Jon Talton - The Night Detectives

“Should I call the FBI?”

“No,” he said. “In an hour, you’ll have twenty agents setting up shop in your living room. Any chance we have will be lost.”

“We don’t have a chance. The baby is dead.”

“No,” Peralta said. I took no comfort from his tone of certainty. He went on: “If the baby was dead, he’d have nothing to bargain with. He did this as a warning. He wanted to throw you a scare in the most dramatic way possible. He’ll call again. You ought to check out historic cases and see about bodies being dropped from airplanes.”

Now he was trying to distract me.

As I leaned against the fender, which had cooled off enough that it didn’t burn me, I thought about being eight years old, coming home from Kenilworth School full of joy to be free, catching the limb of a small tree outside, and getting stung by a bee. As Grandmother removed the stinger, I thought it was the worst thing that could possibly happen, it hurt so much.

Now that same tree was grown tall but my branch was sawed off. It was a long time coming. I was a surprise baby and then my parents died before I even knew them. No brothers or sisters, no aunts or uncles. So many times at the Sheriff’s Office, I had eluded violent death. It was something our unborn child couldn’t do and saving Lindsey’s life meant we couldn’t have another.

“Mapstone.” Peralta knew I was too deep in my head. “I’ll take the package to a private lab and get a workup. Let’s go inside.”

“What about Cartwright?” The thought had just come to me.

“Stop obsessing about the Edward thing.”

“That’s not what I mean,” I said, unaware of any irony involving a man I was prepared to shoot the day before. “He might be dead or in danger. They’re playing us, jerking us around. They kill people we talk to, but they won’t come straight for us.”

His heavy hand guided my shoulder toward the front door. “Ed will be fine, whether it’s nuclear war or some dudes coming onto his property. If anybody was stupid enough to make a move against Ed, he’d have them buried in the desert within the hour.”

Inside, he slipped on the pair of Bose earphones that Lindsey had gotten me for Christmas five years ago and listened to the voice on the recorder. He replayed it several times. Then he settled into the leather chair, put on his reading glasses, and studied my report on Grace Hunter. Lindsey was still cleaning the kitchen.

He folded his glasses. “I agree.”

“Why would she leave her baby and go see Zisman?”

He ticked off scenarios on his fingers. She received a call like I had, perhaps threatening to kill Tim if she didn’t go. Maybe not go to Zisman’s condo. Maybe instructions to go to the corner to meet someone, and she had been taken.

Or Zisman himself had coerced her with some form of blackmail or reward.

Or an abductor had gained entry to the apartment and made her leave with him. A gun at one’s back is a good persuader-could even make a mother leave her newborn baby.

Or she had gone willingly because she and Zisman were still lovers and Tim Lewis didn’t know it, but something had gone wrong, and he had arranged to have her killed while he was on his boat.

“The last one seems improbable,” I said. “She wouldn’t leave the baby.”

“We used to see that all the time,” Peralta said. “Mother abandoning a baby so she can go party. Leaving them inside their cars in the summer while they go shop. Remember the mother who drove off with the baby still on the car roof?”

“It doesn’t fit Grace, and not only the woman described by Tim Lewis, but the woman’s actions. She started her own illegal business, where it required discretion and care. She did it for some time without attracting a pimp, and then she eventually gave him the slip. She wasn’t an airhead.”

“That’s true.”

When I waited in silence, he continued. “I was talking to her father.”

“I’m surprised he would talk to you.”

“I didn’t give him much of a choice. When I went to his place, the housekeeper told me he’d gone hiking. He’s one of these idiots who climbs Camelback every day, even in the summer. So I got a description and waited at the Echo Canyon trailhead for him. Someday Phoenix Fire will have to airlift him off if he keeps this up. He was so heat exhausted that I didn’t have trouble getting him into the cab of the truck.”

“You shouldn’t have gone alone,” I said.

“Why?” He snapped it out in a harsh tone. “I can take care of myself.”

“That’s not my point. We’ve had two clients killed and the murderer is at large.”

“I’m not an old man, Mapstone. You handled the kidnapper’s call on your own. I did this. We don’t have an entire department backing us up any more. Sometimes we have to work separately to get results in a hurry. I sure as hell can take care of myself.”

I shut up. It was the first time I had sensed that he was not as philosophical about losing the election as he appeared. My concern about him going alone, and my frustration that he hadn’t been around to back me up, came off as questioning his abilities.

When he cooled down, Peralta described Grace’s father: a self-made man, owning a successful company in Chandler that sold garage-door mechanisms. In a metropolitan area where big garages were almost as sacred as unlimited gun rights and red-light running, it was a very good business. The daughter he described to Peralta was smart, a National Merit Scholar finalist, but a young woman with a rebellious side. Her father had wanted her to attend Stanford, so of course she had chosen San Diego State. In retaliation, he had made her pay her own way.

“They didn’t get along?” I asked.

“Didn’t sound like it,” he said. “The guy struck me as a prick. Chip on his shoulder. Sense of entitlement. And he’s got a wife half his age, so he’s desperately trying to stay in shape and be the extreme athlete, totally focused on trying to be her age. He’s had work done, I could tell.”

“She’s not Grace’s mother…”

“No. They divorced when Grace was a freshman in college and her mother found out dad had a girlfriend on the side that was his daughter’s age. He said Grace blamed him for the divorce, but the parents had been fighting for years. Grace couldn’t wait to get out of that house.”

“The dad told you all this?”

“No,” he said. “The housekeeper did. I don’t know whether she’s legal or not, but let’s say she was a fan. ‘My Sheriff,’ she called me. She was happy to help.”

“Where was the new wife?”

“Where else? The spa at the Sanctuary.”

After the divorce, Grace had come home to the Phoenix less often, and had visited her dad less still. She hated the young woman who, in her eyes, had broken up her parents’ marriage, and refused even to see her.

So her father was surprised and proud when Grace asked him for a loan to start her own business in San Diego. He was even happier when she paid him back.

“How did he seem to be taking her death?”

“Like a tough guy,” Peralta said, “but I could tell it’s eating at him.”

“Did he bring up Zisman?”

“No, but I did. He claimed he didn’t know Zisman. Grace never mentioned the guy to either parent.”

“Or what her real business was.”

“Right. But Grace had no known enemies and she was emotionally stable, even the housekeeper backed that up. She said Grace was the only nice person in the family. No history of suicide attempts. Later, I talked to her mother on the phone and it all jibed. The mother moved back to Iowa and hadn’t seen Grace for a year.”

“Do they think it was suicide?”

“They don’t know what to think. The dad wanted to know who hired us, and of course he had never heard of Felix Smith. They didn’t know about her boyfriend, either.”