Free Dry Heat by Jon Talton

contained pages that had been blacked out, “redacted” in the legal language.
    Then I braced myself for a confrontation with Kate Vare and went to Phoenix PD records. Kate was not in her cubicle in the Criminal Investigation Division, so my day got better. The PD records clerk was cooperative and friendly, and my rucksack of records grew.
    Back at my office, armed with a Starbucks mocha, I began to read and make notes. By the end of the day, here were some of the things I knew:
    John Pilgrim was thirty-eight years old. He had been an FBI agent for twelve years. He hadn’t served in the war. A photo of him showed a rather round-faced man with thin lips and dark hair. An earnest, serious face. A delicate long nose. I posted the photo on the bulletin board. Pilgrim had been born in Lexington, Kentucky, and had a law degree from the University of Kentucky. He would have been one of the new breed of professional, degreed agents around which J. Edgar Hoover built the FBI somewhere in the 1930s. Pilgrim was posted to Phoenix in the spring of 1947.
    Pilgrim was found floating in an irrigation canal in the late afternoon of Nov. 10, 1948. A farm worker there to let water into some lettuce fields found the body. I posted a city map on the bulletin board and marked where the body was found: near the present-day intersection of Fifty-first Avenue and Thomas. It was half a mile from where the homeless man would fall into the pool half a century later. What the hell did that mean? The landscape had changed from farms to suburbia to the new melting pot. I made a note to find a map of the old canal system.
    I read the narrative of the lead county detective, typed on flimsy paper with a cockeyed “T” key. Pilgrim’s body was wearing a suit and tie. He artfully declined to mention the badge, or the gun, for that matter. The condition of the body made the investigators believe it had floated quite a distance. Pilgrim was last seen alive two days before, November 8, by his partner, Agent Renzetti. Pilgrim told Renzetti he was going to work late that night, running down a lead. The report didn’t mention the nature of the lead.
    I paged through the detective’s notebooks, handwriting in blue ink, and set them aside for later. The dust from the old files made me sneeze.
    The coroner’s report, a Photostat with white type blaring out of black background, said Pilgrim had one gunshot wound to the heart. He was dead when his body went into the water. The bullet was a .38 caliber. This report was heavily censored, whole paragraphs wiped out like a landscape in a snowstorm. But they hadn’t removed the last page. I held it in my fingers for at least a full minute. I can’t tell you if I was breathing or not. For at the bottom of the coroner’s report was the signature, Philip Mapstone.
    My grandfather.
    My grandfather had been a dentist, and he had died in 1977. And as to what his signature was doing on a line that said “coroner,” I had not a clue. When I talked to Peralta on Tuesday, he said it probably didn’t mean anything. The old coroner system, which predated the science and professionalism of medical examiners, was very informal, and a coroner’s jury might be led by a lawyer, an ordinary citizen, a medical doctor, even a dentist. Whatever the reason, the Pilgrim case suddenly grew personal. I didn’t like it.
    On Tuesday I received a gift. The medical examiner’s office reported that the homeless man had died of apparently natural causes. Kate Vare sent me a suspiciously friendly e-mail that morning, saying she was taking herself off the case. I wasn’t sure she could just do that. She was a cold case expert and this was not just cold but freezing. But I wasn’t going to argue. She was needed on the case of the missing teenage girl. The abduction had several disturbing similarities to cases in the 1980s, and Kate said she would be working on analyzing those links. In the ’80s, two girls in their young teens were taken