High Country Nocturne (8 page)

Robin. She was a fairly close match for the actress Robin Wright with long hair, when she was younger and not anorexic. But this Robin had no glamour. She was a storm child. She always called her older sister by her first and middle names, Lindsey Faith.

There was no excusing my part in what happened next, not Robin's aggressiveness, not the fact that Lindsey insisted she stay here, rebuffing my suggestion that Robin move.

Robin and I happened.

Whatever Lindsey did in her personal life during those months, I had no right to whine or pry. I had never judged her.

My offenses became unpardonable the night that Robin and I were in the backyard and she took a bullet intended for me. She died in my arms. The vengeance I took, on that last case as a deputy sheriff, didn't bring her back. For a time, I wondered if Lindsey would leave me, not for having an affair with Robin but for losing her.

Now I said, “Every day, I wish that bullet had hit me.” My voice was too loud.

She sprang up and turned away. “Oh, please, quit feeling sorry for yourself. You did what you did, feeling like the big stud. Now you have the balls to question my integrity? To believe that badged ego telling you I'm a traitor!”

“I don't believe it!”

“She loved you.”

“What?”

“Are you a stupid person, David? Did you not hear what I said? Robin fell in love with you. She told me. I thought I'd lost you.”

“You would barely take my phone calls then,” I said. “This is not about Robin. This is about whatever it is that Melton thinks he knows and how it could hurt us.”

“It hurt us that you believed him.”

“I don't!”

She muttered another profanity and strode across the hardwood floor to the desk, opened a drawer, and produced her blue pack of Gauloises Blondes cigarettes and lighter. Some people smoke after a meal or sex. Lindsey mostly smoked when she was under great stress.

She said, “I don't have to explain myself…”

“I didn't ask you to. I'm not the enemy.”

“Then why are you willing to lie down with the devil!”

We were both shouting now. Shouting fights were very rare in our marriage.

“Now you know national security secrets I swore not to divulge. I had to tell you because you don't trust me!”

Re-crossing the room, she stood before me, one hand on her hip, her eyes now wide and full-on angry violet.

“I'm going for a walk. I need to take a break from this.”

Lindsey was almost always preternaturally calm. Not now. The tone in her voice was boiling.

She quickly slipped on her shoes and headed to the door.

“I never doubted you. Not for a second.”

“Right.” A sardonic half-shout.

“Lindsey, please. Please don't…”

The door closed and I spoke the last word of the sentence to myself.

“…leave.”

Chapter Eleven

Later, I reflected on how a lover's quarrel never takes a logical course and for each of us, a perilous combination of fissile materials—shame, jealousy, and regret—was waiting to create a destructive chain reaction. Later, I would wonder why, why I agreed to accept the star from Chris Melton, and boil it down to one prime motivation: fear. Unreasoning fear for Lindsey. I was ambushed and made the bad call. I was usually good under pressure. Not this time.

But that was later.

Now, I stewed for maybe thirty seconds and stood up.

Outside, it was full dark, moonless, and most of the neighbors had their lights off. But I could see Lindsey, thanks to her white blouse. She was on the sidewalk almost a block away.

She had already crossed Third Avenue and was past the judge's house. He and his wife sang in a band.

The night held no band noises, barely any sounds at all. A bell from a light-rail train clanged two blocks east on Central, the direction Lindsey was heading. If you listened very carefully you could hear the continual grotesque moan of the Papago Freeway to the south.

The street held no FBI watchers, no reporters. Not one car was parked at the curb in our block.

I wanted to run after her but stopped myself. It would only reignite the argument. I started walking east slowly. Maybe I would catch up, maybe I would walk off my own brew of anger, confusion, and neediness. I needed her to understand why I took that file, took that oath.

This would be a good time for one of those business cards from Peralta to turn up and tell me what the hell to do.

I watched as Lindsey reached the gate and wall that closed off Cypress from cars at the end of the block. Pedestrians could walk through openings that lined up with the sidewalk. The wall ran nearly the length of the mile-long historic district. It was one of the horrid changes forced by the neighborhood association—I called it the Willo Soviet—to gain its support for light rail.

The result made the neighborhood, where streets had always run straight through to Central, and when this part of town was much more crowded and busy, into a “gated community.” At least on one end.

The gate across the street supposedly allowed emergency vehicles to come through if need be. But one day a fire truck had stopped and the firefighters had asked Lindsey if she knew the “code” to open the barrier. There was no code. It was a damned locked gate.

The goddamned walls and gates made me angry every time I saw them. If I wanted gates and walls, I'd move to the suburbs.

Lindsey didn't like walking through the Wall of Willo, either. “I always wonder if somebody is waiting to mug me on the other side.” She had said this more than once.

At least an ornamental light had been placed beside the sidewalk entrance on Cypress. It illuminated Lindsey clearly as she stepped through and disappeared on the other side, where First Avenue ran north and south. A block beyond that stood the open arms of the mid-century Phoenix Towers on Central Avenue.

Steps on the grass made me turn.

And there she was.

“Fight with the wifey?” she drawled. “But you want to make it all better.”

The woman Lindsey had nicknamed Strawberry Death was two feet away, that semi-automatic pistol of a make I had never seen before pointed at my chest. This time, no DPS uniform—she wore a black turtleneck, black jeans, and black running shoes. I wondered how long she had been watching.

I opened my mouth and closed it. I was not thinking of clever comebacks.

She drawled, “She's pretty. A little of the Goth girl left in her. If I had time, I'd suicide you both. Suicided is better, cleaner. But I don't have time. Where are my stones?”

“What?”

“Are you hard of hearing? Where are my diamonds?”

So that's what this was about.

“I don't have them.”

“Then I'm going to have to keep the promise I made.”

“To who?”

“Whom,” she corrected. “You should know better, Doctor Mapstone, being an educated man. Whom.”

My feet felt very heavy as I spoke. “To whom?”

“Peralta.”

Gun in your face. Buy time.

“You told him this?”

“I didn't have time,” she said. “But a girl's got to keep her promises. Now, where are my stones?”

She smiled, showing a perfect set of white teeth, and made the mistake of taking two steps toward me as she answered.

I quickly stepped in close, as if we were about to dance. By the time she realized what was happening, it was too late. I planted my right foot and calf behind her left leg and used this as a lever to push her backwards.

At the same moment, I grabbed her gun hand with my left hand while notching my right hand under her elbow. It incapacitated the arm, pushed the gun aside, and helped propel her off balance and down hard.

Thanks to this straight-arm-bar, the gun came loose before she could pull the trigger and I fell on top of her.

This should have knocked the air out of her, but it didn't. She wrestled, punched, and made grunting and growling sounds.

She also wore Chanel Number Five.

My face was instantly on fire. It took a couple of seconds to realize this was a result of her raking fingernails across me. She tried a kick in the groin, but I blocked that by turning to the side. Then she bit me on the wrist.

That let her struggle toward the pistol on the grass while I grasped the waist of her black jeans to hold her back. Her hair had come loose and I pulled on it hard. She screamed and cursed me. My reach was longer and with my other hand I tossed the gun into a hedge. Something black and sudden came into my vision, followed by pain and starbursts. She kicked me in the face with her running shoe.

Her move toward the bushes and her weapon caused me to pull my .38. Before I could even raise the revolver, she sprinted away, leaving her pistol on the ground.

It took me a few seconds to get my balance. She had nailed me good with that kick.

By the time the dizziness faded, she held a good head start and she was fast.

She ran east on Cypress.

I pumped my arms and hammered the asphalt across Third Avenue, over the curb, and across the uneven, eighty-year-old sidewalk. But she was younger and I couldn't catch her.

Her lead extended. She wove in and out of palm trees on the parking lawns, making me momentarily lose sight of her.

Suddenly Lindsey stepped back inside the wall, headed back in the direction of home, and saw us.

Strawberry Death paused beside a palm long enough to reach toward her ankle.

A backup gun.

But she didn't turn on me. Instead, she started running east again. She was thirty feet from the wall.

I shouted, “Lindsey, run! Go back! Run!”

Lindsey froze and stared at me, unsure of what she was seeing.

I tried to get a clean shot but the two women were aligned and now not more than a few steps apart.

“Deputy Sheriff, halt! Drop your weapon! I will fire!”

Hearing this, Lindsey instantly withdrew to the other side.

“What's going on out there? Are you all right?” A man's voice from a porch.

“Get inside and call the police,” I yelled.

Then I stopped, dropped to one knee, made my breathing slow down, and lined up the barrel on the back of the woman, the gold and red of her hair shining under the streetlight.

I slowly let out a breath and started the trigger pull.

But then she passed through the cut in the wall.

And three seconds later, I heard the shot.

Chapter Twelve

Lindsey lay face down on the pavement.

The back of her white blouse was red and wet with blood.

I swept the surroundings with my .38 but the woman was gone. Then I knelt beside my wife and gently turned her over.

“Dave…”

“I'm here.”

“Your face is bleeding.”

“I'm fine.”

“Bad time for a walk, huh?” Her lips tried to smile.

I looked around again, but the parking lots across the street were empty and the edges of the wall looked clear of any lurking killer. The half-smoked Gauloise was burning five feet away.

“Don't leave me.” Her voice sounded groggy.

“No. Never.”

“It hurts. Hurts.”

The entry wound was in the middle of her chest.

I needed a trauma kit.

I needed a trauma team with surgeons.

Her breathing was rapid and shallow. I took her pulse. Weak, thready. Classic shock symptoms. She was bleeding out.

“Stay with me, Lindsey. I love you. Stay awake.”

She stared at me, tried and failed to speak while I shakily dialed 911 on my iPhone, gave our location, my badge number from memory, and called for help.

“My wife has been shot. She's badly wounded.”

Fire Station Four, with a paramedic unit, was only five blocks away. I heard the sirens from McDowell. It took somewhere between forever and eternity for the first emergency lights to appear on First Avenue.

The memory of Robin dying in my arms was banging in my vision. I couldn't let it happen again.

Couldn't.

“Keep breathing, baby. In and out.”

She nodded.

“Hold my hands tight.” She did, but her strength was fading.

Then her eyes closed.

Stripping off the blazer, I carefully rolled her to one side and used it as a makeshift dressing against her back. I wouldn't let the word enter my mind: useless.

Firefighters and cops were arriving. Red and blue lights bounced off the wall, doors opened and closed, and uniforms approached. I moved aside and let them work, giving a description of the shooter to an officer who broadcast it on her portable radio. A helicopter appeared overhead and blasted us with white light.

More sirens were approaching from the distance.

Chapter Thirteen

St. Joseph's Hospital, a Level One Trauma Center, was half a mile away.

An hour later, Lindsey was still in surgery. “Critical condition.” That's all a doctor had told me as I was sent into in a long, largely empty waiting room with a television at one end bolted near the ceiling. A Hispanic family, mother and three small children, sat near it, staring silently.

God didn't owe me anything. That didn't stop me from praying for Lindsey.

A man came in to have me sign paperwork as Lindsey's next of kin. I had her Social Security number memorized. He seemed amazed that we had insurance. I remembered when St. Joe's was a hospital for the elite. Now most of the patients must have been on Medicaid or nothing.

It wasn't even connected to the Catholic Church anymore. After an abortion was performed to save the life of the mother, the bishop retaliated by cutting off church ties that went back to 1895. Now the local wags called it Mister Joe's and the moneyed Anglos had long abandoned it for Mayo. But it still was one of the best hospitals in the Southwest.

After the doctor left, it was quiet except for the television and a page for “Trauma Team Two.” I assumed that “Trauma Team One” was busy with Lindsey.

My face was still burning from the scratches. My left cheek and eye felt swollen from where the woman's running shoe had connected. I didn't want to look in a mirror.

I was bargaining with God like a panicky twelve-year-old, staring at nothing, when Phoenix Police Sergeant Kate Vare strode in, wearing a stylish short leather jacket and carrying an expensive leather portfolio.

She sat next to me. The butt of her Glock protruded from the jacket.

How I wished Lindsey had taken her Glock instead of a pack of cigarettes for that walk.

“I'm sorry, Mapstone.”

It was the most human thing she had ever said to me.

Vare and I were once rivals, or at least she saw it that way when I worked for Peralta and she was a cold-case expert for Phoenix P.D. But the new chief had reorganized the department and now she was a night homicide detective. Otherwise, she looked the same: petite, ash-blond hair in a short bob, tightly wound.

Homicide. I pushed that word away. That was only the name of the unit she was assigned to, the kind of detective sent on this type of call, GSW, gunshot wound, victim in critical condition. Assault with a deadly weapon.

GSW to the chest, exit wound, massive blood loss. I knew the score.

My wife was in there dying.

I put my face in my hands but the pain from the scratches and kick roared up like a wildfire. The wound on my wrist where Strawberry Death had bitten me was red and painful but the skin hadn't been broken. I rose up again.

Vare cleared her throat. “You know we have to do the drill.”

She opened the portfolio and prepared to make notes as I retold my encounter on the lawn with Strawberry Death, disarming her, and chasing her toward Central where Lindsey had the bad luck to turn around and come back our way.

I had already given this information, along with as complete a description of the attacker as I could muster, to a uniformed officer. But this was the drill, as she said.

Then I went through the events of the early morning traffic stop headed into the High Country, the same woman in a DPS uniform drawing down on me and only stopping when the FBI tail vehicle came behind us.

My mind was bouncing in so many directions that for a few seconds I wondered if she really was a DPS officer and a part-time hit woman. Weirder things had happened and Arizona grew weirder by the day. It probably paid well and she had the perfect cover.

“We'll check to see every DPS patrol officer who was on duty last night and this morning around Camp Verde,” Vare said. “But I don't think she was a cop.”

“Why?”

“I'll get to that. Why would this woman be trying to kill you?”

I shook my head. “I have no idea.” I tried to focus. “I've never seen her before. Didn't receive any threatening calls or emails. Nothing I've been working on seemed dangerous.”

I added, “She's done this before.”

Vare cocked an eyebrow.

“She said it would be cleaner if she ‘suicided' me, as she put it.”

Vare wrote it down.

“We recovered a semi-auto from the shrubs near your house.” She tapped her pen on the legal pad. “It's a Heckler and Koch Mark 23, chambered for a .45. That's a Special Forces weapon. It can work with a laser-aiming system and a suppressor. Who the hell did you piss off, Mapstone?”

“Can't civilians get them?”

“In this state?” She sniffed. “You can get anything. Maybe it can give us some fingerprints. What about Peralta?”

That didn't take long. I was surprised it hadn't been her first question.

It was a good question,
the
question. But I had already decided not to mention that the woman had told me she was there for “her stones,” that she had made Peralta a promise. There were good reasons to be honest, chiefly that it might give me police protection. But the reasons to hedge were more compelling. The first reaction of Vare and the FBI would be that I was involved in the diamond robbery.

I chose Door Number Two.

“I'm more shocked than anybody,” I said. “I also don't know why the FBI would be working a diamond robbery.”

“And shooting.”

I nodded.

She set down her pen and thought, then started ticking items off on her bony fingers.

“Maybe the robbery was planned in another country? Or it involved a federal agent or a postal worker? The diamonds might have been from another country and they asked the FBI to investigate. Or Chandler P.D. wanted the bureau's forensic expertise on a major jewel heist. The feds have diamond experts. They have art theft experts.”

“But I didn't even talk to a Chandler detective when I was called up to Ash Fork this morning.”

“What's your point, Mapstone?”

I rubbed my hands, feeling the dried blood on them seeming to cake up into little flakes.

“My point is this whole thing stinks.”

God, why didn't I keep us in the nice hotel downtown with the friendly shower?

I watched the entry to the waiting room, hoping to see a doctor who might tell me something, something good. Every scrub-clad medico walking past drew my eye, but each merely continued going.

Vare stood and pulled out the chair, then placed it directly in front of me and sat again. She pulled closer until our knees almost touched.

“Did it ever occur to you that Peralta might have sent this woman after you?”

You mean the woman who keeps her promises?

I said, “That doesn't make sense. He's my friend…”

She immediately talked over me, like old times. “I thought he was a good cop, too. Obviously we didn't know him. Maybe he's tying up loose ends. Maybe he thinks you know something. It's strange he left a note specifically about you on your business card in his truck.”

Word traveled fast.

She leaned in. “Have you heard from Peralta since the crime?”

I looked at her without blinking, forcing discipline into every cell of my body.

“Kate, my wife is in critical condition and I've had my ass kicked by a girl. So anything I do right now might be grief, or because my face hurts like the devil. But you'll consider it a ‘tell.' ”

Next I looked down and to the left, blinked rapidly, and cleared my throat. “See what I mean?”

Her cheeks turned red with frustration.

I said, “The answer is no, I haven't heard from him.”

I was a good little liar, too.

“Do you know something about the diamond robbery, Mapstone?”

I knew the woman wanted the diamonds. Before that, I had found another business card Peralta had left for me across from the Flagstaff train station. “Find Matt Pennington.” Lindsey had been about to tell me about Pennington when I provoked our ruction and she walked out.

I knew Orville Grainer had seen Peralta exit the truck, change the license plate, and get in a sedan. And Peralta, playing lawn boy on what I hoped was a forgotten landline, had told Sharon that I needed to watch my ass. I hadn't watched it very well.

I said, “No. I want Lindsey protected.”

“It's already done.”

I let out a long breath.

Vare made me go through it all over again and I did. Lindsey leaving to go for a walk, me following.

“Why did you follow her?”

“At first I didn't want to go walking, then I changed my mind.”

No way was I going to tell her we had a fight. For any cop that provided a sweet, low-hanging fruit—alleged marriage trouble.
Maybe Mapstone was screwing this woman and she got tired of hearing him promise to leave his wife. Or Mapstone actually encouraged or even paid her to kill Lindsey and set it up to look like a random crime.

She let it pass. “You should know we found a burglar bag near where you encountered her. It had lock tools, an alarm bypass, handcuffs. You pissed somebody off.”

This information passed into my nervous system and chilled me.

Five beats. “Any marital troubles, Mapstone?”

“No.”

I didn't hate her. Faced with the same facts, I would have asked the same question.

Next Vare wanted to know about recent cases I had investigated as a private detective and what Lindsey had been doing. I kept my answers calm, short, and factual. They filled three handwritten pages of notes.

“That's all for now. There have been a bunch of felony paroles and early releases to save the state money. So we'll check for bad guys you arrested or testified against who might have gotten out recently.”

“Thanks.”

Four women walked past in purple scrubs. None looked in the waiting room.

Vare closed the portfolio, pushed the chair back into place, said they would send over a sketch artist, and handed me her card.

I didn't immediately take it.

Chris Melton was on the television across the room. “Live,” the banner said at the bottom on the screen. “Downtown Phoenix Shooting.”

The TV morons didn't even know it was Midtown, not downtown, if they were talking about what happened to Lindsey.

Melton was standing out in front of the St. Joe's E.R entrance.

“Turn that up, please. Please!”

The Hispanic woman at the other end of the room complied and I heard him talking.

“The Phoenix Police are the primary department investigating this case. What I can tell you is that the wife of a Maricopa County deputy was shot while she was taking a walk. Obviously I can't identify her. She's fighting for her life and I ask everyone to send their prayers.”

My face started throbbing violently. As reporters shouted questions, I could see Vare stiffen.

“No questions,” Melton said. “Here's what I can say, any attack on a family member of a Maricopa County deputy sheriff is an attack on all of us, on the entire law-enforcement community, on the community as a whole. We will not stop until this animal is run down and brought to justice…”

Maybe there had been another shooting of a deputy's relative. But no. The shooter was identified as an Anglo woman in her thirties with reddish blond hair, who remained at-large.

“Goddamn him,” I hissed.

Vare stood over me and her sharp features darkened. “Are you with the Sheriff's Office again, Mapstone?”

“It's temporary.”

“Fuck you,” she said, then lowered her voice. “Why didn't you tell me you were working for Meltdown right off?”

I reacted with equal fury, standing, and towering over her. “He swore me in tonight, damn it! I've been a little distracted, if you didn't notice. My wife is in there…” I threw an arm in the direction of the trauma suites and my voice broke.

But I forced some composure, sat, and spoke slowly. Kate Vare could help me or really hurt me. I needed her help. “He wants me to look into an old dead-body case.”

“What case?”

“I haven't even begun checking out the file. It was a body I found back when I was a patrol officer. I was in my twenties, Kate. In the last century. I don't remember much about it. Some guy who went hiking in the desert, got lost, got dead. It didn't seem suspicious. I turned it over to the detectives and thought it was closed.”

“So what's his angle?”

“I wish I knew. He said there's been a new development. He wouldn't tell me what until I had studied the file he gave me. This happened literally three hours ago.”

I had so lost track of time that probably wasn't “literally” true. Close enough. I wasn't grading freshman essays.

She put her hands on her hips.

“I want to know what it is.”

“I'll tell you when I find out. You should be more concerned about Melton trying to grab publicity by horning in on your case.”

She nodded, went over and muted the television, then sat back down and reopened her portfolio. All the damaged tissue in my face silently groaned.

“I want to go back through this,” she said. “So this woman pulled a gun from an ankle holster.”

“That's what it looked like.”

“Why didn't she shoot you?”

“I had my .38 on her. She saw it and ran. Or maybe she heard the neighbor call from the porch and didn't want to risk a witness.”

“So she ran through the opening in the wall and shot Lindsey. Why?”

I thought about that and told her she knew Lindsey was my wife. And Lindsey was in the wrong place at the wrong time.

“Hmm.” She closed the pad again. Her voice shifted cadence and what came next almost sounded like an afterthought.

“Lindsey lost her sister in a shooting.”

“Robin.” I stared at the wall texture.

“And the woman who murdered Robin is doing life now because you happened to be driving down Maryland Avenue a few days later and identified her…”