The Night Detectives (16 page)

She had spilled her purse on the asphalt behind the truck. She knelt down and slowly gathered up her stuff. Now she was most vulnerable, but neither truck door opened.

After an interminable time spent picking up the contents of her purse and slipping them back in, cursing all the time, she finally made it around the berm and slid into the passenger side of the convertible. Peralta nonchalantly backed up and drove in the opposite direction from the freeway, toward the Big Lots store, and disappeared.

I was left to eat my meal for as long as it took for the Dodge Ram to leave. It consumed a leisurely half hour. They left after twenty minutes but I waited longer before I dared move.

My pulse gradually went down. I called Peralta and reported in.

“So what next?”

“Next,” he said, “we go home.”

“I thought you were following them?”

“We are, Mapstone. With you there to help distract him, Lindsey inserted a tracking device inside his rear bumper. She also got a good description of him through the windshield.”

I'm not sure he needed me there. Lindsey did a fine job of distracting him all by herself.

29

I was about to turn south on Third Avenue into Willo when the xylophone sound made me jump. Exactly like before, the digital readout said, UNKNOWN.

I answered professionally. “Fuck you.”

There was a long pause and I thought he might hang up. Then: “You think you're clever. You think you're putting the pieces together. But you're wrong. You can't solve this case without my help.”

“Why would you help me?”

“I thought we could do business.”

The past tense didn't give me hope for the baby.

I said, “You're wasting my time.”

“Lose anything tonight?”

I was silent.

“You better check, absent-minded professor.”

I didn't say a word. Let him think he outwitted us and found where we were hiding the flash drive, in a motel on the freeway.

Finally, I spoke. “I'm tired of games. Drop a baby doll on me? What does that mean to me?”

I feared what it meant. But I didn't say it. Instead, I pushed on. “I used to solve historic cases for a living. There was a mobster in Seattle who liked to dispose of his victims by having them pushed out of an airplane into Elliott Bay, while he watched from a skyscraper downtown. Unless you're him, this call is over.”

“You didn't like the airplane? I wanted to get your attention. To get you in a bargaining frame of mind. Where would the fun have been if I had just left the package in the vacant lot for you to find? Anyway, if we can drop a baby doll out of an airplane, we can drop other things, too. Just a simple civilian airplane can be quite lethal. Wait until we steal a drone…”

Taking a chance that he was full of his own grandiosity, I said, “I'm hanging up.”

“Wait.”

“For what? I bill by the hour. You're not mysterious. You're not scary. You're an ordinary douchebag. You're wasting my time.”

“You put up a brave front, professor, but you know it's over. Because of your carelessness, now you have nothing to bargain with. That's a good thing for you. I'll let you and everyone you love live. I got what I want.”

Mustering my best acting, having studied theater under Peralta, I filled my voice with surprise. “You son of a bitch!” As if it was only now dawning on me that I had lost the briefcase.

“Don't hang up,” he said. “I want you to think about what I've told you about the country. Don't be a traitor to your race.”

“What about Tim? What about the guy you shot outside our office? They were white.”

I could feel his shrug. “They were in the way of the greater good.”

Now I knew he had killed Felix, too.

I asked about Grace.

“She was a whore,” he said. “All I wanted was the information she had. She wouldn't give it to me. So we made her give herself up like a whore.”

“You raped her before you pushed her off the balcony.”

The rich laugh. “Come, come, Professor. We're both men of the world. I had to let my team have some fun. She sounded like an animal being tortured because they wanted her ass, too. I was above any of that nonsense. But boys will be boys. Afterward, I gave her another chance to help herself. She didn't take it.”

I was about to call him a baby killer but he cut me off.

“You think I'm a criminal, a terrorist. That's what many contemporaries thought about Washington and the Founders. Soon enough, you'll know that I'm a patriot. Count your blessings tonight, Doctor Mapstone, and sleep well.”

The truck-stop cell blinked off, perhaps for good. I pulled over to write down notes on the conversation. The street ahead and behind me was dark and empty.

30

Robin and I were staying at a beachside resort. It curled around a cove on the Pacific with magnificent scenery but we hadn't left the room. She had never looked more radiant. She didn't have Lindsey's classic beauty and was always aware of that. Indeed, they didn't look much of anything like each other. But her smile was the better of the two sisters and it brought all her features together. Her hair was dirty blond, its wavy tresses hitting three inches below her shoulders.

At the moment, she pushed it out of her face as she told me something important. She held a baby in her lap.

Then she sent me out for something, I don't remember what, and on the way back I couldn't remember the room number. Lindsey was at one of the bars and swiveled her stool to face me. She reached out and we embraced and kissed. But I had to get back to Robin. She had the baby with her. So I told Lindsey I would be back and wandered through the halls, restaurants, and shops trying to find the corridor that led to our room. I would have to explain all this to Lindsey but that would have to wait.

But I couldn't find the room, no matter how many halls I roamed, or stairs I climbed. The resort seemed to be adding new buildings as I walked. The place was full of people and I had to push my way through crowds. Some people seemed to know me. I fished in my pocket for my cell phone to call Robin, but all that I found was a rubber pad that said, FRONT TOWARD ENEMY.

“Dave…”

My eyes came open in a dark room. Our bedroom. Lindsey was standing over me.

My groggy voice came to life. “Do we have a fix on those trackers?”

“We're following them. Remember, Peralta wants to wait and see where they go to nest.”

I remembered. It frustrated the hell out of me, but he was no doubt right.

She set her baby Glock on the bedside table, slid out of her clothes, and lay next to me. The skin-on-skin was sublimely visceral.

“Want to see where Grace Hunter's phone went?”

I did.

She opened her new laptop, the bright screen hurting my eyes. I sat up. The clock on the computer read four a.m.

“Have you been up all this time?”

“I couldn't sleep.”

It worried me. I didn't like the idea of her perched on the landing above the living room. True, I had checked from the outside. No one could see her through the picture window. But a fresh memory of Robin shot and dying in the back yard shook me.

“We shouldn't be here,” I said. “It's not safe.”

I didn't give a damn about the assurance I had gotten from the killer.

She said, “We've got an alarm. We've got guns. And we know where the bad guys are. Peralta says we're safe.”

“He's not omnipotent, no matter what he thinks.”

She nodded to the computer screen.

“Let me distract you. I went back a year, and Grace Hunter never left Ocean Beach, exactly like Tim told you. She would walk down to the market a few blocks away, here on Newport Avenue. All her calls were to Tim, her parents, and her friend, Addison. Now, check out April twenty-second. At two-fifty p.m., she leaves the apartment and walks north. It's like she was going to the store. Maybe for diapers.”

I watched as Lindsey brought up a Google maps display.

“Here, at two-fifty-four, she's really on the move.” I watched as the red line ran out of O.B. on Narragansett Avenue, turning north on Chatsworth, and east again on Nimitz Boulevard, heading toward downtown.

“Does she have to be making a call for this to show up?”

“Nope,” Lindsey said. “People would freak out if they knew how much data were being collected on them every minute. All that needs to happen here is for the phone to be turned on. But look here. At three-oh-five, they stop. Right here.”

The map showed the intersection of Nimitz and Locust. It was a nothing little street right before the big stoplight at Rosecrans on the Point Loma Peninsula.

“And that's it. That's where she stays.”

I thought about the missing hours.

“Or,” Lindsey said, “that's where the phone stays.”

“What do you mean?”

“Grace's phone never made it downtown. At four-ten, at Locust and Nimitz, the call was placed on this phone to your office. Grace might have made it. Or, she might have already been in that condo downtown. But at four-seventeen, the phone was turned off at the same location.”

I put my arm around her. “So somebody made contact with her on the way to the store. And she got into a vehicle. Somebody she knew. So she got in with him and they drove toward downtown. Toward Zisman's condo. But what happened at Nimitz and Locust…” My voice trailed off. Things didn't track.

Lindsey shook her head, her voice authoritative. “She had a baby waiting at home. She wouldn't leave him for long. And Zisman wasn't one of her johns. So why would she leave the baby and go to his place? No. Somebody snatched her off the street.”

I was fully awake now, the dream almost forgotten.

She opened a file. “Here's where things get interesting. There was a call made from that phone a few minutes before the call to your office.”

“The San Diego cops didn't have that on their LUDs.”

“They wouldn't,” she said. “It was placed to a scrambling device. Very advanced, very expensive. It scrubs any of the conventional records of the call, even an incoming call. Only some government agencies and corporate executives use this. You have to know where to go in the cell-company databank to find the trail, then decrypt. But here it is. The call was five minutes long.”

“Are you sure nobody knew you were hacking all this?”

“Oh, somebody knew or will know. But what they saw was a low-end data breach coming from the People's Republic of China.”

She opened another file: the list of Grace's clients. “The scrambler call was made to this number. It's his private line.” Another screen showed me his face on the cover of
Fortune
magazine. He looked my age yet was making more money in a week than I would make in my lifetime. Why did I need three college degrees?

“He runs one of the top venture-capital funds in the country,” she said. “He could afford this kind of security. All these executive types have protection. According to the records, he and Grace saw each other regularly for more than two years.”

I took it all in, or thought I did, amazed again at Lindsey's talents.

I stopped myself from tapping my finger on her clean computer screen. “Then the phone was turned off for good, right there on Nimitz?”

“Not exactly. It was turned on again last Friday.”

Suddenly, the air conditioning felt too cold.

“Where is it?”

When she gave me the address, I grew colder still. Grace Hunter's cell phone was in evidence storage at the Phoenix Police Department.

She said, “I answered all of Peralta's questions and it hasn't even been twenty-four hours.”

I let out a long breath. “You're fast.”

She put her hand on my private parts. “I can be.”

31

We were at the Good Egg having breakfast four hours later. Like its neighbor Starbucks at Park Central, it was an institution in Midtown Phoenix. Unlike Sunday, the offices inside the nearby towers were open and the restaurant was busy. The morning was cool enough to sit outside, a dry seventy-nine degrees under the umbrellas, not even hot enough to require the misters. A pleasant dry breeze was coming in from the east. Light-rail trains cruised by on Central, clanging their bells. In her round, nerd-girl sunglasses, Lindsey looked like a spy.

Here we are, I thought, easy targets in assassination range. But the tracker on the Dodge Ram was far away and three Phoenix Police units were in the lot out front, the cops having coffee next door. It would take the bad guys at least a little time to break into the briefcase and even longer to figure out the flash drive.

To figure out they had been played for fools.

A pickup truck did arrive: Peralta's. He was in a suit again and gave us a tiny nod as he walked toward the breezeway and the entrance. I knew it would take time for him to get out on the front patio. He was past his period after leaving office where he didn't want to come here, didn't want to see the assortment of politicos and officials who used the Good Egg for morning meetings. He had shifted his morning routine over to Urban Beans on Seventh Street.

But apparently he was willing to be seen again. I looked back and, sure enough, he was working the room, shaking hands, slapping backs, everyone having a great time. Where were they when he needed them? Now they had a sheriff who was a national embarrassment. He had a long conversation with Henry Sargent, who was sitting at the lunch counter. Henry was a retired honcho from Arizona Public Service.

“Lindsey!” Peralta sat down, full of morning pep. “What have you got for me?”

She went through it as the same waitress who had served him for the past fifteen years poured coffee and went off to place his order.

I read his face: satisfied, impressed, interested, troubled, more interested. An outsider would never know this from his seemingly immobile features, ones that could elicit confessions from criminals or compromises from county supervisors—or, this being Arizona, the other way around. But after so many years, I could see the slight rise of the right eyebrow, the tightening of his mouth, and the easing of a frown which didn't mean his mind was easy. I wondered what troubled him. For me, it was the whole thing.

I asked, “When are we going to interview Zisman?”

He acknowledged me for the first time with a glance of disdain at my Starbucks mocha. “Not yet.”

“When?”

“Mapstone, you sound like an annoying child on a trip. ‘Are we there yet?'”

“Maybe. That makes you the dad who's lost and is too stubborn to ask for directions.”

It was only me and Peralta being ourselves. Lindsey interrupted.

“Boys. I think the targets are definitely in the nest.”

She handed over her new iPad, to which she had added Google maps. Peralta studied it, and then handed it to me. Sure enough, both red dots had converged.

“They've been in this same location for several hours,” she said.

I worried that they might have discovered the trackers and discarded them at the spot on the map. But Lindsey said she had modified each to send a different signal if anyone fiddled with it.

“What time did they get there?” Peralta handed the tablet back to her.

“Around two a.m. They spent a few hours at a bar in Sunnyslope before that.”

He nodded.

The two red dots had nested less than a mile from the bar.

“Excuse me,” he said, and walked back inside the restaurant. The next time I caught sight of him, he was in the breezeway, which once held scores of shops when this was a mall. He was leaning against a pillar, his phone to his ear.

Back at the table, he took his time with breakfast. I had no choice but to do the same, even though I wanted to kick down their door an hour ago.

At last, Peralta gave instructions: take the Prelude home and park it. We would ride with him to greet the kidnappers. I hoped they were good and hung over.

As we left Park Central, he was in the cab of his truck, making another call.

Fifteen minutes later, we were northbound on Seventh Street. Lindsey rode on the jump seat of the extended cab, back with the weapons compartment where he kept his heavy metal. Aside from numbered streets to the east and avenues west, the other easy way you knew your way around Phoenix was to look at the mountains. The South Mountains showed you that direction. The Papago Buttes, McDowells, and, on a clear day, Four Peaks stood to the east. West were the White Tanks. We were driving straight toward North Mountain.

Sunnyslope was one of the few places with soul outside the old city, with a real identity that wasn't subsumed in endless subdivisions. It was located beyond the Arizona Canal and outside the oasis, a desert town, a Hooverville from the Great Depression, and a place that retained its own proud, quirky identity even after it had been annexed into Phoenix in the 1950s. The relatively few natives from there my age and older were “Slopers” first, Phoenicians second. From my perspective, it had some interesting unsolved murders.

The place remained unique even though it had filled in with some of the same fake stucco schlock you found everywhere. A couple of its more notorious biker bars remained. You were aware of being higher than downtown, up against the bare, rocky mountains that shimmered in the sun. If the smog hadn't smudged the view to the South Mountains, you'd see you were at about the same elevation as Baseline Road in south Phoenix, where the Japanese Flower Gardens once stood. From both places, the landscape rolled down to the dry Salt River.

Peralta slowed as we approached the five-point intersection with Dunlap and Cave Creek Road. The parking lot of a shabby shopping strip looked like a used-car joint selling black Suburban vans.

“What the hell?” I said.

“Calm down, Mapstone.”

He wheeled in and parked.

“Stay here.”

He left the engine and air conditioning running and approached the black Suburbans. Out of one stepped a slender man in khakis and an open-collar shirt. Eric Pham, special agent in charge of the Phoenix FBI. Even the head fed wasn't wearing a suit. The New Conformity. They shook hands and talked, and then they walked a ways talking more. Pham was gesticulating, as if laying out a map. Peralta nodded and pointed. Pham nodded.

I asked Lindsey for her iPad and switched the map to a satellite image. The dots had converged at a house at the end of Dunlap, about a mile away. From the photo, it looked like a mid-century modern house. Maybe it was on a little butte; it was hard to tell, but Dunlap rose as it went east before dead-ending at the mountain preserve. That could provide some easy escape routes if they didn't do this right.

Now a couple of Phoenix PD units arrived, along with the huge mobile command post. My stomach was wishing it didn't have breakfast getting in the way of contracting into itself. How long before the news vans and choppers arrived, too?

“Why aren't we doing this ourselves?”

Lindsey put a hand on my shoulder.

“We have to trust him, Dave.”

I leaned my face against her hand, hoping she was right. I knew Peralta still had chits to call in and back channels. But I had a local lawman's mistrust of the feds. I had seen how these quasi-military operations could go very wrong.

The door opened and his bulk filled the seat.

“Phoenix PD is closing off streets,” he said. “The FBI is preparing to deploy a SWAT team.”

“And you explained to Eric Pham that we developed a break in this case…how?”

He took off his sunglasses and rubbed his eyes. “I have my ways, Mapstone.”

“I bet.”

He slipped the shift into drive and rolled back to Seventh Street.

“Wait!” It was an inane blurt, but it came out anyway. Anything to stop this circus. I knew it was too late, even though I had a bad feeling about going in with so many cops, so much firepower.

“Exactly, Mapstone. Wait. There's a baby in that house. The SWAT boys can't send an undercover to the front door with pizza, toss in a flash-bang grenade, and go in blazing. This is going to take time. They'll have to negotiate these guys to come out. We've got other stuff to do in the meantime.”

I looked back with mixed emotions at the gathering army, hoping he was making the right call.