Jon Talton - The Night Detectives

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.