Desert Noir (9781615952236) Read Online Free PDF

conscious mind refused to face?
    Jimmy gave me a sad look before he answered. “It was the early Sixties, Lena. A lot of young women, many of them with children, went missing around then. Young men, too.” 
    â€œThen let’s narrow the search to women who went missing within a thousand-mile radius of Arizona.” 
    He smiled with perfectly straight teeth courtesy of his Mormon adoptive parents. “I’m already on it. Did you think I wouldn’t be?” 
    I blushed. Nobody had to convince Jimmy of the importance of identity. Although he knew who his biological parents were, we were both engaged in the same pursuit—chasing down the ghosts of memory. Who were we—really? Was Jimmy a Pima or a Mormon or a combination of both? Who was I? A victim of child abuse or the lone survivor of a family tragedy? As Jimmy had explained during our first meeting when I asked about his unusual tribal tattoo, “You can’t know where you’re going until you know where you’ve been.” 
    The rest of the day was filled with the usual tasks. I followed up on another of Albert Grabel’s referrals and secured a contract from a restaurant chain. The Golden Apple’s profits had dipped severely in recent months and they had grown suspicious of a certain manager. The personnel director, hamstrung by state and federal employee’s-rights law, could only give me the manager’s name, birth date, and social security number. She told me to do my thing and not to let her know what that thing was. What she didn’t know about couldn’t be testified to in court.
    Within three hours, Jimmy had generated a five-page computer print-out listing every address where the man ever lived, the names and histories of his three ex-wives, his ex-neighbors’ telephone numbers, his educational background (he had not graduated from college as his application stated—he’d been expelled for cheating during his sophomore year), his entire work history (which included seven jobs he had not listed), a bankruptcy, overdue credit card balances amounting to more than twelve thousand dollars, two convictions in Florida for petty theft, and one conviction in South Carolina for embezzlement. Jimmy even discovered that the man had also amassed a considerable on-line gambling debt.
    After a few phone calls to make certain the manager we were investigating was the man on the print-outs, I knew we’d found the source of the Golden Apple’s problem. What they would do with this information was their business but past experience convinced me they wouldn’t prosecute. They’d just fire him and write on his personnel record that he was “not eligible for re-hire.” The man would then move on to the next job and the next embezzlement.
    I smiled at Jimmy. “Brilliant. Now let’s wait until tomorrow before we call the Golden Apple. No point in letting them know how easy this is.” 
    He smiled back. “A child could do it.”
    â€œThat’s what you keep saying.”
    The next job, an insurance investigation, would take a little longer. Copper State Insurance wanted to know if the woman claiming crippling injuries in a car accident was faking. A cursory glance at the print-out of her recent credit card statements hinted at just that. Of course, there might be a perfectly good explanation why a wheelchair-bound woman living alone might need rock-climbing gear. A gift for a boyfriend, maybe? I studied the print-out closer and discovered the shoes were a size six.
    Jimmy went home just after five and I locked up and went upstairs to my overhead apartment, taking my .38 with me. Dusk was more than two hours away, but instead of closing my apartment door behind me, I raised my gun, flipped on the overheads, and slipped carefully through the two rooms, peering behind the shower curtain, into the kitchen pantry, and even into the bedroom’s long, dark