Valley of Shadows

God, or whoever controls the weather, has blessed the valley with a milder morning. Ninety-seven degrees. Dry. Doable. Window down, even, if he wishes. He doesn’t wish, but he appreciates the relief. Gus calls as Mills exits the Squaw Peak.

“Some mornings you just want to throw your arms around Mother Nature and give her a big, fat kiss,” Gus tells him.

“Oh, so that’s who controls the weather?”

“I think so, yes.”

“Well, you better be sure it’s okay with Mother Nature. Unwanted advances can backfire big time. Just ask Cosby.”

“That’s not funny, Alex.”

Gus tells him about some strange vibes he’s been getting again about those tunnels. Gus is insistent. He keeps repeating their names. Aaliyah. Viveca. And he jumps back, now, to the visit to Viveca’s home in Copper Palace, when Mills let him stand in front of the blank wall where the Dali had hung. Gus says there’s a message either in the wall or behind the painting itself. He’s not sure. But he’s sure there’s a message, or a code, or something they’re missing.

Mills smiles. It’s a strange collective effort. A camaraderie he can’t put a price on.

“I know this a little confusing,” Gus says. “But that’s what I get.” “That’s fine,” Mills tells him. “Your confusing vibes, mixed with a little old-fashioned police work, usually gets the job done.”

“I don’t know if that’s a compliment.”

“It’s not an insult.”

This red light is as stubborn as a toothache. He’s going to be late, but fuck it. He rolls down the window and lets the fresh morning air circulate. It’s a soothing kind of warm, and Mills is tempted to cut the A/C. But he doesn’t. He lets the warm stir with the cool, and the capricious mix reminds him of those first few months dating Kelly. He was unsure, unsteady all of the time. He had never been so enchanted or so mowed down by desire for another. He confesses to Gus how scared he is for her, though he doesn’t say scared.

“Of course you’re freaking out,” Gus says.

“I don’t know how I’m going to make it through Friday.”

“You will, dude. Anything I can do?”

“Nothing I can think of.”

“I’m on standby.”

“Good to know.”

The light finally turns green. Mills takes this as a cue to let Gus go. Gus says, “It’s another day for constructing theories, dude. Good luck.” Mills shakes his head with a smile. Constructing. Pure Gus.

Once he’s off the phone he realizes how good it was to be on the phone, for distraction, if nothing else. Now, the rest of the way, he can’t shake it. The image hovers, a dark, spidery mass of tissue and fibers on the horizon, like a web waiting to ensnare. And it does ensnare. He drives right toward it, right into it, to prove what? That he has no fear? He has fear. That he’s not to be fucked with? It fucks with him. It settles on his shoulders. He carries it into headquarters, into the elevator, into his office, and then it lands on his desk and sits there like an ornament: his business cards, a paperweight, a framed picture of Trevor in his football gear, and Kelly’s tumor. He takes a sip of coffee.

As planned, Mills calls David Patrick promptly at ten o’clock. Mills would not be surprised if the guy had decided not to answer his phone. Some people play like that. They won’t cooperate but they don’t have the balls to tell you they won’t cooperate. They just go dark. Unfortunately for those uncooperative types, Alex Mills and the Phoenix Police Department have some very bright, insistent lights. Turns out he won’t be needing the incandescent muscle quite yet. Patrick answers on the third ring.

“Mr. Patrick, it’s Alex Mills from Phoenix PD.”

“You can drop the formalities. My name’s David. Call me David.” “So, David, you asked me to call this morning. Have you thought about meeting with me?”

The guy’s outside. There’s noise in the background, the maddening backup beeps of a truck, then a whistle, then a horn. “I’ve been too busy to really think about it, Detective,” the man says. “But yeah, it’s fine. You free around one, one-thirty?”

“I can be.”

“I’m at a work site. I’ll text you the address. You’ll find me in the trailer. OK?”

“I might have a partner with me,” Alex tells him. “See you then.” After the call, Mills wanders down to the Missing Persons folks. He briefs them on the contents of Aaliyah Jones’s thumb drive.

“Thanks for sharing, Alex,” one of them says. Mills can’t discern whether there’s sarcasm in the woman’s inflection.

“It’s in evidence,” he tells them. “Sign it out if you want.” “Thanks,” the woman says. He’s never met her. Her desk is such a cluttered train wreck he can’t even read her nameplate.

“We got the warrant for her phones,” the other one says. Mills knows him, peripherally. Nate Sharpe.

“Oh?”

“Yeah. We’re still going through them,” Nate says. “That woman didn’t destroy a voice mail.”

“That’s probably a good thing,” Mills says.

“There’s a bit of crossover,” Nate adds. “Some of the same people calling her on both phones.”

Mills shrugs. It’s a classic detective shrug, an in-house shrug. “That doesn’t necessarily surprise me,” he tells them.

“Sources,” Nate specifies. “Some of her sources were calling her on her personal phone as well as her work line.”

Mills offers a more affable nod. “They trusted her. She trusted them.”

“Viveca Canning was increasingly calling her on her personal phone, like she was avoiding Aaliyah’s work phone on purpose.”

“Scared of it being traced, maybe, or not entirely in Aaliyah’s control. That’s my guess,” Mills tells them. “Do me a favor. Send me over whatever you log when you have a chance.”

“Of course,” the nameless woman says. “Give us another day or two.”

Mills says that’ll be fine and heads back to his office. He calls Kelly, gets her voice mail. There’s another call he has to make, but he’s been dreading making it. He reaches for the phone again, but the dread overcomes him. Not yet. He pictures his son, Trevor, equal parts jockish and studious, equal parts sensitive and brutish, a child of dichotomies, a twisted helix of Kelly and Alex and the remnants of ancestry. Trevor settled so well into college life it caught Mills by surprise. How had the kid taken the detachment so seamlessly? And why had he taken it so enthusiastically? They had been good parents. Trevor had had a good upbringing. There were bumps in the road, but the road is bumpy. All roads are bumpy. Children and parents alike make stupid choices. Trevor is only down the road at U of A, and he comes home to visit every other month or so, for birthdays and holidays, but the kid decided to stay in Tucson for the summer and work at a local bookstore. At least he’ll be around books. Maybe some part of Alex rubbed off on his son. He needs to tell Trevor about his mother’s illness. No one prepares you to make this kind of call.

So he doesn’t make it. He’ll do it later. He’ll meet with the squad instead. Get some updates. Then he’ll grab Preston and go meet with David Patrick.

Don’t get him started on development in Phoenix. It’s out of control. The growth. The sprawl. Today’s valley is not the valley of Mills’s youth. And while he doesn’t begrudge the modernization of the skyline and the infrastructure, and while he does, in fact, enjoy living in a more cosmopolitan city, he thinks the growth is unsustainable. If there is an inch of land, there’s a developer waiting to build. It will be a “mixed-use” project. Which means whatever they can shove in there to make the most profit. Every inch of available land. Politicians turn a blind eye as the desert disappears, and it’s easy for them to do that as the developers line their pockets. Mills gets mad about this, because once you destroy the desert, you can’t get it back. It’s gone, along with the beauty of isolation. Soon there will be no place left to build but the medians of the highways, and Mills suspects that the vampires of the valley are already taking bids. He’s trapped in this mental riff because, as it happens, he’s approaching the work site of DP Construction. It’s a small lot near the corner of East McDowell and 52nd, but there are backhoes and excavators and bulldozers. And it’s too damn close to the neighboring buttes. He drives past a sign that says “Magic Creek Townhomes, Coming Soon!”

Preston is riding shotgun.

They park, approach the trailer, and Mills raps hard at the door. “Hey there,” comes a voice from behind them. “You Mills?”

“I am.”

The man in the hardhat steps up to the trailer and offers a handshake to both of them. “David,” he says. “Why don’t we do this inside so you don’t have to wear the hats?”

Inside, blueprints hang from the walls, as do other mechanical drawings and engineering renditions that Mills doesn’t understand. The place is also strewn with OSHA posters warning of work site hazards. Otherwise, the trailer is neat for a temporary office, more upscale in décor than Mills would have imagined. David Patrick sits in a smart, black chair behind a glass and steel desk, while Mills and Preston sit opposite him in matching seats. The pendant lighting above is shaped like Saturn, and Mills is taking mental notes for some home renovation projects of his own that might never happen. Odds are fifty-fifty. “Thanks for meeting with us,” he tells David.

“Like I said, I have no clue what happened to Aaliyah Jones, but I can tell you about my work at the cathedral. Just don’t use my name. I don’t want, you know, bad publicity.”

“Right now, we’ll keep it off the record,” Mills assures him. “But you should know that if you provide information the county deems material, you might end up as part of the official proceeding.”

“Shit,” the man says.

“Why don’t we cross that bridge when we get there?” Mills says. Then Preston leans forward and says, “So, what are you building here? Townhomes, is that right?”

Uncle Ken to the rescue. Just the perfect pitch to put the man at ease.

“Yeah,” David replies. “It’s a small project. Only twenty-two units. The lot is only zoned for eighteen, but the developer got a variance for an extra four. It’ll be a tight squeeze.”

“But ain’t that the story of the valley,” Preston says.

“Guess so.”

Okay, enough warm, fuzzy, avuncular lubrication. “While we understand you don’t know anything about the missing reporter,” Mills intervenes, “we do want to know why she was asking you about construction of the C-ARC in the first place. Can you help us understand that?”

The man tosses his head back and forth and says, “I suppose. She said she found me through LinkedIn because she searched Mulroney Construction, the company I used to work for.”

“Yes, we know that,” Mills tells him. “But why? Why was she looking for construction workers or contractors?”

“Oh. Okay, I understand,” David says. “She told me she was looking for people who had built the cathedral, because some of her sources told her about hidden rooms and vaults and, like, stairways to nowhere. That sort of thing. It sounded like fantasy to her. And she wanted to confirm. She said her sources, some ex church members, were telling her about rumors of a secret underground.”

“Were you able to confirm any of this for her?” Mills asks.

“I was.”

That familiar wave of affirmation rises in Mills’s chest. It floods him with anticipation. “How much of the building did you work on?”

“I did framing mostly. But there were dozens of us. The place is huge, you know.”

“We know,” Preston says. “But did you get a good sense of the whole project?”

“Of course,” David replies. “There were zones, and different workers were assigned different zones, but we were free to be wherever we wanted to be. Though, I will say, that preacher guy and his wife liked to stop by and watch us like hawks.”

The guy laughs, then shrugs.

“And what were you able to confirm to Aaliyah about those rumors?” Mills asks. “Do you have firsthand knowledge of any unusual deviations from normal construction and why that would have alarmed anyone?”

Another shrug from David Patrick. “All I can tell you is that there is an underground beneath the cathedral. It doesn’t fill the entire acreage of the structure above it, but it’s a large underground area. Kind of like a crawl space, but you mostly don’t have to crawl.”

“Did you work on it?” Preston asks.

“Yes. Mostly.”

“Did you see it finished?” Mills asks.

“Not exactly.”

“What does that mean?” Mills persists.

“Well, we did some of the finishing, but then we were told that church members would come in and do most of the painting and flooring themselves . . .”

“An underground in Phoenix sounds like a big effort,” Mills observes. “I mean, with the rocky soil, mostly rock, you know. Most people don’t have basements for that reason.”

The guy leans back in his chair, suddenly relaxed, self-assured, in control. “Well, Detectives, this is the same desert where Mexican traffickers dig tunnels to move their drugs. They build complete underground operations. This can’t be news to you.”

Suddenly, Gus’s vision resonates. “So you built tunnels?” Mills asks.

“It seemed that way. They were really just hallways with low ceilings. But you know, when you excavate, it does sort of look like a drug trafficking operation.”

Preston says, “It seems kind of sinister when you put it that way, but did you actually have any idea what you were building?”

David sits there blinking, his mouth closed. He tilts his head the way people often do when they’re perplexed. “I’m not sure I understand the question.”

“Based on the design of the space, based on the plans you were following, did you have a sense of what the space would be used for?” Lightbulb. It’s all over the contractor’s face. “Oh! I see! Right, well, I don’t really know for sure. But it seemed to me like underground storage space. For supplies, maybe. Or tables and chairs for big functions. I mean, most churches have to put that stuff somewhere.”

“Can you remember how the rooms were divided?” Mills asks him. “How many rooms? How they varied in size?”

David rubs his chin, shakes his head slowly, thoughtfully, “Oh, God. This goes back a while. I can’t be sure. I never really gave it much thought until the reporter called me out of the blue. But, let’s say, maybe six to ten rooms. One really big room with several smaller ones surrounding it. Like maybe an office plan. With workers in the middle and managers in private rooms all around them. Something like that.” “I can’t think of many offices that are completely underground,” Preston says.

David leans forward, now, rests his arms at the edge of his desk. “I realize that, Detective, but I was just trying to describe the space, which is what you asked me to do . . .”

“I’m sorry,” Preston says. “You’re right. We know it probably wasn’t used as an office. But do you have any idea of its intended use? Did you ever ask? Did anyone ever mention during the course of construction what the use might be? Either the contractors or the church people?” “I can’t really remember. Except storage. I don’t think I reached that conclusion on my own. Someone must have said something about storage.” The guy takes a deep breath.

“We’re exhausting you,” Mills says. “We’re sorry. Our work is exhaustive.”

David shakes his head. “No. No, it’s fine. I’m just not sure what the construction, itself, has to do with anything.”

“Ah,” Mills says. “I get it. This all seems very broad to you. Indulge us. The construction is important, because if we have to, let’s say, search the place, it helps to have an insider who can help us understand all the nooks and crannies, if I may borrow a stupid phrase from an English muffin.”

David laughs. “Oh, right. A search. Of course. Maybe you should give me a little more time to really focus on my memories. I might be able to remember more details of the floor plan if you give me a few days to think about it.”

“We’re not saying a search is imminent, and you must not even discuss that possibility outside of this trailer,” Preston cautions him. “But yes, focus. See what you can remember. If and when we need your assistance, we’ll let you know.”

“In the meantime,” Mills begins, “it’s time to talk more specifically about Aaliyah Jones and Viveca Canning.”

The guy looks at his watch. Mills realizes David Patrick has a building to build, twenty-two tightly squeezed units. But Mills’s clock is ticking too. Instead of Mickey Mouse on the face of his watch, it’s a scowling Jake Woods.

“Do you have a few more minutes?” Mills asks him.

“I think so.”

“Just tell me if Aaliyah Jones ever saw the so-called underground of the church,” Mills says.

David’s shoulders pop up. “I doubt it. But I can’t say for sure. Not to my knowledge.”

“Viveca Canning?” Preston asks.

“Yep.”

“Yep, what?” Mills asks him.

“Yeah. She saw the underground space,” David replies. “Aaliyah introduced us. Viveca paid me to show her what was down there.”

“How much?” Preston asks.

“Is that really relevant?” the guy asks back.

“We can decide that once we have all the facts, David,” Mills answers.

“Fifteen hundred dollars. I felt really weird taking the money, but she insisted.”

A plane whizzes overhead into Sky Harbor.

“If you showed her the underground, why are you so sketchy about the details?” Mills asks him.

“I don’t understand.”

“When did this meeting with Viveca take place, David?” Mills asks.

“About a month ago, maybe a month and a half.”

“Since you showed her the underground fairly recently, why are you still relying on your memories from the construction phase?”

David waves his hands in the air. “No, no. I’m sorry. I didn’t physically show it to her. I couldn’t go in the cathedral with her,” he explains. “She said they wouldn’t let nonmembers in beyond a certain point. So I waited outside. But I told her how to get there.”

“How do you get there?” Preston asks.

“It’s weird,” he says. “You get there from, like, this elevator thing in the stadium. It’s in the middle of the stage, and it goes down two floors. First, to the main floor, and then to the underground.”

“From the stage?” Mills asks.

“Yep.”

It’s the hydraulic lift that elevates Gleason Norwood to stage level. Mills is sure of it.

“Was she carrying a key?” Mills asks.

“I’m not sure. She had a big pocketbook.”

Mills’s phone buzzes. It’s a text message from Lt. Chang in Scottsdale. <call me>

“Do you need a key to access the underground area after you get off the elevator?” Preston asks.

“I think so,” David says. “We installed doors. I imagine they had locks, but I don’t remember.”

“What happens when you get off the elevator?” Mills asks.

“You just end up in a long hallway with a low ceiling,” he says. “And, yes, I think it leads to a door. But it’s a while before you hit the door, ’cause it’s a really long hallway.”

“How long was Viveca in there?” Mills asks him.

“Twenty or twenty-five minutes, I guess,” he replies. “But I was just waiting in the parking lot. I didn’t time her, you know . . .”

Preston shifts in his chair, goes avuncular again, this time all posture; he folds an arm across his stomach, bends the other so his chin can rest inside his hand. And nods. So Uncle Ken. “We know you didn’t time her, David. That wouldn’t be our expectation. But what did she tell you when she came out? We’d expect you to remember that.” “Right,” he says. “I do. She was totally freaked out. She came out shaking.”

Mills sits up. “What did she say?”

“That’s the thing—she didn’t say much.”

“Aw, come on, man, she had to have said something,” Mills insists. “I know. I know. But this was very recent. So I remember it exactly how I’m telling you. She came out of that place like she had seen a ghost or something. I thought she was going to have a heart attack.” “And that was it? Did she drive off and never see you again?” Preston asks.

The guy nods. “Yeah. She paid me,” he says. “And then she walked over to her car. I got out and followed her and asked her if she was okay to drive, ’cause, you know, she didn’t look okay. I even asked what happened in there, and she just kept shaking her head and saying she couldn’t talk about it, and I was getting freaked out just because she was freaked out. She said someday Aaliyah Jones would expose the whole truth. And that was it. She got in her car and drove away. There was not a whole lot more I could do after that.”

Mills rises from the chair. Preston follows. “Thank you, David,” Mills says. “You’ve been a tremendous help. It might not feel that way, but you have.” He hands the contractor his card. “Call me if you think of anything else.”

David Patrick walks the detectives back to their car. The outside greets them with a glaring sun. Handshakes all around. “Good luck with Magic Creek,” Mills tells the man.

“Oh, that’s just some stupid name the developer came up with.”

Mills laughs. He figured as much.

They’re only in the car for about thirty seconds when Preston says, “We have to get into that basement.”

Mills nods, but doesn’t reward Uncle Obvious with an obvious affirmation.

With a ball of lead in his stomach and butterflies in his chest, displaced from his stomach by the lead, Mills dials his son. And immediately understands his fret as pointless. You can fret, fret, fret, and fret, and then get voice mail. He gets voice mail. Doesn’t leave a message. He can’t qualify the anticlimactic sensation; it’s just there, relief and protracted dread. He tosses his phone on his desk and that seems to be the cue for his landline to ring.

“Mills.”

“Hey, Alex? It’s Liv Chang. From Scottsdale PD.”

“Oh, right. Sorry. I got your text . . .”

“No prob. Got a sec?”

“Or more . . .”

“We have an ID on that license plate from the Carmichael and Finn break-in,” she says. “Not an easy task. We had to do enhancements of the enhancements to read the tag and get the right make and model. Sorry it took so long.”

“I’ve been there, done that many times. No problem. Who’s your driver?”

“The owner of the vehicle is a Ralph Waters, thirty-two, lives in South Scottsdale.”

“You find any connection between Mr. Waters and the Cannings?”

“Only that he wanted to break into their vault,” she says. “Other than that, no. We’re headed over now to execute a search warrant, probably to make an arrest. Meet us there, if you’d like.”

Mills looks at his watch. 2:41. He tells the detective he can be there shortly after three.

“No rush,” she tells him. “I think we’ll be there a while.”

She gives him the address.

He sends Powell a text <busy?>

Powell replies <Yes/No. What’s up>

<k>

He hates “k.” <Meet in 5 in lot>

After a quick but powerful whizz, Mills is in the driver’s seat, Powell shotgun. The house in South Scottsdale is one of those rectangles on a slab, a 60s-style ranch with zero curb appeal and a driveway laden with so many cracks it looks like a concrete jigsaw puzzle. They meander an obstacle course of Scottsdale cruisers and enter the home. It’s a clusterfuck of cops. They find Lt. Liv Chang questioning her suspect at a kitchen table that, for reasons unknown to Mills, is sitting toward the back of the house in the formal living room. Kind of deformalizes the room.

“So, how is it that you have no connection to Mrs. Canning but you happened to know where she stores her art?” Chang is asking the suspect.

Ralph Waters is wearing a white t-shirt and, from what Mills can see under the table, grey cargo shorts. Ralph Waters must like to gamble. Poker or blackjack, Mills assumes. That would explain the heart, the spade, the club, and the diamond tattooed up his forearm.

He placed a bad bet on the Carmichael and Finn Gallery, to be sure. “I told you I was just helping out a friend.”

“But so far your friend doesn’t seem to have a name,” Chang says. Then, noticing Mills and Powell, she makes the introductions. “Detective Mills and Detective Powell are investigating the murder of Viveca Canning.”

Waters stiffens. He sits up from his languid position, eyes Mills and Powell nervously, as if the two have already framed him for the crime. “I certainly had nothing to do with that,” he says, the emphasis on “I,” which Mills knows is highly significant.

“I was just about to have him taken in for more questioning,” Chang says to Mills. “Glad you could swing by. He’s been Mirandized.” Mills looks at Ralph Waters and says, “Since you’re suspected of trying to break into her vault, you’re a person of interest to us.”

“Great,” the guy says. He sounds yawny, as if he’d been woken from his three o’clock nap.

“You’re facing some serious charges, you realize,” Chang says. “I’m thinking you’ll do better with the county attorney if you cooperate. But that’s up to you . . .”

“Don’t I get my own lawyer?” Waters grumbles.

“That’s up to you too,” Chang replies. “But we asked you if you wanted a lawyer present a few minutes ago, and I think your exact words were, ‘I got nothing to hide.’ You’re free to change your mind.” The guy pushes at the chair and slides it away from the table. The chair scrapes the tile floor and makes a screeching sound that could pierce an eardrum or curdle blood. Mills can now see Waters’s handcuffed wrists resting in his lap. “Going somewhere?” Mills asks him.

The guy makes a spitting sound. “I just need more space,” he says. “If you’re a guy who needs more space,” Chang says, “you won’t be all that comfortable in the county jail. You have a lawyer?”

Waters shakes his head. “No.”

“I’m going to ask you one more time. Want us to get you one?” Waters shrugs.

“That’s not an answer,” Chang says. “And you’re trying my patience.”

Waters studies the floor, and Chang yields to the introspection in much the way Mills would; pieces of the truth often emerge during these interludes, usually starters like, “I can tell you this,” or “You should be talking to . . .”

The noise of the search warrant, meanwhile, fills the house: the opening and closing of doors, cabinets, and drawers, a swarm of footsteps, the snap of rubber gloves. Uniforms everywhere. Serious voices. It would intimidate the fuck out of me, Mills thinks. For him, it’s always about empathy, at least to the extent of knowing where the suspect’s head is at. He knows so many hardened, crusty cops who bristle at the idea of empathy, who equate it with sympathy, and that’s why few of them can make it as detectives. He likes the way Chang works too. He sees something in her, a steely intelligence that transcends her job; he guesses she’s smart about the whole world.

“All I’m gonna say is this,” Waters begins. “I don’t know Mrs. Canning. I never knew Mrs. Canning. I don’t know nothing about her art. Except I know she’s really rich. I’m not going to answer any questions about her murder. But I’ll tell you what I did that night at the gallery.”

Chang checks that her recorder is still rolling.

A cop ducks his head in. “We’ve got drugs,” he says.

“Aw, shit,” cries Ralph Waters. “Really?”

The cop nods. Chang closes her eyes for a second and shakes her head. Everyone sort of defers to her frustration. “OK. One thing at a time. If there are additional charges, we’ll deal with those later,” she says. “What kind of drugs?”

“So far pot and some pills,” the cop says.

“How much pot?” Chang asks.

“I don’t know,” the cop groans. “It’s a lot, but it’s not like I’ve weighed it, Lieutenant.”

“Keep me posted,” she says, as a means to dismiss her colleague. She turns back to Waters who sits there pouting, an aging slacker in a shitload of trouble. “You were saying, Ralph?”

He pushes his screeching chair back to the table so he can rest his elbows there and cradle his stubbly chin in his hands. “I was saying that we used my car. You obviously know that. And that we were supposed to blow open a vault in the gallery. With very low grade explosives.”

The emphasis on “low grade” nearly prompts a burst of laughter from Mills, as if somehow the weakness of the explosives minimizes the crime. Powell snorts aloud and Mills nudges her.

“But there was a guard on duty and he clearly saw my face,” Waters continues. “So there’s no denying that, right? But then we heard all the sirens and we fucking hightailed it . . .”

“What was in the vault?” Chang asks.

“I don’t know,” the guy says. “We never got in.”

“What was supposed to be in the vault?” Chang repeats.

“I just told you, I don’t know. My friend wanted to get something out of there. He said it was important.”

“But he didn’t tell you what it was?” Again, Chang.

“No.”

“You guys took off in your car. Then where did you go?” Mills asks. “I dropped him off at the AJ’s near Thompson Peak. In the parking lot.”

“And what? He walked home?” Chang asks.

“No. He got in his car and drove off. I don’t know where he went.” Mills looks at Chang, tries to transmit a kind of holding pattern in his eyes, just enough of a moment to make the suspect squirm. It seems to work, the silence. The eyeballing. The way Mills makes a tsking sound with his tongue until it almost becomes a song.

And then, “What was in it for you?” Mills asks. “Why do something so colossally stupid and dangerous for a friend?”

The guy doesn’t say a word.

“Huh?” Mills persists.

“Do I have to answer him?” Waters asks Chang.

Chang leans in. “He’s investigating the murder of Viveca Canning, as I’ve already made clear. You tried to break into her gallery vault. So, he has interest in the case, and yes, he has a right to question you . . .”

“And, yes,” Mills interjects, “you have the right to have an attorney present. We can re-Mirandize you if you’d like.”

Waters looks at Mills, then at Chang, then back to Mills, as if the two detectives are playing at Wimbledon. “I owed my friend money . . .” “For?” Chang asks.

“What do you think?” he says. “Drugs.”

“Nice,” Powell whispers. But everybody hears her.

“So, you owed this guy money for drugs and, what, he was going to forgive you the debt if you helped him break into a vault?” Mills asks.

Waters looks down, probes the floor again, shakes his head at his own stupidity and says, “Yeah.”

Chang leans in again. “Look, I can’t make any promises, Ralph, but I’m thinking the county attorney might consider dropping or reducing the drug charges if you cooperate. Assuming we find enough drugs today to charge you . . .”

Waters shrugs. “Whatever. But I need protection.”

“Protection?” Mills asks.

“Yeah,” the guy says without making eye contact.

“Can you elaborate?” Chang prods him.

“I said I need protection because this guy is dangerous, OK? I mean, he’s a dealer. He supports himself by selling drugs. He associates with bad people. And he threatened me . . .”

Mills takes a seat at the table. Powell leans against a wall.

“With?” Mills asks. “What did he threaten you with?”

The guy turns his palms upward with another shrug. “I think he said, ‘I’ll fucking kill you if you ever say a word.’”

“People say things,” Powell chimes in.

The guy sneers at her. “He was serious,” he says matter-of-factly. “I know he’s done some other damage in the valley, so I don’t doubt him. Can I have protection?”

Chang interjects and says, “Obviously, we’ll consider that, depending on what you tell us. But it’s more complicated than just getting you a 24-hour babysitter with a badge.”

“What do you do for work?” Mills asks him.

“I’m a waiter.”

“You share this house with anyone?”

“Another waiter and bartender where I work,” he says.

“He works at The ScottsView,” Chang says.

The ScottsView is an aging golf and tennis resort that has seen better times and bigger crowds. Its elegance has faded along with the paint and the carpets. It’s still popular with tourists, but not the upscale type. Ralph Waters at The ScottsView is typecasting.

“So, you owe this secret friend money for drugs. The money’s forgiven if you help on this art gallery caper,” Chang says. “Have you ever worked with explosives before?”

Waters nods. “I’ve built fireworks. Legal ones. I’ve built some for him.” That’s bullshit, Mills observes. Homemade fireworks are not legal. “Are you by any chance a member of the Church of Angels Rising?” Mills asks.

“What? No. What does that have to do with anything?”

“Viveca Canning was on the church’s board of directors,” Mills tells him. “You were breaking into her vault.”

“Well, I know nothing about that,” Waters insists. “This was just a favor, an arrangement, rather, between me and my dealer to settle up.” The guy fidgets, and then he starts bawling. The breakdown took longer than Mills had expected, but it’s happening. A pure collapse. A cyclone of overwhelming fear and overwhelming dread makes landfall and the suspect loses his shit. Mills, weirdly, senses a cyclone of his own in his gut, and suspects it has something to do with Kelly, Trevor, and the barometric pressure of disease.

“Can I make a deal?” the suspect says between sobs.

“Not with us,” Chang says. “With the county attorney. But we can get that ball rolling, if you want . . .”

“Would I get off?”

“Doubt it,” Chang replies. “You’re facing some serious charges. But if you plead to lesser, I’m sure there’d be reduced sentencing . . .” “The minute I end up in jail his thugs get to me,” Ralph says, evidently an avid viewer of Netflix and HBO.

“Is this guy in a gang?” Chang asks.

“Nah,” Waters says. “But he has a circle.”

“I’m beginning to think you’re full of shit,” Mills says. “You’ll pardon my language. But I just don’t think you did this for a friend. I think you did this for you. I think you had something to do with Viveca’s murder, and I think you’re trying to distract us.”

“Me too,” Powell says with an oomph in her voice.

“And me too,” from Chang as well.

The guy looks up and shakes his head vigorously, so much his cheeks look they’re pulling Gs. His mouth, too, the way its stretches across his face like a fat elastic band. “What the fuck?” he cries. “I just told you everything. I told you I did it for a friend to pay back a drug debt. What else do you want?”

“We want his name,” Mills says, pounding the table once for each word.

“Or we’re back to square one, Ralph,” Chang adds. “You said you had nothing to hide.”

“Without his name, you’re just a punk liar,” Mills says.

“And not even a good one,” Powell tells him.

“Without a name, you have no credibility,” Mills persists. “Good luck with the county attorney. Good luck with the judge. Good luck with the jury. I see you like to gamble.”

“Huh?”

“The tattoos.”

“So what? The Indian Casinos. Poker. Blackjack. Whatever.”

“Well, you’re taking a big gamble with your life.”

“You don’t know nothing about me.”

“I know a slacker like you isn’t going to hold up in prison, buddy,” Mills says. “You think your friend’s thugs are dangerous? Wait ’til you meet your cellmates.”

Ralph slams his head on the table and sobs again. Between the wretched tears, he coughs up a name. “Gabriel,” he says. “I don’t know his last name. But it’s Gabriel.”

Mills wants to shut his eyes and let that sink in. He wants to let the truth bubble in his veins until he gets high off the drip. But he doesn’t. Instead, he sidles up to Ralph Waters and says, “You’re lying. You know his last name. But that’s OK. I know it too.”

The man lifts his head from the table, his face a red, snotty mess. “What?” he snarls.

Mills sits there and nods, does nothing but nod. That’s when Ralph Waters, still handcuffed, thinks it’s his cue to leap from the chair and make a run for the sliding glass doors at the opposite end of the room. Mills is on him in seconds and tackles him to the floor. “I wouldn’t try that again, idiot. You’re handcuffed. Remember?”

Lt. Chang asks a colleague to sit with Waters while she confers with Mills and Powell in another room. They walk into a bedroom that smells of weed and probably hasn’t seen sunlight or a vacuum since Christmas. “Who’s our guy?” she asks Mills.

“Gabriel Norwood,” Mills replies. “Son of Gleason Norwood. Church of Angels Rising.”

Chang’s eyes go wide and stay that way. “Seriously?”

“Yep. I’m not quite sure how or why he fits, but that’s the only Gabriel who comes to mind,” Mills says. “I think we need to get before a judge tonight. Tomorrow morning, latest. You’ve read this guy his rights, so everything he told us sticks and the judge needs to hear it. I want to search Gabriel’s place ASAP. Can your squad handle the surveillance video from AJ’s?”

Chang nods.

“We’re never going to pull all this shit together tonight,” Powell says. “I doubt we’ll get our warrants before the morning.”

“So be it,” Mills says. “But the sooner the better.”

“Between both our resources, we’ll be fine,” Chang says. “I can get one of my guys before a judge in the morning. Can you spare anyone?” Before Mills can answer, Powell says, “Me. He can spare me.” “Perfect,” Chang says. “In the meantime, we’ll bring Waters in, get him processed. I’ll have someone call over to AJ’s.”

Mills thanks her. “Great work,” he says. “And great working with you.”

“You think it’s him?” the lieutenant asks. “You think that Gabriel kid is your perp?”

“I’m not a psychic,” he says. “But I’m a damn good guesser. And if he didn’t kill Viveca Canning, he knows who did.”

On the way back to headquarters, Powell is fidgety and spastic, her nerves jangled. Mills says she should go home and drink a bottle of wine. She says she’d rather arrest Gabriel Norwood first. She’s afraid he’ll flee.

Mills shakes his head. “You’re just being neurotic. He has no reason to flee. Ralph Waters’s arrest isn’t public record yet. Waters’s one call from jail isn’t going to be to Gabriel Norwood.”

“But still . . .”

“But still nothing,” Mills insists. “We can’t go arrest him on the basis that Ralph Waters gave us a first name. But if the surveillance video shows Waters dropping Gabriel Norwood off at AJ’s after the break-in, well then, bingo, we’re in.”

“And if it doesn’t . . .?”

“You’re worrying for the sake of worrying,” he chides her. “If it doesn’t, there are other ways to convince the judge. Plenty of dots we can connect between Gabriel and the Cannings . . .”

That seems to mollify her, and she’s quiet the rest of the way back. Mills needs the quiet. Back at headquarters, he grabs a few files from his desk and heads home in the muted dusk. Until now, it’s been a noisy day. The city has barked and whined and rumbled, all of it baking like an urban casserole under the Phoenix sun. The construction site, as well, was a hot, heavy metal concert of excavation. Which reminds him about exhumation. And the body of Clark Canning. But this is supposed to be a quiet ride home.

And . . . shit. Just shit. It’s 11:30 p.m., and Mills is chastising himself for forgetting the one thing he was supposed to remember. He needs to try Trevor again. All day he had put off making another call. He had found excuses and delays and distractions. He was not acting like a father. He was acting like a fucking chicken. He had come home, taken a nap, gotten up for dinner with Kelly. He had read a chapter of Don Quixote, and then he had taken a shower. Now he stares at himself in the bathroom mirror and says, “You, shit-for-brains.”

He dries himself off, slips into a pair of sweats, and dials from the couch in the living room.

“Hi Dad,” his kid says, like it’s noon.

“You’re up?”

“Just eating dinner,” Trevor says.

“At 11:45?”

“I know what time it is.”

Mills knows what age his son is. And Mills tries to imagine himself at nineteen. Reckless is all he can come up with.

“Look, Trev, I’ve been needing to talk to you about something serious. Is this a good time?”

“Good as ever. Should I be nervous?”

“That’s the whole point of this phone call. You should not be nervous,” Mills tells him. “Mom is sick. But we have everything under control. We felt we owed you a call before her surgery on Friday. We want to keep you in the loop.”

Mills can hear the kid’s television go mute. “Wait. What? Mom’s sick? What do you mean?”

This is what it’s like to go through these things.

This is what it’s like when the abstract becomes concrete.

This is what it’s like.

Here, telling his son, rolling out the details, part clinically, part parentally, this is what it’s like when shit becomes real. He explains Kelly’s diagnosis. He tries to stay as faithful to all the medical and scientific terminology, while also explaining and interpreting it for his son. He didn’t expect this would bring as much pain as it’s bringing to his chest. He didn’t expect the stubborn lump in his throat.

Trevor is silent, interminably. Just muted, like the television. Mills hates this, having to imagine the shockwaves and how they rattle his only child. He listens to Trevor’s unabashed silence and understands that his son can’t think of what to say, or how to react, or what comes next. And Mills says, “Look, we think she’ll be okay. She has these great doctors who are very optimistic. We just wanted you to know because we don’t like secrets.”

“But you kept a secret, Dad. You just told me she had surgery last week. Why was that a secret?”

“We didn’t want you to worry.”

“I’m worried.”

“We didn’t have enough to tell you,” Mills says. “We had more questions than answers.”

“Should I come home for this surgery?” Trevor asks. “It’s not a problem getting off from work, you know.”

“Honestly, kid, I don’t think that’s necessary. She’d love to have you there, but she’s going to be in surgery and recovery all day. You’d only get to see her for a minute,” Mills explains. “Maybe just head home for the weekend. Spend the weekend with her.”

“I’ll drive up Friday night,” Trevor says. “Maybe I can at least be there to say goodnight after her surgery.”

“That’ll work,” Mills tells his son. “You doing well? Still liking the job?”

Then the kid becomes a kid again. Mills can hear it in the shaky straining of Trevor’s voice and the sniffle back of tears when his son says, “She’s not going to die, right?”

“She’s going to be fine, Trevor.”

A sharp breath from Trevor. “OK. OK. I’ll be home this weekend.” “Feel free to call her tomorrow. Wish her luck on the surgery,” Mills suggests. “I’m sure she’d love to hear from you.”

“Yeah. OK.”

It’s 12:21 when they hang up. Thursday morning.

Mills contemplates angels as he crawls into bed and curls up to his wife. She’s one, for sure. But he’s thinking more about the angels of faith and mythology. He’s compelled to consider them because he wishes one to intervene and take the cancer away. He’s compelled to reject them because the Church of Angels Rising has made a sham, a scam of the divine. He’s rolling around the world, tossing and turning in bed, beckoning angels, battling angels, from one gallery to another. Today he’ll meet an angel. If there’s a God, he’ll meet an angel and he’ll arrest an angel. The angel, Gabriel Norwood.

All that has to happen is that everything has to fall into place and it has to happen like clockwork.

That’s all. No wiggle room. No room for error.

He’s running scenarios through his head, screening different versions of Gabriel’s motive. None make sense. The film loops over and over again, and in each loop Gabriel bears a different face. He transforms. He morphs. And, here, in this cloud of exhaustion, Mills remembers that he’s not met the son. So, these versions of him are shifting hybrids of Gleason and Francesca. Gabriel Norwood had been excommunicated from the church. Maybe Viveca had been the one to call for his ousting. Maybe it’s revenge. Maybe this. Maybe that. He can’t sleep.