coach-whip blossoms, and white-capped saguaros. I didn’t know the names of all these things a year ago—Carlo got me an Arizona field guide and binoculars for my last birthday.
I tried to make a little small talk with Max and Laura Coleman, not very successfully, then steered the conversation in the direction of the crime scene, which is where we all wanted to be anyway. “So have you ever seen this car Lynch is talking about? How did it get there?” I asked Max.
Unlike most of us, Max is not a transplant. “It was kind of a rite of passage when I was in high school, to go up here at night. No one knew when or how it was abandoned. Seems it crashed off the side of the road and slid about thirty feet into the arroyo without rolling over. The driver was never found. We sat around it telling ghost stories about the driver coming to take his car back, drinking beer, smoking a little dope. That’s all I know.”
“And nobody ever looked inside?” I asked.
“Sure we did. Sat inside, too. But that was over twenty years ago. Kids stopped going, got more interested in computer games. Easy to imagine nobody looking in that car in the past fifteen years.”
“Who was the owner of record?”
“I can’t remember his name, not an Arizona man, and, like I said, they never found him alive or dead. It’s a local mystery.”
That’s when the road got bumpy. Coleman tried to say something about Floyd Lynch but had to stop for fear of biting her tongue. I wished I’d peed once more before leaving the house.
We were all pretty much silent as we bounced our way up the mountain, where the climate grew more temperate and offered pine trees instead of the drought-hardy vegetation in the valley.
About two-thirds of the way to the summit, Coleman pointed to the car ahead and said Lynch was lifting up his cuffed hands, gesturing. Within another second or two we had all pulled into a line on the narrow shoulder of the right side of the road.
The crime scene techs behind us were all efficiency, getting some small pieces of equipment and two body bags out of the van, along with slings to bring them up from the arroyo into which the rest of us looked as we waited. Lynch was explaining to Coleman the configuration of a saguaro with eight long arms jutting in all directions and a rocky outcropping that helped him locate the spot.
Max introduced me and Sigmund to U.S. Marshal Axel Phillips, all boots and a big gun. Phillips responded politely but without offering to shake our hands. You could tell he kept his attention on Lynch, doing his job. When the techs came up to us with their equipment, I recognized an older one I had seen before on a case, Benny Cassell, and a younger one guided by Benny, introduced as Ray Something. I had a hard time focusing on anyone but Lynch, but I could tell Sigmund kept his eye on me.
The way down into the arroyo was steep and I was glad I brought my stick, which enabled me to gently shrug off Max’s offer of a hand down when I slipped on a pebble. Lynch asked if the marshal would undo his cuffs but was refused, while Phillips angled his shotgun just a little more conveniently to kill his man if he had to while keeping a precarious balance. I hoped he had his safety on.
Max went first, followed by Floyd Lynch, his elbows jutting out for balance, followed by Phillips. Those three chose the way down, followed by Benny and Ray, followed by me and Coleman, all in more or less single file. Sigmund brought up the rear as if he wanted to watch all of us at once. One by one we stopped at the bottom to find a car that must have gone off the road at least three decades ago. Phillips echoed Max, said he’d known about the car, everyone who grew up in the area and had traveled this way more than once had, but probably no one had been around to look inside for a long time.
“I remember the place being filthy with all the trash we left behind,” Phillips said. “Looks like it’s been cleaned up.”
I looked at the car, recognized it as a Dodge Dart from the seventies with the paint long removed by sandstorms and sun. I kept repeating to