High Country Nocturne Read online

  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…”

  I knew and she strongly suspected that was only part of the truth.

  Vare didn’t know that I had been about to execute the woman who killed Robin when my cell phone rang, the screen had said “Lindsey,” and the few better angels I had left by that time stopped me.

  Some days I still regretted letting her live. On those days, days like today, I was on the knife’s edge, justice had not been done and I sure as hell was not noble.

  Robin. And now Lindsey…

  Vare leaned in and whispered, “The women in your life have bad luck, huh?”

  It took every bit of self-control to not leap over and strangle her.

  I said, “I want my wife to have protection, twenty-four hours…”

  “I already told you.” She rose and started to leave. But after two steps she turned and came back, stabbing her index finger in my chest, right about where the bullet entered Lindsey. “Stay the hell out of my investigation, Mapstone. If I find you using that badge to play vengeful husband, I swear to God, I’ll ram my fist so far up your ass, I’ll make you pay for breathing.”

  She stomped away. She weighed a hundred pounds wet but she was a good stomper.

  My anger breached the levees and I yelled after her, “Then find who did this, Kate….” But she was already in the hall and gone.

  I touched the point of pain she had left on my sternum and thought of Lindsey.

  I looked up and Vare was standing over me.

  She cleared her throat and spoke slowly. “I’m sorry, Mapstone.”

  I started to say, “Don’t worry about it,” but she talked over the first syllable.

  “It was uncalled for. Look, I’ve got a new boss. He talks a good corporate game but I don’t think he’s ever gotten his handcuffs dirty. City Council wants to cut our pay and take away our pensions. It’s shitty all over. All I’m asking is, don’t make my job harder.”

  When she had wound down, I nodded. “Fair enough.”

  She patted my shoulder, an astounding gesture of rapport for her, and cocked her head.

  “What kind of leather did your DPS officer wear?”

  I closed my eyes and tried to remember. It had been dark. The gun had held most of my attention.

  �
�Webbed,” I said finally. “She wore a webbed equipment belt.”

  “Then she was fake,” Vare said. “DPS wears plain Safariland leather.”

  Five minutes later, Melton appeared at the doorway. Four gold stars gleamed from the collars of his crisp black uniform. I was up and headed toward him. He must have seen the blood in my eyes so he stepped forward and hugged me.

  The son of a bitch hugged me.

  I didn’t hug back.

  “We’re going to get this shooter, David. Don’t you worry about that.”

  He studied me. “You’re covered with blood. Can I have someone bring you a change of clothes?”

  I stepped back, wishing the blood hadn’t dried, wishing it could have stained his immaculate uniform. I thought of Jackie Kennedy after the assassination, when she had worn that bloodstained suit all the way from Dallas to Washington. “Let them see what they’ve done,” she said.

  I said, “Why do you care about a woman you called a traitor?”

  “David, you’re overwrought. Do you have kids?”

  “We don’t have children.”

  He looked at me like an alien being, then tried to smile sympathetically.

  “Take a few days. Then look into the case. You’re going to need the distraction.”

  My hand made a fist and I forced myself to relax, open up each finger.

  “She’s in good hands.” He clapped me on the shoulders. His eyes swept the room and settled on the Hispanic family at the other end.

  “My God, they cost so much. Our health care, our schools. I bet they’re illegals and we could arrest them right now.”

  Yes, and some resort would lose its housekeeper who worked a second job as a fry cook at another business. I kept my response simple. “Leave them alone.” And almost gagging, I added, “Sheriff.”

  He smiled. “Call me Chris.”

  Halfway out the door, he added, “And call me by Tuesday. Let’s talk about this case.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  The next day didn’t pass in a blur. It went by in agonizing minutes, every sixty seconds scalding me. My body felt as if every nerve was jangling on the surface of my skin.