Concrete Desert (David Mapstone Mystery 1)

Peralta’s jaw tightened. “Bobby fucking Hamid. I should have known he’d eventually turn up. Who is Lindsey, and why is she looking at DEA files?” He looked at me. “Never mind. Jesus, were you this much trouble when you were a history professor?”

“Probably worse,” Kimbrough said, but the edge was gone from his voice.

I asked, “Have we checked in with Coconino County on the progress of their investigation of Townsend’s murder?”

Everybody was silent.

“What’s so hard about this?” said Kimbrough’s partner. “Chick and boyfriend are supposed to carry the cash down to Mexico and bring back cocaine, whatever. Instead, they keep the cash, rip off Bobby Hamid, hide the car here, and wait for the heat to cool down. Bobby finds ’em first, kills ’em both.” He made pistols out of his fingers. Pop. Pop.

Peralta and Kimbrough looked at me.

“Doesn’t make sense,” I said. “Phaedra was plainly on the run. But if Greg Townsend was, too, why was he waiting at home in Sedona when I found him?”

“Cause mules are stupid,” Kimbrough said.

“This guy w

asn’t stupid,” I said. “Ignorant, perhaps, but not stupid. And a million bucks is a lot for a mule to be entrusted with, don’t you think? And Phaedra hated drugs. Everybody says that. And why would Bobby Hamid leave Phaedra’s body where it would be immediately found, posed like Rebecca Stokes’s was?”

Peralta pulled out a handkerchief and wiped his brow. “So what do we know? Tell me what we know.”

“We know she was on the run for approximately a month, most of the time living with her new boyfriend, Noah. She kept in sporadic touch with Susan Knightly, her boss, who said Phaedra admitted to overhearing something she shouldn’t have, something she was afraid of.”

I added, “And we know she met her sister at a coffee place in Tempe the night before her body turned up.”

There was a long, awful pause. “I want her,” Peralta snapped. “I want Julie Riding.”

I started to say something, but I thought, Why? What argument can I make? What argument would I want to make? God, I felt tired.

“And,” Kimbrough said, “we know Phaedra’s car was hidden in this storage unit with a million dollars and a machine gun in the trunk. If that doesn’t tie Phaedra to the deal, I don’t know what does.”

“Noah-that’s the latest boyfriend-said Phaedra was without a car, that her sister had borrowed it,” I announced.

“Jesus!” Peralta shouted. “I want this bitch in jail by morning! Why didn’t I arrest her that first day?”

“Mike…”

He stabbed a thick finger at me. “Goddamn it, David, if you know where she is, you’d better have her booked into the women’s unit by the next time I see you. Do you hear me? If you go thinking with your johnson on this, you’re going to be in a world of hurt.”

Fifteen faces looked up at me. I started to say something, but Peralta cut me off. “I want her in jail. Got it? You wanted to be on this case. Well, consider yourself on it. I want Julie Riding.”

He walked to his car, shouting as he went. “I want Julie Riding in jail. I want those prints. Fibers, mud, semen, anything in that car. I want that cash inventoried and locked up. I want that car impounded and torn apart. I want the paperwork on this storage unit. And I want Bobby Hamid down at Madison Street tomorrow morning with that high-priced mouthpiece of his.”

He climbed in his Ford, slammed the door, and gunned the engine, disappearing around the corner of the rat’s maze, trailing exhaust fumes and dust.

Where was Dr. Sharon when I needed her?

Chapter Twenty-nine

“I have to warn you, Peralta, this is the most egregious case of police harassment I’ve seen in all my years of practicing law. What you have here isn’t a case. It’s a fantasy.”

For an hour, we were crammed into a Spartan white-walled interrogation room: Peralta and me, Bobby Hamid and his lawyer. More detectives were listening behind the one-way glass. The man speaking was the lawyer, Bruton Hennessey, an intense, short, florid-faced easterner who had migrated to Arizona two decades ago and made a name defending high-paying dirtbags.

While Hennessey and Peralta jousted, I was watching Bobby Hamid. He was about my height but more slender, wrapped in a gray suit of the texture and cut that doesn’t even start below a thousand dollars, all set off by a subtle blue Hermes tie. He was the epitome of swarthy meets money: his darkness offset by delicate features, brooding, feminine eyes, and an expensive haircut and manicure. He had walked into the room, shaken our hands-to Peralta’s visible distress-and let lawyer Hennessey do the talking.

“I mean, really, Peralta, do you have nothing better to do than try to hang the flimsiest charges on my client, a businessman responsible for no small amount of taxes in this county?…”

Peralta snarled, “Cut the shit, Hennessey. This ain’t Boston. If I had a dollar for every illegal activity the Ayatollah here was involved with, I’d be a rich man.”