I felt a stab of guilt, for leaving the scene of a crime, for endangering Lindsey, for leaving this house, the only material touchstone of my life, so vulnerable. We couldn’t stay here long. The BMW’s license tag would be run through DMV, and my name and address would scoot across the computer screen that sat on the console of a patrol car. And our only hope seemed to be finding a woman who had watched the carnage at Guadalupe twenty years ago.
The door to the office opened. Lindsey said, “Got her.”
Chapter Twenty-two
Kimbrough answered his phone on the third ring. A child was crying in the background, plates were banging, Sunday morning chaos. But after he recognized my voice, I heard a door close and the background noise went away.
“Where the hell are you, Sheriff? Are you OK?”
I just listened for a minute, trying to get a reading on his voice. What did he know? What was he hiding? I was no good at that kind of thing. What I did know was something about Sunday morning chaos. This Sunday morning, I hadn’t slept in twenty-seven hours. I knew-I’d counted them. My body ached with cold exhaustion, that peculiar feeling of being disconnected from real life, floating in a sea of disembodied pains and fatigue. I was just tired enough that every fear seemed magnified, and every certainty seemed at risk.
“I’m OK,” I said.
“PD found your car downtown,” he said. “It looked like it fell out of a parking garage, fifty feet to the street. Tell me you weren’t there, and that this was some car theft gone wrong.”
“Actually, we were there. I got a call to meet you there.”
“What?” His voice jacked up a half octave. “I never…”
“I got a call on my cell phone from the communications center. They said you left a message to meet you on the fourth floor of the Crown Plaza parking garage, at nine P.M. last night. The message said it was urgent that we meet.”
“Who told you this?” he demanded. “I never left any message like that.”
“Somebody named Deputy Stevens. It sounded authentic. The caller-ID on my cell phone showed a prefix at sheriff’s headquarters, just like it was the communications center.”
I heard him exhale a long, apprehensive blast of air.
I went on. “When we got there, the garage was deserted. But it was only a minute before two guys drove up in a white Crown Vic. They tried to ram us, and we would have been in the car when it hit the street if we hadn’t jumped out and run for our lives.”
“Holy shit!” he exclaimed, sounding surprised as hell. “Why would you go up there alone?”
“I had Lindsey.”
“Did she kill anybody with that H amp;K she checked out from the armory?”
“No,” I said. “But I got one of the guys in the foot. Check the ERs for reports of ‘accidental’ gunshots involving white males last night. Anyway, why would I need backup? The message supposedly came from you. I couldn’t reach you on your cell phone or home phone to check it out in advance.”
“Yeah, well, we had a sick kid last night. I had it turned off,” he said. He sounded sheepish. It sounded genuine. “So where are you now? Why didn’t you wait around for backup?”
I waited at least a minute, listening to the microwave stations buzz, thinking. Finally, “The two guys in the Crown Vic looked like cops. I guess I don’t feel safe in my own department right now.”
“I’ve always believed we had rogue cops involved…” he started.
“Up to two days ago you thought it was Leo O’Keefe,” I challenged him.
“OK, OK,” he said. “Tell me where you are. I’ll send a team of handpicked detectives to guard you.”
I ignored him. “How’s Peralta?” I asked.
My stomach tightened when he hesitated. He said, “Not good. There’s fluid in his right lung. They’re worried about pneumonia. He’s not responding to antibiotics. I just got back from the hospital.”
“There’s got to be something that can be done,” I said.
“There’s something else you should know, Sheriff,” he said. “We got back the ballistics report on Nixon. He was murdered with a nine-millimeter pistol.”
“So?”
“I asked Mrs. Peralta’s permission to test Sheriff Peralta’s service weapon.”
I almost made an angry bite through my lip. “Did you get a warrant, Captain?”
“I didn’t need one,” he said simply.
“Even the sheriff is entitled to due process,” I snarled. Underneath, I thought about the other pistol in Peralta’s desk drawer. Had it been fired? What did I really know? Who did I really trust? Lisa Cardiff was talking in my ear. She wouldn’t shut up. Peralta’s friend Dean Nixon. What the hell was that? I never knew they were friends.
Kimbrough went on. “We also got the report on the bullets fired at Peralta, and at you the other night at Kenilworth. They are both fifty-caliber rounds, fired by the same weapon. That’s heavy-duty sniper stuff. It looks like a hand-load, the shooter going for more power. Lucky for Peralta, the extra powder in the round may have caused the bullet to fragment before it hit him.”
“I don’t know how lucky he is,” I said quietly. My leg muscles burned from exhaustion. But I couldn’t sleep.
“Sheriff,” Kimbrough said. “Let’s talk in person.”
“Not now,” I said. “I’m going to take a couple of days off, just to have some time to myself.”
“This is crazy, Sheriff,” he shouted. “What are you doing? Where the hell are you?”
“I’ll contact you again,” I said. “Find out about the gunshot reports. And find out if there’s a Deputy Stevens in communications.”
Kimbrough was talking, but I carefully set the receiver back into the cold metal cradle of the pay phone.
He was a long way off. I was on the other side of the time zone, the other side of the mountains. I stood up from the cramped airport phone corral and looked out the huge plateglass of the airport terminal. The towers of downtown Denver glittered gold and silver in the distance, backed by the Front Range of the Rockies. The mountains were a shock to the plains, a great wall of purple rising up out of the land, filling the horizon. Fingers of winter mist reaching down the dark canyons toward the city. It must be hard to be an atheist here.
I found a seat and tried to distract myself with Niall Ferguson’s The Pity of War. It’s a brilliant thesis of counterfactual history: What if Britain had stayed out of World War I? We would have had a European Union eight decades early, no world wars, and Britain would still be a world power. I was too tired to wrestle down its flaws. So I allowed myself a bit of envy. My ambition had been to write books such as this. Instead, I was the acting sheriff, running out of time. I thought about Lindsey, my constant preoccupation. “I’m not an intellectual, Dave,” she had told me. And it was true, in a healthy way. I became close to physically ill over such profanity as post-structuralism and political correctness. Lindsey stayed above those hedgerows, despite her fine mind and incisive ability to detect and cut through bullshit. It was my good fortune that she wanted to spend her life with me.
“History Shamus.” Lindsey appeared, carrying bagels and coffee, a mocha for me. “I’d let you give me a backrub but I’d fall asleep right here.”
It was Sunday morning, and the airport was subdued. Or maybe it was the sleepless haze I was moving in. I heard flight announcements, but nobody seemed in a hurry. I let the mocha burn my tongue. The coldness evident out the huge windows made me shiver involuntarily.