High Country Nocturne (David Mapstone Mystery 8)

“I suppose you’re right,” I said out loud.

We hope you will be more gender-sensitive in the future, Professor Mapstone. You enjoy a position of white male gender-privilege that’s not even apparent to you, you bastard.

“Thank you for pointing out my failing. I’m sorry, although I suppose tenure-track is kaput for me. I will not use the term Strawberry Bitch.”

Until her gender-power is being used on me from the business end of another H&K Mark 23.

Then I thought about the situation more seriously. A .45-caliber Special Forces pistol was not an assassination weapon. Hitmen favored .22 caliber pistols firing sub-sonic rounds. These were easy to silence.

So why was she carrying the big gun? For intimidation purposes, perhaps.

Kate Vare had described the bag she had dropped outside our house containing burglar tools, handcuffs, and tranquilizers. Maybe she had intended to stage a murder-suicide—as if I had shot Lindsey and then myself. With the handcuffs, perhaps she intended to torture one or both of us.

For her stones.

As the cars sped past like comets in search of a star, I thought again about her other words, to the effect that she would kill me to fulfill a promise to Peralta.

In her anger, Lindsey had chided me for being naïve, but would Peralta have unleashed this reaper on me? Was I kidding myself about the man I thought I knew? But then I remembered his words on the Dictaphone, “You’re going to hear a lot of things about me. Don’t believe them.”

I rolled down the window and took in the breeze, thought about how close I had come to being blown apart by Belma’s sawed-off shotgun, and my hands became steady. I pulled out my iPhone, and dialed to ask about Lindsey.

Chapter Seventeen

I stopped at the house and changed into casual clothes for the overnight shift. The file from Melton was still there, demanding my attention. Not for the first time, I wished I had told him no, whatever his threats to Lindsey. Everything might be different now.

Or not. We had been on Strawberry Death’s to-do list that night.

Lindsey’s rings went into a sock, which I rolled up with its mate and dropped back in the sock drawer. I slid a couple of books off the shelves and put them into my briefcase with the MacBook Air. Then I put a light jacket on to conceal my big Colt revolver and headed up to the hospital.

There it was so quiet and deserted that I was able to find a space in the two-block-long parking garage close to the skywalk entrance. I checked out the concrete expanse carefully but no killer was hiding in wait. I walked through the automatic doors and headed toward the massive complex of buildings. The skywalk was empty and Tom Petty’s voice was coming over the speakers, singing about learning to fly without wings.

Sharon had nothing new to tell me. This time it was my turn to shoo her off to get rest. She said I looked exhausted.

Two new Phoenix Police officers were outside the ICU. I checked them out long enough that they started giving me the cop eye. This caused them to take extra time looking at my driver’s license—no need to bring my badge into it—before I was buzzed into the unit.

It was almost ten and I was given a lecture about visiting hours, but they took pity on me and allowed me inside Lindsey’s room.

I sat by her high-tech bed and held her limp hand, reading Billy Collins poems aloud. He was her favorite poet. IV bags were changed. A nurse looked at me indulgently, as if to say, She can’t hear you. I knew that she could and kept reading.

After my ten minutes were up, I sat down in the waiting room with the file in the chair beside me.

It was still there when I woke up.

The wall clock showed five after three and I was momentarily disoriented and frightened. The room was empty. No one passed in the halls.

I picked up the file folder, snapped off the rubber band that held it together, and began to read. Pretty soon I was making notes.

Seeing my old handwriting in the cramped boxes of the original incident report made me think of that David Mapstone. Doing the calculations, I seemed impossibly young. I was juggling being a deputy with working on my master’s degree.

I had taken my own apartment at the edge of the lush Arcadia district and had left Grandmother alone in the house on Cypress. She understood a young man’s desire to be on his own. At that time, when the state was determined to ram the freeway through the old neighborhoods, they were in decline. More than once, I found a homeless person sleeping on Grandmother’s lawn.

I drove a ten-year-old Firebird that I was inordinately proud of. I should have kept it—I would have owned a classic. My girlfriend was named Deb. She’s a history profes

sor at Cornell now. I thought Heineken was a sophisticated beer and I knew too little of jazz. The bad recession of 1981 was still lingering.

The service weapon I carried as a deputy was the same one as today, the Colt Python .357 magnum with a four-inch barrel. It wasn’t regulation but the supervisors let it fly. They knew I wanted the stopping-power of the big gun, something the .38 didn’t have. If a hopped-up criminal came at you, the .38 would eventually kill him. But he might keep coming and kill you, too. The .357 magnum would knock him down. I was a believer in stopping-power.

A month before, Peralta had become the youngest captain in the history of the Sheriff’s Office, an obvious comer. He kept pressuring me to stay in the Sheriff’s Office, not become an academic. Sharon had completed her Ph.D. in psychology. They had two young daughters. We had become social friends and would eat Mexican food he cooked every Wednesday night.