The office was big and airy, with large windows looking out on the arid Patriots Square across the street, and the massive new ballpark several blocks east. Other walls were lined with law books and old records, long forgotten by the county. The furnishings were strictly courthouse castoffs: large desk, a couple of tables and straight-back chairs, all of dark, heavy wood. I had brought in a watercolor print by a Santa Fe artist. It reminded me of a trip to New Mexico a few years before, but it bugged Peralta, who had no taste for even the slightly abstract.
I certainly didn’t need the office-I could work at home on the laptop or find a cubicle at the sheriff’s headquarters a block south-but I liked it. It had a wonderful dingy, 1940s quality. Years before it had been the sheriff’s private office before it was relegated to storage and then forgotten, until Peralta commandeered it for me. “It will give you structure,” he had said. But I also knew it would allow him to keep an eye on me but not have me close enough to make the regular deputies at Madison Street uncomfortable.
I cleared off a scuffed wooden courtroom table as my Yarnell workspace. Lindsey was trying to teach me to use computerized spreadsheets and expert programs to organize my information. But I still found comfort in index cards, sheets of paper, a white board, and a cork bulletin board. If the stories about computers melting down on New Year’s Day 2000 were true, my old-fashioned tools might be best. Still, I used my Mac PowerBook for writing, e-mail, and surfing the Net, using about ten percent of its capabilities, Lindsey chided me. Whatever worked. I wanted to deliver a report to Hawkins and Peralta in two weeks at the most.
“Hey-yo, Mapstone.”
Carl, the building security guard, was standing at the door. Flush-faced and white-haired, with a thin British army officer mustache, Carl was retired from the Arizona Highway Patrol. He still carried himself with the bearing of a member of an elite law enforcement agency, but he was also very lonely and could talk the entire morning away.
“Another beautiful day in Phoenix,” Carl said, examining the doorjamb for who-knows-what. “God, I hate days like this. It’ll only make those damned people from the Midwest want to move out here for good. Then they’ll bring all their problems. Then they’ll enact a slew of new laws and make things just like what they wanted to get away from in Minnesota or Illinois.”
