Dry Heat (5 page)

Chapter Seven

“We need to talk.”

Peralta turned to face us. We were sitting in the backseat of Chief Deputy Kimbrough’s ford Expedition. Kimbrough was driving and Peralta was talking. It was a lot of departmental brass to be shoved into one SUV.

Peralta said again, “We need to talk. Lindsey, did you hear of any threats, anything at all?”

“No,” she said. “Where are we going?”

“Around,” Peralta said.

“He doesn’t want to have to deal with Scottsdale PD and the feds,” Kimbrough said, gently grinning, making a half turn to look at us. The chief deputy was wearing a khaki summer suit already, a bad omen for a gentle spring. But, as usual, he carried it off beautifully. The suit was set off with a starched white shirt and abstract pattern blue bow tie that somehow all complemented the rich dark chocolate color of his skin. We were driving north on Scottsdale Road doing the speed limit. Cars and trucks howled impatiently past us.

“I don’t want to be screwing around in public if somebody’s trying to kill Lindsey,” Peralta said. “Better to be mobile.”

“You think that’s what this is?” I asked, a worry pain stabbing me at the bottom of my breastbone.

“How the hell would I know, Mapstone? It’s a damned strange coincidence if this wasn’t a hit. We shut down the Russian mob’s big profit engine. So they retaliate. Why else would somebody take out two feds, working for two separate agencies?”

“And,” Kimbrough said, “do it with that kind of firepower. I thought we won the Cold War? How the hell did the Russian mafia get to Phoenix?”

“It’s a global economy,’ I said. “More people on the move around the world than anytime in history. It’s all because we won the Cold War.”

“Thank you, professor,” Peralta grumbled. “But you’d think these Reds would stand out like a sore thumb here. I can even spot the people who just rolled in from Iowa.”

“You guys should get out more,” I said. “I hear Russian spoken by customers at Safeway.”

“That’s ’cause you live in the ’hood,” Kimbrough said, grinning broadly. “I’m sorry, the historic districts.”

“You’re just jealous,” Lindsey said.

To break the tension, I decided to needle Peralta a little. “To continue the lesson,” I said. He let out a groan. “There are some school districts in Phoenix where more than one hundred languages are spoken.”

“I can’t even get most deputies to learn Español,” Peralta sighed.

“And,” I added, “the Russians have been in the Salt River Valley a long time. I think the first big group came around 1911, to work in the sugar beet fields in Glendale.”

“What about Rachel?” Lindsey said, drumming her long, slender fingers on the tops of her thighs. Kimbrough said officers had checked Rachel’s apartment in Chandler, called her mother in Prescott, tracked down her boyfriend, who was on a business trip to Las Vegas. Scottsdale PD had done a search on foot over a ten-square-block area around the Martini Ranch. Nobody knew where she was.

“They’ve got her…” Lindsey said, her voice flat.

Peralta faced front and everyone fell into silence. Resorts and restaurants flashed past, the pleasure provinces of movie stars, corporate titans and the anonymous extremely wealthy. The lights of mountainside mansions twinkled at us from a safe distance. The police radio kept up a steady conversation about mayhem around the county. I half listened to it, and remembered the only time I met Rachel Pearson.

It was an after-work party at Portland’s restaurant, and Lindsey brought some of her colleagues from the Sheriff’s Office Cybercrimes Bureau. One was a young woman with a pleasant smile, golden brown hair, and a long hippie-retro dress. Rachel talked about her favorite restaurants in Cincinnati, where her family lived and she was raised. I would have imagined her as a schoolteacher or social worker, not a cop. Rachel said Phoenix had no soul.

Like Lindsey, Rachel was a sworn deputy who specialized in computer crime—in Rachel’s case, she had an aptitude for spotting the security weaknesses of large, corporate and governmental computer systems. So if Yuri’s mobsters had kidnapped her, they had a valuable asset. Here was a woman who could tell them how the task force had defeated their credit card scheme. She could tell them how the joint task force worked, maybe allow them into law enforcement computer systems. I didn’t imagine they would ask her politely. And that was only the start of the horrors one could imagine. Car lights flashed across the dark streets. She was out there somewhere. And we were blind and powerless to help her.

“We should have anticipated this,” Peralta said. He swung sideways in his seat, facing Kimbrough and then turning his big head in our direction to make the point. “I’ve talked to the FBI and other agencies. There were thirty members of the task force around the country, including the four in Phoenix. The others are safe. We’re going to arrange for protective custody.’

I looked at Lindsey. She said, “I don’t look good in pink jail jumpsuits, Sheriff.”

He didn’t smile.

“We have safe houses,” Kimbrough said. “We’re arranging for one now.”

Something on the back of my neck tightened. “Slow down,” I said. “We can’t just go into hiding. You”—I nodded toward Peralta—“never ran away from anybody who threatened you.”

“This is different,” Peralta said, staring out at the traffic, shaking his head slowly. His eyes looked like polished black stones. “Can you remember the last time a cop was kidnapped? Kidnapped! Christ! And she’s more a technician than a cop, just sitting in front of a computer screen. No offense, Lindsey. I know you’ve been a real deputy…”

Lindsey faced away, her dark pin-straight hair brushing her collar.

“Bad guys don’t play by the rules,” Peralta said, his deep voice seeming to make the windows hum with a tuning fork echo. “But when the bad guys start snatching cops out of public places, we’ve got a new ballgame. The old Sicilian Mafia wouldn’t have dared kidnap a cop. Even that dirtball Bobby Hamid wouldn’t do this…”

As Peralta spoke, I watched the upscale shopping strips and the gated housing developments slide by the window, all seeming so look-alike safe. But one of the September 11
^th
hijackers had lived briefly in Scottsdale. It was a good place for people with money who wanted to be left alone, who didn’t want to know their neighbors or to be known. Hell, Yuri could be right behind that ornate faux-Spanish gate.

Peralta continued, “These Russians are on the offensive. They don’t follow any of the old rules. We can’t take the chance of Lindsey getting killed. Or captured. Everybody who worked on the task force is being moved to safety right now.”

“You guys can’t go home,” Kimbrough said. “Not even for a change of clothes.”

“How long?” Lindsey asked.

“Two weeks, maybe longer,” Kimbrough said. “Depends on how quickly we can find Yuri and take him out.”

“I have an old cat,” she said. Her voice seemed suddenly tired. “He can’t be left alone.”

“We’ll send deputies for him,” Kimbrough said.

“My garden,” she said quietly.

“Where is this safe house?” I asked.

“We have several,” Kimbrough said.

“Do the taxpayers of Maricopa County know this?”

He just smiled.

“One is up on the highway north of Wickenburg,” Peralta said. “We’ve stashed a few witnesses there before. But it’s too far away from the cavalry if there’s trouble. I have someplace else in mind.”

“Well, this FBI badge thing can certainly wait,” I said. “Nothing’s happening anyway. We don’t even know if it’s a homicide.”

“No,” Peralta said, facing me. “You’re going to stay on that case. It’s important.”

“Working from a safe house? OK, you’re the boss.”

“No,” Peralta said again. “You need to get out in the field and find out what the hell happened to that badge and how it ended up with some homeless guy.”

The inside of the SUV was instantly claustrophobic. Peralta said, “I can’t have you coming and going from the safe house. The Russkies might follow you. If they can find these guys out for a drink in Scottsdale, they can sure as hell track that gigantic Oldsmobile you drive. Kimbrough can give you a voucher for a motel or whatever.”

“I’m not leaving Lindsey,” I said.

Peralta ignored me and started giving Kimbrough instructions on securing the departmental computer systems. I looked over at my lover, encased in her flak vest. An intense chill ran around my neck.

“Hey,” I said, louder. “I’m not leaving Lindsey alone.”

Everyone went silent. She held my hand. Her hand was warm and seemed small.

“David,” Kimbrough said, “this is just for a couple of weeks.”

“This is bullshit. You guys worked on this case for months and you never found Yuri. What are two weeks going to change? There is no way I am going two weeks or two hours without knowing she’s safe.”

“Results, Mapstone,” Peralta said. “I want results on your case.”

“My case has been open for more than half a century!” I argued. “It can wait a few more weeks.”

“It’s the murder of a federal agent,” Peralta said, “in my jurisdiction.”

Lindsey said, “I want my husband with me. If they came after me, they might come after him.”

Peralta said quietly, “It’s an order, Mapstone.”

“Then I want to take vacation,” I said. “Now.”

“You don’t get vacation,” Peralta said. “You’re a consultant.”

“I just got back from taking vacation time!”

“Then why do you want another vacation?”

I was getting angrier, rowing into a dangerous estuary with Peralta. It was too late to turn back, and I damned well didn’t want to. I said, “I quit.”

Kimbrough snorted, then fell silent. I saw his eyes in the rearview mirror, looking intently at me, telegraphing caution.

Finally, Peralta said, “You can’t quit.”

“What, and miss all this fun?” I said. “Not to mention the big salary and benefits. The generous vacation time. I quit.”

“You can’t quit, Mapstone,” Peralta said. “That’s an order, too.”

Kimbrough said, “You’re a former sheriff, Mapstone. You have to set an example.”

“I was acting sheriff for a month,” I said. “I’m not leaving Lindsey.”

Peralta turned to face me full on. The pores of his face seemed blackened with rage. Then swiveled and faced forward, I imagined the anger rippling the muscles of his thick neck. Kimbrough drove around the landscaped perimeter of the Scottsdale Princess. Inside the hotel, rich people were fucking, drinking, snorting coke, bragging to their mistresses and minions, sweating out the latest SEC investigation. Fifteen miles away, around downtown, the homeless camps were settling down for the night. Inside the black cabin of the Expedition, the radio once again broadcast a BOLO for Rachel Pearson. I was being sensible, I told myself. No way was I going to be away from Lindsey if she was in danger. And I was being bratty—I had already been away from her two weeks, time when my friend was dying and I could only think of being in the shelter of her arms.

“How about this,” Kimbrough said suddenly. “David goes to the safe house with Lindsey. But he continues to work the FBI badge case, too. We can get him a second car, and a transfer point. The transfer point is a garage that’s secluded, maybe attached to an apartment. So it makes sense for him to be going there. When he leaves the safe house, he makes sure nobody is following him, then drives to the transfer point and gets in his car to drive to the office. When he quits at the end of the day, he drives his car back to the transfer point—again, making sure nobody’s on his tail—changes to the second car, and drives back to Lindsey.”

It sounded OK to me. Peralta didn’t make a sound. The thick roll of flesh at the back of his neck tensed and rippled.

“Xray Two, Xray Two.” We all responded to the dispatcher’s voice. Xray Two was Kimbrough’s call sign.

“Xray Two,” Kimbrough said into the microphone.

“Xray Two,” said a cool female voice, “Chandler PD is responding to the Price Freeway at Ray Road, southbound lanes. A report of a female subject being thrown from a car or jumping from a car.”

Lindsey squeezed my hand until it started to ache.

The dispatcher continued, “Witness on a cell phone says the female subject has MCSO identification. PD and paramedics are en route now.”

Chapter Eight

Phoenix is less a city than a 1,500-square-mile collection of real estate ventures connected by city streets that have been widened into highways. When people say Phoenix has no soul, they’re really referring to this incoherent sprawlburg. From the mid-1950s until the bubble burst in the great real estate crash of 1990, the developers built skyscrapers along a five-mile length of Central Avenue. All this speculation took place a mile north of the city’s old downtown core, so some projects were called “midtown” and others farther north became “uptown.” The city finally sought to put a sheen of bureaucratic respectability on the mess and called the entire area the Central Corridor.

Take all the skyscrapers and concentrate them, and Phoenix would have as impressive a skyline as any American city outside New York or Chicago. But Phoenix was built by land speculators, not great city planners. So it ended up with a narrow strand of tall buildings running for miles north to south along Central. After 1990, the real estate boys abandoned the corridor for fresh speculative baubles in North Scottsdale and the East Valley. The result was that the heart of the city, after business hours Monday through Friday, became one of the quietest places in the urban West.

There’s a coral-colored, High Modernism condo tower that sits right in the middle of the corridor. Del Webb built it in the mid-1950s, when he was just a small-town Phoenix builder, and for decades it sat quietly as the city grew up around it. The tower flares off in an X-shaped floor plan with balconies and Bauhaus-inspired slab overhangs. It’s right at the foot of Cypress Street, not two blocks from our house. And that’s where Peralta stashed us, on the eighth floor. The place was expensively furnished, with large colorful abstract paintings on the wall. “A friend of the sheriff lets us use this place when he’s in Europe,” Kimbrough had said, Must be nice to have such friends. So after a weekend of deputies bringing over some necessities from home, Lindsey and I had done our best to settle into this odd “safe house.” Other deputies, officers with training in special weapons and tactics, had replaced the retired gentlemen who acted as concierges at the entrance to the building downstairs.

I felt uncomfortable sleeping in a stranger’s bed. Lindsey had bad dreams, She would wake up sure she was hearing the fighter jets that had protected the city in the days after September 11
^th
I couldn’t hear them. Lindsey was a walking array of high-charged senses. After I settled her down and felt her breathing become regular with sleep, I would swing out of bed and pad over to the huge windows I would watch the sparse traffic on Central, the little blocks of lights in the skyscrapers as the cleaning crews worked. Police choppers darted through the metropolitan sky like large fireflies. On clear nights, I could see the jagged black outline of the Sierra Estrella, for the bedroom faced southwest. For days, a hot wind came up in the late afternoon and forced the smog out.

Rachel Pearson had died beside a suburban freeway, out amid the endless red-tile-roof tract houses and shopping strips of Tuscan-themed fakery. The detectives figured she had come out of a vehicle that was doing at least one hundred miles per hour. By the time we got there, she was covered with a yellow tarp. But I couldn’t avoid seeing what looked like skid marks of blood and tissue left as the body hurtled down the oily, ribbed concrete, Smashed wire eyeglasses sat another seventy-five feet south, against a noise wall. Evidence technicians methodically marked everything with small red flags. The shoulder of the freeway was a poppy field of small red flags. Lindsey was convinced that Rachel had jumped. “She fought them,” Lindsey had said. “She knew she didn’t have a chance if she stayed in the car.”

Law officers came from around the state for Rachel’s funeral. Lindsey wasn’t allowed to leave the condo.

***

Peralta demanded that I work. I dreaded leaving Lindsey alone. But she kept her Glock on her belt, and an M-4 carbine, checked out from the sheriff’s armory, just inside the front door. So on Monday I began my new routine, one I repeated every morning and evening. I drove a commandeered white Crown Vic from the condo tower’s underground parking garage to the new Roosevelt Square apartments near downtown. They had a big parking garage, so I could wind my way to the top floor and swap the Vic for my yellow drug dealer’s Oldsmobile. The entire trip was made in curlicues and backtracks on the charming streets and alleys of Willo and the Roosevelt and Story historic districts. No one appeared to be following me.

Peralta had forbidden me to drive by the house on Cypress, but of course I did, first thing Monday morning. The trumpet vines and oleanders were starting to bloom and soon the palm trees would need trimming. There was a contractor’s van in the driveway that I knew held several well-armed deputies.

Finally, at my high-ceilinged office on the fourth floor of the old county courthouse, I had set to work on the case of FBI Special Agent John Pilgrim.

My mind was still on Friday night, on the dangers of the here and now. My desktop reinforced it, with an
Arizona Republic
sitting faceup, the lead headline shouting,
COPS AMBUSHED
, and, on a smaller deck,
COMPUTER SLEUTHS TARGETED BY RUSSIAN MOB
. The Scottsdale shooting had pushed aside the usual Phoenix menu of hit-and-runs, child drowning, dysfunctional state government, and real estate news.

I had to force my mind back to ancient history, the previous Thursday, when a homeless man had been found in a green pool in Maryvale, and sewn in his jacket had been the FBI badge of dead agent Pilgrim. A case that happily was ignored by the local news media.

I set up some basics that would help me tell the history of John Pilgrim, interpret it, maybe understand it. I wheeled over the large combination bulletin board and chalkboard to stand by my desk. On the bulletin board, I posted an index card for each player in the case—for now, John Pilgrim and the homeless John Doe. One part of my task would be to increase those cards, On the blackboard, I started a timeline with November 10, 1948, the day Pilgrim’s body was found. I ended the timeline on April 1, 2004, the day the body was found in the pool. Another task was to fill in the dates between. Maybe they were silly tasks. I needed tasks.

Monday was a records day. From the county’s deep-storage archives, I checked out or copied everything I could get my hands on regarding the Pilgrim case, and crime in general in 1948. There was actually a sizable Pilgrim file because the body had been found in what was then county jurisdiction. It was all joyous, tactile paper. Files made decades before databases, web browsers, and personal computers. But I noted numerous blank file spacers where reports should have been, a black-ink stamp saying simply “removed by FBI.” Other reports contained pages that had been blacked out, “redacted” in the legal language.

Then I braced myself for a confrontation with Kate Vare and went to Phoenix PD records. Kate was not in her cubicle in the Criminal Investigation Division, so my day got better. The PD records clerk was cooperative and friendly, and my rucksack of records grew.

Back at my office, armed with a Starbucks mocha, I began to read and make notes. By the end of the day, here were some of the things I knew:

John Pilgrim was thirty-eight years old. He had been an FBI agent for twelve years. He hadn’t served in the war. A photo of him showed a rather round-faced man with thin lips and dark hair. An earnest, serious face. A delicate long nose. I posted the photo on the bulletin board. Pilgrim had been born in Lexington, Kentucky, and had a law degree from the University of Kentucky. He would have been one of the new breed of professional, degreed agents around which J. Edgar Hoover built the FBI somewhere in the 1930s. Pilgrim was posted to Phoenix in the spring of 1947.

Pilgrim was found floating in an irrigation canal in the late afternoon of Nov. 10, 1948. A farm worker there to let water into some lettuce fields found the body. I posted a city map on the bulletin board and marked where the body was found: near the present-day intersection of Fifty-first Avenue and Thomas. It was half a mile from where the homeless man would fall into the pool half a century later. What the hell did that mean? The landscape had changed from farms to suburbia to the new melting pot. I made a note to find a map of the old canal system.

I read the narrative of the lead county detective, typed on flimsy paper with a cockeyed “T” key. Pilgrim’s body was wearing a suit and tie. He artfully declined to mention the badge, or the gun, for that matter. The condition of the body made the investigators believe it had floated quite a distance. Pilgrim was last seen alive two days before, November 8, by his partner, Agent Renzetti. Pilgrim told Renzetti he was going to work late that night, running down a lead. The report didn’t mention the nature of the lead.

I paged through the detective’s notebooks, handwriting in blue ink, and set them aside for later. The dust from the old files made me sneeze.

The coroner’s report, a Photostat with white type blaring out of black background, said Pilgrim had one gunshot wound to the heart. He was dead when his body went into the water. The bullet was a .38 caliber. This report was heavily censored, whole paragraphs wiped out like a landscape in a snowstorm. But they hadn’t removed the last page. I held it in my fingers for at least a full minute. I can’t tell you if I was breathing or not. For at the bottom of the coroner’s report was the signature, Philip Mapstone.

My grandfather.

My grandfather had been a dentist, and he had died in 1977. And as to what his signature was doing on a line that said “coroner,” I had not a clue. When I talked to Peralta on Tuesday, he said it probably didn’t mean anything. The old coroner system, which predated the science and professionalism of medical examiners, was very informal, and a coroner’s jury might be led by a lawyer, an ordinary citizen, a medical doctor, even a dentist. Whatever the reason, the Pilgrim case suddenly grew personal. I didn’t like it.

On Tuesday I received a gift. The medical examiner’s office reported that the homeless man had died of apparently natural causes. Kate Vare sent me a suspiciously friendly e-mail that morning, saying she was taking herself off the case. I wasn’t sure she could just do that. She was a cold case expert and this was not just cold but freezing. But I wasn’t going to argue. She was needed on the case of the missing teenage girl. The abduction had several disturbing similarities to cases in the 1980s, and Kate said she would be working on analyzing those links. In the ’80s, two girls in their young teens were taken from their parents’ houses in well-to-do north Phoenix neighborhoods. They were raped and murdered, and the cases were never solved. Now another girl was missing. The media were going berserk. I overcame my mistrust of Kate’s sharp features, and wished her well.

The homeless man had died of natural causes and then some. Although he suffered a massive heart attack before falling into the pool, he was also dying of lung cancer, congestive heart failure, and untreated diabetes. The medical examiner speculated the man had “coded out” on the edge of the pool and tumbled in headfirst. It wasn’t a homicide. It was just very damned strange. And whether he was murdered or not, my case was still alive because of the FBI badge sewn into his jacket. When I briefed Peralta and Eric Pham, they agreed I should continue on the case alone. I reminded Pham that the bureau still owed me access to the Pilgrim records, and he said he’d make another call to his bosses to get me clearance.

For now, the Pilgrim case was mine.