David Mapstone Mystery: The Night Detectives Part 16

Peralta took Lindsey and Sharon outside while I called Artie Dominguez at the Sheriff's Office.

"How's the best detective in the department?"

His usual ebullient laugh was subdued. "David. Long time, long time. What's it like working one-on-one with the Big Man every day?"

"You can imagine." I asked him how he was. He snorted.

"He's missed," he said. "I might come be a private d.i.c.k myself soon. You won't believe how f.u.c.ked up things are. Let's say command these days isn't very friendly if you have a last name like Dominguez. I used to get the best homicides. Lately, I've been on auto theft."

"No s.h.i.t."

"Real s.h.i.t, man. Twenty-five years and this is what I get. They're out there playing Border Patrol and everything else has gone to h.e.l.l. Response times are way down. Serious cases are going untouched. The jail's a mess. Wait until you read about the El Mirage s.e.x cases we're not investigating. But rounding up the campesinos standing outside Home Depot makes the old farts in Sun City and the East Valley feel safer. Sucks."

"Can you run a couple of names through NCIC and ViCAP for me?"

"Sure. It'll take a couple of days so I can do it without my new boss asking questions."

I gave him Larry Zisman and Bob Hunter. He was aggravated with me that I didn't have Social Security numbers and dates of birth. That would mean more work.

"If it makes you feel any better, I have a list of about sixty names with SS numbers that I'd like to email you at home and have you check, too. I know it'll take time."

"d.a.m.n, Mapstone. We ought to set you up down here with a desk."

"You know how that would go over with the new guy."

He sighed like a martyr.

"I'll owe you," I added.

"I'll add it to your tab. That it?"

Not quite. I wanted him to check ViCAP-the ma.s.sive FBI database-for suspicious deaths involving young women falling bound from high places. Extra points if they were high-priced prost.i.tutes. And Claymore mine explosions.

After a pause. "Was that you in San Diego?"

"Yep."

"f.u.c.k me," he said. "I thought you guys were going to be peeping on unfaithful husbands."

"You know Peralta would get bored with that in an hour or less."

"True," he said. "Watch your a.s.s, David."

Then I went into the Danger Room to review the footage of the outside security cameras. I backed it up until it showed a new sedan pull in the dirt beside the south fence. It was a white Chevy Impala. A man got out and looked around. He was young and Anglo with a high-and-tight haircut, shaved on the sides with a weed-like tuft on top. Put him in a military uniform and give him a stolen Claymore and things started to come together. He was no vagrant.

I watched as he climbed on the Impala's roof and expertly vaulted the fence, then walked to the carport. Switching to that camera, I saw him open the Prelude driver's door and lean inside. He popped the seatback forward and climbed into the back. Next, he popped the trunk b.u.t.ton and went back there. He was searching for the flash drive. He repeated the move on the pa.s.senger side, and then returned to the Impala, looked around again, and got inside.

Switching to the first camera, I saw him back out to leave and expose the license plate. Nevada. I zoomed in, made a screen shot, and printed it out. It was probably a rental car.

Sharon was standing behind me.

"I'm worried about you."

"Me, too." Why deny it?

"You've changed, David. Lindsey feels it, too."

"That's nice. Another excuse for her to leave me."

She's not going to leave you. It would have been nice to hear that, but Sharon didn't say it.

"Mike told me what you went through with the cartels and the old gangster in Chandler," she said. "n.o.body could go through that without being changed."

"And Robin being murdered."

Sharon watched me with those big empathetic eyes.

Yes, there was that. And the trial would soon begin. It was another reason I didn't want to read the local newspaper. It wouldn't be covered because the defendant was a drug addict who killed someone. But because the victim was a blond, middle-cla.s.s woman who lived in a historic district and was the sister-in-law of a former deputy sheriff-that was news. I would have to testify. I dreaded the effect this would have on Lindsey.

"And losing your child," she said. "You two have gone through so much loss in such a short time. But I don't want to see this destroy two people I love. Your child wouldn't want that. Robin wouldn't want that."

I realized my fists were balled up and forced my hands to relax. "We'll never know, now will we?"

"Mike told me how you chose not to kill the woman who shot Robin," she said. "The David I know would have made that choice."

I didn't answer. It was true: I stalked her, found her, but turned her over to the cops. What Sharon didn't know was that I had the woman on her knees with a dishrag in her mouth, and in my hands I held the a.s.sa.s.sin's .22 caliber pistol with a silencer. I was about to pull the trigger when my cell phone rang and the readout said, "Lindsey." So I didn't pull the trigger. Part of me still regretted it. Nor did Sharon know that the better angels of my nature watched helplessly as I wrapped duct tape around the gangster's mouth and let the Zetas crew carry him out of his Witness Protection Program-funded suburban Chandler house. Or how I rolled the pieces into place for his. .h.i.t man to be on the receiving end of a hit himself in jail.

I didn't regret those things.

Sharon said, "You have to be willing to give it time. Lindsey loves you. That's why she's here."

Time again. As if I had it.

I said, "I'm really trying."

Sharon hugged me and whispered for me to be good to myself. I didn't know how. We walked back into the office to greet Lindsey and Peralta.

"There's a tracker on his truck, too," Lindsey said.

"She has a very cool scanner." Peralta was like a little kid. He was enamored with gadgets. He was enamored with Lindsey. Who wasn't?

He went on: "It picked the tracker right up. Might be a good idea to check the whole office." He added, "If you don't mind."

Lindsey smiled politely. "This tracking device is identical to the one on the Honda. It's not a logger, the thing people use to follow the movements of a cheating lover. The logger maps out their movements and then you can see where they've been. These are real-time trackers that feed right into a Google map display in a following car. They want to be able to follow at a safe distance and not be detected."

"Are they sophisticated?" Peralta asked.

"Not really," she said. "They're certainly not federal issue. But they're battery operated. The battery might last a month if they track the car an hour or two a day. Less if they track us for more time or the heat really kicks up. Otherwise, they have to replace the batteries." She sighed. "Or they're on a limited timeline so it doesn't matter."

After Lindsey was done, I told Peralta about my review of the security camera. The man with the high-and-tight hair was casing the place.

Peralta sat on the edge of his desk. "It's time to take the war to these a.s.sholes."

My anger had been replaced with exhaustion.

"It's over." I held out the truck-stop cell phone. "It's been twenty-four hours since he's called." I was about to say, "The baby is dead," but a look at Lindsey stopped me.

Peralta shook his Easter Island head. "If it was over, that guy wouldn't have been on our property, searching the Prelude. We need to shake things up. Here's how we're going to do it."

27.

An ancient Greek poet wrote, "The fox knows many things but the hedgehog knows one big thing." The philosopher Isaiah Berlin turned that into an influential essay on writers and intellectuals. I was usually a fox. The kidnapping had made me a hedgehog. The single experience defining our lives right now was the kidnapping.

No matter how many law-enforcement agencies were investigating it, I had received the call. I had been bombed with the b.l.o.o.d.y baby doll-a warning, according to Peralta. It was certainly done in a way that got my attention. The caller told me he had something I wanted. It could only be Tim and Grace's baby. And he said I had something he wanted. That could only be the flash drive. But how did that make sense? He had to know that we would break the encryption and download the client names.

Lindsey wondered if some information was hidden elsewhere on the drive. If so, that could make this particular piece of plastic very valuable, and Mister UNKNOWN was a.s.suming we didn't know the hidden data were there. Finding it was another task for her.

My task was to be bait.

Peralta called the shots. He had investigated hundreds of kidnappings. I had solved only one, from 1940. So I had to follow his lead.

At sundown, I went out alone in the Honda Prelude. Well, not quite alone: for company I had Mister Colt Python and Messrs. Smith and Wesson with the Airlite. And several Speedloaders of extra ammo for each revolver. I also had two cell phones: my new iPhone was plugged into my ears and the truck-stop cell, whose number UNKNOWN had, was on the seat beside me.

I drove east on Camelback Road, a spectacular orange sunset to my back, maddeningly thick traffic ahead of me. It used to be that if you went the speed limit in the city of Phoenix, you would make every light with only a few exceptions. Now the freeway entrances and a few million more people had complicated that, so I ended up missing almost every light. It gave me a chance to see the ma.s.sive ugliness of a city that had grown so fast it hadn't had time to clean up after itself. Things would be better in full dark. Phoenix was beautiful at night.

Peralta was on the phone. "I'm about half a mile behind you, giving you plenty of room."

"Where's the tracker on your truck?"

"It's sitting on a table at your house, like a good captured tracker."

That made me laugh. I stopped when he told me Lindsey was with him. Not only did she have work to do, most of all I didn't want her in danger if this excursion went sideways. I kept that to myself.

"Where's Sharon?"

"She's renting us a motel room."

That was new. I decided not to ask questions but to focus on my task.

The real estate got nicer at Twenty-Fourth Street, with its alternative downtown of office towers, fancy condos, and the Ritz Carlton. The magical Biltmore Fashion Park had gotten a facelift a few years back and now looked like any suburban mall. Half a mile north was the entrance to the Biltmore resort. Only a few blocks south, the once solidly middle-cla.s.s neighborhoods had turned over. Now people called it "The Sonoran Biltmore."

I swam the traffic current headed to Scottsdale. If someone were following me, I would never know it. But I deliberately avoided any cute tactics to lose a tail. I wanted a tail. Camelback Mountain loomed straight in front, its head rising first. At Forty-Fourth Street, I turned left and climbed gradually into Paradise Valley.

The road turned east and became McDonald Drive. I wanted to look up and see the Praying Monk formation on the camel's head, but too many headlights intruded. Some toff honked at me for not going the mandatory fifteen miles over the speed limit, then sped around me in his BMW. Phoenicians never used to honk. I used to own a BMW. Patty gave it to me. Lindsey wasn't sorry when some bad guys pushed it out of a parking garage three stories down into Adams Street. I wanted to do the same with this p.r.i.c.k.

After the big intersection at Tatum Drive, McDonald calmed down. The area became low-density and very expensive residential, with few streetlights, no sidewalks, and plenty of gates. One would never know that a huge city enveloped this blessed precinct on every side. The road ran to the north of Camelback Mountain. Across Paradise Valley was the ma.s.s of Mummy Mountain. I never ceased being moved by these works of nature and how they stood out darker than the night sky. For a few seconds my rearview mirror held no headlights. Then some appeared in the distance. My gut tightened.

Bob Hunter lived in a slummy lot for Paradise Valley, meaning his house was a large, perfectly respectable mid-century ranch. But it was definitely lower end than its neighbors. Most of the similar-age houses along Fifty-Second Place had been torn down and replaced by more impressive mansions. Lush desert landscaping predominated and the land was gentle hills. Paradise Valley had filled in since I was young, but it was still low-density. The properties were s.p.a.ced far enough apart that a neighbor wouldn't hear a gunshot. A prominent doctor and his wife had recently been bound and shot, and their bodies were only discovered because the meth-addicted killer also set fire to their house.

For my purposes, Bob Hunter's house had an added benefit: no gate. I killed the headlights and slowly came to a stop on the concrete circle in front of the house. Lights were on inside, as well as on a pair of ornamental wrought iron, amber-tinted porch sconces. If someone had seen me, I would know soon enough. Either he would come to the door, or, more likely, I would find the Paradise Valley cops pulling in behind me.

Neither happened. After ten minutes, Peralta called.

"Report."

"I'm sitting here. n.o.body has even driven by. The mountains look beautiful."

"We're cruising," Peralta said. "I don't want to get too close."

I told him it was too bad we couldn't reverse the tracker and find out if I was actually being followed.

"I didn't bring that kind of technology home with me, Dave." I heard Lindsey's voice over his speaker. She had said home. That was a good sign, right?

I kept scanning my mirrors and windshield, trying to get as much of a three-hundred-sixty-degree view as possible. Nothing was moving behind the ocotillos and, behind a white wall, the tall stand of oleanders that blocked off the backyard. I tried to imagine Grace growing up here, requiring a car for everything. It was so different from the real neighborhood where I was a child. It was easy to envision her counting the days until she could get away.

It was harder to put together Bob Hunter with his golf buddy Larry Zisman, a friend close enough that he took priority over his own daughter's graduation. San Diego PD had notified Hunter of Grace's death; he had flown there to identify the body. He had known where she had died. They would have asked him if he knew the owner of the condominium from where she fell. And he had lied, to Sanchez and to Peralta. Why? That he had been content to allow the police to cla.s.sify Grace's death as a suicide ran a dark charge up the back of my neck.

After half an hour, an amazing time for a beat-up Honda to go unnoticed in Paradise Valley, I slid it into gear and slowly coasted out onto the street, then turned north toward Lincoln Drive. I kept my headlights off and drove slowly. Two hundred yards ahead I pulled on the emergency brake and stopped the car without showing taillights. And yet: nothing. If anybody was behind me, he was running without headlights, too.

He could also be a mile away, tracking me on a laptop or a tablet. He didn't have to show himself. But it was better to pretend I was worried about a tail that had me in sight. That way, he could continue to a.s.sume we hadn't found the tracking device. So I went ahead with the game.

Lights on again, I sat at the intersection of busy Lincoln Drive. I checked in with Peralta who saw no signs of anyone following me.

"Should we call it off?"

"No," he said. "The guy is out there. He's good. Keep going."

Keeping going meant a drive to Tempe, some ten miles away through heavy traffic. Getting over to the Pima Freeway and zooming south would have gotten me there much faster. But Peralta wanted me on surface streets. So I turned right on Lincoln and took it to Scottsdale Road.

If Central Avenue had been the main commercial thoroughfare from territorial days through the early nineties, Scottsdale Road-and miles of loop freeways containing office "parks"-had taken over that t.i.tle since then. When I was a child, the intersection with Lincoln had been out in the desert. Now it was deep in the metropolitan blob.

Scottsdale itself was a long, narrow slice between the city of Phoenix and the Salt River Indian Community, the renamed and, thanks to casinos and development beside the freeway, very rich rez. But Scottsdale, oh, Scottsdale, sang of new money, especially up north where it spread east into the McDowell foothills and the people bragged of never coming south of Bell Road, much less to "the Mexican Detroit." Meaning, Phoenix.

Scottsdale was exclusivity and championship golf, celebrities in the wintertime and the weirdness that comes with having more money than brains. It was the capital of plastic surgery: Silicone Valley. City leaders would never allow anything as plebian as light rail. As a result, its traffic was a nightmare, even with most of the wealthy hitting the summer lifeboats for their other homes in the San Juan Islands or other cooler climes. And Scottsdale Road was full of the same schlocky development as the rest of Phoenix, only with some expensive faades and more expensively done traffic berms.

Once Scottsdale had been a sweet little add-on to Phoenix, part faux cowboy tourist trap-the West's Most Western Town-part artist's colony. Now it sucked up capital, development, and retail sales from the center city like an Electrolux. Yet it never seemed like a happy place. The politics were poison. Every section and street seemed to vie for the power to look down on everybody else. Scottsdale wanted to be Santa Fe or South Beach, but it was neither artistic nor s.e.xy. n.o.body would set a cop show in Scottsdale. A golf or plastic surgery show, maybe.

I suffered the unending traffic jam south past hotels, expensive shopping strips and restaurants, Fashion Square, across the Arizona Ca.n.a.l, and dropping down to Fifth Avenue and Old Scottsdale. Here, a little humanity showed in the scale of the streetscape. A block away was the wonderful Poisoned Pen Bookstore.