“Maybe,” I said. “But why?”
The captain said, “To lure you out. Make you do pretty much what you did. Only O’Keefe wasn’t a good enough shot. Hell, he didn’t even finish off Peralta.”
We sat in silence. The room smelled of Lysol and chalk dust. I wished Peralta were here to dispense with this PD bastard. Younger cops began the real work: writing up the incident report.
Another cop-she looked like a tougher Jennifer Aniston-said, “Your guy, I’ll say this about him. Whether he’s the killer or not, he was willing to run into the busiest freeway in town to get away from talking about it.”
“This is nuts!” the captain said. “If he didn’t fire that shot, who the hell did?”
“Somebody,” I said, “who didn’t want him talking to me.”
Two hours later, Lindsey and I sat over breakfast at Susan’s, a diner out on Glendale Avenue. It was one of Peralta’s favorite places, and it served terrific comfort food. I also sought comfort in the newspaper. So while Lindsey fiddled with her Palm Pilot, I ate scrambled eggs and read the Republic. Peralta’s shooting had moved off the front page, replaced by a thumbsucker on a huge new development north of the city. Why did they call them “master-planned communities,” these endless tracts of houses without even a park or a neighborhood drugstore? I recalled the line about the Holy Roman Empire being neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire. Then I moved onto a helping of requisite Valley crime stories: A New York gang boss was found running a drug ring in the Phoenix suburbs. A landscape worker fed himself and his brand-new fiancee into a wood chipper. A woman stopped to help a pair of stranded motorists with a baby, who turned out to be robbers and shot her dead. My hometown.
“Dave.” Lindsey reached past the ketchup and hot sauce, taking my hand.
She locked those twilight blue eyes on me intensely. “I really need you to stay safe,” she whispered, and her eyes watered over with tears. “Please, Dave…”
I squeezed her hand back, feeling guilty and responsible. I was about to say something sappy when Kimbrough appeared at the front window, nodded awkwardly, then came in the door. I waved him over to the table. He was wearing jeans and a plaid shirt, his gun and badge prominently on his belt. He had an evidence envelope in his hand.
“We haven’t seen you in ages,” Lindsey said, wiping her face and commencing to rip apart the interior of a grapefruit with her fork. Kimbrough pulled up a chair, exchanged pleasantries with Susan, and ordered coffee.
He swallowed the lava-like liquid without flinching. Cops and coffee. I would never understand it.
“David, I was out of line back there,” he said. “I apologize.”
“You weren’t out of line,” I said. “I was a dumb fuck. I just didn’t know what to do.”
He shuffled in the chair, ran a hand over the smooth, dark globe of his scalp. I said, “Don’t worry about it, E.J.” I had never called him by his first name before.
He nodded, sipped more coffee, and relaxed a bit. “We have news,” he said. He slid the evidence container onto the table. Through the clear plastic, I could see a manila envelope, faded with age. On the front, written in a scratchy hand, was: “To be opened in the event of my death.”
“Where did you get this?”
“Nixon’s ex-wife,” Kimbrough said. “A woman named Joyce Bellman, who lives in Tempe. You know her?”
“Nope,’ I said. “Nixon was single when I knew him.”
“Well, she’s wife number two out of three,” Kimbrough said. “We tracked her down this morning on a next-of-kin notification. She said he left this envelope with her years ago. When I saw what she had, I figured you’d want to see it.”
It felt light and unremarkable in my hand. I set it back on the table.
“Have you opened it?”
He shook his head.
“Got any gloves?”
He reached in his pocket and pulled out some latex gloves. I slipped them on and opened the evidence container.
“Everyone will witness the chain of custody is secure,” I said. “I don’t want to be lectured by some Phoenix PD asshole twice in the same day.”
I undid the clasp and the flap opened with no resistance. I slid in a finger and dilated the envelope so we could see inside. It was another envelope, slightly smaller. I gently slid it out. On the front, written in a firmer hand, it said: “For the U.S. Attorney Only.”
Kimbrough and Lindsey looked at each other.
“Dean Nixon reaches out from the grave,” I said. “But why wouldn’t that information be on the cover envelope?”
“Maybe Nixon assumed his ex would be the one to open the outside envelope if he died,” Lindsey said.
I paused and weighed it in my hand. The gloves made my fingers sweat.
“What should we do?” Lindsey said. Our breakfasts sat unattended, getting cold.
“I guess let the feds know,” I said. But now I was feeling awake and curious. “But we can examine the evidence, of course.”
Kimbrough smiled broadly. “Of course.”
“We don’t suspect a federal crime has occurred, do we?” I asked.
“Not us,” they said in unison.
“But this does pertain to an active murder investigation,” I said.
“Very active,” Lindsey said.
“Then let’s see what Dean was afraid of all those years ago.”
I undid the clasp, but the envelope was also sealed. I worked the flap open as gently as I could, and the aging glue gave way with reluctance. Inside was a thick wad of paper. It was stuck inside so tightly that it resisted being pulled out. I could make out colors, lines, grids.
It was a map.
Chapter Eleven
We didn’t have far to go. The map, a detailed plat from the U.S. Geological Survey, showed the area around Shaw Butte in the North Mountain Preserve. It highlighted a trail in yellow marker, then diverged to what the map said was an abandoned mine shaft. Next to that, in a precise hand, were instructions on how to find Dean Nixon’s buried treasure.
We walked up the trail armed with a shovel, crime-scene tape, and more evidence containers from the trunk of Kimbrough’s unmarked Crown Victoria. Ahead of us were bare sunbaked mountains that once cradled the northern edge of the city, marking the beginning of the desert wilderness. Now the city had run around them. But somehow Phoenix had mustered the momentary courage to save the mountains themselves from development. Today we passed a handful of hikers, but the preserve was mostly deserted on a weekday.
As we walked, Kimbrough talked about his family. One child, a boy, was six now, and another was on the way in June. His wife had left the County Attorney’s Office-they met when she was a prosecutor-and she was going to set up her own family law practice. This was Kimbrough’s fifteenth year with the Sheriff’s Office. He was five years younger than me, and came here from the Drug Enforcement Administration when the former sheriff, also a DEA man, won election.
“Now I know why I like you,” I said. “You’re an outsider in this department like me.”
“That and we have great taste in clothes.” He laughed.
We walked up a well prepared trail, but it was still work. The hard desert ground was defined by loose rocks, sand, and outcroppings of jumping cactus. I felt every foot of elevation in my knees and calves. But as we kept walking, the pain lessened, as did the immediate memory of the gunshot that made me dive for the sidewalk just a few hours before.
“Luckily the snakes are hibernating in winter,” I said.
“Great,” Kimbrough said.
“’Course it’s been a warm winter, Dave,” Lindsey said.
As we neared the summit and left the trail, the ugliness of the day became evident. A weather inversion had clamped the smog down hard on the city, just like the lid on a bowl. Only Phoenix’s bowl was the purple and brown necklace of mountains that surrounded it. From where we stood, we should have been able to see the soaring blue towers of the Sierra Estrella to the south and the sheer expanse of the White Tanks to the west. Both were gone, replaced by a yellow-brown haze that spread out across the desert floor. Even Squaw Peak and Camelback, much closer, were barely visible. To the south, the Sunnyslope section of the city fell away in a series of rooftops, palm trees, and billboards until it, too, disappeared in the muck. The line of skyscrapers on the Central Corridor shimmered and faded. To the north, Moon Valley and Deer Valley, newer parts of Phoenix, sprawled around Lookout Mountain, itself cloaked in brown air.