they had to do was stake out Denver flights arriving at Sky Harbor. I didn’t want a dead witness, even if I didn’t like what she was saying.
So we decided to drive back. It wasn’t that simple. I didn’t trust our mid-sized Chevy over the mountains, so we went back to the airport to rent a four-wheel-drive. I used my American Express, which Lindsey predicted might slow the bad guys down for a few hours. I had a hard time believing the same gang that had sent the pro-wrestling dropouts to Beth’s gallery was capable of hacking the financial services network, but I also didn’t have a good explanation for how they found our hotel room.
By 8 P.M., we were aboard one of those huge Chevy Suburbans I had vowed never to drive. But its size and above-the-traffic view were reassuring. If we had to do battle, we were now in a battleship. We came back through Denver and stopped at a mall to buy Beth a coat and some essentials. I vetoed going back to her house, for safety’s sake. Her daughter, Paige, had gone off Sunday to stay at Beth’s sister’s house in Estes Park, so there was nobody else to rescue.
While Lindsey and Beth shopped, I stood at a pay phone by the mall entrance and called Kimbrough. It was a short conversation: I told him I was coming back to the Valley with a material witness, who would only agree to talk under the protection of the feds, and I told him about the encounter at the gallery where the tough guy had identified himself as a bounty hunter.
“That makes sense,” Kimbrough said. “We found a report of a guy who came into St. Joseph’s ER on Saturday night with a gunshot. He said it was self-inflicted. But they called Phoenix PD, and they arrested the guy. Name of Jim Caldwell, and he’s a licensed bounty hunter. Get this, he worked with Dean Nixon, running down bail jumpers. They had a long record of violent situations.”
“So where is he?”
“The lockup at County Hospital,” Kimbrough said proudly. “He’s not talking, but he will. His left ankle was shattered by a.357 round, and his foot was nearly blown off.”
“That’s nothing compared to what he would have done to us,” I said. “So tell me this guy was never a deputy sheriff.”
“I can do that,” Kimbrough said. “This guy’s just some loser. But you need to know, I talked to Internal Affairs today.”
“OK.” A laughing flock of teenage girls flew by, giggling and talking. I switched the receiver to the other ear, sending my left shoulder into a spasm of agony.
Kimbrough said, “They interviewed a retired deputy named Collins, lives out in Sun City. He’s scared he’s going to lose his pension if he doesn’t cooperate. So he starts telling this story of how twenty pounds of cocaine disappeared from the evidence room the week before the shootout in Guadalupe. He says it was checked out for a court appearance by Deputy Virgil Bullock, and never returned.”
“We need to revisit the records of Bullock and Matson,” I said. “Maybe they weren’t the heroes everybody thought.”
“You’ll have their families go crazy,” he said, “but we’ve already started. Their badge numbers are in Nixon’s little book. Petty amounts of money. But this cocaine theft is very troubling I’m going back to look through the evidence logs from that time period.”
I just listened. So at least part of what Beth had been saying might be true. I thought about Bobby Hamid’s question: What happened after the shooting?
“Sheriff,” Kimbrough said, “You need to know people are asking about you. The brass. Davidson and Abernathy, IA. The feds. And Sharon.…”
“How…?”
“It’s not good,” he said. “He’s still got brain activity, but he’s in a deep coma. He might wake up tomorrow, and he might never…”
“I’ll be back in Phoenix tomorrow,” I said.
“What’s this witness all about?”
“It’s about Guadalupe,” I said. I didn’t tell him she was a lethal witness, lethal to Peralta, maybe even to me-the “tall Anglo partner” who was there when the big Hispanic deputy took the cocaine. There would be time enough for that.
“You could try trusting me,” he said quickly.
“I do,” I said. “That’s why I risked making this call.”
***
We drove west, scaling the Front Range on US 285. It seemed safer to take secondary roads, and a few inches of snow were nothing for Colorado snowplow crews. The highway was clear. It was also nearly deserted. When I lived in Denver, I had seen summer weekend traffic stacked up for miles heading back into the city from the Rockies. But on this weeknight, we had the two wide lanes nearly to ourselves as the elevation rose and my ears popped, and popped again.
Beth was a talker, especially once she was warm in a coat again. She sat in the front seat beside me, but turned to face Lindsey.
“Why do you have that?” she touched her nostril, to indicate Lindsey’s nose stud.
“Because I want it,” Lindsey said.
“I’m an artist,” Beth said. “I like the idea of art on the human body. It just doesn’t seem like a cop thing to do. I guess you do it so you can work undercover.”
“No,” Lindsey said simply, and looked back out at the black mountainsides and forest flying by. I remembered the first time I saw Lindsey, brainy and leggy and quietly intense, with that tiny gold stud in her nostril. She asked why I didn’t smile. “I’m smiling inside,” I said. She smiled at me and said, “There are no ironic deputies.” It was the start of a fine romance. I could have told the story of the nose stud, how Lindsey had gone out and done it as a teenager the weekend after her father died, how she told me she needed to feel something amid the crushing numbness. But Beth didn’t need to know any of that.
“You two are together,” Beth said.
“Why do you say that?” I asked.
“It’s the way she looks at you, and the way you look at her. It’s not hard to see.”
I said, “You never told us why you knew Leo was in Phoenix last week. We didn’t tell you that.”
That shut her up, and the miles clicked by. The sky glowed a dull white against the tent poles of pine trees. The speedometer needle stayed steady on 60. No need to take a chance with black ice. I was taking enough chances. On the lam from my own department. Transporting a witness across state lines under a shaky justification. Unable even to arrest the person who shot Peralta. Unwilling to go back to Beth’s recollection of the cocaine and the Hispanic deputy. Who the hell was I? Just the idiot they got to be acting sheriff.
We’d just passed the sign for Como when Beth spoke again.
“I knew Leo was going to Phoenix because he told me he was going to,” she said, “When I told you I hadn’t communicated with him since December, that was a lie. He called me. It was a Sunday night, a week ago.”
Before Peralta was shot, but maybe not before Nixon’s murder.
“He said he was out of prison. He didn’t say he had escaped, and I didn’t want to know, OK? But he said he was going to the Valley.”
“Did he say why?” Lindsey said.
“He said he needed to talk to someone who could help him clear his name. That’s all he said.”
“And the next thing, we show up at your door yesterday asking about him?”
“No.” She shook her head. “I got a call last week. It was Wednesday. From your office. Somebody from the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office, asking if I knew where Leo was. That’s all he asked. That’s why I said ‘You guys never give up’ when you two showed up. And because I knew who your sheriff was, it scared me.”
I watched the road ahead. I knew it was too much to ask if she had gotten a name from this MCSO voice who called. And she hadn’t.
Beth was slowly getting her story straight. Or some kind of story straight. So I decided to push my luck.
“Beth, remember when you told us you didn’t know what Camelback Falls is?”
“Yeah,” she said, guilelessly. “What is it?”
“It’s a house, on Camelback Mountain,” I said. “And you would have to know that, considering we have some photos of you in the house, in some interesting circumstances.”
Out of my peripheral vision I watched for a reaction. She just stared into the windshield, her face sheltered
