High Country Nocturne - [28]

She immediately talked over me, like old times. “I thought he was a good cop, too. Obviously we didn’t know him. Maybe he’s tying up loose ends. Maybe he thinks you know something. It’s strange he left a note specifically about you on your business card in his truck.”

Word traveled fast.

She leaned in. “Have you heard from Peralta since the crime?”

I looked at her without blinking, forcing discipline into every cell of my body.

“Kate, my wife is in critical condition and I’ve had my ass kicked by a girl. So anything I do right now might be grief, or because my face hurts like the devil. But you’ll consider it a ‘tell.’ ”

Next I looked down and to the left, blinked rapidly, and cleared my throat. “See what I mean?”

Her cheeks turned red with frustration.

I said, “The answer is no, I haven’t heard from him.”

I was a good little liar, too.

“Do you know something about the diamond robbery, Mapstone?”

I knew the woman wanted the diamonds. Before that, I had found another business card Peralta had left for me across from the Flagstaff train station. “Find Matt Pennington.” Lindsey had been about to tell me about Pennington when I provoked our ruction and she walked out.

I knew Orville Grainer had seen Peralta exit the truck, change the license plate, and get in a sedan. And Peralta, playing lawn boy on what I hoped was a forgotten landline, had told Sharon that I needed to watch my ass. I hadn’t watched it very well.

I said, “No. I want Lindsey protected.”

“It’s already done.”

I let out a long breath.

Vare made me go through it all over again and I did. Lindsey leaving to go for a walk, me following.

“Why did you follow her?”

“At first I didn’t want to go walking, then I changed my mind.”

No way was I going to tell her we had a fight. For any cop that provided a sweet, low-hanging fruit-alleged marriage trouble. Maybe Mapstone was screwing this woman and she got tired of hearing him promise to leave his wife. Or Mapstone actually encouraged or even paid her to kill Lindsey and set it up to look like a random crime.

She let it pass. “You should know we found a burglar bag near where you encountered her. It had lock tools, an alarm bypass, handcuffs. You pissed somebody off.”

This information passed into my nervous system and chilled me.

Five beats. “Any marital troubles, Mapstone?”

“No.”

I didn’t hate her. Faced with the same facts, I would have asked the same question.

Next Vare wanted to know about recent cases I had investigated as a private detective and what Lindsey had been doing. I kept my answers calm, short, and factual. They filled three handwritten pages of notes.

“That’s all for now. There have been a bunch of felony paroles and early releases to save the state money. So we’ll check for bad guys you arrested or testified against who might have gotten out recently.”

“Thanks.”

Four women walked past in purple scrubs. None looked in the waiting room.

Vare closed the portfolio, pushed the chair back into place, said they would send over a sketch artist, and handed me her card.

I didn’t immediately take it.

Chris Melton was on the television across the room. “Live,” the banner said at the bottom on the screen. “Downtown Phoenix Shooting.”

The TV morons didn’t even know it was Midtown, not downtown, if they were talking about what happened to Lindsey.

Melton was standing out in front of the St. Joe’s E.R entrance.

“Turn that up, please. Please!”

The Hispanic woman at the other end of the room complied and I heard him talking.

“The Phoenix Police are the primary department investigating this case. What I can tell you is that the wife of a Maricopa County deputy was shot while she was taking a walk. Obviously I can’t identify her. She’s fighting for her life and I ask everyone to send their prayers.”

My face started throbbing violently. As reporters shouted questions, I could see Vare stiffen.

“No questions,” Melton said. “Here’s what I can say, any attack on a family member of a Maricopa County deputy sheriff is an attack on all of us, on the entire law-enforcement community, on the community as a whole. We will not stop until this animal is run down and brought to justice…”

Maybe there had been another shooting of a deputy’s relative. But no. The shooter was identified as an Anglo woman in her thirties with reddish blond hair, who remained at-large.

“Goddamn him,” I hissed.

Vare stood over me and her sharp features darkened. “Are you with the Sheriff’s Office again, Mapstone?”

“It’s temporary.”

“Fuck you,” she said, then lowered her voice. “Why didn’t you tell me you were working for Meltdown right off?”

I reacted with equal fury, standing, and towering over her. “He swore me in tonight, damn it! I’ve been a little distracted, if you didn’t notice. My wife is in there…” I threw an arm in the direction of the trauma suites and my voice broke.

But I forced some composure, sat, and spoke slowly. Kate Vare could help me or really hurt me. I needed her help. “He wants me to look into an old dead-body case.”

“What case?”

“I haven’t even begun checking out the file. It was a body I found back when I was a patrol officer. I was in my twenties, Kate. In the last century. I don’t remember much about it. Some guy who went hiking in the desert, got lost, got dead. It didn’t seem suspicious. I turned it over to the detectives and thought it was closed.”