by Jon Talton
It looked as if it had been drawn up and abandoned like some corporate initiative that went nowhere. And what was “other” ?
I pulled out a pad and made some drawings of my own.
One was a starburst with Peralta at the center. I sketched lines out to boxes for me, Ed Cartwright, Eric Pham, Matt Pennington, and the unknown people Peralta had joined in Ash Fork after abandoning his truck at the derelict gas station on Route 66. These represented direct relationships to Mike Peralta.
I added a perpendicular line from the Russians to Cartwright. They had contacted him.
Next I added a box for Strawberry Death with lines to Pennington and me. I made dashes between her and Peralta. I had no physical proof they had made contact or knew each other, but she had told me she had made him a promise.
To be complete, I drew a connection between Horace Mann and me. He had interrogated me on Friday afternoon, summoned me to Ash Fork that night to unlock the gun compartment of the truck, and then didn’t order FBI surveillance of our house. That last had proved very useful to Strawberry Death.
What if she were working with him? If so, why was he so interested in having me dead? It had to be something more than what Kate Vare considered my ability to get in the way.
But the diagram wasn’t quite right.
The only immediate connection to Pennington was Peralta. I pulled out the business card and studied his printing: FIND MATT PENNINGTON.
The dead man wasn’t on the FBI’s radar. But he sure as hell was on somebody’s or Strawberry Death wouldn’t have “suicided” him only a few hours or even minutes before I found him. Who gained from his death? Nobody I could see. But he had information and either gave it up before he died, or…
Or he was that tough and committed. Why not? He was a Naval Academy grad who apparently worked on dangerous assignments.
Or he didn’t know and she killed him anyway.
I looked at the drawing, came up empty, and set it aside.
On the next sheet, I tried different thinking. If the crooks think of themselves as businessmen and some businessmen are crooks, why not look at the supply chain?
This produced boxes along a line. Inside the first was a question mark. After all, Pham wouldn’t tell me where those diamonds in evidence came from. From there, the line went to the FBI evidence control facility to Markovitz in New York to Chandler.
Going only that far raised questions. Why wouldn’t the rogue agent keep the diamonds himself? One obvious answer was to avoid being caught up if a search warrant was served on him. Maybe he didn’t have the contacts and distribution network—I was still thinking supply chain—to turn the rough into cash. That’s where the Russians came in.
And why did I know this much about the journey of these diamonds? One of their advantages was how they could disappear. They were small, easy to conceal, and carry across borders. Were we such great detectives in having this much information? Or was something else going on?
Perhaps I was being paranoid. Being shot at will do that.
After Chandler, I sketched the supply chain diagram in greater detail. Cartwright is shot and Peralta steals the suitcase. He pulls the switch in the parking lot, leaving the suitcase with the tracker in the trunk of Catalina Ramos’ Toyota and taking the hidden rough. He travels the freeway system to Rio Salado College where he goes in the parking garage for more than twenty minutes.
I drew a box for Ash Fork but only added a line of slashes. Too many unknowns.
My hand was about to draw more lines and boxes but it lingered on the Rio Salado box. Twenty minutes. A very long time to change a license plate, especially for a guy as mechanically skilled as Peralta.
I pulled out my iPhone and called Rio Salado College security.
Chapter Thirty-four
The badge did have benefits.
Within an hour, I was still sitting in the ICU waiting room but video camera footage from Friday was streaming on my MacBook Air as I talked to the security chief at Rio Salado.
We started with the camera trained on the entrance to the multi-story parking garage. It faced outward, so we saw the entrance to the parking and beyond it the street and front doors of the college.
At precisely 11:37 a.m., Peralta’s truck turned into the garage.
“Freeze that, please.”
He did and I studied the image. It was definitely Peralta. He had put on a Phoenix Suns ballcap.
I said, “Do you have cameras inside the garage?”
“On every floor.”
He flipped through several cameras and let them run. Peralta appeared on the third floor, drove halfway up, and backed into a parking space. I asked that he slow down the speed and watched as Peralta stepped out and went to the back of the pickup.
“Can you zoom in?”
He could. The light was bad and the image grainy, but Peralta stooped down behind the truck. Here he was changing the tag.
The footage continued to run. A shadow slipped under the camera and became a Chevy Impala. My stomach tightened.
“Slow it more,” I said.
The Chevy stopped directly in front of Peralta’s truck, blocking it. Strawberry Death stepped out. She was wearing a white top and blue jeans, her hair was down, falling below her shoulders.
She walked around the car and ran her hand on top of the truck’s hood. Checking to see if it was still warm from the engine.
She didn’t know he was there.
And then he popped up with his Glock drawn.
It was 11:42.
She had followed him, keeping enough distance not to be suspicious. I wished I could go back and study the tape from the FBI drone. It might have shown her tailing him from the mall.
Through the grainy footage I could see mouths moving. Her hands were empty. He had the drop on her.
“Rookie mistake…”
“Come again?” the security officer said.
“I’m talking to myself.”
She reluctantly turned around and walked to the front of the Chevy, Peralta behind her. Then she spread her feet and bent far forward on the hood, empty hands straight out. This was on his commands, no doubt, even though there was no sound. It put her at a disadvantage, being so off balance. If she tried to fight, he could kick one leg out and send her to the ground.
Something flashed. He produced handcuffs. And like thousands of times in his career, he cuffed her. Next he did a quick search and pulled something out of her back waistband. Some kind of pistol. He slid it into his own waistband and roughly pushed her to the passenger door, opened it, and tossed her in.
Then he crossed to the driver’s side and got in. The Chevy slid forward into a parking space.
They sat there as the clock ran. Maybe she was making him a promise.
Finally, Peralta’s head appeared. He walked over to his truck and retrieved the old license tag from the garage floor by the back bumper. Then he was inside the cab and pulling out.
The digital readout on the camera feed said 11:58.
Afterward, I put on my earbuds, leaned back, and listened to Susie Arioli, Billie Holliday, and Frank Sinatra…
Chapter Thirty-five
I awoke suddenly in a panic attack. The playlist had run through and shut off.
The waiting room was empty, silent, the perfect petri dish for my corrupted brain chemistry. My heart banged against my breastbone, every breath seemed fraught, and I felt as if I were being buried alive.
Pull off the earbuds.
Stand up.
Breathe and walk.
Engage in the movement of the living.
I went to the elevator and rode to the lobby where the crowd snapped me out of it. Then I found the meditation garden. I wasn’t alone. A couple of nurses were talking on one bench. I sat away from them, the dream still vivid in my memory.
&n
bsp; I was in Matt Pennington’s office again. Outside, it was night and through the windows the city was glowing like thousands of Christmas lights. I could smell the body decomposing. I could hear his Naval Academy ring scraping the floor from the movement of a dead hand. The phone rang and it was the same man as before, talking to me…
Fully awake now and calmer, I studied the landscaping and the slant of the sun. It was a beautiful place. My neck ached from where my head had fallen forward as I had conked out. My watch said three p.m.
But what the man in the dream said…
And he said it in a voice I nearly recognized…
Then I realized, part of this was not a dream. He had actually said it yesterday on the phone in Pennington’s office. I only remembered it now.
“They say she was a Mountie, you know.”
He had said that about the hitwoman, that and her name.
It didn’t jibe with the Southern accent, but people can imitate dialects.
Ottawa, headquarters of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, was on Eastern Standard Time, two hours earlier. I didn’t know who to call or what to ask and anyone in authority was probably going home right now.
Instead, I pulled out the MacBook Air and started searching for keywords.
“Amy Morris” and “Mountie” wasted several minutes. “Amy Morris” and “RCMP” only showed me some news stories about a dog bite in Surrey, British Columbia. This Amy Morris was “policy and outreach officer” for the local Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.
So I dropped the “Morris” and spread a wider net. After twenty minutes of different keywords, I found the first promising lead. The Google summary was about the murder of an RCMP officer’s husband and daughter in Calgary.
I pulled up the story and there she was.
The news was three years old, but the photo was unmistakable. A woman with straight, reddish-blond hair parted slightly to the right and falling to spread out a couple of inches onto her shoulders. Heart-shaped face, blue eyes, so-so nose, and full lips in a slight smile. She was wearing civilian clothes.
The girl next door, teacher of the year, young mom at the park.
She would catch your eye and you would think she’s attractive, but the memory wouldn’t last. Men caught a glimpse of Lindsey and didn’t forget her.
The caption said, Sergeant Amy Lisa Russell.
The woman in the photo was Strawberry Death. There was no doubt.
I read the story, read it twice. The sergeant had been on duty when her husband and child had been found “slain” at their home in the Bridgeland neighborhood. I had visited the city only once, years ago, to lecture on the Great Depression at the University of Calgary. It had reminded me of Denver.
I searched for more stories about the homicides but there was nothing but rewrites of the original news.
Then I matched “Amy Russell” and “RCMP.” Her name came up in some official documents regarding something called the Immediate Action Rapid Deployment unit. It sounded like a national SWAT team, very elite. If she had served in this branch of the Mounties, she would have learned the moves she showed when we fought on the front lawn and I lost.
By this time the garden was empty, so I called the RCMP headquarters and got the runaround, nothing could be done until Wednesday at the earliest, I would need to speak to superintendent so-and-so, did I want to leave my name and agency? I did.
Then I went to the RCMP home page and tried to find some other options. The Mounties were organized into four separate districts for the province of Alberta. Calgary had its own city “police service.” It had investigated the killing of the husband and child.
The next call went straight through to the Calgary homicide unit. I gave my name, department, and badge number. Two minutes later, a man picked up and identified himself as Inspector Joe Mapstone.
We spent a few minutes trying to find adjoining branches in our respective family trees. When we discovered no common ancestors, I asked him about the Bridgeland murders.
“They were never officially solved,” he said.
That was a telling word. “Officially?”
“Amy Russell was in the RCMP organized crime task force. Her work sent three members of the Malicious Crew to federal prison, box cars for every one of them.”
I asked about the slang. “Box cars” meant two consecutive life terms.
“The Malicious Crew is one of our worst outlaw motorcycle clubs,” Inspector Mapstone told me. “Our theory was that the homicides were revenge. Amy might have been killed, too. She should have been home but was called to her headquarters that day. Her husband picked up their daughter at school and went home. That’s where the killers were waiting. We never released the details but it was nasty stuff.”
“Which was?”
His tone stiffened. “What exactly is your interest in this case, Deputy?”
There was no reason to soften it. “She’s a suspect in a murder here.”
“Amy?” He almost shouted her name. “That’s preposterous. I worked with her. Everybody loved Amy.”
“That may have been true but there’s no question. The identification is positive. It’s the same woman pictured in the Calgary Herald story about the murders.”
“How can you be sure?”
“Because she pointed a gun at me. She said she would have preferred to ‘suicide’ my wife and me. Then she shot my wife.”
“My God…”
It was a good two minutes before he spoke again. I waited him out in silence. By then he had mastered his emotions.
“Her husband was bound with duct tape,” he said. “He was forced to watch their six-year-old daughter raped, burned with cigarettes, and then slit up the middle from her vagina to her sternum. Six years old. Who would do such a thing? They covered him with her intestines. Then they started on him. It took awhile. A message was being sent.”
“Who found the bodies?”
“Amy did, when she came home that night. We haven’t been able to make the case yet. This is still active and open. Because it involves a police officer, it continues to merit special attention.”
Civilians didn’t realize how often cases were called “open,” but the cops were pretty certain about the suspect. Certainty didn’t always make a case.
There were probably hundreds like that here. Bob Crane of Hogan’s Heroes fame had been killed in Scottsdale in 1978. Add in videotaped sex and it had caused a national frenzy of news coverage. Almost from the start, the detectives had identified a suspect and had begun gathering evidence.
But convincing a prosecutor and a grand jury is another, more difficult matter. They finally had enough evidence to take the suspect to trial in 1994, but the jury acquitted him. The case remains officially open.
I asked, “What kept you from making arrests?”
“The prime suspect killed himself.”
My breath caught in my throat.
He said, “Legal name Aaron Henry Edmonds, street name Chaos. He was the top enforcer of the motorcycle club. We had him in our sights as the prime suspect. But two weeks later, he slit the throats of his two children and his old lady, the common law wife. Then he shot himself in the temple.”
Or he was “suicided,” Amy’s first.
“Is Amy still a Mountie?”
“No,” he said. “She resigned afterwards. You can understand why.”
“You said you knew her.”
“Yes. A fine officer and she served in top units. We had occasion to work together. Everybody respected her. After this… Well, she had to get away. She took a private-sector job. Making more than the Mounties could ever pay. At Yellowknife in the Northwest Territories”
I felt cold merely hearing the words.
The microwaves carried the sound of him turning pages of a file and then he gave me her teleph
one number.
“What’s in Yellowknife?” I said.
“The Ekati diamond mine,” he said. “She became chief of security.”
Chapter Thirty-six
After I set down the phone, I made a note of our entire conversation.
Then I heard my name and turned to see Lindsey’s top surgeon. I had never seen him at this time of day and a spike ran into my solar plexus, my hand gripped the wooden arm of the bench.
Maybe if I didn’t acknowledge him, didn’t turn around and stand up…
He said, “I have good news.”
I almost leapt off the bench but he sat me back down.
“I don’t use the word miracle lightly but your wife’s recovery comes pretty close. A medically induced coma and hypothermic treatment…In other words, lowering her body temperature. It can take up to two weeks. But we’re ready to start bringing her out now.”
“Let’s go!”
“Hang on.” He put a firm hand on my arm.
“This will be very gradual and intermittent. In stages. Think of it like a deep-sea diver being brought up.”
I curbed my enthusiasm, at least on the outside.
He said, “The goal is to bring her to general sedation until she has recovered enough to sustain herself. She’ll come off the ventilator as soon as she’s strong enough to breathe on her own. We’re thinking twelve to twenty-four hours, but if anything looks bad, we’ll need to resume the hypothermic treatment.”
I nodded too many times. I must have looked like an idiot.
I said, “What will she be like?”
“Her brain didn’t sustain any oxygen loss. That’s very good. Toward the end, she should be able to respond normally. Her memories may be affected.”
He sat with me for a surprisingly long time, saying nothing.
Finally he stood. “We can’t declare victory quite yet, Mister Mapstone. But your wife is a very strong woman.”
I knew that.
Chapter Thirty-seven
After a few minutes, I had to get out of the hospital. The claustrophobia was overwhelming. In the waiting room, the television made it impossible to think, sleep, or write a report.