High Country Nocturne (23 page)

“That doesn't make sense,” I said. “If you think Grayson is the bad guy, why not let her follow the tracker? She'd have access to that technology.”

“It would be too easy.” Pham's hand was tightly gripping the computer mouse. “Grayson might suspect something.”

As he talked, I thought about Horace Mann. He would be even more bulletproof. If he recovered the diamonds aboveboard, he'd be a hero. Even if the rough were in the hidden compartment, there would be no probable cause to arrest him. Quite the opposite. If he found the suitcase alone, he would have time to take the rough unobserved. But Peralta beat him to it.

He continued to talk about Grayson. “She needed to see that Peralta had found the hidden rough and taken it. That would rattle her. So we planned for Peralta to dump the suitcase.”

“It's a hell of a gamble when Chandler Police was converging on the mall.”

“Peralta is a cool cat.”

He was that.

Pham continued the footage as the truck rolled out on Chandler Boulevard, pulled to the curb as two police cruisers raced past with lights going—there was no sound on the video. A quick left turn and he was on the 101 freeway traveling north in moderate traffic.

I asked, “Where did you get this?”

“A drone.”

The video continued to follow him as he drove north, taking the interchange to the Superstition Freeway and popping out of the concrete spaghetti going west. Another four miles and he hit wide Interstate 10. The immediate direction was north into Tempe, then it would veer west into Phoenix.

Pham said, “The city cops don't even have a description or tag of the truck by this point.” He seemed very proud of himself and his plan.

Next, something odd happened. Before the interstate curved west, Peralta got off on Broadway and drove north into mundane, low-rise office buildings and warehouses. No, he was going to Rio Salado College, one of the branches of the huge community college system. It was also where KJZZ, the NPR station, had its studios. The drone hovered and zoomed in on the truck entering the parking garage.

“By this time, we calculated that the scene would start to be sorted out. The asset was not going to talk. He was wounded, after all. He played even more disoriented. But the cops would eventually know Peralta was the other guard. So this seemed like a good place for him to change his license tag.”

He fast-forwarded to the truck leaving and returning to the freeway.

“Wait,” I said. “How much time elapsed?”

He pointed to a small digital readout on the corner of the screen. “Twenty-one minutes.”

I said, “That's a damned long time for a gear-head like Peralta to change one tag.”

He let the question pass.

“So you want to know what went wrong,” Pham said. “Peralta had a tracker in his boot. It never activated. The next sign we have of him is in Ash Fork. He was never supposed to go to the High Country. He was supposed to dump the truck and hole up in a motel room with us watching him.”

“And?”

“The Russians. Peralta would wait three days and contact the people who engaged our asset as diamond guard. Offer to sell the diamonds back to them. We have all their phones and computers monitored. So either they would call the person from the Bureau who was their partner or she would call them. By that time, she'd have seen the news coverage. She'd know the diamonds she worked so hard to steal and get this far were gone. When Peralta set up the meet, we'd get them all.”

“Did Peralta know the names of the suspected agents?”

Pham shook his head.

“So if he heard Horace Mann briefing the press on his truck radio, that name wouldn't mean anything? It wouldn't cause him to change course?”

“No. Why would it? Horace Mann is not a suspect, Doctor Mapstone.”

“Then why are you here? Does Mann know you're running this?”

He hesitated, then shook his head. “This is about redundancy,” he said. “About compartmentalization. Washington insisted on this. It says nothing about Horace Mann's competence.”

The Russian had spoken of compartmentalization, too. What could go wrong? I could imagine two sets of FBI agents getting into a gunfight.

I wasn't reassured about Mann, either. One reason why Peralta had left the first business card, the one saying I had nothing to do with the diamond robbery, might have been an attempt to protect me from suspicion. On the other hand, why would the FBI believe the writings of a wanted man? Maybe that first card was meant for me, to telegraph that all was not well with this very complicated operation.

I said, “What about Matt Pennington?”

“That came from Peralta via you,” he said.

“He wasn't in the mix? He's on the white board.”

“Only because of Peralta's note to you, which you informed our asset about. As you know, when Pennington was in the Navy he worked with Mexican authorities on drug interdiction. I'm trying to find out what happened with Pennington in Mexico. It's a DEA matter and they're not being forthcoming.”

I suspected that I would never find out. Pham had been as forthcoming as he would be and only because he wanted something only I could do.

I leaned in again. “So show me more of the drone footage.”

He looked down and spoke quietly. “I can't. The drone couldn't pass over Sky Harbor airspace. We lost him. Now it's time for you to make that phone call.”

Chapter Thirty-three

Afterwards, I stood on the sidewalk by Thomas Road watching the traffic roll by, counting the number of giant pickup trucks that looked exactly like what Peralta drove.

My mind was fried and then sent back to the kitchen to be scrambled.

Lindsey was only a couple of hundred strides from where I stood, but every time I left the hospital I felt as if I was committing a small act of betrayal. Yes, there was nothing I could do to help her. Yes, I had promised Sharon I would find her husband, promised Ed Cartwright I would find his friend. It still felt lousy.

If Strawberry Death wanted to get me at that moment, all she needed to do was be behind the wheel of one of the trucks or SUVs traveling at fifty on Thomas and conquer the curb on the way to splattering me like a bug on the grille.

Pham would dismiss it as another 962 involving a pedestrian, radio code for accident with injuries. Or 963, accident with fatality. Such tragedies happened daily here, where the civic layout had become wide highways called city streets connecting real-estate enterprises. Nothing to see here. Move along.

I had spent my day at the extremes of the city, the mansion in Arcadia and the shabby former hot-dog place. Sure, it got worse. There were shanties in south Phoenix with dirt floors and homeless camps by the river bottom. There were thirty thousand-square-foot mansions on the sides of mountains. Neither extreme talked to the other.

Walking back into the hospital, I felt the anger in my steps. Why was Pham not buying my theory of the hitwoman? In fact, he had gone to the trouble of having his minions find a parolee that debunked my version. But the woman on the corrections sheet wasn't Strawberry Death. One only learned her moves thanks to professional training and constant practice, and never being caught. She operated in the shadows.

He also didn't believe me about Horace Mann. I knew what I heard. I knew Mann was dirty.

Pham's inattention stank: the hubris of a boss who had his mind made up, a massive amount of FBI ass-covering.

Another possibility chilled me. What if Pham was perfectly acquainted with her because Amy Morris was a government agent? She didn't even have to be FBI. We had so many agencies guarding the so-called homeland now.

Like Cartwright, Pham had dismissed me but in his case with an odd mix of formality and fake-casual management jargon. “So don't come back to this location, Doctor Mapstone. Don't try to contact me. You don't have the bandwidth to help in this space. So stay away.”

Stay away, my ass.

I retrieved my briefcase from the ICU nurses and went to the waiting room. I should have written up my interview with Diane Whitehouse to add to the murder book. As far as Eric Pham was concerned, I was done.

The phone call back had seemed to go well but the technicians weren't able to get a fix on the man's location. We agreed to meet at six tonight by the fountain in Scottsdale Fashion Square. Except I wouldn't be there. I described one of Pham's FBI agents as me, as Matt Pennington.

But I wasn't done.

I thought about the white board at Johnnie's, the boxes drawn in blue marker and labeled PERALTA, RUSSIANS, SUSPECT AGENT, PENNINGTON, OTHER?

It looked as if it had been drawn up and abandoned like some corporate initiative that went nowhere. And what was “other” ?

I pulled out a pad and made some drawings of my own.

One was a starburst with Peralta at the center. I sketched lines out to boxes for me, Ed Cartwright, Eric Pham, Matt Pennington, and the unknown people Peralta had joined in Ash Fork after abandoning his truck at the derelict gas station on Route 66. These represented direct relationships to Mike Peralta.

I added a perpendicular line from the Russians to Cartwright. They had contacted him.

Next I added a box for Strawberry Death with lines to Pennington and me. I made dashes between her and Peralta. I had no physical proof they had made contact or knew each other, but she had told me she had made him a promise.

To be complete, I drew a connection between Horace Mann and me. He had interrogated me on Friday afternoon, summoned me to Ash Fork that night to unlock the gun compartment of the truck, and then didn't order FBI surveillance of our house. That last had proved very useful to Strawberry Death.

What if she were working with him? If so, why was he so interested in having me dead? It had to be something more than what Kate Vare considered my ability to get in the way.

But the diagram wasn't quite right.

The only immediate connection to Pennington was Peralta. I pulled out the business card and studied his printing: FIND MATT PENNINGTON.

The dead man wasn't on the FBI's radar. But he sure as hell was on somebody's or Strawberry Death wouldn't have “suicided” him only a few hours or even minutes before I found him. Who gained from his death? Nobody I could see. But he had information and either gave it up before he died, or…

Or he was that tough and committed. Why not? He was a Naval Academy grad who apparently worked on dangerous assignments.

Or he didn't know and she killed him anyway.

I looked at the drawing, came up empty, and set it aside.

On the next sheet, I tried different thinking. If the crooks think of themselves as businessmen and some businessmen are crooks, why not look at the supply chain?

This produced boxes along a line. Inside the first was a question mark. After all, Pham wouldn't tell me where those diamonds in evidence came from. From there, the line went to the FBI evidence control facility to Markovitz in New York to Chandler.

Going only that far raised questions. Why wouldn't the rogue agent keep the diamonds himself? One obvious answer was to avoid being caught up if a search warrant was served on him. Maybe he didn't have the contacts and distribution network—I was still thinking supply chain—to turn the rough into cash. That's where the Russians came in.

And why did I know this much about the journey of these diamonds? One of their advantages was how they could disappear. They were small, easy to conceal, and carry across borders. Were we such great detectives in having this much information? Or was something else going on?

Perhaps I was being paranoid. Being shot at will do that.

After Chandler, I sketched the supply chain diagram in greater detail. Cartwright is shot and Peralta steals the suitcase. He pulls the switch in the parking lot, leaving the suitcase with the tracker in the trunk of Catalina Ramos' Toyota and taking the hidden rough. He travels the freeway system to Rio Salado College where he goes in the parking garage for more than twenty minutes.

I drew a box for Ash Fork but only added a line of slashes. Too many unknowns.

My hand was about to draw more lines and boxes but it lingered on the Rio Salado box. Twenty minutes. A very long time to change a license plate, especially for a guy as mechanically skilled as Peralta.

I pulled out my iPhone and called Rio Salado College security.

Chapter Thirty-four

The badge did have benefits.

Within an hour, I was still sitting in the ICU waiting room but video camera footage from Friday was streaming on my MacBook Air as I talked to the security chief at Rio Salado.

We started with the camera trained on the entrance to the multi-story parking garage. It faced outward, so we saw the entrance to the parking and beyond it the street and front doors of the college.

At precisely 11:37 a.m., Peralta's truck turned into the garage.

“Freeze that, please.”

He did and I studied the image. It was definitely Peralta. He had put on a Phoenix Suns ballcap.

I said, “Do you have cameras inside the garage?”

“On every floor.”

He flipped through several cameras and let them run. Peralta appeared on the third floor, drove halfway up, and backed into a parking space. I asked that he slow down the speed and watched as Peralta stepped out and went to the back of the pickup.

“Can you zoom in?”

He could. The light was bad and the image grainy, but Peralta stooped down behind the truck. Here he was changing the tag.

The footage continued to run. A shadow slipped under the camera and became a Chevy Impala. My stomach tightened.

“Slow it more,” I said.

The Chevy stopped directly in front of Peralta's truck, blocking it. Strawberry Death stepped out. She was wearing a white top and blue jeans, her hair was down, falling below her shoulders.

She walked around the car and ran her hand on top of the truck's hood. Checking to see if it was still warm from the engine.

She didn't know he was there.

And then he popped up with his Glock drawn.

It was 11:42.

She had followed him, keeping enough distance not to be suspicious. I wished I could go back and study the tape from the FBI drone. It might have shown her tailing him from the mall.

Through the grainy footage I could see mouths moving. Her hands were empty. He had the drop on her.

“Rookie mistake…”

“Come again?” the security officer said.

“I'm talking to myself.”

She reluctantly turned around and walked to the front of the Chevy, Peralta behind her. Then she spread her feet and bent far forward on the hood, empty hands straight out. This was on his commands, no doubt, even though there was no sound. It put her at a disadvantage, being so off balance. If she tried to fight, he could kick one leg out and send her to the ground.

Something flashed. He produced handcuffs. And like thousands of times in his career, he cuffed her. Next he did a quick search and pulled something out of her back waistband. Some kind of pistol. He slid it into his own waistband and roughly pushed her to the passenger door, opened it, and tossed her in.

Then he crossed to the driver's side and got in. The Chevy slid forward into a parking space.

They sat there as the clock ran. Maybe she was making him a promise.

Finally, Peralta's head appeared. He walked over to his truck and retrieved the old license tag from the garage floor by the back bumper. Then he was inside the cab and pulling out.

The digital readout on the camera feed said 11:58.

Afterward, I put on my earbuds, leaned back, and listened to Susie Arioli, Billie Holliday, and Frank Sinatra…