High Country Nocturne (David Mapstone Mystery 8)

The number went to Silent Witness, which was less likely to have advanced tracing equipment than calling 911 directly. His time on the phone would be short, but long enough to say that he had spotted the woman who shot the deputy’s wife Saturday night, the one on television, and she’s at this address right now.

He read the note, moving his lips. “Seriously?”

I ran my fingers over the twenties. “Easy money. Then you get lost and forget you ever saw me.”

He reached for the bills but I pulled them away. “After you make the call.”

The boy pulled out a cell phone and started to dial.

Chapter Twenty-eight

I returned to the hospital and settled into an empty ICU waiting room, dozing intermittently. Lindsey’s doctors woke me a little before seven to say that the fever had broken.

My face felt strange. I was smiling.

After being allowed ten minutes beside my sleeping beauty, I found Sharon waiting outside and told her the news. She gave me a hug and sent me home for rest. That was one thing I was not allowed at the moment.

Outside, clouds had come in and it smelled like rain. People were smiling. Rain had that effect in Phoenix.

Home. The first thing I did was to make sure any evidence from early this morning was gone. I picked up Strawberry Death’s shell casings. They went with a .32 caliber pistol. The neighbor’s shrubbery appeared in decent shape.

Inside, I scanned the Arizona Republic. It had a story about how the Sheriff’s Office was missing a number of weapons issued by the federal government through a surplus military gear program. As a result, the feds were cutting off MSCO from future deliveries. There was also a follow-up story on a federal probe of the Sheriff’s Office for racial profiling. My new boss.

By now, a Phoenix Police SWAT team would be interrupting the morning walks of the people along Biltmore Estates Drive. Maybe they would already have the woman in custody or dead. I showered and waited for a call from Vare.

In another suit, starched white shirt, and Salvatore Ferragamo tie from Lindsey, I returned to the Prelude and drove to the address Melton had given me. Exhaustion weighed on my limbs but I couldn’t stop.

It was deep in Arcadia, a district in Phoenix that ran against Scottsdale and contained some of the most beautiful properties in the city. It still benefited from the flood irrigation that remained after the groves were bulldozed. The older houses were long rambling ranches surrounded by mature trees. Camelback Mountain presided over the oasis of orange, lemon, and grapefruit trees, cottonwoods, willows, and sycamores, towering oleander hedges.

You can still drive north on Arcadia Drive at night, turn onto Valle Vista Road clinging to the edge of the mountain and see the vast carpet of city lights below you. Lindsey and I would go up there and make out like high-school kids. Not far away is the Camelback Falls mansion, where I once worked a case after Peralta had been shot and was in a coma.

But Arcadia was changing. New owners were tearing down the older houses and putting up tall McMansions, tearing out trees and foliage that had thrived for decades and throwing down haphazard desert landscaping and concrete for more cars. It added to the heat island. It wasn’t authentic. If you asked me, it was a crappy investment of water to throw down gravel here so developers could add artificial lakes and golf courses out on the fringes. But nobody asked me. Why was everything lovely and historic in my city at risk, all the time?

The only comfort from this vandalism was that the ongoing real-estate bust was keeping the destruction at a slow-mo pace.

I turned north, with the head of Camelback directly before me. It was formed a few million years before the rest of the mountain but wasn’t showing its age. Another turn put me on a street with a long row of ficus trees, two stories tall and meticulously trimmed to make a privacy hedge. Amid them was a gate. I pressed the button on the call box, gave my name, and watched it slowly swing open. The car passed through the copse of trees and oleanders before opening up on a three-story French chalet surrounded by at least two acres of grounds. From the street, you would never know it was here. Which was, of course, the idea.

The house was white—of course, it would be white—with gabled windows on the top floor and three tall chimneys. It was built to look old. A turret completed the facade on one end. With the overcast, I could see lights on in every room, warm, welcoming, giving money to Arizona Public Service.

It was sprinkling when I walked up three low steps to a double front door. I would have preferred to remain outside and feel the rain, smell it, and smell the reaction of the land. But I pressed the doorbell. A Latina housekeeper led me inside and said she would fetch “Miss Diane.”

The foyer was overpoweringly white—walls, tile floor with black diamonds embedded, baby grand piano, marble table topped by a vase of white lilies, multiple arched entrances and a staircase circling overhead. Color was added by tasteful antique chairs, a dark cabinet, black wrought-iron candelabra, oxidizing copper sculpture, and a light-brown fireplace with a mirror on the mantle.

It was a long way from Cypress Street. But the room felt both overcrowded and sterile.

I heard footsteps on the grand staircase, caught a flash of legs, and forced myself not to look up.

Soon a young woman appeared. She was twenty or so, athletically put together. The first thing you noticed was the long tawny hair, then the long tanned legs set off in a casual short dress. Her eyes were a rich brown. She came close enough that I could study her long lashes.

“Well, well.” Her smile was powerful enough to light the house, her teeth the color of polished porcelain. “Aren’t you dressed up? You don’t look familiar. Diane’s had so many lawyers through here since Daddy died that I know them all.”

“I’m not a lawyer.”

“I didn’t think so. You don’t have that transactional look. You’re very tall.”

She placed her hands on my shoulders. “You’re a little old to be Diane’s new distraction but I suppose you’ll do. Yes, you will do. She usually likes them young, after she snagged Daddy, of course. Maybe she’s turning over a new leaf. I find young men boring.”

She was inside my comfort zone. I took a step back and she stepped with me, as if we were dancing. Later, I thought how she was close enough to try to disarm me or run a blade into my stomach, but I put down my defenses because she was pretty and the surroundings moneyed.