The Night Detectives (David Mapstone Mystery 7)

Sanchez deflated by degrees. Even her hair deflated.

“No. They don’t match. The phone she was carrying that night was scrubbed clean of recent calls. We traced it to a seventy-year-old woman who lives on Clairemont Mesa. It was stolen from her in a purse snatching at Fashion Valley mall.”

“So whoever pushed her off that balcony took her real phone.”

She nodded.

“How is the hunt for the baby progressing?”

She forced her expression to harden. “That’s confidential law-enforcement information and you’re only a private dick.”

Robin’s words again. I stifled a smile.

“Come on, Isabel. You don’t have to mimic your jerk colleague.”

Two beats, three.

Then: “We don’t have anything. Not a damned thing. If I had known she was married or had a kid…” She shook her head. “The vic didn’t have any of that information in her purse. Her parents didn’t tell us, either.”

“I understand.” I thought about the wall with our names painted in blood, information I had held back for our protection, and asked about fingerprints.

“The apartment was destroyed. It could take ATF weeks to sort through things and see if there are any usable prints.” She cleared her throat. “What do you make of Larry Zisman?”

I laid out the backgrounding I had done. Among a certain group, people who had lived here a long time, Zisman was still beloved for his college-football days. He was a razzle-dazzle quarterback in the glory years of Sun Devil football. He left less of a mark in the NFL, playing for five teams before being forced to retire early.

Zisman was a native Arizonan, attended the old East High School, and came back here to live after he retired from the NFL. Not only that, but to live year-round, not only keep a casita at one of the resorts for the winter months. He had started a non-profit to fund athletics for inner-city schools. He was in demand to give speeches at Kiwanis and Rotary, but removed enough from celebrity to be under the radar in a city with so many comings and goings.

“Did it surprise you that he had a lover on the side?”

I held out empty hands. “Who ever knows? But, yes, a little. From what I picked up, Larry Zip was so full of clean living that he might have been mistaken for a Mormon.”

“Do you think he killed Grace Hunter?”

“He’s physically capable of it. Former athlete. As a reserve officer, he would have gone through police academy training.”

She made a few notes.

I said, “It would be pretty stupid, though, to push her off his own condo balcony. He’d know that he would be the prime suspect. Better to strangle her and dump her body in the East County.”

“Unless,” she said, “it was an act of passion and he did it in the moment.”

“Right. But then you have the problem of the alibi, of him being on his boat.”

I was only trying to be convivial enough to get Detective Sanchez out of the office. This couldn’t be a mutually beneficial relationship because Peralta and I were concealing critical information. We had dug this hole a little scoop at a time, for good reasons at the moment, and now we were in deep. Too deep.

She thought about what I had said regarding Zisman, twirling a strand of her hair.

“I think he could have done it.”

“You interviewed him that night and cleared him,” I said.

“I read your report,” she said. “After our ass-chewing from Kimbrough and before we got on the plane, I dug a little more. The man at the next boat is a good friend with Zisman, you know. He’s from Arizona, too. You people really need to find another summer escape. The man is a developer who used Zisman as a spokesman for some of his properties. He might be lying for him.”

Zisman hadn’t figured in any of my theories about the case—not that I had formed many yet. I had been focused on getting out of that apartment before my body was turned into an aerosol state, and then on examining whether Grace had actually committed suicide.

“What about Tim?”

I cocked my head.