When the nurses left, I said, “I almost got her. But she escaped. I let you down. They say her name is Amy Morris. But the name doesn’t lead anywhere. Her driver’s license is bogus. If you were up and around, you’d identify her in a heartbeat.”
The ventilator’s rhythm was the only reply.
I was about to continue when a nurse returned to show me out.
As I sat down in the waiting room, my phone rang.
“Are you alone?”
It was Cartwright.
“Yes.”
“There’s good news and bad news. Which do you want first?”
“Good, please.” I felt my body bracing against the institutional furniture.
“Lindsey isn’t under investigation for anything. Melton lied to you. It turns out he was partners with Horace Mann…”
“I know. Kate Vare told me they worked together.”
“Vare? The Phoenix detective?”
“She’s pissed. She doesn’t like being shut out by the feds.”
“Melton wanted you distracted. He’s obviously working with Mann. Maybe your instincts weren’t wrong.”
“Meaning?” I asked.
“Meaning Pamela Grayson went back to her hotel. She visited her father in north Scottsdale. He retired and sold his business back in Ohio. We didn’t know she had a family connection here. Her visit might not be connected to the diamond theft. Now I wonder about Horace Mann, too. He might be a suspect, after all. The man was very prompt to volunteer to take over this investigation. Back in the Army, the first thing I learned was never to volunteer.”
I asked for the bad news.
After a long pause, “Lindsey had an affair with her boss.”
And several lovers while I was letting Robin seduce me. It was our time of madness. I didn’t tell him that or that all I wanted was to have her back with me. So I said I knew. No stranger can really see the inside of a marriage.
“I’m sorry, man. Anyway, time for you to make the phone call to the guy who contacted you in Matt Pennington’s office.”
I was suddenly exhausted again.
“Go have a hotdog at Johnnie’s across the street,” he said.
“Johnnie’s is closed.”
“Go to Johnnie’s,” he said. “Knock on the back door six times and be prepared to show your identification.”
“Should I come highly armed?”
“That would be a bad idea. Remember, back door.”
I thought he was going to end the call, but I heard a sigh. “One more thing, David. Don’t contact me again. I need to lay low for this operation to work and for me to keep my cover.”
I said, “I’m going to find Peralta. And I’m going to find the woman who shot Lindsey.”
“I know.” And he was gone.
Chapter Thirty-two
Johnnie had made the best dogs in central Phoenix but now his shop was another empty storefront facing Thomas Road. The windows were covered with brown paper. Still, I did as Cartwright told me and walked around back. Puddles had gathered in the rutted asphalt.
I stood against the wall behind the liquor store and waited. Situational awareness: No one seemed to be following me. The alley was empty.
The back door to Johnnie’s was white and battered, with a slit of a window guarded by bars. A sign was pasted to the center, black with orange letters, the kind you could buy at a hardware store: “Construction workers only.”
I rapped six times slowly.
A piece of paper peeled back from the slit, as if I were trying to get into a speakeasy. I held open my badge case until I heard a lock turn and the door opened long enough for me to step inside.
A big man with an assault rifle and ballistic vest told me to turn around and put my hands in the air to be searched. The lanyard around his neck showed an FBI identification.
“That won’t be necessary.”
It was Eric Pham.
“Anchorage is hell this time of year,” I said. “But with climate change, it will get better up there.”
He didn’t laugh. He had no sense of humor in the best of times. But in the best of times, he also dressed like a fed with a fussy streak. If it was a hundred ten degrees, he wore a suit, dimple perfectly centered in his tie, gold-and-blue FBI pin properly centered on his lapel. Today, he inhabited jeans and a baggy gray sweatshirt. It made him look much younger and not in a good way.
He and his team were also perfectly concealed. The FBI had recently built a huge new Phoenix field office, but it was way up north by Deer Valley Airport. The Bureau had been located in Midtown all my life, but even it had become another hustle in the sprawl engine tearing the city apart. Now this was the last place anyone would look for the feds.
“You weren’t supposed to be part of this.” He glared at me.
“Peralta made me a part.” I could glare, too. “He left the business card that said, ‘find Matt Pennington.’ Then this hitwoman…”
“We don’t know she’s a hitwoman or even a part of this operation.”
My temples started throbbing. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.
“Walk across the street to the ICU and tell that to my wife. Oh, you can’t because she’s in a coma after the hitwoman shot her and nearly killed her…”
“Calm down, Doctor Mapstone.”
So I was a doctor again.
I was about to go from zero to asshole in 3.6 seconds so I forced my temper down.
The room was dim, lit by a few overhead fluorescent lights long past their prime. The dingy tables from the restaurant had been set up with computers, two and three screens each, with four agents at work. All wore hoodies or T-shirts. They looked me over and went back to their screens.
Other than the computers, it looked nothing like an FBI control center from the movies of television. No expensively designed techno-wonder. A white board stood at one end of the room. Someone had sketched boxes with lettering inside:
PERALTA
RUSSIANS
SUSPECT AGENT
PENNINGTON
OTHER?
Lines connected some of the boxes. It didn’t seem very helpful.
Pham said, “Our asset tells me you found Pennington dead, a suicide.”
The asset being Ed Cartwright. Pham wouldn’t say his name even among this trusted group.
I said, “That’s what it was made to look like. The woman…”
“I understand why you’re obsessed with her, but there’s no evidence she has anything to do with this case.”
“Outside our house on Saturday night, she stuck a gun in my face and said, ‘Where are my stones?’ I don’t think she meant her rock collection. She said she would have preferred to ‘suicide me.’ Exactly what happened with Pennington. I disarmed her but she fought and ran. She had a backup gun and shot Lindsey.”
Pham’s finely chiseled features exuded skepticism.
“Are you sure that’s what she said? You had a gun pointed at you.”
“Yes!” The agents looked at me again and I lowered my voice. “She said something else, too. That she made Peralta a promise and killing us was part of it.”
“Let’s talk privately.” He led me into a cubbyhole made by two six-foot tilt-up panels. Inside was another table where Lindsey and I had probably eaten Chicago dogs many times. Now it was covered with files surrounding a desktop computer. On the wall was an FBI seal and framed photo of the president. Were it not for these totems, I would have thought we were in a mortgage boiler room from the days of the subprime boom.
Pham sat forward on his chair, perfect posture, and waited until I took the seat across from him.
He slid a paper toward me. It was from the Department of Corrections and showed a woman with stringy long hair and cellblock eyes.
“Fourteen years ago, her boyfriend beat her little girl to death. She helped him bury the body in the desert. Shallow grave. She called the police and told them her daughter had been taken by a Mexican man. This was while you were away, but it was a big deal in the media. Peralta interrogated her personally, played it perfectly, got her to confess and testify against the boyfriend. He went away for life and she was sentenced to fifteen years as an accessory.”