The Devil's Elixir

9

“How the hell did they find her?”

We were back at the ranch, the ranch in this case being the FBI’s San Diego field office, a squat, glass-and-concrete three-story structure a couple of miles east of Montgomery Field. Villaverde and I were in his top-floor office. Besides everything that had happened, I’d spent ages briefing a couple of homicide detectives on what had gone down and describing the shooters as best as I could, and right now, I was tired and angry as hell, and my head felt all heavy and clogged up, like someone had pumped molasses into my skull.

“Maybe they followed her from the house,” Villaverde speculated, leaning against the edge of his desk. He was tall and lean and with the clear olive skin and the combed-back onyx-black hair, a walking, talking ad for the bureau. I imagined the suits loved him, and to be fair, from what I’d seen so far, he was a straight-shooting, efficient guy.

“She said she wasn’t followed,” I fired back, more testily than I should have. “Michelle was good. She would have spotted a tail. Especially after what happened. She was looking out for one.”

“What about her phone?”

“She killed the battery after calling me.”

“Maybe she called someone else from the hotel?”

My head snapped left and right. “No way. Michelle was a pro. She wouldn’t take that risk, not after what she’d been through.”

Villaverde shrugged. “Well, we’ll know soon enough. If she did call anyone, it’ll show up on her room’s phone records.”

Another possibility was clawing away at me.

“How many hotels and motels do you think there are out there, by the airport?”

“I don’t know. Not that many. Why? You think that’s how they found her? Trawling them?”

“When she called me from the mall, Michelle said she’d find somewhere to hole up by the airport. If they hacked her phone and were in on that call . . . they’d be looking for a woman and a kid with no luggage and no credit card. Maybe they got lucky.”

“Well if that’s what happened, and depending on how they did it, there might a cloning trail on her phone.” He picked up his desk phone and punched in a couple of buttons. “I’ll get the lab to check it out.”

I stood by the large window as Villaverde made his call and stared out in silence, seething with rage. The sun was long gone, and darkness was now firmly in control, gloomy and oppressive. The streetlamps in the almost empty parking lot were low and subdued, and there was no moon or stars in the sky that I could see, no beacon, no light at the end of the harrowing tunnel that this day had turned into. It was as if nature itself was conspiring to accentuate my sense of loss.

“I don’t get it,” I fumed. “She said they weren’t after a kill. She said one of the shooters had her in his sights back at the house, but didn’t take the shot.”

“Maybe one of them screwed up,” Villaverde offered as he hung up. “You said it yourself, bullets were flying all over the place.” He hesitated, his expression uncertain, then added, “Maybe the one that got her was meant for you.”

My stomach flooded with acid. It was something I’d been wondering about, along with second-guessing everything I’d done, every decision I’d made from the moment Michelle had called.

“Yeah, that’s a great feeling right there,” I grumbled. I tried to shake away the anger and the remorse and focus on what had to be done. “Okay, so what have we got to go on besides her phone? CCTV footage from the hotel, ballistics from the hotel and from the house . . . what else? Fingerprints? Blood from the shooters?”

Villaverde nodded. “We’ve got lots of DNA to work with, from the house and from the mess you left behind in the parking lot. I don’t know what the score is on the camera footage, but forensics are running what they got through NCIC.”

“What about neighbors?”

“Homicide’s had people out there since her nine-one-one call, but I can’t see much coming out of that. What are they going to get? The van’s plates?”

I remembered seeing the shooters’ van in the hotel’s parking lot, but in the heat of the moment, my eyes hadn’t registered its plate. It was irrelevant, anyway. Stolen, rented with a fake ID—either usually did the trick.

“I need you to go downtown and look at some faces,” Villaverde said, referring to the monster database of mug shots on tap. Not something I was relishing.

I nodded grudgingly, wondering about who these guys were and going over what I’d seen, what their faces and their moves told me. They were tough and committed, and they moved well together, like they’d had a lot of practice doing it. It made me wonder what else we’d find out when we finally did track them down.

“They’ve got two guys down, either seriously hurt or more probably dead,” I said.

“They’re not about to roll them to any ER,” Villaverde replied. “Best case, we’ll find their bodies dumped somewhere sometime soon, but I’m not holding my breath. More likely they’ll end up as worm food in one of the canyons or out in the desert.”

Which is what I would have done, if I were them. The thing is, you’ve still got to cover all possible angles, in case the bastards who killed Michelle and whoever was calling the shots for them slipped up—which, luckily for us, they sometimes did.

“They lost two guys in one morning. You know of many crews that can take that kind of damage without blinking?” Before Villaverde could answer, I added, “We need to reach out to the DEA.”

“Why?”

“Michelle couldn’t figure out why anyone would want to come after her. The only thing she could think of was that maybe it was some kind of blowback from her years on the job. We need to ask them about that.”

Villaverde’s face contorted, like this was news to him. “I know the ASAC who runs their local office. I’ll give him a call.” He thought about it for a moment, then asked, “Was she based back east with you?”

I shook my head. “No. Mexico City.”

“Mexico? Is that where you were posted, too?”

“No, I was Chicago.”

“So how’d you guys hook up?”

“I was down there as part of a multi-agency task force. We were chasing down a new outfit that was cooking up some seriously pure crank that was hitting the street. I’d been backtracking the trail through some Latin Kings gangbangers they were supplying.”

“Operation Sidewinder?” Villaverde asked.

“Right. Anyway, Meesh was already there, working out of the DEA’s main digs at the embassy, hitting the kingpins where it hurt most—in their wallets. It didn’t take long for our paths to cross.”

“Okay. Who was the country attaché when she was down there? That’s who we need to talk to.”

I frowned in agreement. “Hank Corliss.”

Villaverde winced. He clearly knew the name. “Corliss. Jesus.”

I nodded. “Is he still DEA?”

He shrugged. “Hell, yeah. After what he went through, what else would he be doing, you know what I’m saying?” He paused, as if out of respect for the man, then said, “He’s top dog in LA. Runs the SoCal task force.” The name had evidently conjured up some questions in his mind, and his brow knotted. “You think what happened to him could be tied to all this?”

The thought had bounced around in my mind, but it was hard to give it too much credence. It was close to five years later now—a long time for anyone to wait before unleashing a second wave of savagery.

“After all this time? With Michelle off the force for years? Doesn’t sound right to me. Besides, she wasn’t part of our task force; she was working a different caseload, undercover. But we do need to talk to him.” I paused for a moment, then added, “Better the request come from you. Corliss and I—we’re not exactly on each other’s Christmas cards list.” I was being generous.

Villaverde blew out a mild chortle. “Noted.”

He went silent for a long second, like he was weighing what he was about to say.

“Look,” he finally said, “this is all good, and maybe something’ll pan out from talking to them, but . . . we can handle this, okay? You’ve got something else to think about right now.”

I looked a question at him.

Villaverde turned and thumbed a finger in the direction of the glass wall that stood between his office and his secretary’s desk. “The kid.”

I looked through the partition. Alex had calmed down and was just sitting there quietly on a black leather couch, staring at the carpet. Two women were now seated next to him. One was Villaverde’s über-efficient personal assistant, Carla, to whom I’d initially entrusted him. They’d been joined by a younger, dark-haired agent in a white shirt and a charcoal skirt suit by the name of Julie Lowery. Their attention was totally focused on him as they were chatting with him, trying to comfort him as he half-heartedly picked his way through a box of nuggets and some fries. Villaverde had already asked for a child psychologist to be brought in to help us out, a woman who’d worked with the bureau before, but they’d only been able to get through to her voicemail and were waiting to hear back.

“Does he have any family he can stay with? He’s going to need some serious TLC,” Villaverde added. “You need to think about that.”

He was right, of course. I was so focused on wanting to get my hands on the sons of bitches who had gunned down Michelle that I wasn’t thinking clearly about the other victim they’d left in their wake.

“I know.”

“So what are you going to do with him?”

I wasn’t sure why he was asking. “He’s my son. What do you think? He’ll live with us.”

“Well, that’s great. But you’re going to have some paperwork to deal with. You’ll probably need to run some blood work to establish paternity. It’s a process.” He paused, like he was already playing it out in his mind, then asked, “You know of any next of kin who might contest it? Are Michelle’s parents around? These things can get messy.”

She’d said there was no one close by when I’d asked her on the phone. I thought back to what I knew about her family. We were only together for a couple of months, and, intense as those months were, peripheral details like that had faded away.

“I’m not sure. No brothers or sisters that I know of. I think her dad’s out of the picture, and her mom wasn’t doing too well back when we were seeing each other, Alzheimer’s I think, but . . . I’m not sure.”

“Okay, we can look into that.” Villaverde’s expression softened up. “Look, all I’m saying is, you’ve got your hands full with this kid. You need to get the red tape sorted out and take him home, get to know him and start laying the groundwork for his new life. And that’s not going to be easy. Not after everything he’s been through today. I mean, he just watched his mom die, for Chrissake. That’s gonna be tough to come back from. You’ve got a mammoth task facing you, my friend. And that’s what you need to focus on right now. The rest of it, we can handle.”

I wasn’t with him. My mind was still locked in a replay loop, and I was watching Michelle buckle over as she dived into the car and hearing the sound of her grunt when the bullet hit her.

I just said, “I want these guys.”

“Hey, I do, too. I already spoke to the head of SDPD’s criminal intel unit. It’s priority one for all of us, believe me. But there’s nothing you can add to the mix. This isn’t New York. It’s not your beat. You’d just be a drag on our resources.” He blew out a lungful of air, pushed off the edge of the desk, and joined me by the glass wall. “Look, Michelle’s dead. Her boyfriend’s dead. Whether the shooters were out to grab her or not, it doesn’t matter anymore. It’s over. These scumbags, they’re gonna crawl back into whatever cesspool they came from. And we’ll just have to keep on working the leads until we find them. Go. Be with your son. Take him home. Let us deal with this.”

I balled my fists and felt my jaw tighten as his words sank in. Alex. Alex was now my priority, and, much as I hate to admit it, there wasn’t much I’d be able to add to the investigation. Not out here. Not as an outsider with no local insights and no real contacts to work. I’d only be a burden to them.

The fact that it was true didn’t make it any less toxic.

I glanced at my watch. It was just after ten—way past any four-year-old’s bedtime. I needed to get Alex out of here and into a warmer, more comforting environment, get him to bed, let him get some rest. I’d always heard that kids were incredibly resilient, and Alex was going to need to draw on a full life’s quota of resilience if he was going to get through this. I was going to have to learn some new tricks real quick, too, starting with the fact that I needed to figure out what I was going to tell him, how and when I was going to break the grim new reality to him. I was totally unprepared for this. I knew I’d need help and need it soon, and it didn’t look like the child psychologist was going to be around before morning.

“I should get him out of here,” I said.

“We’ll get a couple of rooms set up for you at the Hilton. We use it a lot,” Villaverde offered. “Might be a good idea for Jules to tag along and help put him to bed and get him settled,” he added, indicating the brunette agent with a nod.

“Sure.” I nodded somewhat absentmindedly, knowing that the help I really needed would have to come from elsewhere, but more thinking that I had an important call to make, one I could no longer avoid.

I checked my watch again and, for a split second, considered the time difference between California and Arizona before remembering that the Grand Canyon state didn’t observe daylight saving time and was therefore also on Pacific Daylight Time, same as San Diego.

Which meant it wasn’t too late to make that call.

“Give me a few minutes,” I told Villaverde as I stepped out of his office and reached for my phone.