Читать книгу The Death File: A gripping serial killer thriller with a shocking twist - J. Kerley A. - Страница 12

It was eight minutes past midnight when Tasha Novarro pulled into the Dobbins Point Overlook in South Mountain Park, its sixteen thousand-plus desert acres and jagged peaks making it the largest municipal park in the continental US. The Overlook, far above the desert floor and up a winding grade, was always crowded during park hours, but the park had been closed since seven p.m. No problem for Novarro: South Mountain was under the jurisdiction of the Phoenix Police Department, the cop at the entrance long used to Novarro’s nighttime visits and waving her through the gate.

The Dobbins Point Overlook was Novarro’s own little parcel of Paradise, her sole company the spectral saguaros silhouetted in the light of a gibbous moon. Behind and above her, on the peak, stood a vast array of communications antennae with red lights blinking against the liquid sky.

When Novarro was young, she’d thought the lights themselves formed the communications, a version of the heliographs she’d read about in a book borrowed from the library, the lights flashing semaphoric messages to towers miles away. Only later did she learn that the structures communicated via invisible transmission of short-wave energy called microwaves and the lights were only there to ward off aircraft.

Novarro preferred her earlier interpretation.

She shut off her engine and stepped from the cruiser, looking north across a crucible of light: Phoenix the blazing nexus, Glendale to the west, Mesa to the east, Scottsdale northeast. Headlights shimmered down the geometric maze of streets as a jet dropped from below the moon to land at Sky Harbor International Airport, five miles distant and one of the few airports located in the heart of a major metropolis.

A woman killed, Novarro thought, staring into the vortex of light. She’d spent the last three days interviewing friends, neighbors, and business associates of Leslie Meridien, PhD. A pleasant and outgoing woman, by all reports, no apparent enemies.

No one had an answer, no one understood.

“Leslie was more than a psychologist,” a friend had wept. “She was a force for good.”

The killing had been brutal but efficient. Efficient murders were not the norm, Novarro knew from seven years in uniform and eight months in Homicide. The vast majority of killings were messy affairs, anger- or turf-driven, with slashing blades or emptied bullet clips, ball bats or shotgun blasts, people killed for being in the wrong bed or on the wrong corner.

Meridien’s murder was different. It was dispassionate, ice cold. And all of the victim’s patient files were gone, taken in a manner that baffled high-level computer types.

Merle Castle put it in a box he knew: breaking and entering, probably committed by Hispanics. But a television and watch had been left behind … Overlooked? Not by anyone professional enough to kill so efficiently. It was a wrong note, hell, a wrong chord.

Novarro paced the desolate parking lot for a full hour and came to two conclusions: One, that a highly competent professional had broken into Meridien’s cloud account and erased it, and – given high competence as a standard – two, a similar professionalism was likely employed in Meridien’s murder and what she believed was a staged robbery.

There were fierce and desperate people in the valley who would kill for a week’s worth of heroin, pulling a trigger and running. Move up a level and several thousand dollars bought a backseat strangling and a body dumped in the desert.

This was a higher level still.

Her mind reeling with questions, Novarro returned to her vehicle and descended the mountain, angling down Central Avenue and aiming for her downtown home.

Novarro had owned a house in midtown for eight months, making the down payment two days after getting her detective’s shield and the raise accompanying the new badge. The neighborhood was sketchy, but only four blocks from the Roosevelt Historic District, its gentrification effects moving like a slow-motion tsunami toward Novarro’s block.

It was the first home ownership in Tasha Novarro’s family. She’d grown up in a double-wide trailer at the edge of the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community between Mesa and Scottsdale, her mother there mostly, her father never. Though it was Novarro, her younger brother, and mother, rarely were there just the three of them in residence; a ragged procession of relatives constantly passing through the house, sometimes for hours, sometimes months. The fragile emotional conditions at the house led Novarro’s Aunt Chyla to proclaim the domicile “a boxed set of thunderstorms.”

Novarro sought refuge in school, her dedication to study leading to a pre-law scholarship at Arizona State University. Her contribution would have been forty-five hundred dollars saved from working nights and weekends at a Ranch Market in northeast Phoenix, but one of her distant cousins – a handsome thirty-year-old charmer needing a place to stay following a forgery stint in prison – boogied off to points unknown after two months, taking her virginity and checkbook and emptying her account before he disappeared.

Left with only grades and ambition she went to the police academy because it was an arm of the law and was free.

And maybe, someday …

Novarro swung around the corner and onto her street, driving to midblock and pulling into her driveway. It was a small house and the windows were grated out of necessity, but she’d spent almost a thousand dollars and dozens of hours landscaping the yard, hard brown dirt and sand when she’d purchased it, beaten down by three large dogs. Now the driveway was bordered with bright flowers, a desert willow embellishing one corner of the boxy structure, a palo verde the other. The backyard held a lime tree that had somehow survived the canine onslaught. It wasn’t much, but everyone said it was the prettiest house on the street.

Novarro was ten steps from her front door when she noticed a centimeter-wide band of light leaking out. Ajar. A sizzle of electricity ran down her spine and she fell into a crouch, slipping her weapon from her rear waistband and creeping to the door. She put her ear to the crack, nothing. Novarro nudged the door open with her foot and peeked past the frame, smelling the sweet scent of marijuana.

“POLICE!” she yelled. “The house is surrounded. Put your hands on your head and walk to the front.”

A sound from somewhere in the rear.

“NOW!” she yelled. “OR YOU’RE DEAD!”

Seconds later a slender Native American male stepped from the hall with his hands atop a head of long black hair in a rubber-banded ponytail. He was boyishly handsome, like a man not fully formed, the face poised between pretty child and handsome adult. He wore a bead-embellished leather jacket over a white tee and blue jeans, a black concho belt around his waist, his feet in red trail runners. He stepped into the living room and pirouetted, stopping with a stumble into the wall and a broad grin aimed at Novarro.

“Jesus, Tash,” he said. “You’re such a drama queen.”

The muzzle dropped. It was Ben, her twenty-one-year-old brother. She’d given him a key months ago, regretted it a week later, but now it was his. If she asked for the key back or changed the lock, she’d be …

An Indian Giver.

Novarro blew out a breath. “I didn’t see your car outside, Ben.”

“A buddy dropped me off. We were out doin’ a li’l partying.”

Novarro heard the slur of pot and alcohol in her brother’s voice and she gave him narrowed eyes. “Your car’s at home, I hope?”

The last time this happened he’d forgotten where he’d parked.

“Fuckin’ bank came an’ got it yesterday, the bast—” He belched into his palm, “—ards.” He looked up. “’S’cuse me.”

Novarro had a mental picture of the repo man hooking up the 2001 Corolla and driving away. Six months back she’d lent – OK, given – Ben the price of the down payment plus two months of installments.

“You got behind on payments,” she sighed.

“The insur’nce was killing me, Tash.”

“Think your driving record has anything to do with it?”

“I, uh, gotta take a whizzer.” As usual when Ben didn’t like the direction of a conversation, he fled.

It was five minutes until the toilet flushed, reminding Novarro of the time the family’s commode had been leaking for a week until a nine-year-old Ben removed the tank top, stared at the mechanism as he flushed several times, then, using a bent bobby pin, fixed the toilet in thirty seconds.

“How are things at your job?” Novarro asked. “They still got you on thermostats?”

“I got tired of tinkering with little shit.” He winked. “So I disappeared in a puff of smoke.”

Novarro felt her heart drop. “Disappeared?”

“I’m the Coyote, Tasha,” Ben grinned crookedly, invoking the mythological, shape-shifting Trickster in many Native American cultures, reckless, self-involved, with a sense of humor both clownish and cruel. “I have the magic in me.”

Novarro shook her head. He’d quit or been fired. Her voice pushed toward anger, but she fought it. “You have too much liquor in you,” she said quietly.

“Me Indian,” Ben said in a cartoon voice, a distorted smile on his face. “Me like-um firewater. It make-um me big happy.”

“Don’t start that crap, Ben. It’s demea—”

“FYA-WATAH!” he whooped, jumping from the couch and beginning a stumbling circular dance, hand patting his mouth. “Owoo-woo-woo … Owoo-woo-woo … Owoo–woo …” He paused as if taken by a sudden thought. “Me need-um a drum track here, Tash,” he slurred, moving his hands up and down like drumming. “You got-um any tom-toms?”

“I got aspirin,” she said. “Coffee.”

Her brother scowled at his choices. “Coyote need-um more firewater.” His hand flashed beneath his jacket and found a pint bottle of red liquid; his favorite grain alcohol into which he’d poured several bags of strawberry Kool-Aid. At 190proof, it was just shy of pure ethanol. Before Novarro could cross the floor it was in his mouth.

“Give me that shit,” she said, grabbing his arm. Ben spun, his hand pushing Novarro away as his lips sucked greedily at the bottle.

“I said give … me … that.” Novarro wrenched the spirits from her brother’s hand and held it beyond his reach as he grabbed wildly at the pint.

“ME NEED-UM FIREWATER!” he railed.

Novarro retreated across the floor. “You need to go to bed.”

He raised an unsteady hand, fingers opening and closing. “Gimme, gimme, Tash. Need-um bad.”

“No fucking way, Ben.”

“IT’S MIIIINE!” he screamed, kicking over an end table and lamp. The action seemed to surprise him and he stared at the fallen furniture.

Novarro’s eyes tightened to pinpoints. “Get out, Benjamin.”

He turned to her. “Hunh?”

“There’s the door,” Novarro said, finger jabbing toward the entrance. “Get out of my house.”

It took several beats for her words to make sense. Her brother tipped forward but caught himself with hands to knees. “You can’t throw me out, Tash,” he said, taking a stutter-step sideways. “Me drunk Indian.”

“Go sleep in the goddamn alley, Geronimo. Or crawl into a trash can.”

“Don’t be mean, Tash,” her brother said in a voice closer to twelve than twenty-one. He bent to retrieve the toppled lamp but momentum carried him to the floor. He tried to push himself up, but his arms buckled and his nose slammed the carpet.

“I’m all fut up,” he wailed, face-down, fingers clawing at the rug like trying to get a grip on a spinning world. “I’M ALL FUT UP!”

“Shhhh, Ben,” Novarro said gently, slipping her hands beneath his shoulders. “Come on, let’s get you to the couch.”

She wrestled her brother to the couch and got a wastebasket from the bathroom. She pulled the area rug several feet from the couch and set the wastebasket beside him as a vomit pail. He’d miss it, of course. He always did.

She sat in the chair across the room and stared at her brother, his eyes rolled back as he neared sleep. Fixing the toilet was just the start, the harbinger of an innate ability with mechanical systems that led to a job in an uncle’s garage at thirteen. His skills flourished in a high school geared to technical pursuits and he’d received a scholarship in mechanical engineering at Arizona State.

He’d dropped out one semester into the program, claiming to be bored, but Novarro suspected Ben had the same problem afflicting so many lower-class kids in college: Fear that he didn’t belong in that world, that he was insufficient, miscast, hearing whispers only spoken in the mind …

How did that one ever get in?

Despite entreaties from his university counselor and two professors – one who took Ben under her wing like a relative – her brother went to work for a company that installed industrial HVAC systems, actually a decent job, his natural abilities impressing higher-ups from day one. But from the moment he’d quit school, the drinking and pot smoking ramped up. He fell in with a loose crew of ambition-free young men content to hang out near the res and do odd jobs, selling loose joints to needy tourists the most profitable.

Three months later the accumulating hangovers and stink of liquor on Ben’s sweat and breath ended with a pronouncement from his supervisor.

“We really like you, kid; you got an incredible gift. But you also got a problem. Get it fixed and we can …”

A succession of mechanically oriented jobs followed, diminishing in complexity, the most recent reconditioning used hot-water heaters for twelve bucks an hour, a task he claimed – usually drunkenly – that a trained chimp could learn in a day.

Novarro watched her brother until his snoring became regular and unlabored. She bent and kissed his forehead and snuggled a comforter beneath his chin. Sighing, she picked up the half-full bottle and took it to the kitchen sink and turned on the tap. When she started to tip the flask over the drain, her hand froze and she stepped back.

Something on the far side of the planet whispered Coyote.

Novarro retreated to the kitchen table and sat with the blood-red liquid between her and the vase of fresh flowers purchased the previous day, their soft perfume scenting the air.

“Woo-woo,” she whispered. She tipped back the bottle and drank with surprising naturalness.

Fifteen minutes later she was weeping like a baby.