Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1
 
He’d rather be at Starbucks. Or Hava Java. Or Luci’s.
 
He’d rather be spending Saturday morning in a grubby sweatshirt
and a pair of jeans, staring into the sleepy eyes of his beautiful wife,
Kelly, while sipping steamy cups of espresso among whiskery hipsters
who wear wool hats year-round. In the desert.
 
Yes, on a lazy Saturday morning, he’d rather be judging millennials.
 
He’d rather be reading. Or rereading. For his birthday, Kelly
bought him a handsomely bound special edition of To Kill a Mockingbird
that he’s been wanting to devour, as if for the first time.
 
He’d rather be tossing a ball with his son, Trevor.
 
Or hiking at Squaw Peak.
 
Detective Alex Mills of the Phoenix Police Department would
rather be undergoing electrolysis of the gonads on this otherwise lazy
Saturday morning than being here, doing this.
 
Instead of staring into Kelly’s sleepy eyes, Mills is staring into a hole
in the ground. Not a very deep hole, maybe a foot and a half, a gash
really, a pit. In this hole, staring back at him, is a dead John Doe, his
arms and legs akimbo like an acrobat who fell to earth and missed the
net. It’s eight thirty, about sixty-five cool degrees, typical for an early-
March morning in the valley. The smell of death is starting to rise. Mills
guesses the body has been here overnight, that John Doe was murdered
shortly before midnight—but time of death is not his job; that task
belongs to the Office of the Medical Examiner. Judging by the dried
blood around the eyes, the black-and-purple bruises that seep from the
forehead down, the corpse’s dented head, and the crater in the crown,
Mills concludes that John Doe is the victim of a rather unfriendly head
bashing. But cause of death is not his job either. Again, the OME. Sorry
to bother the medical examiner, but the fact is Alex Mills has not been
denied the piety of a lazy Saturday with his wife to perform an autopsy.
He’s here for two reasons: to figure out who killed John Doe and to
figure out why. Of course, that won’t happen right now, right here,
at the crime scene. Mills doesn’t even know at this point if the crime
scene is the place of death. Though this crime scene, it could be strongly
argued, is the ultimate place of death.
 
Mills lifts his head from the hole in the ground. He scans the
horizon. There is death everywhere. Lovely, landscaped, manicured
death. Marked by statuaries of imported marble, exquisitely sculpted.
Like something you’d see outside an Italian palazzo, not here at Valley
Vista Memorial Gardens in Phoenix, Arizona.
 
A gathering of marbleized angels, birds, saints, human hands
clasped in prayer, you name it—they’re all frozen in time here at Valley
Vista. Samuel Shine was a golfer, apparently. Mary Harrison Delahunt
was a fan of roses. Gordon D. Hancock loved dogs. With such a swanky
neighborhood, the property values at Valley Vista Memorial Gardens
are said to be double the value of your average Phoenix home. This is
where the privileged go to rest. The same luxury had not been afforded
John Doe, however. His grave is marked not by marble statuary but
by a cardboard sign roughly excised from a carton that was once the
home of a Whirlpool refrigerator. Add a thick tree branch and some
hearty duct tape, and you have a grave marker staked into the ground
that reads the following:
 
I’m Sorry
That I fucked over everybody
I got what I deserved
And I picked the place myself
 
Alex Mills is shaking his head, bewildered by the fucking crazy
world that produces crazy people who do crazy things when, really,
people should just go to Starbucks, or their favorite coffeehouse, and
fucking relax.
 
“We recovered the Sharpie, Alex,” a crime scene tech tells him from
above.
 
He looks up. “What?” he barks. “You think the murder weapon
was a Sharpie?”
 
“No, Alex. I don’t,” the tech replies, then points to the cardboard
sign. “We believe the Sharpie was the writing instrument.”
 
Mills nods. “Right. That. Of  course. Where’d you find the marker?”
 
“About thirty feet down that slope,” the tech says. “It was resting
in the grass.”
 
“Interesting,” Mills says. “Prints?”
 
“Hopefully.”
 
Mills rises to his feet, gives his legs a shake to loosen his aging
knees, and says, “Nice work.”
 
He takes in the view. It is, indeed, a vista of the valley. From this
acreage of death you can look across Phoenix to the raging peaks of the
Sierra Estrella mountain range and, to the left, the slightly less excited
South Mountain. You can think yourself a poet, for a moment, sent
here by God to interpret the erosion of time and find yourself completely
inadequate, if not a fool, for presuming you can interpret anything
this ancient.
 
What you can interpret, what Alex Mills is paid to interpret, is the
erosion of life.
 
He looks at this crude grave below him once more. It was dug with
irregular scoops; at least that’s what the skid marks from the shovel
suggest. No one tried to be tidy. The dirt was tossed everywhere, the
work of an amateur. Pebbles litter the grass. One of them snuck inside
Mills’s tennis shoe and is rolling around in there like a pinball.
 
Befitting the clientele of Valley Vista, John Doe is wearing a suit
jacket, dress shirt, no tie, as if he came from work. Or a cocktail party.
 
When she first inspected the victim, homicide detective Jan Powell,
a former patrol officer who recently joined the Violent Crimes Bureau,
had pointed to the dead man’s shoes and whispered, “Ferragamo.”
 
If only the body had been as easy to identify as the shoes.
 
No wallet. No ID. No business card. Nothing. The prints came
back with no match to anything in the database.
 
But Alex Mills has a hunch. A good hunch. You don’t get to die
in style and stay anonymous for long. John Doe is a VIP corpse. A
member of the dead elite.
 
He has to laugh. And he does. Audibly. He drifts away, hoping his
foolishness goes unnoticed. He has suddenly amused himself with the
inevitable headline of the valley’s latest murder:
 
DEAD BODY FOUND AT CEMETERY
 
For once, the media will get it right.