The Death File: A gripping serial killer thriller with a shocking twist. J. Kerley A.

enough to kill so efficiently. It was a wrong note, hell, a wrong chord.

      Novarro paced the desolate parking lot for a full hour and came to two conclusions: One, that a highly competent professional had broken into Meridien’s cloud account and erased it, and – given high competence as a standard – two, a similar professionalism was likely employed in Meridien’s murder and what she believed was a staged robbery.

      There were fierce and desperate people in the valley who would kill for a week’s worth of heroin, pulling a trigger and running. Move up a level and several thousand dollars bought a backseat strangling and a body dumped in the desert.

      This was a higher level still.

      Her mind reeling with questions, Novarro returned to her vehicle and descended the mountain, angling down Central Avenue and aiming for her downtown home.

      Novarro had owned a house in midtown for eight months, making the down payment two days after getting her detective’s shield and the raise accompanying the new badge. The neighborhood was sketchy, but only four blocks from the Roosevelt Historic District, its gentrification effects moving like a slow-motion tsunami toward Novarro’s block.

      It was the first home ownership in Tasha Novarro’s family. She’d grown up in a double-wide trailer at the edge of the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community between Mesa and Scottsdale, her mother there mostly, her father never. Though it was Novarro, her younger brother, and mother, rarely were there just the three of them in residence; a ragged procession of relatives constantly passing through the house, sometimes for hours, sometimes months. The fragile emotional conditions at the house led Novarro’s Aunt Chyla to proclaim the domicile “a boxed set of thunderstorms.”

      Novarro sought refuge in school, her dedication to study leading to a pre-law scholarship at Arizona State University. Her contribution would have been forty-five hundred dollars saved from working nights and weekends at a Ranch Market in northeast Phoenix, but one of her distant cousins – a handsome thirty-year-old charmer needing a place to stay following a forgery stint in prison – boogied off to points unknown after two months, taking her virginity and checkbook and emptying her account before he disappeared.

      Left with only grades and ambition she went to the police academy because it was an arm of the law and was free.

       And maybe, someday …

      Novarro swung around the corner and onto her street, driving to midblock and pulling into her driveway. It was a small house and the windows were grated out of necessity, but she’d spent almost a thousand dollars and dozens of hours landscaping the yard, hard brown dirt and sand when she’d purchased it, beaten down by three large dogs. Now the driveway was bordered with bright flowers, a desert willow embellishing one corner of the boxy structure, a palo verde the other. The backyard held a lime tree that had somehow survived the canine onslaught. It wasn’t much, but everyone said it was the prettiest house on the street.

      Novarro was ten steps from her front door when she noticed a centimeter-wide band of light leaking out. Ajar. A sizzle of electricity ran down her spine and she fell into a crouch, slipping her weapon from her rear waistband and creeping to the door. She put her ear to the crack, nothing. Novarro nudged the door open with her foot and peeked past the frame, smelling the sweet scent of marijuana.

      “POLICE!” she yelled. “The house is surrounded. Put your hands on your head and walk to the front.”

      A sound from somewhere in the rear.

      “NOW!” she yelled. “OR YOU’RE DEAD!”

      Seconds later a slender Native American male stepped from the hall with his hands atop a head of long black hair in a rubber-banded ponytail. He was boyishly handsome, like a man not fully formed, the face poised between pretty child and handsome adult. He wore a bead-embellished leather jacket over a white tee and blue jeans, a black concho belt around his waist, his feet in red trail runners. He stepped into the living room and pirouetted, stopping with a stumble into the wall and a broad grin aimed at Novarro.

      “Jesus, Tash,” he said. “You’re such a drama queen.”

      The muzzle dropped. It was Ben, her twenty-one-year-old brother. She’d given him a key months ago, regretted it a week later, but now it was his. If she asked for the key back or changed the lock, she’d be …

      An Indian Giver.

      Novarro blew out a breath. “I didn’t see your car outside, Ben.”

      “A buddy dropped me off. We were out doin’ a li’l partying.”

      Novarro heard the slur of pot and alcohol in her brother’s voice and she gave him narrowed eyes. “Your car’s at home, I hope?”

      The last time this happened he’d forgotten where he’d parked.

      “Fuckin’ bank came an’ got it yesterday, the bast—” He belched into his palm, “—ards.” He looked up. “’S’cuse me.”

      Novarro had a mental picture of the repo man hooking up the 2001 Corolla and driving away. Six months back she’d lent – OK, given – Ben the price of the down payment plus two months of installments.

      “You got behind on payments,” she sighed.

      “The insur’nce was killing me, Tash.”

      “Think your driving record has anything to do with it?”

      “I, uh, gotta take a whizzer.” As usual when Ben didn’t like the direction of a conversation, he fled.

      It was five minutes until the toilet flushed, reminding Novarro of the time the family’s commode had been leaking for a week until a nine-year-old Ben removed the tank top, stared at the mechanism as he flushed several times, then, using a bent bobby pin, fixed the toilet in thirty seconds.

      “How are things at your job?” Novarro asked. “They still got you on thermostats?”

      “I got tired of tinkering with little shit.” He winked. “So I disappeared in a puff of smoke.”

      Novarro felt her heart drop. “Disappeared?”

      “I’m the Coyote, Tasha,” Ben grinned crookedly, invoking the mythological, shape-shifting Trickster in many Native American cultures, reckless, self-involved, with a sense of humor both clownish and cruel. “I have the magic in me.”

      Novarro shook her head. He’d quit or been fired. Her voice pushed toward anger, but she fought it. “You have too much liquor in you,” she said quietly.

      “Me Indian,” Ben said in a cartoon voice, a distorted smile on his face. “Me like-um firewater. It make-um me big happy.”

      “Don’t start that crap, Ben. It’s demea—”

      “FYA-WATAH!” he whooped, jumping from the couch and beginning a stumbling circular dance, hand patting his mouth. “Owoo-woo-woo … Owoo-woo-woo … Owoo–woo …” He paused as if taken by a sudden thought. “Me need-um a drum track here, Tash,” he slurred, moving his hands up and down like drumming. “You got-um any tom-toms?”

      “I got aspirin,” she said. “Coffee.”

      Her brother scowled at his choices. “Coyote need-um more firewater.” His hand flashed beneath his jacket and found a pint bottle of red liquid; his favorite grain alcohol into which he’d poured several bags of strawberry Kool-Aid. At 190proof, it was just shy of pure ethanol. Before Novarro could cross the floor it was in his mouth.

      “Give me that shit,” she said, grabbing his arm. Ben spun, his hand pushing Novarro away as his lips sucked greedily at the bottle.

      “I said give … me … that.” Novarro wrenched the spirits from her brother’s hand and held it beyond his reach as he grabbed wildly at the pint.

      “ME NEED-UM FIREWATER!” he railed.

      Novarro retreated across the floor. “You need to go to bed.”