High Country Nocturne - [9]
“When the car pulled up, did anybody get out? Did it seem like he was being forced inside?”
“No, sir,” he said. “The man got right on in and they was gone.”
“What did the FBI tell you?”
He shook his head, the wind stirring the tendrils of his beard. “Not a damned thing. The Yavapai deputies think I’m a pest, calling about the burglaries, the crime around here. They have a trailer shack down the street here, but you hardly ever see a deputy. Budget cuts and all. I come to think, screw ’em. I can handle things if I need to.”
He opened a button on the coat and patted the butt of a pistol.
Of course.
I handed him my card and asked him to give me a call if anything else came to him, or if he saw that four-door car again.
He mumbled something unintelligible about private eyes, shook my hand, and limped back into his forlorn village.
Mapstone had nothing to do with this. Tell him not to try to find me.
Whatever Peralta really intended by the message, whether he meant it or somebody was leaning on him, he had worked with me long enough to know that sometimes I didn’t follow orders. Even his orders.
Chapter Five
Back in the car, I slid on my holster. Sharon had brushed out her hair and, with the visor mirror down, was nervously freshening her lipstick. She had been agitated on the entire drive up. Who could blame her?
I asked her about Ash Fork and why Mike might have come up here.
She shook her head. “I have no idea.”
“You still have the cabin in Heber?”
“Yes. The FBI was very interested in that. They’re probably at the place now, hoping he’ll show up. They spent hours at our house today-well, yesterday, now-with a search warrant.”
I drove west on the one-way street, turned a block, then came back on the eastbound one-way that returned us to the Interstate. Grainer was gone and it was difficult to imagine the thriving town he had described.
“Did you expect to find him dead here?” I asked Sharon.
“No.”
My body tensed even before she spoke the next sentence.
“He called me tonight.”
Two obscenities came out of my mouth before I stopped myself.
“I’m sorry, David.”
I asked her what time he called. Around eight-thirty.
“When were you going to tell me?”
She flipped up the mirror and the light went off. Her large brown eyes watched me.
“He said not to tell you anything.”
“Sharon…” I stared at the highway, a stream of semis passing us as I stuck to the speed limit. “I can’t believe it. You know the FBI has your phones tapped. You’ll be implicated in this.”
“They don’t even know about this phone. Years ago, the county installed a second landline at the house as a backup in case of an emergency. Then they forgot about it. After he left the sheriff’s office, I called twice to have them take it out. They never did.”
“What did he say?”
She laughed, a surprising sound in this cockpit of tension.
“When I first met him, before I even knew you, I was this girl from the barrio. A nobody. He was a deputy sheriff, the son of a judge. He had grown up in a fancy house in Arcadia. My family had a four-room, tarpaper shack in Golden Gate, before they bulldozed it for the airport. He’d been to Harvard, for God’s sake, and I barely got out of high school. But I was very vain. I knew men liked me. And he liked me. I didn’t always look like an old lady.”
“You’re very attractive, Sharon. And you’re the most accomplished person I know.”
She waved it away. “I wasn’t digging for a compliment, David. There is a point to the story.”
I shut up and ten miles later she continued.
“He liked me, and we started dating. He was only one generation out of the barrio, but he would tease me. He enjoyed making me mad. One of his things was to impersonate a guy named Paco Sanchez. He made up this character that was a gardener who spoke terrible English but was going to take me away from that cop Peralta I was dating. It made me angry, that he was making fun of me. And it made me laugh.”
“That’s a playfulness I never saw in him.”
“Well, you weren’t a sweet young thing he wanted to get in the sack.”
“Thank God for that. I’m still worried about the FBI listening in on your call tonight.”
“All they would have heard is a call from my old beau Paco.”
“What?”
She laughed again. “He used the same voice as back then. ‘Hey, pretty one. You still with that cop?’”
Her voice switched into a high-pitched, heavily accented Spanglish.
“Don’t think I wasn’t worried about a tap, even though this phone number is lost somewhere in the Maricopa County bureaucracy. So I played along. I asked him how he was. He says, ‘So-so, pretty one. I run with a bad crowd. You know that. Things are kind of siniestro. You be okay?’”
“Scary.”
“Right. I told him I was home and safe and he’d better not let my husband catch him calling me. It was the same game we used to play back in the day when he was being Paco. He told me I might not hear from him for a while but it was going to be okay. In between, he did the old flirting in Spanglish.”
“Smart man,” I said. “But he didn’t give you details?”
“None. I was afraid to be too specific in what I asked.”
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.
Писательница Агата Кристи принимает предложение Секретной разведывательной службы и отправляется на остров Тенерифе, чтобы расследовать обстоятельства гибели специального агента, – есть основания полагать, что он стал жертвой магического ритуала. Во время морского путешествия происходит до странности театральное самоубийство одной из пассажирок, а вскоре после прибытия на остров убивают другого попутчика писательницы, причем оставляют улику, бьющую на эффект. Саму же Агату Кристи арестовывают по ложному обвинению.
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