and boyish. Both were marred with multiple wounds and blood. Lindsey gave me a stricken look. I was not the cop. I was the husband. I came up behind her, put my hands on her shoulders, and pulled her back to me.
“What…?” she began.
She lunged toward Peralta. “Why aren’t the paramedics here!” she demanded, her hands outstretched. “Why aren’t you doing CPR?”
He shook his head. She looked over the bodies again and then sagged against me. I walked her a little ways down the sidewalk. Peralta followed us.
“Talk to me, Lindsey,” he said.
She stared out at the night, the streetlights gleaming in her tears. “The guy with the beard is named Jim Britton. He’s with Treasury. The other one is Gary Reece, Department of Justice.” She looked at me. “They worked with me on the credit card case. They were part of the task force.”
“What were they doing here?” Peralta demanded, his big head leaning in to face her.
“They were celebrating,” she said. “They invited me to have a drink tonight. I turned them down because Dave and I had tickets…”
Peralta muttered profanities and walked to his black Ford Crown Victoria. He popped the trunk, dug around inside, and walked back with something in his hand. He held out a flak vest to Lindsey.
“Put this on,” he said.
She hesitated. “You think it’s a hit?” she asked.
Peralta was silent. Lindsey stared at him. She said, “You think this is the Russian mafia?”
Peralta stared at the sidewalk. “I don’t know what I think. But I don’t want to take chances. Scottsdale cops have some witnesses inside. They said the victims were at a table inside when another dude comes in and joins them. The conversation gets a little loud. Britton and Reece pay and get up to go. Next thing anybody remembers there’s gunfire like this is a war zone. When somebody gets up the nerve to look outside, these two are dead on the sidewalk and whoever did it is gone.”
“Do we have a description on the third man?” she asked. Peralta shook his head.
She slipped the vest over her T-shirt and fastened the Velcro. I glanced uneasily around Scottsdale’s little downtown office district. A crowd of yuppies and beautiful people was being kept at a distance by SPD. They couldn’t see the bodies lying this side of the parked cars.
I could see bullet holes gouged into the white paint of one Chevy Suburban, the shattered glass of a Toyota parked beside it, and more bullet holes chipped into the wall of the bar. A lot of bullet holes. I had counted to thirty holes when I heard Peralta’s voice again.
“Where the hell is your firearm?” he growled.
“I don’t take it to baseball games. Sorry.’
He just worked his heavy jaw and shook his head slowly. “Mapstone, do you have any idea how much…”
“Shit!” Lindsey yelled. “What about Rachel?!”
Peralta just stared at her.
“Rachel Pearson!” Lindsey said. “Deputy Rachel Pearson. She works for you in Cybercrimes. She was invited tonight. Has anybody seen her?”
Peralta shrugged. “I guess she didn’t come tonight, like you.”
“She said she was going to come.”
Alarm flickered briefly across Peralta’s face. He stabbed a thick finger into my chest. “Stay here.” He disappeared into the bar.
Lindsey looked at me, and we followed him inside. The room was dark and comforting, with an old Bonnie Raitt song on the sound system. “‘Push comes to shove’,” Bonnie sang. In this old watering hole I had salved a hundred bad days, lubricated a hundred entertaining evenings. But I had no appetite for a drink. We stood on the threshold. Nearby, Peralta conferred with a Scottsdale police captain, then turned to a pair of civilians, clad in the expensive Euro-trash outfits of Scottsdale’s trendy needy wealthy. The conversation grew more animated. Two young Scottsdale cops ran past us out the door. Peralta noticed us, and walked heavily to the top of the stairs.
“It’s a new scenario,” he said grimly. “The female officer may be missing. Those witnesses remember a woman who went out to the street with the men. Nobody’s seen her since the shots were fired.”
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 Espanol,” 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
