“Except Frazier’s car was within walking distance.”
“We almost caught your girl.” She changed the subject suddenly.
“Almost?” My stomach felt as if it had dropped five inches.
“She was at a house by the Biltmore. Up on Biltmore Estates Drive, with those lovely older places? This one was foreclosed on during the worst of the bust, only the neighbors wouldn’t allow a sign out front. It was bank-owned and sat empty. Somehow she found it and was using it as her base.”
I looked straight at her and asked how they almost found her.
“Crime Stoppers call early this morning. We set up a perimeter and called in SWAT. Made entry at eight a.m. She was gone. But she’d been injured. Maybe a gunshot. She had performed surgery on herself, stitched it up. Left a bunch of bloody gauze and a suture kit. She was moving fast. Looks like she made it out through the golf course before we secured the perimeter.”
I leaned toward the steering wheel and let out a long sigh. It was not theater. My best hope for catching Strawberry Death had failed and she was on the loose again.
“Did you shoot her, Mapstone?”
I pulled out the Colt Python and held it up. “If I had shot her, she’d be dead, blown six feet back from the point of impact. Anyway, you told me that if I worked this case, you’d…”
“Yeah, yeah.” She shook her head dismissively. “I’ve changed my mind. This woman is dangerous as hell. I know Lindsey’s in the hospital and for some reason you’ve got this special from Meltdown. But I need your help.”
“You? Need my help?”
Her sharp features tightened. “Don’t fucking congratulate yourself, Professor. Help me.”
I could give her real help, but that would compromise the operation that Peralta and Cartwright were running. Too many secrets, too many compartments.
She said, “Why are you working for Meltdown?”
I told her the truth.
“You’re an idiot, Mapstone.”
“I know.” It started to sprinkle. I watched the drops heal my dry hand.
“Lindsey wouldn’t betray the country.”
“I know.” My voice was louder this time. “It was Saturday night and he was leaning on me. I needed to buy time.”
Vare shook her head. “And you went home, told Lindsey, had a fight, and she left to take a walk and cool down.”
“That’s pretty much it.”
“You asshole,” she said. “Why didn’t you tell me this to begin with?”
“It didn’t seem relevant.”
“Let me tell you about relevant. Twenty minutes after we made entry to the house on Biltmore Estates Drive and secured it, Horace Mann showed up with a dozen agents. He ordered me to turn over control of the scene. My fucking scene! When I refused, he called the chief and…” She punched the steering wheel. “That was that. Why?”
“The woman must be connected to the diamonds.”
“Exactly. And she thinks you’re connected, too. I checked the logs and we did impound the car you described. It was a rental, made with a credit card to a woman named Amy Morris. Have you heard that name before?”
“No.”
“You’re not helping.”
“I’m trying.” Actually, I was lying again. Amy Morris was the name I first heard from the man who called Matt Pennington’s office. That man was still waiting for me, as Pennington, to call him back.
Vare said, “I ran her and nothing. Nothing! The credit card had only been used once to rent that car. She used a North Dakota driver’s license that was fake.”
“She’s a professional assassin. She’s got the tradecraft.”
“But who the hell is she and why is she here?”
“I think she’s here to kill Mike Peralta and everybody close to him.”
“Sharon’s okay…”
“She has FBI agents all over her. But when did the woman first show up? On the road to Ash Fork Friday night. I was driving Sharon’s car and she was with me. This Morris woman was dressed like DPS, pulled out her gun and was ready to shoot me. She would have killed us both if the FBI unit following us hadn’t pulled off the freeway at that moment. Morris gets in her car and leaves. The next time I see her is Saturday night outside our house. By that time, Sharon had a protective cordon outside her house. We didn’t.”
Vare actually let me complete several sentences. She drummed her right fingers on the steering wheel, stared ahead. I could see the gears turning and that made me uncomfortable. Kate Vare had good gears.
“None of this makes sense, Mapstone. Peralta shot a guy, some old man who has a PI license, he stole the diamonds, stashed them in some woman’s old Toyota, and disappeared. He doesn’t even have the stones.”
Maybe Strawberry Death doesn’t know that. Maybe she’s simply out for revenge, whether the diamonds were recovered or not. I speculated out loud without giving away too much. I was relieved that she discounted Ed Cartwright as “some old man.”
She said, “Where is that suitcase? Does Chandler have it? I want to go through it. Maybe the shipment wasn’t even the real diamonds…”
The gears were catching correctly. I told her Horace Mann had taken it into evidence.
“Fuck! Is Peralta guilty or is he running some kind of operation?” Her eyes bore into me.
I didn’t dare even blink. “He’s not guilty of a robbery. Lindsey checked his finances on Saturday. He’s got plenty of money. There’s no motive. If he’s running an operation, he never told me.”
“FBI?” she said. “Peralta and Eric Pham were tight.”
“Pham’s been sent to the Arctic Circle.”
“Then DEA or ATF. The ATF chief lives right down the street from you.”
“She took a post in France.”
“So what?” Vare said. “This thing has cartel written all over it. They use diamonds as a substitute for currency to pay for cross-border shipments of drugs, or to settle drug debts.”
“Peralta hates the cartels,” I said. “But he never told me he was doing anything more than working as a guard on the diamond shipment.”
“Maybe he wanted to protect you?”
I shrugged. “It didn’t succeed.” I waited a few beats. Then, “Who is the go-to diamond fence in Phoenix?”
I already knew the answer. The only surprise was that she wasn’t already thinking that way. She shook her head and promised to find out.
“If you find that person, the pieces might come together,” I said. “But you’re poaching in a federal case.”
“Fuck them.” Her tone was adamant. “This is my town.”
She started the car but didn’t leave.
“Did you know that Mann and Sheriff Meltdown are friends?”
My cheek and eye started burning insistently. “No.”
“Oh, yeah. They were in the Bureau together, both stationed in Minneapolis and Chicago at the same time. They were partners for seven years. Meltdown was best man at Horace Mann’s wedding. I asked around. Something is really wrong here. No offense, but Meltdown didn’t bring you back to the Sheriff’s Office because you’re such a brilliant cop. He…”
This time I interrupted to finish her sentence: “He did it because Horace Mann wants me out of the way.”
I stared out at the shabby streetscape, felt like the idiot she had described.
Vare pushed my elbow. “You are good at finding trouble, Mapstone. So go do it. Get in the way. But keep me in the loop. One more thing. If this Amy Morris is out there, she’s not going away and she’s coming for you. So as much as you love that wheel gun, you’d better carry more firepower. Now go find trouble. Call me, Mapstone.”
She stomped on the gas and fishtailed out onto Twenty-fourth heading south as the sprinkles turned into a hard rain.
Chapter Thirty-one
Lindsey’s color had returned and the medicos were happy with her vital signs. For the first time, the hard realist inside me began to have hope.
I read her some favorite Emily Dickinson. But not about death kindly stopping for me.