Jon Talton - Cactus Heart

By nine o’clock, I was at Phoenix Police headquarters. Little orange hoods declared the parking meters off limits today, so I parked two blocks away amid the vacant lots of an old neighborhood. Well, not a neighborhood now. Just emptiness.

Even when I left Phoenix to teach in Ohio, back in the late 1970s, these straight, wide streets that ran for ten blocks between downtown Phoenix and the Arizona state capitol had been a neighborhood. It had surely been in decline-that’s why they put the ugly police headquarters out here-but it had been a neighborhood nonetheless, with people, life, history . That damned word again. Victorian houses and bungalows had brought the semblance of modernity to a frontier town in the 1890s. Adobe and brick apartment houses had been graced with upstairs sleeping porches for an age without air conditioning. They had stood there, along palm-lined streets, all the way to the state capitol. Now, nothing. Block upon block of leveled, grassless vacant lots. Meeting them to the west: ghastly state office buildings. Back when. I remember . I was starting to sound like a geezer, but I couldn’t stop noticing things. Maybe that’s the curse of years.

Inside police headquarters, there was Lt. Augustus Hawkins. He sat at his desk just as he had the first day I saw him, behind paperwork that looked like a besieging army of forms and reports. This time, however, two other detectives were lounging at the tiny conference table in his office. In another chair, a woman wearing a visitor’s ID looked up at me and gave a little smile. Hawkins didn’t look up, but he gave a hearty post-holiday hello.

“Put on your ID card.”

“We have the DNA test back?” I asked, pinning the MCSO card to my pocket. It had been exactly two weeks since we found the skeletons.

“The fucking thing doesn’t match,” said one of the detectives. He looked eerily like O.J. Simpson, a fact that must have made for some interesting times out on the job.

I just stood there in silence. I’d heard what he said, but my mind didn’t want to process it.

“Must not be your famous Yarnell twins,” drawled the other detective, a white guy with the beefy looks of a second-string football player gone to seed and dark permed curly hair. The young cops favored crew cuts and shaved heads. Some older cops, from the ’70s, still thought they were disco studs. Maybe I was being unkind.

I took the last empty chair and let them fill me in. The woman, who introduced herself as Deb Boswell, was a pathologist from the medical examiner’s office and a national expert in these matters. She launched into a twenty-minute lecture about polymorphisms and probabilities, alleles and slotblocks, electropheresis and PCR, and how much they still couldn’t determine. I was at my liberal arts most ignorant in such matters, but the cops weren’t doing much better.

“Bottom line,” Hawkins broke in, “the DNA fingerprints don’t match.”

“The preferred terms are DNA profiling, or DNA typing,” she said mildly. “It’s not really like fingerprinting.” She faced me. “What all this means, Deputy, is that the two skeletons you found are identical twins. The DNA tells us that. While identical twins have different fingerprints, genetically they’re indistinguishable. But the boys don’t appear to be related to Max and James Yarnell.”

She shuffled her papers and pulled out another sheet.

“This is a case where there wasn’t enough nuclear DNA in the remains. So we used the mitochondrial DNA. There’s many more copies of that in a cell. One big limitation is that it’s passed down by the mother.”

“So,” I said, “these might be the Yarnell twins, but they had a different mother from Max and James Yarnell?”

Hawkins coughed loudly. “You’re reaching, Mapstone. You never said this cattle baron had more than one wife.”

“Actually, we’re talking about the cattle baron’s son. Morgan Yarnell was the father of the twins. But, yeah, he was only married once. Still…”

“You were wrong, Mapstone, admit it,” O.J. Simpson said. I ignored him.

“He’s right,” Boswell said, “this outcome could be explained by a different mother. Otherwise, we can’t say a lot with certainty, because we were able to get such a small sample from the bones. It wasn’t enough for an RFLP, which would be more conclusive.” She leafed through sheets of paper in her lap that looked like large bar codes.

“Hawkins,” I started.

“Please don’t.” He held up his hands. He took a moment. The stress radiated off him like a cloud from a damaged Soviet nuclear reactor. He leaned back in the chair and it creaked loudly, even though it was the newest high-tech metal and non-allergenic upholstery. I was amazed to see such life in him.

“Gentlemen, this is a matter of case clearance. This is a matter of resources. Do you know how many new homicides we have in this city every year?”

He glanced at me with baleful pale eyes. “Excluding the county and those strangler murders. But this department has had to detach twenty detectives to help the sheriff on that. And we’ve got thirty more working on the Grand Avenue Sniper. Resources are too tight to be wasting time on some history project!”

It all had the ambiance of a nasty faculty meeting when someone’s tenure was at stake. I mischievously recalled making love with Lindsey in a world without small men enforcing the rules of bureaucracies.

Hawkins said: “We’re fucked. Do you understand that? We inconvenienced a very powerful man with friends on city council. The media is expecting this to be the bones of the Yarnell twins. Now we have nothing.” Media-are , I thought. I couldn’t stop correcting freshman papers. Nobody spoke for what seemed like a minute.

“We have a mystery,” I said finally.

I swear the pathologist smiled a little.

“I’ve dug into some very old crimes before. And, let me tell you, it makes the clearance rate suck at first.”

He exhaled dramatically. “You’re a sheriff’s deputy,” he sputtered. “You’re not really even that. We went on this very expensive snipe hunt based on your, what? Intuition? Knowledge of historical trivia? Do you have any idea how much DNA fingerprinting costs?”

He filled me with sudden malice. I wanted to say: You pale, little badge-toting turd. I used to flunk your moron daughter when she had to take a history class to keep up her volleyball scholarship. And she would have done anything-anything, Gus-to just scoot by with a D.”

I said, “We still have to find out who the bones belong to. You can assign a new team to the case.” I looked over the two detectives, who gave me sour frowns. “Or let me keep going. We know these are twins. We know they were found in a building owned by Yarneco. The pocket watch has the Yarnell brand on the cover. Maybe there is a different mother. Maybe there’s something about the family we don’t know, such as an adoption…”

“Maybe, maybe, Jesus!” Hawkins said. “This was supposed to be simple.”

I started to speak but he cut me off. “Max Yarnell is very angry over all this, and he doesn’t want to be bothered about it any more.” Hawkins seemed to catch himself. In a lower voice, he said, “Of course, that won’t impede our investigation. No favoritism here. But you, Mapstone, you are done now.”

“Fine.”

We all just sat there. He ran his hands across his paperwork, made a note, signed a form. He looked up and we were all waiting. Then he remembered some dialogue from TV cop shows. “Get the hell out of here,” he moaned. “All of you!”

I took the back door into Peralta’s office suite and sat on his sofa while he finished an interview with a blonde TV reporter.