The Night Detectives (David Mapstone Mystery 7)

A burst came over her radio and she keyed her mic. I was being saved by a call: a burglar alarm a mile away.

She touched my shoulder. “Gotta roll, David. Call me sometime and we’ll catch up. Good luck with Larry. Good guy in my view. Not so much his son.”

“Yeah.”

“I’m surprised the Army accepted him. Don’t tell Larry I said that.”

All my senses kicked to a higher gear. The Army. “Of course not. Stay safe, Amy.”

In a few seconds she was back in the cruiser, where she executed a U-turn over the rounded curbs and zoomed back out toward the exit of the subdivision. I turned off the dome light and tried to breathe normally again.

28

I drove back to the center city on surface streets, sick that Peralta’s plan didn’t seem to be working. My phone was charged and had plenty of time left. It wasn’t ringing.

Through downtown Tempe on Mill Avenue, across the Salt River, Galvin Parkway took me through Papago Park, the two iconic buttes backlit by the city, preserved desert all around. I thought about what Amy Taylor had said—not the “call me sometime” part, but about Zisman having a son. That was another new angle. Or it was Occam’s Razor and Zisman was the john, even if he wasn’t on the flash drive, and Grace had tried to blackmail him exactly as Detective Sanchez had said.

But did that explain why Tim Lewis had been tortured, every finger broken? Somebody thought he had information. Information to kill for. If it were simple blackmail, the problem would have been solved with Grace’s supposed suicide. “Death solves all problems,” said Joseph Stalin, who had yellow eyes. “No man, no problem.” Well, no woman, but there was still a problem. Larry Zisman, former football player, could easily have subdued Grace and thrown her over the balcony. The torturing of Tim Lewis had taken a crew.

At McDowell, I turned left and entered the Phoenix city limits, then drove uphill between the buttes and was greeted by the dense galaxy of lights stretching all the way to the horizon. Phoenix was beautiful at night. On the downhill drive, the iPhone rang.

“I think I’ve got your tail,” Peralta said.

My pulse kicked up. “Do tell.”

“A truck followed you though Tempe, made every turn, and then kept going as you went up Galvin through the park and turned on McDowell. He’s probably a mile behind you. A black Dodge pickup. California plate. He’s got a tag frame that says ‘I love Rancho Bernardo,’ with a heart thing instead of love, you know.”

I did know. It was the truck that had passed me the night I got out of the cab in Ocean Beach, the one I thought was simply looking for a parking space.

“Let’s box him in,” I said. “Do a felony stop.”

After a long pause, Peralta’s voice came back on. “No.”

“Why?”

“First,” he said, “because we’re not the cops anymore. Second, because when I hired you many years ago, I hired your whole toolbox, not just the hammer. Since a year ago, all I get is the hammer.”

Now it was my turn to be silent. His words stung. His words were accurate.

“So what’s the plan?” I asked, and he gave it to me.

“Stay on the phone,” he said.

I drove back through downtown and went north on wide, fast-moving Seventh Avenue. Numbered avenues and drives run north and south west of Central; numbered streets and places run north and south east of Central. Now you know how to get around Phoenix. I assumed the pickup driver was learning this from our excursion.

At Northern, I turned west again and after about two miles reached the Black Canyon Freeway, which ran in a trench below grade level. A Motel 6 sat a few blocks up the southbound access road. Getting to it required turning north into the K-Mart parking lot, then passing through the Super 8 parking lot, and finally reaching the Motel 6 parking lot. We didn’t even need streets with so many seas of asphalt.

I parked away from the motel building and stepped out into the heat. I had a cell phone in each pocket as I walked the fifty feet to a room on the ground floor right in the middle of the ugly four-story box. It had none of the charm of the old motels that had once lined Grand and Van Buren with their Western themes and neon signs.

Three other cars were parked in the lot, all of them empty.

Precisely as Peralta had said, a key card was slipped into the edge of the door all the way down at ground level. I retrieved it, unsnapped the holster holding the Colt Python but, against my better judgment, left the gun there. I popped the card into the lock and stepped inside.

Nobody shot me.

Turning on the light switch, I surveyed a cheap motel room looking like every other cheap motel room in America. It had been the scene of countless assignations. Bring in an ultraviolet detector, and the pattered orange bedspread would have revealed an army of old semen stains, dead in mid-slither.

I spoke into the headset. “Where’s my tail?”