by Betty Webb
I kept reading.
Last night’s dream was Lena’s worst so far. By the time I made it to her bedroom, she was sitting up in the bed, and even though she was awake, she was still screaming. Over and over again, “Golden Boy killed Daddy! And then he killed Jamie!”
As Snowball purred in my lap, I closed my eyes.
Jamie.
My baby brother’s name was Jamie.
Jamie.
Red hair like my father’s. Blue eyes like my mother’s.
A sweet, powder-smelling lump of love.
Jamie.
I buried my face in Snowball’s soft fur.
Chapter Twenty-six
“Rough night?” Jimmy asked when he entered Desert Investigations at seven the next morning and found me already there.
“Something like that.”
Remembering Jamie.
Jamie.
Jamie.
Jamie.
I missed my mother.
I missed my father.
I missed my baby brother.
I…
No. Stop remembering the past. It couldn’t be changed, couldn’t be fixed. Stay in the here and now and do what you can to fix today’s wrongs.
I straightened my back. “You know what I need, Jimmy?”
“Let me guess. You want me to run a search on somebody else.”
“You’re sure on top of things today. You remember Nicole Beltran?”
“How could I forget? After I ran her through the system, I know pretty much everything about her, right down to her favorite game in kindergarten. She was into dominoes.”
“Now look up her parents.”
“Mob dons? Terrorists plotting to bring down the U.S. government?”
Ignoring the sarcasm, I said, “I don’t know their names and they might even be dead, but that big house of hers—she says it belonged to her parents—is weird.”
“Nosey, aren’t you?”
“Call it that, if you want.”
He grunted, then fired up his computer. It sprang to life with a recording of Cree war chants.
I hated paperwork, but for now it helped take my mind off the memories Bernice’s journal had unleashed. For a while I worked on our billing, noting with satisfaction that our receivables, worryingly low last month, had risen again. Paranoia, whether in the office or on the home front, pays. Running background checks on job applicants and/or future domestic partners may be a dirty job, but someone had to do it, and luckily, that someone was often Desert Investigations. At least, billing the paranoid kept my mind off what had happened in that long-ago forest.
I lost myself in a flurry of case hours until Jimmy called over to me.
“Got ’em!”
“Got what?”
“Nicole Beltran’s parents, and I didn’t have to do much to find them. Geoffrey Winslow, her father, founded Renee’s Miracle Beauty Spas—thirty-two of them across the U.S.—after his wife, Renee, a chemist, created Renee’s Miracle Glow, some super skin cream. From the blurbs I’m reading from satisfied customers, seems the stuff actually works. Reduces wrinkles and pores, or something like that. Anyway, they made a heap of money and were flying in their own jet to the opening of their newest spa in Boca Raton when the Cessna went down over Texas. No survivors. Must be tough, losing two parents at once.”
And then your child.
That house wasn’t a house. It was a mausoleum.
But now I knew why, with all the grief in her life, Nicole’s skin had remained so beautiful. She used her parents’ products.
“Good work, Almost Brother.”
“There’s something else. While I was poking around I came up with the name of Nicole’s ex-husband. You know, the father of the little girl that went missing. It’s Sean Beltran.”
I recognized the name. Sean Beltran was a hotshot local architect, and a fervent gun enthusiast. An article on him in Phoenix Magazine swooned over his collection of firearms, many antique, some new, everything from little .22 varmint rifles to a rumored big-ass rocket launcher.
Jimmy gave me a look. “I know what you’re thinking, but remember, Wycoff wasn’t shot.”
“Norma was.”
He shook his head. “The timing isn’t right. Candice Beltran disappeared eight years ago while Wycoff was still in prison.”
“True, but not having the actual kidnapper to take revenge on, Beltran might have decided Wycoff would make a nice substitution. Revenge by proxy, if you will.” It would be a tidy solution to a messy case.
“A little far-fetched, don’t you think? Oh, and by the way, I came across something else you might want to think about. You told me Nicole said she’d practiced criminal defense law before she got into real estate law, correct?”
Wondering what that had to do with anything, I said, “I was under the impression that was a long time ago.”
“It was right after she was admitted to the bar, as matter of fact, a few years before she married and gave birth to Candice. I got a little curious about that abrupt change in specialization. When I started poking around, I discovered that the last criminal case she handled was when she served as second chair in the defense of a man charged in the attempted abduction of a child. She and the lead attorney got the guy off on a technicality, although it was pretty obvious to everyone he hadn’t planned to take the little girl for a treat at the nearest Baskin-Robbins.”
I had a hunch I was about to hear something I wouldn’t like. “And?”
“Six months after going scot-free, he was back in police custody. Not only had he abducted another little girl, but this time he’d raped and strangled her. Name’s Jeffrey Simpson Carmichael, now goes by the handle of Death Row Inmate #783-3761.”
I did the math. Less than five years later, Nicole’s own daughter was abducted, possibly by someone much like Jeffrey Simpson Carmichael.
“Guilt can be a great motivator, Lena.”
I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t.
***
For a while I tried to continue with the billing, but I felt too restless. My skin actually itched from anxiety. I liked Nicole, and despite her ex-husband’s over-the-top arsenal, I liked the homes he built, too. Of all the houses in the Valley of the Sun, his came closest to looking like they actually belonged in the desert, unlike those mini-mansion transplants from Italy.
Setting the billing aside for a moment, I stood up and walked over to the coffeemaker. Surprise, surprise, I’d already gone through an entire pot, and it was only eight o’clock. If I had any sense, I’d switch to decaf. I started to make another pot, then stopped myself. Did I need to be more wired than I already was? Answering my own question, I went back to my desk, then stood there for a moment. With a sigh, I removed my holstered .38 from the bottom drawer and slipped it into my cargo pants pocket.
“Jimmy?”
He peeped over the top of his computer. “What now?”
“You sure you couldn’t find anything dirty on Casey Starr?”
He made a disgusted sound. “Like I told you, not even a traffic ticket. Yeah, I agree that he’s cleaner than any human being has a right to be after forty-plus years on this Earth, but if the guy’s wiped his past, it’s down the rabbit hole and I can’t make it reappear.”
“That leaves us with only one option.”
“Which is?”
“We’ll have to do this the old-fashioned way.”
Jimmy, no slouch, got it immediately. “Good thing gas is cheap these days, huh?”
“Considering my gas-guzzling Jeep, yeah. At least all the addresses you came up with are in Maricopa County.”
“And that only encompasses something like nine thousand square miles.”
Leave it to Jimmy to state the obvious.
***
Since I like to show up at peo
ple’s houses before they leave for work, around eight I was ringing the doorbell at Hallie and Merrrill Polov’s rambling faux-adobe located in the shadow of Scottsdale Fashion Square. The maid who answered had never heard of the Polovs.
“The Morgans live here now,” she said.
“For how long?”
She frowned. “How long what?”
“How long have the Morgans lived here?”
“Ten year. Go away.” She shut the door in my face.
It had been my experience that the residents of older neighborhoods like this one usually stayed around, so after striking out at the Morgans’, I went up the walk to the house next door, another faux adobe. Before I could lift my finger to the doorbell, the door opened and an elderly man bent almost double by arthritis said, “If you’re selling, Honey, I might be buying.”
At the expression on my face, he added, “Hey, just kidding, so don’t go all femi-Nazi on me. You taking one of those polls? By the way, that’s a pretty nifty Jeep you drove up in. Tricked-out ’45-’46?”
“Nailed it.” I smiled. Despite his physical condition, he was a sharp observer. And lonely. Hopeful, I flashed my ID. “Do you remember the Polov family?”
“Couldn’t forget those folks, now, could I? Hey, Miss Lena, why don’t you come in and have some ice tea?”
I accepted his invitation and entered a house that could have doubled as a museum devoted to the Old West. Paintings of cowboys and Indians lined the walls, some old, some contemporary. Among them I spotted what might have been a Frederic Remington, and another which was most certainly a Fritz Scholder. Each table in the sunken living room—and there were a lot of tables—supported bronze castings of Indians killing buffalo, cowboys roping steers, and horses, horses, horses. I decided to like the sexist old coot.
“Great house,” I said, meaning it.
“Been collecting for a while. Sugar in your tea?”
“I like it straight.”
“Like your whiskey and your men, huh?” He grinned wickedly.
Playing along, I said, “Absolutely.”
Gratified, he ignored my offer of help and told me to take a seat on a horse-hair-covered sofa. Then he hobbled into the kitchen. A few minutes later he returned with ice tea poured into matching glasses etched on the sides with the face of John Wayne. After handing me one he eased himself into a chair covered in brown- and white-spotted cowhide.
“Not as young as I used to be.”
“None of us are.” I curled my hand around the Duke’s face and sipped at the tea.
“So. What kind of dirt you want on the Polovs?”
“Maybe you could start by introducing yourself.”
He laughed, a raspy, creaking sound. “Here I’ve been so excited about luring a pretty woman into my abode that I forgot basic manners. I’m Manfred Stephen Chapman the Fourth, but everybody calls me Manny.”
“Pleased to meet you, Manny, and you didn’t forget your manners. This tea is delicious. Now, about the Polovs. Do you know where they live now?”
“Holy Cross Cemetery. I warned Merrill that TR6 of his was a death trap, but did he listen, hell no, so he and Hallie got themselves splattered all over I-17 up by the Carefree Highway off-ramp.”
I made a face. “Tough.”
Chapman looked down his long nose. “Could of been worse. At least the EMTs were able to scrape up enough to bury.”
I avoided picturing that. “Did you know they were foster parents for a while?”
He sniffed. “Couple of do-gooders, didn’t need the money.”
“Did you ever have any trouble with the kids?”
“Just the one.”
“Which one was that?”
“Cass. Cory. Casey. Something like that. Only eleven years old, but what a little shit. Give a man a fishing rod and he’ll eat for a year, give an eleven-year-old boy a can of spray paint and you’ve got a purple and green garage.”
“Casey spray-painted your garage?” That didn’t sound too serious, just the usual kid hijinks, more annoying than destructive. Well, except for the repair bill.
“Isn’t that what I said? Not only mine, but the Ebersons’ and the Wachetzes’ garages, too. ’Course, Merrill being the kind of man he was, he coughed up the money for all the repaints, but still.”
“What happened after that?”
“Merrill kept him on a tighter leash, not that it worked. Kid was bad to the bone.”
People used to say the same thing about me, same as I said about the men in my life. “Define ‘bad.’”
“Just what I said.”
“Maybe you could give me an example.”
“He broke little Rosa’s arm, poor little thing.”
That shook me. “Casey beat up a girl?”
“Slammed her arm in a car door and pretended it was an accident, but that was no accident. I was watching when it happened and he did it deliberate.”
It sounded like another fish story to me. “You were watching at that very moment? Or was the arm-breaking incident something you just heard about?”
He sniffed. “I made it my business to be on the alert when the brat was out and about, so I saw him lure Rosa into the Polovs’ Buick. I was on my way out there to keep them from getting in—it was summer and hot and you know what happens when kids get locked in cars—but before I made it halfway down the walk it was already too late. After the ‘incident,’ as you called it, I grabbed Rosa and carried her across the street to her parents’ house, then went and told Merrill what the little monster had done, but I don’t think he believed me.”
I’m not sure I did, either. From my own experience, I knew that people tended to blame foster kids for everything that went wrong, from destructive oceanic tides to total eclipses of the sun, and tailored what they saw accordingly.
***
The next three stops didn’t pan out. The Atkinsons had long since moved away from their Tempe home and none of the neighbors remembered them. Same story with the Gaults in Mesa. Another foster family, the Morrises, had died in a Queen Creek house fire, but the only person who semi-remembered the fire was in the early stages of Alzheimer’s and had trouble remembering his own name. He was also convinced I was his daughter. The long drive from Queen Creek to Maryvale also turned up nothing, although Fairfield/Starr had lived with two different sets of foster parents in the area. Casey’s former foster parents were long gone, as was everyone who knew them.
Most people don’t realize how transitory the Phoenix area is. We’re a magnet for frostbite victims fleeing the northeast winters, as well as for people running away from bad relationships and/or criminal acts in other states. It’s not unusual for a newcomer to run through several different addresses here before giving up and moving on to California to try their luck there. Foster parents, though, were usually more settled, so I was surprised at my run of bad luck. Surely someone else remembered the kid.
My luck changed when I circled back east and to the Phoenix suburb of Gilbert. Bill and Edith Larson lived in a two-story brick house that looked like it belonged in Wisconsin, not Arizona. The lush green lawn belonged back East, too, and made me wonder about the occupants’ water bill. Growing grass in the desert is an expensive proposition.
After I’d identified myself to the fifty-something woman who answered the door, she informed me that her parents were at Bonny Glen, a nearby assisted living facility. Her mother, she said, had suffered a near-fatal stroke and was no longer verbal. Her father’s mind, however, remained unaffected by the rheumatoid arthritis that kept him in a wheelchair.
“What did you want to talk to them about?” the woman who introduced herself as Beth asked. She was in the middle of “freshening up” the house, as she put it, before the realtor arrived. In contrast to her expensive salon hair, she wore baggy jeans, an oversized man’s shirt, and clutched a filthy dust rag
in her hands.
“I’m interested in hearing about their time as foster parents.”
She gave me a bemused look that struggled with the Botox in her face. “Good luck getting Dad to discuss that.”
I made a quick mental calculation. At the time Casey Fairfield/Starr had been fostered by the Larsens, Beth would have been somewhere in her early teens. “How did you feel about sharing the house with foster kids?”
“Probably the same thing any young girl would feel.”
“Which would be?”
“Irritated. Maybe a little jealous.”
“Nothing else?”
“I had my own life. Puppy loves, that sort of thing. If I remember correctly, at the time I was mooning over some boy named Kevin, or maybe it was Keith, or Kenny, whatever, and when I wasn’t breaking my heart over him, I was hanging out with my girlfriends. I didn’t pay much attention to what was going on at home.”
Her tone was chipper but she was twisting the holy hell out of that dust rag.
“Do you remember a boy named Casey?”
She didn’t answer right away, just twisted the dust rag some more. Finally, she said, “You’d better come in. But we need to make this fast because the realtor is due here in a half hour and I still have to drag more stuff out to the garage. Old people, you know, they never throw anything away.”
When I stepped inside, I saw a living room that had been pretty much gutted. No family pictures, no books, no knickknacks, just furniture that could have been shipped on Noah’s ark. Many of the Larsens’ personal things had taken up residence in the six large cardboard boxes sitting in the middle of the room. After settling myself onto an ugly green sofa, I got straight to the point. “What do you remember about Casey?”
Beth, sitting across from me in a matching chair, raised her already surgically lifted eyebrows even further. “Not much, really. Just that after him, my folks didn’t take in any more fosters.”
If that dust rag had been a chicken, it would have a broken neck.
“Did Casey cause problems?”
“Most foster kids had crappy lives, which is why they wound up in foster care in the first place.”