Desert Rage: A Lena Jones Mystery (5 page)

Fat, half-blind, and probably deaf, too, Pit Bull kept messing me up.

“I take it the name’s a joke,” I called back, pushing Pit Bull away before his inquisitive nose made it to my crotch.

“My nephew’s little joke, not mine. Poor old thing was already on his last legs when Kyle drug him in here from the pound, and that’s been four years ago easy. So you’re a detective, huh? Peculiar job for a woman.”

“I like it.”

As I sidestepped Pit Bull and entered the oven-hot, dimly lit trailer, I could make out what appeared to be a rag-wrapped collection of sticks propped up on an afghan-covered sofa. Once my eyes grew accustomed to the gloom, the sticks revealed themselves to be the limbs of an elderly woman so emaciated it was a marvel she retained enough musculature to speak. Inserted into her nose was a cannula, which led to an oxygen tank sitting on the floor. A heavy stench of tobacco hung in the air.

“You ever shoot that gun I figure you got there in your purse?” the bag of bones asked.

“From time to time.”

“Ever killed anybody with it?”

“I plead the Fifth on that, Ma’am.”

Another cackle. The stream of sunlight trickling through the closed venetian blinds illuminated her almost lipless mouth, revealing a few lower teeth, none on top.

“Plead the Fifth, that’s what I told Kyle to do when he got caught up in that Scottsdale mess, but he wouldn’t listen. Teenagers. Don’t know nothing, think they know everything.” She gestured to a rickety-looking chair. “Take a load off. Just make sure you keep that gun on the other side of you so if it goes off, it’ll shoot you, not me. And for God’s sake, don’t point it at Pit Bull. He’d have a heart attack.”

I took a load off. With a loud groan, Pit Bull collapsed in the middle of the room.

“Ma’am, is that dog all right?”

“He’s still breathing, ain’t he?” She raised her voice to a shriek. “Pit Bull! You still alive?”

Pit Bull thumped his tail.

“Yep, still alive. For now, anyway. But you didn’t come all the way out here to talk dogs, did you? You wanna talk about Kyle, but it ain’t to help him, is it? You want to pin it all on the boy and let the rich girl off the hook. Satan Kyle, using his manly wiles to lead Saint Alison astray, right?”

She might have been old and sick, but she was far from stupid.

“What makes you think that, Mrs. Daggett?”

“’Cause I just got off the phone with his lawyer.”

“Oh.”

“Here’s what I’m going to do, Miss Scaredy Pants When It Comes to Dogs, I’m going to tell you all about my nephew. And when we’re finished, you tell me which one of them was the hell-child and which one of them got drug into something they didn’t understand and got left out there twisting in the wind. Notice who got the hoity-toity Scottsdale attorney along with the fancy lady detective, and who got the cheap court-ordered attorney?”

“Don’t sell your nephew’s attorney short, Mrs. Daggett.”

“I’m not, but I know the odds.”

I leaned back against the chair. Although covered with dog hair, it was surprisingly comfortable. “So here’s your chance to set me straight about Kyle, starting with why I’m talking to you instead of his parents.”

She snorted. “Rats got better parents than that boy.”

“Really?”

“You ready to hear a sad story, Miss Scaredy Pants?”

Oh, yes, I assured her. Lena Jones was always ready for a sad story. After all, hadn’t I had plenty of practice?

Chapter Five

Still, the story of Kyle Gibbs’ young life unsettled me. While listening to Mrs. Daggett’s melancholy account, my emotions careened between sorrow and rage.

Kyle was the product of the rape of a fourteen-year-old girl by her uncle, who was subsequently convicted of sexual assault. At the age of three, Kyle was turned over to Child Protective Services after neighbors found the toddler alone and naked in a filthy apartment; his by-then crack-addicted mother had disappeared and was never seen again. With no relatives stepping forward to claim him, Kyle then began a merry-go-round of foster homes, some good, some bad. At the age of six, he was sexually abused by an older boy, and during his stay at his fourth foster home, he’d suffered cigarette burns on his arm, a broken wrist and a punctured eardrum before CPS stepped in and removed him.

The Scottsdale foster home Kyle had been living in when the Cameron murders occurred turned out to be his eighth, and most stable. He had been living with them for three years.

“Last time the boy was out here, he said they was going to adopt him,” Mrs. Daggett said, although her voice carried little conviction.

“How’d you feel about that?”

She sneered. “I didn’t feel nothing, ’cause that kinda thing’s come up before and it ain’t never happened. It was just Kyle, building castles in the air, the way he always does.”

“Castles?”

“Always dreaming ’bout about better places, better days. I told him time and again he’d better stop doing that because things don’t never get no better.”

A bleak philosophy to instill into a child.

Unaware of my thoughts, she continued. “But blood is blood, and no matter where the state shipped that boy to, I always stayed in contact with him. Well, when I was able to.”

Behind me, Pit Bull farted. I pretended I hadn’t heard it. Trying hard not to cringe away from the stench creeping my way, I asked, “What do you mean, ‘when I was able to’ ? The boy needed a home and you were his aunt.” A sudden thought struck me. “Were you married to the uncle who raped Kyle’s mother?”

Before answering, she moved some magazines off the table beside the sofa, uncovering a can of air freshener. “Here. You do the honors,” she said, handing over the can.

I sprayed, not that it helped much. Despite the tiny fan wheezing at us from the kitchen counter, the interior of the trailer was too small to allow for better circulation. And Pit Bull, at least in the power of his farts, was a mighty dog.

“Before the stink bomb, you was asking me about Kyle’s mother and who raped her. I wasn’t married to that piece of slime, my sister was. We haven’t spoken since she let him move back in with her when he got out of prison. Jack’s his name, in case you’re interested.”

“The only thing I’m interested in, Mrs. Daggett, is why you didn’t provide a home for Kyle, letting Child Protective Services take him.”

A flicker of something, perhaps guilt, crossed her face. “Because I was busy serving a five-year sentence for fraud. I ain’t going to go into details, other than to say I didn’t do what they said I did. Anyway, there was no way CPS would turn that child over to me, even if I’d won my appeal, which I didn’t. Unlike my sister’s precious Jack, I didn’t get no time off for good behavior, either, did the full nickel. Once I got released my husband was dead, another no-count, but at least not a kiddie-diddler, and Kyle had already been a ward of the court for four years. CPS had the decency to let me visit, though. Supervised visitation for a while, but they finally eased up on that, of course.”

“Of course,” I echoed, looking around for the evidence of ill-gotten gains. Cheap sofa, cheap chair, cheap rug, cheap lamp. The only thing of value was a shiny new Cuisinart Elite IV on the kitchen counter. Even at sale price it would still cost more than everything else in this place lumped together.

Seeing me stare at the Cuisinart, Mrs. Daggett explained with a note of pride, “Kyle gave me that. Said the blender would make it easier for me to eat. Paid for it out of his allowance, he did.”

Like Ali paid her mysterious hit man.

“Hey, Miss Scaredy Pants, you wanna see a picture of Kyle?”

“Sure.” Because of his age, the papers hadn’t run the boy’s picture.

She leaned forward and hauled up a vinyl handbag that looked as old as her trailer. Rifled through it. “Here you go.”

She handed over her billfold, which had a thick, accordion-style insert for photographs. “Handsome boy, ain’t he?”

Yes, he was. With his black hair, navy blue eyes, firm chin, and a clear complexion instead of the usual teenage acne, the boy resembled a darker yet more innocent Justin Bieber. I knew from my own history that foster care presents additional danger to pretty children, and many of them became violent in order to cope.

“You do realize, don’t you, Mrs. Daggett, that Kyle shares a background with many murderers, not to mention serial killers? Broken families, sexual and other abuse, foster homes.” I could be describing myself, too, but she didn’t need to know that.

She gave me a hard look. “I may live in a trailer and I may not talk fancy, but I can read the newspaper. Murderers and serial killers start off practicing on animals. Kyle rescues animals, he doesn’t torture them. Cats, dogs, even a couple of those white bunnies people buy for their kids around Easter then get tired of and throw out with the garbage. He’d find them, fix them up, get them good homes.” She nodded toward Pit Bull.

“There was a dog present during the killings, and it was badly beaten.”

“Not by Kyle.”

I had met women like Mrs. Daggett before. Experts at denial, their minds rearranged ugly realities into a more acceptable fiction. I could almost sympathize. Her past had been difficult, and judging from her current health problems, her future looked worse. So I pretended to believe her fairy tale. “Let’s talk about Ali, then. How did she and Kyle meet?”

“Went to the same Scottsdale school. Kyle told me she was being bullied by some of those mean girls, probably deserved it, too, but he stopped them. Same day, she damned near got herself run over in the street outside the school, but he jerked her back just in time. After that, he was her hero.”

To me, such heroism sounded too good to be true, so I immediately became suspicious. “What’s the name of the school?”

She shrugged. “Can’t remember.”

“Did Kyle tell you how he stopped the bullying?”

She looked away, an indication she was about to tell a lie. “He gave them a stern talking to. Since he’s tall for his age, five-ten already, he scared them pretty bad.”

“No physicality involved?”

“Kyle would never hit a girl.”

“Does he hit boys?” I was thinking about Ali’s ten-year-old brother. The picture of the child’s battered body would haunt me forever.

Her lips formed a tight, narrow line. “Kyle never hit anybody.”

No, he just beats them to death with a baseball bat
. “When’s the last time you saw your nephew?”

“Three weeks ago. His foster parents dropped him off here for a couple of hours to see me and Pit Bull. That dog’s nuts over him, I tell you that? Anyways, this was before that Alison bitch killed her whole family and blamed it on Kyle.”

“That’s not the way I heard it went down.”

The sneer she gave me collapsed half her face into downward folds; the other half looked like it was held up by invisible strings. “Yeah, now that the little snot sees how much trouble she’s in, she’s switching her story. Them rich girls are like that, spoiled rotten. Never take responsibility for nothing, always blaming other people when things go wrong.”

Alison Cameron hadn’t come across as spoiled when I talked to her. Terrified and stubborn, maybe, but not spoiled. And the only person she blamed was a non-existent short, brown-eyed blond hit man.

“Kyle confessed that he killed the Camerons, Mrs. Daggett.”

“According to the papers and the cops, and you know how they all lie.”

An idea occurred to me. I might not be able to interview Kyle, but Mrs. Daggett, as next-of-kin, had access. Although any report she gave me would be filtered through love and denial, a few dregs of truth might remain.

“I take it you’ll be visiting him at the detention center.”

Her head drooped and she said something I couldn’t hear.

“Could you speak up, Mrs. Daggett? I didn’t catch that.”

She raised her head and stared at me defiantly. “I’m not on the visitor’s list.”

“That can be easily rectified. I’ll call his attorney and get him to petition the Probation Department to add you. If necessary, he can get a court order.”

Her voice lowered again, but this time I could still hear her.

“You don’t understand, Miss Jones. Kyle don’t want to see me. Said he doesn’t want to spread his trouble around any more than he already has.”

***

Later, while driving away from Whispering Pines Mobile Home Park, I pondered the Saint Kyle problem. Unless the kid changed his mind and allowed Mrs. Daggett to visit him in the Durango facility, she wouldn’t be able to relay back to me the boy’s version of events. If nothing else, the woman and I shared the same distrust of the media, but the fact remained that the newspapers’ coverage of the murders pretty much tallied with the police report, which suggested an unnamed source inside the department. Regardless of what Mrs. Daggett professed to believe, Kyle was probably the Camerons’ killer. After all, his fingerprints were on the bat. My job was to figure out Ali’s involvement. That, and nothing else.

Mrs. Daggett was wrong about another thing, too. Curtis Racine was an excellent attorney, if a bit on the loosey-goosey side where codes of conduct were concerned. By sending me to see Kyle’s aunt, he’d aroused a smidgen of pity in my hard-panned soul.

Not that pity would do either kid any good.

A call to Stephen Zellar, Ali’s attorney, elicited the information that the girl attended Four Palms Middle School. Term was over, but summer school and extra-credit classes might still be in session. I crossed my fingers and headed for the school. Although Scottsdale is only a short drive from Apache Junction, the two towns could be on separate planets. As my Jeep cruised along I-60, raw desert gave way to irrigated greenery. Saguaro cacti diminished, replaced by towering palms and silvery leafed eucalyptus. The mobile homes disappeared, and in their place, Mediterranean mini-mansions strutted their stuff.

Four Palms Middle School was tucked into a plush oasis near the intersection of Lincoln and Mockingbird Lane, an Episcopal church on one side, an art academy on the other. The school’s grounds were immaculate, and its football field would turn Notre Dame green with envy. Summer or no summer, a group of tweens carrying heavy-looking backpacks hovered near the school’s main entrance. Maybe their parents couldn’t get away for the summer, and the brainier kids were utilizing the hot downtime by working on extra credit projects. If you lived in Scottsdale, you were expected to go to college—a good one—and sometimes those extra credits even trumped the size of Daddy’s bank account.

As I drove up, several post-tweens trying hard to look like jaded thirty-year-olds were exiting the main building. Remembering Ali’s dyed black hair, I zeroed in on a similarly dyed girl around her age. In her all-black outfit, she could have been headed to a funeral.

Since I was wearing all black, too, I hoped she might mistake me for a sister Goth. Here is where a female detective has a jump on the opposite gender. Girls, especially savvy Scottsdale teens, would be wary of talking to a strange man, but a woman flashing a private investigator’s ID might arouse more curiosity than distrust.

“Excuse me, Miss,” I called to the mini-Goth as I exited my Jeep. “I’m a detective…” Here I pulled out my ID…“and I’d like to ask you a few questions.”

She looked at me, then at my ride. Studied the Pima symbols. Frowned.

“That’s no cop car.”

“Because I’m a private detective, accent on private. Alison Cameron’s attorney has hired me to look into her case. Do you know Miss Cameron?”

Ignoring my question, she moved toward the Jeep. “That thing on the hood, it’s the labyrinth where Earth Doctor went to hide when Elder Brother overthrew him, isn’t it?”

My lucky day; the kid knew her petroglyphs. Could she be part Pima? A closer look revealed skin as pale as mine, although her eyes were blue, not green.

“Sure is. And as you can see, that’s Coyote on the passenger-side door. He’s escaping in his reed boat while First World is being destroyed by flood. Flying above him are Night Singing Bird and Sky Hawk.”

“Spider Woman’s on the front fender, weaving her magic.”

“And Kokopelli’s on the other fender, playing his flute.”

She stepped off the curb and walked around to the other side. Nodded. “I’m writing an essay on the Pimas for my Arizona History class, and I’m really getting into them, so if you give me a ride home in that Jeep, you can ask me questions. But it doesn’t mean I have to answer.”

“Of course not. I’m just a petroglyph-loving woman doing a favor for another petroglyph-loving woman.”

A touch of genius, the “woman” part. As she climbed in the Jeep, the kid’s smile half-blinded me despite its expensive orthodontia. By the time I dropped her off at her house, a rambling Mediterranean backed up against a golf course, she had given me some interesting information about Ali, as well as the name and address of Kyle’s foster parents. In case I needed more information, the little Gothette shared her name—Tiffany Browning-Meyers—and her private cell number. She also confessed to being the daughter of the forever-banned Suzy, she of the free and easy black dye jobs and the open bar for minors. In turn for all this information, Tiffany made me promise to give her another ride in my Jeep sometime in the near future, and to friend her on Desert Investigations’ Facebook page.

My cell rang just before I pulled away from Tiffany’s house. Ali’s defense attorney.

“Looks like we have a complication, Miss Jones. I’ve just been alerted that a Dr. Bradley Teague, of Pasadena, California, is the dead man’s half-brother. Same mother, different fathers. Dr. Teague also happens to be the executor of Dr. Cameron’s will, which, now that the wife and son are deceased, makes Alison the sole recipient of her father’s estate.”