High Country Nocturne

Chapter Thirty-three

Afterwards, I stood on the sidewalk by Thomas Road watching the traffic roll by, counting the number of giant pickup trucks that looked exactly like what Peralta drove.

My mind was fried and then sent back to the kitchen to be scrambled.

Lindsey was only a couple of hundred strides from where I stood, but every time I left the hospital I felt as if I was committing a small act of betrayal. Yes, there was nothing I could do to help her. Yes, I had promised Sharon I would find her husband, promised Ed Cartwright I would find his friend. It still felt lousy.

If Strawberry Death wanted to get me at that moment, all she needed to do was be behind the wheel of one of the trucks or SUVs traveling at fifty on Thomas and conquer the curb on the way to splattering me like a bug on the grille.

Pham would dismiss it as another 962 involving a pedestrian, radio code for accident with injuries. Or 963, accident with fatality. Such tragedies happened daily here, where the civic layout had become wide highways called city streets connecting real-estate enterprises. Nothing to see here. Move along.

I had spent my day at the extremes of the city, the mansion in Arcadia and the shabby former hot-dog place. Sure, it got worse. There were shanties in south Phoenix with dirt floors and homeless camps by the river bottom. There were thirty thousand-square-foot mansions on the sides of mountains. Neither extreme talked to the other.

Walking back into the hospital, I felt the anger in my steps. Why was Pham not buying my theory of the hitwoman? In fact, he had gone to the trouble of having his minions find a parolee that debunked my version. But the woman on the corrections sheet wasn’t Strawberry Death. One only learned her moves thanks to professional training and constant practice, and never being caught. She operated in the shadows.

He also didn’t believe me about Horace Mann. I knew what I heard. I knew Mann was dirty.

Pham’s inattention stank: the hubris of a boss who had his mind made up, a massive amount of FBI ass-covering.

Another possibility chilled me. What if Pham was perfectly acquainted with her because Amy Morris was a government agent? She didn’t even have to be FBI. We had so many agencies guarding the so-called homeland now.

Like Cartwright, Pham had dismissed me but in his case with an odd mix of formality and fake-casual management jargon. “So don’t come back to this location, Doctor Mapstone. Don’t try to contact me. You don’t have the bandwidth to help in this space. So stay away.”

Stay away, my ass.

I retrieved my briefcase from the ICU nurses and went to the waiting room. I should have written up my interview with Diane Whitehouse to add to the murder book. As far as Eric Pham was concerned, I was done.

The phone call back had seemed to go well but the technicians weren’t able to get a fix on the man’s location. We agreed to meet at six tonight by the fountain in Scottsdale Fashion Square. Except I wouldn’t be there. I described one of Pham’s FBI agents as me, as Matt Pennington.

But I wasn’t done.

I thought about the white board at Johnnie’s, the boxes drawn in blue marker and labeled PERALTA, RUSSIANS, SUSPECT AGENT, PENNINGTON, OTHER?

It looked as if it had been drawn up and abandoned like some corporate initiative that went nowhere. And what was “other”?

I pulled out a pad and made some drawings of my own.

One was a starburst with Peralta at the center. I sketched lines out to boxes for me, Ed Cartwright, Eric Pham, Matt Pennington, and the unknown people Peralta had joined in Ash Fork after abandoning his truck at the derelict gas station on Route 66. These represented direct relationships to Mike Peralta.

I added a perpendicular line from the Russians to Cartwright. They had contacted him.

Next I added a box for Strawberry Death with lines to Pennington and me. I made dashes between her and Peralta. I had no physical proof they had made contact or knew each other, but she had told me she had made him a promise.

To be complete, I drew a connection between Horace Mann and me. He had interrogated me on Friday afternoon, summoned me to Ash Fork that night to unlock the gun compartment of the truck, and then didn’t order FBI surveillance of our house. That last had proved very useful to Strawberry Death.

What if she were working with him? If so, why was he so interested in having me dead? It had to be something more than what Kate Vare considered my ability to get in the way.

But the diagram wasn’t quite right.

The only immediate connection to Pennington was Peralta. I pulled out the business card and studied his printing: FIND MATT PENNINGTON.

The dead man wasn’t on the FBI’s radar. But he sure as hell was on somebody’s or Strawberry Death wouldn’t have “suicided” him only a few hours or even minutes before I found him. Who gained from his death? Nobody I could see. But he had information and either gave it up before he died, or…

Or he was that tough and committed. Why not? He was a Naval Academy grad who apparently worked on dangerous assignments.

Or he didn’t know and she killed him anyway.

I looked at the drawing, came up empty, and set it aside.

On the next sheet, I tried different thinking. If the crooks think of themselves as businessmen and some businessmen are crooks, why not look at the supply chain?

This produced boxes along a line. Inside the first was a question mark. After all, Pham wouldn’t tell me where those diamonds in evidence came from. From there, the line went to the FBI evidence control facility to Markovitz in New York to Chandler.

Going only that far raised questions. Why wouldn’t the rogue agent keep the diamonds himself? One obvious answer was to avoid being caught up if a search warrant was served on him. Maybe he didn’t have the contacts and distribution network-I was still thinking supply chain-to turn the rough into cash. That’s where the Russians came in.

And why did I know this much about the journey of these diamonds? One of their advantages was how they could disappear. They were small, easy to conceal, and carry across borders. Were we such great detectives in having this much information? Or was something else going on?

Perhaps I was being paranoid. Being shot at will do that.

After Chandler, I sketched the supply chain diagram in greater detail. Cartwright is shot and Peralta steals the suitcase. He pulls the switch in the parking lot, leaving the suitcase with the tracker in the trunk of Catalina Ramos’ Toyota and taking the hidden rough. He travels the freeway system to Rio Salado College where he goes in the parking garage for more than twenty minutes.

I drew a box for Ash Fork but only added a line of slashes. Too many unknowns.

My hand was about to draw more lines and boxes but it lingered on the Rio Salado box. Twenty minutes. A very long time to change a license plate, especially for a guy as mechanically skilled as Peralta.

I pulled out my iPhone and called Rio Salado College security.