1

It’s hot as fuck. But this is Arizona, so it’s a dry fuck.

Even still. At 114 degrees, it’s an oven.

Homicide Detective Alex Mills is on his hands and knees in the backyard of Viveca Canning’s ample home. While Mills conducts his search under a blazing sky, Ms. Canning remains coolly inside her air-conditioned house waiting for the Office of the Medical Examiner to arrive. Relatively speaking, there’s no hurry. Ms. Canning is dead. Shot twice in the head, it would seem, and cold, indeed. The crime scene specialists have spread throughout the house searching for evidence while scene investigator Jan Powell supervises. Out here, in the yard, Mills and one of the specialists scour for footprints in the gravel; they should be easy to spot, but they’re not. Someone had kicked enough gravel around, apparently on purpose, to almost certainly render footprints useless. But fuck, it’s hot. This is what happens during a Phoenix summer: every five to seven minutes you remind yourself how fucking hot it is.

And, yes, you sweat, despite the dry heat. A Colorado River of perspiration meanders from Mills’s neck to the small of his back, threatening the Continental Divide of his ass. He’s in the backyard here with the tech because it was obvious upon eyeballing the inside of the house that the perpetrator had entered through the rear by kicking in a glass door between the dining room and the swimming pool. The backyard is a resort, which is common if you live in the Valley of the Sun and you have money. The pool is one of those lazy, shapeless ones, surrounded by boulders and succulents, with a gushing waterfall at one end and a swim-up bar at another. Mills would like to tumble in now, sink to the bottom of the pool; it’s tempting but he wipes his brow and shakes his head. There’s a tennis court. And a small putting green. He gets up, his hands and knees chewed up a bit by the stones of desert landscaping. Immediately he hears a distant fluttering in the wind. A coming percussion. Then a roar. He looks to the sky, fully knowing what approaches. There they are, the metal vultures of the media, swooping in, sniffing around for the carrion. But he’s done. The news choppers won’t see anything out here except the immaculate indulgences of yet another wealthy Phoenician.

He leaves his colleague behind to do her measurements of all things measureable, and there’s a shitload to measure; most people don’t realize how meticulously a crime scene is recreated on paper. He heads back inside, runs into Detective Morton Myers in the doorway. Mills, who was assigned by the sergeant to be case agent, has asked Myers to be the notetaker. Myers is good with notes.

“Preston checked the garage for a car,” Myers tells him. Ken Preston is probably the oldest, wisest detective at the crime scene. “It’s empty.”

“OK,” Mills says. “Any indication that others lived here?”

“I found a stack of bills. All addressed to the victim. Nothing indicating a marriage. Preston is talking to neighbors now.”

“Good.”

“Mind if I go out back?”

“Go where you need to.”

Mills brushes past him and finds Detective Jan Powell in what poses as a library. Mills considers it posing because people don’t read enough anymore to require a personal library; they just want to look like they do, and rich people just want to show that their houses are big enough to accommodate a mahogany room exclusively for books. Phoenix, Scottsdale, and Paradise Valley have become, in recent years, magnets for the pretentious bullshitters who get more for their conspicuous wealth here than they can in LA. Plus the air quality is better, but not by much. He lingers here in the library because he still loves a good book. For some reason, probably back to that English Lit major he dated in college, he knows no better Zen than reading. He reads every night in bed. Can’t get to sleep without escaping first between the pages of literature. He prefers the classics, but he’s started reading contemporary novels too. He likens a good book to a grand detour, as if he’s driving down an everyday, unremarkable highway and suddenly veers left onto a road that doesn’t exist on a map. That sharp left turn takes him into another world, gets him out of his. Kelly, his insanely perfect wife, sometimes calls him a nerd. He finds that charming. There’s a great-looking edition of Don Quixote on a lower shelf of Viveca Canning’s home library. Mills is tempted to remove it and sift. Instead, he turns to Powell and says, “Nothing in here.”

“It’s about the only room on this side of the house that wasn’t touched.”

And she’s right. He returns to the victim. Ms. Canning, in a silk dress, the clinging kind that Kelly would call a “cocktail dress,” lies sprawled on the floor in the next room, a formal room with a fireplace and area rugs, marble tables, and leather upholstery. He drifts in there with Powell at his heels. He studies the room again. There’s a wall of floor to ceiling shelves and cabinets. The cabinets are open and the contents—CDs, records, DVDs—are tossed everywhere on the floor. He turns to the adjacent bedroom where drawers of Viveca Canning’s life clutter the floor, extracted like teeth from the bureaus. Closet doors stand agape, revealing a tumble of jewelry and a landslide of gowns that speak volumes in the silence.

“We have a lot to go through,” Powell tells him in a reverent whisper.

“Yeah.”

“The other bedroom across the hall looks the same,” she says.

“I saw.”

They return to the living room where Viveca Canning rests. Mills really wishes he could channel his good friend Gus Parker right about now; the psychic would have a fucking field day here at the crime scene. But Gus is out of town. He’s out of town a lot these days, costarring, as he is, in the life of rock ’n’ roll star Billie Welch, who lives in LA and tours the world. Today, however, the psychic is burying his father in Seattle. Mills thinks he has the day right, can’t quite remember. But in Gus’s absence Mills is left wishing he had some of the man’s psychic gifts, which he doesn’t and never will, but he does have good instincts, he tells himself, as he stares at the entry wounds in Viveca Canning’s head. He rethinks the shattered glass, the back door, the sign of forced entry. He doesn’t think she was robbed, despite the material carnage.

Too many jewels were left behind. He had noticed pearls on the floor of the bedroom. He had eyed a diamond watch perched on a nightstand. Mills inventories the walls of fine art. Nothing taken, with one exception. One space on the wall is empty; a lone nail and a perfect square, a shade darker than the faded surrounding walls, perfectly mark the site where one painting evacuated. But everything else is intact, and these aren’t prints, to the best of Mills’s estimation. He reads the signatures: Lichtenstein; Pollock; Chagall. Mills doesn’t know much about art, but the collection seems eclectic and original. This is not a woman who peddled in replicas.

“Here’s what I’m thinking,” he tells Powell, backing away from the techs, “this was made to look like a general robbery, but the missing painting tells me whoever did this came for one item and one item alone.” “And killed our victim to get it?”

“Absolutely.”

“It must be worth a lot of money,” Powell says.

“The diamonds and the pearls are worth a lot of money,” Mills reminds her. “And they weren’t taken.”

“I noticed an emerald too,” she whispers. “And I’m almost sure the brooch on the bathroom floor is ruby.”

“Right. So the painting, I’m guessing, is worth more than money to someone.”

Powell nods. Mills goes back to the body, sinks to his knees. The blood from the victim’s head is barely a tributary. A tech, Roni Gates, hands him a fresh pair of gloves. “We found the shell casings,” she says.

“Well, it’s obvious she’s been shot twice.”

“At close range,” Roni says. “Probably within two feet away. I’ve noted the compact stippling around the entry wounds.”

“Exit wounds?”

Roni nods and says she’s just recovered a spent bullet, then points to an exit wound behind the victim’s ear. “It’s consistent, I think, with the bruising under her eye. The bullet apparently exited and hit the wall. It’s got significant deformation.”

“So, we’re assuming the other bullet is lodged somewhere inside her squash here,” Mills speculates.

“Correct,” Roni says. Then she looks at him with a beaming smile. That’s her trademark. He can never be certain whom he’ll run into at a crime scene, but when it’s Roni Gates he’s always greeted with a radiance, as if she has unearthed the secret to happiness in an unhappy world. She is, after all, kneeling over the body of a homicide victim. And smiling.

There’s no weapon in sight. Clearly not a suicide. And again, that empty square on the wall. He looks at it once more, trying to peer through it, as if the answer is just beyond the drywall. He shakes his head.

“We’ll know more after the ME x-rays for the other bullet,” Roni says.

“Yeah. Assuming the bullet didn’t fall apart in her skull.”

“You guys didn’t find a weapon anywhere? Out back? Other part of the house?” she asks. “It’s a big place.”

“We’ve been through it as best as we can on plain sight. There are a few locked cabinets and drawers we’re going to have to break open once we get a judge to sign off,” he tells her, “but I suspect our perp came here with a gun and left with a gun.”

Roni Gates nods and, again, smiles. In that moment, as Mills hovers over the body of Viveca Canning, with her exquisite coif of silver hair, her bluish face, and a bullet nesting in her brain, Mills can honestly say, as long as Roni is smiling, the world still bends toward the light.