The Night Detectives

by Jon Talton

  It held a baby doll, covered in blood. It looked as if a plastic bag of stage blood had been inserted into the package so it would burst on impact.

  “Hey!”

  I looked up and the homeless man was fifty yards away, a maniacal look on his face. “You see me comin’ on the street, it’s lights out!”

  I waved. My stomach felt as if it was going to climb out of my throat. Yeats was running through my brain, I have walked and prayed for this young child…

  The doll’s plastic smile mocked me as I pulled it out of the blood, seeing if the package contained a note. But there was none. The sun beat down on me as I realized the real baby was dead. An entire family wiped out on my watch. It was always going to turn out this way. The baby was going to die. Why did I think it could turn out otherwise? You can’t bargain with kidnappers.

  There had always been a chance to save the baby? Hadn’t there? That we could rescue this child while the bad guys kept it alive and either bargained with us or prepared to sell it on the adoption black market? Hadn’t there been a chance?

  No.

  I banged my fist into the dirt, catching a bunch of burrs that punctured through the latex into my flesh.

  I had not reacted as a professional, but as a hysterical civilian. Now I needed that professional core to return and save me.

  Scooping up the fresh evidence I was about to conceal, I carried it to the car and laid it in the trunk. I peeled off the sweat-filled, blood-and-burr covered evidence gloves and tossed them in, too. Then I waited in the car, blasting the air-conditioning on my face, for another half hour. The cell phone didn’t ring again, no matter how loudly I shouted at it. Not one car appeared on the sidestreets. Finally, I pushed the anger inside and felt very cold. I called Peralta but went to his voice mail. Two things seemed clear: more than one individual was involved, the man who called me and at least one more piloting the airplane. And I needed to get into Grace’s flash drive, find out what was so valuable.

  There was nothing more I could do but drive back home, Yeats still in my ears, his great gloom in my mind.

  An intellectual hatred is the worst.

  I would find who did this.

  And then kill them all.

  The chilled numbness I felt deepened on the doorstep. The door was unlocked. I had gone off in such a hurry that I hadn’t even set the alarm. If they were looking for the flash drive, they had come to the right place. I could walk back to the car and get help, but didn’t. If they were careful, they had already seen me through the picture window. I had five bullets on my side against their automatic weapons or Claymore mines. Maybe they weren’t careful and I would catch them searching. We would settle accounts.

  I stepped inside. Heather Nova was on the stereo. I thought about Frank Sinatra’s quip about committing suicide listening to Sarah Vaughn. Heather wasn’t bad background music to die by.

  “Is that you, Dave?”

  Lindsey Faith Adams Mapstone was in the kitchen, on her knees scrubbing the floor in front of the refrigerator, her brown-black hair in her face. She rose and hugged me, and, after a long time, I put my arms around her, too.

  Her voice was a whisper in my ear. “I have messed up so bad.”

  “Me, too.”

  21

  I heard the engine of Peralta’s truck roaring up Cypress before he walked in the door without knocking. He hugged Lindsey and I took him outside to the Prelude.

  “I told you she’d come back,” he said.

  I ignored that and told him about the call, the runaround, the airplane, and its bombing run. The caller had referred to me as “Doctor Mapstone,” exactly as Felix had done. He knew about me, the failed historian and the failed lawman. The newspapers had written up some of the big cases I had broken, but this wasn’t an innocent informed reader. He had done some homework. On top of that, he admitted that he had set off the Claymore. All I needed to tie it up in a bow was for him to confess to killing Felix. Unfortunately, the only bow I had was the twine from the package with the bloody doll.

  I opened the trunk. Sheltered by the shade, the heat left us alone.

  Kicking at the driveway, I said, “The baby’s dead.”

  He slipped on a fresh pair of evidence gloves and carefully examined the bloody doll.

  “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves.” He leaned in, reading off the brand of the doll, noting the quality of the wrapping paper and twine. “Where’s the flash drive?”

  I told him about the hiding spot in the library.

  “It must have something important if he’s willing to put on this show,” Peralta said.

  I told him about my inability to get past Grace’s pre-recorded greeting.

  Half of his upper lip tilted up, a wide smile for him. “Lindsey can take care of that.”

  “Tell me we’ll find these guys.”

  He raised up and studied me. “We will.”

  I followed him back to his truck, where he produced a garbage bag, then we returned to the Prelude, where he slid the evidence inside. I didn’t want Lindsey to know about this bloody baby doll and what it implied. Anyway, was she visiting? Was she back for good? I didn’t know. This case could only deepen her grief.

  “Should I call the FBI?”

  “No,” he said. “In an hour, you’ll have twenty agents setting up shop in your living room. Any chance we have will be lost.”

  “We don’t have a chance. The baby is dead.”

  “No,” Peralta said. I took no comfort from his tone of certainty. He went on: “If the baby was dead, he’d have nothing to bargain with. He did this as a warning. He wanted to throw you a scare in the most dramatic way possible. He’ll call again. You ought to check out historic cases and see about bodies being dropped from airplanes.”

  Now he was trying to distract me.

  As I leaned against the fender, which had cooled off enough that it didn’t burn me, I thought about being eight years old, coming home from Kenilworth School full of joy to be free, catching the limb of a small tree outside, and getting stung by a bee. As Grandmother removed the stinger, I thought it was the worst thing that could possibly happen, it hurt so much.

  Now that same tree was grown tall but my branch was sawed off. It was a long time coming. I was a surprise baby and then my parents died before I even knew them. No brothers or sisters, no aunts or uncles. So many times at the Sheriff’s Office, I had eluded violent death. It was something our unborn child couldn’t do and saving Lindsey’s life meant we couldn’t have another.

  “Mapstone.” Peralta knew I was too deep in my head. “I’ll take the package to a private lab and get a workup. Let’s go inside.”

  “What about Cartwright?” The thought had just come to me.

  “Stop obsessing about the Edward thing.”

  “That’s not what I mean,” I said, unaware of any irony involving a man I was prepared to shoot the day before. “He might be dead or in danger. They’re playing us, jerking us around. They kill people we talk to, but they won’t come straight for us.”

  His heavy hand guided my shoulder toward the front door. “Ed will be fine, whether it’s nuclear war or some dudes coming onto his property. If anybody was stupid enough to make a move against Ed, he’d have them buried in the desert within the hour.”

  Inside, he slipped on the pair of Bose earphones that Lindsey had gotten me for Christmas five years ago and listened to the voice on the recorder. He replayed it several times. Then he settled into the leather chair, put on his reading glasses, and studied my report on Grace Hunter. Lindsey was still cleaning the kitchen.

  He folded his glasses. “I agree.”

  “Why would she leave her baby and go see Zisman?”

  He ticked off scenarios on his fingers. She received a call like I had, perhaps threatening to kill Tim if she didn’t go. Maybe not go to Zisman’s condo
. Maybe instructions to go to the corner to meet someone, and she had been taken.

  Or Zisman himself had coerced her with some form of blackmail or reward.

  Or an abductor had gained entry to the apartment and made her leave with him. A gun at one’s back is a good persuader—could even make a mother leave her newborn baby.

  Or she had gone willingly because she and Zisman were still lovers and Tim Lewis didn’t know it, but something had gone wrong, and he had arranged to have her killed while he was on his boat.

  “The last one seems improbable,” I said. “She wouldn’t leave the baby.”

  “We used to see that all the time,” Peralta said. “Mother abandoning a baby so she can go party. Leaving them inside their cars in the summer while they go shop. Remember the mother who drove off with the baby still on the car roof?”

  “It doesn’t fit Grace, and not only the woman described by Tim Lewis, but the woman’s actions. She started her own illegal business, where it required discretion and care. She did it for some time without attracting a pimp, and then she eventually gave him the slip. She wasn’t an airhead.”

  “That’s true.”

  When I waited in silence, he continued. “I was talking to her father.”

  “I’m surprised he would talk to you.”

  “I didn’t give him much of a choice. When I went to his place, the housekeeper told me he’d gone hiking. He’s one of these idiots who climbs Camelback every day, even in the summer. So I got a description and waited at the Echo Canyon trailhead for him. Someday Phoenix Fire will have to airlift him off if he keeps this up. He was so heat exhausted that I didn’t have trouble getting him into the cab of the truck.”

  “You shouldn’t have gone alone,” I said.

  “Why?” He snapped it out in a harsh tone. “I can take care of myself.”

  “That’s not my point. We’ve had two clients killed and the murderer is at large.”

  “I’m not an old man, Mapstone. You handled the kidnapper’s call on your own. I did this. We don’t have an entire department backing us up any more. Sometimes we have to work separately to get results in a hurry. I sure as hell can take care of myself.”

  I shut up. It was the first time I had sensed that he was not as philosophical about losing the election as he appeared. My concern about him going alone, and my frustration that he hadn’t been around to back me up, came off as questioning his abilities.

  When he cooled down, Peralta described Grace’s father: a self-made man, owning a successful company in Chandler that sold garage-door mechanisms. In a metropolitan area where big garages were almost as sacred as unlimited gun rights and red-light running, it was a very good business. The daughter he described to Peralta was smart, a National Merit Scholar finalist, but a young woman with a rebellious side. Her father had wanted her to attend Stanford, so of course she had chosen San Diego State. In retaliation, he had made her pay her own way.

  “They didn’t get along?” I asked.

  “Didn’t sound like it,” he said. “The guy struck me as a prick. Chip on his shoulder. Sense of entitlement. And he’s got a wife half his age, so he’s desperately trying to stay in shape and be the extreme athlete, totally focused on trying to be her age. He’s had work done, I could tell.”

  “She’s not Grace’s mother…”

  “No. They divorced when Grace was a freshman in college and her mother found out dad had a girlfriend on the side that was his daughter’s age. He said Grace blamed him for the divorce, but the parents had been fighting for years. Grace couldn’t wait to get out of that house.”

  “The dad told you all this?”

  “No,” he said. “The housekeeper did. I don’t know whether she’s legal or not, but let’s say she was a fan. ‘My Sheriff,’ she called me. She was happy to help.”

  “Where was the new wife?”

  “Where else? The spa at the Sanctuary.”

  After the divorce, Grace had come home to the Phoenix less often, and had visited her dad less still. She hated the young woman who, in her eyes, had broken up her parents’ marriage, and refused even to see her.

  So her father was surprised and proud when Grace asked him for a loan to start her own business in San Diego. He was even happier when she paid him back.

  “How did he seem to be taking her death?”

  “Like a tough guy,” Peralta said, “but I could tell it’s eating at him.”

  “Did he bring up Zisman?”

  “No, but I did. He claimed he didn’t know Zisman. Grace never mentioned the guy to either parent.”

  “Or what her real business was.”

  “Right. But Grace had no known enemies and she was emotionally stable, even the housekeeper backed that up. She said Grace was the only nice person in the family. No history of suicide attempts. Later, I talked to her mother on the phone and it all jibed. The mother moved back to Iowa and hadn’t seen Grace for a year.”

  “Do they think it was suicide?”

  “They don’t know what to think. The dad wanted to know who hired us, and of course he had never heard of Felix Smith. They didn’t know about her boyfriend, either.”

  “And they didn’t know they were grandparents?”

  He shook his head.

  Her mother last spoke to her on the phone the day before she died and Grace said she wanted to tell her some good news. She said it was a complicated story. But her mom was at work, so they decided to talk about it the next day. But the call never came.”

  That made me even more suspicious: additional witnesses that Grace was not depressive, not suicidal. And a phone call promising good news: I assumed that meant telling her about her new baby. This was not a woman who killed herself.

  “We have missing time to fill in,” I said. “On April twenty-second, Grace was gone when Tim returned at three that afternoon. She didn’t die until nearly midnight. None of that time was spent calling her mom in Iowa. So what was she doing?”

  I also didn’t like the cell-phone situation. Someone Grace’s age couldn’t live without constant texting. And yet she had a new cell with nothing on it. I looked once more at my phone, willing Mister UNKNOWN to call again. He didn’t.

  “San Diego PD will re-open this as a homicide based on your report,” Peralta said. “It will take time, but they can find her other phone records.”

  “We don’t have time.” My temples were starting to ache from stress.

  “Maybe I can help.” Lindsey was behind me.

  I didn’t know how much she had heard. But I didn’t want her anywhere near a case that involved what would no doubt be a dead baby. Yet before I could speak, Peralta said, “That would be great, Lindsey.” To me, “Give her the flash drive with Grace’s clients. It’s encrypted.”

  “I need to go to the Apple store at the Biltmore,” she said. “And a Radio Shack. Then I can get started.”

  I handed her the keys to the Prelude.

  22

  By the time Lindsey returned, Peralta was gone. She set a large bag down on the desk where I was working.

  “I want to see the garage apartment.”

  I wasn’t sure that was a good idea for either of us. That had been Robin’s space, where she had lived with us after coming back into Lindsey’s life following a long absence, lived for two years rent-free after she lost her job as curator of a man’s art collection. He lost it all in the real-estate collapse and she was looking for her next adventure. I hadn’t been up there since her death.

  “I want to see it,” Lindsey insisted.

  I tried very hard not to sigh. We walked up the staircase, bookshelves on one side and a wrought-iron railing on the other, to the landing that overlooked the living room, then across the walkway above the interior courtyard where Lindsey’s garden had sat neglected. I fumbled with the keys and opened the door.

&nbs
p; Heat greeted us so I turned on the window air-conditioner. It was a simple space, one large room with a bed and a couple of chairs, an alcove for a little kitchen, and a bathroom. A back door led to an outside staircase on the north end of the building. Grandmother had kept her sewing room up here when I was a child. Robin had added several social realism posters—her specialty in art history—and two of her own oil paintings, abstracts with geometric lines and vivid colors, illuminated by the afternoon sun. Her easel stood in one corner, an empty canvas on it.

  Lindsey walked around, lightly touching the edges of the paintings. Opening the closet, she examined Robin’s clothes, holding a blouse up to her face.

  Her dark hair grew fast and it was now down to her shoulders with bangs added. It fell thick and pin-straight. Women would kill for Lindsey’s hair. The edge of it brushed around the nape of her neck as she ran a hand against Robin’s clothes. They would kill for her fair skin and the lovely contrasts between dark hair, fair skin, and blue eyes. She looked familiar and yet a stranger. In so many ways, I did not know my wife.

  So many times, I had imagined what was next for us, wondered whether I even wanted her to come back. It was a terrible thought, but she had left me once before, when we were first dating, and it had lacerated my heart. She had come back on Christmas Eve and that lyrical return had become a part of our story.

  This time when she left, after losing the baby and taking the job offered to her by the governor of Arizona who was becoming Secretary of Homeland Security, the story turned darker. I tried to understand her need to grieve. She had to get out of this house, she had said at one point she didn’t know if she could ever stand to be here again, and yet here she was. I tried to understand and yet I had been hurting, too. It was our baby that was dead, not only hers. In the blurred months she had been gone, we had talked nothing out and I had given up trying. I didn’t know if I wanted her to come back because I didn’t know if I could open up to the pain of another abandonment. The fortifications I had built against her were not strong.

  She turned and studied me, a big smile playing on her sensual lips. In her eyes was a nothing look that was densely underlain with meaning. It lasted a few seconds.