A police technician used a laptop computer to generate a likeness of Lindsey’s assailant. The problem wasn’t the quality-it was a pretty good rendering. The problem was that she looked like scores of other average-attractive thirtysomething women walking around the malls of Phoenix. This was no doubt an advantage in her trade.
At seven p.m. Sunday, the three Peralta women sent me home to rest, promising to call if anything changed.
Sharon walked me to the door. It was black night outside and I realized I hadn’t seen the sun for more than a day. Then the question that had been sitting under my feet like a land mine finally detonated.
“Why are you here?”
She looked at me strangely. “For you and Lindsey. Why?”
“No, I mean what brought you to the hospital? How did you know we’d be here?”
“The call.”
I was suddenly twitchy. The feeling of imaginary ants marching up the back of my neck was so pronounced that I reached back to brush them off.
“What call?”
She said, “I got a call from the hospital. They said you asked them to call me and say Lindsey had been shot and please come. What’s wrong?”
“I didn’t tell anyone to make a call. Man or woman’s voice?”
“A man.”
I stared through the glass door at the night street. “Accent?”
She shook her head.
I looked back at her. “Could it have been Mike?”
“No.”
“People can change their voices, Sharon.”
“I know my husband’s voice.”
I asked to see her cell phone, but the supposed call from the hospital only showed “602,” the area code. When I attempted a return call, it provoked the familiar three tones followed by “Your call cannot be completed as dialed.” Whoever had called Sharon had concealed his tracks well. Lindsey knew how to pull off such a trick. I didn’t.
I said, “It wasn’t the hospital.”
“Well, thank God someone let me know,” she said.
“How many people have your number?”
She thought for a few seconds, stroking her hair. “Maybe two hundred in five states and D.C.”
I cursed, handed her phone back, and studied her.
“What are you not telling me?”
Her eyes widened in exasperation. “I’m telling you everything.”
I tried to make myself stop, but I couldn’t. “Sharon, are you in on this with him? Did he call you about Lindsey being shot?”
“No! David, you’re traumatized.”
I couldn’t tell if she was being truthful. Sharon was usually as straightforward as her husband and thankfully lacked his manipulative streak. But who knew better how to lie than a shrink?
I repeated, “What are you not telling me? Whatever it is, another miscalculation by him and we’ll all be dead.”
She turned away and placed her hand against the wall, lightly at first and then with such force that it was if she were trying to push the building off its foundations. When she faced me again, her eyes were still wet with tears.
I had never seen Sharon cry in all the years I had known her, all the years she heard other people tell their psychological nightmares, all the years she had endured her husband’s moods and tirades.
“I didn’t know what Mike meant,” she managed in a husky voice. “When he called on the old county landline as Paco and told you to watch your ass. I should have done more. Should have realized. Now Lindsey is hurt.”
“It’s not your fault. I’m to blame.”
“I’m afraid…” she began. Then she lowered her head for a long moment before finishing. “For the first time in my life, I’m afraid he’s in over his head. We can’t lose both of them, David. And you lost Robin, too.”
“We won’t lose them,” I whispered without conviction.
“He’s in trouble, David, and he needs you.”
I suddenly felt angry again. “If he needs me, he has to do more than drop a cryptic note on a business card.”
“I know, I know.” She put both hands on my shoulders, calm again. “I don’t know how to ask for your help because you’re totally focused on Lindsey. As you should be. But…”
“We can help each other.” I said it not knowing what it meant, what I was promising. “I’ll try to find him.”
“Thank you.” She pulled my face close. “You’re exhausted. Go home and get some sleep. I promise we’ll call if anything changes here.”
She turned me and pushed my numb body forward.
The automatic sliding glass doors gave their kissing sound and I walked through. When I looked back, she was watching me with those wide brown eyes. I shook my head and forced myself to move along.
Chapter Fifteen
A cop had given me a ride to the hospital, so I crossed the expanse of Thomas Road and walked the nine blocks home, past the narrow streets I had memorized on my bicycle as a child. Edgemont, Windsor, Cambridge, Virginia, Wilshire, Lewis, Vernon, Encanto Boulevard, Cypress.
Hardly anyone lived in the neighborhood from those days. One friend from grade school went into the Diplomatic Service and was posted to Budapest, another was a lobbyist in California. Yet another was living in London. So many had left town.
Willo was one of the safest neighborhoods in the metropolitan area. If I didn’t live here, if I hadn’t brought trouble, there would barely have been a violent crime in years.
There was no time for those thoughts. No time to appreciate the distinctive character of each house or mourn about the idiots who had put in desert landscaping where this had always been the oasis. No time, for now, to worry about Lindsey. All my senses had to be on high alert.
It was Sunday night in the heart of the city and few cars passed me on Fifth Avenue. A couple walked their dog. No assassins were hiding behind oleander hedges in the service alleys. Overhead, high thin clouds lingered, turned pink by the reflected city lights. A slight breeze tousled my hair.
At home, I armed the alarm and took a long shower, locking the bathroom door and setting two guns and my iPhone on the vanity. I let the needles of hot water pummel my battered face, let the room fill with steam.
I dried off and approached the dreaded mirror. Even after using several cold packs at the hospital, the tissue around my right eye was colorful and swollen, plenty of purple, red, and orange like an Arizona sunset. It hurt in colors, too, all in the red zone. My left cheek bore the slashes of the killer’s fingernails. I popped four Advils.
The little meteor strike of skin was four inches above my right nipple, the remains of the only time I had been shot. It had come on the first case Peralta gave me to clean up. I lost enough blood to pass out and they airlifted me from Sedona to St. Joe’s. I was lucky my lung didn’t collapse. When I woke up, Lindsey was there. We weren’t even married. Sometimes when we were in bed, she would lightly worry the scar with her fingertip, trying to erase it. Fragments of the bullet were still inside me.
“Lord, have mercy.”
I spoke the words to myself and said them conversationally, not exactly as a petition to the almighty but a stress valve letting off. The moment stunned me. My grandmother, a daughter of the frontier who knew much loss in her long life, had used that phrase often and in exactly that tone of voice. Now I said it.
A few years ago, I realized that if I were in a relaxed situation, especially sitting down, my hands would join in my conversation. This was not wild gesticulation. It was hands and wrists. Grandmother had done the same thing. When I was a little boy, I had thought it was strange. Now I did the same thing all the time.
The grandparents who raised me were long dead and yet they lived on through me. I considered how I had underestimated Melton. Yes, I had taken the badge out of unreasoning fear, to buy time for Lindsey, even though I didn’t believe a word he said about her. But he had also gotten to me about how “I owed” my hometown.