Free Dry Heat by Jon Talton Page A

from their parents’ houses in well-to-do north Phoenix neighborhoods. They were raped and murdered, and the cases were never solved. Now another girl was missing. The media were going berserk. I overcame my mistrust of Kate’s sharp features, and wished her well.
    The homeless man had died of natural causes and then some. Although he suffered a massive heart attack before falling into the pool, he was also dying of lung cancer, congestive heart failure, and untreated diabetes. The medical examiner speculated the man had “coded out” on the edge of the pool and tumbled in headfirst. It wasn’t a homicide. It was just very damned strange. And whether he was murdered or not, my case was still alive because of the FBI badge sewn into his jacket. When I briefed Peralta and Eric Pham, they agreed I should continue on the case alone. I reminded Pham that the bureau still owed me access to the Pilgrim records, and he said he’d make another call to his bosses to get me clearance.
    For now, the Pilgrim case was mine.

Chapter Nine
    That evening, I walked on a sidewalk laid down in 1948. I had walked on it a hundred times, going from my office in the old court-house to the county lot where I parked. But this time I noticed the date chiseled into the concrete block I wondered if Special Agent John Pilgrim had walked this sidewalk when it was new. I thought about the world of John Pilgrim in Phoenix in 1948. Men wore suits, ties, and hats, even when not at work. Women were rare in offices and factories, even though the war had added to their numbers. The diversity we take for granted in any American city and town in the early twenty-first century was not found in Pilgrim’s Phoenix. It was an overwhelmingly Anglo place, with the blacks and Mexicans “kept in their place.” Society was similarly fixed, men worked, women raised children, everyone married, and roles were clear. Authority still meant something, ruling with a combination of respect and fear. For entertainment, people went to movies and listened to radio; only a few well-off families could afford the new televisions. A middle-class family owned one car, not three or four. But the mode of travel preferred by most Americans was still the train, with the new streamliners promising more luxury than ever. And Phoenix—it was little more than a big town, instead of America’s fifth largest city. John Pilgrim’s world, America a mere half century ago, seemed more foreign than some distant historical epoch.
    Those were the musings that took me to the parking lot, to the back of the Oldsmobile.
    I sensed movement behind me. Even though I had been carrying the Colt Python in a nylon holster on my belt, I felt nauseatingly vulnerable. I’m sure I visibly jumped.
    “I’m not going to hurt you, mister.”
    “I know,” I said, pride quickly replacing terror. The Russian mafia had not fallen on such hard times that they had sent a bag lady to kill the husband of their nemesis, the brilliant Lindsey Faith Mapstone.
    The woman must have been concealed by some of the vans and SUVs nearby. I leaned against the car door and took her in: straight, dirty blond hair; broad, sunburned face; a stocky, medium-height body Throw her in a shower, dress her differently, and put her in a minivan in Chandler, and she might be mistaken for a soccer mom. If you didn’t look too closely. Someone had knocked one of her teeth out. Her tan was raw and uneven. The collar of her T-shirt was filthy.
    I don’t have any money,” I said, and started to get in the car.
    “I don’t go hitting up cops,” she said. But she didn’t move on. She just stood there, watching me.
    She said, “You were looking for
Weed.
”
    I stopped, gently reclosed the door, and faced her.
    “They said at the shelter you were looking for Weed,” the woman said. “Two cops, a woman and a man. They said the man was tall and looked like a schoolteacher, and he drove this big yellow Olds 442.”
    David Mapstone, the