by Jon Talton
“That the name,” she said. “He was a star for the Sun Devils back in the seventies. I remember.”
Occam’s Razor, indeed.
Peralta attacked his second chili dog with more aggression than usual. A Scottsdale McMansion of possibilities had opened up. One room contained the obvious, that Zisman was a client. Another held the possibility that Zisman had hit on his buddy’s daughter and gotten it for free. The rest of the floor plan was too twisted to think about over lunch.
I said, “Maybe Zisman wasn’t her client.”
“He wasn’t,” Lindsey said.
Everybody turned to her.
“It took me about two minutes to break into that flash drive,” she said. “It contained an Excel spread sheet with sixty two clients: names, Social Security numbers, driver’s license numbers, dates, and amounts. No Larry Zisman.”
Nobody took a bite.
I said, “The johns gave her that information?”
“They would have to do that for an escort agency,” Sharon said. “It helps ensure safety.”
“But,” I said, “Zisman knew Grace’s father and covered it up.”
I could see the slow burn on Peralta’s features over Hunter lying to him. Maybe Grace’s father didn’t know his daughter had been intimate with Larry Zip. That was the most charitable explanation. But he sure knew that Grace had fallen out of Zip’s condo, and yet he hadn’t admitted their friendship either to Peralta or Isabel Sanchez.
“There’s something else.” Lindsey nodded toward our front parking lot. “The Prelude has a GPS tracking device tucked inside the front fender. You can buy one in any spy shop.”
My legs and feet felt very heavy on the floor.
“What did you do with it?” Peralta asked.
“I left it there.” She ate a bite of salad and dabbed her lovely, orgasm-flushed face with a paper napkin. “If they don’t know we found it, we have an edge. From what Dave says, San Diego PD has a hard-on for Zisman now that Dave’s shown that Grace didn’t kill herself. Maybe we can work with them.”
“They’re not going to work with private detectives,” Peralta said.
After a long silence, I looked at him. “These scumbags have had the upper hand from before Felix walked in that door. They placed a call to our number using Grace’s cell phone so the cops would be suspicious of us. I’m tired of playing defense. What’s our next move?”
He inhaled and rose up in his chair. “I’ve heard a person’s cell phone can be tracked. Not only the calls they make and receive, but the locations of the user at any point. Is that true?”
“Absolutely,” Lindsey said. “Wherever you go, your cell phone sends data and it’s mapped. And the cell providers keep those records. So somebody could find out Grace’s moves on any given date.” She paused and looked into her lap, and then she pushed her hair out of her face. “These companies have very sophisticated security and firewalls.”
“Can you hack it?”
My appetite fled. I stood and stalked the six feet to his desk. “I can’t believe what you asked her to do. That’s a federal crime.”
He shot up out of his chair and stabbed a finger at me. “What’s your plan, Mapstone? Get blown up again? You might not be so fast next time. We’ve been played for chumps and our clients are dead. Do you know why? I don’t. What I do know is it’s only a matter of time before we’re dead, especially if they get that flash drive.”
“Then we’ll take them on. Why bring Lindsey and Sharon into it?”
“Because they’re already in it with us.” He spat the words. “These assholes are cleaning up loose ends. Tim and the baby were loose ends. Why do they have a tracker on your car? Because they’re afraid of you? No. So they can find you and kill you when the time is right. Who’s going to help you? Your new buddy, Isabel? Not when she finds out you’ve been withholding evidence.”
He wasn’t the only one running hot. I went from zero to asshole in three seconds. I barked, “Lindsey could go to prison! Put your own ass on the line. Put mine. But leave her out of it! Let San Diego PD track Grace’s movements. Somebody cased our office. My god, are you nuts? We’re not safe here. We’re not safe at home. You said it yourself. We’re loose ends.”
So much for our convivial reunited family.
And then Vesuvius went dormant. He sat back in his executive chair and pushed his hair back with both hands. In a conversational voice: “We are safe as long as they are willing to bargain for the flash drive. That’s our hole card. They want it badly. If they hurt us or kill us, no flash drive.”
“Did the guy in the parking lot know that?” I told him about our visitor.
“Yes. He was probably some vagrant. If not, he was only on a recon mission.”
He looked so damned sure of himself.
“Now,” he said, “As for San Diego PD, I would leave this to them, David, but I don’t know how sophisticated they are or how big their caseload is. They might figure this out tomorrow or next month or never. The more I meddle, the more suspicious Kimbrough is going to be that we’re holding back evidence. I would hack those phone records myself, but I don’t know how. Lindsey does. She spent eight years in the Sheriff’s Office Cybercrimes Unit. She can reverse-engineer that knowledge.”
“I know how to be a hacker.” Lindsey’s voice was small but sounded weightier than our explosions.
It wasn’t as easy for me to dial back my anger, but I tried to match her soft voice. “Don’t do this, Lindsey, please.”
I had just, maybe, gotten her back. Now I would lose her again.
She took in my imploring glance, studied Sharon’s practiced calm, and then looked back at Peralta.
“Can you cover your tracks?” he asked.
Her look was that of the old insouciant Lindsey I had fallen for years ago, in her black miniskirt, nose stud, and irreverence that was somehow never cruel. The quarter smile that got the inside joke. The one who would answer him: They’ll never know I was there.
Now I knew that within my haunted beauty was her mother’s voice telling her she was never good enough, her “Linda Unit” as Robin had called it. I had no question about my wife’s skills. But the risks seemed intolerable. There had to be another way.
She looked at Peralta. “You always said I was the best.”
“Then do it.”
26
Peralta took Lindsey and Sharon outside while I called Artie Dominguez at the Sheriff’s Office.
“How’s the best detective in the department?”
His usual ebullient laugh was subdued. “David. Long time, long time. What’s it like working one-on-one with the Big Man every day?”
“You can imagine.” I asked him how he was. He snorted.
“He’s missed,” he said. “I might come be a private dick myself soon. You won’t believe how fucked up things are. Let’s say command these days isn’t very friendly if you have a last name like Dominguez. I used to get the best homicides. Lately, I’ve been on auto theft.”
“No shit.”
“Real shit, man. Twenty-five years and this is what I get. They’re out there playing Border Patrol and everything else has gone to hell. Response times are way down. Serious cases are going untouched. The jail’s a mess. Wait until you read about the El Mirage sex cases we’re not investigating. But rounding up the campesinos standing outside Home Depot makes the old farts in Sun City and the East Valley feel safer. Sucks.”
“Can you run a couple of names through NCIC and ViCAP for me?”
“Sure. It’ll take a couple of days so I can do it without my new boss asking questions.”
I gave him Larry Zisman and Bob Hunter. He was aggravated with me that I didn’t have Social Security numbers and dates of birth. That would mean more work.
“If it makes you feel any better, I have a list of about sixty names with SS nu
mbers that I’d like to email you at home and have you check, too. I know it’ll take time.”
“Damn, Mapstone. We ought to set you up down here with a desk.”
“You know how that would go over with the new guy.”
He sighed like a martyr.
“I’ll owe you,” I added.
“I’ll add it to your tab. That it?”
Not quite. I wanted him to check ViCAP—the massive FBI database—for suspicious deaths involving young women falling bound from high places. Extra points if they were high-priced prostitutes. And Claymore mine explosions.
After a pause. “Was that you in San Diego?”
“Yep.”
“Fuck me,” he said. “I thought you guys were going to be peeping on unfaithful husbands.”
“You know Peralta would get bored with that in an hour or less.”
“True,” he said. “Watch your ass, David.”
Then I went into the Danger Room to review the footage of the outside security cameras. I backed it up until it showed a new sedan pull in the dirt beside the south fence. It was a white Chevy Impala. A man got out and looked around. He was young and Anglo with a high-and-tight haircut, shaved on the sides with a weed-like tuft on top. Put him in a military uniform and give him a stolen Claymore and things started to come together. He was no vagrant.
I watched as he climbed on the Impala’s roof and expertly vaulted the fence, then walked to the carport. Switching to that camera, I saw him open the Prelude driver’s door and lean inside. He popped the seatback forward and climbed into the back. Next, he popped the trunk button and went back there. He was searching for the flash drive. He repeated the move on the passenger side, and then returned to the Impala, looked around again, and got inside.
Switching to the first camera, I saw him back out to leave and expose the license plate. Nevada. I zoomed in, made a screen shot, and printed it out. It was probably a rental car.
Sharon was standing behind me.
“I’m worried about you.”
“Me, too.” Why deny it?
“You’ve changed, David. Lindsey feels it, too.”
“That’s nice. Another excuse for her to leave me.”
She’s not going to leave you. It would have been nice to hear that, but Sharon didn’t say it.
“Mike told me what you went through with the cartels and the old gangster in Chandler,” she said. “Nobody could go through that without being changed.”
“And Robin being murdered.”
Sharon watched me with those big empathetic eyes.
Yes, there was that. And the trial would soon begin. It was another reason I didn’t want to read the local newspaper. It wouldn’t be covered because the defendant was a drug addict who killed someone. But because the victim was a blond, middle-class woman who lived in a historic district and was the sister-in-law of a former deputy sheriff—that was news. I would have to testify. I dreaded the effect this would have on Lindsey.
“And losing your child,” she said. “You two have gone through so much loss in such a short time. But I don’t want to see this destroy two people I love. Your child wouldn’t want that. Robin wouldn’t want that.”
I realized my fists were balled up and forced my hands to relax. “We’ll never know, now will we?”
“Mike told me how you chose not to kill the woman who shot Robin,” she said. “The David I know would have made that choice.”
I didn’t answer. It was true: I stalked her, found her, but turned her over to the cops. What Sharon didn’t know was that I had the woman on her knees with a dishrag in her mouth, and in my hands I held the assassin’s .22 caliber pistol with a silencer. I was about to pull the trigger when my cell phone rang and the readout said, “Lindsey.” So I didn’t pull the trigger. Part of me still regretted it. Nor did Sharon know that the better angels of my nature watched helplessly as I wrapped duct tape around the gangster’s mouth and let the Zetas crew carry him out of his Witness Protection Program-funded suburban Chandler house. Or how I rolled the pieces into place for his hit man to be on the receiving end of a hit himself in jail.
I didn’t regret those things.
Sharon said, “You have to be willing to give it time. Lindsey loves you. That’s why she’s here.”
Time again. As if I had it.
I said, “I’m really trying.”
Sharon hugged me and whispered for me to be good to myself. I didn’t know how. We walked back into the office to greet Lindsey and Peralta.
“There’s a tracker on his truck, too,” Lindsey said.
“She has a very cool scanner.” Peralta was like a little kid. He was enamored with gadgets. He was enamored with Lindsey. Who wasn’t?
He went on: “It picked the tracker right up. Might be a good idea to check the whole office.” He added, “If you don’t mind.”
Lindsey smiled politely. “This tracking device is identical to the one on the Honda. It’s not a logger, the thing people use to follow the movements of a cheating lover. The logger maps out their movements and then you can see where they’ve been. These are real-time trackers that feed right into a Google map display in a following car. They want to be able to follow at a safe distance and not be detected.”
“Are they sophisticated?” Peralta asked.
“Not really,” she said. “They’re certainly not federal issue. But they’re battery operated. The battery might last a month if they track the car an hour or two a day. Less if they track us for more time or the heat really kicks up. Otherwise, they have to replace the batteries.” She sighed. “Or they’re on a limited timeline so it doesn’t matter.”
After Lindsey was done, I told Peralta about my review of the security camera. The man with the high-and-tight hair was casing the place.
Peralta sat on the edge of his desk. “It’s time to take the war to these assholes.”
My anger had been replaced with exhaustion.
“It’s over.” I held out the truck-stop cell phone. “It’s been twenty-four hours since he’s called.” I was about to say, “The baby is dead,” but a look at Lindsey stopped me.
Peralta shook his Easter Island head. “If it was over, that guy wouldn’t have been on our property, searching the Prelude. We need to shake things up. Here’s how we’re going to do it.”
27
An ancient Greek poet wrote, “The fox knows many things but the hedgehog knows one big thing.” The philosopher Isaiah Berlin turned that into an influential essay on writers and intellectuals. I was usually a fox. The kidnapping had made me a hedgehog. The single experience defining our lives right now was the kidnapping.
No matter how many law-enforcement agencies were investigating it, I had received the call. I had been bombed with the bloody baby doll—a warning, according to Peralta. It was certainly done in a way that got my attention. The caller told me he had something I wanted. It could only be Tim and Grace’s baby. And he said I had something he wanted. That could only be the flash drive. But how did that make sense? He had to know that we would break the encryption and download the client names.
Lindsey wondered if some information was hidden elsewhere on the drive. If so, that could make this particular piece of plastic very valuable, and Mister UNKNOWN was assuming we didn’t know the hidden data were there. Finding it was another task for her.
My task was to be bait.
Peralta called the shots. He had investigated hundreds of kidnappings. I had solved only one, from 1940. So I had to follow his lead.
At sundown, I went out alone in the Honda Prelude. Well, not quite alone: for company I had Mister Colt Python and Messrs. Smith and Wesson with the Airlite. And several Speedloaders of extra ammo for each revolver. I also had two cell phones: my new iPhone was plugged into my ears and the truck-stop cell, whose number UNKNOWN had, was on the seat beside me.
>
I drove east on Camelback Road, a spectacular orange sunset to my back, maddeningly thick traffic ahead of me. It used to be that if you went the speed limit in the city of Phoenix, you would make every light with only a few exceptions. Now the freeway entrances and a few million more people had complicated that, so I ended up missing almost every light. It gave me a chance to see the massive ugliness of a city that had grown so fast it hadn’t had time to clean up after itself. Things would be better in full dark. Phoenix was beautiful at night.
Peralta was on the phone. “I’m about half a mile behind you, giving you plenty of room.”
“Where’s the tracker on your truck?”
“It’s sitting on a table at your house, like a good captured tracker.”
That made me laugh. I stopped when he told me Lindsey was with him. Not only did she have work to do, most of all I didn’t want her in danger if this excursion went sideways. I kept that to myself.
“Where’s Sharon?”
“She’s renting us a motel room.”
That was new. I decided not to ask questions but to focus on my task.
The real estate got nicer at Twenty-Fourth Street, with its alternative downtown of office towers, fancy condos, and the Ritz Carlton. The magical Biltmore Fashion Park had gotten a facelift a few years back and now looked like any suburban mall. Half a mile north was the entrance to the Biltmore resort. Only a few blocks south, the once solidly middle-class neighborhoods had turned over. Now people called it “The Sonoran Biltmore.”
I swam the traffic current headed to Scottsdale. If someone were following me, I would never know it. But I deliberately avoided any cute tactics to lose a tail. I wanted a tail. Camelback Mountain loomed straight in front, its head rising first. At Forty-Fourth Street, I turned left and climbed gradually into Paradise Valley.
The road turned east and became McDonald Drive. I wanted to look up and see the Praying Monk formation on the camel’s head, but too many headlights intruded. Some toff honked at me for not going the mandatory fifteen miles over the speed limit, then sped around me in his BMW. Phoenicians never used to honk. I used to own a BMW. Patty gave it to me. Lindsey wasn’t sorry when some bad guys pushed it out of a parking garage three stories down into Adams Street. I wanted to do the same with this prick.
