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“Not anymore.”
I had to wait for the conversation to work at its own speed. Grainer pulled a can of Copenhagen from his back pocket and stuffed another piece of chaw inside his rosy cheek. A sudden gale of cold, dry wind failed to make any impression on his wide hat.
“He didn’t seem nervous. He walked my way a bit, so I was getting worried he’d find me watching him. Then he yawned and stretched and turned around. Went back and leaned against that truck, and enjoyed his smoke. He waited maybe twenty minutes and a car pulled up. White four-door, California plates. I couldn’t read the numbers. Eyes are going. He climbed inside and they went back on the Interstate.”
“Heading?” I hoped he knew their direction.
“Couldn’t be sure.”
“Do you know about what time he got here?”
“Little after ten.”
That was several hours unaccounted for after the robbery.
I asked if he had unloaded anything from the truck.
Grainer shook his head.
“Nothing?” I asked.
“Nothing.”
Diamond couriers used a small suitcase on wheels. The FBI had played the tape for me, showing Peralta and the second guard going through a back corridor of the mall. They walked side-by-side—the hallway was made for deliveries, so it was plenty wide. The other guard had the wheelie bag.
Then Peralta suddenly spun the man off balance and snatched the case with his left hand. When the man reached for his gun, Peralta already had his Glock in his right hand and fired. One shot. The other guard fell back. Peralta took the bag and walked calmly out of the camera’s view.
This was all the feds would show me. I asked about other cameras, other angles, and they went into the we-ask-the-questions attitude. But the reality was that they had lost him.
Then he got to Ash Fork.
But the weapons locker in his truck was empty. That was unusual. The man always drove around with multiple guns. I would have to do an inventory of the room-sized armory back at the office, which Lindsey’s sister Robin had christened “The Danger Room.” Now we had plenty of danger.
I thought about what Grainer had told me. The diamonds could theoretically be stuffed in his pockets, depending on the size of the settings. So he had decided to dump the suitcase.
“Did he do anything while he waited?”
He puffed out his cheeks and smiled at the miracle of a returned memory.
“Yep, yep. Now that you mention it, he did. Got on his haunches and fiddled with the back bumper of the truck.”
I thought about that. Arizona only required one tag on a vehicle, not two. Peralta must have put on a different tag to get out of town. His real one would have been on all the police broadcasts. Otherwise, it was one of thousands of Ford pickups. Then he changed back to his real tag. He intended for the truck to be found and identified.
And he left the business card with the message for me on the dash.
“When the car pulled up, did anybody get out? Did it seem like he was being forced inside?”
“No, sir,” he said. “The man got right on in and they was gone.”
“What did the FBI tell you?”
He shook his head, the wind stirring the tendrils of his beard. “Not a damned thing. The Yavapai deputies think I’m a pest, calling about the burglaries, the crime around here. They have a trailer shack down the street here, but you hardly ever see a deputy. Budget cuts and all. I come to think, screw ’em. I can handle things if I need to.”
He opened a button on the coat and patted the butt of a pistol.
Of course.
I handed him my card and asked him to give me a call if anything else came to him, or if he saw that four-door car again.
