High Country Nocturne (David Mapstone Mystery 8)

I ate in silence. She was right. Perhaps. One of my many character flaws was getting into target-acquisition mode and immediately going to afterburners. Sometimes I needed to slow down.

I said, “But he left the second card. He knows I love trains. He knows I love the Flagstaff depot. He called Sharon from a pay phone there, made sure she heard the railroad in the background. Sure enough, he had left a message where I would find it. That would indicate he wants me to be involved.”

“Why?”

“Maybe something went wrong. Or, he is not undercover but being coerced into this robbery.”

She pointed to the newspaper. “Nothing subtle about it. If he wanted the diamonds, he could have overpowered the other guard before they got to the mall. Instead, he shot him there and did it on camera.”

“That gives him more credibility going deep undercover.”

“And ruins his good name.”

“For now.”

“But something went wrong and now he needs you?”

I shrugged. I didn’t know. The more I ate, the more my body wanted to sleep.

She applied a dainty napkin to her mouth. Then she swigged the coffee like a truck driver. “What if he really did it?”

“Lindsey!” I lowered my voice. “How can you even think that?”

“The man gave his life to serving the people of Maricopa County.” She looked around at the breakfast crowd. “And they kicked him to the curb because suddenly it’s unAmerican to be Hispanic in Arizona. It’d make me want to get a little revenge.”

“That’s not him. He was philosophical about losing the election. We were the ones who were angry.”

“We have to look at this dispassionately,” she said. “That’s the way you would approach any other case.”

I nodded.

She leaned toward me. “Maybe he wanted to prove something.”

“Prove?”

“The white supremacist took his gun, remember? You had to rescue him. That had never happened during his career.”

Peralta and I had never discussed that incident, but what Lindsey said was true. Mike Peralta’s credo was never give up your weapon. But in that situation, he had been blindsided, disarmed, and strapped to a chair in a room with explosives. By the time Peralta was unstrapped, two bad guys were dead. But all through it, he had been, for probably the first time in his life, helpless.

“He may be feeling old,” she continued. “Feeling as if…”

After a few minutes, I finished her sentence, “Feeling as if he needed to prove he was still capable. So maybe that drove him to accept a dangerous assignment.”

“Or,” she sipped her coffee, “become a jewel thief.”

We finished breakfast in silence. I knew what she was thinking: nobody really knows anybody else.

Afterward, we boarded the train and rode down Central to the Encanto station, we walked two-and-a-half blocks to the 1928 Spanish Revival house on Cypress Street. The street was blessedly free of satellite trucks, black SUVs, and strawberry blond DPS troopers.

The temperature had warmed into the high sixties and the air was dry and magical. It would be the kind of day when you could say, yes, this is paradise. When I was young, it had been a flawed Eden, a garden city surrounded by citrus groves, farms, and the Japanese flower gardens, and beyond that the empty majesty of the Sonoran Desert.

That was almost all gone now that the builders had turned the Valley into fifteen hundred square miles of lookalike housing developments, shopping strips, and tilt-up offices and warehouses built on spec. Even Baker Nursery, a reminder of the days when even the most humble place was lovingly landscaped, had closed. Newcomers threw down gravel and thought they were being responsible. “We live in a desert,” they would say. They knew nothing about this wettest desert in the world and the oasis they were profaning. There was Scottsdale and Paradise Valley, if you had the money. But it wasn’t my paradise anymore.

Time was, we had seven lovely months and five hellish ones. Now it had almost flipped. It didn’t cool down until after Halloween and the heat kicked up in March. The temps had gone up ten degrees in my lifetime, and that was local warming, replacing the groves and farms with concrete and red tile roofs. Nobody wanted to talk about what climate change would do here. I kept friendships by not bringing it up

But on Cypress Street, in the historic districts, especially within this property line, here was the magnet that kept me in Phoenix.

Inside, I thought momentarily about driving into the office and going through recent cases we had worked, everything I could discover about the diamond runs. To find Matt Pennington.