David Mapstone Mystery: The Night Detectives Part 13

"They don't know what to think. The dad wanted to know who hired us, and of course he had never heard of Felix Smith. They didn't know about her boyfriend, either."

"And they didn't know they were grandparents?"

He shook his head.

Her mother last spoke to her on the phone the day before she died and Grace said she wanted to tell her some good news. She said it was a complicated story. But her mom was at work, so they decided to talk about it the next day. But the call never came."

That made me even more suspicious: additional witnesses that Grace was not depressive, not suicidal. And a phone call promising good news: I a.s.sumed that meant telling her about her new baby. This was not a woman who killed herself.

"We have missing time to fill in," I said. "On April twenty-second, Grace was gone when Tim returned at three that afternoon. She didn't die until nearly midnight. None of that time was spent calling her mom in Iowa. So what was she doing?"

I also didn't like the cell-phone situation. Someone Grace's age couldn't live without constant texting. And yet she had a new cell with nothing on it. I looked once more at my phone, willing Mister UNKNOWN to call again. He didn't.

"San Diego PD will re-open this as a homicide based on your report," Peralta said. "It will take time, but they can find her other phone records."

"We don't have time." My temples were starting to ache from stress.

"Maybe I can help." Lindsey was behind me.

I didn't know how much she had heard. But I didn't want her anywhere near a case that involved what would no doubt be a dead baby. Yet before I could speak, Peralta said, "That would be great, Lindsey." To me, "Give her the flash drive with Grace's clients. It's encrypted."

"I need to go to the Apple store at the Biltmore," she said. "And a Radio Shack. Then I can get started."

I handed her the keys to the Prelude.

22.

By the time Lindsey returned, Peralta was gone. She set a large bag down on the desk where I was working.

"I want to see the garage apartment."

I wasn't sure that was a good idea for either of us. That had been Robin's s.p.a.ce, where she had lived with us after coming back into Lindsey's life following a long absence, lived for two years rent-free after she lost her job as curator of a man's art collection. He lost it all in the real-estate collapse and she was looking for her next adventure. I hadn't been up there since her death.

"I want to see it," Lindsey insisted.

I tried very hard not to sigh. We walked up the staircase, bookshelves on one side and a wrought-iron railing on the other, to the landing that overlooked the living room, then across the walkway above the interior courtyard where Lindsey's garden had sat neglected. I fumbled with the keys and opened the door.

Heat greeted us so I turned on the window air-conditioner. It was a simple s.p.a.ce, one large room with a bed and a couple of chairs, an alcove for a little kitchen, and a bathroom. A back door led to an outside staircase on the north end of the building. Grandmother had kept her sewing room up here when I was a child. Robin had added several social realism posters-her specialty in art history-and two of her own oil paintings, abstracts with geometric lines and vivid colors, illuminated by the afternoon sun. Her easel stood in one corner, an empty canvas on it.

Lindsey walked around, lightly touching the edges of the paintings. Opening the closet, she examined Robin's clothes, holding a blouse up to her face.

Her dark hair grew fast and it was now down to her shoulders with bangs added. It fell thick and pin-straight. Women would kill for Lindsey's hair. The edge of it brushed around the nape of her neck as she ran a hand against Robin's clothes. They would kill for her fair skin and the lovely contrasts between dark hair, fair skin, and blue eyes. She looked familiar and yet a stranger. In so many ways, I did not know my wife.

So many times, I had imagined what was next for us, wondered whether I even wanted her to come back. It was a terrible thought, but she had left me once before, when we were first dating, and it had lacerated my heart. She had come back on Christmas Eve and that lyrical return had become a part of our story.

This time when she left, after losing the baby and taking the job offered to her by the governor of Arizona who was becoming Secretary of Homeland Security, the story turned darker. I tried to understand her need to grieve. She had to get out of this house, she had said at one point she didn't know if she could ever stand to be here again, and yet here she was. I tried to understand and yet I had been hurting, too. It was our baby that was dead, not only hers. In the blurred months she had been gone, we had talked nothing out and I had given up trying. I didn't know if I wanted her to come back because I didn't know if I could open up to the pain of another abandonment. The fortifications I had built against her were not strong.

She turned and studied me, a big smile playing on her sensual lips. In her eyes was a nothing look that was densely underlain with meaning. It lasted a few seconds.

"Did you f.u.c.k her there?"

She nodded toward the bed.

Before I could answer-the answer was no-she strode quickly over and slapped me. The blow was so hard it brought little lighted planets and asteroids to the edge of my vision.

"Did you f.u.c.k my sister in that bed?" The smile was gone and her eyes were burning violet with emotion.

She was about to deliver another blow but I caught it. She was strong as h.e.l.l. With her other hand, she shoved me against the wall and mashed her mouth roughly against mine. You could call it a kiss if you called knuckle-breaking a handshake. I twirled her around and slammed her back into the plaster and our tongues fought. She was making sounds that were half whimpers, half snarls. We were both sweating. b.u.t.tons were popping off my shirt. I was jerking her jeans and panties down despite the fact that not a millimeter of s.p.a.ce separated our half-wrestling, half-embracing bodies.

We both fell on the floor and the rest of the clothes came off. What happened next was the angriest lovemaking I could ever imagine. The hardness of the floor was apt. A bed would have been out of place. Her hair fell into my mouth.

Usually there was a part of me standing outside every interaction observing. That me fluttered on the perimeter for only a few seconds, managing to remember Chrissie Hynde lyrics about love and hate and the thin line, wondering if I was taking my woman back or she was taking her man back, noticing that my formerly inhibited Lindsey had been practicing moves and not with me, or if any of this even mattered beyond these minutes and that rough floor, and then the observer was sucked back inside our primal bout and lost. She moaned "f.u.c.k me" among many untranslatable sounds.

Her o.r.g.a.s.m was more intense and longer lasting than any I ever remembered, and finally she collapsed on top of me. The only familiar gesture was her tucking her feet under my legs.

In the silence, I could only hear the fronds of a palm tree brushing against the window. Spasms ripped through my back as my San Diego dive caught up with me, and my face was still stinging from her slap. All other thoughts had been torn away like our clothes.

My shoulder was suddenly wet. And then she started sobbing, in heaving, loud convulsions that seemed too big to be coming out of her slender body. All I could do was hold her and stroke her hair. She initially resisted even as she mashed herself against me, until she finally gave in and held me too. Her arm wrapped so tightly around my neck that I almost pa.s.sed out. It was a long time before she was simply crying.

Afterwards, we lay side by side, one of her long legs over mine. The room was finally cooling down. Somebody could have come in and killed us right then and it would have been okay.

She retrieved a pack of Gauloises out of her wadded up jeans and lit one, then exhaled a long, blue vapor trail. Tobacco mingled with the pervasive scent of s.e.x.

I followed the smoke out into the room, down her lovely body, past our reddened knees, and noticed the tattoo on the top of her right foot. The word "Emma" was surrounded by brambles.

It made me smoke one of her French cigarettes, too, even though it would probably make me slightly ill. I am an old guy, so in my mental world body art is confined to Melville's whalers, real sailors and enlisted Marines, and trailer trash. It is elitism out of step with the age, but I find tattoos barbarous. And here was one on the perfect fair foot of my wife. True, she had worn a small stud in her nose when we had first dated, but that was years ago and Lindsey was no longer twenty-eight. This made her feel more alien and distant from me.

The tattoo's provenance was no mystery: Emma, at least for Lindsey, was our lost daughter. Emma wasn't a name I would have chosen. We didn't even know the gender of the baby.

It was better to make light conversation as she lay against me, both of us staring at the ceiling.

"How was the Apple Store?"

"I got a new laptop," she said. "And other stuff."

I had never seen Lindsey travel without a computer. "What happened to yours?"

She blew a smoke ring, then a second.

"They confiscated it after they took away my security clearance and fired me."

23.

Lindsey dropped me at the office the next morning. Even though it was ten, I had beaten Peralta there again. I was so sore from the various explosions in my life that my first few steps were like an old man's. I wasn't complaining about the ones that involved Lindsey but I was out of practice. The night before, I went to bed while Lindsey worked on her new computer. She had claimed a s.p.a.ce on the landing above the living room and sat cross-legged with her back against the wall. When I was a child, the stairs and landing had seemed exceptionally high. Now, having grown to six-feet-two, I could touch the landing with my hand. Such was perspective and context.

Sleep hadn't come easily, so I was still awake when Lindsey had slipped in bed and curled up against me. It was so much like what Robin had done that first night that it kept me awake even longer. At first I thought my dreams had turned into a hallucination. But, no, it was Lindsey. Robin was taller and bustier. We fit together beautifully. Robin was dead.

Lindsey woke me from two nightmares, but when she wanted to know what I was dreaming, I said I couldn't remember. Hearing about other people's dreams was as tedious as watching their vacation videos and Lindsey sure didn't want to know about my dreams lately.

Around five, we had s.e.x again, this time without the anger, but she was as loud as her half-sister, something new about my wife.

We used to play a game over c.o.c.ktails. Lindsey had been endlessly entertained about my adventures before we got together, but she had drawn the line at knowing about my former girlfriends. It was better for her mental health not to know, or so she had said. As we had enjoyed martinis, I would tease her: "I'll tell you anything, all you have to do is ask."

"No thanks," she would say.

When I had asked about her life, she would say, "I lived a boring life before you, Dave. There's nothing to tell." I had never believed that, even though I was older than she and had lived perhaps more adventures, but she didn't talk easily about herself. I knew she had grown up in chaos, run away to join the Air Force where she had learned computers, and had claimed one boyfriend before me. Perhaps this was even the truth.

Now I wondered how much I wanted to know about the past months of her life. I imagined her boyfriend in D.C. as wealthy, handsome, and definitely better endowed than me. Maybe he was a black guy. Maybe her lover was a woman. And now I knew this person had mined a deeper lode of s.e.xual pa.s.sion from her than I had ever been able to reach. For that to happen, a woman had to be willing to really let her lover in, really open herself. She had not done that for me. I didn't realize it at the time, but the past twenty-four hours had shown me different. Did I really want to know about those past months?

After we lost the baby, Lindsey could barely endure being touched. That changed yesterday as we bounced the historic floorboards in the garage apartment. My wife, who had never even used the word "a.s.s" before, was now talking dirty during s.e.x.

I supposed I should thank the son of a b.i.t.c.h.

Now I was slipping my report on Grace Hunter into a file folder when the office phone rang and the readout was a San Diego area code.

"This is Detective Sanchez with the San Diego Police," came a pleasant voice on the other end. So Isabel Sanchez was going to talk to me after all.

"How may I help you?"

"How about opening your gate so I can come in."

This was not good. I wished Peralta were here but pressed the b.u.t.ton to open the gate.

The night detective was about five-four with a size two figure, dark eyes with long lashes, and long, black hair that looked as if it had caught a gust off the Pacific at that exact second. Her pregnancy was also beginning to show. The man with her was a few inches shorter than me but very buff with yellow surfer-boy hair. San Diego had the best-looking cops in the country.

"This is my partner, Detective Jones," she said. I invited them to sit down, thinking: sure, Jones-he probably had multiple IDs and aliases, too.

"Deputy Chief Kimbrough speaks highly of you," she said.

"That's nice. He's a great cop."

"That's why we're not filing a charge to ask our friends in Phoenix to arrest you on," said the pleasant voice.

So it was going to be like this.

Several charges came to mind, but she wouldn't know about those.

I said quietly, "I was a victim of a crime in your city."

"I can understand how you might still feel badge-heavy, Mapstone," said Jones, who, with his mean little eyes, looked exactly like a badge-heavy cop. "But you're not a deputy sheriff anymore."

We went through this small talk, all designed to get a rise out of me, for about ten minutes. None of it worked. Jones gave me the cop stare. I returned it with the amiable look of a concerned civilian. I didn't even feel the need to bring up their rushed and shoddy investigation into Grace's death. From their att.i.tude, it seemed clear that Kimbrough had already done that, based on my report that Peralta had emailed to him yesterday.

Sanchez said, "Grace Hunter phoned your office the day she died."

I looked at her evenly, which probably made her more suspicious. But this was the way I always reacted to shocking news. It took me a moment to deny it, but then she produced a copy of the LUDs-local usage details-from Grace's phone.

She handed me the sheet. Sure enough, our 602 area code number stood out, call placed at four-ten p.m. on the day she died. The call lasted two minutes. I memorized Grace's phone number to write down once they had left.

"Care to explain?" Sanchez looked at me sweetly.

I cared a great deal and had no explanation. I turned on my laptop and opened up the office calendar. It showed that Peralta had given a speech that afternoon at a law-enforcement conference. We hadn't been in the office when the call came in. No one had left a message. Sanchez walked around, looked over my shoulder, and examined the listing.

"How long did you know Grace Hunter?" Jones asked unsweetly.

"I didn't know her when she was alive. There was no message left here. You can see from the LUD that it was a quick call. It probably rang to the answering machine and the caller hung up."

Jones leaned forward in his chair. "Want to try again?"

"No."

We sat for a good five minutes with only the sound of the air conditioner to keep us company. I struggled to maintain my agreeable, relaxed look, but the reality was that it sucked being on the other side of an interrogation. I wasn't used to it. This would be a good time for Peralta to arrive.

"It seems too coincidental," Sanchez said, walking in a circle around the office, studying the large, framed maps of Arizona and Phoenix that I had bought at Wide World of Maps to decorate the place. "You go to San Diego and find her husband, Tim Lewis, murdered. His apartment blows up. Now we know that Grace Hunter called you before she died."

"If she did, we didn't know that," I said. So they were married. "And Tim was a client. He asked us to look into her suspicious death..."

"We know all that." Detective Jones dismissed me with a chop of his hand. "We found your receipt in the blast debris. Hand written on blank paper and signed by you. Real professional operation you have going here, Mapstone. No answering service. Hand-written records."

It was my turn to lean toward him. "We all have our shortcomings, Jones. Like when Tim filed a missing person's report on Grace with your department and n.o.body made the connection that she was already dead and miscla.s.sified as a suicide."

Jones' ears started turning red.

"Wait for me in the car, Brent," Sanchez said. He noisily pushed back the chair and slammed the door behind him.

She leaned against Peralta's desk and watched her partner leave, then turned her head toward me.

"Are you the good cop?" I asked.

"Dream on. So no call from Grace Hunter?"

"We never talked to her."