It took less than an hour and a half to get to Quartzsite. Not even the highway patrol wanted to spend time on that road, so I was safe speeding. Sure, it was the multilane highway between Phoenix and Los Angeles, but it was also the hottest, ugliest stretch of road in the state. Featureless flat desert rolled away in all directions. No vegetation higher than your knees, and even that was parched and gray.
I didn’t have a temperature gauge in the truck but my bare arm out the window confirmed that October temperatures had not yet arrived in La Paz County. God’s country, my ass.
In winter, the little town of Quartzsite swells from its usual population of two thousand to over a quarter of a million, playing host to one of the largest RV-based snowbird communities in the world, and holding nationally known gem and mineral shows. By July it is a hellish ghost town.
I cruised up and down the main strip twice, then chose the most disreputable-looking hamburger stand of the three that were available.
A gaunt, stray dog panted in the shade of a Dumpster and a Gila monster warmed itself on a flat stone next to the front door. Its bands of black and pearl scales looked like something on offer at the gem show. I pulled open the warped screen door and crossed the three feet from the entrance to the counter. A double helix of fly-studded paper twirled overhead.
“Herman Prosky around?” I asked the heavyset man who was scraping the grill.
“Who’s asking?” He didn’t look up from his task.
“Paula Chatham asked me to stop by and say hi. Says she remembers Ajo.”
“Ajo?” He finally looked me in the eye. “That doesn’t mean nothing to me but ‘garlic.’”
“Well, literally, yeah, I can see what you mean.” Ajo did mean “garlic” in Spanish. “Paula said you might be able to help me out with something.”
He put down the spatula and approached the counter, wiping greasy hands on an already spotted apron. “You a cop?”
I shook my head. “Farthest thing from it.”
He detoured around me on the way to the front door, locked the screen, and turned the sign around to read BACK IN 15 MINUTES. I followed him through the kitchen and out the back door.
His used-to-be-mobile home sat dead center on a square concrete pad behind the burger joint. If it had been a fried egg, my mother would have applauded the placement. He held the door open for me and I preceded him up two steps and into the trailer. It smelled the way Herman looked—old, unwashed, and greasy.
“Whadda ya need?” he asked, closing the door behind him. The smell grew stronger.
“I’m looking for a gun.”
“Really? I thought you were here for a Tootsie Roll pop.” He snorted, then opened the tiny refrigerator and pulled out a beer without offering me one. “So, what’ll it be?”
“Something small.”
Prosky sat down at the built-in U-shaped dining table and yanked up the seat cushion on the rear bench. Digging out a rolled towel, he unfurled it on the table.
“Ya got yer Colt, yer Ruger if you like .45s. This is the best bargain today.” He pointed at a short-barreled revolver with a white plastic grip that looked about as durable as cotton candy. “An RG .22. I can let you have it for a hunnert and seventy-five.”
He didn’t see any spark of interest in my eyes, so he dug deeper into the bench seat and came out with another towel, this one wrapping a longer shape. “How about a rifle? I’ll give you a better price on this Ruger Mini-14 than you could get at Wal-Mart.”
“What’s that?” I asked, spying a familiar shape in a fold of cloth under the rifle.
“Oh, this little thing?”
It was a twin to the LadySmith I’d used to kill Walter Racine, but this one had deep red, burled wood instead of the hard, black rubber grip that one had. It looked like Prosky was holding a beating heart in his hand. I had to have it.
“How much?”
He named a figure that was triple the retail price, but I wasn’t in the market for retail. I got him to knock it down fifty bucks and throw in a box of bullets and a little switchblade with a five-inch double-edged sticker and called it quits.
It was already almost three o’clock and the sun was doing its worst. I bought a bag of ice and two big bottles of water for the trip back home. More than a hundred degrees and sunset was still four hours away.
I dunked a handkerchief in the melting ice and wrung it out loosely, leaving in the small chips of ice that had gathered in the folds. I sighed as I wrapped it around my neck.
I’d be back in Tucson by dark.
The setting sun turned the sky from persimmon to bruise. My mind spun with the tires. I still had so many unanswered questions. Who had buried a note with my name in Markson’s grave? If the note was in Felicia’s handwriting, then Markson might have been alive as much as two days after the attack. Where had he been? And if he was already dead, why hadn’t they buried him?
Treadwell should know by now whether the paint on Carlos’s car matched Markson’s. But where was Carlos and why did he have a child’s seat in his car?
Emily Markson’s role in this wasn’t clear, either. She’d lied to the cops about her husband being in New Mexico on the night of the attack and she was fooling around with her lawyer-neighbor. That, plus the bruises on her arms and the cryptic e-mail I’d seen signed “A” about meeting someone at the arroyo, left too many gaps in her story, too.
And what about that creepy Paul Willard, hooked into this both by his affair and by Felicia’s internship? I could understand if he wanted to get Markson out of the way, but what did Felicia and her boyfriend have to do with that?
It was only eight o’clock by the time I got back to Tucson. Not too late to check in with my friendly local cop.
Deke Treadwell’s house was only a mile from my parents’ place, tucked into one of the side streets behind the Arizona Inn. I pulled up at the curb and shut off the engine. In case the neighborhood wasn’t as safe as it looked, I locked the new LadySmith in the toolbox in the back of the pickup.
All the lights in the house were on, although I couldn’t hear any noise from inside. I passed the squat, fat palm tree by the front porch and was greeted by the smell of pot roast.
“Jessica? Is that you? My, you’ve changed.”
Mary Louise, Deke’s wife, hadn’t changed at all. Her hair was still iron-filing gray, in tight curls like a poodle’s around her face. Her arms were open in welcome.
“Come in! Come in! It’s been such a long time since we’ve seen you.”
I guess Deke hadn’t been passing along the news of my arrival in Tucson any more than my brother Martin had.
“Hi, Mrs. Treadwell. I hope I’m not interrupting dinner.”
“Nonsense. We have plenty. Come along.” She swept me through the tidy living room—plastic coverings on the armrests, plastic ficus in the corner—and into the kitchen.
“I thought you were up in Phoenix,” Deke said, putting down his fork.
“I got back earlier than I expected.” He gestured me to sit, and I pulled out the chair next to him at the small round table. Mary Louise put a plate loaded with carrots, potatoes, parsnips, and fork-tender beef in front of me. So much for my promised diet.
“Biscuits, Jessica?” she prompted.
I’d come by to pump Deke for information, but that could wait. I wasn’t about to turn down any of Mary Louise’s cooking. I had fond memories of evenings spent here eating macaroni and cheese and mustardy potato salad, but what I most loved her for were the deliveries of chocolate-chip cookies and lemon bars to me in jail. The sweet treats rarely made it past the guards, but just the thought that she had come by with them made my days easier.
We talked the silly superficialities of weather and whereabouts until our plates were empty and cleared away. “Why don’t you two go sit in the living room and I’ll clean up,” Mary Louise said, sensing our unspoken need.
We ignored the living room and headed for the aluminum glider on the back porch. Deke took up three-quarters of it and I let his feet set the rocking pace.
“What did you find out about Carlos’s car?” I asked after a moment of silence.
“Jessie, don’t put me in the middle of this—”
“You’re already in the middle of it, and so am I. I don’t want to be flying blind if there’s something I ought to know.”
He sighed and rocked another three times. “The paint on Ochoa’s car matches what we found on Markson’s Cadillac. He was involved in the rear-end collision.”
“Do you know if Carlos was driving?”
“His prints are all over the car, but there are others, too.”
“Maybe Guillermo should listen to the HandsOn call. He’d recognize his brother’s voice. Maybe he’d know the third guy, too.” I looked sideways at him. “There really were three, right?”
“Yeah, the forensic team says it’s three voices. Maybe—”
“What about the child seat?” I interrupted.
“There’s no reason that Carlos needed one and no proof that he ever bought one. But Darren Markson bought a car seat just like the one we found and put it on his company credit card a month ago.”
“What did his wife say?”
Deke kept rocking. “More of nothing. She had no idea…He never mentioned it…They didn’t need one…Maybe he bought it as a gift for an employee.”
“Well, maybe he did. But why would he have had it in his car on the way to a business meeting in New Mexico?” Until I heard a better answer, I was assuming that the sixty-pound weight that HandsOn had recorded in the back was a child’s seat. A child’s seat with someone sitting in it. Who was that child and where was he?
“Any more news on Felicia’s internship? What did the guys at the law firm say?”
“Willard says he knew about the internship but never had any dealings with her. She seemed to work in Levin’s group, but even there it was just filing and stuff.”
I still wasn’t willing to shrug aside her internship as “just a coincidence.” I had only glanced at the Willard, Levin and Pratt documents that Mr. Villalobos had given me. But if Felicia was just doing filing, why did she have the law office documents at home at all? They deserved a closer look.
“Jesus, Deke. This is getting scary. Darren Markson is found dead more than two days after I talk to him. Felicia gets blown up right after I meet her. And now there may be a child involved? What are you guys doing about it?” I rocked our glider faster and it protested with a high-pitched dry squeak.
“Leave it alone, Jessie. We’re working the case.”
“Did you check Markson’s other phone calls through the HandsOn system? Maybe one of the earlier calls—”
“Give it a rest, Jessie.” He stood up and walked to the leafy mulberry in the center of the backyard. “Emily Markson’s lawyer is trying to restrict our use of the HandsOn information. Says that all that data is owned by the Marksons, not HandsOn, and any use of the information would be like forcing the Marksons to testify against themselves.”
“But you got a subpoena that night, right?”
Silence. Deke kicked at the tree trunk.
“You didn’t?”
He shook his head. “We got the nine-one-one information from your call, then contacted HandsOn and asked you to come down. Your bosses probably shouldn’t have released the information without a subpoena or approval from the Marksons.”
“You were looking for a man who was in danger. Isn’t there something about exigent circumstances?”
“Nothing exigent in calling you the next day, I guess.” He stripped a small branch of its leaves and littered them on the dry grass. “Anyway, a judge is looking into it now.”
“And Emily Markson is trying to keep you from getting the information.”
“Yep.”
What was she hiding? The HandsOn information couldn’t implicate her—she said she was home at the time of the attack. And it couldn’t implicate her husband; he was dead. Unless they were both involved in something they didn’t want the cops to know about.
It looked like I had already passed along the HandsOn information illegally, so I might as well keep going. I told Deke about listening in to Markson’s car a second time on that call.
“That scenario matches somebody stringing him up from his feet and beating the shit out of him,” he said.
“Is that what his body looked like?”
He nodded. “There were rope burns around his ankles and he’d taken a beating before he was killed. Broken arm, cheekbone. Broken ribs. The bruises had had enough time to show up, anyway. But he would have lived if somebody hadn’t put a bullet in his head.”
I was back to my original hypothesis that Markson had been held for ransom. But now I had more questions. Where was the child who had been in the backseat? And why didn’t Emily Markson want us to find out?