Cactus Heart - [10]

Talbott ended up doing odd jobs around the Yarnell house, sometimes filling in as chauffeur for the family. Meanwhile, he had gotten in over his head with gambling debts. To the county attorney, those things spelled opportunity and motive. In 1943, Talbott was executed at the state penitentiary in Florence. Richie received life in prison. Talbott’s last meal was a steak, which the authorities apparently fulfilled despite wartime rationing. He never confessed to the crime. He never told where the boys were buried.

The files contained no mention of the old building where we found the skeletons. Nor was there a report of a missing pocket watch. Most of all, I wondered: Why had this powerful family waited a week to call the cops?

I rubbed my eyes, nursed a paper cut, stood up and stretched, then sat back down to go through it all over again, this time making notes. By the time the clerk came by to tell me the warehouse was closing, I had several pages written and I was ready for a break. As Hawkins said, just a nine-to-five job.

6

There weren’t many old buildings left in Phoenix, but I worked in one: the old city-county building at Washington and First Avenue. Finished in 1929 just before the stock market crashed, the five-story courthouse was a mélange of Jazz Age ambition and Hoover utility under a vast red-tile roof. On the city hall side, art deco Phoenix birds rose up grandly to bolster the brown sandstone. It must have been the most imposing building in Phoenix when this was a farm town with a population of 48,000. Later, it served as Phoenix police headquarters into the 1970s. Now, with nearly three million people spread across the Salt River Valley, the building sat like a museum piece surrounded by the monotonous glass and concrete boxes of downtown.

It was Wednesday and my ankle hurt worse. The elevator was still out; with the building nearly empty except for the marriage license bureau in the basement, the county wasn’t in a hurry to fix it. I limped up the winding staircase, leaning on the wrought-iron railing as I climbed past the empty hallways of dark wooden doorframes, 1930s light fixtures and Spanish tile floors. I was on the fourth floor, which was mostly used as storage for who-knew-what old city and county records. Outside my office at the end of the hallway, a county maintenance crew had attached a new sign that said, Deputy David Mapstone, Sheriff’s Office Historian. It still looked strange to me.

The office was big and airy, with large windows looking out on the arid Patriots Square across the street, and the massive new ballpark several blocks east. Other walls were lined with law books and old records, long forgotten by the county. The furnishings were strictly courthouse castoffs: large desk, a couple of tables and straight-back chairs, all of dark, heavy wood. I had brought in a watercolor print by a Santa Fe artist. It reminded me of a trip to New Mexico a few years before, but it bugged Peralta, who had no taste for even the slightly abstract.

I certainly didn’t need the office-I could work at home on the laptop or find a cubicle at the sheriff’s headquarters a block south-but I liked it. It had a wonderful dingy, 1940s quality. Years before it had been the sheriff’s private office before it was relegated to storage and then forgotten, until Peralta commandeered it for me. “It will give you structure,” he had said. But I also knew it would allow him to keep an eye on me but not have me close enough to make the regular deputies at Madison Street uncomfortable.

I cleared off a scuffed wooden courtroom table as my Yarnell workspace. Lindsey was trying to teach me to use computerized spreadsheets and expert programs to organize my information. But I still found comfort in index cards, sheets of paper, a white board, and a cork bulletin board. If the stories about computers melting down on New Year’s Day 2000 were true, my old-fashioned tools might be best. Still, I used my Mac PowerBook for writing, e-mail, and surfing the Net, using about ten percent of its capabilities, Lindsey chided me. Whatever worked. I wanted to deliver a report to Hawkins and Peralta in two weeks at the most.

“Hey-yo, Mapstone.”

Carl, the building security guard, was standing at the door. Flush-faced and white-haired, with a thin British army officer mustache, Carl was retired from the Arizona Highway Patrol. He still carried himself with the bearing of a member of an elite law enforcement agency, but he was also very lonely and could talk the entire morning away.

“Another beautiful day in Phoenix,” Carl said, examining the doorjamb for who-knows-what. “God, I hate days like this. It’ll only make those damned people from the Midwest want to move out here for good. Then they’ll bring all their problems. Then they’ll enact a slew of new laws and make things just like what they wanted to get away from in Minnesota or Illinois.”

“I know.” It was an old discussion, among Arizonans and between Carl and me.

He moved into the office and leaned against the edge of the desk.