The Night Detectives

31

We were at the Good Egg having breakfast four hours later. Like its neighbor Starbucks at Park Central, it was an institution in Midtown Phoenix. Unlike Sunday, the offices inside the nearby towers were open and the restaurant was busy. The morning was cool enough to sit outside, a dry seventy-nine degrees under the umbrellas, not even hot enough to require the misters. A pleasant dry breeze was coming in from the east. Light-rail trains cruised by on Central, clanging their bells. In her round, nerd-girl sunglasses, Lindsey looked like a spy.

Here we are, I thought, easy targets in assassination range. But the tracker on the Dodge Ram was far away and three Phoenix Police units were in the lot out front, the cops having coffee next door. It would take the bad guys at least a little time to break into the briefcase and even longer to figure out the flash drive.

To figure out they had been played for fools.

A pickup truck did arrive: Peralta’s. He was in a suit again and gave us a tiny nod as he walked toward the breezeway and the entrance. I knew it would take time for him to get out on the front patio. He was past his period after leaving office where he didn’t want to come here, didn’t want to see the assortment of politicos and officials who used the Good Egg for morning meetings. He had shifted his morning routine over to Urban Beans on Seventh Street.

But apparently he was willing to be seen again. I looked back and, sure enough, he was working the room, shaking hands, slapping backs, everyone having a great time. Where were they when he needed them? Now they had a sheriff who was a national embarrassment. He had a long conversation with Henry Sargent, who was sitting at the lunch counter. Henry was a retired honcho from Arizona Public Service.

“Lindsey!” Peralta sat down, full of morning pep. “What have you got for me?”

She went through it as the same waitress who had served him for the past fifteen years poured coffee and went off to place his order.

I read his face: satisfied, impressed, interested, troubled, more interested. An outsider would never know this from his seemingly immobile features, ones that could elicit confessions from criminals or compromises from county supervisors-or, this being Arizona, the other way around. But after so many years, I could see the slight rise of the right eyebrow, the tightening of his mouth, and the easing of a frown which didn’t mean his mind was easy. I wondered what troubled him. For me, it was the whole thing.

I asked, “When are we going to interview Zisman?”

He acknowledged me for the first time with a glance of disdain at my Starbucks mocha. “Not yet.”

“When?”

“Mapstone, you sound like an annoying child on a trip. ‘Are we there yet?’”

“Maybe. That makes you the dad who’s lost and is too stubborn to ask for directions.”

It was only me and Peralta being ourselves. Lindsey interrupted.

“Boys. I think the targets are definitely in the nest.”

She handed over her new iPad, to which she had added Google maps. Peralta studied it, and then handed it to me. Sure enough, both red dots had converged.

“They’ve been in this same location for several hours,” she said.

I worried that they might have discovered the trackers and discarded them at the spot on the map. But Lindsey said she had modified each to send a different signal if anyone fiddled with it.

“What time did they get there?” Peralta handed the tablet back to her.

“Around two a.m. They spent a few hours at a bar in Sunnyslope before that.”

He nodded.

The two red dots had nested less than a mile from the bar.

“Excuse me,” he said, and walked back inside the restaurant. The next time I caught sight of him, he was in the breezeway, which once held scores of shops when this was a mall. He was leaning against a pillar, his phone to his ear.

Back at the table, he took his time with breakfast. I had no choice but to do the same, even though I wanted to kick down their door an hour ago.

At last, Peralta gave instructions: take the Prelude home and park it. We would ride with him to greet the kidnappers. I hoped they were good and hung over.

As we left Park Central, he was in the cab of his truck, making another call.

Fifteen minutes later, we were northbound on Seventh Street. Lindsey rode on the jump seat of the extended cab, back with the weapons compartment where he kept his heavy metal. Aside from numbered streets to the east and avenues west, the other easy way you knew your way around Phoenix was to look at the mountains. The South Mountains showed you that direction. The Papago Buttes, McDowells, and, on a clear day, Four Peaks stood to the east. West were the White Tanks. We were driving straight toward North Mountain.

Sunnyslope was one of the few places with soul outside the old city, with a real identity that wasn’t subsumed in endless subdivisions. It was located beyond the Arizona Canal and outside the oasis, a desert town, a Hooverville from the Great Depression, and a place that retained its own proud, quirky identity even after it had been annexed into Phoenix in the 1950s. The relatively few natives from there my age and older were “Slopers” first, Phoenicians second. From my perspective, it had some interesting unsolved murders.

The place remained unique even though it had filled in with some of the same fake stucco schlock you found everywhere. A couple of its more notorious biker bars remained. You were aware of being higher than downtown, up against the bare, rocky mountains that shimmered in the sun. If the smog hadn’t smudged the view to the South Mountains, you’d see you were at about the same elevation as Baseline Road in south Phoenix, where the Japanese Flower Gardens once stood. From both places, the landscape rolled down to the dry Salt River.

Peralta slowed as we approached the five-point intersection with Dunlap and Cave Creek Road. The parking lot of a shabby shopping strip looked like a used-car joint selling black Suburban vans.

“What the hell?” I said.

“Calm down, Mapstone.”

He wheeled in and parked.

“Stay here.”

He left the engine and air conditioning running and approached the black Suburbans. Out of one stepped a slender man in khakis and an open-collar shirt. Eric Pham, special agent in charge of the Phoenix FBI. Even the head fed wasn’t wearing a suit. The New Conformity. They shook hands and talked, and then they walked a ways talking more. Pham was gesticulating, as if laying out a map. Peralta nodded and pointed. Pham nodded.

I asked Lindsey for her iPad and switched the map to a satellite image. The dots had converged at a house at the end of Dunlap, about a mile away. From the photo, it looked like a mid-century modern house. Maybe it was on a little butte; it was hard to tell, but Dunlap rose as it went east before dead-ending at the mountain preserve. That could provide some easy escape routes if they didn’t do this right.

Now a couple of Phoenix PD units arrived, along with the huge mobile command post. My stomach was wishing it didn’t have breakfast getting in the way of contracting into itself. How long before the news vans and choppers arrived, too?

“Why aren’t we doing this ourselves?”

Lindsey put a hand on my shoulder.

“We have to trust him, Dave.”

I leaned my face against her hand, hoping she was right. I knew Peralta still had chits to call in and back channels. But I had a local lawman’s mistrust of the feds. I had seen how these quasi-military operations could go very wrong.

The door opened and his bulk filled the seat.

“Phoenix PD is closing off streets,” he said. “The FBI is preparing to deploy a SWAT team.”

“And you explained to Eric Pham that we developed a break in this case…how?”

He took off his sunglasses and rubbed his eyes. “I have my ways, Mapstone.”

“I bet.”

He slipped the shift into drive and rolled back to Seventh Street.

“Wait!” It was an inane blurt, but it came out anyway. Anything to stop this circus. I knew it was too late, even though I had a bad feeling about going in with so many cops, so much firepower.

“Exactly, Mapstone. Wait. There’s a baby in that house. The SWAT boys can’t send an undercover to the front door with pizza, toss in a flash-bang grenade, and go in blazing. This is going to take time. They’ll have to negotiate these guys to come out. We’ve got other stuff to do in the meantime.”

I looked back with mixed emotions at the gathering army, hoping he was making the right call.