Desert Vengeance Page 4

  “Because you taught me to.”

  “Hon…” He caught himself just in time. “Lena, I never meant you any harm, and I’m sorry if I…”

  “Shut. Your. Mouth.” I put the wasp spray back in my tote, and after making certain no one at the other booth was watching, pulled out the Vindicator and laid it next to my coffee cup. “I played with the idea of a gelding knife, but finally decided on this. It’ll do the job just fine, don’t you think?”

  “I’ve changed!” When his voice rose to a near-shriek, the family in the other booth turned around to see what was going on. The little redhead’s smile vanished.

  I raised my own voice. “If you want this discussion at top volume, I’m happy to accommodate you.”

  Wycoff’s eyes widened in panic, but somehow he managed to force his words back into a whisper. “You know what? You’re crazy!”

  “No argument there.” I rustled through my tote and one by one put the rest of my weapons on the table. Taser. Fury Tactical Leather SAP. Colt .38. “I’m undecided as to which I should start with, SAP or Taser. Or maybe the knife? Help me out here.”

  He couldn’t take his eyes off the Vindicator.

  “Good choice,” I said. “I admire your taste.”

  “I’m calling the police.” Still in a whisper.

  I raised my voice further. “I’m sure the police will be delighted to hear from their friendly neighborhood pedophile.”

  The father in the other booth, a bulky man who could have passed for a professional wrestler, turned around again and narrowed his eyes at Wycoff.

  “Hmm, I forget. How many children were you convicted of raping?” My voice volume even higher.

  “I wasn’t convicted. I took a plea!” This time he forgot to whisper.

  “Yeah, after the first two kids had testified about what you did to them. Five more were waiting their turn, including me.” I said it so loudly they could probably hear me in Vancouver.

  The father gestured toward the elderly waitress, who had been hovering near the overflow section. He asked for the check, which gave me another idea. After sweeping my arsenal back into the tote, I hauled it and myself out of the booth and approached their table.

  I handed the father several flyers. “Mr. Wycoff’s house is only four blocks from here. Maybe you’d like to give these out to your neighbors, especially those who have children.”

  Nodding, the man took the flyers. Read one. Got up. Started walking toward Wycoff. With a squeak, Wycoff tumbled out of the booth and ran out the back exit.

  As he fled across the parking lot, I realized I was shaking.

  And I felt about nine years old.

  ***

  Thursdays were horrific when I was nine years old and living with the Wycoffs, but in a way, Wednesdays were almost as bad. On Wednesday, I spent all day dreading what would happen the next afternoon, as soon as Norma left for her church activities and Papa Brian came home early, and…

  One Wednesday morning, my teacher asked me why I was crying, but I couldn’t tell her because Papa Brian had threatened to kill Sandy if I ever told on him, and I loved Sandy more than I loved life. Life? Is that what you called it when your every day was filled with pain, but Thursdays brought the kind of pain that paled all others? And when Wednesday, oh Wednesday, delivered the awareness that tomorrow I would be praying for death so the pain would end? The teacher, so well-meaning but not knowing what to do, escorted sent me to the nurse’s office. The nurse, also not knowing what to do, called Norma to come and pick me up.

  The minute I climbed into Norma’s car, she slapped me.

  ***

  But this was a Wednesday filled with triumph, not dread. I had faced-down the dragon and won. After Wycoff fled out the back door of Denny’s, I made a quick swing by the Apache Junction Library. There, I gave some of my flyers to Bess Graves, a librarian friend of mine since our college days at Arizona State University. Then I headed back to Scottsdale, where Jimmy was waiting at Desert Investigations, wanting to talk.

  “I don’t get it, Lena. You tell me you’re going to shrug off a woman’s murder? Aren’t you at least curious?”

  “At best, Norma Wycoff was an enabler. At worse, she colluded in her husband’s crimes.”

  “Still…”

  “There is no ‘still,’ Jimmy.” How could he ever understand when he’d spent his whole life being loved?

  “You’re going to get yourself arrested for stalking, and we don’t have enough in petty cash to bail you out.”

  “Then write a check on the company account.” I sat down at my desk and picked up the phone to retrieve my messages.

  “Bail bondsmen don’t take checks.”

  I had missed fourteen calls, six of them from Frank Gunnerston, who apparently didn’t take no for an answer. Was he dumb enough to think I would turn over his runaway wife’s address after what I’d learned about him? In a just and wise world, I’d be able to bill him extra for wasting my time.

  As I erased his messages, Jimmy rose from his desk and went over to the coffee machine. A coffee snob, he had tired of Jamaican Blue Mountain and moved on to Graffeo Dark. Next week we would be drinking something picked by a virgin on the north slope of Kilimanjaro at midnight during a lunar eclipse.

  The Graffeo smelled good, though. “You could always bail me out using our company Visa.” I held up my cup. “Hit me.”

  “We’re already at our credit limit. Sugar?”

  “Surely you jest.”

  “About the Visa limit or the sugar?”

  “Both.”

  He poured me a cup, sans sugar. “No on both.”

  The coffee tasted as good as it smelled. “They won’t arrest me for stalking if I get Wycoff arrested first.” I remembered the little girl at the restaurant and Wycoff’s inability to ignore her.

  “That’s all you’re trying to do—get him arrested?”

  “Yes,” I lied.

  Jimmy always knew when I was lying, but there being nothing he could do about it, he went back to his desk and lost himself in his computer.

  I was about to do the same when my cell phone beeped. Glancing at the screen, I saw an update from the GPS system installed on Wycoff’s car. After a short stop at his motel, he was on the move again, headed west on I-60 in the direction of the Superstition Springs Mall. A shopping excursion, perhaps? Even child molesters need clothes. Or, while rotting away in prison, he had read about modern malls’ ability to attract free-range children and was trying his luck.

  Wrong. The Civic passed the Superstition Springs exit and continued west until it arrived at the 101 interchange, where it turned north. For the next half hour I sat at my desk and watched as the little red dot on my screen left Scottsdale, crawled west across the outskirts of Phoenix, then skated onto the I-17 interchange where it swung north again, picking up speed. Wycoff was leaving town.

  Monkey see, monkey do.

  I told Jimmy I might be gone for a few hours, or days, grabbed the emergency backpack I always kept supplied, and rushed to my Jeep.

  The official outskirts of the Valley of the Sun ended soon after I passed Anthem, a relatively new bedroom community of north Phoenix. From there, I-17 began a long upgrade into hill country. Years earlier, in anticipation of Wycoff’s eventual release, I had put together a file of his known contacts. Although he had been active in various church activities, the parishioners who had once been vocal in his defense dropped him like a used Kleenex when his confession aired live on FOX-10 News. Most of his relatives dropped him, too. In fact, during his entire incarceration, his only regular correspondent had been Norma, but a couple of years ago one of my contacts at the prison alerted me that Wycoff had begun receiving letters and visits from someone named Grace Genovese, a resident of Black Canyon City. Further research revealed that Grace Genovese’s maiden name was Wycoff. She was Bri
an’s only sibling, a younger sister.

  Grace and her husband, Mario, had a thirty-something daughter named Shana, mother of Luke, thirteen, and Bethany, eight. Due to a split a year ago from her husband and the ongoing financial squabbling, Shana and her children had temporarily moved into Casa Genovese. Surely Wycoff wasn’t heading there! Another stipulation of his probation was that he never live under the same roof as minors. Yet as I tracked the GPS signal up I-17, my worst fears were confirmed. The Civic exited the freeway on Old Black Canyon Highway.

  Black Canyon City, population four thousand-something, once served as a stagecoach stop, but was now home to a combination of ranchers, farmers, hard-core commuters, and a trickle of exhausted retirees eager to escape the Valley’s hustle and bustle. Other than its interesting Old West history, the town’s major claim to fame was the Rock Springs Café, where the pie list alone drew customers all the way from Phoenix and Flagstaff. But I doubted Wycoff made the trip here for a slice of its famed Bourbon Pecan.

  I took the same turnoff and followed the GPS signal along the main drag, past a small strip mall designed to look like a stage stop, a thrift store, a couple of saloon-styled bars, a combination psychic readings/souvenir shop, a beauty parlor, a Quik Snax, a general store, and a fry bread shack. While the town couldn’t exactly be called bustling, judging from the pickup trucks and motorcycles parked in front of the stores, business was steady. The bad news was that some of the businesses, especially the Quik Snax, attracted children.

  Deciding not to confront Wycoff until he reached his sister’s house, I doubled back to the fry bread stand and stood in line to buy myself an extra-large, slathered with cinnamon and honey. To wash it down, I had a regular Coke since they were out of Diet, and had never heard of Tab. The combined sweetness left my teeth aching. After a brief glance at my Timex, which had taken many a licking but kept on ticking, I realized my lunch break had lasted little more than ten minutes. To kill more time, I walked over to the supermarket and started reading the notices on the bulletin board.

  Bulletin boards give you a snapshot of a community. Hiking and fishing were a big thing up here, as were horseback riding at Red Rock Ranch, and mud-bogging with a group named the Dirty Dozen. People were selling trailers, pickup trucks, backhoes, wood-burning stoves, and roosters. I wasn’t interested in roosters or trailers, but the index card advertising Debbie’s Desert Oasis, a local B&B, caught my eye. There was no telling how long I’d be up here, so I scribbled the number down in my notebook.

  Then I checked my Timex again. If Wycoff hadn’t settled in by now, it wasn’t going to happen, so I walked back to my Jeep and took off.

  Despite naming itself a “city,” the town was small enough that I didn’t need the GPS tracker’s signal to guide me to 17034 Moonbeam Lane, but when my Jeep topped the hill leading down to the long, narrow valley carved out by Black Canyon Creek, I had to pull off to the side of the road to calm myself. Even after a series of deep breaths, I had trouble holding my binoculars steady as I checked out the scene below.

  On a slight rise overlooking the mostly dry creekbed sat a cottonwood-shaded ranch house at the northern end of a property large enough to run several head of cattle, four horses, and a Shetland pony. Parked in the house’s wide driveway were a crew cab Chevy pickup, a Jeep Cherokee so new it still bore dealer’s tags, and an elderly Volvo missing one of its hubcaps. Behind the Volvo sat the beige Honda Civic. On a cement pad on the other side of the house sat a well-travelled Winnebago camper with a Pink Princess bicycle leaning against it.

  The craft of manipulation being a pedophile’s pièce de résistance, I could imagine the conversation taking place inside the house, but as it turned out, I was wrong.

  Several minutes later, just as I had decided to drive down to the house and educate the adult inhabitants of the illegality of allowing convicted pedophiles to live under the same roof as minor children, the front door flew open and Brian Wycoff emerged. Rather clumsily, at that. Squinting my eyes against the early afternoon sun, I saw the reason for his staggers. He was being pushed forward by a burly, fifty-ish man with olive skin and slightly graying black hair. Mario Genovese, Wycoff’s brother-in-law. Since the wind was right, I could catch snatches of their conversation.

  “…see you anywhere near her and…”

  “…got me all wrong, I…”

  “…if not for my wife I’d kill…”

  “…wanted to get to know my niece…”

  “…don’t you even mention her name…”

  “…I did my time so…”

  “…fuck’s the matter with…?”

  This intriguing exchange ended when Genovese opened the Winnebago’s passenger’s door and shoved the still-protesting Wycoff in. Puffing with rage, Genovese bent over his granddaughter’s Pink Princess bicycle, tossed it into the yard, then went around to the driver’s side of the RV and climbed in. Seconds later the engine roared to life and the RV backed out of the driveway and rumbled down a dirt track that led up to a livestock gate. Genovese got out, opened the gate, drove the RV through, then got out again and closed the gate behind him. He drove the Winnebago toward the far end of the pasture, then slowed as it neared a long stand of cottonwoods. Steering carefully between the trees, he parked it in the shade.

  A few seconds later Genovese re-emerged. Wycoff didn’t.

  The horses’ ears pricked up as Genovese left the Winnebago behind and jogged across the pasture back toward the house. The cattle, less curious, kept on grazing.

  I had been so busy watching the Winnebago drama I hardly noticed the door to the house open again, but my own ears pricked up when a middle-aged woman came out wailing. She was joined in her distress by a young blond girl. Genovese’s eight-year-old granddaughter, Bethany.

  She looked a lot like me at that age.

  Chapter Five

  Because of Madeline, I knew what I looked like before the worst happened.

  The memories of the first few years of my life were wiped away by the bullet that almost took my life. Once I learned to walk again, I made my way through several foster homes until CPS placed me with Madeline. She was, and still is, an artist. Images were important to her. From the day the social worker walked me through Madeline’s front door with my garbage bag “suitcase,” she began taking pictures of me. She drew me, she painted me, she delighted in me. If only…

  What’s the old saying? If wishes were horses, beggars would ride?

  Madeline developed breast cancer and became too ill to care for me, although God knows she tried. When the social worker learned about her condition, he moved me to the Wycoffs, and the only thing I was able to salvage was the scrapbook Madeline and I had put together. In the pictures, I was always smiling.

  Pictures lie.

  Years later, when my therapist decided I was ready to face the past, I had gone to the library and looked up old editions of the Arizona Republic, and read the coverage of Wycoff’s trial. In the photographs accompanying the articles, he looked like your typical clean-cut, church-going suburbanite, a man no sane person would suspect of harboring sexual fantasies about children. Norma didn’t look like a monster, either. In photographs taken as she entered the courthouse, she appeared to be just another attractive Scottsdale housewife, although a bit camera-shy. The social worker who had placed children with those two monsters appeared bored, but I later learned he had attempted suicide.

  Pictures lie. A lot.

  ***

  In response to his wife’s pleas, Mario Genovese had not turned her brother away, but for safety’s sake, he’d moved the pedophile as far from his house as possible. As long as Wycoff remained on the property, however, Wycoff was in defiance of his court-ordered probation, and conceivably, Genovese could be charged for endangering his granddaughter. He needed talking to, and I was just the person to do it. For now, though, the Genovese family needed some time to themselves. />
  Cognizant of the day’s rising temperatures—Black Canyon City wasn’t far enough north of Phoenix to completely escape the August heat—I steered the Jeep off the shoulder and into a copse of acacias for some shade and settled down for a long wait.

  ***

  By five, Wycoff still hadn’t poked his nose outside the RV, but I had been treated to the view of the muscular Mario Genovese as he tinkered with a tractor motor, replaced loose boards on the barn, and—aided by his grandson—hauled bales of hay out to the livestock. The sight of all those animals chowing down reminded me that the only thing I’d eaten all day had been one helping of fry bread and two stale granola bars out of my emergency backpack. My stomach growled so loudly it was a miracle the Genoveses couldn’t hear it, and I was sweating so heavily it was another miracle they couldn’t smell me, too. I needed food and a shower, in reverse order.

  Debbie’s Desert Oasis was located on the same road that led over the hill and down to the Genoveses’ spread. In fact, the B&B was close enough I could have walked the distance in less than ten minutes.

  The bed and breakfast came as a surprise.

  At the front of a small gravel parking lot near a small yellow house sat a turquoise 1956 Ford F100 pickup truck. Script writing on its side promised that at Debbie’s Desert Oasis, the fish were always biting.

  The house itself sat in a mini-forest of gnarled mesquite and acacia, looking cute enough to be featured in Arizona Highways, but it wasn’t a B&B in the usual sense. Instead of bedrooms, Debbie Margules rented out single-wide trailers, each tucked separately among the mesquite and brush for maximum privacy. In accordance with the latest Southwestern travel trailer rage, they were painted to illustrate differing themes. The exterior of mine, aptly named “Monarch,” was buttercup-yellow, and sported hand-painted pictures of butterflies all over the sides. Little butterflies. Big butterflies. Medium-sized butterflies. The butterfly theme continued on into the interior, where butterfly designs fluttered across the sofa’s slipcovers, toss pillows, lampshades, towels, sheets, and bedspread. Four butterfly-decorated coffee mugs sat next to a Mr. Coffee embellished with a butterfly sticker.