“And losing your child,” she said. “You two have gone through so much loss in such a short time. But I don’t want to see this destroy two people I love. Your child wouldn’t want that. Robin wouldn’t want that.”
I realized my fists were balled up and forced my hands to relax. “We’ll never know, now will we?”
“Mike told me how you chose not to kill the woman who shot Robin,” she said. “The David I know would have made that choice.”
I didn’t answer. It was true: I stalked her, found her, but turned her over to the cops. What Sharon didn’t know was that I had the woman on her knees with a dishrag in her mouth, and in my hands I held the assassin’s.22 caliber pistol with a silencer. I was about to pull the trigger when my cell phone rang and the readout said, “Lindsey.” So I didn’t pull the trigger. Part of me still regretted it. Nor did Sharon know that the better angels of my nature watched helplessly as I wrapped duct tape around the gangster’s mouth and let the Zetas crew carry him out of his Witness Protection Program-funded suburban Chandler house. Or how I rolled the pieces into place for his hit man to be on the receiving end of a hit himself in jail.
I didn’t regret those things.
Sharon said, “You have to be willing to give it time. Lindsey loves you. That’s why she’s here.”
Time again. As if I had it.
I said, “I’m really trying.”
Sharon hugged me and whispered for me to be good to myself. I didn’t know how. We walked back into the office to greet Lindsey and Peralta.
“There’s a tracker on his truck, too,” Lindsey said.
“She has a very cool scanner.” Peralta was like a little kid. He was enamored with gadgets. He was enamored with Lindsey. Who wasn’t?
He went on: “It picked the tracker right up. Might be a good idea to check the whole office.” He added, “If you don’t mind.”
Lindsey smiled politely. “This tracking device is identical to the one on the Honda. It’s not a logger, the thing people use to follow the movements of a cheating lover. The logger maps out their movements and then you can see where they’ve been. These are real-time trackers that feed right into a Google map display in a following car. They want to be able to follow at a safe distance and not be detected.”
“Are they sophisticated?” Peralta asked.
“Not really,” she said. “They’re certainly not federal issue. But they’re battery operated. The battery might last a month if they track the car an hour or two a day. Less if they track us for more time or the heat really kicks up. Otherwise, they have to replace the batteries.” She sighed. “Or they’re on a limited timeline so it doesn’t matter.”
After Lindsey was done, I told Peralta about my review of the security camera. The man with the high-and-tight hair was casing the place.
Peralta sat on the edge of his desk. “It’s time to take the war to these assholes.”
My anger had been replaced with exhaustion.
“It’s over.” I held out the truck-stop cell phone. “It’s been twenty-four hours since he’s called.” I was about to say, “The baby is dead,” but a look at Lindsey stopped me.
Peralta shook his Easter Island head. “If it was over, that guy wouldn’t have been on our property, searching the Prelude. We need to shake things up. Here’s how we’re going to do it.”
27
An ancient Greek poet wrote, “The fox knows many things but the hedgehog knows one big thing.” The philosopher Isaiah Berlin turned that into an influential essay on writers and intellectuals. I was usually a fox. The kidnapping had made me a hedgehog. The single experience defining our lives right now was the kidnapping.
No matter how many law-enforcement agencies were investigating it, I had received the call. I had been bombed with the bloody baby doll-a warning, according to Peralta. It was certainly done in a way that got my attention. The caller told me he had something I wanted. It could only be Tim and Grace’s baby. And he said I had something he wanted. That could only be the flash drive. But how did that make sense? He had to know that we would break the encryption and download the client names.
Lindsey wondered if some information was hidden elsewhere on the drive. If so, that could make this particular piece of plastic very valuable, and Mister UNKNOWN was assuming we didn’t know the hidden data were there. Finding it was another task for her.
My task was to be bait.
Peralta called the shots. He had investigated hundreds of kidnappings. I had solved only one, from 1940. So I had to follow his lead.
At sundown, I went out alone in the Honda Prelude. Well, not quite alone: for company I had Mister Colt Python and Messrs. Smith and Wesson with the Airlite. And several Speedloaders of extra ammo for each revolver. I also had two cell phones: my new iPhone was plugged into my ears and the truck-stop cell, whose number UNKNOWN had, was on the seat beside me.
I drove east on Camelback Road, a spectacular orange sunset to my back, maddeningly thick traffic ahead of me. It used to be that if you went the speed limit in the city of Phoenix, you would make every light with only a few exceptions. Now the freeway entrances and a few million more people had complicated that, so I ended up missing almost every light. It gave me a chance to see the massive ugliness of a city that had grown so fast it hadn’t had time to clean up after itself. Things would be better in full dark. Phoenix was beautiful at night.
Peralta was on the phone. “I’m about half a mile behind you, giving you plenty of room.”
“Where’s the tracker on your truck?”
“It’s sitting on a table at your house, like a good captured tracker.”
That made me laugh. I stopped when he told me Lindsey was with him. Not only did she have work to do, most of all I didn’t want her in danger if this excursion went sideways. I kept that to myself.
“Where’s Sharon?”
“She’s renting us a motel room.”
That was new. I decided not to ask questions but to focus on my task.
The real estate got nicer at Twenty-Fourth Street, with its alternative downtown of office towers, fancy condos, and the Ritz Carlton. The magical Biltmore Fashion Park had gotten a facelift a few years back and now looked like any suburban mall. Half a mile north was the entrance to the Biltmore resort. Only a few blocks south, the once solidly middle-class neighborhoods had turned over. Now people called it “The Sonoran Biltmore.”
I swam the traffic current headed to Scottsdale. If someone were following me, I would never know it. But I deliberately avoided any cute tactics to lose a tail. I wanted a tail. Camelback Mountain loomed straight in front, its head rising first. At Forty-Fourth Street, I turned left and climbed gradually into Paradise Valley.
The road turned east and became McDonald Drive. I wanted to look up and see the Praying Monk formation on the camel’s head, but too many headlights intruded. Some toff honked at me for not going the mandatory fifteen miles over the speed limit, then sped around me in his BMW. Phoenicians never used to honk. I used to own a BMW. Patty gave it to me. Lindsey wasn’t sorry when some bad guys pushed it out of a parking garage three stories down into Adams Street. I wanted to do the same with this prick.
After the big intersection at Tatum Drive, McDonald calmed down. The area became low-density and very expensive residential, with few streetlights, no sidewalks, and plenty of gates. One would never know that a huge city enveloped this blessed precinct on every side. The road ran to the north of Camelback Mountain. Across Paradise Valley was the mass of Mummy Mountain. I never ceased being moved by these works of nature and how they stood out darker than the night sky. For a few seconds my rearview mirror held no headlights. Then some appeared in the distance. My gut tightened.