Camelback Falls (6 page)
I was forty-three years old and in the principal’s office. We all were. Me, Lindsey, Kimbrough, half a dozen Phoenix cops, and the school security guard who had opened the place so we had somewhere to sit. It was 4:45
A.M.
on Thursday.
“Dave went to school here, and now he’s the sheriff,” Lindsey said to the security guard. “They ought to have a Dave Mapstone Day.”
“Yes, ma’am,” he said, trying to understand.
“Sheriff, if I may speak frankly,” Kimbrough said.
“Yes, yes.” I waved my hand at him. I was sitting bent over in a too-small plastic chair, suddenly wishing I could sleep for about a hundred years.
“Sir,” Kimbrough said, “with all due respect.”
Lindsey said, “Just say it. I bet I agree with it.”
He let loose: “What the fuck”—this last word was shouted—“was that little stunt about!?” He added quietly, “Sheriff.”
He wheeled on Lindsey. “And you! You were supposed to keep him from doing something pretty much just like this!”
“Sorry,” she said. “He’s headstrong. I like that, sometimes.”
“Jesus!” he said. “It’s like you have Peralta’s recklessness without, without…”
He let it hang, and a grizzled Phoenix captain said, “His balls.”
Kimbrough raised up and said, “Fuck you. Where were your people when we needed them? Where were those silly-ass bicycle patrols? The suspect just walks down Interstate 10 and gets away, while Phoenix PD is at Krispy Kreme.”
Kimbrough turned back to me. “How did he even get your number?”
“It’s listed,” I said, feeling ever more foolish.
“Who’s going to write this report?” a younger city cop demanded, realistically.
God, my head and knees hurt. Maybe I’d end up like one of those old people who has total knee replacement with some very expensive composite material, kind of like the stuff flying off those cars in the tunnel, and yet your knees still hurt like hell.
I looked around the room.
A jurisdictional goat-fuck
, I heard Peralta’s voice say. Yes, my friend, and you would know just how to take charge. Just the right amount of politicking, and just the right amount of hard-ass. Well, if I knew those things I’d have tenure at a major university history department.
I said quietly, “It’s not O’Keefe.” Everybody stopped talking and looked at me.
“O’Keefe didn’t shoot Peralta.”
“Oh, bullshit,” the Phoenix captain said under his breath.
“He just tried to shoot you, too!” Kimbrough said. “And from the way you describe the shot, I wouldn’t be surprised if ballistics finds this is the same gun that shot Peralta.”
I shook my head. “He’s not our guy.”
“Oh, Jesus Christ!” Kimbrough said. “Leo O’Keefe was an accessory in the worst assault on Maricopa County deputies in history. Leo O’Keefe is a convicted murderer. Now, he’s an escapee. We have a threatening note, sent by him, found on the body of a former deputy, who was also involved in that Guadalupe incident. And now he’s tried to take a whack at you, Mapstone—you, the deputy who arrested him and signed his booking record. The guy is two decades of trouble. He’s a monster.”
I had to admit told that way it sounded airtight. Leo O’Keefe, broken out of the big house and come to settle the big score with the sheriff’s office. But I also knew the ways of law enforcement bureaucracies. Leo was our only theory in a high-profile shooting. Without Leo, we were screwed.
I said, “It wasn’t a threatening note. It was his name on a piece of paper. Tonight, Leo didn’t seem to know who I was, beyond the guy on the television from the press conference yesterday. That doesn’t sound like somebody who’s been carrying a hit list stamped on his heart since 1979. He said he didn’t shoot Peralta.”
Lindsey said, “Dave, can you really believe what he said on the phone? Did he actually say he didn’t shoot Peralta?”
“It’s not just that,” I said. “It’s Nixon. He didn’t know about Nixon turning up dead.”
“What…?” Kimbrough started.
It was true. We had held back the information of Dean Nixon’s murder from the media. In yesterday’s press briefing on the hunt for Peralta’s killer, we didn’t even mention Nixon.
For one thing, it was a piece of critical information that would hold down the number of needy nutcases who might come in and confess in O’Keefe’s place. If Nixon’s murder were tied to the shooting of Peralta, then the real killer would know that information. And holding it back would have kept the suspect off balance, if he thought we hadn’t discovered Nixon’s body yet—if the two shootings were connected. Plus, cops just liked to hoard information.
But O’Keefe didn’t know that Dean Nixon was dead.
“He asked me if I had talked to Dean Nixon. As in, present tense.”
Kimbrough pursed his lips, said nothing.
“Maybe he was just messing with you,” said another city cop. She was sipping on some coffee in Styrofoam cups that had appeared from the security guard. I waved one away.
“Maybe,” I said. “But why?”
The captain said, “To lure you out. Make you do pretty much what you did. Only O’Keefe wasn’t a good enough shot. Hell, he didn’t even finish off Peralta.”
We sat in silence. The room smelled of Lysol and chalk dust. I wished Peralta were here to dispense with this PD bastard. Younger cops began the real work: writing up the incident report.
Another cop—she looked like a tougher Jennifer Aniston—said, “Your guy, I’ll say this about him. Whether he’s the killer or not, he was willing to run into the busiest freeway in town to get away from talking about it.”
“This is nuts!” the captain said. “If he didn’t fire that shot, who the hell did?”
“Somebody,” I said, “who didn’t want him talking to me.”
***
Two hours later, Lindsey and I sat over breakfast at Susan’s, a diner out on Glendale Avenue. It was one of Peralta’s favorite places, and it served terrific comfort food. I also sought comfort in the newspaper. So while Lindsey fiddled with her Palm Pilot, I ate scrambled eggs and read the
Republic
. Peralta’s shooting had moved off the front page, replaced by a thumbsucker on a huge new development north of the city. Why did they call them “master-planned communities,” these endless tracts of houses without even a park or a neighborhood drugstore? I recalled the line about the Holy Roman Empire being neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire. Then I moved onto a helping of requisite Valley crime stories: A New York gang boss was found running a drug ring in the Phoenix suburbs. A landscape worker fed himself and his brand-new fiancée into a wood chipper. A woman stopped to help a pair of stranded motorists with a baby, who turned out to be robbers and shot her dead. My hometown.
“Dave.” Lindsey reached past the ketchup and hot sauce, taking my hand.
She locked those twilight blue eyes on me intensely. “I really need you to stay safe,” she whispered, and her eyes watered over with tears. “Please, Dave…”
I squeezed her hand back, feeling guilty and responsible. I was about to say something sappy when Kimbrough appeared at the front window, nodded awkwardly, then came in the door. I waved him over to the table. He was wearing jeans and a plaid shirt, his gun and badge prominently on his belt. He had an evidence envelope in his hand.
“We haven’t seen you in ages,” Lindsey said, wiping her face and commencing to rip apart the interior of a grapefruit with her fork. Kimbrough pulled up a chair, exchanged pleasantries with Susan, and ordered coffee.
He swallowed the lava-like liquid without flinching. Cops and coffee. I would never understand it.
“David, I was out of line back there,” he said. “I apologize.”
“You weren’t out of line,” I said. “I was a dumb fuck. I just didn’t know what to do.”
He shuffled in the chair, ran a hand over the smooth, dark globe of his scalp. I said, “Don’t worry about it, E.J.” I had never called him by his first name before.
He nodded, sipped more coffee, and relaxed a bit. “We have news,” he said. He slid the evidence container onto the table. Through the clear plastic, I could see a manila envelope, faded with age. On the front, written in a scratchy hand, was: “To be opened in the event of my death.”
“Where did you get this?”
“Nixon’s ex-wife,” Kimbrough said. “A woman named Joyce Bellman, who lives in Tempe. You know her?”
“Nope,’ I said. “Nixon was single when I knew him.”
“Well, she’s wife number two out of three,” Kimbrough said. “We tracked her down this morning on a next-of-kin notification. She said he left this envelope with her years ago. When I saw what she had, I figured you’d want to see it.”
It felt light and unremarkable in my hand. I set it back on the table.
“Have you opened it?”
He shook his head.
“Got any gloves?”
He reached in his pocket and pulled out some latex gloves. I slipped them on and opened the evidence container.
“Everyone will witness the chain of custody is secure,” I said. “I don’t want to be lectured by some Phoenix PD asshole twice in the same day.”
I undid the clasp and the flap opened with no resistance. I slid in a finger and dilated the envelope so we could see inside. It was another envelope, slightly smaller. I gently slid it out. On the front, written in a firmer hand, it said: “For the U.S. Attorney Only.”
Kimbrough and Lindsey looked at each other.
“Dean Nixon reaches out from the grave,” I said. “But why wouldn’t that information be on the cover envelope?”
“Maybe Nixon assumed his ex would be the one to open the outside envelope if he died,” Lindsey said.
I paused and weighed it in my hand. The gloves made my fingers sweat.
“What should we do?” Lindsey said. Our breakfasts sat unattended, getting cold.
“I guess let the feds know,” I said. But now I was feeling awake and curious. “But we can examine the evidence, of course.”
Kimbrough smiled broadly. “Of course.”
“We don’t suspect a federal crime has occurred, do we?” I asked.
“Not us,” they said in unison.
“But this does pertain to an active murder investigation,” I said.
“Very active,” Lindsey said.
“Then let’s see what Dean was afraid of all those years ago.”
I undid the clasp, but the envelope was also sealed. I worked the flap open as gently as I could, and the aging glue gave way with reluctance. Inside was a thick wad of paper. It was stuck inside so tightly that it resisted being pulled out. I could make out colors, lines, grids.
It was a map.
We didn’t have far to go. The map, a detailed plat from the U.S. Geological Survey, showed the area around Shaw Butte in the North Mountain Preserve. It highlighted a trail in yellow marker, then diverged to what the map said was an abandoned mine shaft. Next to that, in a precise hand, were instructions on how to find Dean Nixon’s buried treasure.
We walked up the trail armed with a shovel, crime-scene tape, and more evidence containers from the trunk of Kimbrough’s unmarked Crown Victoria. Ahead of us were bare sunbaked mountains that once cradled the northern edge of the city, marking the beginning of the desert wilderness. Now the city had run around them. But somehow Phoenix had mustered the momentary courage to save the mountains themselves from development. Today we passed a handful of hikers, but the preserve was mostly deserted on a weekday.
As we walked, Kimbrough talked about his family. One child, a boy, was six now, and another was on the way in June. His wife had left the County Attorney’s Office—they met when she was a prosecutor—and she was going to set up her own family law practice. This was Kimbrough’s fifteenth year with the Sheriff’s Office. He was five years younger than me, and came here from the Drug Enforcement Administration when the former sheriff, also a DEA man, won election.
“Now I know why I like you,” I said. “You’re an outsider in this department like me.”
“That and we have great taste in clothes.” He laughed.
We walked up a well prepared trail, but it was still work. The hard desert ground was defined by loose rocks, sand, and outcroppings of jumping cactus. I felt every foot of elevation in my knees and calves. But as we kept walking, the pain lessened, as did the immediate memory of the gunshot that made me dive for the sidewalk just a few hours before.
“Luckily the snakes are hibernating in winter,” I said.
“Great,” Kimbrough said.
“’Course it’s been a warm winter, Dave,” Lindsey said.
As we neared the summit and left the trail, the ugliness of the day became evident. A weather inversion had clamped the smog down hard on the city, just like the lid on a bowl. Only Phoenix’s bowl was the purple and brown necklace of mountains that surrounded it. From where we stood, we should have been able to see the soaring blue towers of the Sierra Estrella to the south and the sheer expanse of the White Tanks to the west. Both were gone, replaced by a yellow-brown haze that spread out across the desert floor. Even Squaw Peak and Camelback, much closer, were barely visible. To the south, the Sunnyslope section of the city fell away in a series of rooftops, palm trees, and billboards until it, too, disappeared in the muck. The line of skyscrapers on the Central Corridor shimmered and faded. To the north, Moon Valley and Deer Valley, newer parts of Phoenix, sprawled around Lookout Mountain, itself cloaked in brown air.
“Yuck,” Lindsey said. We were all winded from the climb, and the sight of the air didn’t make breathing easier.
“I remember when the sky here was the bluest blue in the world,” I said, working my way up a slick boulder. “But I’m sounding like an old fogey.”
Lindsey grabbed my hand and pulled herself up on the next level of rock. “You’re a young fogey,” she said, “like me.”
We paused and studied the map. Sure enough, a slab of concrete was set into a cluster of boulders, marked off by signs that warned “Danger. Abandoned Mine.”
“I didn’t realize there was mining in the Valley,” Lindsey said, kindly teasing my eternal pedagogic sensibility.
“Yeah, my wife thinks these mountains just look like giant slag heaps,” Kimbrough said. “But she’s from Pennsylvania.”
“Well, these mountains were really not much. The mining districts east of here, around Globe, or north in the Bradshaw Mountains actually had some gold and silver.” I restrained myself. “Anyway, there were a few mines around Phoenix. Squaw Peak had some quicksilver mines. A German POW hid in one for awhile when he escaped, back in World War II.”
I could go on all day, and Lindsey said my history talks were wildly romantic. But we fell silent as we studied Nixon’s instructions. Northeast corner of the concrete slab, right by the fence pole. I stuck the shovel in the hard, dry dirt and started digging.
After several cuts at the ground, I was about to let Kimbrough take his turn digging. Then the blade of the shovel struck metal.
“That’s it,” I said. I changed the angle of the shovel and soon outlined what looked like an old metal ammunition box, just the size of a bread box, its olive green paint suddenly peeking out of the blond and gray desert soil.
“Whatever it was,” Lindsey said, “Nixon didn’t want it at his trailer. But he didn’t want it that far away, either.”
I grasped the handle of the box and pulled it out of the ground. “Well, we’re about to find out.”
I put latex gloves back on and released the metal catch on the ammo box. The top swung open, releasing sand and rocks. Inside it was empty.
“I don’t believe it,” Kimbrough said. “This is like when Geraldo opened Al Capone’s vault.”
“Wait a minute.” I put my hand on the bottom and it gave way. A piece of dark metal, cut to create a false bottom. I pulled out the metal plate and beneath it was some kind of book, wrapped in plastic. I pulled it out and shook it off, being paranoid about scorpions and other desert creepy-crawlies. But inside it was clean and dry, a red, hardcover journal. It was the kind of logbook you might have seen in any small business a generation ago.
“Hmmmm,” Kimbrough said, reacting to the cover. It was a vivid cartoon of two pigs in police uniforms, having sex while riding a Harley. Beneath it was inscribed, “MCSD RIVER HOGS.”
“That dates it,” I said. “Back in the seventies, it was the Maricopa County Sheriff’s
Department
, MCSD, when we were trying to prove how big-city we were.”
“What were the River Hogs?” Lindsey asked.
I shook my head, looking over at Kimbrough.
“Before my time,” he said. “But I never heard the phrase before.”
“When did Nixon’s ex get that envelope?” I asked.
“She didn’t recall exactly,” he said. “They divorced in 1991, and she moved to Tempe. She knows Nixon gave her the envelope to hang onto after they divorced. She said she hadn’t even seen Nixon since 1995.”
“Dave’s ex gave him a BMW,” Lindsey said, poking my ribs.
“So he was anticipating somebody killing him for at least five years, maybe longer?” I said.
“Maybe,” Kimbrough said. “But he was a drunk and a washout as a law enforcement officer. Maybe he was just paranoid.” I held out the book again and opened the cover. Beyond some blank initial sheets, the pages turned dense with columns. Pages and pages of numbers and columns. I flipped through. Nothing but numbers and columns. One column appeared to be dates, starting in 1977. On the last page, the date was 12/31/80. Another column was clearly about money: Each page saw that column set off with a precisely-drawn dollar sign—and the same person appeared to have written all the entries. The sums weren’t small, $1,000 being a common amount, and some lines showing as high as $15,000.
“What’s that?” Kimbrough indicated another column, with four-digit numbers.
I shook my head. “Some kind of code, maybe.” I scanned the pages, and the four-digit numbers frequently repeated themselves. A few appeared quite regularly, every week.
“Like a book-making operation?” Lindsey asked. I shook my head, feeling suddenly like something cold had wrapped itself around my neck.
“Or payoffs,” I said. “Bribes to cops. Nixon left nothing in this case except this book. He obviously thought it was self-evident, and that the information was explosive. We’re not talking about records of poker games, here.”
“That’s why he wrote the thing about taking it to the U.S. Attorney,” Kimbrough said.
“So what is the code?” Lindsey asked. “Maybe there’s a key somewhere in the book.”
Kimbrough’s star and gun hanging on his belt caught my eye, and it was clear. “They’re badge numbers,” I said.
Lindsey drew closer. “Jeez, Dave, are you in there?”
“What was Nixon’s badge number?” I asked. Kimbrough shook his head.
“Hang on,” Lindsey said, pulling out her Palm Pilot.
“I guess I have to get one of those,” I said.
“This one’s old,” she said, using a stylus to make some marks on the little screen. “It takes a long time to beam into the mainframe down on Madison Street.”
I looked out, past the blown-apart, burned boulders, over the brown haze obscuring the city.
Badge numbers
. So this was what Nixon wanted someone to see in the event of his death. Leo O’Keefe? No, Dean Nixon had been fearing something for a very long time, and it had to do with badge numbers.
“Got it,” Lindsey said, reading out Nixon’s number from the central computer. And, sure enough, Nixon was a regular in the book. In just one month, he accounted for $8,500, and that was 1979 money.
Lindsey drew close to me and began scanning the pages herself. Suddenly, she drew in a sharp breath. “Oh!”
I couldn’t believe it. Didn’t want to. But there it was. And it reappeared. Again and again, on page after page.
“That can’t be,” I said.
“What the hell are you guys talking about,” Kimbrough demanded. But then his eyes picked up the four digits, too.
“Oh, my God,” he said.
There was only one badge number that was so familiar in the Sheriff’s Office that everyone knew it by sight.