Desert Lost - Chapter 1
Stake-outs are boring, which is why I tend to avoid them. But there I was at midnight, lurking in an RV parked in a friend’s south Scottsdale storage yard, waiting for taggers to swarm over the wall and spray paint nasty things about snowbirds on the sides of mothballed Winnebagos. At least, thanks to the RV’s in-service potty, I wasn’t wearing diapers.
The rest of Scottsdale liked to pretend this area of town didn’t exit. Instead of the trendy condos and palatial homes further north, the neighborhood consisted of a series of heavy equipment storage yards semi-protected by cyclone fencing topped with loops of razor wire. No one lived here. No one wanted to.
I had been sitting in the RV for six hours, drinking coffee to keep me warm, killing time with stomach crunches and push-ups. I was just congratulating myself that the storm which had blown through Phoenix earlier in the evening had skipped Scottsdale altogether when a car pulled up near the fence. Grunts and shoe-shuffling floated towards me on the crisp March air. The taggers, out for another night of ageist vandalism? Grateful that my boring vigil was about to end, I grabbed my Mag-Lite and camera, and tiptoed to the half-open door.
Although security lights bathed much of the storage yard in weak green florescence, pockets of black dotted the gaps between the RVs. To add to my sightline problems, the cyclone fencing around the yard was ringed by a thick row of eight-foot-high oleander bushes, the standard Arizona remedy for ugly.
So I waited.
More grunts, more shoe shuffling. Then a thud, followed by quick steps and a car door closing. A few seconds later, the car rolled away as silently as it had arrived.
Not taggers.
Curious, I stepped out of the RV and approached the fence. Doves, awakened by the bustle, cooed briefly, then went back to sleep. A soft wind scraped oleander leaves together. Florescent lights hummed. The only other sounds came from cars rushing along the freeway and the lonely yip of a coyote on the nearby Salt River Pima/Maricopa Indian reservation
With the keys the yard’s owner had loaned me, I unlocked the front gate and peered out. As my eyes became accustomed to the shadows, I saw something wedged between the gap in the oleander hedge fronting a boat storage yard across the street. A wee hours garbage drop from a nearby business whose Dumpster was already full? Such bad-neighbor practices were not uncommon in this area of the city, but experience had shown me that objects other than garbage were sometimes dumped, too.
Conscious of the sounds of my own footsteps, I crossed the street for a better look. At first the bundle appeared to be little more than thick wrappings of cloth holding together a red-splotched tarp, but when I switched on my Mag-Lite, I saw the terrible reality.
A woman. She looked dead.
The faraway coyote howled again. Another answered. When I drew in my breath, the doves rustled once more, then flew away.
The breeze on my face felt like cold fingers.
No. It couldn’t be. Not here.
I fought back the surge of sorrow that threatened to render me useless and knelt down to check for a pulse. My initial impression had been correct. Although the woman’s skin was still warm, her carotid artery didn’t pulse, and her glazed blue eyes stared sightlessly into the merciless night. The wounds on the left side of her head had leaked onto her single braid. More blood had spread onto her calico dress, a garment so long it covered everything except her hands and feet.
As I gazed into those dead eyes, I realized that she looked vaguely familiar.
I didn’t know her, but I’d seen her on a hundred other faces, pale Nordic features made almost identical by generations of incest. The prairie-type dress, designed to hide a woman’s shameful body from lustful eyes, sealed the deal.
Not possible. Not in Scottsdale.
But the truth lay before me, cooling in the night.
The dead woman was a polygamist.