Valley of Shadows Read online

  More Praise for the

  Gus Parker & Alex Mills series

  “With Valley of Shadows, Steven Cooper has pulled off a neat trick. He’s written a tightly-plotted police procedural that somehow manages to subvert genre expectations and offer something brand new. Think you know what to expect from a detective teaming up with a psychic? Better think again. Long live Detective Alex Mills and his reluctant psychic sidekick, Gus Parker.”

  Hank Early, award winning author of Heaven’s Crooked Finger

  “Beneath the endless money, the gorgeous mountain homes, and the perfectly-ordered lives of Phoenix high society lies a seething, malignant obsession with power and wealth that feeds on the ambitions and insecurities of the members of a cultish religion. In Valley of Shadows, Steven Cooper thrusts Alex Mills and Gus Parker into the middle of their most hair-raising investigation yet.”

  Roger Johns, award-winning author of the Wallace Hartman Mysteries

  “Along with the authentic police procedural detail, Cooper provides quirky and vivid characters, smart and snarky social observations, and challenging but fulfilling personal relationships. This is first-rate entertainment.”

  Publishers Weekly Starred Review

  “Cooper continues to blend solid investigative work, psychological insight, and personal touches to create a broadly appealing series....”

  Kirkus Reviews

  “A harrowing, riveting, addictive page-turner, author Steven Cooper outdoes himself with Dig Your Grave. I can hardly wait for the next entry in the series! Highly recommended!”

  Eric Peterson, The Internet Review of Books

  “Cooper follows Desert Remains with an intricately plotted police procedural perfect for readers of P.J. Tracy’s Monkeewrench novels. The strong sense of place and teamwork further complement this compelling, intense story.”

  Library Journal

  VALLEY OF SHADOWS

  ALSO BY STEVEN COOPER

  Desert Remains

  Dig Your Grave

  A GUS PARKER AND ALEX MILLS NOVEL

  VALLEY OF SHADOWS

  STEVEN COOPER

  Published 2019 by Seventh Street Books®

  Valley of Shadows. Copyright © 2019 by Steven Cooper. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, digital, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or conveyed via the Internet or a website without prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  This is a work of fiction. Characters, organizations, products, locales, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously.

  Cover image © Shutterstock

  Cover design by Jennifer Do

  Cover design © Start Science Fiction

  Inquiries should be addressed to

  Start Science Fiction

  101 Hudson Street, 37th Floor, Suite 3705

  Jersey City, New Jersey 07302

  PHONE: 212-620-5700

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  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  ISBN 978-1-64506-000-0 (paperback) | ISBN 978-1-64506-006-2 (ebook)

  Printed in the United States of America

  To

  Paul Milliken and Nancy Sciore

  24/7

  1

  It’s hot as fuck. But this is Arizona, so it’s a dry fuck.

  Even still. At 114 degrees, it’s an oven.

  Homicide Detective Alex Mills is on his hands and knees in the backyard of Viveca Canning’s ample home. While Mills conducts his search under a blazing sky, Ms. Canning remains coolly inside her air-conditioned house waiting for the Office of the Medical Examiner to arrive. Relatively speaking, there’s no hurry. Ms. Canning is dead. Shot twice in the head, it would seem, and cold, indeed. The crime scene specialists have spread throughout the house searching for evidence while scene investigator Jan Powell supervises. Out here, in the yard, Mills and one of the specialists scour for footprints in the gravel; they should be easy to spot, but they’re not. Someone had kicked enough gravel around, apparently on purpose, to almost certainly render footprints useless. But fuck, it’s hot. This is what happens during a Phoenix summer: every five to seven minutes you remind yourself how fucking hot it is.

  And, yes, you sweat, despite the dry heat. A Colorado River of perspiration meanders from Mills’s neck to the small of his back, threatening the Continental Divide of his ass. He’s in the backyard here with the tech because it was obvious upon eyeballing the inside of the house that the perpetrator had entered through the rear by kicking in a glass door between the dining room and the swimming pool. The backyard is a resort, which is common if you live in the Valley of the Sun and you have money. The pool is one of those lazy, shapeless ones, surrounded by boulders and succulents, with a gushing waterfall at one end and a swim-up bar at another. Mills would like to tumble in now, sink to the bottom of the pool; it’s tempting but he wipes his brow and shakes his head. There’s a tennis court. And a small putting green. He gets up, his hands and knees chewed up a bit by the stones of desert landscaping. Immediately he hears a distant fluttering in the wind. A coming percussion. Then a roar. He looks to the sky, fully knowing what approaches. There they are, the metal vultures of the media, swooping in, sniffing around for the carrion. But he’s done. The news choppers won’t see anything out here except the immaculate indulgences of yet another wealthy Phoenician.

  He leaves his colleague behind to do her measurements of all things measureable, and there’s a shitload to measure; most people don’t realize how meticulously a crime scene is recreated on paper. He heads back inside, runs into Detective Morton Myers in the doorway. Mills, who was assigned by the sergeant to be case agent, has asked Myers to be the notetaker. Myers is good with notes.

  “Preston checked the garage for a car,” Myers tells him. Ken Preston is probably the oldest, wisest detective at the crime scene. “It’s empty.”

  “OK,” Mills says. “Any indication that others lived here?”

  “I found a stack of bills. All addressed to the victim. Nothing indicating a marriage. Preston is talking to neighbors now.”

  “Good.”

  “Mind if I go out back?”

  “Go where you need to.”

  Mills brushes past him and finds Detective Jan Powell in what poses as a library. Mills considers it posing because people don’t read enough anymore to require a personal library; they just want to look like they do, and rich people just want to show that their houses are big enough to accommodate a mahogany room exclusively for books. Phoenix, Scottsdale, and Paradise Valley have become, in recent years, magnets for the pretentious bullshitters who get more for their conspicuous wealth here than they can in LA. Plus the air quality is better, but not by much. He lingers here in the library because he still loves a good book. For some reason, probably back to that English Lit major he dated in college, he knows no better Zen than reading. He reads every night in bed. Can’t get to sleep without escaping first between the pages of literature. He prefers the classics, but he’s started reading contemporary novels too. He likens a good book to a grand detour, as if he’s driving down an everyday, unremarkable highway and suddenly veers left onto a road that doesn’t exist on a map. That sharp left turn takes him into another world, gets him out of his. Kelly, his insanely perfect wife, sometimes calls him a nerd. He finds that charming. There’s a great-looking edition of Don Quixote on a lower shelf of Viveca Canning’s home library. Mills is tempted to remove it and sift. Instead, he turns to Powell and says, “Nothing in here.”

  “It’s about the only room on this side of
the house that wasn’t touched.”

  And she’s right. He returns to the victim. Ms. Canning, in a silk dress, the clinging kind that Kelly would call a “cocktail dress,” lies sprawled on the floor in the next room, a formal room with a fireplace and area rugs, marble tables, and leather upholstery. He drifts in there with Powell at his heels. He studies the room again. There’s a wall of floor to ceiling shelves and cabinets. The cabinets are open and the contents—CDs, records, DVDs—are tossed everywhere on the floor. He turns to the adjacent bedroom where drawers of Viveca Canning’s life clutter the floor, extracted like teeth from the bureaus. Closet doors stand agape, revealing a tumble of jewelry and a landslide of gowns that speak volumes in the silence.

  “We have a lot to go through,” Powell tells him in a reverent whisper.

  “Yeah.”

  “The other bedroom across the hall looks the same,” she says.

  “I saw.”

  They return to the living room where Viveca Canning rests. Mills really wishes he could channel his good friend Gus Parker right about now; the psychic would have a fucking field day here at the crime scene. But Gus is out of town. He’s out of town a lot these days, costarring, as he is, in the life of rock ’n’ roll star Billie Welch, who lives in LA and tours the world. Today, however, the psychic is burying his father in Seattle. Mills thinks he has the day right, can’t quite remember. But in Gus’s absence Mills is left wishing he had some of the man’s psychic gifts, which he doesn’t and never will, but he does have good instincts, he tells himself, as he stares at the entry wounds in Viveca Canning’s head. He rethinks the shattered glass, the back door, the sign of forced entry. He doesn’t think she was robbed, despite the material carnage.

  Too many jewels were left behind. He had noticed pearls on the floor of the bedroom. He had eyed a diamond watch perched on a nightstand. Mills inventories the walls of fine art. Nothing taken, with one exception. One space on the wall is empty; a lone nail and a perfect square, a shade darker than the faded surrounding walls, perfectly mark the site where one painting evacuated. But everything else is intact, and these aren’t prints, to the best of Mills’s estimation. He reads the signatures: Lichtenstein; Pollock; Chagall. Mills doesn’t know much about art, but the collection seems eclectic and original. This is not a woman who peddled in replicas.

  “Here’s what I’m thinking,” he tells Powell, backing away from the techs, “this was made to look like a general robbery, but the missing painting tells me whoever did this came for one item and one item alone.” “And killed our victim to get it?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “It must be worth a lot of money,” Powell says.

  “The diamonds and the pearls are worth a lot of money,” Mills reminds her. “And they weren’t taken.”

  “I noticed an emerald too,” she whispers. “And I’m almost sure the brooch on the bathroom floor is ruby.”

  “Right. So the painting, I’m guessing, is worth more than money to someone.”

  Powell nods. Mills goes back to the body, sinks to his knees. The blood from the victim’s head is barely a tributary. A tech, Roni Gates, hands him a fresh pair of gloves. “We found the shell casings,” she says.

  “Well, it’s obvious she’s been shot twice.”

  “At close range,” Roni says. “Probably within two feet away. I’ve noted the compact stippling around the entry wounds.”

  “Exit wounds?”

  Roni nods and says she’s just recovered a spent bullet, then points to an exit wound behind the victim’s ear. “It’s consistent, I think, with the bruising under her eye. The bullet apparently exited and hit the wall. It’s got significant deformation.”

  “So, we’re assuming the other bullet is lodged somewhere inside her squash here,” Mills speculates.

  “Correct,” Roni says. Then she looks at him with a beaming smile. That’s her trademark. He can never be certain whom he’ll run into at a crime scene, but when it’s Roni Gates he’s always greeted with a radiance, as if she has unearthed the secret to happiness in an unhappy world. She is, after all, kneeling over the body of a homicide victim. And smiling.

  There’s no weapon in sight. Clearly not a suicide. And again, that empty square on the wall. He looks at it once more, trying to peer through it, as if the answer is just beyond the drywall. He shakes his head.

  “We’ll know more after the ME x-rays for the other bullet,” Roni says.

  “Yeah. Assuming the bullet didn’t fall apart in her skull.”

  “You guys didn’t find a weapon anywhere? Out back? Other part of the house?” she asks. “It’s a big place.”

  “We’ve been through it as best as we can on plain sight. There are a few locked cabinets and drawers we’re going to have to break open once we get a judge to sign off,” he tells her, “but I suspect our perp came here with a gun and left with a gun.”

  Roni Gates nods and, again, smiles. In that moment, as Mills hovers over the body of Viveca Canning, with her exquisite coif of silver hair, her bluish face, and a bullet nesting in her brain, Mills can honestly say, as long as Roni is smiling, the world still bends toward the light.

  2

  The priest’s words fall absently. They don’t resonate with him at all. Gus is not a churchgoer. To many at the church service, Gus is the antichurch. The anti-Christ to some, of course, what with their hostility toward him, their ignorance about his gift. This is what he contends with in Seattle: the curious stares, the outright scorn, the indignation that he’d have the gall to return even now. They don’t care that he’s burying his father. He’s a heathen! A fortuneteller! A soothsayer! Mrs. McConnell over there has a UTI; it’s just a sudden vibe he gets. His vibes always got him in trouble as a child. That’s why his parents banished his blasphemous soul from Seattle. Together his parents, Meg and Warren Parker, equaled one Piper Laurie.

  He rides to the cemetery with his sister, Nicole, and her lawyer-turned-preacher husband, an irritable man named Mack (short for Mackleroy).

  “See, church isn’t so bad,” Nicole says, a placid smile resting on her pale white face. She could be Amish, but she’s not. A sister wife, but she doesn’t share. A cover model for Preacher’s Wife Monthly, but she has a lazy eye.

  “But it’s not so good either,” Gus tells her.

  Mackelroy clears his throat.

  “I’m sorry, Mack. Didn’t mean to offend. But I have a problem with a family using religion to disown a child.”

  “You weren’t exactly disowned,” Nicole scoffs.

  “Mom and Dad threw me out of the house because they thought my visions were the work of the devil. What would you call it?”

  “They loved the sinner, hated the sin,” Mack says.

  “Oh please. Who’s to say that a little psychic hobby is a sin?” “Hobby!” Mack says with a snort. “You make it sound so innocent.”

  “It is. And it wasn’t a choice. You don’t choose to be psychic. In fact, I never refer to myself as psychic. You know that, Nicole. I’m too neurotic to trust most of my visions. The ones that come true always rattle me.”

  “Whatever,” his sister says.

  “You don’t seem too sad that Dad is gone.”

  She turns to him. “Of course I am.”

  “You’ve been smiling all morning.”

  “It’s my faith,” she says. Her preacher husband puts his arm around her. “You’re the one who doesn’t seem so sad.”

  “I’m not happy. But for the past twenty-five years or so, he’s been mostly a stranger to me. So I don’t really feel much at all.”

  “You’re so cold,” she tells him. Then the limo driver swings open her door and guides her out.

  As they walk toward the gravesite, Mrs. McConnell approaches and tugs at Gus’s arm. “Gus? A word?” She has a throaty, growling voice, the kind that crawls out of a pack of cigarettes. “You mind?” “Uh, no. I guess. Don’t want to hold up the service, but okay . . .” They step aside, stopping by the grave of Lil
lian Hemingway (1921-1998, Beloved Wife and Mother). “I can’t say I’m speaking for all of your parents’ friends, Gus, but I suspect I am when I say it’s shocking to see you here.”

  “Shocking?”

  “You know how protective your parents were of the church.”

  “Yes. Something like that.”

  “And yet here you are defiling it again in your father’s name.”

  He looks at her vacantly. He guesses she’s in her early seventies, the same generation as his parents. She has a scrimshaw of smokers’ wrinkles around her mouth but nowhere else. For a woman of her age, she has remarkable posture. There she is standing tall and indignant in her black pillbox hat and veil.

  “I’m here out of respect for my father,” he tells her. “What happened between him and me is a private matter.”

  First she rolls her head to register her outrage. Then she says, “Are you telling me to mind my own business?”

  He nods. “Pretty much. And I mean no offense.”

  “Your being here is an offense, Gus Parker.”

  He locks eyes on hers. He bores into her. “If you’re so concerned about defiling the church, Mrs. McConnell, perhaps you should reconsider being here yourself.”

  “How dare you?”

  He speaks slowly, quietly. “Does Mr. McConnell know that you have been engaging alternately in vaginal and anal intercourse with the retired professor who lives at the end of your cul de sac?”

  “What?” she shrieks.

  “Your UTI, Mrs. McConnell. It’s speaking to me.”

  She nearly trips as she turns on her heels and makes a mad dash. Gus can hear her screaming, “Heathen, Soothsayer, Fortuneteller, Anti-Christ,” her hands wringing the air, all the way to Warren Parker’s gravesite.

  That’s pretty much how the funeral went. He had no reason to stay in Seattle afterward, not even to visit Georgetown or the International District, the only neighborhoods where he fits in, so he’s off to SEATAC for his flight to Los Angeles. He won’t stay long; it’s just a drop-in on his crazy relationship with Billie Welch (knowing the ugliness he’d be greeted with in Seattle, he begged her not to come to the funeral). His rock ’n’ roll girlfriend finished touring after almost a year (they rendezvoused in Miami, Cleveland, New Orleans, London, and Paris, and took a few weeks last summer to vacation in Italy), and now they’re returning to their completely abnormal normal life. He lives in Phoenix. She lives in LA. They commute back and forth. Her music is waiting for her in California. His clients are waiting for him in Arizona. And his job. He still works as a tech at Valley Imaging. Whether with a client for a psychic consultation or with a patient for an MRI, he really does like seeing stuff no one else sees. Unless the images disturb him. Which they often do these days.