Camelback Falls

Chapter Twenty-seven

Beth didn’t want to call the Denver cops. So we ended up back in the hotel room, where Lindsey procured ice. The right side of my face was swollen and felt like an overused pin cushion. My left hand had a nasty cut from some point in the fight. My left shoulder hurt like hell unless I kept it raised as if I were in a perpetual half-shrug. But I felt like I got off easy.

Beth sat in a green upholstered chair, holding an ice pack to her eye. Her shirt had been ripped, and she had a small, deep strawberry-colored cut on one cheek. A crescent bruise was working its way down her perfect jawline. She was wearing black leather pants, and sat with her legs drawn up to her chest. She sobbed quietly.

“We’ve got to talk, Beth,” I coaxed.

“They showed me badges, just like you guys,” she whispered. “They said they were going to kill me.”

“Did they say why?”

She shook her head and hunkered deeper in the chair. Speaking slowly, she told us how the two men had come in a half hour before I arrived, then waited for her last patrons to leave. When they were alone, the big one shoved her into the back room and started slapping her.

“What did they say they wanted?”

“I don’t want to talk now,” she said. “I want to go home.”

“OK,” I said, nursing my own pain. “They may be waiting for you at home.”

She looked at me as if I had slapped her. I suggested, “It’s time to call the police.”

“No,” she said, too loud. Lindsey glanced at me. Beth stared at the floor and said, “They wanted Leo. They wanted me to tell them where he was.”

“I thought you hadn’t talked to Leo,” I said.

“You know I did.” She smiled unhappily. “We corresponded by e-mail. It was censored by the prison, of course. He was coming up for parole, finally. He was actually hopeful that this time he might make it.”

“When did you last hear from him?” I asked.

There was a commotion in the hall and my stomach knotted up, sending a sharp pain into my ribs. Lindsey sprang up, drew her Glock, and moved lightly to the door, which was already bolted. She just shook her head. The noise died down. I asked Beth the question again.

“I got the last message from him just before Christmas.”

“Did you have any sense he was planning an escape?”

“No.” She shook her head vehemently, tossing her fair hair, pushing it back with an agitated hand.

“Why would he escape if he thought he might get parole?” Lindsey asked, returning to sit on the bed.

“I don’t know,” Beth said.

“Really?” Lindsey asked.

“Yes, really.” Beth stared daggers at Lindsey.

“So what did you tell these tough guys when they wanted to know where Leo was?” I asked.

“I told them I didn’t know,” she said, lightly touching a finger to the cut on her cheek. The motion made my face throb.

“So Leo hasn’t contacted you since he escaped?”

“No, damn it. He hasn’t. Why would he come to Denver if he was in Phoenix last week?”

Lindsey and I kept poker faces. But Beth was quick, if dulled a bit by being beaten up. She realized instantly we hadn’t told her that Leo was seen in Phoenix. She muttered an obscenity and stared into her lap.

“What do you want from me?” she demanded in a raw voice.

“The truth would be a good starting point,” I said.

She stared out into the room for a long time. Then, quietly, she said, “Tell me about you guys. I’m usually very intuitive about people, and you two definitely don’t look like cops.”

I’d seen Peralta break down hard guys in the interrogation room. He could browbeat, threaten, manipulate, and sometimes be the most compassionate man in the city. But his interview skills always had a beginning, a middle, and an end designed to wear down the suspect. He never let the suspect take control, as Beth had just done. But I went along with it.

“Lindsey works with computers.” I said. “I’m the acting sheriff.”

“You’re the sheriff?” she asked, with enough incredulity to sting my ego. “How did that happen?”

“I’ve been asking myself the same question,” I said quietly. “The real sheriff is badly wounded. I told you that yesterday. I guess the county brass figured I’d be the safest choice to fill in for a few days.”

“You’re a cop?” she demanded.

“Not really. I work on old cases. I’m a historian by training, and I used to teach. I kind of landed in this job three years ago.”

“Unbelievable,” she said, but seemed pleased with this information.

“So tell us what really happened,” I prodded.

“They told me they’d kill me if I said a word!” She looked at me straight on, fear in her eyes.

“Tonight?”

“No.” She shook her head vehemently. “No, damn it. Twenty years ago…” She tried to slow her breathing. “You don’t know anything, do you?”

We just sat and watched her. The room smelled of winter heat. Beth wrapped her arms around her legs and talked in a slow voice. “That night in 1979, when the shooting happened. It wasn’t what you think. Billy and Troyce had a deal with those old cops. They stole twenty pounds of cocaine from the evidence room, and Billy and Troyce were going to break it down and sell it. They were going to split the profits.”

My head felt heavy from the swelling around my eye, and from Beth’s words. I said, “Beth, these were decorated deputies, killed in the line of duty on a traffic stop.”

“Yeah, right.” She laughed. “I was there, OK? I saw what happened.”

Lindsey asked, “How did all this come about? How did Billy and Troyce know the deputies?”

“I don’t know,” she said, too quickly. “They knew a lot of bad people.”

“How did you get there?” Lindsey wanted to know.

“They picked up Leo and me, to go riding,” she said. “We didn’t know what the hell was going on. And once we realized, it was too late to bail out. So we were just supposed to meet these cops in Guadalupe, take the stuff and go. That was it.”

I said into the pause, “What went wrong?”

She shook her head. “I don’t know for certain. We stayed in the car. But I could see Billy and Troyce start shouting. It got really heavy. Then Billy ran back and got this rifle, and started shooting. We ducked down in the back seat. I just knew we were dead.”

She readjusted the ice on her jaw and went on. “Don’t you get it? The cops were dealing drugs. There was twenty pounds of cocaine in that cop’s car that night.”

“But you said you were threatened about talking,” I said. “Who threatened you?”

“After we were put in jail, this detective talked to me. He said if I ever talked about what I’d seen that night, they’d find me and kill me. He told me what I was supposed to say, and gave me a statement to sign. The statement said we’d been stopped for speeding, and Billy and Troyce opened fire on the cops for no reason. That’s not at all what happened.”

“Did you tell your lawyers any of this?” Lindsey asked.

“Are you nuts?” Beth said. “This guy said they’d kill me, and I believed him. I always hated having a rich father, but that time I let him rescue me, and I never talked about what happened.”

I asked, “What did this detective look like?”

“I don’t know,” she said, flustered. “A white guy. Average. Dark hair.”

“What happened to the cocaine that night?”

She sighed and stretched out her legs. “You got anything to drink?”

There was a bottle of Glenlivet on the dresser. I rounded up three glasses and poured everybody two fingers. Beth bolted down the scotch in one slug. Then we sat in silence, listening for God knows what coming down the hallway. A soft murmur of downtown traffic penetrated the window.

Finally, Beth said, “Another cop took the coke.”

We didn’t say a word, so she went on. “He was big. Hispanic.”

Every one of my aches throbbed deeper, but I just sat there and nursed the Glenlivet. I wished for the more expensive scotch I had enjoyed earlier in the evening, when my overly complicated life was a little less complicated than it had since become.

“Why don’t you walk us through what you remember,” Lindsey suggested.

“I was in the back of a squad car, handcuffed,” Beth said. “But I had a good view. This Hispanic cop walked to the trunk of the first cop car. The trunk was already open. And he took out the coke, and put it in his car.”

“How do you know it was the cocaine?” Lindsey asked.

“I saw it,” Beth said. “The old cops had pulled it out and showed it to Billy and Troyce before things turned bad. It was in this grocery bag. And after…well, this big Hispanic cop took it.”

“Beth,” I said. “You’d just been through a shootout. You were afraid for your life. Are you sure you remember that correctly?”

“That’s when your senses are at their peak,” she said. “Look”-she sighed-“the big cop took it, he and his partner, a tall Anglo. A younger guy. He was the son-of-a-bitch who threw me down in the dirt and handcuffed me.”

I just stared into the golden liquid, wondering what her game was. She said, “Don’t you see why this could get me killed? And Leo? That deputy was named Peralta. I saw his photo in the newspaper after I was arrested, and I never forgot that name. And I know he’s your sheriff now. So how the hell are you going to protect me, professor?”

Lindsey glanced at me, but I had no grand plan to telegraph back. I said, “Will you testify about this?”

“Are you nuts?” She laughed. “When those two gorillas showed up tonight, it was just like that detective had told me twenty years ago. If I talked, they’d find me and kill me.”

“What about the FBI, the U.S. Attorney?” I said. “Nobody can touch you there.”

“I’ll think about it,” she said.

The phone rang. I reached over and picked it up, but it was just empty air. I set it back into the cradle. A flash of alarm registered in Lindsey’s dark blue eyes. I tried not to feel paranoid.

The phone rang again, an efficient electronic trill. I watched it for a moment, let it ring three times and picked up.

“Mapstone,” an unfamiliar voice said. A male voice. Wait, had I heard that voice last week on the phone in Peralta’s office? The voice said, “You’re all dead.”

“We’ve got to go,” I said, dropping the receiver, tossing aside the ice pack and standing. Lindsey had read the situation and was already moving.

“What?” Beth shouted. “What?”

“There’s no time,” I said. “We’re in danger. We’re going to the Denver police.”

“No!” she shouted, her voice jagged. “I have a business here. I can’t have this. Jesus, I have tried to get away from all this for twenty years!”

Her face worked in agony. Her jaw tensed and eased, tensed and eased. She jumped up. “OK, I’ll go back to Phoenix. I’ll talk to your U.S. Attorney. Just talk.”

There was no time. The phone’s insistent trill still seemed embedded in the walls. We grabbed coats, guns, and bags, checked the hallway, then carefully went down the fire stairs and out into the cold.