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“And,” I said, “thanks to your brilliant police work, the Earleys are apparently investors in the limited partnership.”
“Just luck, my love. Here’s another lucky stroke. Rice’s office and home are close. The office is right on the south side of the airpark.”
She directed me to an address on Seventy-Eighth Place, an older one-story building. Out here, “older” meant from the 1980s. We stepped out to the noise of a Lear jet taking off. But we were back in the car in five minutes. The office was dark and empty, and someone in the neighboring suite, an office of construction defect attorneys, said Rice had retired last year. So we drove again, this time down Scottsdale Road to Shea, then east across the Pima Freeway. Five more minutes, and we found the right cul-de-sac.
Hydrologists must do well, at least based on the Rice house. It was a custom job, with more attention paid to the quality of the stucco and coloring and tile roof. Native stone turrets provided the grand entryway. On the opposite side, another turret had French doors from a patio to a dining room, or maybe a study. The lot was spacious, and shaded by tangly mesquite and cottonwood trees. We pulled into the curving drive, directly in front of the entry. I started out but Lindsey’s voice stopped me.
“Dave,” she said, handing me my holstered Colt Python. “I know it’s hot outside, and you don’t like to carry. But someone tried to hurt you, and he may be the same one who murdered three people.” I took the gun and she smiled. That smile alone was worth it. We walked up the flagstones to the double front doors, which were painted a glossy black and looked out from darkened, beveled glass. The street was quiet except for a leaf blower, far away. I rang the doorbell, and just out of old habits, habits I had learned in the academy and then had carried with me for years, even as a college professor—out of old habits, I stood aside. Lindsey was already standing on the other side of the door, with the wall to her side.
The explosion of gunfire and shattering of glass came at the same instant. I turned my head away from the wash of shards and watched nickel-sized chunks of wood fly out of the trunk of a mesquite tree. My brain said “automatic weapon,” but my body was in charge, crouching down against the wall. The heavy .357 Magnum was in my hand, and I couldn’t recall how it got there. Lindsey was in a similar pose on the other side of the doorway, holding her black baby Glock 26 in a two-handed combat grip. The Mapstones, enjoying one of the finer neighborhoods of north Scottsdale.
“Hey!” A bald, tanned man in green shorts was marching our way. “You don’t live here!”
“Get away, you idiot!” Lindsey yelled, and another burst of fire sent the man scuttling back behind his wall. My ears were ringing.
“Sheriff’s deputies!” I shouted, producing yet another string of gunfire. The poor mesquite was looking quite wounded. “That obviously did a lot of good,” I said in a conversational voice.
Lindsey tried to smile at me, but in her eyes I could see that she had done the same calculus that kept me melted against the wall. Neither of us could hope to get on the other side of the Prelude, and relative safety, without a perhaps fatal run across the drive. Moving along the wall was no good, either. The windows could become gun-ports. I kept glancing behind, toward the French doors that opened onto a patio. Aside from the ringing in my ears, it became quiet. Not even the leaf blower was sounding. I cleaved closer to the wall and motioned for Lindsey to get down more.
Sweat sluiced off my sides and back, but I fought to stop shivering. Lindsey produced a cell phone from her bag and held it to her face. A piece of glass clattered out of the door, nearly making me open fire. I pulled the Python back, the four-inch barrel close to my face, reducing my profile as much as possible. The barrel was surprisingly cool. The bulk of the car seemed as far away as Paris. And all my strength was going to tamp down the panic that threatened to engulf me: Lindsey was in danger.
In an instant, something heavy put me on the ground, and the ground seemed to shift for a second. It took my ears and brain a couple seconds more to process what had happened. Something big had blown up. It sounded like it had come from the back of the house. A nauseating chemical smell was in the air. Lindsey was still crouched, leaning against the far wall, safe. Then, in the distance, sirens.
It was only a few hours of report writing and a cautionary visit to the emergency room, and even that didn’t yield Earl Rice. As the Scottsdale cops explained it, Rice had sold the house the previous winter, and an investor in Minneapolis had bought it. The renters were cooking meth and protecting it with automatic weapons. They blew the place when they thought we were raiding it. The cops didn’t ask much about what we were doing there once it became clear we weren’t narcotics detectives trying to steal a showy bust in their town. Peralta never arrived. By the time we left Scottsdale Police Headquarters, the sun was far in the west and the air was broiling with heat and dust.
We had celebratory martinis at Z-Tejas with the fashionable Scottsdale crowd, all the rapturous bodies and perfect tans. Then we ate Thai food at Malee’s on Main. Peralta’s deadline was glaring at us with the same intensity as his obsidian eyes, but for a few hours it was just good to celebrate being alive, and being alive with my love. When we left Scottsdale it was full dark. Although the heat was unbearable, at least the sun was gone for a few hours. We drove back home through light mid-week traffic on Indian School Road.
This soothing streetlight contentment in me lasted until I caught sight of the police cruisers in front of our house.
29
The front door was standing open to Cypress Street, a fortune in air-conditioning being lost. We identified ourselves to a uniformed officer on the porch. He led us inside, where Robin was sitting on the leather sofa, her blond mane more disheveled than usual. Kate Vare was standing behind her with a satisfied look on her thin face.
“David!” Robin leapt up and grabbed me, kissing me on the mouth before I could push her away. “You’ve got to stop them!” she pleaded. I didn’t notice if she hugged Lindsey, because soon Vare and a couple of the uniforms were pulling her back onto the sofa.
“Kate…” I began.
“We’re executing a search warrant, Mapstone,” she said. “Please sit down.”
“I think we’ll stand,” Lindsey said. Her voice was small and dry. “Let me see the warrant.”
Vare held out an envelope and Lindsey took it. She put on her glasses, read it slowly, then handed it to me. I started to read it, but Lindsey was advancing on Kate. “That warrant includes computers and contents, and I’m calling the sheriff and the U.S. attorney. My laptops contain highly…”
“Don’t get your knickers twisted, missy,” Vare said.
“My name is Lindsey.”
Vare went on. “We haven’t even looked in the main part of the house. We didn’t need to.”
Coldness crept into my middle. None of the old familiar surroundings gave me any comfort.
“You read all those books, Mapstone?” Vare waved toward the floor-to-
ceiling shelves at the north end of the living room.
“They’re just for show, Kate. What cold case has brought you to our house?”
“There’s no cold case, Mapstone,” she said. “I’m just helping out the homicide detectives…”
