Dry Heat (David Mapstone Mystery 3)

It was indeed, but it was a strange, exhilarating sound: Lindsey Faith Mapstone. We were still newlyweds. So I allowed myself the husband’s prerogative of listening to his wife’s dulcet alto, a voice that so soothed me. She talked about her big case. Most of the technology went over my head, the extensible markup language, secret sharers, buried code, and identity masking software that the good guys used to get the bad guys. I just want a computer to do what I want. Lindsey is way ahead of me. That’s why she was picked for the task force that spent a year tracking some superstars of international crime. They had hacked into every major credit card network, stealing identities, draining cash, reselling stolen credit card numbers. They had even discovered a way to steal information off smart cards. Tracks led to Russia, Malaysia, and Gilbert, Arizona, a quiet suburb outside Phoenix.

“The mistake we were making was to think these guys were in a place, using a computer,” she said. “They were, of course, but the real crime was happening on the networks, out in cyberspace. They could operate from a phone booth, from a moving car. So we fought fire with fire.”

“I bet that was your idea,” I said.

“I helped,” she said, sipping her martini, then replacing it on the bedside table. “I infiltrated their network. I mean, I found them out there, in the Visa system, and I followed them home, so to speak. Not only was I able to get into their computers, but I set up a dummy network around them. Every time they logged on, wherever they were, I could hack their computers. Pretty soon, they thought they were stealing real credit card numbers, but they were really in this dummy network.” The big smile, the amazing mouth. “Yeah, I guess I did good. And I got lucky-they got careless, just like street scumbags get careless.”

“So how’d you get them?”

“You won’t even believe it, Dave. Once we got into their computers, we could get into every file. So it wasn’t hard to figure out the real identities. One guy, we got him when he logged onto AOL to check his personal e-mail. So two days ago, police in three countries carried out simultaneous raids. A dozen were arrested. I felt like sending a virus that would pop up on their screens just before the cops kicked the door in, and it would say, ‘You’re busted!’ I didn’t, sad to say. Anyway, all that came to a head while you were in Portland, love. And I never had to leave the study in there”-she nodded toward the other end of the house-“except to sit through excruciating meetings with the FBI.”

“Did you meet a guy named Pham?”

“Eric Pham? No, he’s the SAC.” Special agent in charge. “I just dealt with his minions. Minions in search of Meester Beeg.” She had a nice laugh. I told her about my encounter with Pham, the homeless man in the swimming pool, and the long-missing FBI badge.

“I think El Jefe is a prick for making you work the minute you get back, especially after what you’ve been through. He lost his father last year. He ought to have a little more emotional intelligence.”

It was true. Judge Peralta’s death had barely registered on him, on the outside at least. It was just the way he was.

“I always loved the judge,” Lindsey said. “So courtly, so old school. You’d think Mike would be more of a sensitive guy considering his wife is such a big time psychologist.”

“I knew them when he was just a deputy, and she was just a scared housewife.”

“You are an old guy, Dave.” She tickled me, and I nearly upset what was left of my drink.

“Yeah, kid, I remember you on my very first case back at the sheriff’s office. Seems like only yesterday. I said, ‘Who is this babe in the miniskirt and the nose stud.’”

“I saved your ass, Dave.”

“True enough.”

She snuggled against me. “You saved me back,” she said.

“Anyway,” Lindsey said conspiratorially. “Dr. Sharon living in San Francisco, what does that mean for the sherif

f’s marriage?”

I shrugged. “They have their own thing, and it’s survived for thirty years or so. I think her radio syndicator wanted her in San Francisco. And the daughters live in the Bay Area. I still can’t imagine Mike and Sharon as grandparents. But Sharon says she’s just commuting there during the week.” I listened to the wind, stroked her soft hair. “Do you regret we didn’t go to San Francisco?”

She said, “Sometimes.” Before the dot-com bubble blew up, Lindsey had what seemed like a stack of offers from companies in the Bay Area.

“I would have gone with you,” I said.

“Damn right you would have,” she said. “But I wanted to do something that mattered. It’s never been about money. And this is your home, Dave. I know how much that means to you.”

“Sometimes I wish it weren’t,” I said, thinking about the premature hundred-degree day on April first. Suddenly, I lost the high that Lindsey and sex and Bombay Sapphire had conjured in me.

Dan Milton disdained Phoenix as a barbarous place, all subdivisions and automobiles. It was one of the reasons why I disliked him when we first met. I had barely been away from Arizona when I went to the Midwest for my Ph.D. work. A protege of Arthur Link, Milton had been an enfant terrible in the 1960s, engaging in violent intellectual jousts with Arthur Schlesinger Jr., and legendary party binges with Robert Conquest. By the time I came to study with him, he was one of the most distinguished scholars of Woodrow Wilson and the Progressive era, widely published, cherished, and still controversial.

He was hard on his students. To study with Dan Milton was to live in the library-this was before personal computers-learning what he called “real research methods…not the candy-ass lazy shit you learned scamming your master’s degrees at state colleges.” He was a native Texan and reveled in being a profane scholar. He had a weakness for guns and fine Kentucky bourbons. He affected to be uninterested in my youthful detour to become a deputy sheriff. To him, scholarship, done right, meaning Dan Milton’s way, was heroic.

Out in the house, I heard Billy Bragg’s “California Stars” on the stereo. I let the guitars and wanderlust harmonica stoke my melancholy. I was now approaching the age that Milton was when I arrived on his doorstep as a twentysomething Ph.D. candidate. It made me feel strange, caught in time’s riptide and unable to see the shore.

He was hard on his students because the ones who made it were his great legacy. They went on to become noted professors, cutting-edge scholars, influential authors, in-demand advisers to secretaries of state, and national security aides-and me, I came back home to Phoenix and took a job at the sheriff’s office again.

I read to Dan Milton as he lay dying from stomach cancer. He had long ago moved to Portland, a wonderfully civilized city for a man who prized civilization. Writing a pair of bestsellers-one book won the Parkman Prize-had supplemented his family money, so the high cost of living was no object. His condo overlooked downtown and the river, Mount Hood in the far distance. Its rooms were occupied by books, modernist paintings, and a young woman with honey-colored hair named Kathleen. Milton always had a Kathleen or a Heather or a Pamela, intellectual young women who ran through his life, each for a few years, and amused him. He favored Smith graduates. He was as much auteur as scholar.

Finally, a hospital bed was added. And a part-time nurse. He dismissed the entreaties of his grown children to go to a nursing home.