The Night Detectives (David Mapstone Mystery 7)

An ancient Greek poet wrote, “The fox knows many things but the hedgehog knows one big thing.” The philosopher Isaiah Berlin turned that into an influential essay on writers and intellectuals. I was usually a fox. The kidnapping had made me a hedgehog. The single experience defining our lives right now was the kidnapping.

No matter how many law-enforcement agencies were investigating it, I had received the call. I had been bombed with the bloody baby doll—a warning, according to Peralta. It was certainly done in a way that got my attention. The caller told me he had something I wanted. It could only be Tim and Grace’s baby. And he said I had something he wanted. That could only be the flash drive. But how did that make sense? He had to know that we would break the encryption and download the client names.

Lindsey wondered if some information was hidden elsewhere on the drive. If so, that could make this particular piece of plastic very valuable, and Mister UNKNOWN was assuming we didn’t know the hidden data were there. Finding it was another task for her.

My task was to be bait.

Peralta called the shots. He had investigated hundreds of kidnappings. I had solved only one, from 1940. So I had to follow his lead.

At sundown, I went out alone in the Honda Prelude. Well, not quite alone: for company I had Mister Colt Python and Messrs. Smith and Wesson with the Airlite. And several Speedloaders of extra ammo for each revolver. I also had two cell phones: my new iPhone was plugged into my ears and the truck-stop cell, whose number UNKNOWN had, was on the seat beside me.

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I drove east on Camelback Road, a spectacular orange sunset to my back, maddeningly thick traffic ahead of me. It used to be that if you went the speed limit in the city of Phoenix, you would make every light with only a few exceptions. Now the freeway entrances and a few million more people had complicated that, so I ended up missing almost every light. It gave me a chance to see the massive ugliness of a city that had grown so fast it hadn’t had time to clean up after itself. Things would be better in full dark. Phoenix was beautiful at night.

Peralta was on the phone. “I’m about half a mile behind you, giving you plenty of room.”

“Where’s the tracker on your truck?”

“It’s sitting on a table at your house, like a good captured tracker.”

That made me laugh. I stopped when he told me Lindsey was with him. Not only did she have work to do, most of all I didn’t want her in danger if this excursion went sideways. I kept that to myself.

“Where’s Sharon?”

“She’s renting us a motel room.”

That was new. I decided not to ask questions but to focus on my task.

The real estate got nicer at Twenty-Fourth Street, with its alternative downtown of office towers, fancy condos, and the Ritz Carlton. The magical Biltmore Fashion Park had gotten a facelift a few years back and now looked like any suburban mall. Half a mile north was the entrance to the Biltmore resort. Only a few blocks south, the once solidly middle-class neighborhoods had turned over. Now people called it “The Sonoran Biltmore.”

I swam the traffic current headed to Scottsdale. If someone were following me, I would never know it. But I deliberately avoided any cute tactics to lose a tail. I wanted a tail. Camelback Mountain loomed straight in front, its head rising first. At Forty-Fourth Street, I turned left and climbed gradually into Paradise Valley.

The road turned east and became McDonald Drive. I wanted to look up and see the Praying Monk formation on the camel’s head, but too many headlights intruded. Some toff honked at me for not going the mandatory fifteen miles over the speed limit, then sped around me in his BMW. Phoenicians never used to honk. I used to own a BMW. Patty gave it to me. Lindsey wasn’t sorry when some bad guys pushed it out of a parking garage three stories down into Adams Street. I wanted to do the same with this prick.

After the big intersection at Tatum Drive, McDonald calmed down. The area became low-density and very expensive residential, with few streetlights, no sidewalks, and plenty of gates. One would never know that a huge city enveloped this blessed precinct on every side. The road ran to the north of Camelback Mountain. Across Paradise Valley was the mass of Mummy Mountain. I never ceased being moved by these works of nature and how they stood out darker than the night sky. For a few seconds my rearview mirror held no headlights. Then some appeared in the distance. My gut tightened.

Bob Hunter lived in a slummy lot for Paradise Valley, meaning his house was a large, perfectly respectable mid-century ranch. But it was definitely lower end than its neighbors. Most of the similar-age houses along Fifty-Second Place had been torn down and replaced by more impressive mansions. Lush desert landscaping predominated and the land was gentle hills. Paradise Valley had filled in since I was young, but it was still low-density. The properties were spaced far enough apart that a neighbor wouldn’t hear a gunshot. A prominent doctor and his wife had recently been bound and shot, and their bodies were only discovered because the meth-addicted killer also set fire to their house.

For my purposes, Bob Hunter’s house had an added benefit: no gate. I killed the headlights and slowly came to a stop on the concrete circle in front of the house. Lights were on inside, as well as on a pair of ornamental wrought iron, amber-tinted porch sconces. If someone had seen me, I would know soon enough. Either he would come to the door, or, more likely, I would find the Paradise Valley cops pulling in behind me.

Neither happened. After ten minutes, Peralta called.

“Report.”

“I’m sitting here. Nobody has even driven by. The mountains look beautiful.”

“We’re cruising,” Peralta said. “I don’t want to get too close.”

I told him it was too bad we couldn’t reverse the tracker and find out if I was actually being followed.

“I didn’t bring that kind of technology home with me, Dave.” I heard Lindsey’s voice over his speaker. She had said home. That was a good sign, right?

I kept scanning my mirrors and windshield, trying to get as much of a three-hundred-sixty-degree view as possible. Nothing was moving behind the ocotillos and, behind a white wall, the tall stand of oleanders that blocked off the backyard. I tried to imagine Grace growing up here, requiring a car for everything. It was so different from the real neighborhood where I was a child. It was easy to envision her counting the days until she could get away.

It was harder to put together Bob Hunter with his golf buddy Larry Zisman, a friend close enough that he took priority over his own daughter’s graduation. San Diego PD had notified Hunter of Grace’s death; he had flown there to identify the body. He had known where she had died. They would have asked him if he knew the owner of the condominium from where she fell. And he had lied, to Sanchez and to Peralta. Why? That he had been content to allow the police to classify Grace’s death as a suicide ran a dark charge up the back of my neck.

After half an hour, an amazing time for a beat-up Honda to go unnoticed in Paradise Valley, I slid it into gear and slowly coasted out onto the street, then turned north toward Lincoln Drive. I kept my headlights off and drove slowly. Two hundred yards ahead I pulled on the emergency brake and stopped the car without showing taillights. And yet: nothing. If anybody was behind me, he was running without headlights, too.