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“I know.”
“That could lead to a mistrial.”
“Maybe,” he said. “Check. You’re a sworn sheriff’s deputy, whatever fucked-up personal history you have.”
“And you like to fuck with people.”
He barely-barely-cracked a smile.
“Do I get paid for doing this?” I asked.
“You get reimbursed with my goodwill,” Peralta said. “And considering everything that’s happened, you’re probably going to need it.”
“I talked to Harrison Wolfe yesterday.”
Peralta sat up straight. “Wolfe?”
I told him what I knew. He listened through two caffeine-free diet Cokes and then pinched the bridge of his nose. “God, I need a drink and a cigar,” he said.
We concealed our badges and ID cards and walked over to Tom’s Tavern, which for half a century had been the meeting place of Arizona’s political elite. I didn’t even know it still existed. When we walked in, I was sweating nonstop. Peralta was immaculate in his cream-colored suit, bola tie, and summer Stetson. We made our way to the back through the cool semidarkness as Peralta worked the room: a congressman here, a superior court judge there. There was a caricature of him on a wall of famous people, riding a horse, aiming a six-gun. I was happy to be nobody. When we were settled, Peralta had a Kentucky premium bourbon on the rocks and I had a martini. He clipped and lighted a Churchill, luxuriously protected from politically correct conventions out in the broad world.
“This is an amazing place,” Peralta said. “And here I am, just a poor kid from the barrio.”
“Who studied at the Kennedy School at Harvard.”
He took a languid drag on the cigar. “Why does he think she was killed by someone she knew?”
“He said the landlady found Rebecca’s door opened, unlocked, and her luggage inside. He said if she disappeared that night, she would have had to open her door. Who was she likely to do that for? Someone she knew.”
“Or somebody impersonating a cop.”
I looked at him through the smoke and gloom. “Wolfe also said Rebecca’s body didn’t have the mutilations found on the other Creeper killings.”
“That’s thin,” Peralta said.
“I think he’s probably right.”
“Why?” Peralta waved the cigar. “None of this was in the original reports.”
“He said the county attorney took the reports.”
“Oh Jesus,” Peralta said. “Just another old cop trying to settle a score with his bosses.”
“I believe him.”
Peralta just looked at me like I was pathetic.
“Because he was the investigating officer,” I went on. “He was there. Gut feelings count, too.”
“Shit, here I am defending your work against you.”
“I was sloppy, Mike. I moved too quickly on the research. I didn’t do enough to verify what I found was true. It was methodology I wouldn’t have allowed from an under
graduate. Cicero said the first law for a historian is that he shall never dare utter an untruth.”
“Oh, who knows what truth is?” he said airily, mostly to get my goat, I think.
“Jesus, you sound like the tenure committee at San Diego State,” I said, annoyed. “I think we need to look at the case further.”
