by Jon Talton
After the big intersection at Tatum Drive, McDonald calmed down. The area became low-density and very expensive residential, with few streetlights, no sidewalks, and plenty of gates. One would never know that a huge city enveloped this blessed precinct on every side. The road ran to the north of Camelback Mountain. Across Paradise Valley was the mass of Mummy Mountain. I never ceased being moved by these works of nature and how they stood out darker than the night sky. For a few seconds my rearview mirror held no headlights. Then some appeared in the distance. My gut tightened.
Bob Hunter lived in a slummy lot for Paradise Valley, meaning his house was a large, perfectly respectable mid-century ranch. But it was definitely lower end than its neighbors. Most of the similar-age houses along Fifty-Second Place had been torn down and replaced by more impressive mansions. Lush desert landscaping predominated and the land was gentle hills. Paradise Valley had filled in since I was young, but it was still low-density. The properties were spaced far enough apart that a neighbor wouldn’t hear a gunshot. A prominent doctor and his wife had recently been bound and shot, and their bodies were only discovered because the meth-addicted killer also set fire to their house.
For my purposes, Bob Hunter’s house had an added benefit: no gate. I killed the headlights and slowly came to a stop on the concrete circle in front of the house. Lights were on inside, as well as on a pair of ornamental wrought iron, amber-tinted porch sconces. If someone had seen me, I would know soon enough. Either he would come to the door, or, more likely, I would find the Paradise Valley cops pulling in behind me.
Neither happened. After ten minutes, Peralta called.
“Report.”
“I’m sitting here. Nobody has even driven by. The mountains look beautiful.”
“We’re cruising,” Peralta said. “I don’t want to get too close.”
I told him it was too bad we couldn’t reverse the tracker and find out if I was actually being followed.
“I didn’t bring that kind of technology home with me, Dave.” I heard Lindsey’s voice over his speaker. She had said home. That was a good sign, right?
I kept scanning my mirrors and windshield, trying to get as much of a three-hundred-sixty-degree view as possible. Nothing was moving behind the ocotillos and, behind a white wall, the tall stand of oleanders that blocked off the backyard. I tried to imagine Grace growing up here, requiring a car for everything. It was so different from the real neighborhood where I was a child. It was easy to envision her counting the days until she could get away.
It was harder to put together Bob Hunter with his golf buddy Larry Zisman, a friend close enough that he took priority over his own daughter’s graduation. San Diego PD had notified Hunter of Grace’s death; he had flown there to identify the body. He had known where she had died. They would have asked him if he knew the owner of the condominium from where she fell. And he had lied, to Sanchez and to Peralta. Why? That he had been content to allow the police to classify Grace’s death as a suicide ran a dark charge up the back of my neck.
After half an hour, an amazing time for a beat-up Honda to go unnoticed in Paradise Valley, I slid it into gear and slowly coasted out onto the street, then turned north toward Lincoln Drive. I kept my headlights off and drove slowly. Two hundred yards ahead I pulled on the emergency brake and stopped the car without showing taillights. And yet: nothing. If anybody was behind me, he was running without headlights, too.
He could also be a mile away, tracking me on a laptop or a tablet. He didn’t have to show himself. But it was better to pretend I was worried about a tail that had me in sight. That way, he could continue to assume we hadn’t found the tracking device. So I went ahead with the game.
Lights on again, I sat at the intersection of busy Lincoln Drive. I checked in with Peralta who saw no signs of anyone following me.
“Should we call it off?”
“No,” he said. “The guy is out there. He’s good. Keep going.”
Keeping going meant a drive to Tempe, some ten miles away through heavy traffic. Getting over to the Pima Freeway and zooming south would have gotten me there much faster. But Peralta wanted me on surface streets. So I turned right on Lincoln and took it to Scottsdale Road.
If Central Avenue had been the main commercial thoroughfare from territorial days through the early nineties, Scottsdale Road—and miles of loop freeways containing office “parks”—had taken over that title since then. When I was a child, the intersection with Lincoln had been out in the desert. Now it was deep in the metropolitan blob.
Scottsdale itself was a long, narrow slice between the city of Phoenix and the Salt River Indian Community, the renamed and, thanks to casinos and development beside the freeway, very rich rez. But Scottsdale, oh, Scottsdale, sang of new money, especially up north where it spread east into the McDowell foothills and the people bragged of never coming south of Bell Road, much less to “the Mexican Detroit.” Meaning, Phoenix.
Scottsdale was exclusivity and championship golf, celebrities in the wintertime and the weirdness that comes with having more money than brains. It was the capital of plastic surgery: Silicone Valley. City leaders would never allow anything as plebian as light rail. As a result, its traffic was a nightmare, even with most of the wealthy hitting the summer lifeboats for their other homes in the San Juan Islands or other cooler climes. And Scottsdale Road was full of the same schlocky development as the rest of Phoenix, only with some expensive faÇades and more expensively done traffic berms.
Once Scottsdale had been a sweet little add-on to Phoenix, part faux cowboy tourist trap—the West’s Most Western Town—part artist’s colony. Now it sucked up capital, development, and retail sales from the center city like an Electrolux. Yet it never seemed like a happy place. The politics were poison. Every section and street seemed to vie for the power to look down on everybody else. Scottsdale wanted to be Santa Fe or South Beach, but it was neither artistic nor sexy. Nobody would set a cop show in Scottsdale. A golf or plastic surgery show, maybe.
I suffered the unending traffic jam south past hotels, expensive shopping strips and restaurants, Fashion Square, across the Arizona Canal, and dropping down to Fifth Avenue and Old Scottsdale. Here, a little humanity showed in the scale of the streetscape. A block away was the wonderful Poisoned Pen Bookstore.
South of Old Town, the shopping strips became more downscale and behind them were ordinary tract houses built in the sixties. At Roosevelt, I crossed over into Tempe and the street changed names: Rural Road. It had once been rural. Now all the fields were long gone. The main Arizona State University campus loomed on the right, including the stadium where Larry Zisman had thrown his legendary passes. Then the big new Biodesign Institute. Who knew what they were working on?
By then, I was ready to chew my arm off from the traffic. The average Phoenician made this kind of drive or even longer every day. How did they stand it? The only place I felt comfortable was in the old city. This was my hometown, but it didn’t feel like home any more. The Japanese Flower Gardens were gone. The miles of citrus groves were gone. Why did I stay here? I would miss my friends in the old neighborhood, the familiar diorama of mountains, the smell of citrus blossoms in the spring, not much else.
Larry Zisman lived at The Lakes, a series of subdivisions that took over the farm fields south of Baseline Road starting in the seventies. The tract houses were built around little lakes, hence its namesake. Tempe had made a fetish of artificial lakes, most notably Town Lake, contained within dams on the Salt River.
After some wandering along the curvilinear streets, I found Zisman’s house. Unlike some of the houses in The Lakes, it lacked any old-growth shade trees. One pitiful little tree was planted on a small, square lawn. Beyond that stood a stucco house with one window, a door through an arch, and the mandatory large garage door and driveway. Above the garage was a second story.
The lights were off. Modest and relatively sm
all, it seemed like an odd home for a one-time football star, but maybe he lost most of his money. Maybe he preferred it here, not far from his college glory days. I pulled directly in front, shut off my lights and engine, and checked in with Peralta. My stomach became a sea of acid. This was as risky as Paradise Valley. Everything about Lindsey’s old Prelude screamed “Does Not Belong Here.” Signs proclaimed a neighborhood watch. I didn’t know how long I dared sit.
Not long.
The Tempe Police cruiser slid in behind me and a spotlight swung white light into the Prelude.
I put my hands on top of the steering wheel and tried to mentally untangle my internal organs. The officer or officers would be looking me over, typing my license plate in for wants and warrants, wondering if the driver was armed. That was my first problem. My second problem: if the person following with the GPS tracker had me in sight, he might misinterpret this interaction. He had ordered me on Sunday to bring no law enforcement. Now here I was, with law enforcement come to me.
“Turn on the overhead light please.” A female voice. She was right behind me, in a proper protective stance. I flipped on the dome.
“David Mapstone!”
She came into sight and slid her flashlight into her equipment belt.
“Hey, Amy.”
Amy Taylor had been a patrol deputy for the Sheriff’s Office. I had worked with her on a number of occasions before she left for a better-paying job in Tempe. She looked the same, attractive and strawberry hair in a tight bun. I glanced over at the truck-stop phone sitting on the passenger seat, willing it to not ring at this moment.
“How’s the Sheriff’s Office?”
“It sucks.”
“That’s what I hear. What are you doing?” Her tone was friendly.
So I told her part of the truth. I was working with Peralta now as a private investigator. A young woman had fallen from Larry Zisman’s condominium in San Diego, handcuffed and nude, and we have been engaged to find out whether it was a suicide or something more.
“Holy crap!” She put her hands on her hips. “Zisman’s married. You know he’s a reserve officer in Phoenix?”
“I do. He also owned the handcuffs.”
A burst came over her radio and she keyed her mic. I was being saved by a call: a burglar alarm a mile away.
She touched my shoulder. “Gotta roll, David. Call me sometime and we’ll catch up. Good luck with Larry. Good guy in my view. Not so much his son.”
“Yeah.”
“I’m surprised the Army accepted him. Don’t tell Larry I said that.”
All my senses kicked to a higher gear. The Army. “Of course not. Stay safe, Amy.”
In a few seconds she was back in the cruiser, where she executed a U-turn over the rounded curbs and zoomed back out toward the exit of the subdivision. I turned off the dome light and tried to breathe normally again.
28
I drove back to the center city on surface streets, sick that Peralta’s plan didn’t seem to be working. My phone was charged and had plenty of time left. It wasn’t ringing.
Through downtown Tempe on Mill Avenue, across the Salt River, Galvin Parkway took me through Papago Park, the two iconic buttes backlit by the city, preserved desert all around. I thought about what Amy Taylor had said—not the “call me sometime” part, but about Zisman having a son. That was another new angle. Or it was Occam’s Razor and Zisman was the john, even if he wasn’t on the flash drive, and Grace had tried to blackmail him exactly as Detective Sanchez had said.
But did that explain why Tim Lewis had been tortured, every finger broken? Somebody thought he had information. Information to kill for. If it were simple blackmail, the problem would have been solved with Grace’s supposed suicide. “Death solves all problems,” said Joseph Stalin, who had yellow eyes. “No man, no problem.” Well, no woman, but there was still a problem. Larry Zisman, former football player, could easily have subdued Grace and thrown her over the balcony. The torturing of Tim Lewis had taken a crew.
At McDowell, I turned left and entered the Phoenix city limits, then drove uphill between the buttes and was greeted by the dense galaxy of lights stretching all the way to the horizon. Phoenix was beautiful at night. On the downhill drive, the iPhone rang.
“I think I’ve got your tail,” Peralta said.
My pulse kicked up. “Do tell.”
“A truck followed you though Tempe, made every turn, and then kept going as you went up Galvin through the park and turned on McDowell. He’s probably a mile behind you. A black Dodge pickup. California plate. He’s got a tag frame that says ‘I love Rancho Bernardo,’ with a heart thing instead of love, you know.”
I did know. It was the truck that had passed me the night I got out of the cab in Ocean Beach, the one I thought was simply looking for a parking space.
“Let’s box him in,” I said. “Do a felony stop.”
After a long pause, Peralta’s voice came back on. “No.”
“Why?”
“First,” he said, “because we’re not the cops anymore. Second, because when I hired you many years ago, I hired your whole toolbox, not just the hammer. Since a year ago, all I get is the hammer.”
Now it was my turn to be silent. His words stung. His words were accurate.
“So what’s the plan?” I asked, and he gave it to me.
“Stay on the phone,” he said.
I drove back through downtown and went north on wide, fast-moving Seventh Avenue. Numbered avenues and drives run north and south west of Central; numbered streets and places run north and south east of Central. Now you know how to get around Phoenix. I assumed the pickup driver was learning this from our excursion.
At Northern, I turned west again and after about two miles reached the Black Canyon Freeway, which ran in a trench below grade level. A Motel 6 sat a few blocks up the southbound access road. Getting to it required turning north into the K-Mart parking lot, then passing through the Super 8 parking lot, and finally reaching the Motel 6 parking lot. We didn’t even need streets with so many seas of asphalt.
I parked away from the motel building and stepped out into the heat. I had a cell phone in each pocket as I walked the fifty feet to a room on the ground floor right in the middle of the ugly four-story box. It had none of the charm of the old motels that had once lined Grand and Van Buren with their Western themes and neon signs.
Three other cars were parked in the lot, all of them empty.
Precisely as Peralta had said, a key card was slipped into the edge of the door all the way down at ground level. I retrieved it, unsnapped the holster holding the Colt Python but, against my better judgment, left the gun there. I popped the card into the lock and stepped inside.
Nobody shot me.
Turning on the light switch, I surveyed a cheap motel room looking like every other cheap motel room in America. It had been the scene of countless assignations. Bring in an ultraviolet detector, and the pattered orange bedspread would have revealed an army of old semen stains, dead in mid-slither.
I spoke into the headset. “Where’s my tail?”
“He’s backed off. But don’t spend too much time there. I don’t have a good feeling about this. Remember, he can track you on a computer. He doesn’t have to see you.”
I looked at the bed again. The spread looked ruffled, as if a couple had finished and moved on moments before I got there. I sat in a chair and waited for a call on the other cell. The device was a little Sphinx made in a foreign sweatshop.
Then I saw it, sitting on the low chest of drawers. It wasn’t a Claymore mine, but somehow it stuck a spike of dread into my throat.
I studied the Zero Halliburton briefcase with its tough aluminum construction. Somewhere I had read this was the brand of case that a military aide carried at all times with the president. Inside was the “nuclear football” containing the laun
ch codes to end the world. And this one looked that sinister.
“What the hell is this?” My voice sounded strange alone in the room.
He knew what I was talking about without describing the flashy case that looked so out of place in the shabby room.
“Sharon bought it today. Open it up.” He gave me a code. I dialed open the lock and unlatched it.
Inside were some men’s clothes, legal pads and pens, and a shaving kit.
“Look in the socks,” he said.
Sure enough, inside one of the rolled-up pairs of socks was a flash drive.
He was inviting them to steal it.
“Is this the real flash drive?”
“Of course not,” he said. “But Lindsey encrypted it so it would take even a good techie hours to break in.”
“But…”
“Mapstone, why don’t you hang there for a few more minutes, then find a place to stash the case, and call me when you’re back in the car.” He hung up.
The motel room felt close and hot around me. I used the bathroom, checked to make sure the door was locked again, and searched for some artful spot to place the briefcase. The bed was on a solid wood frame, so that wouldn’t work. The drawers would be too obvious: better to make them think I was trying to hide it. So I arranged it under the pillows and remade the bed with military neatness.
Back in the car, sweating and worried, I started to go out to the access road, but changed my mind.
Instead, I cruised north through the alley behind the motel, turned around, shut off the headlights, and slowly drove back the way I had come. I nosed out behind the building in time to see another car: a new white Chevy Impala coming around the front of the Super 8. There are thousands of lookalike Impalas. But this one looked exactly like the one that I saw on the security camera earlier in the day outside our office, right down to the Nevada tag.
