High Country Nocturne - [11]
For whatever reason, the media still didn’t know that the diamond thief was former Maricopa County Sheriff Peralta. He was one of the better-known people in the state. Merely walking into a mini-mart to use the restroom would be taking a chance. That this information hadn’t been released made me think he was on assignment.
But one he couldn’t, or wouldn’t, tell me about.
Then there was the empty gun case. That made no sense under either scenario.
Finally, I told her about the woman who had stopped us earlier, what really happened behind the car as her finger was on the trigger of the semiautomatic pistol, and my doubts that she was really a DPS officer.
“Then,” she said, “ don’t you think you should do as Mike wrote on the card, and as he said when he was playing Paco? Let it alone. Let it play out.”
“Aren’t you worried?”
She put her hand on my wrist. “I’ve never been more worried in my life.”
“Me, too. What about his diabetes?”
“All his insulin is gone. So is his blood-sugar meter.”
“So he planned this.” The thought gave me no comfort.
Then I checked the rearview mirror and saw it-a pay telephone across the street.
The mile-long train was still loudly passing through as I whipped the convertible around, turned onto Santa Fe Avenue, made an illegal U-turn, and stopped in front of this artifact of twentieth-century communications technology. I was even old enough to remember phone booths. This was a simple hooded stand that held the phone.
I put on the flashers and stepped out. It had gotten colder. The hard plastic receiver was freezing, battered, would not pass a health-code inspection-but it carried a dial tone. I slipped it back in the cradle and looked around.
The slip of paper was slid into the top of the phone casing, sheltered from the wind by the minimalist stand. It was actually a business card. My business card. They got around. And to think I had wondered if I would even need them when I became Peralta’s partner. I turned it over and read the familiar draftsman printing:
FIND MATT PENNINGTON
I pocketed it and stepped off the curb as a Flagstaff cop cruised slowly past. By the time I slid into the driver’s seat, he had picked up a call and sped off silent code three, emergency lights but no siren.
I showed Sharon the card. “Ever hear him mention this name?”
“No. It doesn’t sound familiar at all.”
My phone vibrated. A message from Lindsey with three numbers.
It was time to get back to Phoenix.
Ninety minutes later and a mile lower, we passed through the enormous freeway interchange on the north end of the metropolitan area. Sharon was asleep. Some civic wrecker had climbed onto an overpass and written in black capital letters: OMENVILLE.
Chapter Six
The Westin was the one of the new swanky hotels in downtown Phoenix, occupying the lower floors of the bland Freeport-McMoRan building. The glass-sheeted box had been finished as the Great Recession blew up.
In the go-go years before the crash, one in three jobs had been connected to real estate. It was the only conversation at my gym in the basement of Central Park Square. Even the woman who cut my hair was flipping houses. For me, it was like Joe Kennedy’s anecdote about shoeshine boys trading stock tips in 1929. Anybody could see it coming if they cared to look.
The result in Phoenix had been a straight-up Depression. Now it had mellowed into a prolonged recession, whatever the boosters said. Phoenix had seen nothing like it since the bad years of the 1890s. The perpetual-motion growth machine had broken down.
Thousands of people were still underwater on their mortgages, owing more than the houses were worth. Thousands more had simply walked away. Entire subdivisions within the “master planned communities” of suburbia had been empty. Then Wall Street had moved in and bought the houses as rentals. Even this didn’t stop the economy’s bleeding and many of the rental houses, already built on the cheap, turned shabby fast. Wall Street flipped the properties to new slumlords. Talented young people and empty-nest baby boomers with means were moving to cities with real downtowns, places like Seattle and Portland. Fewer retirees had the money to move to Phoenix and brag about not having to shovel sunshine.
Phoenix embodied Eric Hoffer’s remark, “Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.”
But the Westin’s lobby looked modishly elegant, if empty, when I walked in at six a.m. The friendly young woman at the registration desk said hello and I responded as if I belonged there and went to the elevators.
When I stepped out on the eighth floor, the hallway was empty. The space was quiet. Not even a sound of a couple making early-morning love. I walked to the room number Lindsey had texted and knocked.
The door opened two inches, the security latch in place.
“House gigolo,” I said.
“Please come in. I called hours ago.”
Then she was in my arms and for that moment the world was right and safe. I felt the contours of her body through the plush white robe she wore.
In this "prequel" to the popular David Mapstone mysteries, author Jon Talton takes us back to 1999, when everything dot-com was making money, the Y2K bug was the greatest danger facing the world, and the good times seemed as if they would never end.It was a time before David and Lindsey were together, before Mike Peralta was sherriff, and before David had rid himself of the sexy and mysterious Gretchen.In Phoenix, it's the sweet season and Christmas and the new millennium are only weeks away. But history professor David Mapstone, just hired by the Sheriff's Office, still finds trouble, chasing a robber into an abandoned warehouse and discovering a gruesome crime from six decades ago.Mapstone begins an investigation into a Depression-era kidnapping that transfixed Arizona and the nation: the disappearance of a cattle baron's grandsons, their bodies never found.
The private-detective business starts out badly for former Phoenix Deputy David Mapstone, who has teamed up with his old friend and boss, Sheriff Mike Peralta. Their first client is gunned down just after hiring them. The case: A suspicious death investigation involving a young Arizona woman who fell from a condo tower in San Diego. The police call Grace Hunter's death a suicide, but the client doesn't buy it. He's her brother. Or is he? After his murder, police find multiple driver's licenses and his real identity is a mystery.
Cheryl Beth Wilson is an elite nurse at Cincinnati Memorial Hospital who finds a doctor brutally murdered in a secluded office. Wilson had been having an affair with the doctoras husband, a surgeon, and this makes her a aperson of interesta to the police, if not at outright suspect. But someone other than the cops is watching Cheryl Beth.The killing comes as former homicide detective Will Borders is just hours out of surgery. But as his stretcher is wheeled past the crime scene, he knows this is no random act of violence.
A handsome young New York professor comes to Phoenix to research his new book. But when he's brutally murdered, police connect him to one of the world's most deadly drug cartels. This shouldn't be a case for historian-turned-deputy David Mapstone – except the victim has been dating David's sister-in-law Robin and now she's a target, too. David's wife Lindsey is in Washington with an elite anti-cyber terror unit and she makes one demand of him: protect Robin.This won't be an easy job with the city police suspicious of Robin and trying to pressure her.
Cincinnati homicide Detective Will Borders now walks with a cane and lives alone with constant discomfort. He's lucky to be alive. He's lucky to have a job, as public information officer for the department. But when a star cop is brutally murdered, he's assigned to find her killer. The crime bears a chilling similarity to killings on the peaceful college campus nearby, where his friend Cheryl Beth Wilson is teaching nursing. The two young victims were her students. Most homicides are routine, the suspects readily apparent.
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Без аннотации Вашему вниманию предлагается сборник зарубежных детективов.
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