Phoenix Noir

So he did. The scene was clearly fresh. The parents had gotten back maybe moments after the perpetrator had exited. Police response had been fast. The blood on the hallway carpet was still liquid. Dark red, not black, against the kid’s pale skin. The kid’s pale skin was a problem from the start. They all knew it. They were in a position to act fast and heavy, so they were going to, and they knew it would be claimed later that the speed was all about the kid being white, not black or brown. It wasn’t. It was a question of luck and timing. They got a fresh scene, and they got a couple of breaks. I nodded, like I accepted his view. Which I did. I was a journalist, and I liked mischief as much as the next guy, but sometimes things were straightforward.

“Go on,” I said.

There were photographs of the kid all over the house. She was an only child. She was luminous and beautiful. She was stupefying, the way fourteen-year-old white Arizona girls often are.

“Go on,” I said.

The first break had been the weather. There had been torrential rain two days previously, and then the heat had come back with a vengeance. The rain had skimmed the street with sand and mud and the heat had baked it to a film of dust, and the dust showed no tire tracks other than those from the parents’ vehicle and the cop cars and the ambulance. Therefore the perpetrator had arrived on foot. And left on foot. There were clear marks in the dust. Sneakers, maybe size ten, fairly generic soles. The prints were photographed and e-mailed and everyone was confident that in the fullness of time some database somewhere would match a brand and a style. But what was more important was that they had a suspect recently departed from a live scene on foot, in a landscape where no one walked. So APBs and be-on-the-lookouts were broadcast for a two-mile radius. It was midnight and more than a hundred degrees and pedestrians were going to be rare. It was simply too hot for walking. Certainly too hot for running. Any kind of sustained physical activity would be close to a suicide attempt. Greater Phoenix was that kind of place, especially in the summer.

Ten minutes passed and no fugitives were found.

Then they got their second break. The parents were reasonably lucid. In between all the bawling and screaming they noticed their daughter’s cell phone was missing. It had been her pride and joy. An iPhone, with an AT&T contract that gave her unlimited minutes, which she exploited to the max. Back then iPhones were new and cool. The cops figured the perp had stolen it. They figured the kind of guy who had no car in Arizona would have been entranced by a small shiny object like an iPhone. Or else if he was some kind of big-time deviant, maybe he collected souvenirs. Maybe the cache of photographs of the kid’s friends was exciting. Or the text messages stored in the memory.

“Go on,” I said.

The third break was all about middle-class parents and fourteen-year-old daughters. The parents had signed up for a service whereby they could track the GPS chip in the iPhone on their home computer. Not cheap, but they were the kind of people who wanted to know their kid was telling the truth when she said she was sleeping over at a girlfriend’s house or riding with a buddy to the library. The cops got the password and logged on right there and then and saw the phone moving slowly north, toward Tempe. Too fast for walking. Too fast for running. Too slow to be in a car.

“Bike?” one of them said.

“Too hot,” another answered. “Plus no tire tracks in the driveway.”

The guy telling the story next to me on his stool had been the one who had understood.

“Bus,” he said. “The perp is on the bus.”

Greater Phoenix had a lot of buses. They were for workers paid too little to own cars. They shuttled folks around, especially early in the morning and late at night. The giant city would have ground to a halt without them. Meals would have gone unserved, pools uncleaned, beds unmade, trash not collected. Immediately all the cops as one imagined a rough profile. A dark-skinned man, probably small, probably crazy, rocking on a seat as a bus headed north. Fiddling with the iPhone, checking the music library, looking at the pictures. Maybe with the knife still in his pocket, although surely that was too much to ask.

One cop stayed at the house and watched the screen and called the game like a sports announcer. All the APBs and the BOLOs were canceled and every car screamed after the bus. It took ten minutes to find it. Ten seconds to stop it. It was corraled in a ring of cars. Lights were flashing and popping and cops were crouching behind hoods and doors and trunks and guns were pointing, Glocks and shotguns, dozens of them.

The bus had a driver and three passengers aboard.

The driver was a woman. All three passengers were women. All three were elderly. One of them was white. The driver was a skinny Latina of around thirty.

“Go on,” I said.