The media moved on, to a gang rape out in the suburbs that occurred after a high-school dance, to the shooting of a police officer in the white suburb of Gilbert, reminding readers and viewers that “things like this don’t happen here.” The implication was that they did happen in the city, where the brown-skinned people lived, where severed heads were delivered right to your doorstep.
Peralta left office without talking to the media. The new sheriff immediately announced he would begin sweeps to arrest illegal immigrants. Peralta had focused on the smugglers that abandoned the immigrants to die in the desert, or held them hostage-sometimes a hundred in a house-until relatives paid to set them free. He had worked with the state attorney general to go after the electronic fund transfer services such as Western Union. The bad guys used them to move ransom money.
Violent crime in the areas policed by the county was at twenty-year lows and the jails were well run. He had put Bobby Hamid in prison. Mike Peralta had been the best sheriff in the county’s history, better than “Cal” Boies-Peralta never used his deputies to sway an election-better even than Carl Hayden, who went on to be one of the longest-serving senators in American history. He stood for, as I heard him say in one campaign speech, “tough law enforcement and simple justice.” In the end, the only thing that seemed to matter was his opponent’s pledges to “stop illegal immigration.” “What part of illegal don’t you understand?!,” one of his campaign signs read. I wondered who did the landscaping at the new sheriff’s house in Fountain Hills. Now he’d probably use inmates.
By the end of the week my beard was coming in nicely. I hadn’t worn one since I had joined the Sheriff’s Office. I awaited word from the university, wondering what it would be like to teach again, what students were like now. I had seen some of the classrooms. They had high-tech lecterns with a microphone and a computer dock for PowerPoint presentations and all sorts of new media. I didn’t need that. Just give me some willing minds. I wondered if I would have to take Robin to class with me. I wondered if I would be endangering the students as long as this case remained open. Some times I lay awake and pondered whether Jax could really be the killer they said he was. Most of the time I fought to keep my mind off the events of last year, especially the late summer when the dreadful heat lingered. Sometimes the bedroom seemed so large that I would shrink to nothing and float away.
