Fear No Evil

Chapter 22

Los Angeles

With guns drawn, Ned Mahoney and I followed Patrick Loughlin through the open gate and into the estate belonging to the parents of the murdered FBI agent’s widow.

Built of rust-colored pavers, the driveway climbed steeply beneath the shade of giant palms. Terraced gardens with flowers abloom broke the lower grounds into tiers on both sides of the drive, which crested onto a flat area with more meticulously maintained gardens.

A riot of birds of paradise flowers surrounded a flowing fountain in the circle in front of the Reisings’ house, a rambling, white Cape with green trim and wings off both sides. Birds sang in the jacaranda trees, and somewhere chimes moved on the breeze.

“Ahh, Jaysus, no!” Loughlin cried and hurried toward a body sprawled in the driveway between the fountain and the front door. Male. Late thirties. Blue suit and tie. He had been shot between the eyes.

Loughlin’s face twisted and paled. “Special Agent Carlos Deeds. Nine-year veteran of the Bureau. Young wife. Two kids. Jaysus fricking—”

“We’ve got another, Pat,” Mahoney said, gesturing across the lawn to the left of the drive where a woman lay facedown.

Deeds’s partner, Special Agent Madeline Cruise. She’d been shot high in the back.

“Someone’s paying for this,” Loughlin said hoarsely. “I promise you that.”

“Call it in?” Mahoney asked.

The LA supervising special agent cleared his throat and said, “Let’s see the sorry lot of it before we call in the cavalry.”

We entered in full combat mode, guns up, sweeping back and forth as we went through the nineteen rooms in the mansion. We found Amelia White’s father, Jeffrey Reising, in his home office, dead of two gunshot wounds to the face. In the upstairs master bedroom, Reising’s wife, Jane, looked to have been executed with a single shot to the forehead as she slept.

We all kept it together until we found their three grandchildren, nine-year-old Ricky and the five-year-old twins, Kate and Anne, all dead in their beds, their throats slit.

Loughlin, who’d been a cop since the age of twenty, broke down. Mahoney, a twenty-four-year agent, had to lean against a wall.

I’d been a homicide investigator for most of my adult life but lurched to a bathroom and puked up my breakfast. I entered the kitchen a few minutes later, and it turned out to be a blessing that I had an empty stomach.

Amelia White had been gagged, stripped naked, and lashed to a ladder-back chair. The condition of her body — the cuts, bruising, and broken bones — all suggested that the disgraced FBI agent’s wife had been tortured before her throat was mercifully slit.

Someone had dipped a rolled-up section of that morning’s Los Angeles Times in the blood pooled on the floor and used it to scrawl these words on the wall behind her:

Las familias muertas no cuentan cuentos.

“‘Dead families tell no tales,’” Mahoney translated.

“Frickin’ bastards!” Loughlin said, gesturing to the bloody newspaper that had been left on the floor, unfolded to show the story of Special Agent White’s murder and his extraordinary confession to being an assassin for the Alejandro drug cartel.

I said, “Alejandro cartel hitmen did this.”

“They’re front and center in my book too,” Loughlin said. “No souls. Pure evil to do this to her and... her children. Jaysus.”

“This massacre isn’t just payback,” Mahoney said. “It’s a warning to anyone else who might be tempted to confess their sins.”

“A warning straight from that supermax in Colorado,” I said.

Loughlin shook his head. “I talked to the warden at the Florence penitentiary yesterday. Marco Alejandro has been held there one hundred percent incommunicado for nearly a year. No interaction with other prisoners. No visitors. No mail. No internet. Nada. It was part of his sentence. The judge wanted Marco to remain in silence a full year to contemplate the carnage he’d caused.”

“I don’t think the silence is complete,” I said. “The brutality here has got Marco written all over it. Somehow, he’s aware of what’s going on. Somehow, he’s in communication with his people. He ordered this.”

“Maybe,” Mahoney said. “Or maybe Marco’s successor in Mexico did.”