by Jon Talton
She opened another file: the list of Grace’s clients. “The scrambler call was made to this number. It’s his private line.” Another screen showed me his face on the cover of Fortune magazine. He looked my age yet was making more money in a week than I would make in my lifetime. Why did I need three college degrees?
“He runs one of the top venture-capital funds in the country,” she said. “He could afford this kind of security. All these executive types have protection. According to the records, he and Grace saw each other regularly for more than two years.”
I took it all in, or thought I did, amazed again at Lindsey’s talents.
I stopped myself from tapping my finger on her clean computer screen. “Then the phone was turned off for good, right there on Nimitz?”
“Not exactly. It was turned on again last Friday.”
Suddenly, the air conditioning felt too cold.
“Where is it?”
When she gave me the address, I grew colder still. Grace Hunter’s cell phone was in evidence storage at the Phoenix Police Department.
She said, “I answered all of Peralta’s questions and it hasn’t even been twenty-four hours.”
I let out a long breath. “You’re fast.”
She put her hand on my private parts. “I can be.”
31
We were at the Good Egg having breakfast four hours later. Like its neighbor Starbucks at Park Central, it was an institution in Midtown Phoenix. Unlike Sunday, the offices inside the nearby towers were open and the restaurant was busy. The morning was cool enough to sit outside, a dry seventy-nine degrees under the umbrellas, not even hot enough to require the misters. A pleasant dry breeze was coming in from the east. Light-rail trains cruised by on Central, clanging their bells. In her round, nerd-girl sunglasses, Lindsey looked like a spy.
Here we are, I thought, easy targets in assassination range. But the tracker on the Dodge Ram was far away and three Phoenix Police units were in the lot out front, the cops having coffee next door. It would take the bad guys at least a little time to break into the briefcase and even longer to figure out the flash drive.
To figure out they had been played for fools.
A pickup truck did arrive: Peralta’s. He was in a suit again and gave us a tiny nod as he walked toward the breezeway and the entrance. I knew it would take time for him to get out on the front patio. He was past his period after leaving office where he didn’t want to come here, didn’t want to see the assortment of politicos and officials who used the Good Egg for morning meetings. He had shifted his morning routine over to Urban Beans on Seventh Street.
But apparently he was willing to be seen again. I looked back and, sure enough, he was working the room, shaking hands, slapping backs, everyone having a great time. Where were they when he needed them? Now they had a sheriff who was a national embarrassment. He had a long conversation with Henry Sargent, who was sitting at the lunch counter. Henry was a retired honcho from Arizona Public Service.
“Lindsey!” Peralta sat down, full of morning pep. “What have you got for me?”
She went through it as the same waitress who had served him for the past fifteen years poured coffee and went off to place his order.
I read his face: satisfied, impressed, interested, troubled, more interested. An outsider would never know this from his seemingly immobile features, ones that could elicit confessions from criminals or compromises from county supervisors—or, this being Arizona, the other way around. But after so many years, I could see the slight rise of the right eyebrow, the tightening of his mouth, and the easing of a frown which didn’t mean his mind was easy. I wondered what troubled him. For me, it was the whole thing.
I asked, “When are we going to interview Zisman?”
He acknowledged me for the first time with a glance of disdain at my Starbucks mocha. “Not yet.”
“When?”
“Mapstone, you sound like an annoying child on a trip. ‘Are we there yet?’”
“Maybe. That makes you the dad who’s lost and is too stubborn to ask for directions.”
It was only me and Peralta being ourselves. Lindsey interrupted.
“Boys. I think the targets are definitely in the nest.”
She handed over her new iPad, to which she had added Google maps. Peralta studied it, and then handed it to me. Sure enough, both red dots had converged.
“They’ve been in this same location for several hours,” she said.
I worried that they might have discovered the trackers and discarded them at the spot on the map. But Lindsey said she had modified each to send a different signal if anyone fiddled with it.
“What time did they get there?” Peralta handed the tablet back to her.
“Around two a.m. They spent a few hours at a bar in Sunnyslope before that.”
He nodded.
The two red dots had nested less than a mile from the bar.
“Excuse me,” he said, and walked back inside the restaurant. The next time I caught sight of him, he was in the breezeway, which once held scores of shops when this was a mall. He was leaning against a pillar, his phone to his ear.
Back at the table, he took his time with breakfast. I had no choice but to do the same, even though I wanted to kick down their door an hour ago.
At last, Peralta gave instructions: take the Prelude home and park it. We would ride with him to greet the kidnappers. I hoped they were good and hung over.
As we left Park Central, he was in the cab of his truck, making another call.
Fifteen minutes later, we were northbound on Seventh Street. Lindsey rode on the jump seat of the extended cab, back with the weapons compartment where he kept his heavy metal. Aside from numbered streets to the east and avenues west, the other easy way you knew your way around Phoenix was to look at the mountains. The South Mountains showed you that direction. The Papago Buttes, McDowells, and, on a clear day, Four Peaks stood to the east. West were the White Tanks. We were driving straight toward North Mountain.
Sunnyslope was one of the few places with soul outside the old city, with a real identity that wasn’t subsumed in endless subdivisions. It was located beyond the Arizona Canal and outside the oasis, a desert town, a Hooverville from the Great Depression, and a place that retained its own proud, quirky identity even after it had been annexed into Phoenix in the 1950s. The relatively few natives from there my age and older were “Slopers” first, Phoenicians second. From my perspective, it had some interesting unsolved murders.
The place remained unique even though it had filled in with some of the same fake stucco schlock you found everywhere. A couple of its more notorious biker bars remained. You were aware of being higher than downtown, up against the bare, rocky mountains that shimmered in the sun. If the smog hadn’t smudged the view to the South Mountains, you’d see you were at about the same elevation as Baseline Road in south Phoenix, where the Japanese Flower Gardens once stood. From both places, the landscape rolled down to the dry Salt River.
Peralta slowed as we approached the five-point intersection with Dunlap and Cave Creek Road. The parking lot of a shabby shopping strip looked like a used-car joint selling black Suburban vans.
“What the hell?” I said.
“Calm down, Mapstone.”
He wheeled in and parked.
“Stay here.”
He left the engine and air conditioning running and approached the black Suburbans. Out of one stepped a slender man in khakis and an open-collar shirt. Eric Pham, special agent in charge of the Phoenix FBI. Even the head fed wasn’t wearing a suit. The New Conformity. They shook hands and talked, and then they walked a ways talking more. Pham was gesticulating, as if laying out a map. Peralta nodded and pointed. Pham nodded.
I asked Lindsey for her iPad and switched the map to a satellite image. The dots had converged at a house at the end of Dun
lap, about a mile away. From the photo, it looked like a mid-century modern house. Maybe it was on a little butte; it was hard to tell, but Dunlap rose as it went east before dead-ending at the mountain preserve. That could provide some easy escape routes if they didn’t do this right.
Now a couple of Phoenix PD units arrived, along with the huge mobile command post. My stomach was wishing it didn’t have breakfast getting in the way of contracting into itself. How long before the news vans and choppers arrived, too?
“Why aren’t we doing this ourselves?”
Lindsey put a hand on my shoulder.
“We have to trust him, Dave.”
I leaned my face against her hand, hoping she was right. I knew Peralta still had chits to call in and back channels. But I had a local lawman’s mistrust of the feds. I had seen how these quasi-military operations could go very wrong.
The door opened and his bulk filled the seat.
“Phoenix PD is closing off streets,” he said. “The FBI is preparing to deploy a SWAT team.”
“And you explained to Eric Pham that we developed a break in this case…how?”
He took off his sunglasses and rubbed his eyes. “I have my ways, Mapstone.”
“I bet.”
He slipped the shift into drive and rolled back to Seventh Street.
“Wait!” It was an inane blurt, but it came out anyway. Anything to stop this circus. I knew it was too late, even though I had a bad feeling about going in with so many cops, so much firepower.
“Exactly, Mapstone. Wait. There’s a baby in that house. The SWAT boys can’t send an undercover to the front door with pizza, toss in a flash-bang grenade, and go in blazing. This is going to take time. They’ll have to negotiate these guys to come out. We’ve got other stuff to do in the meantime.”
I looked back with mixed emotions at the gathering army, hoping he was making the right call.
32
The afternoon sun was cooking toward one-hundred by the time I was waiting for Peralta at the Deer Valley Airport in far north Phoenix, on the other side of the mountains. Since the city had turned Sky Harbor exclusively into a commercial aviation hub, this had become the major general aviation airport. It lacked the cachet of the Scottsdale Airpark, but it was one of the largest general aviation airports in the country. It was also probably the place where UNKNOWN had taken off and landed on his mission to drop the bloody baby doll on me.
But he wasn’t unknown now. I had met Artie Dominguez for lunch downtown at Sing Hi. I left the Prelude on Cypress and took light rail downtown. No reason for all my movements to be known. The train was packed as usual. The light-rail system was one of the few elements of progress to arrive in recent years and its popularity made its critics more hysterical in their opposition. I liked it.
It only hurt a little to get out at the stop by the old courthouse. The building was as handsome as ever, although I wouldn’t let myself look up to my office. It was a crime that they had ripped out the old palm trees, grass, and shade trees years ago. Downtown needed more shade. And they had added more parking on the south side, more concrete to help make the summers hotter and last longer. For all this, it was the best-looking building downtown. Across Washington Street, a little band protested against the new sheriff.
Sing Hi was two blocks south. Dominguez wasn’t worried about being seen with me because the venerable Chinese restaurant had lost a good part of its clientele of deputies and prosecutors to the new restaurants at CityScape, the boring mix-used development to the north. I still liked Sing Hi’s chow mein.
He played at being aggrieved over my hurry-up request, but he was clearly interested.
Bob Hunter and Larry Zisman came up pretty clean. Each had accumulated a few speeding tickets. The same was not true of Zisman’s son, Andrew. The son had two juvenile arrests for assault and weapons at ages sixteen and seventeen. His father had paid a top criminal lawyer to get him out of both. He joined the Army but was discharged for being part of a white supremacist cell at Fort Hood, Texas, that was blamed for the beating of a black non-com and the rape of a female soldier. Three of his buddies had gone to military prison. Andrew Zisman had been sent back into the civilian population. His last known address was his father’s condominium in San Diego but over the past year, he had racked up two moving violations in metro Phoenix.
ViCAP was no help on either anti-personnel mines or women being pushed from balconies.
But I had also emailed Artie the list of Grace Hunter’s clients.
“It’s like the Forbes 400,” he commented.
The list contained chief executives, investment bankers, a venture capitalist, doctors, lawyers, and one Indian chief.
The one exception was named Edward Kevin Dowd, age thirty-six.
Yes, Edward.
“This one has an outstanding federal warrant.” Dominguez showed me the intelligence report. “He’s suspected of involvement in the theft of anti-personnel mines from Fort Huachuca.”
A sheet of paper had never felt so heavy.
“Dowd left the Army six years ago after serving for a decade in Special Forces. He had seen multiple deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan. Then Obama became president and Dowd started recruiting what he called the White Citizens Brigade among other disaffected soldiers. He was no redneck, but a trust-fund baby from back east, attended Andover and Yale. He was a captain. It was two years before the military got a hint of what he was doing on the side and brought him up on charges. But the investigators didn’t find any laws broken, yet. So the Army quietly pushed him out.”
Dominguez slid a photo across the table. Dowd had a lean face, a full head of reddish-brown hair, a narrow soul patch that looked like a Hitler mustache that had fallen to his chin, and small, mean eyes.
“This guy is a killing machine,” Dominguez said. “He’s also a licensed pilot.”
Killing machine. I thought about what Ed Cartwright had told me.
“I need those back.”
I reluctantly slid the material back across the table.
“Did Dowd know Andrew Zisman?”
Dominguez shook his head. “Unknown.”
What was known was that Dowd had been a client of Grace’s, meeting her a dozen times.
“So Artie, where was Dowd last operating?”
He smiled crookedly. “Phoenix and San Diego. What the hell have you gotten yourself into?”
It was a lethally pertinent question, but when Peralta arrived at the airport terminal we had no time to talk. Two tough, big men in suits came inside and called our names. They led us outside where an imposing Gulfstream jet was waiting on the tarmac.
“I’m going to have to ask for your weapons,” one said.
“No,” I said. It was one of Peralta’s cardinal rules: you never give up your sidearm.
“It’s all right, Mapstone.” Peralta handed over his Glock. I reluctantly did the same. On a pat-down, they found my last-option knife and confiscated that, too. Peralta glared at me. I glared right back. We stepped up inside the jet, visions of being tossed out in the desert dancing through my head.
“Mike, how the hell are you?”
Mister Fortune Magazine, whose name was Jim Russo, looked older than his photograph, even though he appeared very fit with a golf-course tan. He led us to a sumptuous seating area where a young woman brought us bourbon.
“It’s been too long,” Russo said. “How’s Ed Cartwright doing?”
Now I was confused and paranoid.
“Crazy as ever,” Peralta said. To me: “We were all in the same unit.”
“That crazy Indian saved my ass more than once,” Russo said.
“Mine, too.” Peralta savored the bourbon. The small talk continued for an interminable time. He even got around to introducing me.
“I appreciate you flying over here,” Peralta said.
&nb
sp; Russo stared at the floor. “I’m sorry, Mike. I should have contacted you sooner. But if this had gotten into the financial press…” He shook his head. “After Felix was killed, I didn’t know what to do.”
He had my attention.
“Felix was the head of my security detail,” Russo said. “He was a Navy SEAL who lost a leg in Afghanistan. Won a Silver Star saving his comrades after an IED attack. He was a good man.”
“Why did he have multiple driver’s licenses?” I asked.
Russo explained that sometimes he needed to check into hotel suites under assumed names. Apparently like many billionaires, he was a target of threats and would be a tempting catch for kidnappers. I tried to pay attention while wondering how the situation in Sunnyslope was progressing.
“Scarlett.” Peralta let the name drop ever so lightly.
Russo made a face. “Foolish old rich man, huh? I know what you’re thinking.”
“I’m not thinking anything, Jim. She was a pretty girl.”
“I have a wife and children,” Russo said. “But my wife and I drew apart sexually a long time ago. Grace…” He hesitated. “Grace helped me.”
“Grace?” I said.
He smiled sadly. “I knew her name. Felix provided a complete dossier on her background for me.”
“We’re not here to judge,” Peralta said. “Hell, I envy you, you horny wop. It might have helped to know you were the one hiring us instead of Felix.”
“He did it,” Russo said. “I only gave him your name. He didn’t trust the police, and he was mindful of my privacy. I thought if anyone could help, you could.”
“Was he seeing Grace, too?” That was my fart in church.
“Oh, no,” Russo said, “Felix was gay. But he was the one to give Grace a ride to my place in Rancho Santa Fe and back. They got to know one another. Felix did love her, but like a brother. You see, when he was deployed his real sister was abducted and killed. He never forgave himself. He became very protective of Grace, especially after he learned she was being pimped out. He got her out of that situation and back together with her old boyfriend. I hated to have to give her up but she deserved a real life.”
