High Country Nocturne - [43]

Two weeks later the toxicology findings came in and the detective stopped his efforts to find out about Tom Frazier and why he had left his car and walked into the wilderness with no water.

I read the three-page tox report, marveling at how primitive it was compared with today. But it was modern enough make the cause of death definitive: a heroin overdose.

The case was closed as a probable suicide.

The theory was that Frazier was despondent over his mother’s death and decided to push himself over the edge with too much H.

This was the conclusion of the eighty-seven pages of documents before me. The case was listed as cleared but much about it didn’t make sense to me. I wanted to think that even the young me would have known it, had I circled back around to follow up.

For one thing, why didn’t Frazier simply stay in the car and die? Also, given the amount of the drug in his system, it was amazing he walked as far as he did.

The reports contained no evidence that Frazier was a drug abuser. His body was decomposing and had been snacked on by coyotes, but the medical examiner found no evidence of multiple needle holes. He wasn’t an addict. His colleagues said he didn’t even smoke pot.

So maybe he chose to use heroin once as his ticket out.

Maybe. But where was his paraphernalia? When I had searched the car, I had found nothing. Addicts, especially with decent-paying jobs, had shooting kits nearby, all the time.

The detective surmised that Frazier must have sat down and shot up once he was out in the desert. But no needle, cooking spoon, lighter, or tourniquet was found.

By the time all the official cars have arrived and deputies had tramped through the area surrounding where the body and car had been found, it was impossible to even know for certain if Frazier had really been alone.

I was as much to blame as anyone. I didn’t suspect a homicide. I only saw another example of a fool walking into the desert in the summertime.

The desert makes people do strange things. But this was a suspicious death not a suicide. Tom Frazier had no one fighting on his behalf to find out what really happened out there, not even the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office.

Did he have enemies? Why would he spend money for a tank of gas if he intended suicide? Who else saw him on his day off? What was his demeanor in the days before his death? How did he spend his days off?

The biggest problem was that his wallet was missing. For the second time, I went through the inventory of items found. The wallet was neither on him, in the car, nor in the desert between the vehicle and the body.

This was long before the immense migration of illegal immigrants headed el norte through the desert, many dying there. The land was astoundingly empty by today’s standards. Someone wouldn’t have happened upon the corpse and stolen the wallet.

In addition, a skirmish line of academy students had swept the terrain searching for anything, finding nothing.

His car tag and dental records had identified the corpse.

He was buried in the Green Acres cemetery in Scottsdale, the arrangements paid for by an unidentified family friend.

I opened my MacBook Air and wrote up my assessment. To: Sheriff Melton. From: Deputy David Mapstone. It was like the old days, only the wrong man was sheriff. I blind copied Kate Vare. It also wasn’t my “history thing,” as Peralta called it.

The history thing. It had set me apart from an ordinary cold-case detective, using a historian’s techniques to dig deep into the case and its times.

Now I wasn’t so sure. I had been in law enforcement longer now than I had been teaching. It felt so strange, so wrong. When I was twenty, I meant my time at the Sheriff’s Office to be a youthful adventure, a stint of public service, something I could tell my grandchildren about. Now, here I was, still, and there would be no grandchildren to tell.

In any event, Melton didn’t deserve the history thing.

I would email the report to him, fulfilling the county’s paperless ambitions. Then I would FedEx a resignation letter with my star and identification card.

Doctors swept into the waiting room. One was a tall man about my age, the trauma surgeon. He looked and acted like a fighter pilot. The second was an Asian woman, introduced as the “hospitalist.” I had no idea what that meant. It was only a little past six a.m.

Again, I should have taken notes, but I was too distracted by the presence of the docs and my hopes and fears.

The surgeon was pleased Lindsey had made it through the first twenty-four hours.

“That’s crucial for controlling shock and stabilizing cardiovascular and neural functions…”

She showed good brain activity. She wasn’t paralyzed.

But we weren’t past the crisis, he said-that would last through the first seventy-two hours “at least.”

They talked about reversing the shock and dealing with any extra fluid swelling that occurs with trauma.

The doctors wouldn’t make any predictions. I didn’t ask.

“We continue to hold out hope,” the woman said.

I realized that was meant to be honest yet comforting but it almost pushed me off the edge of a very tall cliff. I nodded.