High Country Nocturne - [63]

Downtown, I parked the Prelude in the CityScape garage and crossed to the courthouse, showing my identification and being let past the metal detector as if I really worked there.

Beside the door to my office, the county had placed a new placard:

DAVID MAPSTONE

Sheriff’s Office Historian

It was much like the one that sat on the wall outside my old office, including the MCSO star emblem. Below was added: Christopher J. Melton, Sheriff. Even Peralta hadn’t thought of that granular bit of self-promotion. Seeing the thing made me queasy.

For ten minutes, I admired the restoration-high ceiling, art deco light fixtures, dark wood moldings, frosted glass panel of the door. Someone had hung a large photo from the 1950s showing citrus groves spreading out below Camelback Mountain, not a house in sight. Behind my desk was a photo of Chris Melton in his black uniform, furled American flag in the background, Hollywood smile.

Then when there was a tap, like a doctor about to come in the exam room, and Melton stepped in.

“You didn’t have to dress up,” he said.

“I like to.”

Melton was dressed up in black BDUs-battle dress uniform-with baggy cargo pants, combat boots, and ballistic vest. Cops playing soldiers. I thought about Peralta’s rising concern about the militarization of law enforcement, and that was even before the Department of Defense started showering even the smallest police forces with gear.

“I was tagging along with SWAT.” He pulled up a chair.

“Everybody safe?”

“Sure. We were serving a warrant.”

I remembered serving warrants alone, but said nothing.

“Turned out there were no weapons,” he said. “But we got fifty dollars’ worth of marijuana.”

I wondered how much it had cost the taxpayers to mobilize the SWAT team for a petty drug raid. He went through the motions, asking about Lindsey, and I went through the motions, telling him the basics. He wanted to know if I liked the “historic photo” and I told him that I did.

“You did an outstanding job digging into that case.” He slid a UBS flash drive across the desk. It was black, like his uniform.

“What’s this?”

“Paperless office, remember? The new county policy. So this,” he tapped it, “is the murder book for your case.”

“Wait a minute, Sheriff…”

He smiled and switched his index finger at me.

I tried again. “Wait a minute, Chris. You have a homicide unit this should go to if you think Frazier’s death was suspicious. I’m not a homicide investigator.”

“You sell yourself short, David. How many murders did you solve for Mike Peralta? Fifty?”

“Sixty-two.”

“There you go.”

I felt as if I had rubbed against poison ivy but the itch was deeper than my skin. I wanted him out of this office. I wanted out of this office.

He pulled a clear plastic bag out of one of his commodious pants pockets and placed it beside the data stick. It said EVIDENCE in red. Inside there appeared to be a wallet.

“Check it out,” he said.

I held up my hands. “No gloves.”

He fished a pair out of his pants. Of course he had some. He probably had a complete crime-scene kit in those cargo-pants pockets. I reluctantly slid them on and opened the evidence envelope.

The wallet was blue nylon with a Velcro seam. It was dated only by its design and materials. Otherwise, it was in surprisingly good shape for being so old. I already knew what it held before I pulled it open and saw Tom Frazier’s driver’s license. He had dark hair and the card said he was six feet, two inches, two hundred pounds, brown eyes.

“He’s not so different from your build,” Melton said. “About the same age. He had lost his mother, his last family member. You only had your grandmother at that age.”

He had done his homework on me. I didn’t like that.

I made a quick inventory of the other contents: an emergency medical technician card issued by the state, an Associated Ambulance employee identification, thirty-two dollars in currency signed by Donald Regan. No credit cards, but hardly anyone that age back then would have qualified for one. No photos.

Other things seemed missing, too: dirt or sand from the desert, and faded material from being out in the sun.

I said, “Where did you get this?”

“Are you interested in the case?”

“Mildly.”

He leaned forward. “Enough to have a conversation with the person who found the wallet?”

“I’m a historian,” I said. “That’s the way I approach cases. It seems like you need a real homicide detective who works cold cases.” I mentioned a couple of names.

“So what’s the difference between a historian and a detective?”

I had been asked this so many times, thought about it when Peralta first brought me aboard, that I should have had a neat elevator speech. But I didn’t.

Good detectives and historians had much in common. They wanted to find the “how” as well as the “why.” Both gave heavy weight to primary sources-whether witness interviews documents, diaries, and other reminiscences of the people actually involved in the event-as opposed to secondary sources such as newspaper accounts. Both were mindful of bias.

There were important differences, too. A good historian wanted to understand causality and complex underlying social and economic forces and pivotal personalities, not merely assemble evidence. He or she was open to new interpretations as fresh scholarship emerged, formerly secret archives were opened and key players who had kept silent decided to talk.