by Jon Talton
“You would have made a good one.”
He ignored the praise. “I was more interested in putting away criminals than kissing ass. They were never going to let me in their country club. But I was so committed to the Bureau that my wife left me. My children are grown but for years they wouldn’t talk to me. Who can blame them? I was on the job. I wasn’t there for them.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. I made my choices. The last five years, my daughter and I have rebuilt something. She had a baby last year. I’m a grandpa, can you believe that?”
I smiled and nodded.
“All my career, I saw the worst of people every day. It was hard to see the good, to trust anyone. So here I am. Taking the undercover job…Well, when I decided to go that way, I didn’t feel like I had anything to lose.”
“Do you still feel that way?”
“No, actually. You hear a lot about how deep undercover people lose their way. Some do. They become what they set out to fight. Doing this has actually grounded me in a way that wearing the suit and tie every day never did. I have to keep myself tethered to reality, to the mission. So that’s my advice for you.”
“Point taken.”
He said, “You reading about the Great War?”
“It’s all that’s on my bedside table.”
“Be sure to read The Sleepwalkers. It’s the best book on the causes of the war that I’ve ever seen. It will completely change your perspective.”
“It’s waiting for me at home.”
Then he asked me why I was still wearing the deputy’s badge and I told him about my meeting with Melton on Saturday night. I felt such a deep shame that my face burned.
“He manipulated you.”
“I know. That’s what Lindsey said.”
“Smart woman. Keep her. Look, I can make some discreet inquiries about what Melton told you. See if it’s real.”
I thanked him. Then, “Is that really a Soviet scalp in there?”
“Naw.” He smiled. “It’s an old chamois I used to polish my car. I stuck it in my compost barrel for a few days and then put it in a plastic bag to preserve the gamey smell. Figured it might come in handy someday. Remember what I said about playing to stereotypes giving you an advantage?”
I wondered what mine was now, my wife shot, my partner missing, me carrying a star issued by Chris Melton. Stereotypical fool, sounded accurate.
“What are you going to do with him?”
He pulled the cap down, shading his eyes. “Drive him out to some Walmart lot, take off the handcuffs, and tell him to slowly walk a hundred paces before he removes the blindfold. By that time, I’ll be gone.”
“They can find you.”
He didn’t answer.
“Do you believe what Bogdan told us?”
“No reason not to.” His shaded eyes scanned the lot. “This confirms the diamonds are the ones we were looking for, stolen FBI evidence. It doesn’t tell us where they came from in the first place, how the Russians knew the diamonds were coming here, or who was the intended recipient.”
“It also doesn’t explain why Peralta left me the note to find Matt Pennington. According to Bogdan, Pennington wasn’t part of the heist…”
Cartwright saw the expression on my face. “What?”
I suddenly remembered the matchbook in Pennington’s pack of cigarettes and the telephone number written inside it. I called up the note on my iPhone and read the number to him.
“Doesn’t sound familiar,” he said. “Call it.”
I hesitated. Then I pressed the number and held the phone to my ear.
On the second ring, a man’s voice answered.
Peralta.
Several dozen exclamations fought for attention in my brain, relief, joy, anger, anticipation. I pushed them away and said, “It’s Matt Pennington.”
“You have the wrong number,” he said and hung up. It sounded like the same old blunt Peralta. I didn’t detect fear or coercion in his tone.
I had finished telling Cartwright about the brief exchange when my phone rang. Not Abba. An old-fashioned phone ring. It was the number I had just dialed.
“Wait,” Cartwright held out a hand. “Give it to me.”
“Apache Mortgage,” he said in a happy sales voice. It was a radical change from his normal tone. “May I have your account number, please?”
He handed it to me.
“Whoever called back hung up.”
“He’s alive!”
He nodded slowly. “But he’s with somebody. Not the Russians. Not Pamela Grayson. And whoever it was, he couldn’t talk around them. The woman who shot Lindsey?”
I shook my head. “She confronted me demanding the diamonds. She said she had made Peralta a promise, whatever that means. But it didn’t seem like a pleasant one. I don’t think he’d be alive if he was with her.”
He kicked the asphalt again.
“Then there’s another player. The man who called Pennington’s office. Maybe the original owner of the diamonds who somehow tracked them here.”
I was eager to get moving, out of the sun, back to the hospital, and, as soon as I could, send the badge back to Chris Melton with my resignation letter.
Cartwright stopped me after I had taken two steps.
“Don’t be too hard on yourself, David. If your wife hadn’t gone for that walk, you might both be dead. This woman might have come in while you were sleeping. End of story.” He slid his left arm back in the sling, wincing. “Oh, I’m getting too old for this.”
The pain-creases in his face relaxed and he spoke again. “Don’t cut your ties with Sheriff Meltdown yet. They might be useful to us.”
“I was afraid you were going to say that.”
He stared at me for a long minute.
“You know, David, it ain’t what you don’t know that gets you in trouble. It’s what you know for sure but just ain’t so.” He winked. “Mark Twain.”
I reluctantly nodded and walked away. By the time I was across Third Avenue, the RV was gone. All that remained was a blue cloud of carbon monoxide.
Chapter Twenty-six
When I reached the ICU, Sharon was back with her daughters. Lindsey’s condition hadn’t changed; none of her physicians were there; and the closest I could get was watching her through the window. So I took Sharon down to the Starbucks in the lobby and told her what I could.
“At least he’s still alive,” she said
She seemed distracted. I studied her face but could only see her struggling to keep up the strong front. I had expected her to be happier, but she looked gaunt with worry.
I said, “No calls on that landline?”
She looked at me curiously, then shook her head.
I asked if the FBI was still tailing her.
“Like white on rice,” she said. “We’ve started taking coffee and sandwiches out to the unit watching the house. I’m not worried about us. I am worried about Mike. And you, David. When was the last time you slept?”
I shrugged. “I’ve been taking catnaps.”
“You look awful. Go home and let us keep watch. I promise to call when something changes.”
“Sharon, you only left a little while ago.” I was about to protest more but the exhaustion hit me deep in the bone. I was struggling to keep my head up.
So I left and the farther away I drove, I became strangely happy to be momentarily freed from the hospital.
Back on Cypress, I had to fend off concerned neighbors. How is Lindsey? How are you holding up? We saved your mail and newspapers. What can we do to help? Willo was that kind of place.
Then I scoped out the property, finding nothing amiss. The landscaping service had come and gone and the winter lawn looked glorious.
Inside the bedroom, I locked the door and slid a chair again
st it, set an alarm for two hours, and collapsed into the bed. For a few seconds, I looked at the stack of unread books on the bedside table. Then I was gone.
By three thirty, I was out the door in a light gray suit and navy blue rep tie. I drove over to our office on Grand Avenue and went into the Danger Room. There, I ran through the surveillance tapes on fast-forward. At two a.m. today, a dark four-door Chevy pulled sideways beside the gate and a woman emerged.
Strawberry Death.
Looking for her stones.
She was dressed entirely in black and put a dark watch cap over her distinctive fair hair. Then she stepped onto the hood, mounted the roof of the car, and draped what looked like a comforter over the spikey top of the security fence. One smooth move and she was over, pulling off the comforter and moving toward the office door. The entire maneuver took less than a minute. She had been trained.
Any passing patrol car would merely see a parked vehicle. The angle kept me from getting a tag number.
I switched to an outside camera that showed her disappear around the northwest corner of the building. The back door was secured with a heavy gate meant to defeat the most skillful burglar. Nor would that burglar find the concealed alarm box. Sure enough, she emerged on the other side in a few minutes and went to the front door.
She suddenly looked toward Grand Avenue and fell to the ground. That passing police car might have appeared. She stayed there for seven minutes, not moving.
Finally, she stood and again approached the door. I tried another camera, one mounted to the edge of the roof. She was working with small lock-picking tools. Her head swung around, then went back to her attempted break-in.
“Good luck with that,” I said out loud.
I grew more concerned when I saw a small crowbar in her hand. But she backed away and moved lithely to the edge of the building. The parking lot was already illuminated cadmium orange by two sodium lamps. A bright white spotlight joined in, sweeping the front of the building. I switched to the camera that showed Grand. Sure enough, a PPD unit had pulled in behind the Chevy.
Calling up the rear-facing camera, I watched her sprint to the back fence. It was ten feet high, but she shimmied up the steel, stood with her feet between the spikes, and launched herself into the darkness. She was in amazing shape.
I fast-forwarded the front camera. Within a half-hour, the single police cruiser had been joined by two more, then a tow truck departed with the Chevy. She lost her wheels. Was it too much to hope they had caught her nearby? Probably. But I could check with Vare on the provenance of Strawberry Death’s car.
I should have been frightened. I was elated.
I was edgy enough, though, to jerk when my phone rang. It had a Sheriff’s Office prefix.
“David, it’s Chris. How is Lindsey?”
We were so damned casual and friendly. I told him.
“I read your report. It’s exactly the kind of excellent work I expected. And I appreciate you doing this at a time of tragedy.”
I mumbled a single-syllable response, wondering if he always spoke as if he were on television.
“Let’s talk about it. I know this is a tough time, but maybe you could come down to headquarters. Better yet, I can meet you at your office in the courthouse.”
I wanted to protest but didn’t, mindful of Cartwright’s admonition. I sure didn’t want to go to the new headquarters building at Fifth Avenue and Jackson Street, in what was once the downtown warehouse district. The ninety-three million-dollar building looked like an alien battlecruiser was mating with a 1970s shopping strip. But ugly as it was, it was Peralta’s baby: he conceived it and fought for the funding and now it was Chris Melton’s temple. The idea of going inside made me sick.
“How about the courthouse?” I said.
“Does twenty minutes give you enough time?”
I told him that it did.
On the way downtown, I called Kate Vare and told her what I had found.
Her voice was icy. “Are you working my case, Mapstone?”
“No, this is why I’m calling you. I stopped by our office and checked the surveillance tapes.”
“Why?”
“Because I was the victim of a crime. Because I wanted to make sure our office was secure. Because I wanted to. Why does that have anything to do with what I’m telling you?”
“I’ve seen your act, Mapstone.”
What the hell did that mean? I started to speak but she cut me off.
“I want to see these tapes.”
“Sure, fine.”
“And why were you there?”
I went through it again. To me, the point was easy: The woman was not only in town, she was still stalking me, trying to burglarize our office. Not only that, she had almost been caught and the police would have the car, the license. Hell, they might have even picked her up a few blocks away, or at least done a field interview until Strawberry Death sweetly talked her way out of it.
I said, “She was here early this morning, trying to break in. If you check the logs and find the suspected four-five-nine call, where a vehicle was towed from our address on Grand, you might find the identity of this woman.”
“Quit telling me how to do my job,” Vare said. “You have bigger issues. You have something she wants.”
“I don’t know what,” I said, trying to keep any “tells” out of the timbre or rhythm of my speech. “Any thoughts?”
She chuckled joylessly. “I know you’re into history, so I’ll tell you a story. When I was starting out, they told stories about the old police headquarters. It had an elevator up to the city jail. It was a really, really slow elevator. And when they had a suspect who was holding back, the detective might ride up with him and carry a rolled-up phone book in his hand. By the time that really slow elevator reached the jail floor, the suspect would be talking like his life depended on it. I always liked that story.”
She would love for me to be the guy handcuffed in the slow elevator and her with the phone book. Properly used, it could inflict terrible pain and never leave a bruise. Or so the old-timers had told me. I didn’t take the bait.
I said, “The Chandler detective told me they recovered the diamonds.”
“I know. Too bad for your buddy. He did the crime and he didn’t even get to keep the diamonds.” Another chuckle. “I read the report you sent to Meltdown on your old case. You fucked up.”
“The detective fucked up.”
“You were the first officer on the scene, Mapstone. The Sheriff’s Office was pretty shoddy back then. They let you be a deputy, right? Now they’ve brought you back, so that tells you a lot about Sheriff Meltdown.”
“Kate, what are you doing to find the woman who shot my wife?”
“I’ll let you know when we have something concrete. I’ve picked up three homicides since Saturday night, okay? So you’re not the only family member asking for help from the police.”
I struggled to keep my voice even and professional.
“Any luck with fingerprints from the gun she lost? Or the burglar bag?”
“No prints,” Vare said. “She probably wore tactical gloves and you didn’t notice. Not even one hair from the bag.”
I suppressed a sigh.
“Look at it this way, Mapstone. You disarmed her of the big gun. What shot Lindsey was smaller caliber. We recovered a .32 shell casing. So things could have been way worse if the woman had fired her primary weapon.”
“Yes.”
“If she’s a pro, the Beretta Bobcat or Tomcat is fashionable now. Small, concealable and it can carry a silencer. So we are working this case.”
I thanked her and asked again if she would check into the impounded Chevy from Grand Avenue.
But I was only speaking to myself. She was gone.
I wondered how long it would take her to make a connection to th
e late Matt Pennington. “Suicided.”
But by that time, the FBI would already be involved and Kate Vare’s life would be a jurisdictional goat fuck, as Peralta would say. Peralta, who had answered the phone that went with the number on the inside of Pennington’s matches. The number his killer had been seeking.
Downtown, I parked the Prelude in the CityScape garage and crossed to the courthouse, showing my identification and being let past the metal detector as if I really worked there.
Beside the door to my office, the county had placed a new placard:
DAVID MAPSTONE
Sheriff’s Office Historian
It was much like the one that sat on the wall outside my old office, including the MCSO star emblem. Below was added: Christopher J. Melton, Sheriff. Even Peralta hadn’t thought of that granular bit of self-promotion. Seeing the thing made me queasy.
For ten minutes, I admired the restoration—high ceiling, art deco light fixtures, dark wood moldings, frosted glass panel of the door. Someone had hung a large photo from the 1950s showing citrus groves spreading out below Camelback Mountain, not a house in sight. Behind my desk was a photo of Chris Melton in his black uniform, furled American flag in the background, Hollywood smile.
Then when there was a tap, like a doctor about to come in the exam room, and Melton stepped in.
“You didn’t have to dress up,” he said.
“I like to.”
Melton was dressed up in black BDUs—battle dress uniform—with baggy cargo pants, combat boots, and ballistic vest. Cops playing soldiers. I thought about Peralta’s rising concern about the militarization of law enforcement, and that was even before the Department of Defense started showering even the smallest police forces with gear.
“I was tagging along with SWAT.” He pulled up a chair.
“Everybody safe?”
“Sure. We were serving a warrant.”
I remembered serving warrants alone, but said nothing.
“Turned out there were no weapons,” he said. “But we got fifty dollars’ worth of marijuana.”
I wondered how much it had cost the taxpayers to mobilize the SWAT team for a petty drug raid. He went through the motions, asking about Lindsey, and I went through the motions, telling him the basics. He wanted to know if I liked the “historic photo” and I told him that I did.