High Country Nocturne (David Mapstone Mystery 8)

“This is Terminal Four at Sky Harbor on Friday morning. As you can see, Peralta and the other guard approach this man.” He pointed to a nondescript middle-aged Anglo in a cheap suit. “That’s the jeweler. He’s passed through security to the main terminal. Peralta signs for the shipment and takes the rolling suitcase. It has the diamonds inside.”

More tapping a

nd black-and-white images came up. “This is from the service hallway at the mall.”

Here was something I had already seen. A mall security guard lets in Peralta and Cartwright. There’s a conversation and the mall guard walks ahead several paces and disappears around the corner. Then Peralta pushes Ed back and draws his weapon. He fires and Ed goes down. Peralta walks quickly toward the camera, pulling the suitcase, and going back the way he came.

I said, “So far, so good?”

“All according to plan.”

Another view appeared on the screen, this time in color. Peralta was walking fast, carrying the suitcase now. He opened the door to his pickup, tossed the bag inside, backed up, and drove toward the street. It is a huge parking lot. Almost every space was taken. Two, no, three shoppers walked by as he cruised past.

“Here.”

Pham froze the screen. Peralta had stopped at the outermost bank of parking. The truck was beside an old Toyota. The one belonging to Catalina Ramos.

The action moved forward slowly. As I had suspected, Peralta used a Slim Jim to open the driver’s side, from which he could pop the trunk. He dumped the suitcase inside, closed the trunk, and drove away.

“This is where things went sideways?” I asked.

“No,” Pham said. “We planned for him to do this so the GPS tracker in the suitcase would be useless.”

“That doesn’t make sense,” I said. “If you think Grayson is the bad guy, why not let her follow the tracker? She’d have access to that technology.”

“It would be too easy.” Pham’s hand was tightly gripping the computer mouse. “Grayson might suspect something.”

As he talked, I thought about Horace Mann. He would be even more bulletproof. If he recovered the diamonds aboveboard, he’d be a hero. Even if the rough were in the hidden compartment, there would be no probable cause to arrest him. Quite the opposite. If he found the suitcase alone, he would have time to take the rough unobserved. But Peralta beat him to it.

He continued to talk about Grayson. “She needed to see that Peralta had found the hidden rough and taken it. That would rattle her. So we planned for Peralta to dump the suitcase.”

“It’s a hell of a gamble when Chandler Police was converging on the mall.”

“Peralta is a cool cat.”

He was that.

Pham continued the footage as the truck rolled out on Chandler Boulevard, pulled to the curb as two police cruisers raced past with lights going—there was no sound on the video. A quick left turn and he was on the 101 freeway traveling north in moderate traffic.

I asked, “Where did you get this?”

“A drone.”

The video continued to follow him as he drove north, taking the interchange to the Superstition Freeway and popping out of the concrete spaghetti going west. Another four miles and he hit wide Interstate 10. The immediate direction was north into Tempe, then it would veer west into Phoenix.

Pham said, “The city cops don’t even have a description or tag of the truck by this point.” He seemed very proud of himself and his plan.

Next, something odd happened. Before the interstate curved west, Peralta got off on Broadway and drove north into mundane, low-rise office buildings and warehouses. No, he was going to Rio Salado College, one of the branches of the huge community college system. It was also where KJZZ, the NPR station, had its studios. The drone hovered and zoomed in on the truck entering the parking garage.

“By this time, we calculated that the scene would start to be sorted out. The asset was not going to talk. He was wounded, after all. He played even more disoriented. But the cops would eventually know Peralta was the other guard. So this seemed like a good place for him to change his license tag.”

He fast-forwarded to the truck leaving and returning to the freeway.

“Wait,” I said. “How much time elapsed?”

He pointed to a small digital readout on the corner of the screen. “Twenty-one minutes.”

I said, “That’s a damned long time for a gear-head like Peralta to change one tag.”