by Jon Talton
Wishing the Prelude were not so damned white, I watched as the Impala sped up to the door I had left minutes before. If he noticed me, it didn’t show. He was moving so fast, I thought he might ram through the wall. But, no, he slammed to a stop at the last second. If I had the brake-shop monopoly in Phoenix, I would be a rich man.
I dropped the emergency brake enough to slide another couple of feet beyond the edge of the building. The security lighting on the outside of the motel was impeccable. Back where I sat was relative darkness.
Out of the Impala stepped the high-and-tight haircut who had been searching the Prelude earlier in the day. He was wearing jeans and a black T-shirt, carrying something in each hand. One something was a gun. He headed straight to the motel room door without even looking in my direction. If he were a soldier or a former soldier, it was poor situational awareness, but it worked in my favor.
I relayed all this to Peralta on the iPhone.
“He’s also got some kind of a crowbar,” I said. It was small and black, easy to conceal, and made quick work of the door. “He’s inside. I’m going to take him.”
Peralta might have had a very clever plan. But this was as close to the suspect as we were likely to get. I felt suddenly cool and comfortable, my breathing even.
Peralta barked at me. “No. This is not the guy who was tailing you. Don’t go back to that room, Mapstone…”
“Too bad.” I pressed the little red virtual button on the glass screen that said, “end call,” and tossed the earbuds onto the seat.
I mapped it out in my head: twenty quick strides to reach the door, keep the Python down against my leg so it wasn’t obvious I was packing, pause, assess, and try to quietly ease the door open. No kicking it down. The crowbar had made that unnecessary. Then he and I could have a civil conversation about where the baby was. That is, unless he raised his firearm.
But with my hand on the Honda’s door latch, I hesitated. What if the black Dodge Ram suddenly showed up?
High-and-tight almost immediately re-emerged, carrying the Halliburton briefcase. It gleamed in the light. So much for my clever job of hiding it. He quickly got into the Impala and drove toward the access road. I rolled after him, headlights off.
After the third ring, I activated the iPhone.
Peralta’s voice came across: “don’t follow him.”
“Are you nuts? This is the guy who was casing our office.”
“The plan is working, Mapstone. Let the plan work.”
All I knew was that I had spent several hours I could never get back driving around Phoenix and had nothing to show for it. Still, I reluctantly swung around the other way, back north through the alley, and turned on my headlights.
As I came around the other side of the motel, two Phoenix Police cruisers were sitting driver’s door to driver’s door. They might have been talking shop or sports or flirting with each other. Or they were watching me. By this time, however, I was only another law-abiding citizen driving through the night.
The Impala driver was long gone.
I muttered profanities.
“Glad you didn’t use the hammer, Mapstone?” I could feel the gloat carried across the cell towers. “Sharon left the briefcase when she rented the room. Earlier today she sewed a small tracking device into it. Two can play this game with electronics and ours are better.”
I spoke low and slowly, in a rage. “So explain the next move to me, Sheriff.”
“Come down to the Whataburger at Bethany Home. Go through the drive-thru. We’re in the silver convertible. But don’t come over to us.”
I did as told, merging into the concrete river of lights that was the freeway and speeding south two miles. After taking the Bethany Home Road exit, I crossed over and made a quick jog up the northbound access road to the restaurant. The building was separated from the traffic by a faux desert berm with a couple of palo verde trees and some creosote bushes. And the drive through, which ran around it like a letter “C.” The entrance was at the top of the “C,” so I went that way, noticing Sharon’s Infiniti parked in one of the spaces to my left, across a gravel-covered berm.
The bad guys knew his pickup, thought they had it rigged with a tracker. In its place, he was driving a silver two-door convertible, starting price sixty grand.
“You’re very inconspicuous in that ride,” I told Peralta, “especially in this part of town.”
“Check it out, Mapstone.”
On the left, immediately in front of the restaurant, a black Dodge Ram was parked near the door. Sure enough, his frame hearted Rancho Bernardo. The windows were tinted dark and I couldn’t tell if the engine was running.
Better to not linger: I pulled into the drive-thru, anxiously tapping the steering wheel and wondering about the truck’s occupant. His partner had probably told him that he had broken into the motel room and taken the briefcase. Now, what would he think if he saw me pulling in? Maybe he was inside, but I doubted it—he would be tracking me from the cab of the truck.
I didn’t understand why Peralta was taking the risk of having me drive here. I hoped he believed in coincidences.
“So what’s the plan again?”
“Get your order,” Peralta ordered. “Pull around to the front, pull in a couple of spaces apart, and eat it where he can see you. Pretend to be dumb.”
That part was easy.
By this time, I was actually hungry. So I got a burger, fries, and Diet Coke. Then I parked three spaces south of the Dodge Ram. The tinted windows made it impossible to see if anyone was inside.
Take small bites in case you get in a gunfight, like your grandma taught you.
I was two bites into the cheeseburger when Lindsey stepped out of the convertible and walked toward the restaurant. She was wearing a short khaki skirt and a tight sleeveless top that accentuated her small, pert breasts and very erect nipples. Her ability to look ten years younger than her real age was not diminished by the harsh lights of the parking lot.
She strutted within inches of the Ram driver’s door and went inside.
My head throbbed. Over the phone, I demanded, “Are you crazy?”
“No.” Peralta was fully in his Zen master mode. I almost preferred the volcano. He was taking a hell of a chance, assuming that my presence would distract the driver. I prayed he hadn’t checked me out in enough detail to realize that the woman with the legs that went on for days was Lindsey Faith Mapstone.
Five minutes later, she walked back the way she had come. She paused in front of the Ram’s grille and sipped sensually from a drink, paying no attention to me. She turned back as if she were going to return to the restaurant, and then faced forward again, fellating the straw for the occupants of the truck. If they had missed her the first time, they sure didn’t now. She stepped off the curb and walked to the convertible, her skirt swinging saucily.
If the truck door opened on the way to grabbing her and hauling her off for rape and ransom, I was going to control and dominate the situation immediately, badge or no badge.
“Fuck!” Lindsey yelled it.
She had spilled her purse on the asphalt behind the truck. She knelt down and slowly gathered up her stuff. Now she was most vulnerable, but neither truck door opened.
After an interminable time spent picking up the contents of her purse and slipping them back in, cursing all the time, she finally made it around the berm and slid into the passenger side of the convertible. Peralta nonchalantly backed up and drove in the opposite direction from the freeway, toward the Big Lots store, and disappeared.
I was left to eat my meal for as long as it took for the Dodge Ram to leave. It consumed a leisurely half hour. They left after twenty minutes but I waited longer before I dared move.
My pulse gradually went down. I called Peralta and reported in.
“So what next?”
“Next,” he sa
id, “we go home.”
“I thought you were following them?”
“We are, Mapstone. With you there to help distract him, Lindsey inserted a tracking device inside his rear bumper. She also got a good description of him through the windshield.”
I’m not sure he needed me there. Lindsey did a fine job of distracting him all by herself.
29
I was about to turn south on Third Avenue into Willo when the xylophone sound made me jump. Exactly like before, the digital readout said, UNKNOWN.
I answered professionally. “Fuck you.”
There was a long pause and I thought he might hang up. Then: “You think you’re clever. You think you’re putting the pieces together. But you’re wrong. You can’t solve this case without my help.”
“Why would you help me?”
“I thought we could do business.”
The past tense didn’t give me hope for the baby.
I said, “You’re wasting my time.”
“Lose anything tonight?”
I was silent.
“You better check, absent-minded professor.”
I didn’t say a word. Let him think he outwitted us and found where we were hiding the flash drive, in a motel on the freeway.
Finally, I spoke. “I’m tired of games. Drop a baby doll on me? What does that mean to me?”
I feared what it meant. But I didn’t say it. Instead, I pushed on. “I used to solve historic cases for a living. There was a mobster in Seattle who liked to dispose of his victims by having them pushed out of an airplane into Elliott Bay, while he watched from a skyscraper downtown. Unless you’re him, this call is over.”
“You didn’t like the airplane? I wanted to get your attention. To get you in a bargaining frame of mind. Where would the fun have been if I had just left the package in the vacant lot for you to find? Anyway, if we can drop a baby doll out of an airplane, we can drop other things, too. Just a simple civilian airplane can be quite lethal. Wait until we steal a drone…”
Taking a chance that he was full of his own grandiosity, I said, “I’m hanging up.”
“Wait.”
“For what? I bill by the hour. You’re not mysterious. You’re not scary. You’re an ordinary douchebag. You’re wasting my time.”
“You put up a brave front, professor, but you know it’s over. Because of your carelessness, now you have nothing to bargain with. That’s a good thing for you. I’ll let you and everyone you love live. I got what I want.”
Mustering my best acting, having studied theater under Peralta, I filled my voice with surprise. “You son of a bitch!” As if it was only now dawning on me that I had lost the briefcase.
“Don’t hang up,” he said. “I want you to think about what I’ve told you about the country. Don’t be a traitor to your race.”
“What about Tim? What about the guy you shot outside our office? They were white.”
I could feel his shrug. “They were in the way of the greater good.”
Now I knew he had killed Felix, too.
I asked about Grace.
“She was a whore,” he said. “All I wanted was the information she had. She wouldn’t give it to me. So we made her give herself up like a whore.”
“You raped her before you pushed her off the balcony.”
The rich laugh. “Come, come, Professor. We’re both men of the world. I had to let my team have some fun. She sounded like an animal being tortured because they wanted her ass, too. I was above any of that nonsense. But boys will be boys. Afterward, I gave her another chance to help herself. She didn’t take it.”
I was about to call him a baby killer but he cut me off.
“You think I’m a criminal, a terrorist. That’s what many contemporaries thought about Washington and the Founders. Soon enough, you’ll know that I’m a patriot. Count your blessings tonight, Doctor Mapstone, and sleep well.”
The truck-stop cell blinked off, perhaps for good. I pulled over to write down notes on the conversation. The street ahead and behind me was dark and empty.
30
Robin and I were staying at a beachside resort. It curled around a cove on the Pacific with magnificent scenery but we hadn’t left the room. She had never looked more radiant. She didn’t have Lindsey’s classic beauty and was always aware of that. Indeed, they didn’t look much of anything like each other. But her smile was the better of the two sisters and it brought all her features together. Her hair was dirty blond, its wavy tresses hitting three inches below her shoulders.
At the moment, she pushed it out of her face as she told me something important. She held a baby in her lap.
Then she sent me out for something, I don’t remember what, and on the way back I couldn’t remember the room number. Lindsey was at one of the bars and swiveled her stool to face me. She reached out and we embraced and kissed. But I had to get back to Robin. She had the baby with her. So I told Lindsey I would be back and wandered through the halls, restaurants, and shops trying to find the corridor that led to our room. I would have to explain all this to Lindsey but that would have to wait.
But I couldn’t find the room, no matter how many halls I roamed, or stairs I climbed. The resort seemed to be adding new buildings as I walked. The place was full of people and I had to push my way through crowds. Some people seemed to know me. I fished in my pocket for my cell phone to call Robin, but all that I found was a rubber pad that said, FRONT TOWARD ENEMY.
“Dave…”
My eyes came open in a dark room. Our bedroom. Lindsey was standing over me.
My groggy voice came to life. “Do we have a fix on those trackers?”
“We’re following them. Remember, Peralta wants to wait and see where they go to nest.”
I remembered. It frustrated the hell out of me, but he was no doubt right.
She set her baby Glock on the bedside table, slid out of her clothes, and lay next to me. The skin-on-skin was sublimely visceral.
“Want to see where Grace Hunter’s phone went?”
I did.
She opened her new laptop, the bright screen hurting my eyes. I sat up. The clock on the computer read four a.m.
“Have you been up all this time?”
“I couldn’t sleep.”
It worried me. I didn’t like the idea of her perched on the landing above the living room. True, I had checked from the outside. No one could see her through the picture window. But a fresh memory of Robin shot and dying in the back yard shook me.
“We shouldn’t be here,” I said. “It’s not safe.”
I didn’t give a damn about the assurance I had gotten from the killer.
She said, “We’ve got an alarm. We’ve got guns. And we know where the bad guys are. Peralta says we’re safe.”
“He’s not omnipotent, no matter what he thinks.”
She nodded to the computer screen.
“Let me distract you. I went back a year, and Grace Hunter never left Ocean Beach, exactly like Tim told you. She would walk down to the market a few blocks away, here on Newport Avenue. All her calls were to Tim, her parents, and her friend, Addison. Now, check out April twenty-second. At two-fifty p.m., she leaves the apartment and walks north. It’s like she was going to the store. Maybe for diapers.”
I watched as Lindsey brought up a Google maps display.
“Here, at two-fifty-four, she’s really on the move.” I watched as the red line ran out of O.B. on Narragansett Avenue, turning north on Chatsworth, and east again on Nimitz Boulevard, heading toward downtown.
“Does she have to be making a call for this to show up?”
“Nope,” Lindsey said. “People would freak out if they knew how much data were being collected on them every minute. All that needs to happen here is for the phone to be turned on. But look here. At three-oh-five, they stop.
Right here.”
The map showed the intersection of Nimitz and Locust. It was a nothing little street right before the big stoplight at Rosecrans on the Point Loma Peninsula.
“And that’s it. That’s where she stays.”
I thought about the missing hours.
“Or,” Lindsey said, “that’s where the phone stays.”
“What do you mean?”
“Grace’s phone never made it downtown. At four-ten, at Locust and Nimitz, the call was placed on this phone to your office. Grace might have made it. Or, she might have already been in that condo downtown. But at four-seventeen, the phone was turned off at the same location.”
I put my arm around her. “So somebody made contact with her on the way to the store. And she got into a vehicle. Somebody she knew. So she got in with him and they drove toward downtown. Toward Zisman’s condo. But what happened at Nimitz and Locust…” My voice trailed off. Things didn’t track.
Lindsey shook her head, her voice authoritative. “She had a baby waiting at home. She wouldn’t leave him for long. And Zisman wasn’t one of her johns. So why would she leave the baby and go to his place? No. Somebody snatched her off the street.”
I was fully awake now, the dream almost forgotten.
She opened a file. “Here’s where things get interesting. There was a call made from that phone a few minutes before the call to your office.”
“The San Diego cops didn’t have that on their LUDs.”
“They wouldn’t,” she said. “It was placed to a scrambling device. Very advanced, very expensive. It scrubs any of the conventional records of the call, even an incoming call. Only some government agencies and corporate executives use this. You have to know where to go in the cell-company databank to find the trail, then decrypt. But here it is. The call was five minutes long.”
“Are you sure nobody knew you were hacking all this?”
“Oh, somebody knew or will know. But what they saw was a low-end data breach coming from the People’s Republic of China.”
