“Here.”
Pham froze the screen. Peralta had stopped at the outermost bank of parking. The truck was beside an old Toyota. The one belonging to Catalina Ramos.
The action moved forward slowly. As I had suspected, Peralta used a Slim Jim to open the driver’s side, from which he could pop the trunk. He dumped the suitcase inside, closed the trunk, and drove away.
“This is where things went sideways?” I asked.
“No,” Pham said. “We planned for him to do this so the GPS tracker in the suitcase would be useless.”
“That doesn’t make sense,” I said. “If you think Grayson is the bad guy, why not let her follow the tracker? She’d have access to that technology.”
“It would be too easy.” Pham’s hand was tightly gripping the computer mouse. “Grayson might suspect something.”
As he talked, I thought about Horace Mann. He would be even more bulletproof. If he recovered the diamonds aboveboard, he’d be a hero. Even if the rough were in the hidden compartment, there would be no probable cause to arrest him. Quite the opposite. If he found the suitcase alone, he would have time to take the rough unobserved. But Peralta beat him to it.
He continued to talk about Grayson. “She needed to see that Peralta had found the hidden rough and taken it. That would rattle her. So we planned for Peralta to dump the suitcase.”
“It’s a hell of a gamble when Chandler Police was converging on the mall.”
“Peralta is a cool cat.”
He was that.
Pham continued the footage as the truck rolled out on Chandler Boulevard, pulled to the curb as two police cruisers raced past with lights going-there was no sound on the video. A quick left turn and he was on the 101 freeway traveling north in moderate traffic.
I asked, “Where did you get this?”
“A drone.”
The video continued to follow him as he drove north, taking the interchange to the Superstition Freeway and popping out of the concrete spaghetti going west. Another four miles and he hit wide Interstate 10. The immediate direction was north into Tempe, then it would veer west into Phoenix.
Pham said, “The city cops don’t even have a description or tag of the truck by this point.” He seemed very proud of himself and his plan.
Next, something odd happened. Before the interstate curved west, Peralta got off on Broadway and drove north into mundane, low-rise office buildings and warehouses. No, he was going to Rio Salado College, one of the branches of the huge community college system. It was also where KJZZ, the NPR station, had its studios. The drone hovered and zoomed in on the truck entering the parking garage.
“By this time, we calculated that the scene would start to be sorted out. The asset was not going to talk. He was wounded, after all. He played even more disoriented. But the cops would eventually know Peralta was the other guard. So this seemed like a good place for him to change his license tag.”
He fast-forwarded to the truck leaving and returning to the freeway.
“Wait,” I said. “How much time elapsed?”
He pointed to a small digital readout on the corner of the screen. “Twenty-one minutes.”
I said, “That’s a damned long time for a gear-head like Peralta to change one tag.”
He let the question pass.
“So you want to know what went wrong,” Pham said. “Peralta had a tracker in his boot. It never activated. The next sign we have of him is in Ash Fork. He was never supposed to go to the High Country. He was supposed to dump the truck and hole up in a motel room with us watching him.”
“And?”
“The Russians. Peralta would wait three days and contact the people who engaged our asset as diamond guard. Offer to sell the diamonds back to them. We have all their phones and computers monitored. So either they would call the person from the Bureau who was their partner or she would call them. By that time, she’d have seen the news coverage. She’d know the diamonds she worked so hard to steal and get this far were gone. When Peralta set up the meet, we’d get them all.”
“Did Peralta know the names of the suspected agents?”
Pham shook his head.
“So if he heard Horace Mann briefing the press on his truck radio, that name wouldn’t mean anything? It wouldn’t cause him to change course?”
“No. Why would it? Horace Mann is not a suspect, Doctor Mapstone.”
“Then why are you here? Does Mann know you’re running this?”
He hesitated, then shook his head. “This is about redundancy,” he said. “About compartmentalization. Washington insisted on this. It says nothing about Horace Mann’s competence.”
The Russian had spoken of compartmentalization, too. What could go wrong? I could imagine two sets of FBI agents getting into a gunfight.
I wasn’t reassured about Mann, either. One reason why Peralta had left the first business card, the one saying I had nothing to do with the diamond robbery, might have been an attempt to protect me from suspicion. On the other hand, why would the FBI believe the writings of a wanted man? Maybe that first card was meant for me, to telegraph that all was not well with this very complicated operation.
I said, “What about Matt Pennington?”
“That came from Peralta via you,” he said.
“He wasn’t in the mix? He’s on the white board.”
“Only because of Peralta’s note to you, which you informed our asset about. As you know, when Pennington was in the Navy he worked with Mexican authorities on drug interdiction. I’m trying to find out what happened with Pennington in Mexico. It’s a DEA matter and they’re not being forthcoming.”
I suspected that I would never find out. Pham had been as forthcoming as he would be and only because he wanted something only I could do.
I leaned in again. “So show me more of the drone footage.”
He looked down and spoke quietly. “I can’t. The drone couldn’t pass over Sky Harbor airspace. We lost him. Now it’s time for you to make that phone call.”
Chapter Thirty-three
Afterwards, I stood on the sidewalk by Thomas Road watching the traffic roll by, counting the number of giant pickup trucks that looked exactly like what Peralta drove.
My mind was fried and then sent back to the kitchen to be scrambled.
Lindsey was only a couple of hundred strides from where I stood, but every time I left the hospital I felt as if I was committing a small act of betrayal. Yes, there was nothing I could do to help her. Yes, I had promised Sharon I would find her husband, promised Ed Cartwright I would find his friend. It still felt lousy.
If Strawberry Death wanted to get me at that moment, all she needed to do was be behind the wheel of one of the trucks or SUVs traveling at fifty on Thomas and conquer the curb on the way to splattering me like a bug on the grille.
Pham would dismiss it as another 962 involving a pedestrian, radio code for accident with injuries. Or 963, accident with fatality. Such tragedies happened daily here, where the civic layout had become wide highways called city streets connecting real-estate enterprises. Nothing to see here. Move along.
I had spent my day at the extremes of the city, the mansion in Arcadia and the shabby former hot-dog place. Sure, it got worse. There were shanties in south Phoenix with dirt floors and homeless camps by the river bottom. There were thirty thousand-square-foot mansions on the sides of mountains. Neither extreme talked to the other.
Walking back into the hospital, I felt the anger in my steps. Why was Pham not buying my theory of the hitwoman? In fact, he had gone to the trouble of having his minions find a parolee that debunked my version. But the woman on the corrections sheet wasn’t Strawberry Death. One only learned her moves thanks to professional training and constant practice, and never being caught. She operated in the shadows.