It worried me. I didn’t like the idea of her perched on the landing above the living room. True, I had checked from the outside. No one could see her through the picture window. But a fresh memory of Robin shot and dying in the back yard shook me.
“We shouldn’t be here,” I said. “It’s not safe.”
I didn’t give a damn about the assurance I had gotten from the killer.
She said, “We’ve got an alarm. We’ve got guns. And we know where the bad guys are. Peralta says we’re safe.”
“He’s not omnipotent, no matter what he thinks.”
She nodded to the computer screen.
“Let me distract you. I went back a year, and Grace Hunter never left Ocean Beach, exactly like Tim told you. She would walk down to the market a few blocks away, here on Newport Avenue. All her calls were to Tim, her parents, and her friend, Addison. Now, check out April twenty-second. At two-fifty p.m., she leaves the apartment and walks north. It’s like she was going to the store. Maybe for diapers.”
I watched as Lindsey brought up a Google maps display.
“Here, at two-fifty-four, she’s really on the move.” I watched as the red line ran out of O.B. on Narragansett Avenue, turning north on Chatsworth, and east again on Nimitz Boulevard, heading toward downtown.
“Does she have to be making a call for this to show up?”
“Nope,” Lindsey said. “People would freak out if they knew how much data were being collected on them every minute. All that needs to happen here is for the phone to be turned on. But look here. At three-oh-five, they stop. Right here.”
The map showed the intersection of Nimitz and Locust. It was a nothing little street right before the big stoplight at Rosecrans on the Point Loma Peninsula.
“And that’s it. That’s where she stays.”
I thought about the missing hours.
“Or,” Lindsey said, “that’s where the phone stays.”
“What do you mean?”
“Grace’s phone never made it downtown. At four-ten, at Locust and Nimitz, the call was placed on this phone to your office. Grace might have made it. Or, she might have already been in that condo downtown. But at four-seventeen, the phone was turned off at the same location.”
I put my arm around her. “So somebody made contact with her on the way to the store. And she got into a vehicle. Somebody she knew. So she got in with him and they drove toward downtown. Toward Zisman’s condo. But what happened at Nimitz and Locust…” My voice trailed off. Things didn’t track.
Lindsey shook her head, her voice authoritative. “She had a baby waiting at home. She wouldn’t leave him for long. And Zisman wasn’t one of her johns. So why would she leave the baby and go to his place? No. Somebody snatched her off the street.”
I was fully awake now, the dream almost forgotten.
She opened a file. “Here’s where things get interesting. There was a call made from that phone a few minutes before the call to your office.”
“The San Diego cops didn’t have that on their LUDs.”
“They wouldn’t,” she said. “It was placed to a scrambling device. Very advanced, very expensive. It scrubs any of the conventional records of the call, even an incoming call. Only some government agencies and corporate executives use this. You have to know where to go in the cell-company databank to find the trail, then decrypt. But here it is. The call was five minutes long.”
“Are you sure nobody knew you were hacking all this?”
“Oh, somebody knew or will know. But what they saw was a low-end data breach coming from the People’s Republic of China.”
She opened another file: the list of Grace’s clients. “The scrambler call was made to this number. It’s his private line.” Another screen showed me his face on the cover of Fortune magazine. He looked my age yet was making more money in a week than I would make in my lifetime. Why did I need three college degrees?
“He runs one of the top venture-capital funds in the country,” she said. “He could afford this kind of security. All these executive types have protection. According to the records, he and Grace saw each other regularly for more than two years.”
I took it all in, or thought I did, amazed again at Lindsey’s talents.
I stopped myself from tapping my finger on her clean computer screen. “Then the phone was turned off for good, right there on Nimitz?”
“Not exactly. It was turned on again last Friday.”
Suddenly, the air conditioning felt too cold.
“Where is it?”
When she gave me the address, I grew colder still. Grace Hunter’s cell phone was in evidence storage at the Phoenix Police Department.
She said, “I answered all of Peralta’s questions and it hasn’t even been twenty-four hours.”
I let out a long breath. “You’re fast.”
She put her hand on my private parts. “I can be.”
31
We were at the Good Egg having breakfast four hours later. Like its neighbor Starbucks at Park Central, it was an institution in Midtown Phoenix. Unlike Sunday, the offices inside the nearby towers were open and the restaurant was busy. The morning was cool enough to sit outside, a dry seventy-nine degrees under the umbrellas, not even hot enough to require the misters. A pleasant dry breeze was coming in from the east. Light-rail trains cruised by on Central, clanging their bells. In her round, nerd-girl sunglasses, Lindsey looked like a spy.
Here we are, I thought, easy targets in assassination range. But the tracker on the Dodge Ram was far away and three Phoenix Police units were in the lot out front, the cops having coffee next door. It would take the bad guys at least a little time to break into the briefcase and even longer to figure out the flash drive.
To figure out they had been played for fools.
A pickup truck did arrive: Peralta’s. He was in a suit again and gave us a tiny nod as he walked toward the breezeway and the entrance. I knew it would take time for him to get out on the front patio. He was past his period after leaving office where he didn’t want to come here, didn’t want to see the assortment of politicos and officials who used the Good Egg for morning meetings. He had shifted his morning routine over to Urban Beans on Seventh Street.
But apparently he was willing to be seen again. I looked back and, sure enough, he was working the room, shaking hands, slapping backs, everyone having a great time. Where were they when he needed them? Now they had a sheriff who was a national embarrassment. He had a long conversation with Henry Sargent, who was sitting at the lunch counter. Henry was a retired honcho from Arizona Public Service.
“Lindsey!” Peralta sat down, full of morning pep. “What have you got for me?”
She went through it as the same waitress who had served him for the past fifteen years poured coffee and went off to place his order.
I read his face: satisfied, impressed, interested, troubled, more interested. An outsider would never know this from his seemingly immobile features, ones that could elicit confessions from criminals or compromises from county supervisors-or, this being Arizona, the other way around. But after so many years, I could see the slight rise of the right eyebrow, the tightening of his mouth, and the easing of a frown which didn’t mean his mind was easy. I wondered what troubled him. For me, it was the whole thing.
I asked, “When are we going to interview Zisman?”
He acknowledged me for the first time with a glance of disdain at my Starbucks mocha. “Not yet.”
“When?”
“Mapstone, you sound like an annoying child on a trip. ‘Are we there yet?’”
“Maybe. That makes you the dad who’s lost and is too stubborn to ask for directions.”
It was only me and Peralta being ourselves. Lindsey interrupted.
“Boys. I think the targets are definitely in the nest.”
She handed over her new iPad, to which she had added Google maps. Peralta studied it, and then handed it to me. Sure enough, both red dots had converged.