“Don’t ask about Peralta,” he said. “I don’t know anything new.” We walked past the metal detectors and out onto Washington Street. Outside, it was nicely brisk-balmy compared to the weather in Denver or out on the Navajo Reservation with Beth by the roadside.
“You know Beth cleared him,” I said.
He bit his lip. “I know she backed away from saying he stole that cocaine.” We stopped on the street, facing each other. “Look, don’t make me the bad guy in this, Sheriff. I’m just doing the job. We still have to deal with Peralta’s badge number in Nixon’s payoff book.”
“Maybe we don’t,” Lindsey said. A little clot of traffic passed by, and she went on.
“While Dave was getting beaten up, I took all the badge numbers in the book and set up a database to handle other information we had about East County deputies for April, May, and June 1979. Things like personal logs, court appearances, overtime reports, sick time. Then I created a program to make some comparisons.
“Here’s the thing: It doesn’t make any sense the way Nixon recorded it. He lists a payoff of $1,200 to Peralta’s badge number on April 3, but for most of that month Peralta was at an FBI school in Quantico.”
I remembered. He was.
“The same result comes out in several other instances. A payoff is given to a badge number, but the deputy is on sick leave. Another payoff is listed, but that badge number goes to somebody who’s been transferred to the West Valley.”
“So,” Kimbrough said, “you’re saying it’s all bogus?”
“Not necessarily,” Lindsey said. “It might be pretty simple. They might have thrown in some innocent deputies on that list to provide cover, just in case they were ever caught. Or it might be a code. For example, maybe Peralta’s badge number in the logbook actually means somebody else. I ran some scenarios that way, and they came out in a way that would make sense. Maybe not airtight for a courtroom, but enough to point us to the real dirty cops. Certainly enough to clear Peralta.”
“Wait a damned minute,” Kimbrough said. “I want this to be a happy ending, too. But you’re using technology that didn’t even exist twenty years ago, and if it did no damned sheriff’s deputy knew how to use it.”
“They wouldn’t have to,” I said. “It would be as simple as a sheet of paper with the real dirty cops and their badge numbers on one side, and the decoy badge numbers on the other. Just a simple key. Now I don’t know why that key wasn’t with Nixon’s book. But the bad guys obviously thought we had it.”
Kimbrough stuck his hands in his pockets and stared at the sidewalk. “OK, Sheriff,” he said. “Maybe it gives us a starting point.”
I leaned over and whispered to Lindsey, “You’re pretty smart for a propellerhead.” She lightly stroked my cheek.
“Sheriff Mapstone!”
It was a federal guard, walking briskly from the building. “You got a message. It came through the security office. From a woman named Sharon at Good Samaritan?”
“Yeah?” I felt a cold bolt driven into my legs.
“She wants you at the hospital. Said it’s urgent. Does that make sense?”
“I guess so,” I heard myself say.
“Here,” Kimbrough pointed us toward the curb. “We can take my car.”
The elevator moved upstairs slowly. It was sized for two or three hospital beds, but the three of us just seemed to move involuntarily into one corner. The cables and gears churned quietly. The panel glowed with a single button depressed to the correct floor. And then we were there. The doors opened with a heavy jerk. I forced myself to walk quickly down the hall, half-lit now for night running. Across the polished floor tiles: Step on a crack…My stomach felt that hard thumb of pain again. My panic attack, if Beth was to be believed. To have come through all this just to…
“Mapstone.”
Peralta lay in his bed, halfway raised, his large dark eyes wonderfully open. His skin was too pale and his lips were badly chapped. But he looked at us. We bunched up in the doorway, afraid to walk farther.
“Mapstone,” he repeated, his voice reedy and soft. “Where the hell have you been?”
Sharon was sitting in a chair beside the head of the bed. She looked up at us and began to tear up. “He woke up two hours ago. Just woke up.” She swallowed hard. “I’m taught to discount miracles. I’ll take this one.”
I stepped forward and put a hand on his big shoulder. “Good to have you back,” I said.
He shook his head. “You got beat up, Mapstone.”
“I hurt ’em back,” I said.
His eyes followed me. “Did you get the bad guys?” he asked.
“Almost,” I said. “We’re about to get them all.”
“You know about Camelback Falls, the River Hogs?” he whispered insistently.
“David, let him rest. .” Sharon prodded.
I pleaded with her with my eyes. I glanced back at Kimbrough, then Lindsey. Then I pulled up a chair and let him talk.
He filled in some gaps for us. Told us what we needed to know. I could hear Kimbrough scratching some notes on his pad.
Peralta closed his eyes for a second, then gave in to some coughing-also a wonderful relief to hear. He looked at me again, and this time his voice had some of the old steel in it.
“Well,” he said. “Don’t get too used to that title, Sheriff Mapstone.”
I smiled so wide my face convulsed in a dozen points of pain. It felt great.
Chapter Thirty-three
I watched the sunset that night, a prisoner of the glass of the federal building, and it was a tragedy. It had rained while we were in Denver and then cleared. The sky was scrubbed clean. The twilight spreading out from the west deserved the full wonder that came from standing in endless space and breathing wild dry Western air. But the view through the window would do. At least once a month, Lindsey and I tried to take in a sunset from the Compass Room at the top of the Hyatt, just to remind ourselves that for all of Phoenix’s flaws, we lived in a place of daily miracles.
It was already full dark when Kimbrough delivered us to Cypress Street. Off on Seventh Avenue, some moron was gunning his car, trying to find someone to impress. But Willo was dark, quiet, and safe. The house was safe. The cat was glad to see us. And a note was sandwiched in the windshield wiper of Lindsey’s Prelude.
That’s why an hour later I turned off Camelback Road onto Arcadia Lane and followed the street as it wound its way up the mountain. I parked in a dirt turnoff, shut off the lights, and stepped out. The night was cool and dry, magical in the way that only 14 percent humidity can do. Around me at discreet distances, multi-million-dollar homes sparkled like miniature galaxies glimpsed through enchanted telescopes. I’d never own one of those houses on a professor’s paycheck, much less on a deputy sheriff’s.
Jonathan Ledger had done all right. His glass-and-marble dream-house still clung to the side of the mountain. Some ornamental lights marked off the gate and the path down to the house, but otherwise the place looked like it hadn’t been lived in since Reagan was president. A Realtor’s sign. Another sign warned of alarms. I thought of Yeats’ poem, but ignored the sign. I lifted a heavy iron latch on the gate, swung it open, and stepped inside.
Past the gate, the mountainside desert encased me in silence. The path was paved and led downhill at a steep angle. I walked as silently as I could, past some overgrown stands of jumping cactus and creosote bush. Civilization was never far away: breaking the surface of the sandy soil were some metal conduits, leading down to the house.
The place was bigger than it looked from the road. It hugged the side of the mountain and cascaded down in two levels. Rock-encrusted walls disappeared into Camelback’s soil. An interior courtyard was guarded by a black, wrought-iron gate. Around on the side facing the city, I got a sense of the place. It was mostly glass, framed by stone and what looked like redwood timbers. It was dark inside-the owners were who-knows-where in the global economy. But I swore I could make out the smooth surfaces of the interior fountain, Camelback Falls.