Camelback Falls (David Mapstone Mystery 2)

“Beth,” I said. “You’d just been through a shootout. You were afraid for your life. Are you sure you remember that correctly?”

“That’s when your senses are at their peak,” she said. “Look”-she sighed-“the big cop took it, he and his partner, a tall Anglo. A younger guy. He was the son-of-a-bitch who threw me down in the dirt and handcuffed me.”

I just stared into the golden liquid, wondering what her game was. She said, “Don’t you see why this could get me killed? And Leo? That deputy was named Peralta. I saw his photo in the newspaper after I was arrested, and I never forgot that name. And I know he’s your sheriff now. So how the hell are you going to protect me, professor?”

Lindsey glanced at me, but I had no grand plan to telegraph back. I said, “Will you testify about this?”

“Are you nuts?” She laughed. “When those two gorillas showed up tonight, it was just like that detective had told me twenty years ago. If I talked, they’d find me and kill me.”

“What about the FBI, the U.S. Attorney?” I said. “Nobody can touch you there.”

“I’ll think about it,” she said.

The phone rang. I reached over and picked it up, but it was just empty air. I set it back into the cradle. A flash of alarm registered in Lindsey’s dark blue eyes. I tried not to feel paranoid.

The phone rang again, an efficient electronic trill. I watched it for a moment, let it ring three times and picked up.

“Mapstone,” an unfamiliar voice said. A male voice. Wait, had I heard that voice last week on the phone in Peralta’s office? The voice said, “You’re all dead.”

“We’ve got to go,” I said, dropping the receiver, tossing aside the ice pack and standing. Lindsey had read the situation and was already moving.

“What?” Beth shouted. “What?”

“There?

?s no time,” I said. “We’re in danger. We’re going to the Denver police.”

“No!” she shouted, her voice jagged. “I have a business here. I can’t have this. Jesus, I have tried to get away from all this for twenty years!”

Her face worked in agony. Her jaw tensed and eased, tensed and eased. She jumped up. “OK, I’ll go back to Phoenix. I’ll talk to your U.S. Attorney. Just talk.”

There was no time. The phone’s insistent trill still seemed embedded in the walls. We grabbed coats, guns, and bags, checked the hallway, then carefully went down the fire stairs and out into the cold.

Chapter Twenty-eight

We held a quick strategy session out in the car, as I drove around the snow-shiny streets south of downtown to ensure we were not being followed. Lindsey was sure the bad guys had tracked us down through our county credit card transaction. “It’s easy to hack into. Anybody can do it,” she said to a man who gets tangled up in a web browser. If they were that savvy, they’d know our return flight and be waiting. Even if we changed the flight, all they had to do was stake out Denver flights arriving at Sky Harbor. I didn’t want a dead witness, even if I didn’t like what she was saying.

So we decided to drive back. It wasn’t that simple. I didn’t trust our mid-sized Chevy over the mountains, so we went back to the airport to rent a four-wheel-drive. I used my American Express, which Lindsey predicted might slow the bad guys down for a few hours. I had a hard time believing the same gang that had sent the pro-wrestling dropouts to Beth’s gallery was capable of hacking the financial services network, but I also didn’t have a good explanation for how they found our hotel room.

By 8 P.M., we were aboard one of those huge Chevy Suburbans I had vowed never to drive. But its size and above-the-traffic view were reassuring. If we had to do battle, we were now in a battleship. We came back through Denver and stopped at a mall to buy Beth a coat and some essentials. I vetoed going back to her house, for safety’s sake. Her daughter, Paige, had gone off Sunday to stay at Beth’s sister’s house in Estes Park, so there was nobody else to rescue.

While Lindsey and Beth shopped, I stood at a pay phone by the mall entrance and called Kimbrough. It was a short conversation: I told him I was coming back to the Valley with a material witness, who would only agree to talk under the protection of the feds, and I told him about the encounter at the gallery where the tough guy had identified himself as a bounty hunter.

“That makes sense,” Kimbrough said. “We found a report of a guy who came into St. Joseph’s ER on Saturday night with a gunshot. He said it was self-inflicted. But they called Phoenix PD, and they arrested the guy. Name of Jim Caldwell, and he’s a licensed bounty hunter. Get this, he worked with Dean Nixon, running down bail jumpers. They had a long record of violent situations.”

“So where is he?”

“The lockup at County Hospital,” Kimbrough said proudly. “He’s not talking, but he will. His left ankle was shattered by a.357 round, and his foot was nearly blown off.”

“That’s nothing compared to what he would have done to us,” I said. “So tell me this guy was never a deputy sheriff.”

“I can do that,” Kimbrough said. “This guy’s just some loser. But you need to know, I talked to Internal Affairs today.”

“OK.” A laughing flock of teenage girls flew by, giggling and talking. I switched the receiver to the other ear, sending my left shoulder into a spasm of agony.

Kimbrough said, “They interviewed a retired deputy named Collins, lives out in Sun City. He’s scared he’s going to lose his pension if he doesn’t cooperate. So he starts telling this story of how twenty pounds of cocaine disappeared from the evidence room the week before the shootout in Guadalupe. He says it was checked out for a court appearance by Deputy Virgil Bullock, and never returned.”

“We need to revisit the records of Bullock and Matson,” I said. “Maybe they weren’t the heroes everybody thought.”