Valley of Shadows Read online

  Having to say you’re huge in philanthropy, Mills suspects, suggests the philanthropy is not completely about the philanthropy. He keeps that assessment to himself. But if there is such a thing as nouveau riche philanthropy (giving simply to show how much cash you have to give), this must be it. “So she had no enemies, no rivals, nobody who had ill will toward her?”

  “Of course not,” Bennett says with a spit. “She’s practically a saint.”

  “Practically a saint,” Preston repeats. “But even saints have enemies.”

  Again, a wrenching wail from the kid. Then, “Obviously it was a break-in or a robbery, or something. I mean, if you’re looking for a motive, someone probably thought they could break in here, steal a fortune, and get away.”

  Mills nods. “Of course we’re considering that.” Now he folds his arms across his chest. “But I’m not sure how somebody would get past the guardhouse.”

  “Good point,” Bennett says. “Unless it was an inside job.”

  “A neighbor?” Preston asks.

  “Worth considering.”

  “For sure,” Mills says. “Everyone’s a suspect.” He hands Bennett Canning his card, but asks the guy to stick around. “We’ll have more questions for you.”

  The kid nods, then lowers his head as he drifts toward his automobile and slips into the lap of Mercedes luxury. Mills tells the gum-chewing officer to keep an eye on the dead woman’s son, to not let him leave.

  4

  CalAir Flight 1212 dips into Sky Harbor and chews up the waiting runway as the plane grinds to a stop. All of a sudden, inertia. Earth, not sea. Air, not water. Alive, not entombed at the bottom of the ocean. Still, his stomach is in knots. The vision of Transcontinental Airlines going down was one of the most vivid in recent memory. One of the most disturbing. The first vision ever that foresaw massive death. He’ll need to talk to Beatrice about this. The vision is too big for one psychic.

  “Hope you had a nice flight,” the attendant says as Gus files toward the exit. “Buh-bye now.”

  They still say “Buh-bye.”

  Later, at home, Gus drops his luggage in the front hall and makes a mad dash for his office, where he powers up his computer and tries to recall every single detail of that doomed flight. He creates a file called “Transcontinental” and it looks something like this:

  TRANSCONTINENTAL

  (unknown flight number)

  Possible departure point: LAX

  Possible destination: Australia, New Zealand, Fiji

  Wide body. Twin aisle. Upstairs 2x2x2. Downstairs 3x4x3. 450 passengers. New plane. Fresh scent. Chemicals. Floral. Sweet. Blue sky. A white mattress of clouds. A mostly white interior. Nose up. Soaring. Seats of sky blue fabric, abstract lime green stitching. TRANSCONTINENTAL. Bright. Promising. Smiling cabin attendants, accents from somewhere in Oceania. Adventure, luxury, the beauty, the beauty, the beauty, all of it palpable. Dinner simmers in a nearby galley. Carts jostling, rolling, braking. White gloves, linen cloths. More smiles. A flutter of turbulence. A rolling tremor. A tug-of-war from wing to wing. The plane, with a burst, escapes the bad air and steadies at a higher altitude. The relief is short-lasting. The turbulence has followed, stalking TRANSCONTINENTAL and tugging it by the tail. People gripping the armrests. The bounce of heads. The turning of faces. Alarmed. Then everything pushes forward, like a rear collision, like a tremendous weight and people scream. Attendants tumble in the aisles. Overhead bins burst open. Oxygen masks drop. Dangling masks. A constant scream, a constant wailing. Attendants cry, “Brace, Brace, Brace.” Nose down. Nose down and spinning. A spiral of seats and heads and meticulously arranged oval windows. There are no shades, just wide-eyed witnesses and imminent death.

  “What the fuck? If I do say so myself,” says Beatrice Vossenheimer after lunch, reclining on her brocade fainting couch in the living room of her Paradise Valley home, she and Gus in a cube of glass that takes in a view of Camelback Mountain and the spread of the valley beyond it. She’s been dog sitting for Ivy, Gus’s devoted golden retriever.

  “I know! Crazy. I have no clue,” Gus confesses. He’s lying on the floor with Ivy on top of him, all sixty pounds of her.

  “We can work on this,” Beatrice assures him. “Don’t worry.”

  He shakes his head. “Yeah, but this isn’t going to resolve overnight no matter how much work we do. My gut says this will be difficult to completely unfold. I see it as a long, protracted test. I don’t feel up to a test.”

  Beatrice purrs for a moment and then says, “I’m with you, hon. We’ll figure it out.”

  “And in the meantime, a plane goes down.”

  “No,” she says with a resolve that pitches Gus forward. “No. My vibes tell me this incident is not imminent. It feels months away, Gus. Distant. Out there on the horizon.”

  He sits up, nudges Ivy aside. “I don’t know. My vibes tell me to warn someone.”

  “Who?”

  “The FAA? The TSA? The NTSB? The FBI?”

  “Let me know when you get off the acronym train,” she says with a laugh. “And I’ll tell you to do none of the above.”

  “L-O-L.”

  “Not really an acronym, darling. And besides we are not LOLers. We’re not those people. And we’re not people foolish enough to go the government with this kind of warning. Next thing we’d know, we’d be on the No-Fly List.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Are you kidding me? Have you been living under a rock?” “Mostly.”

  “It’s a list of potentially dangerous passengers forbidden to fly.” “Well, you would know. You’re in the air more than you’re on the ground for this book tour of yours,” he says. Then, “Oh, God . . .” “What?”

  “What if it’s your plane going down? Jesus . . .”

  “Oh, please,” she scoffs. “You’re not seeing my plane going down because I’m not seeing my plane going down, and I’m not headed across the Pacific any time soon. But I have to tell you something.”

  “Okay . . .”

  She leans forward. “Would you like some more wine?”

  “No. I’m good.” Still on the floor, he scoots to the side of the couch and rests his arm there, facing her.

  “I just want to say you walked in my house tonight a lonely man.” “Lonely?”

  “Yes. What do you think that’s about?”

  “It’s my disposition,” he says.

  She tsks. “No, it’s not, Gus. Don’t be silly. I can always tell the single people from the partnered ones. People with love in their life have an energy beside them at all times. I can see it, sense it, feel it. It’s a light, a bubble of light, with a kind of prism inside. You have the bubble. No prism.”

  “Suddenly?”

  “I’ve been doubting your prism for a long time.”

  “So, what are you saying?”

  She drifts off, her face toward the mountain outside, toward the great beast whose only movement in centuries can be measured in tectonic inches. She scans the blurry horizon and nods. He waits and watches. She tents her hands in front of her face as if she’s a doctor about to prognosticate. “Ask Billie where she sees this going . . .”

  “Where she sees this going? What do you mean?”

  “I mean the future, for the two of you.”

  “We’ve been together for over two years. Where do you think it’s going?”

  “You don’t know. Do you? It’s a mystery to you. Are you content to live in that mystery?”

  He smiles. “You mean, am I content not to label our relationship? Yeah, I am.”

  “Neither of you wants to commit. She thinks love is too fragile. And you think she’s too strong to let you get any closer.”

  “Are you getting this from her music?”

  She gives him a light kick. “Did you forget I’m psychic? I see you lonely and so I wonder if you could be seeking more commitment from her.”

  “Here’s what I’m seeing about what you’re seeing, psychic to psychic: She’s older than
me by ten years. She may go before I go. And then I’ll be lonely for her. Then her energy might be missing from my side.”

  Beatrice doesn’t say anything for a moment. He listens to her hum softly. She has a violin hum. “When she goes, her energy will never be missing from your side. Love doesn’t die like that. I tell this to everyone.

  But yes, I might be seeing you in those later years without her. And still I sense that a little clarification now goes a long way.”

  “Duly noted.”

  “Have you lost your keys?”

  He feels for his pockets. “Uh, no,” he says. “My mind, maybe, not my keys.”

  “Oh, never mind. I just had a weird vibe about your keys. Or my keys, maybe. Or somebody’s keys.”

  “Maybe you’re telling me to go home.”

  She laughs. “You can stay as long as you’d like, but I’m ready for a siesta. The wine, you know. Hang around if you’d like.”

  But he doesn’t. As Beatrice drifts off into the dainty snoring phase of her nap, Gus and Ivy slip out of the house and into the car.

  5

  Well, if it isn’t the ultracool Calvin Cloke. Cloke is Mills’s favorite medical examiner in Maricopa County. Most of the doctors assigned to the OME don’t turn up at the crime scenes. They send the examiners, the civilians. But Dr. Cloke is all in. He loves this shit. A onearmed Gulf War vet with awful skin but an overcompensating smile, Cloke always gives prompt, precise, and cheerful service to the PD. Mills has never seen the guy have a bad day despite the consequences of battle. Cloke is not bitter about the war. In fact he remembers it fondly as the time he, personally, put Saddam Hussein on notice. If his arm were collateral damage, he’d tell people, it was a price he was willing to pay. And yet, he’s not a crazy war hawk looking to shoot down every news chopper he sees, which puts him on opposite sides of that argument with Mills. “Dude!” Cloke shouts.

  “Dude!”

  “Don’t they kick people like you out of places like this?”

  “Yeah,” Mills says. “But now that you’re here, finally, I can blend in with your elegance.”

  “Finally?”

  “Well . . .”

  “Come on, man, I was right in the middle of a shrimp quesadilla when I got the call.”

  Mills explains the demise of Viveca Canning. “I’m confident you’ll find at least one bullet in her brain.”

  “First place I’ll look,” the ME tells him.

  “If only the brain could reveal those last few minutes of life,” Mills says. “If only you could download the memory. You know?”

  “Sounds like a job for your psychic.”

  “He’s not my psychic,” Mills says.

  “So he’s everyone’s psychic. Thanks for sharing.”

  “Powell’s in the house. She’s scene investigator. Have fun.”

  As Cloke’s hulking frame passes through the front door, Mills reaches for his phone and dials Gus Parker.

  “Hi, this is Gus Parker. Don’t bother leaving your name or number,” the recording says. “I know who you are and how to reach you. Just kidding. I’m not as psychic as you think I am.”

  Mills shakes his head. “Your new message is supremely douchey,” he says after the beep. “Call me.”

  Then he heads back to the street to deal with the son of Viveca Canning. He does another quick study of the man’s face, looking for a nuance, any nuance, which might suggest a lingering emotion. Gus Parker has told him to look beyond the obvious emotion, to see little flickers of truth that would otherwise be hiding beneath the surface. Watch the last syllable of a smile for a wince, Gus says. Watch for wickedness running through the shadows of grief. The corner of the mouth. The glint in the eye. Gus tells him the lingering emotion is the first step to intuit the rest, and Mills can’t argue because it’s really part of his repertoire anyway; their work is not so different in this regard. In every other regard, Gus is in another world.

  The chiseled Bennett Canning, still leaning against his precious automobile, his arms folded across his chest, yields very little beyond the cocksure posture and the Hollywood hair. Mills knows his searching gaze is making the guy uncomfortable, but he doesn’t care. He lets it hang there until the slightest tremble crosses Canning’s bottom lip. Mills offers a thoughtful nod as if to encourage more divulgence. The slick scion could be playing him, however. He could be onto Mills. The tremble of the kid’s lip, even in its microscopic brevity, could be a ruse. Then Canning exhales a deep sigh and rolls his shoulders. “You okay?” Mills asks him.

  “I don’t know,” Canning replies. “You tell me.”

  “What would you like me to tell you?”

  “I’d like you tell me who killed my mother.”

  “I’m afraid it’s too soon to know that.”

  “Right, of course.”

  “If you’d be more comfortable, we can continue our conversation back at headquarters,” Mills suggests. The suggestion is not a threat of any kind. It’s a genuine offer.

  The kid shakes his head. “No. I’m fine here,” he says. “I’m staying here as long as my mother’s here.”

  And that’s fine. Restrained by the yellow tape, the gawkers can’t hear what they’re saying. There’s a fair degree of privacy out here in the open.

  “How well do you know the neighbors?” Mills asks him.

  “Like I told you, I don’t live here. Never have. My parents bought the house after I went to Andover.”

  “Andover?”

  “Prep school in Massachusetts. You never heard of it?” Canning asks, his inflection preppy and presumptuous.

  “No.”

  “Well, that’s where I lived for high school, except summers, and then I went to tennis camp. And then I went off to college. You know how it goes.”

  “How it goes . . . of course.”

  Canning removes his sunglasses, bats his eyes against the glare, and says, “Are you sure it’s her?”

  “She matches the faces in the photos throughout the house,” Mills says. “You can confirm it’s her if you want to. But we’re not quite done yet.”

  “Yes. I want to see her.”

  Mills takes one step closer. “You have a sister? The neighbors tell us you have a sister.”

  “I do. A younger sister. I just called her with the news.”

  “Name, age, place of residence?”

  “Her name is Jillian. She’s twenty-seven, lives in San Francisco. Well, Berkeley, actually.”

  “What does she do there?”

  “She’s a lesbian.”

  Mills shakes his head. “Okay, but that’s not what she’s doing, Ben. I’m asking what she does for work.”

  “Oh.” His shifts his eyes back and forth, up and down. “Something with film. I think she’s a film editor.”

  “You’re not close?”

  “We both have busy lives.”

  “What’s your line of work?” Mills asks him.

  “I’m between jobs.”

  “Doing?”

  The cocksure posture returns, the arms across his chest. “Are you interrogating me?”

  “Of course not,” Mills lies. “It’s just really important for us to know as much as we can about the people surrounding the victim. Let’s say you angered someone in your line of work. Maybe this is revenge.” Or maybe you’re in between jobs and need a shortcut to your inheritance, Bennett Canning.

  “I don’t think so. I don’t anger people in my line of work. I’m a tennis pro.”

  Of course you are. “Where?”

  “Most recently The Cliffs Resort and Spa.”

  “And why aren’t you there anymore?”

  “That’s really none of your business.”

  “That’s okay. We can find out.”

  “I assure you my mother’s murder had nothing to do with The Cliffs.”

  Mills smiles mischievously. “Unless a jealous husband caught you doing more than training his wife on the court.”

  Canning groans. “Oh, com
e on, Detective, you’ve been watching too many Lifetime movies.”

  “Never,” Mills says. “Follow me.”

  Just inside the foyer Mills grabs a pair of booties and instructs the son of Viveca Canning to slip them on. The man’s eyes widen, fear and doubt lodged there now, as he takes in a foreign scene before him in an otherwise familiar place. The cops, the techs, the people are crawling everywhere. There are specimen kits. There are gloved hands all over the family’s treasures. There are voices uttering a language he can’t possibly understand. And then he gasps, almost stumbles backward. His mother’s body on the floor. Dead.

  Mills watches the whole thing unfold across Bennett’s face.

  The kid covers his mouth, utters, “Oh God.”

  Mills says, “You okay?”

  “Oh my God,” Bennett chants, without acknowledging the question. “Oh my God.”

  Mills gently tugs at the guy’s shoulder. “You can’t get any closer. I’m sorry, but we have to stay back.”

  The dead woman’s son nods slowly. He seems unable to blink. Mills recognizes shock setting in, so he guides the man away from the body.

  “Tell me, Ben, how old is your mom?”

  “Sixty-four.”

  “Looks like she was an art lover,” Mills says, gesturing to the walls.

  “A collector, yes.”

  Then Mills points to the obvious empty space between paintings. “You know what hung there?”

  “I’m pretty sure it was a Dali. An original,” Canning replies. “Where is it?”

  “That’s what we’d like to know,” Mills tells him.

  “It was the most valuable one she’d display.”

  “Do you know how valuable?”

  “Not really. But probably a million or more,” Canning replies. “She’d rotate it, all of them, actually, in and out of the vault.”

  “What vault?”

  “She has a collector’s vault in one of the galleries in Scottsdale,” he replies. Then after a moment of consideration, he says, “You think it was stolen? You think maybe she interrupted a burglary?”

  “You’re ahead of us, I’m afraid.”

  “But it’s possible, no?”