Jon Talton - The Night Detectives

“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.

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.