Private: #1 Suspect

CHAPTER 112

Cruz was driving the fleet car, Rick in the seat beside him, Jack’s blue Lamborghini filling the rearview mirror. Ahead of them, Carmelita Gomez was sending all of their speedometer needles into the red. Cruz kept his foot on the gas, staying close, aware that if Gomez braked or plowed into another car, he couldn’t stop in time.

The woman was guilty of something, for sure.

Cruz tried to get his mind around what Tyson Keyes had said about her, and he was picturing that cute but snooty woman in a whole different way.

He flashed on her standing near the wardrobe at Havana, wearing that tight pink dress, not looking at him the way women usually looked at him. At all.

He remembered her later, sitting next to him in the car, finally giving up a guy she said was her driver, Billy Moufan, saying that Moufan knew the killer’s identity.

But there was no Billy Moufan. Anywhere.

Tyson Keyes had been her lover and her driver. And he had said Gomez was a man-hater who had sex with men for a living. How twisted was that?

A car horn blew loud and long as the speeding caravan forced a Caddy tight up against the median strip.

Del Rio said, “Pay attention, Emilio.”

“Pay attention? I’m driving in a straight line. It’s too fast, man? You want me to pull over and you drive? That’s okay with me. I want to piss my pants, you hear me?”

The Impala made a sudden screaming right onto Neenach, and Cruz followed, Jack tight behind them.

Neenach was residential, a lot like the street where Gomez lived, two lines of facing single-story stucco homes fronted by low walls or small gardens, a few trees sprouting up between the houses and the asphalt.

Cruz didn’t want to take his eyes off the road long enough to check the speed, but his gut told him they were going ninety down Neenach, flying toward the intersection at Haddon.

But Gomez didn’t take the turn at Haddon.

There was a sound wall up ahead where Neenach Street dead-ended at the freeway. Gomez wasn’t stopping. She sped into the cul-de-sac, a dead end with a semicircle of houses, maybe six of them, facing the high cement wall that separated them from the freeway.

Cruz slammed on the brakes.

So did Jack and the four cruisers behind him. Cars spun and jackknifed, ran up on lawns and into parked cars. Rubber burned. There was the grating sound of metal compacting as cars slammed into garbage cans and walls.

Cruz saw the Impala leap forward in stop action. The car seemed to pause in the air, then fold up as it collided with the wall. Cruz had his hand on his door handle before his car stopped, and then he was out and running.

Rick and Jack were also running toward the crash, but Rick was yelling at Jack, “Jack, stop. That car is going to blow.”

Jack shouted back over the noise, “I have to know if she’s alive,” and kept running toward the crushed red metal that had been Carmelita Gomez’s car.