The Night Detectives

29

I was about to turn south on Third Avenue into Willo when the xylophone sound made me jump. Exactly like before, the digital readout said, UNKNOWN.

I answered professionally. “Fuck you.”

There was a long pause and I thought he might hang up. Then: “You think you’re clever. You think you’re putting the pieces together. But you’re wrong. You can’t solve this case without my help.”

“Why would you help me?”

“I thought we could do business.”

The past tense didn’t give me hope for the baby.

I said, “You’re wasting my time.”

“Lose anything tonight?”

I was silent.

“You better check, absent-minded professor.”

I didn’t say a word. Let him think he outwitted us and found where we were hiding the flash drive, in a motel on the freeway.

Finally, I spoke. “I’m tired of games. Drop a baby doll on me? What does that mean to me?”

I feared what it meant. But I didn’t say it. Instead, I pushed on. “I used to solve historic cases for a living. There was a mobster in Seattle who liked to dispose of his victims by having them pushed out of an airplane into Elliott Bay, while he watched from a skyscraper downtown. Unless you’re him, this call is over.”

“You didn’t like the airplane? I wanted to get your attention. To get you in a bargaining frame of mind. Where would the fun have been if I had just left the package in the vacant lot for you to find? Anyway, if we can drop a baby doll out of an airplane, we can drop other things, too. Just a simple civilian airplane can be quite lethal. Wait until we steal a drone…”

Taking a chance that he was full of his own grandiosity, I said, “I’m hanging up.”

“Wait.”

“For what? I bill by the hour. You’re not mysterious. You’re not scary. You’re an ordinary douchebag. You’re wasting my time.”

“You put up a brave front, professor, but you know it’s over. Because of your carelessness, now you have nothing to bargain with. That’s a good thing for you. I’ll let you and everyone you love live. I got what I want.”

Mustering my best acting, having studied theater under Peralta, I filled my voice with surprise. “You son of a bitch!” As if it was only now dawning on me that I had lost the briefcase.

“Don’t hang up,” he said. “I want you to think about what I’ve told you about the country. Don’t be a traitor to your race.”

“What about Tim? What about the guy you shot outside our office? They were white.”

I could feel his shrug. “They were in the way of the greater good.”

Now I knew he had killed Felix, too.

I asked about Grace.

“She was a whore,” he said. “All I wanted was the information she had. She wouldn’t give it to me. So we made her give herself up like a whore.”

“You raped her before you pushed her off the balcony.”

The rich laugh. “Come, come, Professor. We’re both men of the world. I had to let my team have some fun. She sounded like an animal being tortured because they wanted her ass, too. I was above any of that nonsense. But boys will be boys. Afterward, I gave her another chance to help herself. She didn’t take it.”

I was about to call him a baby killer but he cut me off.

“You think I’m a criminal, a terrorist. That’s what many contemporaries thought about Washington and the Founders. Soon enough, you’ll know that I’m a patriot. Count your blessings tonight, Doctor Mapstone, and sleep well.”

The truck-stop cell blinked off, perhaps for good. I pulled over to write down notes on the conversation. The street ahead and behind me was dark and empty.