The Night Detectives (David Mapstone Mystery 7)

She said, “We’ve got an alarm. We’ve got guns. And we know where the bad guys are. Peralta says we’re safe.”

“He’s not omnipotent, no matter what he thinks.”

She nodded to the computer screen.

“Let me distract you. I went back a year, and Grace Hunter never left Ocean Beach, exactly like Tim told you. She would walk down to the market a few blocks away, here on Newport Avenue. All her calls were to Tim, her parents, and her friend, Addison. Now, check out April twenty-second. At two-fifty p.m., she leaves the apartment and walks north. It’s like she was going to the store. Maybe for diapers.”

I watched as Lindsey brought up a Google maps display.

“Here, at two-fifty-four, she’s really on the move.” I watched as the red line ran out of O.B. on Narragansett Avenue, turning north on Chatsworth, and east again on Nimitz Boulevard, heading toward downtown.

“Does she have to be making a call for this to show up?”

“Nope,” Lindsey said. “People would freak out if they knew how much data were being collected on them every minute. All that needs to happen here is for the phone to be turned on. But look here. At three-oh-five, they stop.

Right here.”

The map showed the intersection of Nimitz and Locust. It was a nothing little street right before the big stoplight at Rosecrans on the Point Loma Peninsula.

“And that’s it. That’s where she stays.”

I thought about the missing hours.

“Or,” Lindsey said, “that’s where the phone stays.”

“What do you mean?”

“Grace’s phone never made it downtown. At four-ten, at Locust and Nimitz, the call was placed on this phone to your office. Grace might have made it. Or, she might have already been in that condo downtown. But at four-seventeen, the phone was turned off at the same location.”

I put my arm around her. “So somebody made contact with her on the way to the store. And she got into a vehicle. Somebody she knew. So she got in with him and they drove toward downtown. Toward Zisman’s condo. But what happened at Nimitz and Locust…” My voice trailed off. Things didn’t track.

Lindsey shook her head, her voice authoritative. “She had a baby waiting at home. She wouldn’t leave him for long. And Zisman wasn’t one of her johns. So why would she leave the baby and go to his place? No. Somebody snatched her off the street.”

I was fully awake now, the dream almost forgotten.

She opened a file. “Here’s where things get interesting. There was a call made from that phone a few minutes before the call to your office.”

“The San Diego cops didn’t have that on their LUDs.”

“They wouldn’t,” she said. “It was placed to a scrambling device. Very advanced, very expensive. It scrubs any of the conventional records of the call, even an incoming call. Only some government agencies and corporate executives use this. You have to know where to go in the cell-company databank to find the trail, then decrypt. But here it is. The call was five minutes long.”

“Are you sure nobody knew you were hacking all this?”

“Oh, somebody knew or will know. But what they saw was a low-end data breach coming from the People’s Republic of China.”

She opened another file: the list of Grace’s clients. “The scrambler call was made to this number. It’s his private line.” Another screen showed me his face on the cover of Fortune magazine. He looked my age yet was making more money in a week than I would make in my lifetime. Why did I need three college degrees?

“He runs one of the top venture-capital funds in the country,” she said. “He could afford this kind of security. All these executive types have protection. According to the records, he and Grace saw each other regularly for more than two years.”

I took it all in, or thought I did, amazed again at Lindsey’s talents.

I stopped myself from tapping my finger on her clean computer screen. “Then the phone was turned off for good, right there on Nimitz?”

“Not exactly. It was turned on again last Friday.”

Suddenly, the air conditioning felt too cold.

“Where is it?”