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Twenty-One
Peter Carillo
Peter went to three houses on his street before he found exactly what he was looking for.
Mrs. Emily Carmichael lived across the street, three doors down. Carmichael was an eighty-year-old widow, and her son had installed security cameras after a string of robberies in the neighborhood last year. She was a nice-enough lady for a busybody, and knowing that Peter was a cop, she waved to him when she saw him.
He talked his way into her house to look at her computer, where the security footage was stored for two weeks before it auto-deleted. He knew this because he’d talked to Emily’s son when he first installed the system.
He made up an excuse—that Annie had seen a prowler, but he didn’t have a camera on the side of his garage. And to ease his wife’s mind, he wanted to just check.
Emily hovered, chatting about her kids and grandkids and two great-grand kids. Peter blocked it all out while he searched the footage for Sunday morning at 7:00 a.m.
Then he watched.
He saw himself leaving. He fast-forwarded until seven thirty-two when a Jeep pulled into his driveway. A moment later, the garage door went up; the Jeep pulled in, and the door went down. Thirty-six minutes later, the Jeep left with Annie in the front seat. A woman was driving—a woman wearing a baseball cap. He couldn’t see her face well, didn’t recognize her.
The children had to be in the back, but he couldn’t see them through the tinted windows.
He copied the clip and saved it to a flash drive, thanked Mrs. Carmichael while politely ignoring her questions, and left.
He had a license plate. An Arizona plate.
One of the perks of being a state trooper was taking home his patrol cruiser. Most cops didn’t have such a privilege.
He sat in the car, turned on the laptop, and ran the plate. Yes, there would be a log of his action, every single thing he did in the system was logged, but no one looked at the information—there was no need to. If down the road someone did inquire, he’d come up with an excuse. He ran plates all the time—dozens, sometimes hundreds a day.
The Jeep was registered to Margaret Elizabeth Angelhart. She lived on North 14th Street in Sunnyslope, one of the oldest neighborhoods in Phoenix, near the Phoenix Mountains Preserve.
Why was that name familiar?
Angelhart.
Well, shit. He knew the name because there had been a prosecutor named Angelhart.
He shut down his work laptop and went inside to his personal computer. Bringing up Google, he typed the name. It was an uncommon last name and all the top results were for Angelharts in Phoenix.
Cooper Angelhart went to prison three years ago for murder—killed a fellow doctor at the VA. Now Peter remembered the case. It had been wall-to-wall coverage for weeks. Cooper Angelhart was married to a lawyer, Ava, who was the daughter of retired judge Hector Morales. Peter didn’t remember working with Ava when she’d been a prosecutor, but he found her biography on a website for Angelhart Investigations.
The woman was now a private investigator.
Ava Maria Morales Angelhart graduated from the University of Arizona with a degree in criminal justice and a minor in history. She attended law school at Arizona State University to be closer to home as she began her family with her husband, Cooper.
After law school, Ava took a job as a prosecutor for Maricopa County. Ten years later, she was appointed as County Attorney when George Fieldstone resigned following a heart attack. She was elected twice to the post, but declined to run for a third term. Instead, she and her sister, Rita Morales Garcia, opened their own law firm, Arizona Legal Services, where they handle a variety of cases both civil and criminal. Ava is the cofounder of Angelhart Investigations.
Who was Margaret? A kid? Grandkid? Did she work for the firm? Was a former prosecutor responsible for taking his wife and children from him?
It took him fifteen minutes of digging around on the internet because none of the Angelharts had a large digital footprint. He found Angelhart Investigations—but no Margaret. Ava, Jack—a former Phoenix PD officer—and Teresa were the principal investigators. Maybe this Margaret was a nobody, a secretary...
Why was she here? Where had she taken his kids? His wife?
After thirty more minutes of frustrating searches, he finally identified her. Margaret went by Margo and she, too, was a private investigator but didn’t work for the family. A lone wolf, working from a tiny storefront near where she lived, likely not much more than a mail drop.
Margo Angelhart would know where his wife was. If she didn’t cooperate, he would consider going to her mother.
Why? Why did you leave me, Annie?
Maybe he had on occasion been a bit rough on Annie when she irritated him. She understood what he liked, what he expected, what he expected of her. That was no reason to disappear with his children.
