Desert Vengeance

by Betty Webb

  Not for the first time it occurred to me that I could purchase my own horse and board her on the Rez. Maybe even buy a horse trailer so we could explore the forests up north, the canyons to the east, the…

  “Thinking of me?” Dusty’s horse, a buckskin gelding, was nice enough, but nowhere near Arabella’s class.

  I scowled. “This is a trail ride, not a date.”

  “Whatever you say.” He winked.

  The man was incorrigible, but he had his charms. Still, to keep from falling under his spell again, I forced myself to remember his Las Vegas-acquired wife shooting up my apartment, and how much it had cost to replace all that drywall.

  Arabella’s gaits were as beautiful as her glistening coat, her jog easy to sit to, her canter smooth. Riding her was like sitting on a cloud.

  “What are you smiling about now, Hon?”

  “I didn’t know I was smiling. And don’t…”

  “Don’t call me ‘Hon,’” he mimicked. And smiled.

  Oh, how could any woman ever refuse this man?

  ***

  By the time I returned from my ride, I discovered that everything had changed at Debbie’s Desert Oasis.

  Not only had the sheriff’s office returned the backpack they had commandeered from me right after Wycoff’s murder, they returned something else, too.

  Debbie.

  Ballistics tests had confirmed that the bullets the crime scene techs sifted from the dirt in front of MEMORY were a match for the bullets dug out of Norma Wycoff’s brain. Unfortunately, ballistics had not been able to match the spent .22 LR bullets to any rifle in the system. As soon as the guilt-ridden Detective Eastman called the Oasis with these good tidings, Nicole—fully recovered from yesterday’s scare—had filed a motion to have her friend released. The sheriff joyfully complied.

  Still smelling like horse, I joined Nicole and Debbie in their get-out-of-jail-free celebration in the yellow house. Arrayed on the kitchen table in front of us were a Bible, five paperback romances, a box of Godiva chocolates, a giant bag of BBQ-flavored potato chips, numerous Slim Jims, and a homemade red velvet cake with cream cheese frosting.

  My third chocolate, a tasty Godiva morsel named Almond Praline Raindrop, almost held its own against the superb red velvet cake.

  “This cake’s fantastic,” Nicole’s voice was little more than a mumble since her mouth was stuffed with the red stuff.

  I was feeling guilty for even considering the fact that Nicole might have killed the Wycoffs. After all, she’d been shot at along with me. Then again, Nicole had once been a criminal defense attorney and probably still had contacts in that world. Deciding to worry about that later, I turned to Debbie and asked, “Sure you don’t want a piece of chocolate? I saved the Raspberry Ganache Twirl for you.”

  Looking more refreshed than you would expect for a woman who had just spent two days in the slammer, Debbie shook her head.

  “That’s my second Godiva box. I already scarfed up the one Sheriff Headley gave me right after I got booked. By the way, did you know that good chocolate is more uplifting than cocaine? I sure had a buzz on in that cell, but I’d better settle down now or I won’t get any sleep tonight.” She took another sip of her chamomile tea.

  Since Brian Wycoff was universally loathed, the authorities hadn’t wanted to arrest Debbie in the first place, so to make up for doing their lawful duty, gift-bearing visitors would sometimes sneak illicit gifts into her holding cell. The Godivas came from Detective “Maria” Eastman. The Bible, courtesy of the swing shift dispatch officer. The red velvet cake had been baked from scratch by the sheriff’s wife, who also passed along the romance novels. The rest of the haul came from other law-breaking officers of the law.

  Nicole and I had already packed up for our return to the Valley, the attorney’s inn-keeping duties now no longer necessary, but Debbie had insisted that we join her calorie-laden celebration first.

  “Good as that cake is, I can’t eat it all by myself,” she said. “Take some with you.”

  Not wanting to appear greedy, I demurred. Nicole felt no such delicacy, and when I finally headed out the door to my Jeep, she was wrapping a huge slice of cake to take with her on her own drive back to Scottsdale.

  ***

  As I drove south toward Phoenix and saguaros replaced scrub pine along I-17, I refused to think about Dusty and my growing desire to rekindle our romance. Instead, I made myself focus on the Wycoff case.

  Thanks to my interview with Cyril and his wife, Shana Genovese Ferris’ alibi was no longer as tight as before. Despite what Mario Genovese had told me, Shana hadn’t helped her father pour the drunken Cyril into Roseanne’s car. But Mario Genovese’s alibi remained firm. He was definitely still at the bar when Wycoff was murdered. Of course, Roseanne could have been lying, but why would she? The only thing she cared about besides her well-kept home was an alcoholic husband who had been too drunk to squash a cockroach, let alone slowly torture a man to death.

  And then there was the handsome, manipulative, too-good-to-be-true Casey Starr. Guy DeLucca, my old social worker, had said to me, “You’ve done the best of them all.” Jimmy had checked him out and he’d come up clean, but what if…?

  I shook my head. Impossible.

  But maybe not.

  I worried about it all the way to Scottsdale, where to my surprise, I found Jimmy bent over his computer, typing furiously away. He greeted me with a smile.

  “The traveler returns!”

  After driving around in my open-air Jeep in the heat, the air-conditioned office felt like the inside of a glacier. Ignoring the rapidly-rising goosebumps on my arms, I said, “What are you doing here on a Saturday?”

  “Making up for the time I spent up at the pow wow.”

  “Good. Then would you do me a favor and look up Casey Starr again?”

  “As I told you before, Lena, I ran the usual check on Casey Starr and the guy’s clean. I’m working on his wife now.”

  “But you know what we forgot? Starr’s a major computer whiz, owns an Internet security company. What if he was able to erase his records? Can that be done?”

  His smile vanished. “In certain circumstances. Even high school kids have been known to use their computer skills to change their grades, but they leave a trail that’s pretty easy to follow back to the originator. If someone on the level of Starr wiped his records, though, there’s a good chance those records are gone forever. With no telltale markers.”

  “Try.”

  A frown.

  “I mean, as soon as you get a chance. I can see you’re busy. But in the meantime, could you just get me the address of every place Casey Starr ever lived, starting with the time his daddy got his mommy pregnant?”

  An almost canine growl. “Don’t want much, do you?”

  Abashed, I apologized. ““I just want to make sure Debbie doesn’t wind up arrested again. Or Nicole. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go upstairs and take a cold shower. There was a dust devil crossing I-17 up by Anthem, and the Jeep got the brunt of it.”

  Actually, I wanted to see how Snowball was doing.

  ***

  An hour later, dust-free, wearing clean clothes, and sipping on a Tab while a little white kitten purred in my lap, I was still thinking about the case. With Debbie in the clear—for now, anyway—I could in all good conscience walk away from it. I didn’t care who’d killed Brian Wycoff. No one cared. My feelings were the same for Norma, his purposely see-no-evil wife. But getting shot at had changed things. The case was now personal.

  I had realized during the drive from Black Canyon City, that I should have stopped at the Coyote Corral and re-interviewed Shana, but I hadn’t. Speaking of bars, it also occurred to me that I had never interviewed Jacklyn Archerd, the biker chick who supposedly had been bunking in the Mustang trailer when both killings went down. Unlike Nicole, who
had stayed to help out at the B&B in Debbie’s absence, Jacklyn had pled work obligations and returned to the Valley.

  Like so many others, Jacklyn had a motive to kill the Wycoffs since her own son had been kidnapped and God only knows what else had been done to him. Besides that, her holstered Glock proved she was no stranger to firearms. Maybe I should…

  My landline rang.

  “I’ve got those addresses for you,” Jimmy said. “and it’s quite a list. Looks like CPS moved Starr around a lot after his placement with the Wycoffs. That could be a sign of serious behavior problems.”

  I remembered my own childhood behavior problems, which included breaking a bullying classmate’s nose and pouring vinegar into a harsh geometry teacher’s Coke. Some incidents were even more serious, so much so it was a miracle I hadn’t wound up in a correctional facility. And Casey Starr and I had both endured the same horrors.

  “I’ll be right down,” I told Jimmy, killing the call.

  I gave Snowball a final nuzzle and sat him down on the floor. He scampered over to what was left of my drapes and began climbing them again. He liked heights.

  When I walked into my office downstairs, Jimmy handed an odd-looking object to me. From the amused expression on his face he’d recovered from his earlier bad temper. My partner never could hold a grudge.

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  “It’s called a Sticky Buddy. Pet hair remover. I bought one for myself when I started babysitting Snowball. It’s my guess you’re about to leave for an interview, and you can’t go around looking like that.”

  I looked down at my black cargo pants and tee shirt. Or rather, formerly black cargo pants and tee shirt. They were now covered with fine white cat hairs. “Oh.”

  “Yeah, oh. Snowball’s also why I’m wearing beige, in case you didn’t notice.”

  He was right. I hadn’t noticed. His snug-fitting beige tee shirt and beige khakis made a nice contrast to his terra cotta-colored skin, not to mention showcasing his ripped abs and pecs. Forcing myself not to stare at this vision of male perfection, I got busy with the Sticky Buddy. A few minutes later, I said, “How’s this?”

  “Looks good. Now turn around.”

  A chortle let me know that I’d forgotten to Sticky Buddy my ass, so I rolled that, too. “Better?”

  “All good. Now here’s those addresses you wanted, all the foster parents he went through. One additional thing. I tracked down Casey Starr’s mother’s name. Or names, plural.”

  I lifted my eyebrows.

  “Maiden name, Etta Mae Eloise White. At the age of sixteen, she gave birth to a little girl, father unknown, and gave the baby up for adoption. A couple years later she married a guy named Pete Craddock and had another baby—a son, this time—but kept the kid until CPS stepped in and took it away. She claimed her husband was the one who broke the baby’s arm and leg, he said she did it. The upshot of the deal was that they relinquished parental rights, and he was adopted out, too.”

  “That kid was Casey Starr?”

  Jimmy shook his head. “Nope. Turns out, Etta Mae was quite the prolific mama. After losing custody of another child to CPS—her second girl, by the way—she and Craddock wound up divorced. She took back her maiden name and married a few more times, giving birth to three more children by two different husbands and one boyfriend. Names on those birth certificates were, in order, Seth Jepson, Ramsey Heat, and our old buddy Casey Fairfield/Starr. After Baby Jepson died under suspicious circumstances, the next two babies were both removed from her custody at birth.”

  “Jesus!”

  “Yeah, gotta have a license to drive a car, but anyone can be a parent.”

  “Where’s Etta Mae-nee-White now?” I asked.

  “OD’ed a year after her last kid was born. She was pregnant at the time.”

  Jesus was probably tired of getting his name evoked under such circumstances but I did it again.

  Indians don’t curse, so Jimmy just said, “What a world, huh?”

  “Not gonna disagree with you there.”

  “As to the last kid. Casey. He already had a couple of broken ribs by the time CPS got to him.”

  I winced. “So Casey’s father of record was definitely Richard Fairfield?”

  “Etta Mae got around, so without a DNA test, Casey could be anybody’s. By the way, Richard Fairfield, better known as Dick, has a lengthy criminal record, including armed robbery and assault. Pistol-whipped some guy during a gas station heist, sentenced to twenty years, released early for good behavior, nothing nasty on his record since. A year after his release he married a woman named Ada. Before you ask, the current Mrs. Fairfield has no record other than a parking ticket, and that was on the day she reported for jury duty and couldn’t find an all-day spot. Dick and Ada have a couple kids—Richard, Jr. and Avalon, female. Twelve and ten, respectively.”

  After digesting this, I said, “So it looks like Casey Starr wiped his past, but for some reason, left the record of his crappy parentage intact. I wonder why.”

  Jimmy shrugged. “Prepping for an ‘I-had-an-abusive-childhood-so-that’s-why-I’m-a-serial-killer’ defense? Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men.”

  “From The Shadow. I didn’t know you liked old radio shows.”

  “And the 1994 film remake starring Alec Baldwin. I like a lot of things you don’t know about, Lena.”

  “Apparently so. Did you by any chance come up with Richard Fairfield’s last known address?”

  He hit the PRINT command, and Fairfield’s address, along with several others, slithered out of the printer. Glendale. Where Jacklyn Archerd lived and worked.

  Wondering if there was any connection, I put my .38 in its pocket holster, picked up my tote, and left.

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Casey Starr’s supposed biological father lived in a trailer park on the rougher side of Glendale. No charming Debbie’s Desert Oasis, Sunrise Acres looked like a place where those who had given up all hope went to die, so it was disconcerting to see a couple of heatstroke-daring children playing on the trailer court’s decrepit swing set.

  The new Fairfield brood lived at No. 83, a double-wide defaced by several years of rust and wear. I parked the Jeep next to a paint-peeling Dodge Shadow, and rapped on the trailer’s door.

  The woman who answered wasn’t what I expected. Hispanic, somewhere in her forties, she wore an orange fast-food uniform; her nametag announced her as ADA. No beauty, but with her soft brown eyes a shade darker than her lush brown hair, she’d been good-looking enough to attract an ex-con.

  “Yes?” she smiled, revealing crooked but white teeth. “What can I do for you?”

  The smile faded when I handed her my card and told her the reason for my visit. “Oh. Casey. We haven’t seen him in months, God love him. But you might as well come in, not that either of us will be of any help.”

  You can’t tell a book by its cover, and you can’t tell a double-wide from its rusting shell. While no Versailles, the living room was spotless and the heavenly scent of homemade chili emanated from the open-plan kitchen. Bright throws cheered up an old leather sofa and matching chairs, and the big coffee table was buried under a mound of library books. The one on top was titled Nightwatch: A Practical Guide to Viewing the Universe. That’s when I noticed the telescope in the corner.

  “I just got home from work,” Ada Fairfield explained, “so sorry about the mess.”

  “What mess?”

  She looked around. “The kids haven’t been too bad today, have they? Here, have a seat and I’ll go get Richard.”

  Ada waved me to one of the chairs and headed down a narrow hall.

  While she was gone, I sifted through the books on the coffee table. Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird. Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything. Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander. A Julia Child cookbook, a National Geogr
aphic, a Scientific American, and several other science-based magazines. Someone in this trailer was smarter than the average-type bear.

  A series of clanks and thumps from the hallway tore me away from my snooping. I looked up to see a tall man dressed for the weather in a Led Zeppelin concert tee shirt and denim cutoffs. He favored his right leg, which was encased in a brace from the ankle to just above the knee. As he drew closer, I could see a flattened nose and a half-gone ear. Prison can be rough on a man’s looks. He looked closer to seventy than sixty.

  Without preamble, he demanded, “You accusing my son of killing that son of a bitch?”

  “Just a few routine questions.”

  He snatched my card from his wife and scowled at it. “Just routine, my ass.” A bitter laugh. “Hold your horses while I go stir the damned chili, then I’ll come back and properly tell you to mind your own business. Not gonna ask you to stay for dinner, neither.”

  “Dick,” Ada reproved, “don’t be rude.”

  He turned to her, a fierce look on his battered face. “And don’t you…” At her expression, the fierceness faded into shame. “Sorry.” Turning to me again, he muttered, “Sorry to you, too. Want some chili? Made enough to feed an army.”

  “No thanks.”

  He looked relieved. “Be right back.”

  While Fairfield fussed with the chili, Ada sat on the chair next to mine and leaned forward. “His leg’s bothering him, and that makes him cranky, but we’ve agreed he will not take pain-killers. He’s going in for an acupuncture treatment tomorrow and that should help some.”

  Sharing the usual cop’s cynicism toward “reformed” criminals and the women who made excuses for them, I merely nodded.

  Chili stirred, Fairfield clanked back into the living room area and collapsed on the sofa, his braced leg sticking straight out. “Okay, Miss Jones. What you want to know?”

  “Tell me about Casey.”

  A hint of pride entered his voice. “My boy’s doing great. Brains oozing out of his ears.”