I told her.
She dropped her head. “Oh, no. No!”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I couldn’t,” she said. “Then you would have known I had the diamonds.”
“So all the way up to Ash Fork and back, we had them in the trunk.”
“Yes.”
“In Ash Fork, the old cowboy told me he got into a car with some men. What about that?”
She sighed. “He told me there was a man up there who would let him borrow a car and lie convincingly to the FBI about him getting in a car. He used to run a hunting lodge near Hell Canyon where Mike would go, back before I made him stop killing innocent animals. They remained friends.”
Orville Grainer. A patient of my grandfather, Doc Mapstone, my ass.
I slapped the wall in frustration, but my voice was resigned. “Oh, Sharon…”
“The landline was a lie, too. There is no landline. I made up the Paco stuff because he was adamant about you knowing there was real danger, after he was nearly ambushed in the garage.”
Who could lie better than a shrink?
“What about Saturday night, when somebody called you to the hospital” Was that Mike?”
“No,” she said. “I swear, David. That was a voice I didn’t recognize.”
She kept apologizing, tried to put her hand on my shoulder, but I brushed it away. I made no attempt to comfort her.
“So why the hell did you beg me to find him? What was that about?”
She shrugged. “I lost my nerve. He didn’t say anything about going to the High Country. I panicked.”
“But not enough to tell me the whole truth.”
She shook her head.
I said, “What happens if you text him the key word first, before you hear from him?”
She hesitated. “I don’t know. He was afraid the whole plan is compromised. He made me promise to wait for his signal before I did anything, including involving you.”
I thought about that. This would be a good time for a sensible person to walk back over to Johnnie’s and knock on the back door. Peralta must be overreacting. Or contact Kate Vare, bring in the entire cavalry. There was Ed Cartwright, too.
But for various reasons none of those options felt right. Cartwright had said he needed to lay low. The local law would muscle me out of the way and wreck the mission, which was to bring down the person who stole the diamonds. Pham…He was trustworthy, right? After the past six days, I trusted fewer and fewer people. I recalled the agents inside the former hotdog place watching me. Pham might be penetrated and not even know it. Then there was Strawberry Death. She belonged to me.
So I told Sharon to text “DM is bringing the dry cleaning per the dictaphone.” That should make it clear enough.
I watched as she typed the words and pressed send.
In only a few seconds the text appeared. “Yes.”
“What are you going to do?” she asked.
“Bring the rough.”
“But I don’t even know where he is.”
“I have a good idea,” I said. “Give me your car keys.” After I pocketed them, I added, “Watch over Lindsey.”
“But what if someone follows you?”
“That’s the idea.”
As I walked away, she was leaning against the wall sobbing.
Chapter Forty
I took the long skywalk to the parking garage, pulled the black duffel bag of weapons out of the Honda Prelude, and found Sharon’s car. I resisted the temptation to open the trunk. Out of the corner of my eye was a black SUV. So I tossed the duffel into the passenger’s side and settled into the driver’s seat. The fine German engineering cradled my hindquarters and made me realize how old everything in the Prelude was, right down to the seats.
When I pulled onto Third Avenue going south, the SUV was right behind me. But I made it a point to put down the ragtop so it was obvious Sharon was not behind the wheel. Here was a test about whether Mann’s FBI watchers took me seriously. Sure enough, by the time I had gone five blocks, the SUV turned left. Somebody had given an order.
Somebody might have a tracking device on the car anyway.
At the house, I changed into black jeans, black turtleneck, and Timberland boots. I moved quickly. That was a very expensive car sitting in my driveway.
Back in the convertible, I adjusted my cell so its GPS was working. My dark device was now trackable. Then I put the top up and drove, crossing over to Third Street and taking the ramp down to the Papago Freeway, which ran though Midtown under a park. Crossing all the lanes of traffic, I made it to the Loop 202 exit and went straight east on the Red Mountain Freeway, past the north end of Tempe, Town Lake, Sun Devil Stadium, lots of shopping schlock, and getting off at Country Club Drive in Mesa. I turned left, crossed the Salt River, and the road became the Beeline Highway.
The rain had scrubbed away the smog and the day was spectacular. Ahead of me towered Four Peaks and the Mazatzal Mountains. Ahead of me were the High Country and the town of Payson.
At the top of the hour, I listened to the radio news. Fresh developments on the Saturday night shooting of a deputy’s wife. The suspect was Amy Lisa Russell, a former Mountie. You could go on the station’s Web site to see her photo. Police were “tight-lipped” about a motive.
The motive that would satisfy a prosecutor was the stones.
Vare had invested hours in badgering the truth out of RCMP headquarters in Ottawa. Canada is a major producer of diamonds. While Amy Russell was chief of security at the Ekati mine, she compiled an impressive record of installing ever-better anti-theft technology and detaining employees who tried to sneak out little bits of rough.
It was only months after Russell resigned that mine officials realized that over a year between fifteen million and twenty million dollars in gem-quality rough had gone missing. The thefts happened a little at a time, but they added up impressively. Further investigation showed that the new security measures had proved essential to cloaking the drip-drip-drip heist. Only then was Russell seen as the obvious suspect and the RCMP was called in.
But she was missing, last known address in Vancouver.
I didn’t know how her stones ended up as FBI evidence. Or how Horace Mann figured in. Was he working with her and the Russians? Or Pamela Grayson really was Suspect Number One. Maybe Mann was innocent.
As to Amy Russell’s motive that would satisfy curious fellow humans…perhaps even she didn’t know. If I were a hot-shit Mountie, I wouldn’t throw away my career for diamonds. But then I hadn’t suffered through finding my family massacred. I didn’t feel this supernatural pull of the stones that locked onto so many, made them willing to steal, kill, take every risk. Changed them. And who the hell knows why anybody does anything?
The next few hours might tell.
My phone rang. Kate Vare.
“Where are you?” she asked.
“Lindsey woke up,” I said.
“That’s good,” she said. “I want to interview her.”
“Tomorrow. She’s in a lot of pain. They only let me talk to her for a few minutes before she fell asleep. She didn’t remember the shooting. Where are you?”
“Pennington’s office. We got in the safe. He had fifteen million in cash, twenty million in euro bearer bonds, some diamonds.”
After a long pause, she added, “He had a list of numbers. I’m guessing they’re offshore bank accounts.”
“I bet you find one for an FBI agent named Pamela Grayson. Or Horace Mann.”
“That will require bringing in the FBI, but yes.” She sounded very happy.
Then I told her what I had learned about Pennington’s actual job.
She didn’t answer.
I said, “So contact your DEA friend. They’re not going to like losing their own.”
She gave a heavy sigh. “This is a hell of a mess.”
The desert lowlands fell away as I passed the abortion of Fountain Hills-I remembered when it was a lovely saguaro forest-then the rugged enchantment of Red Mountain and the Indian casino and the cottonwood-lined Verde River at Fort McDowell.