Desert Rage: A Lena Jones Mystery (35 page)

“Bring it on, Chef.”

A few minutes later I was eating stew and warm Parmesan bread rolls, thinking that they would help settle my stomach if I could just get enough down. I waved a roll at him. “Did you make these?”

“Trader Joe made them.” He sat at the table, watching me with an intensity that made me nervous. Or maybe it was all the Excedrin I’d taken. The stuff was loaded with caffeine.

“Why are you looking at me like that?” I asked.

“Checking your reflexes.” Without warning, he slapped the Parmesan roll out of my hand. It flew across the room and bounced off a cabinet.

I stared at him. “Why the hell did you do that?”

“To see how quickly you’d react. And you didn’t react at all.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. I have the best reflexes of anyone I know, including you.” He began to blur around the edges, and I was having trouble seeing where he left off and the cabinet began. How could that be possible?

As I fought for balance, he leaned over me. “One of your pupils is dilated, the other isn’t. I’m calling Valerie.”

“Your cousin the nurse?”

“I only have one cousin named Valerie, and yes, she’s a nurse.”

“Well, then, she works summers…” Did I just say ‘summers’ when I meant days? “Uh, days, and she sure as hell isn’t going to leave work cactus, uh, leave work early just because you’re playing the piano, uh, I mean overreacting.” I blinked rapidly, trying to bring him into focus again. My tongue wouldn’t behave, either.

“Today’s Friday, her day off.” Before I could stop him, he was on his cell phone, telling Valerie she’d better get over here right away, that he didn’t like the way I was acting.

“Pay no attention to rattles, uh, to Jimmy, Valerie,” I yelled, hoping she’d hear me. “I’m Chinese! I mean, I’m fine! Fine!”

When Jimmy ignored me and kept talking, I stood up and tried to snatch the phone away. He blurred some more, and because I couldn’t see where the phone was in relation to his hand, I missed.

Then the floor hit me in the face.

Chapter Thirty-one

“He means it, Helen. We need to get out of here while we still can.”

I was half-asleep in the back of our tent, but not so much that I didn’t understand that my father and mother were having another argument. They whispered, but I could hear. Four-year-olds have good ears.

“It was just talk,” she said. “Abraham’s always quoting the Bible.”

“Not like this. Listen, we’ll be in Flagstaff in another couple of hours, and he’ll have to stop for gas. That’s our chance to get away. I still have some money left, enough for bus tickets back home and enough for food until we get there. Then all I need is to play a few gigs at that tonk down the road, and Nashville, here we come. Just like we originally planned.”

“But I don’t want to get away. These people are our friends. And she’s happy here. It would break her heart if we left. She’d especially miss Abraham’s son. She adores him.”

No I don’t, I thought. I just pretended to like Golden Boy so he won’t know how much he scared me. “You should never let anyone know they scare you, because that would give them the advantage.” Whatever ‘advantage’ meant. Who’d said that? Grandma? But she said that a long, long time ago, before Mom and Dad met the man with the big white bus. Abraham. I was scared of him, too. Even more scared of him than I was of Golden Boy.

“Helen, I’m telling you we have to get away before something bad happens.”

“Oh, you silly. Nothing bad is going to happen. It’s just that wild imagination of yours, which is what I get for taking up with you.” When she laughed, it sounded like Christmas bells, but it wasn’t Christmas now. “You bluesmen, you always look on the dark side, but that’s why you’re so good, isn’t it? All those songs about doom and gloom. Even John Lee said you were right up there with the best.”

Listen to Daddy, I wanted to scream. Wherever Flagstaff was, I wanted to run away there, get away from Abraham and his Golden Boy. I didn’t want to do what they want me to do and I’d told my mother but she wouldn’t believe me and it was coming closer every day and Daddy was right and we had to get out before…

***

“I see you’re finally awake.”

The room was so bright I had to squint to see a dark blob against the glaring white. “How are you feeling?” A woman. Her voice sounded familiar but I couldn’t place her.

I closed my eyes against the glare. “Headache. Light doesn’t help.”

“You have a subdural hematoma. They had to drill a burr hole in your skull to relieve the pressure.”

I opened my eyes again. “Hole in my head?”

The dark blob leaned closer, came into focus. Black hair, amber eyes, faint scent of turpentine. Madeline.

“Just a small one, Lena. Don’t worry, your prognosis is good. Excellent, even, if you behave yourself. It’s a good thing you were at Jimmy’s. He scraped you off the floor and drove you straight to the ER, then called me.”

“Don’t remember.”

“Well, you were unconscious at the time.”

“Where is he?”

“In the cafeteria getting breakfast. He slept here last night. Night before, too, same as me. You had us scared for a while.” She sat in one of two plastic chairs next to my bedside. The painting smock she wore looked crumpled.

“I’ve been here two days?”

“Three. It’s Monday.”

“I was supposed to be someplace, I think.”

I tried to sit up, but the IVs attached to my arms made it too complicated, so I lay back down. At least my eyes worked better. What I had first experienced as a surrounding whiteness turned out to be pale peach walls lit by a high-wattage overhead light. A framed print hung on the wall next to the bathroom. Almost Disneyesque, it portrayed three deer standing in a yellow-tinted forest glade. Papa deer, Mama deer, Baby deer. They shimmered and glowed so much they looked drenched in butter. Thomas Kincade. There was no escape from him.

Madeline noticed me staring at it. “Piece of crap, huh?”

Thomas Kincade. Why did he remind me of someone? I thought hard. Dolphins, for some reason. And a mermaid. Then I remembered Ali’s uncle walking past the art galleries on Main Street.

Ali.

“I need to see someone.” Despite the IVs, I struggled to a sitting position.

Madeline pushed me back down.

“Lie still, Sweetie. You’ll have to put up with this for a couple more days to make sure you don’t develop an infection. Then you’re going home with me. At least you’ll be surrounded by better art.”

I looked around the room, noticed the bathroom, the lack of a neighboring bed. “I can’t afford a private room for five days.”

“You didn’t start off in one, but all the screaming kept waking your roommate up.”

“I was screaming?”

“Something about a gold boy and a white bus. Anyway, don’t worry about the cost. Turns out you’ve got great hospitalization insurance.”

“That must have been Jimmy. He takes care of the business side of things.”

“He’s…Speak of the devil, here he comes.” But she was smiling as Jimmy came through the door and took the seat next to her.

“Look who’s awake,” he said.

“I need to see Ali. And Juliana. I made an appointment.”

“You’re three days late. When you didn’t show at Juliana’s house Wednesday, she called and left a message on the office phone. I got back to her and told her what happened. Ali wants to see you, but I don’t think that’s a good idea right now. Oh, and here’s some advice. Don’t look in the mirror.”

“Here’s some advice for you, buddy. Don’t tell me what not to do.” There had to be a mirror in the bathroom, so I struggled up again. This time it was Jimmy who pushed me back down. “Vanity, thy name is Lena. If you really have to know, your face is the size and color of a pumpkin and just as scary. You’ve got an even bigger bald spot on the back of your head than before, not that it matters. You’re supposed to be resting, not fussing about your looks.”

He didn’t understand. “I need to get back on my feet and take care of business.”

“Oh, for God’s sake,” Madeline interjected. “Jimmy, explain to her what a subdural hematoma is. Maybe she’ll listen to you.”

“Lena doesn’t listen to anyone,” he growled, then proceeded to tell me that Monster Woman’s blow to my head caused bleeding in my brain, blah, blah, blah, and the consequences could have been life-threatening, blah, blah, blah, especially since I’d ignored my first doctor’s orders and continued running around town, blah, blah, blah, and all that movement resulted in complications, blah, blah, blah, and I was old enough to know better, and blah, blah, blah…

“Cut the lecture,” I snapped. “It’s making my head hurt.”

“Blame it on me, why don’t you?”

“Would you two stop bickering?” This, from Madeline. “You sound like some old married couple.”

That shut us up.

With a smile of triumph, she continued. “Here’s what we’re going to do, Lena. The minute your doctors discharge you, you’re coming home with me, and you’ll stay in bed until I say you can get up. We don’t need any more emergency trips back to the hospital, now, do we?”

Annoyed by her hospital-ese use of the royal “we,” I pointed out the flaw in her plan. “No,
we
don’t. But if something happens,
we
don’t need to be way out there in the Boonies, do
we
?
We’ll
be better off if
we
stay right here in Scottsdale where
we’ll
be right down the street from a hospital.”

“There’s a perfectly good hospital right down the road from my studio. Florence General. Excellent ratings. Jimmy checked it out.”

Jimmy added his own unwelcome opinion to the mix. “Furthermore, if you’re out there in the Boonies, as you so delicately call the Florence area, you won’t be so quick to hop in your Jeep and go back to work. And just to make sure, I’m keeping your Jeep at my place. You won’t get the keys back until the doctor clears you to drive.”

“That’s car theft. Now just you listen to me, I’m going to…”

The nurse picked that moment to come in, carrying a hypodermic on a tray.

I didn’t like the looks of it. “What’s that?”

“It’s our sleepy-bye shot,” she said, and jabbed me.

Before I could protest, we went sleepy-bye.

Chapter Thirty-two

The clouds were pretty, the desert was pretty, but other than sitting around admiring all the prettiness, there was nothing to do at Madeline’s. I had been cooped up in her two-story studio for almost a week, bored out of my mind. My Jeep was at Jimmy’s, along with my cell phone and laptop, yet Madeline—overprotective to a fault—wouldn’t let me cook, clean, or even read, declaring that given my fragile condition, reading might give me a headache. As for entertainment, forget it. Madeline didn’t own a television, and as for music, she was into New Age Ambient, better known as “mood music.” She played it over the studio’s sound system until I threatened to one day hunt Yanni down and set fire to his piano. Phoning anyone was out, too, because Madeline had no landline and kept her cell phone in her handbag. The only thing left to do was stare out the window and watch the wind move dust around.

Once, in a seemingly lenient mood, she allowed me to sit in on one of the art classes she conducted in her downstairs studio, but as it turned out, she correctly guessed it would bore me so much I’d go back upstairs and stare out the window some more. Now that the pain from my sore head had diminished, I was restless but had no outlet for it.

Madeline’s converted barn/home/studio sat on an unpopulated area off SR-79. Her nearest neighbors to the east consisted of several thousand white-faced cattle; to the west, thousands of acres of assorted cacti; to the north, the Superstition Mountains. The only hint of human habitation I could see from the upstairs window was the dome-shaped top of a water tower at the Arizona State Prison complex two miles south.

Not much action there, either.

Every now and then a jackrabbit would hop by, sometimes a coyote. Then there were the buzzards. I don’t have anything against buzzards—they keep the desert clean—but they made for depressing viewing. They only swooped down when something was dead or about to be dead, which brought back memories of the times they’d dropped in on me. Once, when I was a runaway child; the other, when a murderer tried to add me to his list of victims.

I was safe now.

And bored out of my sore skull.

Knowing that painting always put Madeline in a good mood, I clumped down the stairs and threw myself on my imprisoner’s mercy. “If I don’t get some exercise I’m going to go nuts. You want that on your conscience?”

She stood at her easel, adding finishing touches to whatever-it-was, a brown blob sporting a purple halo. It looked like something Mark Rothko might have painted if he’d been half-blind and shooting heroin.

I loved it.

She gave me a paint-smeared smile. “Tell you what, Sweetie. You can take a walk today. A short one.”

“Define ‘short.’”

“Fifteen minutes tops. I’ll time you.” She shook her watch at me.

As I headed toward the door, she called out, “Make sure you don’t get dirty! The doctor warned me infection’s still a possibility!”

“I promise not to play in the mud.” Not that there was any. Too dry.

I’ve always been happy living in Scottsdale, but there’s something about being out in undeveloped desert that lifts my spirits. Out here you don’t smell car exhaust, you smell sage. There were no shopping malls, just cacti: tall saguaro, with their arms lifted to an unpolluted sky; teddy bear cholla nestling in family groups; fat barrel cacti, their wet pulp often serving as lifesavers for lost desert wanderers; the purple prickly pears, with their rose-to-lavender pads glimmering in sweet contrast to the surrounding miles of gold, gray, and pale green. At the tail-end of July, it was still hotter than hell, but because the ground beneath me was earth instead of asphalt or concrete, the temperature was at least ten degrees lower than in the city.

I inhaled the sweet fruits of the desert, and in the spirit of full disclosure, yes, I also got a faint hint of manure from the neighboring cattle. At least they grazed downwind.

I walked.

Madeline’s property sat on a raised, triangular-shaped wedge of land bordered by two deep ravines that met in a tangle of boulders at the apex. The triangle’s base was the wiggly two-lane blacktop that ran from U.S. 60 to Florence, a small desert city, then on toward Tucson. Exulting in my new freedom, I race-walked the property’s perimeter again and again, once narrowly avoiding stepping on a rattler seeking shade beneath a mesquite. As I walked, I thought about the Camerons, especially about Ali. In a way, we were sisters, united by grief, kept company by the ghosts of murdered parents.

Was Ali back with her cold uncle, living in a hotel? Or was she still at Juliana’s? If so, how had Juliana explained such an unusual arrangement, not only to Ali, but to her campaign manager? Kids have always been my weak spot, so I thought about Kyle, too, and his horrific life. Although I had only met the boy once, I’d been impressed by his courage and his devotion to Ali.

Maybe someday someone would love me as much as he loved her.

Then I caught myself. Fairy tale endings? I’ve never believed in them. In this modern world, the best we can hope for is an absence of pain.

“Time’s up!” Madeline’s voice silenced the sweet call of a cactus wren.

“Yeah, yeah,” I muttered, turning back toward the big red barn.

My own private prison.

***

Given my constant state of boredom, the sound of Madeline’s students arriving downstairs a couple of hours later came as a relief. Her Sunday afternoon class proved her most advanced, several of them having slipped loose the surly bonds of photographic realism to explore the more demanding realm of post-modernism and whatever the hell else they called contemporary art these days. Boredom aside, there was another reason I was glad for their arrival.

I had a plan.

It’s always easy to pick out the rebel in a group. This one’s name was June-Mae Ronstadt, a grim-looking woman of about fifty. When Madeline instructed the class to mix their pigments with sand, June-Mae mixed them with bird droppings and weeds. If Madeline told them to stretch their canvases into rhomboids, June-Mae created a perfect disc. Oppositional temperament aside, she remained Madeline’s favorite student because her work was flat-out brilliant, if distressing. Finding her inspiration in Florence’s state prison complex, she turned out canvas after canvas filled with shadowy shapes hunched at the base of forbidding gray walls. But her most useful trait, at least to me, came from the fact that June-Mae was the only person in Madeline’s class who smoked.

Five minutes before the class took its regular break, I asked Madeline if I could go outside again and get some fresh air, explaining that the turpentine fumes drifting upstairs were making me sick. Ever alert to my health needs, she agreed.

“Just don’t wander off the property,” she said.

“Oh, I won’t.”

Smiling sweetly, I headed straight for the big boulder where June-Mae regularly befouled her lungs, and waited.

A few minutes later the studio door opened and the students streamed out, breathing in the clear desert air. June-Mae split off from the others and headed for her usual spot. At first she looked disconcerted to see me, but her tobacco craving trumped her irritation.

“Nice day,” I said, as she lit up.

Nothing. Just a big inhale, then a phlegmy exhale of poisonous fumes.

“That your ’92 Nissan over there?” I asked, pointing to a decrepit sedan parked under the mesquite.

A grunt.

“Windshield’s cracked.”

“Tell me something I don’t know.”

“It could get you a ticket. A very expensive one.”

Another grunt.

“Bet you could use some extra money. Maybe enough to fix that windshield.”

“You’re cute, but I don’t swing that way.”

I chuckled. “Neither do I, but I need a ride into Florence tomorrow, and I don’t have a car.”

“Use Madeline’s panel van.”

“See, there’s the problem. She’s delivering a couple of paintings to a Scottsdale gallery tomorrow, which will leave me high and dry at the very hour I need to be in Florence. Didn’t I once hear you tell one of the other students you have Mondays off?”

She flicked her eyes toward the front of the studio, where Madeline stood chatting with the other students, then gave me a slit-eyed stare. Mimicking me, she said, “Didn’t I once hear Madeline say you’re recovering from a head injury?” In her own voice she added, “What kind of numbskull do you take me for?”

“A broke one. Tell you what, June-Mae. If you pick me up tomorrow at nine, that’s when Madeline’s leaving for Scottsdale, drive me over to the public library so I can take care of some business, and get me back here before she returns, I’ll buy you a tank of gas as well as a new windshield. Oh, and I’ll need to borrow your cell phone for the duration, which means I’ll throw in another hundred to pay for the calls.”

She flashed nicotine-stained teeth. “Deal.”

***

The next morning she picked me up at nine-fifteen, five minutes after Madeline disappeared down the road with a load of paintings. When I hopped into June-Mae’s Nissan sedan, I found the backseat occupied by three toddlers whose identical faces and identical pink clothes suggested they were triplets. They took one look at me and started to scream. The car’s decibel level rose high enough to make your ears bleed, but its driver’s expression was stoic.

“Who’re they?” I asked.

“
They
are my granddaughters. They live with me. Along with my bat-shit crazy daughter-in-law. Don’t ask why.”

“Wouldn’t dream of it.” Oh, people and their traps. No wonder her paintings looked so depressing.

The triplets screamed all the way into town, where June-Mae shoved an old flip-top cell phone into my hand along with two estimates for windshield replacement, and dropped me off in front of the Florence Public Library. As soon as she drove away, I sat down on a bench near the entrance and placed my first call.

“How’s Ali?” I asked Juliana.

She answered my question with a question. “How are you?”

“I’m perfectly fine. Tell me about Ali.”

“She, too, is perfectly fine, and is staying with me for the interim. Right now, she’s over at Kyle’s house. Fiona said they’re all going to the movies.”

When I expressed surprise, she said, “Trying to keep those two separated would be more trouble than it’s worth. You know teenagers.”

I was starting to. “You said she’s staying with you ‘for the interim.’ Define ‘interim.’”

“Dr. Teague and I are waiting for an emergency hearing on the custody issue. It’ll be just a formality, because he and I are in perfect agreement as to the girl’s best interest. Meanwhile, Ali and I are using the time to get better acquainted.” Before I could ask, she added, “At this point she knows only that I’m an old friend of her mother’s, but that will eventually change. Speaking of Alexandra, the police haven’t been exactly forthcoming about the case, so I applied a little pressure in certain quarters. I don’t know yet if it worked, but we’ll see. Now, as for you, I know you’ve been injured because I had a long chat with your partner.” Her voice took on a new seriousness. “The charges against Ali may have been dropped, but the public’s perception of her remains one of guilt, and that must be remedied. It’s been a month since the Cameron murders and there’s still no arrest.”

Sometimes there never is. Sometimes a case just drags on and on until it’s filed away in a back room. I didn’t share that possibility with Juliana, just assured her that despite my injury I was still working the case and promised to inform her of any new developments.

“See that you do,” she said, and hung up.

My second call was to Arizona Pet Lab, which for a hefty surcharge, had promised a faster than usual turnaround. The technician I talked to told me the DNA results on Monster Woman’s Rottweiler had been completed, and what did I want done with them.

“Hang onto them until the police pick them up,” I answered.

My third call was to Sylvie Perrins, who, wonder of wonders, was at her desk, probably filling out the reams of paperwork that are a cop’s lot. After a too-long discussion of my physical health, I told her about my visit to Arizona Pet Lab.

She laughed. “You don’t miss a trick, do you, Lena? Okay, Bob and I’ll get over there as soon as we finish up here. By the way, you’ll be interested to know that our own lab completed the tests from the murder scene, so we’ll know right away if there’s a match-up.”

I was surprised. “That was fast.”

“No shit, Sherlock. Apparently your big deal client became impatient and placed a call to a higher authority, namely the governor. Next thing we know—ta da!—we had the DNA results from the murder scene in our hot little hands. Bob was so thrilled he did the Dougie dance all over the office, talk about one butt-ugly sight. This brings me to the bad news. That impounded van, the one belonging to the Pebble Creek gardener? Turns out he was telling the truth. He didn’t use it to kill the Camerons. The stench came from common fertilizer, not doggie do.”

“How about those two surveillance cameras from the neighborhood? Did the real murder van show up on either of them?”

“Fat lotta good that was. Both cameras caught a white ’83 Ford Econoline tooling down the street at the time the boy was headed to the Cameron house, but the plate was rigged out with one of those anti-radar film overlays, as well as some good ’ol Arizona dust. Our tech did what he could, but it was a no go. Got nada. We sent out a statewide BOLO on that model, though, and ran it through the Motor Vehicles base, but there’s a couple thousand ’83 Econolines still on the road, and with the manpower problem being what it is, well, you know. Say, did I tell you what Bob did the other day? He…”

I tried not to let disappointment leak into my voice. At least the DNA results from the murder house were in, and that was something. But we needed something to match them to.

Sylvie was still talking. “…and that was that. You should have seen Bob’s face. Hey, what’s this number you’re calling me from? It’s not your phone.”

Rather than narc off June-Mae, I muttered a quick good-bye and rang off.

Maybe the DNA results at Arizona Pet Lab would match the DNA from the murder scene, maybe not. Terry Jardine, aka Monster Woman, was out-of-control enough to kill someone—she’d sure as hell tried to kill me—but where the Camerons were concerned, it didn’t feel right. Too much planning there for an off-the-walls ’roid rage situation.