The Night Detectives

23

Lindsey dropped me at the office the next morning. Even though it was ten, I had beaten Peralta there again. I was so sore from the various explosions in my life that my first few steps were like an old man’s. I wasn’t complaining about the ones that involved Lindsey but I was out of practice. The night before, I went to bed while Lindsey worked on her new computer. She had claimed a space on the landing above the living room and sat cross-legged with her back against the wall. When I was a child, the stairs and landing had seemed exceptionally high. Now, having grown to six-feet-two, I could touch the landing with my hand. Such was perspective and context.

Sleep hadn’t come easily, so I was still awake when Lindsey had slipped in bed and curled up against me. It was so much like what Robin had done that first night that it kept me awake even longer. At first I thought my dreams had turned into a hallucination. But, no, it was Lindsey. Robin was taller and bustier. We fit together beautifully. Robin was dead.

Lindsey woke me from two nightmares, but when she wanted to know what I was dreaming, I said I couldn’t remember. Hearing about other people’s dreams was as tedious as watching their vacation videos and Lindsey sure didn’t want to know about my dreams lately.

Around five, we had sex again, this time without the anger, but she was as loud as her half-sister, something new about my wife.

We used to play a game over cocktails. Lindsey had been endlessly entertained about my adventures before we got together, but she had drawn the line at knowing about my former girlfriends. It was better for her mental health not to know, or so she had said. As we had enjoyed martinis, I would tease her: “I’ll tell you anything, all you have to do is ask.”

“No thanks,” she would say.

When I had asked about her life, she would say, “I lived a boring life before you, Dave. There’s nothing to tell.” I had never believed that, even though I was older than she and had lived perhaps more adventures, but she didn’t talk easily about herself. I knew she had grown up in chaos, run away to join the Air Force where she had learned computers, and had claimed one boyfriend before me. Perhaps this was even the truth.

Now I wondered how much I wanted to know about the past months of her life. I imagined her boyfriend in D.C. as wealthy, handsome, and definitely better endowed than me. Maybe he was a black guy. Maybe her lover was a woman. And now I knew this person had mined a deeper lode of sexual passion from her than I had ever been able to reach. For that to happen, a woman had to be willing to really let her lover in, really open herself. She had not done that for me. I didn’t realize it at the time, but the past twenty-four hours had shown me different. Did I really want to know about those past months?

After we lost the baby, Lindsey could barely endure being touched. That changed yesterday as we bounced the historic floorboards in the garage apartment. My wife, who had never even used the word “ass” before, was now talking dirty during sex.

I supposed I should thank the son of a bitch.

Now I was slipping my report on Grace Hunter into a file folder when the office phone rang and the readout was a San Diego area code.

“This is Detective Sanchez with the San Diego Police,” came a pleasant voice on the other end. So Isabel Sanchez was going to talk to me after all.

“How may I help you?”

“How about opening your gate so I can come in.”

This was not good. I wished Peralta were here but pressed the button to open the gate.

The night detective was about five-four with a size two figure, dark eyes with long lashes, and long, black hair that looked as if it had caught a gust off the Pacific at that exact second. Her pregnancy was also beginning to show. The man with her was a few inches shorter than me but very buff with yellow surfer-boy hair. San Diego had the best-looking cops in the country.

“This is my partner, Detective Jones,” she said. I invited them to sit down, thinking: sure, Jones-he probably had multiple IDs and aliases, too.

“Deputy Chief Kimbrough speaks highly of you,” she said.

“That’s nice. He’s a great cop.”

“That’s why we’re not filing a charge to ask our friends in Phoenix to arrest you on,” said the pleasant voice.

So it was going to be like this.

Several charges came to mind, but she wouldn’t know about those.

I said quietly, “I was a victim of a crime in your city.”

“I can understand how you might still feel badge-heavy, Mapstone,” said Jones, who, with his mean little eyes, looked exactly like a badge-heavy cop. “But you’re not a deputy sheriff anymore.”

We went through this small talk, all designed to get a rise out of me, for about ten minutes. None of it worked. Jones gave me the cop stare. I returned it with the amiable look of a concerned civilian. I didn’t even feel the need to bring up their rushed and shoddy investigation into Grace’s death. From their attitude, it seemed clear that Kimbrough had already done that, based on my report that Peralta had emailed to him yesterday.

Sanchez said, “Grace Hunter phoned your office the day she died.”

I looked at her evenly, which probably made her more suspicious. But this was the way I always reacted to shocking news. It took me a moment to deny it, but then she produced a copy of the LUDs-local usage details-from Grace’s phone.

She handed me the sheet. Sure enough, our 602 area code number stood out, call placed at four-ten p.m. on the day she died. The call lasted two minutes. I memorized Grace’s phone number to write down once they had left.

“Care to explain?” Sanchez looked at me sweetly.

I cared a great deal and had no explanation. I turned on my laptop and opened up the office calendar. It showed that Peralta had given a speech that afternoon at a law-enforcement conference. We hadn’t been in the office when the call came in. No one had left a message. Sanchez walked around, looked over my shoulder, and examined the listing.

“How long did you know Grace Hunter?” Jones asked unsweetly.

“I didn’t know her when she was alive. There was no message left here. You can see from the LUD that it was a quick call. It probably rang to the answering machine and the caller hung up.”

Jones leaned forward in his chair. “Want to try again?”

“No.”

We sat for a good five minutes with only the sound of the air conditioner to keep us company. I struggled to maintain my agreeable, relaxed look, but the reality was that it sucked being on the other side of an interrogation. I wasn’t used to it. This would be a good time for Peralta to arrive.

“It seems too coincidental,” Sanchez said, walking in a circle around the office, studying the large, framed maps of Arizona and Phoenix that I had bought at Wide World of Maps to decorate the place. “You go to San Diego and find her husband, Tim Lewis, murdered. His apartment blows up. Now we know that Grace Hunter called you before she died.”

“If she did, we didn’t know that,” I said. So they were married. “And Tim was a client. He asked us to look into her suspicious death…”

“We know all that.” Detective Jones dismissed me with a chop of his hand. “We found your receipt in the blast debris. Hand written on blank paper and signed by you. Real professional operation you have going here, Mapstone. No answering service. Hand-written records.”

It was my turn to lean toward him. “We all have our shortcomings, Jones. Like when Tim filed a missing person’s report on Grace with your department and nobody made the connection that she was already dead and misclassified as a suicide.”

Jones’ ears started turning red.

“Wait for me in the car, Brent,” Sanchez said. He noisily pushed back the chair and slammed the door behind him.

She leaned against Peralta’s desk and watched her partner leave, then turned her head toward me.

“Are you the good cop?” I asked.

“Dream on. So no call from Grace Hunter?”

“We never talked to her.”

“But she called you.”

“Somebody called here with her phone. She was found dead with a new phone that didn’t have any called numbers on it. That was in your report.”

Sanchez persisted. “Why would this somebody call here?”

I told her the truth: I didn’t know. Maybe it was Tim, using her phone. Considering he didn’t know she was dead when I first met him, that seemed unlikely, but no need to tell her that.

I didn’t say how this call to our office indicated that whoever killed Grace, set off the Claymore mine, and took the baby had made that call to frame us, or at least slow us down, knowing the police would track the LUDs. This had been planned well ahead of the moment Felix walked in that door.

The only alternative was that Grace herself had actually tried to call us. But why? She didn’t even know us.

“I can make your life miserable.” Sanchez sat in the chair in front of my desk, crossed her legs, and placed long fingers protectively across her belly. “Losing your license will only be the start of the hurt I can put on you.”

“I don’t doubt it,” I said. “But Kimbrough and Peralta go back a long way, and you’ve got a bungled investigation on your hands. Let me ask you a question, if you don’t mind: you pulled Grace’s LUDs. Do they match with the phone found in her purse that night?”

Sanchez deflated by degrees. Even her hair deflated.

“No. They don’t match. The phone she was carrying that night was scrubbed clean of recent calls. We traced it to a seventy-year-old woman who lives on Clairemont Mesa. It was stolen from her in a purse snatching at Fashion Valley mall.”

“So whoever pushed her off that balcony took her real phone.”

She nodded.

“How is the hunt for the baby progressing?”

She forced her expression to harden. “That’s confidential law-enforcement information and you’re only a private dick.”

Robin’s words again. I stifled a smile.

“Come on, Isabel. You don’t have to mimic your jerk colleague.”

Two beats, three.

Then: “We don’t have anything. Not a damned thing. If I had known she was married or had a kid…” She shook her head. “The vic didn’t have any of that information in her purse. Her parents didn’t tell us, either.”

“I understand.” I thought about the wall with our names painted in blood, information I had held back for our protection, and asked about fingerprints.

“The apartment was destroyed. It could take ATF weeks to sort through things and see if there are any usable prints.” She cleared her throat. “What do you make of Larry Zisman?”

I laid out the backgrounding I had done. Among a certain group, people who had lived here a long time, Zisman was still beloved for his college-football days. He was a razzle-dazzle quarterback in the glory years of Sun Devil football. He left less of a mark in the NFL, playing for five teams before being forced to retire early.

Zisman was a native Arizonan, attended the old East High School, and came back here to live after he retired from the NFL. Not only that, but to live year-round, not only keep a casita at one of the resorts for the winter months. He had started a non-profit to fund athletics for inner-city schools. He was in demand to give speeches at Kiwanis and Rotary, but removed enough from celebrity to be under the radar in a city with so many comings and goings.

“Did it surprise you that he had a lover on the side?”

I held out empty hands. “Who ever knows? But, yes, a little. From what I picked up, Larry Zip was so full of clean living that he might have been mistaken for a Mormon.”

“Do you think he killed Grace Hunter?”

“He’s physically capable of it. Former athlete. As a reserve officer, he would have gone through police academy training.”

She made a few notes.

I said, “It would be pretty stupid, though, to push her off his own condo balcony. He’d know that he would be the prime suspect. Better to strangle her and dump her body in the East County.”

“Unless,” she said, “it was an act of passion and he did it in the moment.”

“Right. But then you have the problem of the alibi, of him being on his boat.”

I was only trying to be convivial enough to get Detective Sanchez out of the office. This couldn’t be a mutually beneficial relationship because Peralta and I were concealing critical information. We had dug this hole a little scoop at a time, for good reasons at the moment, and now we were in deep. Too deep.

She thought about what I had said regarding Zisman, twirling a strand of her hair.

“I think he could have done it.”

“You interviewed him that night and cleared him,” I said.

“I read your report,” she said. “After our ass-chewing from Kimbrough and before we got on the plane, I dug a little more. The man at the next boat is a good friend with Zisman, you know. He’s from Arizona, too. You people really need to find another summer escape. The man is a developer who used Zisman as a spokesman for some of his properties. He might be lying for him.”

Zisman hadn’t figured in any of my theories about the case-not that I had formed many yet. I had been focused on getting out of that apartment before my body was turned into an aerosol state, and then on examining whether Grace had actually committed suicide.

“What about Tim?”

I cocked my head.

She went on. “Maybe he followed her to Zisman’s condo and found out she was cheating on him. Oldest motive in the world.”

To me, he barely had the guts to change a baby’s diaper, much less kill his wife or have the strength to do it in such a physical manner. Sure, people would surprise you, especially if money or sex were concerned. If so, he would have had to do a good job feigning surprise and sorrow when I told him Grace was dead. And been tough enough to slit his own throat and wire his apartment to explode.

I remembered a case in Scottsdale years ago, where a man cut the throats of his family, shot them, set the house on fire, and blew it up. They never caught him.

Detective Sanchez also didn’t know that our names had been written in blood on the apartment wall. Tim Lewis didn’t do that in the seconds before his carotid arteries bled out. Then there was yesterday’s phone call, Mister UNKNOWN saying he had detonated the Claymore and with his aerial theater implying he either had the baby or had murdered it.

“Tim was genuinely torn apart when I told him Grace was dead,” I said. “And remember, the pimp was beating him up when I got there. And if Tim was Grace’s killer, who took the baby?”

She sighed. “I wish I could keep things simple. Occam’s Razor, right? My ass is on the line for this now, and there’s a hundred local, state, and federal investigators living in my shit because of that explosion and kidnapping.”

I appreciated a woman who could quote the classics, but this was one instance where the least complex hypothesis wouldn’t do.

“The pimp is Keavon William Briscoe,” she said, spelling the first name. “He’s middling, not a big player. This is a guy who provides prostitutes for sailors and Marines on leave and runs streetwalkers, not escorts for big-time executives and legislators.”

“He claimed Grace worked for him.”

“Maybe she did. It wouldn’t be the first time a coed made some money on the side. The reason I don’t like Briscoe for this is that he was in jail on the night of April twenty-second, a parole violation. He had a baggie of pot in the car. He’ll probably go back to prison but it gives him an alibi for the one-eighty-seven.” The homicide.

“How did he find where she lived?”

“That’s the thing,” she said. “He was cruising O.B. on April twenty-first and said he saw her, followed her home, and was driving around the block for a parking space when a marked unit stopped him and arrested him. His sister didn’t bail him out for several days.”

“Did you execute a search warrant?”

“Don’t piss me off, Mapstone.” The dark eyes deepened. “I usually don’t fuck up cases. Yes, we gave his place a total colonoscopy and didn’t even find a cheap gun, much less explosives. That brings me back to Zisman. If Zisman found out that Grace was tricking on the side, he would have even more motive to kill her. Maybe it’s his baby. Maybe he has access to military explosives.”

I nodded, but I had seen this so many times: a detective latches onto a theory and does whatever it takes to make it stick and clear the case. Back when I untangled cold cases for the Sheriff’s Office, this was often the original sin in what turned out to be an unsolved case, or worse, one that sent an innocent person to prison.

I also appreciated the heat she was feeling from the brass.

Sanchez didn’t know the full extent of Grace’s entrepreneurship. It sounded as if she was unsure if she had even been a real prostitute or only a wild child.

“What about her friend, Addison?”

“Addison Conway,” Sanchez said. “Jones talked to her. She went back home to Oklahoma at the end of the semester. Grace hadn’t made a call to her since March.”

“So did Zisman and Grace have contact the day of her death?”

She sighed. “It’s not in the LUDs. I went back through two years of records and didn’t find his number. Grace called her mother on the twenty-first. She received a call from the human resources department at Qualcomm that same day. She called your office on the twenty-second. That’s the only call she made on the day she died. The other thing is, the semen inside her doesn’t match Tim’s DNA. In fact, it shows evidence that she had sex with three different men, but none of them her husband.”

The information exchange was definitely working in my favor. I was processing it, thinking out loud. “Grace had gone to a lot of trouble to drop out and get away from guys like Larry Zisman…”

A big smile played across her face. “Until she needed him. Come on, Mapstone, don’t be naïve. Babies are expensive and there’s college coming right up on a parent. You probably have kids, so you understand. She hadn’t even started her job at Qualcomm. Her bank account was drawn way down, only six hundred dollars.”

I wondered if they had checked all her bank accounts, but said nothing.

Sanchez continued: “What if she showed up at Zisman’s condo unannounced and wanted money? Former pro football player-she’s got to figure he’s loaded. Pay up or I’ll tell your wife. Better than that, pay up or I’ll tell your wife I had your baby. Zisman loses it and tosses her off the balcony, goes to his boat, and has his friends cover for him.”

“Wouldn’t Grace have been seen coming into the lobby? Or him going?”

“The night concierge didn’t come on duty until eleven,” she said. “Nobody was at the front desk for eight hours that day. They’ve been having staffing problems. In San Diego, ‘sunshine dollars’ only go so far.”

I thought back to our visit to the condo. “But the building has a card-key entrance. Nobody could get in without using the card.”

“Unless somebody coming in held the door for them. Anyway, after the body hit the concrete, the concierge runs out to the pool area. So if Zisman left, nobody would see him.”

“Cameras?”

She shook her head. “The lobby cam was broken all week.”

It didn’t seem so neat to me. But the former football hero was in her radar lock.

“Have you interviewed Zisman again?”

The luminous black hair shook. “He’s not answering his phone. But I’ve got a lot of questions when he resurfaces.”

I still wondered about the missing hours in Grace’s day. I said, “Why would she leave the apartment without telling Tim?”

She shrugged. “Men aren’t the only ones who lie about sex.”