Part 14 (1/2)

”But she called you.”

”Somebody called here with her phone. She was found dead with a new phone that didn't have any called numbers on it. That was in your report.”

Sanchez persisted. ”Why would this somebody call here?”

I told her the truth: I didn't know. Maybe it was Tim, using her phone. Considering he didn't know she was dead when I first met him, that seemed unlikely, but no need to tell her that.

I didn't say how this call to our office indicated that whoever killed Grace, set off the Claymore mine, and took the baby had made that call to frame us, or at least slow us down, knowing the police would track the LUDs. This had been planned well ahead of the moment Felix walked in that door.

The only alternative was that Grace herself had actually tried to call us. But why? She didn't even know us.

”I can make your life miserable.” Sanchez sat in the chair in front of my desk, crossed her legs, and placed long fingers protectively across her belly. ”Losing your license will only be the start of the hurt I can put on you.”

”I don't doubt it,” I said. ”But Kimbrough and Peralta go back a long way, and you've got a bungled investigation on your hands. Let me ask you a question, if you don't mind: you pulled Grace's LUDs. Do they match with the phone found in her purse that night?”

Sanchez deflated by degrees. Even her hair deflated.

”No. They don't match. The phone she was carrying that night was scrubbed clean of recent calls. We traced it to a seventy-year-old woman who lives on Clairemont Mesa. It was stolen from her in a purse s.n.a.t.c.hing at Fas.h.i.+on Valley mall.”

”So whoever pushed her off that balcony took her real phone.”

She nodded.

”How is the hunt for the baby progressing?”

She forced her expression to harden. ”That's confidential law-enforcement information and you're only a private d.i.c.k.”

Robin's words again. I stifled a smile.

”Come on, Isabel. You don't have to mimic your jerk colleague.”

Two beats, three.

Then: ”We don't have anything. Not a d.a.m.ned thing. If I had known she was married or had a kid...” She shook her head. ”The vic didn't have any of that information in her purse. Her parents didn't tell us, either.”

”I understand.” I thought about the wall with our names painted in blood, information I had held back for our protection, and asked about fingerprints.

”The apartment was destroyed. It could take ATF weeks to sort through things and see if there are any usable prints.” She cleared her throat. ”What do you make of Larry Zisman?”

I laid out the backgrounding I had done. Among a certain group, people who had lived here a long time, Zisman was still beloved for his college-football days. He was a razzle-dazzle quarterback in the glory years of Sun Devil football. He left less of a mark in the NFL, playing for five teams before being forced to retire early.

Zisman was a native Arizonan, attended the old East High School, and came back here to live after he retired from the NFL. Not only that, but to live year-round, not only keep a casita at one of the resorts for the winter months. He had started a non-profit to fund athletics for inner-city schools. He was in demand to give speeches at Kiwanis and Rotary, but removed enough from celebrity to be under the radar in a city with so many comings and goings.

”Did it surprise you that he had a lover on the side?”

I held out empty hands. ”Who ever knows? But, yes, a little. From what I picked up, Larry Zip was so full of clean living that he might have been mistaken for a Mormon.”

”Do you think he killed Grace Hunter?”

”He's physically capable of it. Former athlete. As a reserve officer, he would have gone through police academy training.”

She made a few notes.

I said, ”It would be pretty stupid, though, to push her off his own condo balcony. He'd know that he would be the prime suspect. Better to strangle her and dump her body in the East County.”

”Unless,” she said, ”it was an act of pa.s.sion and he did it in the moment.”

”Right. But then you have the problem of the alibi, of him being on his boat.”

I was only trying to be convivial enough to get Detective Sanchez out of the office. This couldn't be a mutually beneficial relations.h.i.+p because Peralta and I were concealing critical information. We had dug this hole a little scoop at a time, for good reasons at the moment, and now we were in deep. Too deep.

She thought about what I had said regarding Zisman, twirling a strand of her hair.

”I think he could have done it.”

”You interviewed him that night and cleared him,” I said.

”I read your report,” she said. ”After our a.s.s-chewing from Kimbrough and before we got on the plane, I dug a little more. The man at the next boat is a good friend with Zisman, you know. He's from Arizona, too. You people really need to find another summer escape. The man is a developer who used Zisman as a spokesman for some of his properties. He might be lying for him.”

Zisman hadn't figured in any of my theories about the case-not that I had formed many yet. I had been focused on getting out of that apartment before my body was turned into an aerosol state, and then on examining whether Grace had actually committed suicide.

”What about Tim?”

I c.o.c.ked my head.

She went on. ”Maybe he followed her to Zisman's condo and found out she was cheating on him. Oldest motive in the world.”

To me, he barely had the guts to change a baby's diaper, much less kill his wife or have the strength to do it in such a physical manner. Sure, people would surprise you, especially if money or s.e.x were concerned. If so, he would have had to do a good job feigning surprise and sorrow when I told him Grace was dead. And been tough enough to slit his own throat and wire his apartment to explode.

I remembered a case in Scottsdale years ago, where a man cut the throats of his family, shot them, set the house on fire, and blew it up. They never caught him.

Detective Sanchez also didn't know that our names had been written in blood on the apartment wall. Tim Lewis didn't do that in the seconds before his carotid arteries bled out. Then there was yesterday's phone call, Mister UNKNOWN saying he had detonated the Claymore and with his aerial theater implying he either had the baby or had murdered it.

”Tim was genuinely torn apart when I told him Grace was dead,” I said. ”And remember, the pimp was beating him up when I got there. And if Tim was Grace's killer, who took the baby?”

She sighed. ”I wish I could keep things simple. Occam's Razor, right? My a.s.s is on the line for this now, and there's a hundred local, state, and federal investigators living in my s.h.i.+t because of that explosion and kidnapping.”

I appreciated a woman who could quote the cla.s.sics, but this was one instance where the least complex hypothesis wouldn't do.

”The pimp is Keavon William Briscoe,” she said, spelling the first name. ”He's middling, not a big player. This is a guy who provides prost.i.tutes for sailors and Marines on leave and runs streetwalkers, not escorts for big-time executives and legislators.”

”He claimed Grace worked for him.”

”Maybe she did. It wouldn't be the first time a coed made some money on the side. The reason I don't like Briscoe for this is that he was in jail on the night of April twenty-second, a parole violation. He had a baggie of pot in the car. He'll probably go back to prison but it gives him an alibi for the one-eighty-seven.” The homicide.

”How did he find where she lived?”