The Night Detectives (18 page)

34

It didn't really matter if the bad guys were tracking me now. They had bigger problems. So I didn't even bother to remove the spy device from the Prelude before I rolled off to catch the freeway system that would take me to Tempe. Fortunately, I saw the disaster of the Papago Freeway before I turned onto the Third Street on-ramp. Rush hour, or hours rather, was not allowing anybody to move at more than a slow crawl, if that. So I settled for the street grid.

By the time I got to Larry Zisman's house at The Lakes, the sun was down and it looked as if most everybody who lived on the cul-de-sac had made it home, closed their garage doors, and were watching television back in their Arizona rooms. Not a single other car was parked at the curb. The lights were still off at Zisman's place, but you never knew. Unlike houses in the historic districts, most of these homes focused activity away from the front and the street. Zisman could well be in his Arizona room watching the “police situation in Sunnyslope” unfold. If so, I could finally ask some questions.

At the moment I didn't give a damn if he was a reserve police officer. I wanted to sit across from him and watch his face and body language as he told me about the night Grace Hunter was pushed off the balcony of his condominium. He wasn't on her client list, so why did he claim she was his girlfriend? Former football star or no, Larry Zisman seemed an unlikely man to attract Grace. I had seen recent photos of Zisman: he had lost his athletic body to a gut and his face was puffy. It wasn't as if Grace needed more chances to, as my once semi-prudish wife puts it, fuck and suck.

I wanted to know who he was covering for: his son, Andrew? Edward Dowd? And where was he when Grace died? Was he really already at his boat? If so, why did he leave her with her murderer at the condo? This was only the beginning of the questions I intended to ask.

But when I set the tip of my toe on the step of the arched entranceway, I knew that he would not be giving me any answers.

The big answer popped me in the nose: that unique, fiendish sulfurous smell I had first encountered as a young deputy, the scent of a body that had been dead for a while. In an un-air-conditioned building in the Arizona heat, it would become noticeable within a day. Air conditioning gave you a little longer. Often mail carriers or neighbors would be knocked down by the odor halfway across the yard.

We called them “stinkers.”

A quick scan of the front door showed a mail slot. So no mail was piling up obtrusively outside. Maybe the mailman had a bad sense of smell. No newspapers were accumulating on the doorstep, either, but fewer people subscribed now, a sad thing for democracy.

It was tempting to walk around the house and look through a window. But that would definitely attract a neighborhood watch hotdog. So I walked back down the wide driveway toward the street, looking as if I belonged there in the warm suburban air, stealthily scanning to see if anyone was watching from the neighboring houses. Nobody seemed to be.

Out of the cul-se-sac, I drove north to Baseline Road and found a rare pay phone. There, I called 911 and reported a strange odor coming from the Zisman address. Larry Zip had thrown his last pass. Now I wondered if he had killed himself or become one more loose end for Dowd to tie up.

My phone rang. Peralta.

He was brief. “Get up here as fast as you can.”

35

He didn't have to say where “here” was. I drove as fast as I could to the parking lot on Seventh Street and Dunlap. Peralta's truck was moored beside a dozen marked and unmarked law-enforcement units, plus two giant command vans. All of the television stations had positioned satellite trucks there as well. Bright TV lights were focused ahead of me. I parked the Prelude and pushed my way through a crowd of civilians and cops.

Eric Pham, wearing a vest with “FBI” emblazoned on it, was reading a statement for the cameras. Peralta was standing beside him. He couldn't resist the cameras. He never could.

“….at five p.m., a SWAT team made entry into the home. A brief exchange of fire resulted in one man dead. Our preliminary information indicates he was armed with a semi-automatic rifle and fired on the officers. Five other men were taken into custody. A large cache of weapons was seized, including Claymore anti-personnel mines. We believe these mines were stolen from Fort Huachuca. We also took possession of computers and maps that indicate these individuals were planning to use the mines in attacks on shopping malls and federal facilities in the Phoenix area. We also believe they intended to use shoulder-fired missiles to shoot down an airliner landing or taking off from Sky Harbor Airport…”

His statement contained all the caveats about the early nature of the investigation and how he couldn't disclose further information that might compromise an ongoing probe.

“We believe,” he said, “that we have disrupted what could have been a catastrophic domestic terrorism attack.”

“Agent Pham!” A female reporter with perfect red hair shouted the question. “We have information that these men were members of the White Citizens Brigade, a domestic terror group. Is that true?”

“This was an organized, anti-government group. Beyond that, I'm not prepared to comment, Megan.” He was cool and unruffled as a cascade of further questions followed. What were the names of the suspects? Who was the man who was shot by SWAT? What were the specific targets the terrorists intended to strike? He gave up nothing.

My stomach was an acid bin. No mention of the baby. Why had I expected anything different?

“Is this connected to the explosion in San Diego last week?”

“It's too early for us to draw conclusions, Brahm.”

“What is former Sheriff Peralta doing here?” a reporter wanted to know.

Pham nodded knowingly. “Retired Sheriff Peralta is acting as a consultant for the bureau.”

When the press conference wrapped up, Peralta worked his way toward me like a slow-moving bulldozer, ignoring the journalists' questions as only he could do. As I had watched countless times over the years, he didn't answer but he worked the crowd. It was showtime all over again. It made me wonder if he intended to run for sheriff again someday, maybe when sanity returned to Arizona.

“Where were you?” He wrapped me in his big arm and steered me toward his truck. I thought:
I was rifling my wife's luggage, learning about her fuckathon in the nation's capital while I was sleeping with her younger sister in our marriage bed. A normal family. Any other questions?
I said, “I wanted to talk to Larry Zisman.”

“How'd it go?”

“He's been dead inside his house for some time. I called Tempe PD anonymously.”

“Balls. Get in.”

We closed out the noise with a swoosh of the doors and drove slowly out of the lot, turning east on Dunlap. The lights of the cars, streetlights, and houses rocketed by in streams of white and yellow, and ahead was the police roadblock of red and blue. As the road rose, the city lights spread out to my right in an endless jewel.

We are the night detectives. We would never be private investigators peeping on unfaithful husbands. That was not the trouble that we would chase, the trouble that would run us down. I would not write grand history in thrillingly reviewed best-sellers. I am with Gibbon, history being “little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind.” I am with Peralta, where we track it down armed. This is the job.

I gingerly fed my curiosity, afraid of what I might learn. “Are you a consultant for the FBI?”

“I guess we are now.”

“Are you holding out on me? Have you been playing a side game all along with Pham?”

“Jeez, Mapstone. No.”

I asked him what Pham was holding back from the press.

Peralta ticked off points with fingers on the hand that wasn't guiding the steering wheel. “The house was rented three months ago by Edward Dowd, using his own name. He wrote a check for a year's rent on a New York bank and it cleared without any problem. In this economy, the owner was glad to have a tenant who paid ahead. The suspects arrested are all confirmed members of the White Citizens Brigade, all former military. The Brigade is suspected of committing seven bank robberies in Arizona and Southern California over the past two years. It appears they used the money to fund their ordnance purchases, among other things…”

A Phoenix uni who looked about fifteen years old waved us through and we climbed up Dunlap as it narrowed and technically ended, turning into a dirt trail petering out against a metal barrier. Beyond it was the darkness of the Phoenix Mountain Preserve.

One sharp left turn put us at the house I had seen from television. It was built of gray cinder blocks with a wide overhanging roof. The trail made another turn to reach a two-car garage. Black-clad cops from various agencies were milling about, many with nothing to do but try to look busy and officious. The SWAT guys wore helmets, boots, body armor, and, beneath that, T-shirts that were two sizes too small. Dazzling floodlights, running on loud generators, illuminated the scene. A police chopper was hovering overhead, vainly playing its spotlight over the mountain preserve.

I slid to the dirt and walked with him as he laid it out.

The electricity and air conditioning had been shut off early. FBI and ATF negotiators had tried for hours over the landline to persuade the people inside to come out. They had refused. Meanwhile, a SWAT member had been able to snake a tiny night-vision-capable camera into the ventilation system so they could see inside some of the rooms. A robot had scouted the perimeter of the house to make sure it wasn't mined.

They had pumped tear gas into the vents at four-forty-five and then had broken down the front door, tossing in a flash-bang grenade. Only one suspect had returned fire and a tactical officer had put him down instantly with one shot. He had been airlifted to Mister Joe's but was dead when he hit the floor. The others had put down their weapons without a fight.

“It could have been really hairy,” Peralta said. It was interesting that he had walked onto so many crime scenes over the years that nobody thought to challenge him now.

Outside the front door, a tarp was spread. Most of it was covered with weapons: AR-15s, pump-action shotguns, assorted varieties of pistols, two shoulder-fired missiles, and enough crates of ammunition to make Ed Cartwright happy. The Claymores were probably safely in the custody of ATF. I barely paid attention.

“Where's the baby?”

“They didn't find him, Mapstone.”

“What about Dowd?”

“Him, neither.”

I used my hand to stop him at the door, no easy task given his bulk and momentum.

“What are you saying?”

His eyes shone black. “Dowd got away.”

“I knew it…” All the cops, all the jurisdictions and expensive toys and command vans and they couldn't make a simple collar. I started a cursing jag notable for its creativity.

He pinched my shoulder until I thought it would fall off and leaned in to whisper. “Play well with others.”

I did my best.

Evidence technicians were photographing the living room. The floor had traces of blood and was covered with yellow numbered markers. One marker was on the Halliburton briefcase. A laptop sat on a sofa, drawing another yellow tag. They had probably had plenty of time to realize the flash drive was phony, otherwise Dowd would have taken it with him.

My answer was next to evidence marker forty-two: the flash drive we planted in the expensive briefcase was shattered, as if by an angry boot. My feet felt as if they were sinking into the floor. The remains of the tear gas stung my lungs.

Another tech was taking inventory in the kitchen. The cabinets were fully stocked with canned goods, meals ready to eat, and bottles of water. A bedroom closet held body armor, helmets, and night-vision goggles.

“Dowd told them to make a stand here,” Peralta said. “Kill as many police as possible.”

“How did he get away?”

“Let me show you.”

He led me down a hallway and opened a door that revealed a staircase down. I led the way as he talked.

“The house was built in nineteen sixty-two by a doctor. He put a fallout shelter in the basement. It was the height of the Cold War.”

It was the year of the Cuban Missile Crisis, but I kept my mouth shut.

We came into a finished basement with wood paneling and an ancient pool table. He pointed to another, heavier door at the far end of the room. I stepped through that portal into a concrete-encased hallway that slanted down. Bare light bulbs protected by steel frames burned overhead. I started to sweat.

It reminded me of one of my maze dreams as I stepped more slowly, made a turn and went another twenty feet on a slanting concrete floor. Two doors were open. One led through thick walls into a shelter, maybe ten feet by ten feet, looking as if it hadn't been touched since Kennedy was president. A dusty yellow Geiger counter sat on a table. Ed Cartwright would look down his apocalyptic nose at such a primitive set-up.

The other door led outside, where a Phoenix cop stood guard. He greeted Peralta by name, as if the election had never happened.

We were at the bottom of the stubby hill. The house loomed above us.

“This is where Dowd probably got out while we were still staging,” Peralta said. “We didn't realize there was this escape route out.”

“What's this ‘we,' Lone Ranger?” I said sourly. “I said we should go in and do it ourselves instead of setting up the paramilitary show that everybody could see.”

“Mapstone, we would have been shot dead.”

He was right, of course. But I was still angry. The only benefit was the hot west wind, replacing the tear gas in my lungs with good old Phoenix smog and dust. The sheen of sweat across my chest and belly remained.

“We think Dowd came out here and went into that neighborhood.” He pointed to lights two-hundred yards away. “He kidnapped a woman and made her drive him through a checkpoint. Let her go down at Forty-Fourth Street and Camelback. He's probably already ditched her car.”

Dowd's black Dodge Ram truck sat ten feet to my right, with its tracker no doubt uselessly attached to the back.

He faced me. “Where are the girls?”

“Shopping in Scottsdale.”

“Call. Get them here. Now.”

I already had the cell out. I asked Lindsey to bring Sharon and meet us back at Seventh and Dunlap.

He walked out into the darkness, kicking the hard ground, thinking.

“Thoughts? Ideas?” It was as if he were talking to the mountains as much as to me.

I moved toward him, wondering if Dowd was watching with night vision. He could take us out right here with a sniper rifle.

“We can't stay on Cypress.” I stated the obvious through a scratchy throat. “Your place in Dreamy Draw is more secure but not secure enough. It's also dangerously isolated.”

I had only gotten Lindsey back. Sure, she had left me twice before, but for now it was sweet. The idea of putting her at risk was intolerable, a rocket into my brain. Dowd knew we had defrauded him with the flash drive. He would come to kill us all. And he was the kind of man who would seek out Lindsey first, so my agony would be under way well before he got to me. I would have been responsible for losing them both, Robin and Lindsey.

I said,“You know we've got to find him ourselves. Get him first. You know this, right?”

He nodded.

“But for now,” he said, “we need to get out of the Valley. How about San Diego?”

It sounded smart. But one other thing bothered me.

“How many Claymores did they find here?”

“Ten.”

“You're sure?”

He shook his head and cursed. He could do the arithmetic as easily as I: a dozen stolen, one used on me in Ocean Beach, ten seized tonight.

One Claymore was still missing and I wagered it was with Dowd.