He also didn’t believe me about Horace Mann. I knew what I heard. I knew Mann was dirty.
Pham’s inattention stank: the hubris of a boss who had his mind made up, a massive amount of FBI ass-covering.
Another possibility chilled me. What if Pham was perfectly acquainted with her because Amy Morris was a government agent? She didn’t even have to be FBI. We had so many agencies guarding the so-called homeland now.
Like Cartwright, Pham had dismissed me but in his case with an odd mix of formality and fake-casual management jargon. “So don’t come back to this location, Doctor Mapstone. Don’t try to contact me. You don’t have the bandwidth to help in this space. So stay away.”
Stay away, my ass.
I retrieved my briefcase from the ICU nurses and went to the waiting room. I should have written up my interview with Diane Whitehouse to add to the murder book. As far as Eric Pham was concerned, I was done.
The phone call back had seemed to go well but the technicians weren’t able to get a fix on the man’s location. We agreed to meet at six tonight by the fountain in Scottsdale Fashion Square. Except I wouldn’t be there. I described one of Pham’s FBI agents as me, as Matt Pennington.
But I wasn’t done.
I thought about the white board at Johnnie’s, the boxes drawn in blue marker and labeled PERALTA, RUSSIANS, SUSPECT AGENT, PENNINGTON, OTHER?
It looked as if it had been drawn up and abandoned like some corporate initiative that went nowhere. And what was “other”?
I pulled out a pad and made some drawings of my own.
One was a starburst with Peralta at the center. I sketched lines out to boxes for me, Ed Cartwright, Eric Pham, Matt Pennington, and the unknown people Peralta had joined in Ash Fork after abandoning his truck at the derelict gas station on Route 66. These represented direct relationships to Mike Peralta.
I added a perpendicular line from the Russians to Cartwright. They had contacted him.
Next I added a box for Strawberry Death with lines to Pennington and me. I made dashes between her and Peralta. I had no physical proof they had made contact or knew each other, but she had told me she had made him a promise.
To be complete, I drew a connection between Horace Mann and me. He had interrogated me on Friday afternoon, summoned me to Ash Fork that night to unlock the gun compartment of the truck, and then didn’t order FBI surveillance of our house. That last had proved very useful to Strawberry Death.
What if she were working with him? If so, why was he so interested in having me dead? It had to be something more than what Kate Vare considered my ability to get in the way.
But the diagram wasn’t quite right.
The only immediate connection to Pennington was Peralta. I pulled out the business card and studied his printing: FIND MATT PENNINGTON.
The dead man wasn’t on the FBI’s radar. But he sure as hell was on somebody’s or Strawberry Death wouldn’t have “suicided” him only a few hours or even minutes before I found him. Who gained from his death? Nobody I could see. But he had information and either gave it up before he died, or…
Or he was that tough and committed. Why not? He was a Naval Academy grad who apparently worked on dangerous assignments.
Or he didn’t know and she killed him anyway.
I looked at the drawing, came up empty, and set it aside.
On the next sheet, I tried different thinking. If the crooks think of themselves as businessmen and some businessmen are crooks, why not look at the supply chain?
This produced boxes along a line. Inside the first was a question mark. After all, Pham wouldn’t tell me where those diamonds in evidence came from. From there, the line went to the FBI evidence control facility to Markovitz in New York to Chandler.
Going only that far raised questions. Why wouldn’t the rogue agent keep the diamonds himself? One obvious answer was to avoid being caught up if a search warrant was served on him. Maybe he didn’t have the contacts and distribution network-I was still thinking supply chain-to turn the rough into cash. That’s where the Russians came in.
And why did I know this much about the journey of these diamonds? One of their advantages was how they could disappear. They were small, easy to conceal, and carry across borders. Were we such great detectives in having this much information? Or was something else going on?
Perhaps I was being paranoid. Being shot at will do that.
After Chandler, I sketched the supply chain diagram in greater detail. Cartwright is shot and Peralta steals the suitcase. He pulls the switch in the parking lot, leaving the suitcase with the tracker in the trunk of Catalina Ramos’ Toyota and taking the hidden rough. He travels the freeway system to Rio Salado College where he goes in the parking garage for more than twenty minutes.
I drew a box for Ash Fork but only added a line of slashes. Too many unknowns.
My hand was about to draw more lines and boxes but it lingered on the Rio Salado box. Twenty minutes. A very long time to change a license plate, especially for a guy as mechanically skilled as Peralta.
I pulled out my iPhone and called Rio Salado College security.
Chapter Thirty-four
The badge did have benefits.
Within an hour, I was still sitting in the ICU waiting room but video camera footage from Friday was streaming on my MacBook Air as I talked to the security chief at Rio Salado.
We started with the camera trained on the entrance to the multi-story parking garage. It faced outward, so we saw the entrance to the parking and beyond it the street and front doors of the college.
At precisely 11:37 a.m., Peralta’s truck turned into the garage.
“Freeze that, please.”
He did and I studied the image. It was definitely Peralta. He had put on a Phoenix Suns ballcap.
I said, “Do you have cameras inside the garage?”
“On every floor.”
He flipped through several cameras and let them run. Peralta appeared on the third floor, drove halfway up, and backed into a parking space. I asked that he slow down the speed and watched as Peralta stepped out and went to the back of the pickup.
“Can you zoom in?”
He could. The light was bad and the image grainy, but Peralta stooped down behind the truck. Here he was changing the tag.
The footage continued to run. A shadow slipped under the camera and became a Chevy Impala. My stomach tightened.
“Slow it more,” I said.
The Chevy stopped directly in front of Peralta’s truck, blocking it. Strawberry Death stepped out. She was wearing a white top and blue jeans, her hair was down, falling below her shoulders.
She walked around the car and ran her hand on top of the truck’s hood. Checking to see if it was still warm from the engine.
She didn’t know he was there.
And then he popped up with his Glock drawn.
It was 11:42.
She had followed him, keeping enough distance not to be suspicious. I wished I could go back and study the tape from the FBI drone. It might have shown her tailing him from the mall.
Through the grainy footage I could see mouths moving. Her hands were empty. He had the drop on her.
“Rookie mistake…”
“Come again?” the security officer said.
“I’m talking to myself.”
She reluctantly turned around and walked to the front of the Chevy, Peralta behind her. Then she spread her feet and bent far forward on the hood, empty hands straight out. This was on his commands, no doubt, even though there was no sound. It put her at a disadvantage, being so off balance. If she tried to fight, he could kick one leg out and send her to the ground.
Something flashed. He produced handcuffs. And like thousands of times in his career, he cuffed her. Next he did a quick search and pulled something out of her back waistband. Some kind of pistol. He slid it into his own waistband and roughly pushed her to the passenger door, opened it, and tossed her in.