Cactus Heart - [37]

“That’s right,” I said, mindful of any ironic inflection in either of our voices. We slipped our badges onto our belts and walked through the gate.

The house was long and low, hugging the side of a hill with lots of glass and modern adobe. From one side, the McDowells towered above. From the other, the city fell off through an arroyo, the view going all the way to the Estrellas, which today were cloaked in yellow-brown smog.

I walked through the double doors into the home and Peralta met me.

“What are you doing here?” I asked.

“Just watching your ass,” he said. “Yarnell’s house is in a little piece of county land. So technically, it’s our case, although we’ll cooperate with Scottsdale. I want every constituent served, even the dead ones.”

I followed him into a large room where evidence technicians were taking still and video photographs. The room was sparsely but expensively furnished with the kind of modern pieces you see in decorating articles in the New York Times Magazine. One wall was entirely glass, facing toward the city. The light show must be breathtaking. Then there was an airy chrome and wood desk, and beside that I could see a man’s head on the floor.

I didn’t understand what had happened until I walked carefully to the other side of the desk. Yarnell was on his back and a milky-colored stake was jutting out of the mashed bones and tissue where his breastbone used to be. There wasn’t much blood dirtying up the spotless hardwood floor. His eyes stared up with the peculiar glaze of the dead.

“God,” I said in spite of myself.

“It’s petrified wood,” Peralta said. “Looks like it came from over there.” He indicated a minimalist bookshelf off to the left. “A good Arizona kind of murder.”

“Somebody must have been strong as hell,” I said.

“This thing looks pretty heavy, so all you’d need is gravity,” said an evidence technician named Hernandez. “Especially after you cracked him on the jaw. Look at this.” He knelt and ran a gloved finger over the bottom of Yarnell’s face, which was discolored but not quite bruised. “Somebody hit him good,” Hernandez said. “You’d see a hell of a strawberry if he still had a heart beating.”

“Maybe he was a vampire,” said a uniform and everybody laughed.

“That’s enough,” Peralta said. He caught me by the shoulder and steered me out on the broad stone terrace.

“Tell me why your phone number is on the note pad on the dead man’s desk.”

“He called me last night and said he wanted to talk. He sounded like he’d had a few too many.”

“What did he want to talk about?”

“Beats the hell out of me. I told him I’d call today. Then I thought about it-he hasn’t been cooperative and now he wanted to talk-so I drove out here. No answer at the gate. So I drove home. You were already asleep.”

“This was what time?”

“Maybe ten-thirty.”

“Did he want to talk about the skeletons, or what?”

“He didn’t say. He said he’d only talk in person, not on the phone.”

Peralta shoved his hands into his pants pockets and stared down at the brown cloud enveloping the city.

“He had enough enemies,” he said. “You’ve heard about this new copper mine? He had the environmental whackos on his ass.”

“I don’t get the sense there are very many environmentalists in Arizona, much less whacko…”

“Well, the neighboring property owners aren’t too happy, either. They wanted to develop subdivisions.”

“When I first interviewed him, he said the company had received threats. He had some major-league bodyguards in the office.”

Peralta crooked his mouth down as he mulled it over. “Well, he was all alone out here last night. But he had a state-of-the-art alarm system, and a.38 in his desk drawer. When the housekeeper showed up this morning he was like this.”

“Maybe it’s the Yarnell curse.”

“I only worry about bad luck that shoots back, Mapstone. I want to know what progress you’ve been making on this case.”

“Not much,” I said. “The pocket watch belonged to Hayden Yarnell, according to his son, James. I can’t find any other twins who would have been missing and buried in a basement in downtown Phoenix during that same time. Yarnell’s businesses were having cash problems…”

“That’s not good enough,” he said harshly. I felt a flush spread up my face, angry and embarrassed to be brought up short by him. He went on: “Max Yarnell had a stake driven through his damned chest last night right after he told you he needed to talk to you. Doesn’t that raise your curiosity a bit, professor?”

I looked at the smog. “I’ll get you some answers.”

“I want to know if this homicide had anything to do with what you’re working on. This isn’t just a little Phoenix Police matinee anymore, Mapstone. It’s a real case. Try not to fuck up.”

“I’ll see if I can measure up.” I turned and strode to the door.

“Mapstone,” he called. When I turned, a mischievous grin momentarily played across over his dark features. “Hope you got a good night’s rest.”

I shrugged and walked back into the big room. I wanted out of Max Yarnell’s big house, back into my big bed with Gretchen where all the violence of the world couldn’t reach us. I sidestepped a Scottsdale cop making a diagram and an evidence technician setting up some high-tech contraption. I made my own mental notes. The room was neatly arranged considering the physical violence that had occurred. Whoever attacked Max Yarnell did it with suddenness and precision. He was probably someone Yarnell knew and let into the house. Yarnell was dressed in slacks and golf shirt. I looked around for a glass that might have held his libations, and sure enough one sat on a table by two leather chairs on the other side of the room. A cordless phone sat nearby. The evidence technician was preparing to bag them up.