High Country Nocturne (David Mapstone Mystery 8)

He mumbled something unintelligible about private eyes, shook my hand, and limped back into his forlorn village.

Mapstone had nothing to do with this. Tell him not to try to find me.

Whatever Peralta really intended by the message, whether he meant it or somebody was leaning on him, he had worked with me long enough to know that sometimes I didn’t follow orders. Even his orders.

Chapter Five

Back in the car, I slid on my holster. Sharon had brushed out her hair and, with the visor mirror down, was nervously freshening her lipstick. She had been agitated on the entire drive up. Who could blame her?

I asked her about Ash Fork and why Mike might have come up here.

She shook her head. “I have no idea.”

“You still have the cabin in Heber?”

“Yes. The FBI was very interested in that. They’re probably at the place now, hoping he’ll show up. They spent hours at our house today—well, yesterday, now—with a search warrant.”

I drove west on the one-way street, turned a block, then came back on the eastbound one-way that returned us to the Interstate. Grainer was gone and it was difficult to imagine the thriving town he had described.

“Did you expect to find him dead here?” I asked Sharon.

“No.”

My body tensed even before she spoke the next sentence.

“He called me tonight.”

Two obscenities came out of my mouth before I stopped myself.

“I’m sorry, David.”

I asked her what time he called. Around eight-thirty.

“When were you going to tell me?”

She flipped up the mirror and the light went off. Her large brown eyes watched me.

“He said not to tell you anything.”

“Sharon…” I stared at the highway, a stream of semis passing us as I stuck to the speed limit. “I can’t believe it. You know the FBI has your phones tapped. You’ll be implicated in this.”

“They don’t even know about this phone. Years ago, the county installed a second landline at the house as a backup in case of an emergency. Then they forgot about it. After he left the sheriff’s office, I called twice to have them take it out. They never did.”

“What did he say?”

She laughed, a surprising sound in this cockpit of tension.

“When I first met him, before I even knew you, I was this girl from the barrio. A nobody. He was a deputy sheriff, the son of a judge. He had grown up in a fancy house in Arcadia. My family had a four-room, tarpaper shack in Golden Gate, before they bulldozed it for the airport. He’d been to Harvard, for God’s sake, and I barely got out of high school. But I was very vain. I knew men liked me. And he liked me. I didn’t always look like an old lady.”

“You’re very attractive, Sharon. And you’re the most accomplished person I know.”

She waved it away. “I wasn’t digging for a compliment, David. There is a point to the story.”

I shut up and ten miles later she continued.

“He liked me, and we started dating. He was only one generation out of the barrio, but he would tease me. He enjoyed making me mad. One of his things was to impersonate a guy named Paco Sanchez. He made up this character that was a gardener who spoke terrible English but was going to take me away from that cop Peralta I was dating. It made me angry, that he was making fun of me. And it made me laugh.”

“That’s a playfulness I never saw in him.”