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work, pardon my French. But Phaedra really worked.”
    I asked Susan Knightly about her photo business.
    “You have to do a little of everything to survive in this town. Some PR, some freelance for
Phoenix Magazine
, advertising, social scene. I don’t do weddings and babies, if that’s what you mean.” She examined me to see if I was a philistine, but declined to share the verdict. “I had a show at the Gilbert Gallery in Scottsdale earlier this year.”
    I nodded, then asked, “Do you have any reason to believe Phaedra might have been a victim of foul play?”
    “Of course I do,” she said, her voice gathering intensity. “That’s such a stupid cop question. Look at the newspaper every day: driveby shootings, kidnappings and rapes, random killings. My neighbor was mugged a week ago in broad daylight. An attractive young woman just doesn’t disappear like this.”
    “My boss thinks she’s off with a new boyfriend. She has a history of that, you know.”
    “Tell your boss I think he’s a pig,” she said. Then her face softened. “Phaedra really wants to be a photographer. It really bit her, and she’s worked hard. Has a good eye, too. Tell me why she would just walk away from the chance I was giving her, no matter how sexy a new boyfriend might be?”
    It was a good question, and I didn’t have an answer for it yet.
    I left Susan Knightly to finish watering the plants while I knocked on doors. I had deliberately come early to find people at home, but the neighbors had only a passing knowledge of Phaedra. Such was the norm in a transient city.
    “She’s sure loud when she has sex,” the woman next door told me, blushing. “Makes me envious.” But the woman didn’t even know Phaedra’s name, much less actually see any men or realize she’d been gone for weeks. “I thought it was pretty quiet lately,” she allowed. The landlord said Ms. Riding had paid her rent three months ahead, and that was really all he cared about. By the time I left, I had again become accustomed to flashing my badge to get people to talk to me.
    I had to move on. Class was at 10:30, but it went by quickly: lecture and discussion on the origins of the Civil War, two chapters to read before Friday. By the time I drove the three miles from Phoenix College to the Sheriff’s Office downtown, the temperature was well over 110 degrees. I regretted that I had worn a blue shirt, and I ran the Blazer’s air-conditioning on high to make some of the sweat disappear.
    I spent the afternoon in Central Records, working on the Stokes case. If Rebecca Stokes had run into a serial killer nicknamed “the Creeper,” who was he and what might have happened to him?
    I’m not great with computers, but a young deputy named Lindsey showed me how I could set up search parameters to comb the database for certain kinds of offenders from that era.
    Lindsey had straight black hair, pale skin, a small gold stud in her left nostril, and very shapely legs set off by sheer black panty hose and a black miniskirt. She was pretty, but with a look of constant sardonic detachment. She asked why I wasn’t smiling, and I said, “I’m smiling inside.” She adjusted her oval tortoiseshell glasses and said, “There are no ironic deputies.” Then she smirked at me, and we became fast friends.
    We looked for men with convictions for murder, assault, or rape, along with ones convicted of breaking and entering, who might have been in Phoenix in the late 1950s. We checked files from MCSO, the Phoenix Police Department, the Arizona Department of Corrections, and NCIC, the National Crime Information Center. By four o’clock, we had built a program to look for what we wanted. While Lindsey ran the computer, I looked the old-fashioned way, through my cache of records over at the old courthouse and in the microfilm of old newspapers. All this was an imprecise exercise, dealing with old data and a hundred variables, but it was information Peralta would