Jon Talton - The Night Detectives

Another call: “Go to the McDonald’s on Central. Pull into the parking lot facing east. I’ll be there in a few minutes.”

This next leg took me about five more minutes, back the way I had come before, a few blocks north of the punch card building. I drove to the east end of the long lot and waited. Ironically, the FBI offices were in my view to the northeast. Otherwise, it was acres of empty blight, adorned here and there with a dead palm tree looking like a giant burned matchstick. During the 2000s boom, before the biggest-ever collapse of Phoenix’s only real industry, real-estate speculation, these lots facing Central were supposed to become twin, sixty-story condo towers. I don’t think anybody ever believed it would really happen. It didn’t.

As I drank cold water, the airplane came in low from the east, a small, single-engine private craft. It was flying very low. Dangerously low. Immediately before it passed to my right, it jettisoned something. That something fell straight down and landed in a plume of dust on one of the empty lots. I didn’t need a phone call to make me speed a block to the landing zone. If I had that pair of binoculars, I might have gotten a tail number, but probably not. The airplane pulled up and disappeared into the sun.

I slammed the gearshift into park and sprinted into the empty lot. It was a stupid thing to do, but I was powered by a panicky instinct, adrenaline, and dread. Dust was still in the air as I approached a parcel little more than a foot long wrapped in brown paper and tied with twine. Something red was leaking through. My chest felt as if all its bones had suddenly collapsed.

That stopped me enough to return to the car for the evidence gloves that I had always kept there from my time as a deputy. I got the gloves and scanned the side streets: nothing. Then I saw him: a man was walking toward the parcel. He was tall and thin with stringy hair the color of urine.

“Stop!”

He ignored me. He looked like a homeless man, but I had my hand on the revolver as I walked back across the empty ground.

We faced off.

“My stuff!”

Was he really a street person or a watcher? I decided on the former.

“This is police business.”

He looked at my PI credentials, not too closely thank goodness, and shuffled quickly toward Central.

I watched him go, then pocketed the wallet and pulled on the gloves. Call the police, call the FBI -this was what my interior voice was saying. I ignored it, dropped to my haunches, pulled out a small knife, and cut the twine. It might be another bomb , came the interior governor that had saved me so often in the past. I ignored that too, and carefully unwrapped the parcel.

It held a baby doll, covered in blood. It looked as if a plastic bag of stage blood had been inserted into the package so it would burst on impact.

“Hey!”

I looked up and the homeless man was fifty yards away, a maniacal look on his face. “You see me comin’ on the street, it’s lights out!”

I waved. My stomach felt as if it was going to climb out of my throat. Yeats was running through my brain, I have walked and prayed for this young child …

The doll’s plastic smile mocked me as I pulled it out of the blood, seeing if the package contained a note. But there was none. The sun beat down on me as I realized the real baby was dead. An entire family wiped out on my watch. It was always going to turn out this way. The baby was going to die. Why did I think it could turn out otherwise? You can’t bargain with kidnappers.

There had always been a chance to save the baby? Hadn’t there? That we could rescue this child while the bad guys kept it alive and either bargained with us or prepared to sell it on the adoption black market? Hadn’t there been a chance?

No.

I banged my fist into the dirt, catching a bunch of burrs that punctured through the latex into my flesh.

I had not reacted as a professional, but as a hysterical civilian. Now I needed that professional core to return and save me.

Scooping up the fresh evidence I was about to conceal, I carried it to the car and laid it in the trunk. I peeled off the sweat-filled, blood-and-burr covered evidence gloves and tossed them in, too. Then I waited in the car, blasting the air-conditioning on my face, for another half hour. The cell phone didn’t ring again, no matter how loudly I shouted at it. Not one car appeared on the sidestreets. Finally, I pushed the anger inside and felt very cold. I called Peralta but went to his voice mail. Two things seemed clear: more than one individual was involved, the man who called me and at least one more piloting the airplane. And I needed to get into Grace’s flash drive, find out what was so valuable.

There was nothing more I could do but drive back home, Yeats still in my ears, his great gloom in my mind.

An intellectual hatred is the worst .

I would find who did this.

And then kill them all.

The chilled numbness I felt deepened on the doorstep. The door was unlocked. I had gone off in such a hurry that I hadn’t even set the alarm. If they were looking for the flash drive, they had come to the right place. I could walk back to the car and get help, but didn’t. If they were careful, they had already seen me through the picture window. I had five bullets on my side against their automatic weapons or Claymore mines. Maybe they weren’t careful and I would catch them searching. We would settle accounts.

I stepped inside. Heather Nova was on the stereo. I thought about Frank Sinatra’s quip about committing suicide listening to Sarah Vaughn. Heather wasn’t bad background music to die by.

“Is that you, Dave?”

Lindsey Faith Adams Mapstone was in the kitchen, on her knees scrubbing the floor in front of the refrigerator, her brown-black hair in her face. She rose and hugged me, and, after a long time, I put my arms around her, too.

Her voice was a whisper in my ear. “I have messed up so bad.”

“Me, too.”

I heard the engine of Peralta’s truck roaring up Cypress before he walked in the door without knocking. He hugged Lindsey and I took him outside to the Prelude.

“I told you she’d come back,” he said.

I ignored that and told him about the call, the runaround, the airplane, and its bombing run. The caller had referred to me as “Doctor Mapstone,” exactly as Felix had done. He knew about me, the failed historian and the failed lawman. The newspapers had written up some of the big cases I had broken, but this wasn’t an innocent informed reader. He had done some homework. On top of that, he admitted that he had set off the Claymore. All I needed to tie it up in a bow was for him to confess to killing Felix. Unfortunately, the only bow I had was the twine from the package with the bloody doll.

I opened the trunk. Sheltered by the shade, the heat left us alone.

Kicking at the driveway, I said, “The baby’s dead.”

He slipped on a fresh pair of evidence gloves and carefully examined the bloody doll.

“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves.” He leaned in, reading off the brand of the doll, noting the quality of the wrapping paper and twine. “Where’s the flash drive?”

I told him about the hiding spot in the library.

“It must have something important if he’s willing to put on this show,” Peralta said.

I told him about my inability to get past Grace’s pre-recorded greeting.

Half of his upper lip tilted up, a wide smile for him. “Lindsey can take care of that.”

“Tell me we’ll find these guys.”

He raised up and studied me. “We will.”

I followed him back to his truck, where he produced a garbage bag, then we returned to the Prelude, where he slid the evidence inside. I didn’t want Lindsey to know about this bloody baby doll and what it implied. Anyway, was she visiting? Was she back for good? I didn’t know. This case could only deepen her grief.