High Country Nocturne - [27]

I was bargaining with God like a panicky twelve-year-old, staring at nothing, when Phoenix Police Sergeant Kate Vare strode in, wearing a stylish short leather jacket and carrying an expensive leather portfolio.

She sat next to me. The butt of her Glock protruded from the jacket.

How I wished Lindsey had taken her Glock instead of a pack of cigarettes for that walk.

“I’m sorry, Mapstone.”

It was the most human thing she had ever said to me.

Vare and I were once rivals, or at least she saw it that way when I worked for Peralta and she was a cold-case expert for Phoenix P.D. But the new chief had reorganized the department and now she was a night homicide detective. Otherwise, she looked the same: petite, ash-blond hair in a short bob, tightly wound.

Homicide. I pushed that word away. That was only the name of the unit she was assigned to, the kind of detective sent on this type of call, GSW, gunshot wound, victim in critical condition. Assault with a deadly weapon.

GSW to the chest, exit wound, massive blood loss. I knew the score.

My wife was in there dying.

I put my face in my hands but the pain from the scratches and kick roared up like a wildfire. The wound on my wrist where Strawberry Death had bitten me was red and painful but the skin hadn’t been broken. I rose up again.

Vare cleared her throat. “You know we have to do the drill.”

She opened the portfolio and prepared to make notes as I retold my encounter on the lawn with Strawberry Death, disarming her, and chasing her toward Central where Lindsey had the bad luck to turn around and come back our way.

I had already given this information, along with as complete a description of the attacker as I could muster, to a uniformed officer. But this was the drill, as she said.

Then I went through the events of the early morning traffic stop headed into the High Country, the same woman in a DPS uniform drawing down on me and only stopping when the FBI tail vehicle came behind us.

My mind was bouncing in so many directions that for a few seconds I wondered if she really was a DPS officer and a part-time hit woman. Weirder things had happened and Arizona grew weirder by the day. It probably paid well and she had the perfect cover.

“We’ll check to see every DPS patrol officer who was on duty last night and this morning around Camp Verde,” Vare said. “But I don’t think she was a cop.”

“Why?”

“I’ll get to that. Why would this woman be trying to kill you?”

I shook my head. “I have no idea.” I tried to focus. “I’ve never seen her before. Didn’t receive any threatening calls or emails. Nothing I’ve been working on seemed dangerous.”

I added, “She’s done this before.”

Vare cocked an eyebrow.

“She said it would be cleaner if she ‘suicided’ me, as she put it.”

Vare wrote it down.

“We recovered a semi-auto from the shrubs near your house.” She tapped her pen on the legal pad. “It’s a Heckler and Koch Mark 23, chambered for a.45. That’s a Special Forces weapon. It can work with a laser-aiming system and a suppressor. Who the hell did you piss off, Mapstone?”

“Can’t civilians get them?”

“In this state?” She sniffed. “You can get anything. Maybe it can give us some fingerprints. What about Peralta?”

That didn’t take long. I was surprised it hadn’t been her first question.

It was a good question, the question. But I had already decided not to mention that the woman had told me she was there for “her stones,” that she had made Peralta a promise. There were good reasons to be honest, chiefly that it might give me police protection. But the reasons to hedge were more compelling. The first reaction of Vare and the FBI would be that I was involved in the diamond robbery.

I chose Door Number Two.

“I’m more shocked than anybody,” I said. “I also don’t know why the FBI would be working a diamond robbery.”

“And shooting.”

I nodded.

She set down her pen and thought, then started ticking items off on her bony fingers.

“Maybe the robbery was planned in another country? Or it involved a federal agent or a postal worker? The diamonds might have been from another country and they asked the FBI to investigate. Or Chandler P.D. wanted the bureau’s forensic expertise on a major jewel heist. The feds have diamond experts. They have art theft experts.”

“But I didn’t even talk to a Chandler detective when I was called up to Ash Fork this morning.”

“What’s your point, Mapstone?”

I rubbed my hands, feeling the dried blood on them seeming to cake up into little flakes.

“My point is this whole thing stinks.”

God, why didn’t I keep us in the nice hotel downtown with the friendly shower?

I watched the entry to the waiting room, hoping to see a doctor who might tell me something, something good. Every scrub-clad medico walking past drew my eye, but each merely continued going.

Vare stood and pulled out the chair, then placed it directly in front of me and sat again. She pulled closer until our knees almost touched.

“Did it ever occur to you that Peralta might have sent this woman after you?”

You mean the woman who keeps her promises?

I said, “That doesn’t make sense. He’s my friend…”