Desert Wind (15 page)

“I’m not hungry any more,” Jimmy said, pushing away his grilled chicken with an expression of distaste. “Ready to hear what I found out?”

No longer hungry myself, I tossed our uneaten dinner into a nearby waste can, where three starlings flew down and began fighting over it.

I pointed to the laptop. “Start with Mia Tosches.”

“I was going to, anyway. She’s quite the bad girl, our Mia, or at least she used to be.” He tapped a few keys, bringing up a newspaper article from
The Apache Junction Gazette
, dated fifteen years earlier. Daylight was fading, but I had no trouble reading the headline on the laptop’s bright screen.

TEEN GANG APPREHENDED

Friday afternoon six teens, ages ranging from 13 to 17, were apprehended at the Superstition Springs Mall for allegedly shoplifting from a J.C. Penny’s store. Several of the teens, including the 17-year-old girl suspected of being the group’s leader, had been arrested at the same mall last month and are already facing trial in juvenile court. Because they are minors, the
Gazette
will not release their names.

The stolen items included makeup, scarves, costume jewelry, and a fur-trimmed jacket valued at $345. The older girl was allegedly wearing it when apprehended.

“My daughter’s a good girl,” the teen’s mother, a widow, protested when interviewed at her Apache Junction home. “She would never do anything like this. She’s very popular, and the other kids at school have always been jealous of her, so I think she was set up.”

When asked to explain her statement, the teen’s mother said she’d heard it on good authority that store security had been tipped off to the group’s actions by two of the 17-year-old’s classmates who were shopping in the store at the time as the alleged shoplifters.

I turned to Jimmy. “What makes you think Miss Teenage Thief was Mia Tosches? There aren’t any names here.”

“I have the police report.”

“Those kids were minors, Jimmy. That report would have been sealed, along with every court document concerning the case.”

He looked at me with pity. “Oh ye of little faith. Trust me, I have the report. Mia’s maiden name was Albright, as stated on her first Las Vegas marriage license.”

First? “Maybe it’s another Albright.”

“Living at the same home address as listed on the police report?”

Jimmy’s computer talents being varied and mysterious, I stopped arguing. “Okay, so it’s Mia. But she was seventeen. Kids can turn around.” After all, I had.

“That was her first run-in with the law, at least the first where she was caught. I’ve only studied about half the information on her, and I’ve already uncovered several other incidents. She and her cohorts—you’ll have noticed she was referred to as the group’s leader—received suspended sentences. But, yes, you’re right about some kids turning around. The others have stayed out of trouble, at least from what I could tell. But Mia was arrested again two years later for walking out of a jewelry store in Scottsdale with an eighteen-thousand-dollar ring. Her excuse was that she’d been trying it on when she remembered that she was supposed to meet a friend for lunch at Applebee’s, said she forgot all about the ring when she left the store with it on her finger.”

Behind me, the starlings were arguing so loudly that I had to raise my voice. “Was she ever convicted?”

“Charges dropped after her mother paid for the ring.”

“
Paid
for it? That’s a lot of cash.”

“Her mother took out a second mortgage on her house. It got foreclosed on a couple of years later after she had to hire another criminal defense lawyer, who got Mia off by the skin of her teeth in a second jewelry store heist.”

I sighed. “What’d her precious darling daughter steal that time?”

“Another ring. A bigger one this time. Apparently she likes bright, glittery things.”

I remembered the huge solitaire I’d seen Mia wearing. The light bouncing off it had almost blinded me. “Did she ever do time?”

“Never.”

“Must be nice to have a mother who bails your crooked ass out of jail.”

“Not really. It means you never learn your lesson.”

True enough, given the fact that Mia’s crimes had escalated. “Did any of her crimes involve violence?”

“None I’ve found so far. Like I said, I still have a lot of work to do.”

“A minute ago you said something about Mia’s
first
Las Vegas marriage license?
First
? She married there twice? Come to think of it, that newspaper article, it’s dated fifteen years back. If she was a high school senior then, she’d be thirty-one or thirty-two now.” Silly me, mistaking a grownup for a child bride.

“Thirty-two and a half. And yeah, each of her three marriages took place in Las Vegas. She moved there after barely graduating from high school. Before you ask, yes, you have to be twenty-one to work at a Vegas casino, but that’s not what she did. In fact, there’s no record of her ever working anywhere under any name. She fell off the radar for a couple of years, and who knows what she was doing to support herself, but we can guess. Then the marriages started. Jardine, her first, was a Baccarat dealer at Caesar’s Palace. Graumann, the second, owned Sweet Rides, a car dealership. She finally hit the big time with Tosches.”

A loud squawk made me turn my head. Two starlings had grabbed opposite ends of a chicken breast; neither wanted to let go. As they jerked it back and forth, a cactus wren swooped down, picked off a small piece of fried skin, and departed with it. The starlings dropped the breast in shock and flew off after the wren. Greedy bastards.

“Any financial settlements after the divorces?” I asked Jimmy.

He shook his head. “Not from the Baccarat dealer. When she split from Graumann, she cashed in to the tune of a little more than two hundred thousand in property, plus spousal support until she remarried. Comfy, but no fortune. She took care of that quickly enough, though. Six months after her divorce, she snagged Tosches, who was in town for a golf tournament. It was one of those gimmicky charity deals where all the caddies were babes in bikinis. Did I mention that our girl was once Miss Bikini Las Vegas? And knew a three-wood from a driver?”

Vegas golf courses are great places to meet men, especially when you’re spilling out of your bikini. I wondered if Tosches had run a background check on his darling bride. Probably not. When it came to bikinied hotties, most men thought with Mister Friendly.

“Nice to see a woman move up in the world. Have you come up with anything concrete between her and Ted?”

Jimmy’s usually open face closed down, signaling a forbidden subject. “Ted would never have an affair with someone like Mia Tosches.”

It was all I could do not to harrumph. In my experience, women who married for money were like tigers prowling the jungle on the lookout for vulnerable prey. Once they’d slaked their appetite for bright shiny things, they turned their attention to the more sensuous pleasures. Handsome Ted, still grieving over his wife’s death, would certainly have been vulnerable enough.

“How about Tosches himself? Any dirt there, besides the dirty uranium mine on the Navajo rez?”

“Some,” he said. “But not as much as you’d expect, considering everything he’s been involved in. Then again, he’s a local, and this town tends to protect its own.”

Tosches, the only progeny of a wealthy copper mining couple whose private holdings included the land the Black Basin was on, had increased his inheritance tenfold by judicious investments that remained unaffected by the current economic downturn. He’d used some of his fortune to develop Sunset Canyon Lakes, and had already doubled his investment.

“He was born with a silver spoon in his mouth and he turned it into gold, metaphorically speaking,” Jimmy said. “On the civic responsibility side, not much, other than being the president of the Walapai Flats Chamber of Commerce and a member of the National Mining Association. Oh, and he’s an avowed enemy of the Sierra Club, as well as V.U.M. No surprise there, since he believes land is meant to be developed, not looked at.”

“Nothing at all suspicious?”

“No wants, no warrants, no record of drunken nights at bordellos or associations with mob figures. But I couldn’t find any record of large bequests to any charity, either, and given the amount of money the guy has, that’s surprising. And…” He turned the laptop around again, letting me scroll through newspaper accounts of OSHA investigations regarding injuries incurred during the building of Sunset Canyon Lakes. One man had fallen to his death while working on the six-story timeshare building; another had his leg amputated after a similar fall. Both victims’ families accepted settlements so miniscule I found them shocking.

“Tosches has good attorneys, doesn’t he?”

“The best.”

“I’ll bet he has an iron-clad pre-nup with Mia.”

Jimmy’s mouth tugged at the corners. “No pre-nup at all, Lena. The guy was crazy in love. Or lust.”

Oh, Mr. Friendly. How foolish you can be.

“Don’t worry, I’m not giving up on the Tosches,” Jimmy said. “I already have so much material it’ll take days to sift through. Moving on, you also asked about Olivia Eames.”

“The reporter. I saw her covering the demonstration today, so I guess she’s the real deal.”

Renewed squawking signaled the return of the starlings. This time there were seven of them, and they busied themselves in the trashcan so deeply that I could only see their tail feathers sticking out. As they bitched and fought over the chicken dinners’ remains, a crumpled napkin flew out of the trash and bounced toward me. I picked it up and returned it to the trash. Unfazed, the starlings continued gorging.

When I sat myself back down at the picnic table, Jimmy said, “Olivia got her start at the Silver Ridge newspaper.”

“Silver Ridge? That old mining town over by the freeway?”

“Correctomundo, kemosabe. When she graduated from Silver Ridge High, where she was editor of the school paper, she received a scholarship to the University of Missouri’s School of Journalism. After getting her bachelor’s, she lit out for the East Coast, served an internship at the
Boston Globe
, and from there, moved on to—surprise, surprise—the
New York Times
and some pretty meaty stories.”

Apparently the
Times
had a more relaxed dress policy than I would have guessed. “What kind of meaty stories are you talking about? Political stuff?”

“Not exactly. An investigative piece on an outbreak of
E.coli
she managed to trace to an upstate packing house. She wrote another piece on defective pacemakers that wound up putting one of the manufacturer, another New York company, out of business. She’s quite respected in the journalism community, won several awards.”

“Pulitzer?”

“Not yet, but I’d say she’s on her way. She did snag a George Polk Award for the meatpacking story. I wonder why she’s hanging around Sunset Canyon Lakes and not in Silver Ridge, where she’s from? Maybe she didn’t come out here to renew familial ties. I mean, if she did, she’d have bunked with her folks, wouldn’t she? Or if they were full up, she could have found a closer place to stay. There are two motels in Silver Ridge, and both look nice. I checked them out online.”

“She’s working a story, Jimmy.” I was willing to bet Olivia had wrangled her way into Nancy Donohue’s book club not so much for her love of books, but because of the Black Basin Mine connection. Nancy was, after all, married to the mine’s public relations expert. Or was, until he was snuffed. The only question was, considering the fact that the East Coast had plenty of scandals of its own to investigate, why had she come all the way out here to dig up Arizona dirt? Maybe she thought the Black Basin flap was Pulitzer-worthy and couldn’t pass it up; journalists could be obsessive that way. But if the mine was the reason for her visit, why now? Why not a year earlier, when Ted’s wife was murdered?

But maybe she did. “Jimmy, did you find anything to indicate that Olivia came out here after Kimama Olmstead was shot?”

“Nope. She didn’t. I checked.”

“What about her personal life?” Not that reporters had much time for one.

An expression I couldn’t read flickered across Jimmy’s face.

“What?”

“Well, I did do a little light digging, and…Sure you want to hear?”

“Stop being coy.”

“It’s sad, Lena.”

Jimmy’s continued hesitation, combined with the stiffening breeze and the lowering light, was beginning to annoy me. “How sad?”

“Sad as in being gang-raped. Sad as in losing her fiancé in the World Trade Center.”

Mercifully, he only gave a brief summation of both horrors. While Olivia was covering a story in the East Village one night, a group of men dragged her into an abandoned warehouse and raped her over a six-hour period. The men were never caught. Four months later—on 9/11—her fiancé, a policeman, was killed at the World Trade Center while attempting to rescue a woman in a wheelchair.