High Country Nocturne - [6]
I nodded.
“How do I know you didn’t drive the truck up here yourself and then slip back to Phoenix.”
“I was at home all night.”
“With your wife, Lindsey?”
I didn’t like him bringing her name into the conversation. I nodded.
“Let’s say you’re telling the truth. Why would Peralta abandon his truck up here? What does he have going here?”
Nothing, as far as I knew. We had never worked a case in or near Ash Fork. I told Mann that.
“Dave, you know Mike Peralta better than anyone.”
“That’s why I know that he’s innocent. He’s the most by-the-book cop I ever knew. He may be under duress. Or he’s working a case that is above your pay grade and your bosses haven’t clued you in.”
“Dave…” he started again.
“David.”
“Dave, we have witnesses and video footage showing Mike Peralta shoot a guard at Chandler Fashion Center, then carry away a million dollars in diamonds.”
I shrugged.
“He was on duty, Horace. He was one of the two guards protecting the diamond shipment.”
“He told you he was going to do this?” Ask the same question, again and again, try to find an inconsistency in the answer.
“Guard the shipment, yes. It was routine.”
“The diamonds are gone,” Mann said. “Peralta took them.”
“Your people keep telling me that.”
“It’s all on the video. You’ve seen it.”
I shrugged.
He looked over at the Lexus convertible. “Who’s that with you?”
“My girlfriend.” The last thing Sharon needed was more harassment from the FBI.
He snorted. “Does Lindsey know about that?”
“She’s open-minded.”
“Considering that vehicle is registered to Sharon Peralta, I’d guess that’s who is in the car. Is she your girlfriend?”
“Why don’t you give her a break? She was interrogated for hours. She doesn’t know anything.”
“But she came up here with you.”
“That’s because she was afraid her husband was dead in that truck.”
He slipped a hand into his suit jacket and held out an evidence envelope. It contained a small rectangular piece of paper.
“Recognize this?”
He flipped on the dome light. Inside the plastic wrapper was my business card:
Peralta & Mapstone P.C.
David Mapstone
Private Investigator
I asked him where he got it.
“That was sitting on the dashboard of the truck, Dave, right in front of the steering wheel.”
I reached for the bag and he pulled it back. Let’s play keepaway. I didn’t want to play.
“Why would that card be in the truck?”
“Why would I know that, Horace?”
His mouth tightened. He didn’t like the familiarity, either.
“What about this?” He turned the bag so I could read handwriting on the back of the card.
MAPSTONE HAD NOTHING TO DO WITH THIS.
TELL HIM NOT TO TRY TO FIND ME.
“Is that your buddy’s handwriting?”
It was. Peralta wrote in an old-school draftsman’s capital letters. I had received countless notes and memos in that same script, when he was Maricopa County Sheriff and later, when he lost the election and we set up our private detective business.
Mann folded the evidence envelope, slipped it back in his coat, and breathed out a sigh. “We are going to find him. He’s only been on the run for less than twenty-four hours. And sooner than you think, you are going to be charged as an accessory. Don’t think that writing on the card lets you off. If I were you, I’d get a lawyer.”
Peralta’s pickup left the lot hooked to the tow truck, headed back to the Interstate. A deputy took down the yellow tape.
I faced Mann.
“Did you have somebody follow me up here?”
He looked through me. Classic fed move. “You should consider yourself under surveillance. I won’t say more.”
“What about a blond woman in a DPS uniform? Was that part of your game, Horace?”
He stabbed a finger into my chest. “Don’t push me. I don’t know anything about blondes, Dave. You’re going to be lucky if you don’t leave here in handcuffs.”
I tamped down my anger. He could probably rendition my ass to Saudi Arabia for “enhanced interrogation,” if I wasn’t careful.
“Look, I’m as shocked as anybody about what happened. You know everything I do. Probably more. Am I free to go?”
He stared hard at me, that stone face trying to turn me into a pillar of salt. It wasn’t working.
He snapped off the dome light.
“For now.”
I opened the door, stepped out, and turned back to face him.
“Peralta didn’t do this.”
He raised his voice against the wind. “He shot a man.”
“How’s he doing?”
Mann looked surprised by the question. “The hospital sent him home. It was a flesh wound.”
I said, “That proves my point.”
“What point?”
“If Mike Peralta had really intended to do damage, that man would be dead.”
Chapter Four
Horace Mann let me go and the last cruisers and black FBI Suburbans left. Soon, the lot was empty, the old gas station stood yellow and forlorn under the cone of the single streetlight. It had been stripped of everything from its signs to the gas pumps. Plywood covered the windows and doors.
I took a moment to imagine the station in its glory along Route 66 in the fifties. Uniformed attendants, cars with fins, signs advertising clean restrooms and Ethyl gas, the bell-ding of the comings and goings. Now it was a dead zone presided over by the whoosh of passing trucks and cars on Interstate 40 that looped south around the village.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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