Left for Dead

41

2:00 P.M., Monday, April 12

Fountain Hills, Arizona

Humberto Laos had become an old crook by being a smart crook. He paid his people good money, and he expected them to earn it. When Tony and Sal had come back from dumping the girl’s body, he had taken them at their word and hadn’t given the matter another thought. They’d told him she was dead; he believed the girl was dead. He had told them to dump her in the desert. With any kind of luck, it would be months before someone stumbled across her body.

Because Humberto had plenty of money, he had plenty of sources of information. There were people in various cop shops and media outlets who, for a hefty cash payment made by a discreet third party, would provide the inside scoop on things that interested him, in this case the murder investigation into the death of Chico Hernández. When Humberto heard from one of his informants that a person of interest in the case was a seventeen-year-old girl who had been missing for three years, that made sense. The girls Chico pimped hadn’t fallen out of trees. They had to come from somewhere.

So far, that was all to the good. Humberto knew that the girl the cops were looking for—presumably, the one whose prints they had found in his vehicle—was lying dead in the desert somewhere. As long as they were looking for the dead girl, they weren’t looking at Humberto.

But Humberto believed in being thorough. So he checked with two more sources, both of whom were inside Phoenix PD. There he learned that the person of interest, the missing girl, was named Rose Ventana. She had run away at age fourteen and was thought to have a rose tattoo on her right boob.

Humberto knew for a fact that the part about the rose tattoo was true. The girl Chico had called Breeze definitely did have a rose tattoo, one with a few recent additions to the original design. Again, he wasn’t especially concerned, but then things started to go south. One of his media sources came up with a very disturbing piece of information—a rumor, a tweet from Rose Ventana’s sister—that maybe Rose wasn’t dead at all; that she had been found badly injured on Friday and was being treated at an as yet unnamed hospital somewhere in Tucson.

Humberto was appalled. He could afford a lot of things, but he couldn’t afford to have Breeze Domingo or Rose Ventana or whoever she was alive and able to talk. That was unacceptable. It was time for serious damage control, and it had to happen right away.

Humberto didn’t call Sal and Tony in and read them the riot act. Instead, he opened the safe in the wall behind his desk and took out seventy-five thousand in cash. Then he went online and found photos of some of the known players—especially the parents and the homicide cop—anything that would help identify the targets.

With photos and the money loaded into a briefcase, Humberto left his chauffeur and the Bentley behind and drove himself to Phoenix in his silver Carrera. He parked outside a building that contained a high-end detail shop. Tossing his keys to an attendant, he went inside to look for Angel Moreno. Angel’s company, Starshine, specialized in auto detailing. Angel himself was into another kind of work altogether.

“I’ve got a job for you,” Humberto said, setting the briefcase on Angel’s Formica-topped desk. “Three of them, actually. The sooner the better.”