High Country Nocturne

by Jon Talton

  Until Ed Cartwright told me otherwise, until we knew Peralta was safe, it was my doorstep, too.

  I left her in the bedroom and let myself out.

  Chapter Thirty

  I got half a mile when the phone rang. Kate Vare. Would I meet her?

  She was sitting in an unmarked Chevy Impala in a parking lot off Twenty-fourth Street and Osborn. The homely one-story building nearby had once been a home-cooking restaurant named Linda’s. Now it was a Mexican eatery. I pulled next to her in the timeless cop fashion, driver’s door to driver’s door.

  Her elbow was resting on the doorframe, window down, and she looked me over. “Why are you so dressed up?”

  “I went to see Diane Whitehouse.”

  She cocked her head and I gave the elevator speech about Tom Frazier’s wallet.

  “Jeez.” She laughed, a strange sound coming from her. “Old Man Whitehouse in the closet? He hit on me once, you know. Years ago when I was a uni. Went to a burglary call at one of his subdivisions under construction. He talked to me about how hard it must be for me, being tough all the time, and I wouldn’t have to be that way with him. It was a smoother come-on than it sounds.”

  I took it in and said nothing. Even though it was getting toward noon, the streets were slick and moody, the rain clouds low and misshapen like boiling lead.

  “I’d love to be there when you log in those photos as evidence,” Vare said. “Do you like him for this?”

  She meant did I think the late Elliott Whitehouse, the legendary Phoenix homebuilder, had murdered his lover. Oh, and the lover was a young man.

  I shook my head. “Frazier was found dead of a heroin overdose, but there’s no evidence he was a user. If he was Whitehouse’s lover, this seems like a lot of bother. Why not simply bludgeon him with a piece of rebar and dump the body in a mineshaft or bury it under a concrete slab? Hire a hitman. It doesn’t make sense.”

  “And why keep the wallet?” she said. “Maybe he thought it would make identification more difficult.”

  “Except Frazier’s car was within walking distance.”

  “We almost caught your girl.” She changed the subject suddenly.

  “Almost?” My stomach felt as if it had dropped five inches.

  “She was at a house by the Biltmore. Up on Biltmore Estates Drive, with those lovely older places? This one was foreclosed on during the worst of the bust, only the neighbors wouldn’t allow a sign out front. It was bank-owned and sat empty. Somehow she found it and was using it as her base.”

  I looked straight at her and asked how they almost found her.

  “Crime Stoppers call early this morning. We set up a perimeter and called in SWAT. Made entry at eight a.m. She was gone. But she’d been injured. Maybe a gunshot. She had performed surgery on herself, stitched it up. Left a bunch of bloody gauze and a suture kit. She was moving fast. Looks like she made it out through the golf course before we secured the perimeter.”

  I leaned toward the steering wheel and let out a long sigh. It was not theater. My best hope for catching Strawberry Death had failed and she was on the loose again.

  “Did you shoot her, Mapstone?”

  I pulled out the Colt Python and held it up. “If I had shot her, she’d be dead, blown six feet back from the point of impact. Anyway, you told me that if I worked this case, you’d…”

  “Yeah, yeah.” She shook her head dismissively. “I’ve changed my mind. This woman is dangerous as hell. I know Lindsey’s in the hospital and for some reason you’ve got this special from Meltdown. But I need your help.”

  “You? Need my help?”

  Her sharp features tightened. “Don’t fucking congratulate yourself, Professor. Help me.”

  I could give her real help, but that would compromise the operation that Peralta and Cartwright were running. Too many secrets, too many compartments.

  She said, “Why are you working for Meltdown?”

  I told her the truth.

  “You’re an idiot, Mapstone.”

  “I know.” It started to sprinkle. I watched the drops heal my dry hand.

  “Lindsey wouldn’t betray the country.”

  “I know.” My voice was louder this time. “It was Saturday night and he was leaning on me. I needed to buy time.”

  Vare shook her head. “And you went home, told Lindsey, had a fight, and she left to take a walk and cool down.”

  “That’s pretty much it.”

  “You asshole,” she said. “Why didn’t you tell me this to begin with?”

  “It didn’t seem relevant.”

  “Let me tell you about relevant. Twenty minutes after we made entry to the house on Biltmore Estates Drive and secured it, Horace Mann showed up with a dozen agents. He ordered me to turn over control of the scene. My fucking scene! When I refused, he called the chief and…” She punched the steering wheel. “That was that. Why?”

  “The woman must be connected to the diamonds.”

  “Exactly. And she thinks you’re connected, too. I checked the logs and we did impound the car you described. It was a rental, made with a credit card to a woman named Amy Morris. Have you heard that name before?”

  “No.”

  “You’re not helping.”

  “I’m trying.” Actually, I was lying again. Amy Morris was the name I first heard from the man who called Matt Pennington’s office. That man was still waiting for me, as Pennington, to call him back.

  Vare said, “I ran her and nothing. Nothing! The credit card had only been used once to rent that car. She used a North Dakota driver’s license that was fake.”

  “She’s a professional assassin. She’s got the tradecraft.”

  “But who the hell is she and why is she here?”

  “I think she’s here to kill Mike Peralta and everybody close to him.”

  “Sharon’s okay…”

  “She has FBI agents all over her. But when did the woman first show up? On the road to Ash Fork Friday night. I was driving Sharon’s car and she was with me. This Morris woman was dressed like DPS, pulled out her gun and was ready to shoot me. She would have killed us both if the FBI unit following us hadn’t pulled off the freeway at that moment. Morris gets in her car and leaves. The next time I see her is Saturday night outside our house. By that time, Sharon had a protective cordon outside her house. We didn’t.”

  Vare actually let me complete several sentences. She drummed her right fingers on the steering wheel, stared ahead. I could see the gears turning and that made me uncomfortable. Kate Vare had good gears.

  “None of this makes sense, Mapstone. Peralta shot a guy, some old man who has a PI license, he stole the diamonds, stashed them in some woman’s old Toyota, and disappeared. He doesn’t even have the stones.”

  Maybe Strawberry Death doesn’t know that. Maybe she’s simply out for revenge, whether the diamonds were recovered or not. I speculated out loud without giving away too much. I was relieved that she discounted Ed Cartwright as “some old man.”

  She said, “Where is that suitcase? Does Chandler have it? I want to go through it. Maybe the shipment wasn’t even the real diamonds…”

  The gears were catching correctly. I told her Horace Mann had taken it into evidence.

  “Fuck! Is Peralta guilty or is he running some kind of operation?” Her eyes bore into me.

  I didn’t dare even blink. “He’s not guilty of a robbery. Lindsey checked his finances on Saturday. He’s got plenty of money. There’s no motive. If he’s running an operation, he never told me.”

  “FBI?” she said. “Peralta and Eric Pham were tight.”

  “Pham’s been sent to the Arctic Circle.”

  “Then DEA or ATF. The ATF chief lives right down the street from you.”

  “She took a post in France.”

  “So what?” Vare said. “This th
ing has cartel written all over it. They use diamonds as a substitute for currency to pay for cross-border shipments of drugs, or to settle drug debts.”

  “Peralta hates the cartels,” I said. “But he never told me he was doing anything more than working as a guard on the diamond shipment.”

  “Maybe he wanted to protect you?”

  I shrugged. “It didn’t succeed.” I waited a few beats. Then, “Who is the go-to diamond fence in Phoenix?”

  I already knew the answer. The only surprise was that she wasn’t already thinking that way. She shook her head and promised to find out.

  “If you find that person, the pieces might come together,” I said. “But you’re poaching in a federal case.”

  “Fuck them.” Her tone was adamant. “This is my town.”

  She started the car but didn’t leave.

  “Did you know that Mann and Sheriff Meltdown are friends?”

  My cheek and eye started burning insistently. “No.”

  “Oh, yeah. They were in the Bureau together, both stationed in Minneapolis and Chicago at the same time. They were partners for seven years. Meltdown was best man at Horace Mann’s wedding. I asked around. Something is really wrong here. No offense, but Meltdown didn’t bring you back to the Sheriff’s Office because you’re such a brilliant cop. He…”

  This time I interrupted to finish her sentence: “He did it because Horace Mann wants me out of the way.”

  I stared out at the shabby streetscape, felt like the idiot she had described.

  Vare pushed my elbow. “You are good at finding trouble, Mapstone. So go do it. Get in the way. But keep me in the loop. One more thing. If this Amy Morris is out there, she’s not going away and she’s coming for you. So as much as you love that wheel gun, you’d better carry more firepower. Now go find trouble. Call me, Mapstone.”

  She stomped on the gas and fishtailed out onto Twenty-fourth heading south as the sprinkles turned into a hard rain.

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Lindsey’s color had returned and the medicos were happy with her vital signs. For the first time, the hard realist inside me began to have hope.

  I read her some favorite Emily Dickinson. But not about death kindly stopping for me.

  When the nurses left, I said, “I almost got her. But she escaped. I let you down. They say her name is Amy Morris. But the name doesn’t lead anywhere. Her driver’s license is bogus. If you were up and around, you’d identify her in a heartbeat.”

  The ventilator’s rhythm was the only reply.

  I was about to continue when a nurse returned to show me out.

  As I sat down in the waiting room, my phone rang.

  “Are you alone?”

  It was Cartwright.

  “Yes.”

  “There’s good news and bad news. Which do you want first?”

  “Good, please.” I felt my body bracing against the institutional furniture.

  “Lindsey isn’t under investigation for anything. Melton lied to you. It turns out he was partners with Horace Mann…”

  “I know. Kate Vare told me they worked together.”

  “Vare? The Phoenix detective?”

  “She’s pissed. She doesn’t like being shut out by the feds.”

  “Melton wanted you distracted. He’s obviously working with Mann. Maybe your instincts weren’t wrong.”

  “Meaning?” I asked.

  “Meaning Pamela Grayson went back to her hotel. She visited her father in north Scottsdale. He retired and sold his business back in Ohio. We didn’t know she had a family connection here. Her visit might not be connected to the diamond theft. Now I wonder about Horace Mann, too. He might be a suspect, after all. The man was very prompt to volunteer to take over this investigation. Back in the Army, the first thing I learned was never to volunteer.”

  I asked for the bad news.

  After a long pause, “Lindsey had an affair with her boss.”

  And several lovers while I was letting Robin seduce me. It was our time of madness. I didn’t tell him that or that all I wanted was to have her back with me. So I said I knew. No stranger can really see the inside of a marriage.

  “I’m sorry, man. Anyway, time for you to make the phone call to the guy who contacted you in Matt Pennington’s office.”

  I was suddenly exhausted again.

  “Go have a hotdog at Johnnie’s across the street,” he said.

  “Johnnie’s is closed.”

  “Go to Johnnie’s,” he said. “Knock on the back door six times and be prepared to show your identification.”

  “Should I come highly armed?”

  “That would be a bad idea. Remember, back door.”

  I thought he was going to end the call, but I heard a sigh. “One more thing, David. Don’t contact me again. I need to lay low for this operation to work and for me to keep my cover.”

  I said, “I’m going to find Peralta. And I’m going to find the woman who shot Lindsey.”

  “I know.” And he was gone.

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Johnnie had made the best dogs in central Phoenix but now his shop was another empty storefront facing Thomas Road. The windows were covered with brown paper. Still, I did as Cartwright told me and walked around back. Puddles had gathered in the rutted asphalt.

  I stood against the wall behind the liquor store and waited. Situational awareness: No one seemed to be following me. The alley was empty.

  The back door to Johnnie’s was white and battered, with a slit of a window guarded by bars. A sign was pasted to the center, black with orange letters, the kind you could buy at a hardware store: “Construction workers only.”

  I rapped six times slowly.

  A piece of paper peeled back from the slit, as if I were trying to get into a speakeasy. I held open my badge case until I heard a lock turn and the door opened long enough for me to step inside.

  A big man with an assault rifle and ballistic vest told me to turn around and put my hands in the air to be searched. The lanyard around his neck showed an FBI identification.

  “That won’t be necessary.”

  It was Eric Pham.

  “Anchorage is hell this time of year,” I said. “But with climate change, it will get better up there.”

  He didn’t laugh. He had no sense of humor in the best of times. But in the best of times, he also dressed like a fed with a fussy streak. If it was a hundred ten degrees, he wore a suit, dimple perfectly centered in his tie, gold-and-blue FBI pin properly centered on his lapel. Today, he inhabited jeans and a baggy gray sweatshirt. It made him look much younger and not in a good way.

  He and his team were also perfectly concealed. The FBI had recently built a huge new Phoenix field office, but it was way up north by Deer Valley Airport. The Bureau had been located in Midtown all my life, but even it had become another hustle in the sprawl engine tearing the city apart. Now this was the last place anyone would look for the feds.

  “You weren’t supposed to be part of this.” He glared at me.

  “Peralta made me a part.” I could glare, too. “He left the business card that said, ‘find Matt Pennington.’ Then this hitwoman…”

  “We don’t know she’s a hitwoman or even a part of this operation.”

  My temples started throbbing. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.

  “Walk across the street to the ICU and tell that to my wife. Oh, you can’t because she’s in a coma after the hitwoman shot her and nearly killed her…”

  “Calm down, Doctor Mapstone.”

  So I was a doctor again.

  I was about to go from zero to asshole in 3.6 seconds so I forced my temper down.

  The room was dim, lit by a few overhead fluorescent lights long past their prime. The dingy tables from the restaurant had been set up with computers,
two and three screens each, with four agents at work. All wore hoodies or T-shirts. They looked me over and went back to their screens.

  Other than the computers, it looked nothing like an FBI control center from the movies of television. No expensively designed techno-wonder. A white board stood at one end of the room. Someone had sketched boxes with lettering inside:

  PERALTA

  RUSSIANS

  SUSPECT AGENT

  PENNINGTON

  OTHER?

  Lines connected some of the boxes. It didn’t seem very helpful.

  Pham said, “Our asset tells me you found Pennington dead, a suicide.”

  The asset being Ed Cartwright. Pham wouldn’t say his name even among this trusted group.

  I said, “That’s what it was made to look like. The woman…”

  “I understand why you’re obsessed with her, but there’s no evidence she has anything to do with this case.”

  “Outside our house on Saturday night, she stuck a gun in my face and said, ‘Where are my stones?’ I don’t think she meant her rock collection. She said she would have preferred to ‘suicide me.’ Exactly what happened with Pennington. I disarmed her but she fought and ran. She had a backup gun and shot Lindsey.”

  Pham’s finely chiseled features exuded skepticism.

  “Are you sure that’s what she said? You had a gun pointed at you.”

  “Yes!” The agents looked at me again and I lowered my voice. “She said something else, too. That she made Peralta a promise and killing us was part of it.”

  “Let’s talk privately.” He led me into a cubbyhole made by two six-foot tilt-up panels. Inside was another table where Lindsey and I had probably eaten Chicago dogs many times. Now it was covered with files surrounding a desktop computer. On the wall was an FBI seal and framed photo of the president. Were it not for these totems, I would have thought we were in a mortgage boiler room from the days of the subprime boom.

  Pham sat forward on his chair, perfect posture, and waited until I took the seat across from him.