Page 24 of Safe Enough

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 that 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 corralled 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 Hispanic of thirty.

“Go on,” I said.

The guy beside me sipped his beer again and sighed. He had arrived at the point where the investigation was botched. They had spent close to twenty minutes questioning the four women, searching them, making them move up and down the street while the cop back at the house watched for GPS action on the screen. But the cursor didn’t move. The phone was still on the bus. But the bus was empty. They searched under the seats. Nothing. They searched the seats themselves.

They found the phone.

The last-but-one seat at the back on the right had been slit with a knife. The phone had been forced edgewise into the foam rubber cushion. It was hidden there and bleeping away silently. A wild goose chase. A decoy.

The slit in the seat was rimed with faint traces of blood. The same knife.

The driver and all three passengers recalled a white man getting on the bus south of Chandler. He had seated himself in back and gotten out again at the next stop. He was described as neatly dressed and close to middle age. He was remembered for being from the wrong demographic. Not a typical bus rider.

The cops asked, “Was he wearing sneakers?”

No one knew for sure.

“Did he have blood on him?”

No one recalled.

The chase restarted south of Chandler. The assumption was that because the decoy had been placed to move north, then the perp was actually moving south. A fine theory, but it came to nothing. No one was found. A helicopter joined the effort. The night was still dark but the helicopter had thermal imaging equipment. It was not useful. Everything single thing it saw was hot.

Dawn came and the helicopter refueled and came back for a visual search. And again, and again, for days. At the end of a long weekend it found something.

“Go on,” I said.

The thing that the helicopter found was a corpse. White male, wearing sneakers. In his early twenties. He was identified as a college student, last seen the day before. A day later the medical examiner issued his report. The guy had died of heat exhaustion and dehydration.

“Consistent with running from a crime scene?” the cops asked.

“Among other possibilities,” the medical examiner answered.

The guy’s toxicology screen was baroque. Ecstasy, skunk, alcohol.

“Enough to make him unstable?” the cops asked.

“Enough to make an elephant unstable,” the medical examiner answered.

The guy beside me finished his beer. I signaled for another.

I asked, “Case closed?”

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