David Mapstone Mystery: The Night Detectives Part 15

The sound was so soft I wasn't sure I had even heard it over the periodic whoosh of cars on Grand. Lindsey noticed my expression and I held up a hand. Someone was walking across the lot, very slowly. It couldn't be Peralta, whose entrance was announced with the alert of the gate opening, followed by roaring engine and b.u.mping suspension. My blood stopped pumping for a couple of seconds. Someone had jumped the fence, no easy maneuver. It could be anybody. The office door was unlocked.

Mail, she mouthed?

I shook my head. The mail lady came later in the afternoon and the gate was locked.

"Get under the desk."

She didn't question me and scrambled into the cave where my legs would normally go. I pulled out the Python, dropped to my knees, and stayed close.

"Are you armed?" I whispered.

She shook her head.

I slipped the Airlite from my pocket and handed it to her.

The only fancy furniture in our office was our chairs and the leather sofa. Otherwise, most of the rest was second-hand, including the two heavy Steelcase desks that looked as if they had once been part of a 1960 secretarial pool. You could fire a rocket-propelled grenade at them and barely make a dent.

I waited for the door to open. Maybe the gate had somehow jammed open, an innocuous malfunction, and the footsteps belonged to a new client, a traveling salesman, or a Jehovah's Witness who would knock and say, "h.e.l.lo, is anyone here?"

The room was silent.

I didn't dare move to catch a glimpse. The desk sat so close to the ground, I was confident that if someone did come in he couldn't see us. That would change if he walked behind Peralta's desk, or toward the Danger Room. By then, I would have him in my gun sights, unless he was prepared.

If I get hit, come out blazing, I telepathed to the frightened blue eyes watching me.

The floor was old and creaked when you walked on it. The hinges squeaked when the door opened. But n.o.body tried to enter. The sound of footsteps came again, this time from the carport. Whoever had come into the lot was still out there. The palm of my hand was sweating into the custom combat grips of the Python.

Then, nothing.

I had to let a good five minutes pa.s.s before I dared slither out on the far side of the desk, ready for action. But no one was there. Waiting was the safe way. But it also ensured that I couldn't see if our visitor had a vehicle. For that matter, I also couldn't get a license tag number. We waited. Finally, I stood and locked the door. Peering out the blinds, I could see the gate was indeed shut.

25.

Not long afterwards, Peralta arrived, sweeping into the room like a parade.

"Lindsey."

"Sheriff."

She was sitting on my desk. I stopped stroking her knees, said nothing, and resolved to avoid his glance.

"Lindsey!" Sharon's voice. I looked up, and she walked in carrying a bag of hot dogs from Johnnie's on Thomas. This was fun food.

As Lindsey and Sharon embraced, Peralta's eyes found mine, and he knew what we had been doing, and his eyes actually twinkled like a tough Saint Nick of nooners. I felt my face flushing.

"We're all here together, like it should be," Peralta announced like the paterfamilias. As if anything were settled. "So let's eat and get to work!"

Lindsey had fixed us healthy salads, to which I added a Chicago dog from Johnnie's.

"He's too gaunt," Sharon whispered to Lindsey.

I told Peralta about the visit from the San Diego cops and the mystery guest who had been in the parking lot but never came in. His forehead tightened as he listened, but he only dived into lunch.

Peralta, with his mouth full: "Sharon talked to Tim Lewis' parents," which I translated from shawob awked a wimoois barents. It had taken many years of listening to Peralta over breakfasts at Susan's Diner and lunches at Durant's to master this particular dialect.

I said, "They talked to you?"

"I used my winning people skills," she said, pulling a chair closer to his desk as she ate her salad like a lady. "Empathy, trust, respect..."

"She flashed her credentials," Peralta said, amazingly pausing in his eating. "Show them."

She held a wallet identifying her as a police psychologist for the San Francisco Police Department.

"After being married to him for thirty years, who could be more qualified?" She winked at him.

"Plus, Tim's mother had all of Sharon's books," he said.

"As I was saying..." Sharon reclaimed the floor, and Peralta, uncharacteristically, shut up. "The mother's name is Vicki, father named Mike. They were both there, a nice couple, and were very generous with their time considering all they've been through. They're devastated by Tim's death and sick about their grandson. The police have tapped their phones, but they haven't heard anything, much less a ransom demand. They don't understand why anyone would have killed Tim or Grace."

I actually swallowed my food before speaking. "So they knew Grace?"

Sharon nodded. "They met her when she and Tim first started dating. After they got together again, they saw her more than a dozen times, including at their wedding, which was held in Riverside, and when she gave birth. They loved her. That was the word each one used."

I listened to Sharon and was so glad to see her. She was a couple of inches shorter than Lindsey's five-seven, but was still in great shape with the black hair and angelic face off a tapestry in a Mexican church. In a way words couldn't describe, she centered our world. I had known her when she was a young, uncertain mother, then as she put herself through college and graduate school, not always with Peralta's emotional support. This had been one of the old battlegrounds between Peralta and me. Then she had hit it big and finally she had divorced him. But apparently "finally" had a second act.

She said what we had heard before: Grace was stable, not suicidal, and had no enemies. Tim's childhood sounded suburban normal, the kind that produced golf pros or lone ma.s.s shooters. And Grace had done a very good job of keeping people from knowing how she had made money working through college.

"They didn't have a clue," Sharon said. "But the world of high-end call girls can be very different from the s.e.xual exploitation you find with streetwalkers or immigrants from Eastern Europe who thought they were getting a trip to America for a job in a factory and it turns out to be a very different kind of a.s.sembly line. What Grace was doing was even more specialized, working on her own. Most work for agencies. But powerful men will pay very well for the services."

"I bet." Peralta licked his fingers. Sharon shot him a civilizing glance and he stopped, using his napkins instead.

"These men pay for the s.e.xual skills, no question. The more versatile, the better. They think they have a woman in her s.e.xual prime who really wants to have s.e.x and enjoys it. Many of them are narcissists who want a beautiful young woman on their arms. It's a prestige thing. If he's an executive, it's gotten too risky to hit on subordinates. So a discreet hooker is the thing."

Lindsey said, "Is it only about the prestige and the s.e.x?"

Sharon shook her head. "Many of the johns also want an emotional connection that they feel they aren't getting from their wives. If Grace was all these things, plus polished, cheerful, intelligent, sophisticated, and romantic, then she could get top dollar. In San Francisco, I met call girls who were getting more than five thousand an hour."

"An hour?" Peralta raised an eyebrow.

"Yes."

"Considering she was their daughter-in-law," I said, "it's better that they didn't know her past."

I certainly didn't know Lindsey's recent past.

Sharon said. "They liked being a family to her. It sounds as if Grace's mother was totally self-absorbed and her father was even worse. Tim's parents went to her graduation last year. Neither of Grace's parents did. Her father was at a golf tournament with his buddy, some washed up pro football player."

I stopped in mid-bite and pushed the hot dog away.

"Larry Zisman?" I asked.

"That the name," she said. "He was a star for the Sun Devils back in the seventies. I remember."

Occam's Razor, indeed.

Peralta attacked his second chili dog with more aggression than usual. A Scottsdale McMansion of possibilities had opened up. One room contained the obvious, that Zisman was a client. Another held the possibility that Zisman had hit on his buddy's daughter and gotten it for free. The rest of the floor plan was too twisted to think about over lunch.

I said, "Maybe Zisman wasn't her client."

"He wasn't," Lindsey said.

Everybody turned to her.

"It took me about two minutes to break into that flash drive," she said. "It contained an Excel spread sheet with sixty two clients: names, Social Security numbers, driver's license numbers, dates, and amounts. No Larry Zisman."

n.o.body took a bite.

I said, "The johns gave her that information?"

"They would have to do that for an escort agency," Sharon said. "It helps ensure safety."

"But," I said, "Zisman knew Grace's father and covered it up."

I could see the slow burn on Peralta's features over Hunter lying to him. Maybe Grace's father didn't know his daughter had been intimate with Larry Zip. That was the most charitable explanation. But he sure knew that Grace had fallen out of Zip's condo, and yet he hadn't admitted their friendship either to Peralta or Isabel Sanchez.

"There's something else." Lindsey nodded toward our front parking lot. "The Prelude has a GPS tracking device tucked inside the front fender. You can buy one in any spy shop."

My legs and feet felt very heavy on the floor.

"What did you do with it?" Peralta asked.

"I left it there." She ate a bite of salad and dabbed her lovely, o.r.g.a.s.m-flushed face with a paper napkin. "If they don't know we found it, we have an edge. From what Dave says, San Diego PD has a hard-on for Zisman now that Dave's shown that Grace didn't kill herself. Maybe we can work with them."

"They're not going to work with private detectives," Peralta said.

After a long silence, I looked at him. "These sc.u.mbags have had the upper hand from before Felix walked in that door. They placed a call to our number using Grace's cell phone so the cops would be suspicious of us. I'm tired of playing defense. What's our next move?"

He inhaled and rose up in his chair. "I've heard a person's cell phone can be tracked. Not only the calls they make and receive, but the locations of the user at any point. Is that true?"

"Absolutely," Lindsey said. "Wherever you go, your cell phone sends data and it's mapped. And the cell providers keep those records. So somebody could find out Grace's moves on any given date." She paused and looked into her lap, and then she pushed her hair out of her face. "These companies have very sophisticated security and firewalls."

"Can you hack it?"

My appet.i.te fled. I stood and stalked the six feet to his desk. "I can't believe what you asked her to do. That's a federal crime."

He shot up out of his chair and stabbed a finger at me. "What's your plan, Mapstone? Get blown up again? You might not be so fast next time. We've been played for chumps and our clients are dead. Do you know why? I don't. What I do know is it's only a matter of time before we're dead, especially if they get that flash drive."

"Then we'll take them on. Why bring Lindsey and Sharon into it?"

"Because they're already in it with us." He spat the words. "These a.s.sholes are cleaning up loose ends. Tim and the baby were loose ends. Why do they have a tracker on your car? Because they're afraid of you? No. So they can find you and kill you when the time is right. Who's going to help you? Your new buddy, Isabel? Not when she finds out you've been withholding evidence."

He wasn't the only one running hot. I went from zero to a.s.shole in three seconds. I barked, "Lindsey could go to prison! Put your own a.s.s on the line. Put mine. But leave her out of it! Let San Diego PD track Grace's movements. Somebody cased our office. My G.o.d, are you nuts? We're not safe here. We're not safe at home. You said it yourself. We're loose ends."

So much for our convivial reunited family.

And then Vesuvius went dormant. He sat back in his executive chair and pushed his hair back with both hands. In a conversational voice: "We are safe as long as they are willing to bargain for the flash drive. That's our hole card. They want it badly. If they hurt us or kill us, no flash drive."

"Did the guy in the parking lot know that?" I told him about our visitor.

"Yes. He was probably some vagrant. If not, he was only on a recon mission."

He looked so d.a.m.ned sure of himself.

"Now," he said, "As for San Diego PD, I would leave this to them, David, but I don't know how sophisticated they are or how big their caseload is. They might figure this out tomorrow or next month or never. The more I meddle, the more suspicious Kimbrough is going to be that we're holding back evidence. I would hack those phone records myself, but I don't know how. Lindsey does. She spent eight years in the Sheriff's Office Cybercrimes Unit. She can reverse-engineer that knowledge."

"I know how to be a hacker." Lindsey's voice was small but sounded weightier than our explosions.

It wasn't as easy for me to dial back my anger, but I tried to match her soft voice. "Don't do this, Lindsey, please."

I had just, maybe, gotten her back. Now I would lose her again.

She took in my imploring glance, studied Sharon's practiced calm, and then looked back at Peralta.

"Can you cover your tracks?" he asked.

Her look was that of the old insouciant Lindsey I had fallen for years ago, in her black miniskirt, nose stud, and irreverence that was somehow never cruel. The quarter smile that got the inside joke. The one who would answer him: They'll never know I was there.

Now I knew that within my haunted beauty was her mother's voice telling her she was never good enough, her "Linda Unit" as Robin had called it. I had no question about my wife's skills. But the risks seemed intolerable. There had to be another way.

She looked at Peralta. "You always said I was the best."

"Then do it."

26.