After we lost the baby, Lindsey could barely endure being touched. That changed yesterday as we bounced the historic floorboards in the garage apartment. My wife, who had never even used the word “ass” before, was now talking dirty during sex.
I supposed I should thank the son of a bitch.
Now I was slipping my report on Grace Hunter into a file folder when the office phone rang and the readout was a San Diego area code.
“This is Detective Sanchez with the San Diego Police,” came a pleasant voice on the other end. So Isabel Sanchez was going to talk to me after all.
“How may I help you?”
“How about opening your gate so I can come in.”
This was not good. I wished Peralta were here but pressed the button to open the gate.
The night detective was about five-four with a size two figure, dark eyes with long lashes, and long, black hair that looked as if it had caught a gust off the Pacific at that exact second. Her pregnancy was also beginning to show. The man with her was a few inches shorter than me but very buff with yellow surfer-boy hair. San Diego had the best-looking cops in the country.
“This is my partner, Detective Jones,” she said. I invited them to sit down, thinking: sure, Jones-he probably had multiple IDs and aliases, too.
“Deputy Chief Kimbrough speaks highly of you,” she said.
“That’s nice. He’s a great cop.”
“That’s why we’re not filing a charge to ask our friends in Phoenix to arrest you on,” said the pleasant voice.
So it was going to be like this.
Several charges came to mind, but she wouldn’t know about those.
I said quietly, “I was a victim of a crime in your city.”
“I can understand how you might still feel badge-heavy, Mapstone,” said Jones, who, with his mean little eyes, looked exactly like a badge-heavy cop. “But you’re not a deputy sheriff anymore.”
We went through this small talk, all designed to get a rise out of me, for about ten minutes. None of it worked. Jones gave me the cop stare. I returned it with the amiable look of a concerned civilian. I didn’t even feel the need to bring up their rushed and shoddy investigation into Grace’s death. From their attitude, it seemed clear that Kimbrough had already done that, based on my report that Peralta had emailed to him yesterday.
Sanchez said, “Grace Hunter phoned your office the day she died.”
I looked at her evenly, which probably made her more suspicious. But this was the way I always reacted to shocking news. It took me a moment to deny it, but then she produced a copy of the LUDs-local usage details-from Grace’s phone.
She handed me the sheet. Sure enough, our 602 area code number stood out, call placed at four-ten p.m. on the day she died. The call lasted two minutes. I memorized Grace’s phone number to write down once they had left.
“Care to explain?” Sanchez looked at me sweetly.
I cared a great deal and had no explanation. I turned on my laptop and opened up the office calendar. It showed that Peralta had given a speech that afternoon at a law-enforcement conference. We hadn’t been in the office when the call came in. No one had left a message. Sanchez walked around, looked over my shoulder, and examined the listing.
“How long did you know Grace Hunter?” Jones asked unsweetly.
“I didn’t know her when she was alive. There was no message left here. You can see from the LUD that it was a quick call. It probably rang to the answering machine and the caller hung up.”
Jones leaned forward in his chair. “Want to try again?”
“No.”
We sat for a good five minutes with only the sound of the air conditioner to keep us company. I struggled to maintain my agreeable, relaxed look, but the reality was that it sucked being on the other side of an interrogation. I wasn’t used to it. This would be a good time for Peralta to arrive.
“It seems too coincidental,” Sanchez said, walking in a circle around the office, studying the large, framed maps of Arizona and Phoenix that I had bought at Wide World of Maps to decorate the place. “You go to San Diego and find her husband, Tim Lewis, murdered. His apartment blows up. Now we know that Grace Hunter called you before she died.”
“If she did, we didn’t know that,” I said. So they were married. “And Tim was a client. He asked us to look into her suspicious death…”
“We know all that.” Detective Jones dismissed me with a chop of his hand. “We found your receipt in the blast debris. Hand written on blank paper and signed by you. Real professional operation you have going here, Mapstone. No answering service. Hand-written records.”
It was my turn to lean toward him. “We all have our shortcomings, Jones. Like when Tim filed a missing person’s report on Grace with your department and nobody made the connection that she was already dead and misclassified as a suicide.”
Jones’ ears started turning red.
“Wait for me in the car, Brent,” Sanchez said. He noisily pushed back the chair and slammed the door behind him.
She leaned against Peralta’s desk and watched her partner leave, then turned her head toward me.
“Are you the good cop?” I asked.
“Dream on. So no call from Grace Hunter?”
“We never talked to her.”
“But she called you.”
“Somebody called here with her phone. She was found dead with a new phone that didn’t have any called numbers on it. That was in your report.”
Sanchez persisted. “Why would this somebody call here?”
I told her the truth: I didn’t know. Maybe it was Tim, using her phone. Considering he didn’t know she was dead when I first met him, that seemed unlikely, but no need to tell her that.
I didn’t say how this call to our office indicated that whoever killed Grace, set off the Claymore mine, and took the baby had made that call to frame us, or at least slow us down, knowing the police would track the LUDs. This had been planned well ahead of the moment Felix walked in that door.
The only alternative was that Grace herself had actually tried to call us. But why? She didn’t even know us.
“I can make your life miserable.” Sanchez sat in the chair in front of my desk, crossed her legs, and placed long fingers protectively across her belly. “Losing your license will only be the start of the hurt I can put on you.”
“I don’t doubt it,” I said. “But Kimbrough and Peralta go back a long way, and you’ve got a bungled investigation on your hands. Let me ask you a question, if you don’t mind: you pulled Grace’s LUDs. Do they match with the phone found in her purse that night?”
Sanchez deflated by degrees. Even her hair deflated.
“No. They don’t match. The phone she was carrying that night was scrubbed clean of recent calls. We traced it to a seventy-year-old woman who lives on Clairemont Mesa. It was stolen from her in a purse snatching at Fashion Valley mall.”
“So whoever pushed her off that balcony took her real phone.”
She nodded.
“How is the hunt for the baby progressing?”
She forced her expression to harden. “That’s confidential law-enforcement information and you’re only a private dick.”
Robin’s words again. I stifled a smile.
“Come on, Isabel. You don’t have to mimic your jerk colleague.”
Two beats, three.
Then: “We don’t have anything. Not a damned thing. If I had known she was married or had a kid…” She shook her head. “The vic didn’t have any of that information in her purse. Her parents didn’t tell us, either.”