The Night Detectives

by Jon Talton

  Half an hour later, we hit solid pavement and Peralta spoke for the first time since he had returned to the pickup truck.

  “There was a day when he would have killed you.”

  I let my breathing return all the way to normal before speaking.

  “Ed? As in Edward? America’s Finest Pimp thought I was the enforcer of some guy named Edward. He was afraid of Edward, and he didn’t strike me as the kind who was afraid of many people. The man he described as Edward’s muscle sounded a hell of a lot like Felix.”

  “That’s not this Ed,” Peralta said.

  “How do you know? Did you see the ‘tell’ when I told him about Felix? He was lying.”

  “He had a loaded AK-47 being held by a crazy man, Mapstone. That’s not a ‘tell’ you can trust.”

  “Maybe. His name is still Edward.”

  “Ed was a decorated FBI agent before his end-of-the-world fetish got him in trouble and he was fired. Only that’s not the whole story. He’s quietly enjoying his FBI pension and an honorable retirement.”

  “So tell me the whole story.”

  “Being known as a disgraced, bitter former special agent gives him cred. He deals guns to skinheads and bikers, cartels, Mexican Mafia, whoever pays. Gives ‘em training, if they need it. And any takedowns happen so far down the line that nobody suspects crazy old Ed Cartwright.”

  “I never heard of him.”

  “You wouldn’t,” Peralta said. “He doesn’t work for the FBI, doesn’t work for Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. He reports to higher authorities. Maybe where your wife works, Mapstone. Nobody else in Phoenix law enforcement even knows about him, except as another reclusive old coot living out in Wittman with his guns. That’s the way it’s supposed to work.”

  “Why would white supremacists deal with somebody who has brown skin?”

  “They must dig the whole Apache noble savage thing.”

  My breathing return to normal. It would have helped if Peralta had given me the whole story before we went visiting, to know what his play was. That kind of non-disclosure was like the old Peralta. It would have helped if Cartwright could have done a better job of connecting the Claymore to an apartment in San Diego, a young woman’s fall out of a condo tower, and her boyfriend’s violent death. Was he her boyfriend or husband? I didn’t even know. How nuts was that?

  “We’ve got white supremacists in the armed forces,” I said. “I thought that was the least racist institution in America.”

  “Not after you break the force in two long wars,” he said. “And drop recruiting standards. And have a black guy as commander in chief, which has brought out all the whackos. You remember the group they arrested in Georgia? Five soldiers were stockpiling weapons. They wanted to poison the apple crop, set off bombs, and overthrow the government? Thank God for stupid criminals.”

  “Until some smart criminals show up,” I said. “So I assume Cartwright’s bosses will be on this.”

  Peralta shrugged and we rode the rest of the way in silence back through the antic monstrosity of the suburban asteroid belt and into Phoenix. It might have been quicker to take the Loop 101 down to the Papago Freeway but Peralta stuck to surface streets. What were all these people doing out? Driving was the local sport.

  Outside the office, he shifted the truck into park and turned to face me.

  “Mapstone, I know you’re not yourself, but…”

  Peralta’s voice trailed off. He set his jaw and turned forward.

  I got out. He drove off.

  19

  A few minutes later I returned home, eating a Popsicle to cool down and brooding. For the first time in my life, I had come close to being the worst thing possible in law enforcement: a hot dog. Cartwright was Peralta’s play and I should have stayed in the shadows, let him handle it, and listened. I had allowed Cartwright and my anxiety over the baby to strip away my professionalism, send me into a tantrum with a loaded gun. He was going to get the idea that he couldn’t count on me, never a good place to be with Peralta.

  But the reality was that Peralta wasn’t getting anywhere and Cartwright was holding back. Now I knew about the stolen Claymores but the connection from there was tenuous. The idea of white supremacist cells in the military was frightening. Some future Gibbon would write about that. For much of America’s history, the nation had frowned on large standing armies. Now it was part of our economic policies and if you didn’t “support the troops,” you were a commie. And how all this tied in to Grace, Tim, and baby David, I did not know.

  I was still running out of time. Sure, every law enforcement agency in Southern California would be working this case. But it was on me. That, at least, was how my concussed brain parsed it.

  I checked the Amber Alert for the tenth time that day. The baby was still missing. He hadn’t been in the apartment when I went through it. That much I was sure of. I was also certain that this was no child-custody issue but a kidnapping. Soon the FBI would come knocking. I was, after all, not merely a washed-up historian of cold cases. I was an expert on lost children.

  But there would be nothing helpful I could tell them. My lost child was the one conceived with Lindsey. The child that never made it past four months in her womb before the miscarriage. Lindsey fled to the job in Washington, insisting that Robin continue to live here. Her only demand of me was that I keep Robin safe, a task at which I had failed. Now they were all gone and a house I had expected to be filled with unaccustomed baby sounds was silent. There was no Amber Alert for our loss.

  These were thoughts I had become a master at stuffing in a closet of my brain and locking away. Patty had complained that I lacked the discipline to write serious history. She didn’t know how disciplined I could become. I hardly cried now. It helped that I had hidden away all the photos of Lindsey and Robin. I didn’t speak of it. No pity party for me. I didn’t want Sharon Peralta to shrink my head, get me in touch with my feelings. Those would kill me. I was not special. The world was a planetary engine fueled by loss. Some things could never be made right.

  At the Sheriff’s Office, one of the cardinal rules of “incident command,” say a hostage situation, was “stay in your own lane.” One of Peralta’s commandments was to avoid what he called a jurisdictional goat fuck. We were gone from the Sheriff’s Office, and yet I knew he still thought that way. So I tried to choose a lane to make my own, take one of the many strands that had dropped on us in the past few days and follow it.

  That would be the suspicious death of Grace Hunter.

  Putting the Mac to sleep, I moved over to the leather chair, the police files of Grace Hunter’s death on my lap. My body gradually cooled off from the hike through the desert to Cartwright’s bunker. From the study, I could see the big picture window of the living room and I dawdled, staring out at the lush shady landscape of the street. Phoenix had done so many things wrong as a city. One of the things it had done right was preserving some of the old neighborhoods such as Willo.

  I meditated on all the things I had done wrong in San Diego. Whores always lied. This was something I had learned as a young deputy. Most had drug habits. Most had children. So much could go wrong in their lives. Telling the truth was an occupational hazard. I should have interrogated Tim in much more depth. Who knew if Grace was even telling him the whole story? On the other hand, I had never dealt with high-priced call girls. Yet something told me the same operating procedure, the lying, applied. Many of them were victims. Some were not. None had a heart of gold, whatever Tim’s conviction that she wanted to leave the life and be a mommy in Ocean Beach.

  I should have gotten much more information about both Tim’s and Grace’s pasts, should have asked to see her computer and especially her emails. When she didn’t come home that day, did he try to call or text her? I failed to ask. Did they have any friends in town with whom they socialized, besides her girlfriend Addison? Had any new neighbors moved in
, or were there folks they had recently started to hang with, and had any taken an interest in Grace? I didn’t know.

  I had assumed we would have more time for a follow-up, a foolish supposition considering that our first client, the one who had launched us on this quest, had been gunned down outside our office. Most of all, I should have waited until Tim was safely in his car with the baby and driving out the alley and toward the freeway to Riverside and his parents’ house. I was not at the top of my game.

  The police files had a familiar feel. Every department used standardized reporting now. But the information from my first spin through the paperwork showed me I wasn’t the only one who had made mistakes. I pulled over a legal pad from the desk and started making notes.

  On April twenty-second, the first emergency call came in at 11:54 p.m., a woman had fallen or jumped from a condo balcony. It was placed by another female who had been with her boyfriend in the Jacuzzi by the pool. Grace landed no more than twenty feet away and the caller was sure she had come off the nineteenth floor. The woman lived on twenty and her balcony was distinctive because of its hanging plants.

  The first units to arrive, three minutes later, were a fire department engine company, then, five minutes after the first call, a paramedic unit. Grace was obviously DOA. All the witnesses agreed she was nude and handcuffed from behind.

  Unfortunately, the building’s night concierge was there, too, and opened the condo door for the firefighters. And they walked right in, finding the place empty, and the door leading to the balcony open. Uniformed police got there six minutes after the call, which had originally been routed to the fire department as a medical emergency. That’s not surprising. The woman in the Jacuzzi was probably hysterical when she made the call and was perhaps assuming, with the hope of the traumatized, that Grace was only hurt. But it was several minutes before the officers could secure the condo.

  That meant the first investigator to arrive, Isabel Sanchez, the “night detective” to use Peralta’s lingo, was already facing a contaminated scene. I thought about Peralta telling me she was a looker, how it would do me a world of good to get laid. What would my opening line be? “Hi, I’m David and I’m concealing evidence. What’s your sign?”

  Back to work, Mapstone. At least two firefighters, the night concierge, and perhaps some curious civilians had been in the unit before the uniformed officers ran them out. The “fact” that the condo had been locked with a deadbolt also came second-hand, from the night concierge.

  The inventory of Grace’s belongings was minimalist: one pair of jeans, a cotton blouse, bra and panties, and black sneakers. But the clothes had not been neatly folded. The blouse was draped over a chair in the living room and the bra was two feet away on the floor. The jeans and panties were in the bathroom, again on the floor. There was a small amount of standing water on the bathroom floor, but the towels were dry and the shower hadn’t been recently used. One sneaker was in the hallway leading to the bedroom. The other was in the kitchen.

  Her purse was on the living room sofa, a small black satchel, tipped on its side. Inside were a wallet, cell phone, tissues, keys, sunglasses, and hand lotion. I studied the photos of each. No pepper spray or knife, which Tim had said she always carried.

  A cynical street cop would say Grace was wandering the condo, stripping down as she cried or raved or hallucinated. Maybe she splashed water from the sink onto her face—and onto the floor—trying to make herself snap out of it. But then she found the nerve, walked to the door, opened it, and stepped out on the balcony. Next, to make sure she couldn’t change her mind again, she handcuffed herself.

  It might have gone down that way.

  Wide-angle shots of the rooms showed nothing to indicate violence. Lamps were in their place. A big, fragile piece of pueblo pottery was undisturbed on a table nearest to the glass door. The bed was made. The kitchen looked as if no one ever cooked in it. The floors were clean except for the discarded clothing.

  Another photo showed the inside of the front door. Writing in red said, I AM SO SORRY. It jarred me momentarily, bringing back memories of the wall in Tim’s apartment. But it wasn’t blood. A lab report said it was lipstick.

  My cynical street cop, who had spent so many hours filling out paperwork for successful and attempted suicides, said to me: “See, she offed herself. Leave it to a Southern California airhead to have no writing implements other than her lipstick.”

  The only problem was that the inventory showed no lipstick, no cosmetics of any kind. I did a grad-school speed skim of the rest of the incident report, supplemental reports, and Detective Sanchez’s case notes. No lipstick tube.

  Sanchez tried Grace’s keys on the condo door. None fit. Her driver’s license had an out-of-date address. But her parents’ names and phone number were in her wallet, and they were the ones Sanchez called to notify. They flew over and identified her remains. If Grace’s wallet also had baby photos, they weren’t listed in the inventory. There was no mention of a baby anywhere.

  The medical examiner rushed through the autopsy and toxicology reports, the cops no doubt being mindful of the Coronado case. Its findings were what you would expect from a fall of at least one-hundred-ninety feet onto concrete. Massive head trauma, burst organs, collapsed lungs, and dozens of fractured bones. “The cause of death was the fall,” one comment noted. Her bloodstream contained neither drugs nor alcohol. Her wrists showed abrasions where the handcuffs had been placed, but this could be consistent with a falling person’s panic. She had semen in her vagina.

  I got up and returned to the laptop, using Google to search for keywords about what happened that night. Not one story appeared. I remembered what my friend Lorie Pope, once a reporter at the Arizona Republic, had told me: that newspapers had reassigned or pushed out the old-time police reporters, the ones who went on calls and formed close relationships with the cops. That was how she and I had first met, me a deputy, Lorie working the police beat on the city desk. Now the newspapers only wrote up what the police public information officers told them. Crime upset readers, or so the editors thought. Television was a different matter, but only if they had “visuals,” and no station seemed to pick up on the action that night. It was nearly midnight when she fell, after the end of the eleven o’clock news. If SDPD feared another suspicious death circus, they didn’t need to worry.

  The death and autopsy photos were what I expected. About all that was recognizably left of Grace Hunter was the butterscotch hair with blond streaks.

  Larry Zisman returned at one, a little more than an hour after Grace’s long dive. Sanchez initially interviewed him downstairs in the owners’ lounge. Then she took him to the station to sign statements.

  Zisman and his wife had owned the condo for six years. They often spent the summer months there. His wife worked for Intel and sometimes traveled, so Zisman was frequently there alone. Zisman described Hunter as his girlfriend and begged the police not to tell his wife. They had five children. He had never been unfaithful before. The usual routine. He also referred to Grace as “Scarlett,” a discrepancy Sanchez noted and questioned him on. “Subject states that he only knew deceased as Scarlett, a student at SDSU.”

  He had met her three years before at a convention and they became occasional lovers. He denied giving her money, only some presents. As for the handcuffs, they belonged to Zisman, the reserve Phoenix police officer. He said they used them for light bondage during sex.

  Zisman said they had a fight the night of her death. She wanted to see him more regularly and demanded that he leave his wife. She became hysterical and was generally “emotional” and “high strung.” It did not become physical, according to Zisman’s statement, only shouting and tears. “Subject stated that he left the condo at approximately 2230 hours with Hunter still there, to let the situation cool down.”

  According to Zisman, they did not have sex that night.

  Zisman said he wen
t to his boat, which was moored at a marina less than a mile away, and stayed there reading until half past midnight. Coming and going, he talked with a couple that owned a craft at the next slip. This checked out.

  So if Zisman left the condo at half past ten that night, Grace was alone for little more than an hour before her death. If she was, in fact, alone.

  I thought about what Tim had told me. He had gone to classes that morning and not returned until after three. Grace was gone. So even if she went out right before three, it left many unaccounted hours before her death. I found nothing that gave an indication of how they might have been spent. Grace had a new cell phone and it had no information on it, no calls, no texts, either incoming or outgoing. Would the mother described by Tim simply walk out of the Ocean Beach apartment, leaving the baby, and not even check in?

  If Sanchez asked Zisman the last time prior to that night he had seen Grace, or Scarlett, it wasn’t in the report. If he hadn’t seen her for, say, eighteen months, then Tim’s story might be accurate. If he had been with her four times that month, Tim had been betrayed. Unfortunately, after my encounter with the Claymore mine, I didn’t think Isabel Sanchez would tell me diddly.

  If Tim was telling the truth about them hiding out for more than a year in O.B. as Grace gave birth to their baby, one of the most important questions remained unanswered: why Grace would have gone downtown to meet up with a former john?

  I had to hand it to Zisman. From the case notes, he came across with exactly the right mixture of distraught, surprise, and forthcoming. And maybe all that was genuine. But he was also in law enforcement. The only ones better at lying than whores were cops.

  Then there was the missing lipstick tube.

  I walked around the house and returned to the chair, spending two hours reading in more detail. This didn’t change my initial impression. The man with the prosthetic leg had been right.

  This was not a suicide.