The Night Detectives

by Jon Talton

  “We believe,” he said, “that we have disrupted what could have been a catastrophic domestic terrorism attack.”

  “Agent Pham!” A female reporter with perfect red hair shouted the question. “We have information that these men were members of the White Citizens Brigade, a domestic terror group. Is that true?”

  “This was an organized, anti-government group. Beyond that, I’m not prepared to comment, Megan.” He was cool and unruffled as a cascade of further questions followed. What were the names of the suspects? Who was the man who was shot by SWAT? What were the specific targets the terrorists intended to strike? He gave up nothing.

  My stomach was an acid bin. No mention of the baby. Why had I expected anything different?

  “Is this connected to the explosion in San Diego last week?”

  “It’s too early for us to draw conclusions, Brahm.”

  “What is former Sheriff Peralta doing here?” a reporter wanted to know.

  Pham nodded knowingly. “Retired Sheriff Peralta is acting as a consultant for the bureau.”

  When the press conference wrapped up, Peralta worked his way toward me like a slow-moving bulldozer, ignoring the journalists’ questions as only he could do. As I had watched countless times over the years, he didn’t answer but he worked the crowd. It was showtime all over again. It made me wonder if he intended to run for sheriff again someday, maybe when sanity returned to Arizona.

  “Where were you?” He wrapped me in his big arm and steered me toward his truck. I thought: I was rifling my wife’s luggage, learning about her fuckathon in the nation’s capital while I was sleeping with her younger sister in our marriage bed. A normal family. Any other questions? I said, “I wanted to talk to Larry Zisman.”

  “How’d it go?”

  “He’s been dead inside his house for some time. I called Tempe PD anonymously.”

  “Balls. Get in.”

  We closed out the noise with a swoosh of the doors and drove slowly out of the lot, turning east on Dunlap. The lights of the cars, streetlights, and houses rocketed by in streams of white and yellow, and ahead was the police roadblock of red and blue. As the road rose, the city lights spread out to my right in an endless jewel.

  We are the night detectives. We would never be private investigators peeping on unfaithful husbands. That was not the trouble that we would chase, the trouble that would run us down. I would not write grand history in thrillingly reviewed best-sellers. I am with Gibbon, history being “little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind.” I am with Peralta, where we track it down armed. This is the job.

  I gingerly fed my curiosity, afraid of what I might learn. “Are you a consultant for the FBI?”

  “I guess we are now.”

  “Are you holding out on me? Have you been playing a side game all along with Pham?”

  “Jeez, Mapstone. No.”

  I asked him what Pham was holding back from the press.

  Peralta ticked off points with fingers on the hand that wasn’t guiding the steering wheel. “The house was rented three months ago by Edward Dowd, using his own name. He wrote a check for a year’s rent on a New York bank and it cleared without any problem. In this economy, the owner was glad to have a tenant who paid ahead. The suspects arrested are all confirmed members of the White Citizens Brigade, all former military. The Brigade is suspected of committing seven bank robberies in Arizona and Southern California over the past two years. It appears they used the money to fund their ordnance purchases, among other things…”

  A Phoenix uni who looked about fifteen years old waved us through and we climbed up Dunlap as it narrowed and technically ended, turning into a dirt trail petering out against a metal barrier. Beyond it was the darkness of the Phoenix Mountain Preserve.

  One sharp left turn put us at the house I had seen from television. It was built of gray cinder blocks with a wide overhanging roof. The trail made another turn to reach a two-car garage. Black-clad cops from various agencies were milling about, many with nothing to do but try to look busy and officious. The SWAT guys wore helmets, boots, body armor, and, beneath that, T-shirts that were two sizes too small. Dazzling floodlights, running on loud generators, illuminated the scene. A police chopper was hovering overhead, vainly playing its spotlight over the mountain preserve.

  I slid to the dirt and walked with him as he laid it out.

  The electricity and air conditioning had been shut off early. FBI and ATF negotiators had tried for hours over the landline to persuade the people inside to come out. They had refused. Meanwhile, a SWAT member had been able to snake a tiny night-vision-capable camera into the ventilation system so they could see inside some of the rooms. A robot had scouted the perimeter of the house to make sure it wasn’t mined.

  They had pumped tear gas into the vents at four-forty-five and then had broken down the front door, tossing in a flash-bang grenade. Only one suspect had returned fire and a tactical officer had put him down instantly with one shot. He had been airlifted to Mister Joe’s but was dead when he hit the floor. The others had put down their weapons without a fight.

  “It could have been really hairy,” Peralta said. It was interesting that he had walked onto so many crime scenes over the years that nobody thought to challenge him now.

  Outside the front door, a tarp was spread. Most of it was covered with weapons: AR-15s, pump-action shotguns, assorted varieties of pistols, two shoulder-fired missiles, and enough crates of ammunition to make Ed Cartwright happy. The Claymores were probably safely in the custody of ATF. I barely paid attention.

  “Where’s the baby?”

  “They didn’t find him, Mapstone.”

  “What about Dowd?”

  “Him, neither.”

  I used my hand to stop him at the door, no easy task given his bulk and momentum.

  “What are you saying?”

  His eyes shone black. “Dowd got away.”

  “I knew it…” All the cops, all the jurisdictions and expensive toys and command vans and they couldn’t make a simple collar. I started a cursing jag notable for its creativity.

  He pinched my shoulder until I thought it would fall off and leaned in to whisper. “Play well with others.”

  I did my best.

  Evidence technicians were photographing the living room. The floor had traces of blood and was covered with yellow numbered markers. One marker was on the Halliburton briefcase. A laptop sat on a sofa, drawing another yellow tag. They had probably had plenty of time to realize the flash drive was phony, otherwise Dowd would have taken it with him.

  My answer was next to evidence marker forty-two: the flash drive we planted in the expensive briefcase was shattered, as if by an angry boot. My feet felt as if they were sinking into the floor. The remains of the tear gas stung my lungs.

  Another tech was taking inventory in the kitchen. The cabinets were fully stocked with canned goods, meals ready to eat, and bottles of water. A bedroom closet held body armor, helmets, and night-vision goggles.

  “Dowd told them to make a stand here,” Peralta said. “Kill as many police as possible.”

  “How did he get away?”

  “Let me show you.”

  He led me down a hallway and opened a door that revealed a staircase down. I led the way as he talked.

  “The house was built in nineteen sixty-two by a doctor. He put a fallout shelter in the basement. It was the height of the Cold War.”

  It was the year of the Cuban Missile Crisis, but I kept my mouth shut.

  We came into a finished basement with wood paneling and an ancient pool table. He pointed to another, heavier door at the far end of the room. I stepped through that portal into a concrete-encased hallway that slanted down. Bare light bulbs protected by steel frames burned overhead. I started to sweat.

  It reminded me of
one of my maze dreams as I stepped more slowly, made a turn and went another twenty feet on a slanting concrete floor. Two doors were open. One led through thick walls into a shelter, maybe ten feet by ten feet, looking as if it hadn’t been touched since Kennedy was president. A dusty yellow Geiger counter sat on a table. Ed Cartwright would look down his apocalyptic nose at such a primitive set-up.

  The other door led outside, where a Phoenix cop stood guard. He greeted Peralta by name, as if the election had never happened.

  We were at the bottom of the stubby hill. The house loomed above us.

  “This is where Dowd probably got out while we were still staging,” Peralta said. “We didn’t realize there was this escape route out.”

  “What’s this ‘we,’ Lone Ranger?” I said sourly. “I said we should go in and do it ourselves instead of setting up the paramilitary show that everybody could see.”

  “Mapstone, we would have been shot dead.”

  He was right, of course. But I was still angry. The only benefit was the hot west wind, replacing the tear gas in my lungs with good old Phoenix smog and dust. The sheen of sweat across my chest and belly remained.

  “We think Dowd came out here and went into that neighborhood.” He pointed to lights two-hundred yards away. “He kidnapped a woman and made her drive him through a checkpoint. Let her go down at Forty-Fourth Street and Camelback. He’s probably already ditched her car.”

  Dowd’s black Dodge Ram truck sat ten feet to my right, with its tracker no doubt uselessly attached to the back.

  He faced me. “Where are the girls?”

  “Shopping in Scottsdale.”

  “Call. Get them here. Now.”

  I already had the cell out. I asked Lindsey to bring Sharon and meet us back at Seventh and Dunlap.

  He walked out into the darkness, kicking the hard ground, thinking.

  “Thoughts? Ideas?” It was as if he were talking to the mountains as much as to me.

  I moved toward him, wondering if Dowd was watching with night vision. He could take us out right here with a sniper rifle.

  “We can’t stay on Cypress.” I stated the obvious through a scratchy throat. “Your place in Dreamy Draw is more secure but not secure enough. It’s also dangerously isolated.”

  I had only gotten Lindsey back. Sure, she had left me twice before, but for now it was sweet. The idea of putting her at risk was intolerable, a rocket into my brain. Dowd knew we had defrauded him with the flash drive. He would come to kill us all. And he was the kind of man who would seek out Lindsey first, so my agony would be under way well before he got to me. I would have been responsible for losing them both, Robin and Lindsey.

  I said,“You know we’ve got to find him ourselves. Get him first. You know this, right?”

  He nodded.

  “But for now,” he said, “we need to get out of the Valley. How about San Diego?”

  It sounded smart. But one other thing bothered me.

  “How many Claymores did they find here?”

  “Ten.”

  “You’re sure?”

  He shook his head and cursed. He could do the arithmetic as easily as I: a dozen stolen, one used on me in Ocean Beach, ten seized tonight.

  One Claymore was still missing and I wagered it was with Dowd.

  36

  The call came a little after eight p.m. Only one person had called me on the cheap phone I had bought in El Centro.

  “Time’s up, Doctor Mapstone.”

  “For you,” I said. “You escaped once, you won’t again.”

  “Did you ever serve in the military? In combat?”

  “No.”

  “Then you don’t understand anything. I gave you a chance to serve your country by giving me the list of Scarlett’s clients. I appealed to your patriotism. I appealed to your intellectual side. But, no. You refused to obey my orders. You refused to negotiate.”

  “I’m really sorry about that.”

  “If you had served in combat, you would know that a soldier can’t let his rage get the better of him. It can overwhelm discipline and training. Effectiveness. So I have to push you with some clearer incentives. I’ve researched you, Doctor Mapstone. I’m going to kill everyone you love. Then I’m going to kill you. And then I’m going to bring the war where it belongs, right here to America.”

  “Keep talking, General,” I said. “The trace is working.”

  There was no trace.

  He laughed as if a private joke had been shared between friends.

  “I’m going to start with your first wife, Patricia.” He read out an address in La Jolla. It was Patty’s address. “I know you’re in San Diego. If you come alone and bring the client list, then I’ll let her live. I might even be willing to let you live. But you have to come within the next hour. You won’t find her there. If I’m satisfied you’re alone, I’ll call and give you instructions. No cops. No bullshit. This is your last chance to negotiate.”

  Then I was only holding a useless plastic object to my ear, hearing nothing.

  37

  But I was not in San Diego.

  I was in Phoenix.

  I was in the valley of decision.

  Sharon and Lindsey had driven the Prelude to Ocean Beach. Find a parking place and leave it, I had told them. It would be two weeks before the police towed it away. Then they had checked into a hotel downtown.

  Peralta and I went to the Hotel Clarendon in Midtown Phoenix to wait for the call I knew would come. The Clarendon was where Arizona Republic reporter Don Bolles had been assassinated by a mobster’s bomb in 1976. After its restoration, the new owners put a memorial photo gallery in a hallway.

  What I hadn’t counted on was him leaving while I was in the shower. “Checking on something with Eric Pham. Back soon,” he had scrawled on the hotel stationery. He had known I wouldn’t let him go without me. “I’m not an old man,” he had barked at me. He had to prove something to himself. At least he was with Pham.

  Or so I had thought. In thirty minutes, I had called Pham. He had told me he was held up in a meeting and had canceled on Peralta.

  So he had gone on his errand alone. My calls to him went straight to voice mail.

  Now, I dressed quickly in black jeans, black running shoes, and black T-shirt. I thought about stopping by the office and unlocking the Danger Room. But, no. There was no time. I didn’t even bring the Python. Instead, I carried the Airlite and two Speedloaders. That would be enough or it wouldn’t matter. At last, I didn’t need the toolbox, only the hammer.

  Dowd had let the woman he kidnapped off at Forty-Fourth Street and Camelback. Her car had been recovered at Tatum and Lincoln, in the parking lot by the statue of Barry Goldwater. I made a guess that there was one place nearby where Edward Dowd could hole up: the house of Bob Hunter, Grace’s father. Like Larry Zisman, Bob Hunter had become a loose end that needed to be snipped. It was only a few blocks away.

  I called a cab. While I waited, I phoned Isabel Sanchez and asked her to check on Patty, if Patty even still lived at that address.

  Then I made one more call.

  It was nearly ten when the cab let me out on McDonald. I gave him a twenty-dollar tip and hiked into the desert, a ghost passing the million-dollar homes. The night was moonless, a few prominent stars claiming the indigo vault above, and I was profoundly aware of the possibility of snakes. But I didn’t move with a heavy step. I walked slowly and carefully, aware of every sound, each scurrying noise of an animal that had been disturbed. The sounds of the city were far away.

  I came up on the Hunter house from the south and followed the pale adobe wall toward the front. The air was still and hot. My skin was cool and all my senses were notched up high.

  The form on the ground was ten feet ahead. I crouched and watched. It wasn’t moving and nobody seemed near it.

  Closer
, I saw a man prone in the dirt and rocks a few feet off the driveway. He was on his belly and his back contained a messy exit wound the size of a dinner plate. I turned him over carefully. His breathing was shallow and rapid. It was a miracle he was still alive. A bullet had struck him just above the heart. His face looked privileged and tan, even near death: Bob Hunter. He had made his last hike up Camelback. He stared at me without seeing.

  “Who’s inside?” I demanded it in a whisper.

  He opened his lips and mouthed something. My wife? Maybe that was what he said. His eyes might as well have been glass.

  The elaborate porch sconces were turned off but the door was cracked open, as if Hunter had left it that way and gone for a stroll. Or tried to make an escape. Once again, I scanned the terrain. The desert landscaping was done so well, too well.

  I pushed the door open and entered with the snubnosed revolver out and up.

  High-and-tight stood a few feet away, facing toward me and holding a black semi-automatic pistol in his right hand pointed down. This was the same man who had searched the Prelude at the office, the same man who filched the briefcase from the cheap motel on Black Canyon. He looked younger close up. His eyes narrowed as I kept walking.

  “Who am I negotiating with? You?”

  His gun arm started up and I made the smooth trigger pull of the Airlite. The walls echoed with the gun’s quick boom as a dime-sized red hole appeared between his eyes and his head snapped back hard. In nanoseconds, the wadcutter bullet fragmented inside his skull and sent a wide shower of red and gray onto the wall. His body lurched back against an expensive floor lamp and both crashed to the floor.

  And I was alone in the large living room. Cowboy paintings hung on taupe walls. But there was little time for art criticism. I swept the dining room and the kitchen, finding each deserted.

  “Back here, Doctor Mapstone.”

  I stepped up into a hallway and followed the voice. It sounded unconcerned.

  Edward Dowd was standing in the master suite, unarmed. He appeared ordinary except for the soul patch: medium height, average build, shaved head. The mastermind wore a loose, white Tommy Bahama shirt, shorts, and sandals. The hauteur of his military pretentions didn’t extend to his wardrobe tonight. His calves were well defined by muscles.