“I understand.” I thought about the wall with our names painted in blood, information I had held back for our protection, and asked about fingerprints.
“The apartment was destroyed. It could take ATF weeks to sort through things and see if there are any usable prints.” She cleared her throat. “What do you make of Larry Zisman?”
I laid out the backgrounding I had done. Among a certain group, people who had lived here a long time, Zisman was still beloved for his college-football days. He was a razzle-dazzle quarterback in the glory years of Sun Devil football. He left less of a mark in the NFL, playing for five teams before being forced to retire early.
Zisman was a native Arizonan, attended the old East High School, and came back here to live after he retired from the NFL. Not only that, but to live year-round, not only keep a casita at one of the resorts for the winter months. He had started a non-profit to fund athletics for inner-city schools. He was in demand to give speeches at Kiwanis and Rotary, but removed enough from celebrity to be under the radar in a city with so many comings and goings.
“Did it surprise you that he had a lover on the side?”
I held out empty hands. “Who ever knows? But, yes, a little. From what I picked up, Larry Zip was so full of clean living that he might have been mistaken for a Mormon.”
“Do you think he killed Grace Hunter?”
“He’s physically capable of it. Former athlete. As a reserve officer, he would have gone through police academy training.”
She made a few notes.
I said, “It would be pretty stupid, though, to push her off his own condo balcony. He’d know that he would be the prime suspect. Better to strangle her and dump her body in the East County.”
“Unless,” she said, “it was an act of passion and he did it in the moment.”
“Right. But then you have the problem of the alibi, of him being on his boat.”
I was only trying to be convivial enough to get Detective Sanchez out of the office. This couldn’t be a mutually beneficial relationship because Peralta and I were concealing critical information. We had dug this hole a little scoop at a time, for good reasons at the moment, and now we were in deep. Too deep.
She thought about what I had said regarding Zisman, twirling a strand of her hair.
“I think he could have done it.”
“You interviewed him that night and cleared him,” I said.
“I read your report,” she said. “After our ass-chewing from Kimbrough and before we got on the plane, I dug a little more. The man at the next boat is a good friend with Zisman, you know. He’s from Arizona, too. You people really need to find another summer escape. The man is a developer who used Zisman as a spokesman for some of his properties. He might be lying for him.”
Zisman hadn’t figured in any of my theories about the case-not that I had formed many yet. I had been focused on getting out of that apartment before my body was turned into an aerosol state, and then on examining whether Grace had actually committed suicide.
“What about Tim?”
I cocked my head.
She went on. “Maybe he followed her to Zisman’s condo and found out she was cheating on him. Oldest motive in the world.”
To me, he barely had the guts to change a baby’s diaper, much less kill his wife or have the strength to do it in such a physical manner. Sure, people would surprise you, especially if money or sex were concerned. If so, he would have had to do a good job feigning surprise and sorrow when I told him Grace was dead. And been tough enough to slit his own throat and wire his apartment to explode.
I remembered a case in Scottsdale years ago, where a man cut the throats of his family, shot them, set the house on fire, and blew it up. They never caught him.
Detective Sanchez also didn’t know that our names had been written in blood on the apartment wall. Tim Lewis didn’t do that in the seconds before his carotid arteries bled out. Then there was yesterday’s phone call, Mister UNKNOWN saying he had detonated the Claymore and with his aerial theater implying he either had the baby or had murdered it.
“Tim was genuinely torn apart when I told him Grace was dead,” I said. “And remember, the pimp was beating him up when I got there. And if Tim was Grace’s killer, who took the baby?”
She sighed. “I wish I could keep things simple. Occam’s Razor, right? My ass is on the line for this now, and there’s a hundred local, state, and federal investigators living in my shit because of that explosion and kidnapping.”
I appreciated a woman who could quote the classics, but this was one instance where the least complex hypothesis wouldn’t do.
“The pimp is Keavon William Briscoe,” she said, spelling the first name. “He’s middling, not a big player. This is a guy who provides prostitutes for sailors and Marines on leave and runs streetwalkers, not escorts for big-time executives and legislators.”
“He claimed Grace worked for him.”
“Maybe she did. It wouldn’t be the first time a coed made some money on the side. The reason I don’t like Briscoe for this is that he was in jail on the night of April twenty-second, a parole violation. He had a baggie of pot in the car. He’ll probably go back to prison but it gives him an alibi for the one-eighty-seven.” The homicide.
“How did he find where she lived?”
“That’s the thing,” she said. “He was cruising O.B. on April twenty-first and said he saw her, followed her home, and was driving around the block for a parking space when a marked unit stopped him and arrested him. His sister didn’t bail him out for several days.”
“Did you execute a search warrant?”
“Don’t piss me off, Mapstone.” The dark eyes deepened. “I usually don’t fuck up cases. Yes, we gave his place a total colonoscopy and didn’t even find a cheap gun, much less explosives. That brings me back to Zisman. If Zisman found out that Grace was tricking on the side, he would have even more motive to kill her. Maybe it’s his baby. Maybe he has access to military explosives.”
I nodded, but I had seen this so many times: a detective latches onto a theory and does whatever it takes to make it stick and clear the case. Back when I untangled cold cases for the Sheriff’s Office, this was often the original sin in what turned out to be an unsolved case, or worse, one that sent an innocent person to prison.
I also appreciated the heat she was feeling from the brass.
Sanchez didn’t know the full extent of Grace’s entrepreneurship. It sounded as if she was unsure if she had even been a real prostitute or only a wild child.
“What about her friend, Addison?”
“Addison Conway,” Sanchez said. “Jones talked to her. She went back home to Oklahoma at the end of the semester. Grace hadn’t made a call to her since March.”
“So did Zisman and Grace have contact the day of her death?”
She sighed. “It’s not in the LUDs. I went back through two years of records and didn’t find his number. Grace called her mother on the twenty-first. She received a call from the human resources department at Qualcomm that same day. She called your office on the twenty-second. That’s the only call she made on the day she died. The other thing is, the semen inside her doesn’t match Tim’s DNA. In fact, it shows evidence that she had sex with three different men, but none of them her husband.”
The information exchange was definitely working in my favor. I was processing it, thinking out loud. “Grace had gone to a lot of trouble to drop out and get away from guys like Larry Zisman…”
A big smile played across her face. “Until she needed him. Come on, Mapstone, don’t be naïve. Babies are expensive and there’s college coming right up on a parent. You probably have kids, so you understand. She hadn’t even started her job at Qualcomm. Her bank account was drawn way down, only six hundred dollars.”