Read Online Cactus Heart by Jon Talton - Free Book Online Page A

here.”
    â€œWhat is here?” I asked. “It’s not exactly prison-like.”
    â€œWe’re kind of a nursing home,” Heather Amis said.
    â€œWhy not just release her?”
    â€œShe was an accessory to a capital crime and for years the Yarnell family opposed it. Yarnell money has elected a lot of governors and legislatures. Parole boards pay attention.”
    â€œDo they still oppose it?”
    â€œI don’t know, Deputy.” A flush of anger crept into her tan cheeks. “She’s been left to rot in the system for decades. I may be the first person who ever took an interest in her.”
    Then she kind of deflated. “Anyway, Miss Richie has nowhere to go. She was an orphan. No family. No friends outside the walls. What would she be released to?”
    She shook her head and ran slender brown hands through curling brown hair. “You’re a cop, so you have no reason to cut anybody a break. And most of the people I see in here, I can understand that. But, Jesus, the state of Arizona has taken this woman’s entire life. Can’t you just let her die in peace?”
    We sat in silence for a moment. There was nothing to debate. The truth is, cops routinely deal with the marginal, the ignored, the alone, the people who fall through the cracks, as Lindsey says. But Frances Richie was all that in the extreme. Finally, I said as gently as I could, “May I see her?”
    â€œShe’s not really responsive,” Heather said. “I’ve been working in the unit for six months, and she’s never said more than five words to me. But, whatever.”
    She walked out in a whirl of loose denim and clopping clogs and came back in about ten minutes, backing in the door, pulling a wheelchair.
    Somebody said a great novelist could see the beautiful young girl inside the old woman. It would have been difficult with Frances Richie, even though the old news photos showed a young woman who was somewhere between cute and beautiful. Now her face was dominated by an enormous double chin, bulbous nose and battleship gray eyes poking from bony temples—the skull starting to come out at last—all mounted on a body long since overtaken by starchy food, inactivity, and disease. Heather Amis turned her toward me, knelt down and told her who I was.
    She just stared and nobody said anything for a long time. In the silence, the room’s smell of Lysol covering urine became apparent. Somewhere in the background, an electric something-or-other hummed.
    Finally, I said the only thing that seemed to matter. “We found the bodies of Andrew and Woodrow Yarnell.”
    Frances Richie just stared that watery, unfocused stare, her eyes fixed on a place we couldn’t see.
    I went on: “We found them bricked up in a wall, down in a tunnel in a building near Union Station in downtown Phoenix.”
    Heather shot me a nasty look. I could see Frances Richie breathing harder, her bulky chest laboring to fill her lungs.
    â€œMiss Richie,” I said, “tell us how those boys got in that building.”
    â€œIs this really necessary?” Heather whispered, looking at me like I was the vilest man alive. “I’m going to get some coffee. I can’t listen to this.” She clopped off down a hallway, and I was alone with Frances Richie. But the old woman looked out into the sunlight, her face an unreadable ruin of wrinkles and fat. I stood and walked maybe ten feet, to a grimy window.
    Outside, brand-new sidewalks cut across the flat brown earth of the desert, heading to other buildings past barbed wire, elaborate gates and security cameras perched like electronic vultures. On the other side of the parking lot, a group of male convicts wearing orange jumpsuits were doing something in a cotton field. What was the tunnel into Frances Richie?
    I said, “I saw the photo of you in the dark dress the day you were brought back to Phoenix. Seemed like a very pretty