his obsession with Bethany. But who would have told her? The second I asked myself that question, I remembered young Luke arguing with his grandmother when she’d attempted to take the little girl out to the RV. He might easily have shared his concerns with his mother.

  I stood up and grabbed my new emergency backpack, now plump with fresh clothes. “Jimmy, I have to drive back to Black Canyon City and talk to someone.” I looked at my watch. It was headed for late afternoon, and I hated driving back and forth in the heat. “Depending on how things go, I might be gone overnight.”

  Then I remembered the crowd at the Coyote Corral who had overheard Mario arguing with Grace about allowing her brother to stay on their property. “Maybe even a couple of nights.” I headed for the door.

  “Aren’t you forgetting something?” Jimmy asked, before I could make it out.

  I paused. “Forgetting about what?”

  “Snowball.”

  Out of shock, I almost dropped my backpack. “What am I going to do? The little thing’s just a baby. I can’t leave it alone, but I’ve still got to do my job.”

  He looked at me pityingly. “Welcome to the wonderful world of pet ownership. Tell you what. Leave me the key to your apartment and I’ll look in on him. Or her, whatever.”

  “Look in on? But it’ll get lonely!” I knew all about loneliness.

  Jimmy was, if nothing, a man of surprises. “If you want, I can do a little pet-sitting for you, spend the night with your, ahem, ‘baby.’ Pet it, play with it, let it tear my hands to ribbons, all that fun stuff.”

  “You’d do that for me?”

  “I like cats. And I don’t want you to worry.”

  I walked back to my desk and opened the center drawer where I kept my spare keys taped to its underside. After handing them over, I said, “I appreciate this, Jimmy.”

  Load lifted, I headed for my Jeep.

  ***

  I hadn’t planned my escape from the Valley wisely. Early rush hour had already begun, so the traffic was bumper-to-bumper until I made it to Anthem, where I stopped for gas. It occurred to me, not for the first time, that as much as I enjoyed driving my open-air Jeep, it might be wise to purchase a vehicle with better gas mileage and better protection from the elements. I could still keep the Jeep for weekend jaunts.

  After filling up, it was smooth sailing all the way to the Black Canyon City turnoff, where the temperature felt ten degrees cooler. Feeling optimistic, I pulled into Coyote Corral’s parking lot next to Shana’s Volvo. If no complications arose, I should be able to take care of business and make it back to Scottsdale by sunset, thus relieving Jimmy from cat-sitting duties.

  I should have realized from the number of cars in the parking lot, that the place would be packed. Some of the customers were enjoying an early dinner in the dining area but most stood three-deep at the bar, drinking their way through the Happy Hour special. Shana, looking exceptional in a tight blue tee shirt and matching shorts, ran back and forth from one end of the bar to the other, delivering slopping pitchers of beer and tequila shots. Every now and then she bumped into her father, who looked as frazzled as she did. Trying for an interview now being pointless, I turned around and walked back to my Jeep.

  Ten minutes later I was signing the guest register at Debbie’s Desert Oasis. Here the parking area was only half full, so I guessed some of the fishing folk had either checked out or driven farther north for the day to wherever the fish happened to be biting. The door to the little yellow house was open, allowing a soft breeze to float through, carrying along the scent of scrub pine and creosote bushes.

  Soon attorney Nicole Beltran and I were sitting in Debbie’s office, discussing my progress—or lack thereof—on her case. As we had passed through the living room, I’d noted it was decorated in a style best described as Arizona Cute, with a Navajo rug hanging above the ranch-style sofa, an earth tone braided rug covering a scarred wood floor, and a collection of Kachina dolls on the bookshelf. But Debbie’s office was strictly business, the only jarring note being the oil painting of Lindsey, her daughter. I’d once read that some parents of missing children erected shrines to them in their homes, but so far I had seen nothing like that in Debbie’s house, just the portrait. Maybe that was the only reminder she needed.

  I thought about the bankers’ box sitting in my living room, and the memory-haunting contents inside. Sometimes it was better to forget.

  “Any news on your investigation?” Nicole’s question interrupted my trip down Memory Lane.

  I pulled my mind away from that terrible box. “Ah, nothing concrete. What are the chances of Debbie being granted bail?”

  She shook her head. “With a double murder charge hanging over her head? Doubtful, but I’m trying. You want to stay in Monarch again? A couple of fishermen were in there yesterday, but they checked out this morning and I’ve already cleaned it up. Fresh sheets.”

  “Might as well, since it was beginning to feel like home. Anything happening with Jacklyn since I left?”

  “She’s having no luck getting her shift covered at the Iron Cross, so she’s stuck down there until next Monday. Maybe you’ll come up with something by then.”

  I wanted to tell her that within days Wycoff’s real killer would be caught and Debbie freed, but my earlier optimism was dead as ashes. There were just too many people with good reasons to kill the Wycoffs.

  “These things take time,” I told her.

  She didn’t look surprised. Movie star complexion notwithstanding, she was, after all, an attorney and knew from experience that investigations could crawl.

  “By the way, Nicole, in the phone message you left with my part
ner, you said Debbie’s alibi fell apart. What happened?”

  She pressed her lips together as if trying to keep her anger inside. Failing, she snapped, “I told her not to say anything to the authorities, but she didn’t listen. Remember that female detective, Eastman, I think her name is?”

  “Yvonne Eastman, right. The one into West Side Story.”

  “It’s must be Debbie’s favorite movie, too, because despite my previous warnings, she eventually cozied up to Eastman and the next thing you know, was telling the cop her life story, right down to the part where she drove down to Apache Junction the day that son of a bitch was released, just to check him out.”

  “She what?!” This was news, and not the good kind.

  The expressions on Nicole’s face ran the gamut of sorrow to exasperation. “Not only that, but she told Eastman she sat in front of his house for a couple of hours, hoping to see what he looked like now so if she ever saw him visit his sister, she’d recognize him. When he never came out, she gave up and drove back here. At least she said he never came out of the house.”

  “Did she mention seeing his car?” Since there’s more than one way to ID someone.

  “Beige Honda Civic. Older model. Yeah. Said she even wrote down the license plate number.”

  As a PI, I’ve long known that intelligent people can do dumb things, but this took the cake. “Debbie blurted out all that just because she and Eastman share the same taste in music?”

  “That and the fact she figured she’d get found out anyway. Why, you might ask? Because when scoping out the Wycoff house in Apache Junction, she parked too close to a fire hydrant and got ticketed. She also figured the neighbors might have noticed the truck, too, since she was driving her bright turquoise 1956 Ford F100 pickup. You know, the one that has DEBBIE’S DESERT OASIS, BLACK CANYON CITY, WHERE THE FISH ARE ALWAYS BITING. on both front doors. With her phone number under it.”

  It was all I could do not to bury my head in my hands. “You and Jacklyn didn’t notice she was gone, for what, four hours minimum?”

  “We were fishing. And talking. So much so we probably scared away the fish, which would account for us coming back empty-handed while everyone else nearby was hauling out bass by the truckload.”