The Night Detectives (David Mapstone Mystery 7)

I clinked my glass against hers. “Gladly.”

Oscar Peterson came on. The Maharajah of the Keyboard, as Duke Ellington called him, sealed the deal.

“You’re crying.” She held my face close and wiped my wet cheeks. “Are they good tears?”

I nodded. But they were, in fact, a mixed bag.

“Happy that you’re back,” I said. “I want to do everything I can to put us back together…”

“Me, too.”

“And I’m sad for all the ones we lost. At least some could have been saved if we’d been faster or smarter. I can’t say we covered ourselves in glory on our first case. Grace, Felix, Tim, Larry Zip, Bob Hunter, his wife, all dead. We might have stopped some of it.”

“Dave, you can’t take all that on yourself.”

“The only one who got away was Addison.”

Lindsey cocked her head.

“Grace’s friend,” I explained. “Aside from Tim’s parent’s, she was the only one Grace and Tim had contact with while they were hiding out in O.B. She left school and went home to Oklahoma they tell me. A good thing. But I can’t forget holding that baby after I changed him. Now he’s in some hole out in the desert. What a shitty thing.”

And I cried.

Lindsey held me close for a long time.

Finally, she said, “Addison is a really bad name.”

“That’s what I think.”

“Mind if I try a hunch?”

39

We drove east from San Diego through Poway and Ramona on the old Julian Road. Suburbia slipped away and the hills and mountains surrounded us. Ahead were the Anza-Borrego Desert and the little town of Borrego Springs. We climbed around Grapevine Mountain, huge rocks leaning in on us, and then the desert valley emptied beneath.

Patty and I had been here many times. We made a ritual of staying one weekend a year at a little inn at Borrego Springs. It was a single-story speck in the desert surrounded by rocky, bare mountains. I remembered that it had a traffic circle. And I remembered a photo that Patty had taken of me on a hot day, surrounded by barrel cactuses in bloom.

But our trip to the badlands today was not for pleasure. The temperature was over one-fifteen and the town was emptied out of all but the hardiest year-round residents. A room would be cheap this time of year.

The traffic circle was still there: Christmas Circle, and a little beyond was a simple little motel with statues of desert bighorn sheep out front. Patty and I had stayed at the tonier Borrego Valley Inn, with its Southwest architecture and private patios. But I had seen this motel many times, never giving it a second look.

“There,” Lindsey said.

She pointed to an older Toyota sedan parked in front of the ranch-style block of rooms. It was the only car in the lot. Peralta parked fifty feet away and we all piled out of the pickup truck.

“Let us go first.” By this, Lindsey meant Sharon and her.

Peralta and I were well-armed, but I didn’t think we would need firepower today. He nodded, and we watched the two women walk to the door directly in front of the Toyota and knock.

They talked to the person who opened it, and after a couple minutes they went inside.

Peralta and I found some shade and waited, saying nothing.

Lindsey had followed her hunch and it pointed true.

Addison Conway’s car was not in Oklahoma. It was sitting a few paces from us under the mid-day California sun. Thanks to Lindsey’s black magic, the Chinese had hacked the phone company again and tracked Addison’s cell phone. Last Friday, it had been in Ocean Beach, at Tim’s apartment, an hour after I had left. Then it had taken the same route we had just driven and stayed here.

Sharon stepped out and smiled at us: come on in.