Cactus Heart - [17]

“Yeah,” he said, “and you haven’t had every law enforcement agency and media outlet in the West second-guessing you, either.”

“You’re a tragic fucking figure, Chief Peralta.”

He ignored me. “It’s a serial killer: some nerdy, unemployed, impotent white guy with a rage, like Kirk Douglas in that movie they show on cable.”

My mind went blank for a moment. “I think you mean Michael Douglas.”

“Whatever. We’ll catch him.”

“So let me drink my mocha.”

There was a long pause. “Mocha?” Then the line went dead.

10

The highway from Phoenix to Florence once traveled for miles through citrus groves until it hit Apache Junction, then turned south into the desert. Nothing but two lanes through the cactus and hard cracked earth for another hour or more. Now the highway was a freeway. The citrus groves were gone, replaced by closely spaced subdivisions and trailer courts, shopping centers and fast-food restaurants. The only familiar sights came from Superstition Mountain looming in the east and the desert at the end of the urban pipeline, and these seemed at risk. I’d always been an Arizona libertarian, reared on Barry Goldwater values of individual freedom and cussed independence. But every day that Phoenix ate another twenty-four acres of desert I was turning into an environmental extremist.

In another hour, I rolled out of the desert into Florence. It’s a typical one-industry town, but instead of coal or textiles, it depends on the forcible detention of human beings. Some of them are bad-break losers who never connected with the Franklin Planner map of life, others are as feral as the guys we met on the street Monday night, who’d literally just as soon kill you as look at you. Either way, they were the commodity that allowed these desert Florentines to scratch out a living.

Not too many years ago, the Arizona State Prison was a tough joint cut off by bleached walls and miles of arid wasteland from the fine people of the Grand Canyon State. Now it was one of many facilities run in the area by the corrections department. But if humanity regained its virtue tomorrow, the entire non-convict population of Florence would be out of work.

Frances Richie was neither in the big central prison nor in the women’s unit. A guard directed me past a half dozen one-story modern buildings-they were right out of the Cold War missile silo school of architecture-until I came to one with a sign that said: UNIT 13. An appropriate sign of bad luck for what had been a twenty-four-year-old woman who fell in with the wrong kind of man. I checked in, showed credentials, signed papers, and was shown into a large, sunny room stocked with institutional tables and chairs. In a moment, a door buzzed and a woman in a loose denim jumper and clogs came in and shook my hand.

“I’m Heather Amis,” she said. “I’m a social worker here.” She was in her thirties and so tan that her skin, lips, hair, and eyebrows were varying shades of brown. Only her eyes stood out a bit, two green orbs amid the brown. She had a learned calm, but her words weren’t: “I have to tell you, I was hoping you wouldn’t come.”

“It’s always good to be wanted,” I said.

“You were very insistent on the phone that you come today,” she said. “I read the Republic. Finding the bodies of the Yarnell twins.”

She motioned me to sit and I folded into a hard plastic chair made for a midget with a strong back.

“Miss Richie is in her eighties. She has diabetes and a heart condition. She can’t be in the general population at the women’s units. She’s senile. So she’s here.”

“What is here?” I asked. “It’s not exactly prison-like.”

“We’re kind of a nursing home,” Heather Amis said.

“Why not just release her?”

“She was an accessory to a capital crime and for years the Yarnell family opposed it. Yarnell money has elected a lot of governors and legislatures. Parole boards pay attention.”

“Do they still oppose it?”

“I don’t know, Deputy.” A flush of anger crept into her tan cheeks. “She’s been left to rot in the system for decades. I may be the first person who ever took an interest in her.”

Then she kind of deflated. “Anyway, Miss Richie has nowhere to go. She was an orphan. No family. No friends outside the walls. What would she be released to?”

She shook her head and ran slender brown hands through curling brown hair. “You’re a cop, so you have no reason to cut anybody a break. And most of the people I see in here, I can understand that. But, Jesus, the state of Arizona has taken this woman’s entire life. Can’t you just let her die in peace?”

We sat in silence for a moment. There was nothing to debate. The truth is, cops routinely deal with the marginal, the ignored, the alone, the people who fall through the cracks, as Lindsey says. But Frances Richie was all that in the extreme. Finally, I said as gently as I could, “May I see her?”

“She’s not really responsive,” Heather said. “I’ve been working in the unit for six months, and she’s never said more than five words to me. But, whatever.”

She walked out in a whirl of loose denim and clopping clogs and came back in about ten minutes, backing in the door, pulling a wheelchair.