The Devil's Elixir

15

I left Tess, Alex, and Jules at the hotel and went to meet Villaverde at his office. Our sit-down with Corliss was set for ten thirty, allowing us to dodge Los Angeles’s brutal morning rush hour traffic and giving us a chance to sample its delightful mid-morning snarl-ups instead. Tess was eager to go to Michelle’s house and collect the stuff that her friend had recommended to give Alex a measure of comfort, and Villaverde had arranged to have an SDPD squad car drive her to the house while we were away and watch over her while she did her thing.

The first half of the drive was easy enough, a straight run up the interstate with the sun at our backs and nothing but the ocean to our left and sand dunes and rolling hills to our right for a good chunk of an hour. Then we hit San Clemente and its pastoral settings helped ease us into the less attractive aspects of human colonization and the chaotic asphalt cauldron that was downtown LA.

We drove past the building and turned in to take the ramp that led down to the underground parking. Outside the building’s entrance were four huge fifty-foot metallic sculptures, flat cutouts of male figures leaning into each other like they were in a huddle. They were pockmarked with hundreds of small round holes and looked like they’d been shot up by a crazed army of gangbangers. I wasn’t sure that was the best imagery to have outside a federal building, but then again, I never claimed to get modern art, and the symbolism that eluded me was probably much deeper and more sophisticated than anything I could hope to grasp.

We went up to the twentieth floor and were ushered into Corliss’s office, and I got two small shocks.

The first was seeing Corliss after all those years. I knew what he’d been through, of course—it had happened after I’d left Mexico, but it was big news at the bureau back then, in all of its gory detail—yet I was still surprised by how much he’d aged. Not so much aged as worn out. The Hank Corliss I knew back in the day was a tough, hard-headed, and generally unpleasant sonofabitch with a crafty set of neurons firing away behind a pair of vigorous eyes that didn’t miss a trick. The guy who greeted us from behind his desk was an antique-mirror reflection of the guy I remembered. His face was gaunt, his skin was lined and ashen, and he had black bunkers under his eyes. He moved with a slow step, and my grandmother, in her eighth decade, had a handshake with more of a kick to it.

The second was seeing Jesse Munro there with him. Two blasts from the past, two revenants from an unpleasant chapter of my life. Munro, however, hadn’t aged a day. Hell, I knew he spent enough time at the gym looking after his finely preened image to make sure of that. He was pretty much as I remembered him. Thick blond hair gelled straight back, deeply tanned, unbuttoned shirt over a deep-V-necked white T-shirt that showed off his upper pecs, bright solid-gold chain. And that cocky, shit-eating grin, of course, that was never too far from the surface.

Corliss motioned us all into a seating area across from his desk.

“So,” he said as he scrutinized me like I was there for a job interview, “I hear you’re doing some good work out in New York. Looks like the move back there sure did you a world of good, didn’t it?”

The wry smile that flitted across his lips confirmed the subtext in his words, not that I thought for a second that he’d forgotten the heated exchanges we’d had in Mexico. At the time, I was livid at myself at having killed—executed—an unarmed American citizen, Wade McKinnon, whom I knew little about beyond that he was a chemistry whiz who had developed some kind of superdrug for a narco named Navarro. Munro was with me on that ill-fated mission, and he’d done even worse things that night—things no one should be allowed to walk away from. And whereas Munro didn’t seem to have qualms about it after we got back, I had a lot of trouble dealing with what I’d done. It kept gnawing away at me until it got to a point where I felt I had to do something to make amends—see if I could find any relatives of McKinnon’s, let them know what had happened, come clean, get some kind of absolution or face whatever punishment I was due. Corliss and the rest of the suits, on the other hand, had no such misgivings and couldn’t give a rat’s ass about my inner demons. Most of all, they didn’t want me out there blabbing about it either. So they dangled a carrot for me—a transfer to the New York City field office with a primo seat at the antiterrorist desk, a trophy position they knew might hit the spot. After endless deliberations and torturing myself over it for days, I’d ended up taking the carrot—not my proudest moment, I admit—and here we were, five years later, with the ghost of Corliss past looking all smug about it.

Anyway, I was going to answer that it did us both a lot of good, but given what he went through after I left, that would have been a seriously uncool thing to say. Instead, I went with a middle-ground peace offering.

“It’s been a real hoot.”

He watched me, like he was unsure about how to respond to that, then adjusted his seating position and got down to it.

“I’m very sorry to hear about Martinez. She did some good work for us, even if her leaving the agency was a bit, um, abrupt.” He looked at me as he said it, like I had something to do with it. Which, as it turned out, I did, though I was pretty sure he didn’t know about that. I mean, he knew we were seeing each other—it wasn’t exactly a secret—but Michelle had told me that she hadn’t made her pregnancy public knowledge within the agency. “Tell me how we can help.”

He and Munro listened attentively as I took them through what I knew, then Villaverde filled them in on the ballistics match, which they were already aware of and was the part of the story that piqued Corliss’s interest, given that it was a live lead into a dead investigation of his.

“So,” he said when we were done, “you got any other handles on the crew?”

“Not yet,” Villaverde said. “That’s why we’re here.”

Corliss pursed his lips and spread his palms out. “Hey, I was hoping you were coming here with something more for me, something that’d help us nail these fuckers.”

“Right now, that’s all we’ve got.”

Corliss frowned. “Well that makes two of us then. We hit a wall on our end. These guys showed up, did their business, and got away clean. They had face masks. The cars they used were stolen, we found them wiped clean and burnt to a crisp. Ballistics and CCTV footage didn’t get us anywhere either. No word on the street, no jackass shooting his mouth off in some bar, nothing. And six months later, it’s all gone beyond cold.”

I’d been hoping for something, anything, but not this. I glanced over at Munro and back at Corliss. “That’s it?” I asked.

“That’s it.” His features sagged with a distant, dejected finality. “Look, what can I tell you? You think I’m happy about that? It’s a goddamn embarrassment. I’ve had so much heat over this thing, I had the governor barking down my phone so bad I could smell his cigar breath through the handset. I didn’t mind. I was just as pissed off as he was. I wanted to fry those sons of bitches, but they didn’t leave us much to work with.”

The room went silent for a moment while we digested the downer, then Villaverde asked, “What about the line of inquiry into them being three-patchers?” He was referring to members of outlaw motorcycle gangs and the three patches—the two rockers with the name of the club and its location, and the central patch with its logo—that they wear on the backs of their jackets and cut-offs. “Where are you at with that?”

Villaverde and I had talked about that on the drive up. He’d told me about the “biker types” reference from one of the survivors of the raid at the institute, and the comment didn’t sit too badly with what I’d seen either. The crew that had come after Michelle at the hotel were hard-asses with alcohol-and-dope-corroded faces who could well have been bikers, but it was hard to tell given that they weren’t wearing their colors, and too much of them was covered up to expose any telltale gang ink, biker or otherwise. Outlaw gangs, though, were acting more and more as enforcers for the cartels north of the border, that much we knew. It wasn’t a stretch to imagine that if some narco from Michelle’s past wanted to get to her for some reason, like recovering money she’d helped confiscate or just plain revenge, using a biker gang was an easy option. Villaverde and I had agreed that I needed to spend some more time going through some mug shots, with a more focused range this time. The ATF—the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives—were the experts on the bikers, and Villaverde had already put in a call to his contact there to get some sheets readied up for me to look at.

“We’re chasing it up,” Munro told us. “We’re still leaning on every lowlife on our books and working it with ATF, but it’s like getting blood from a stone. These gangs, they’re all very tight-knit. The only time those dickwads let anything slip is to mess us around and screw with our heads by putting out rumors that it’s the dirty work of some rival. So you’ve got the Desperados saying it’s the Huns, the Huns saying it’s the Sons of Azazel, the Sons of Azazel saying it’s the Aztecas. It’s a fucking nightmare. The only way to get any kind of traction is to have someone in there undercover, and that takes time. Besides, we don’t even know what gang, let alone what chapter, we’re talking about.”

“What about the cartels?” I asked. “Any luck working it the other way around, from the top down?”

Corliss chortled. “Good luck with that. Our friends from the south have an even more rigid code of silence.”

“But if they are bikers, you still think they were hired muscle and not end users,” I pressed.

“My read? Yes. Absolutely.” Corliss hunched forward. He gestured at Villaverde and said, “We’ve all had great success in shutting down plenty of local meth labs, but you know as well as I do that all it’s done is move the production part of the equation south of the border. And that’s where these white coats are needed. Not here. Our narco friends down there, they’re now running superlabs where each one of them’s churning out three, four hundred pounds of meth a day. A day. That’s a lot of product, and it has to be done right. So when they get their hands on some hotshot chemist who can streamline their processes and give them a better quality product without blowing up their labs, they’re not letting him go.”

I felt like I was still missing a big piece of the puzzle. “I still don’t get what any of this could possibly have to do with Michelle. It’s been five years.”

“Who knows,” Corliss said, brushing it off casually, his tone growing weary. “She worked the cartel money trails. She caused some bad guys a lot of pain by taking away their toys and wiping out their bank accounts. Maybe one of them wanted some payback. These guys . . . they go to prison for a while, then they bribe or shoot their way out, they move around and stay under the radar . . . Maybe it took this long for one of them to track her down. Especially since she worked undercover.”

It didn’t sit straight with me, but right now, I didn’t have much else to go on.

“They did take her laptop,” Villaverde offered, giving me a sideways glance as if reinforcing Corliss’s point. “Maybe they’re looking for a way to reverse a trade? Get her to make some transfers their way?”

Corliss didn’t take too long to chew on it—a dubious eyebrow spiked upward as soon as Villaverde mentioned it.

I tensed up, knowing where this was heading.

“Her laptop?” Corliss asked.

Villaverde nodded.

Corliss shrugged, not saying it but signaling it clearly enough with a wry, skeptical expression.

“What?” I pressed.

“Well, she took away a lot of money from some of these guys,” he said, his mouth bent downward like he’d just sniffed some sour milk. “Maybe she kept some of it for herself. It sure as hell wouldn’t be the first time that happened.”

I felt my face flame up. “Michelle was clean,” I said in no uncertain terms.

“And you know that because you two had a fling?”

“She was clean,” I insisted.

“She’s a trained undercover agent, remember? She knows how to keep secrets. Even from whoever’s sharing her bed.”

I saw the look he and Munro exchanged and could feel the veins in my neck go rock hard. I had to fight to keep myself under control. Michelle wasn’t even in the ground yet and this damaged, bitter prick was already soiling her memory.

I flicked a glare across at Villaverde and back at Corliss. “She was straight. One hundred percent. No question.”

I waited to let the words sink in, ready to pounce on any retort from any of them, but none came. Corliss just held my gaze with his tired, vacant eyes, then shrugged, the edges of his mouth still sagging dismissively.

“Maybe she was,” he said. “Either way . . . it’s something that needs to be looked into. It could lead us to our shooters.”

I didn’t like the suspicion hanging there, but nothing I could say was going to change that. But there was something I could throw back at him. “If it’s about narcos tracking her down, you’ve got a leak in here. It’s the only way they could have found her.”

Corliss wasn’t moved. “Big fucking surprise. You know how much time and resources we spend trying to keep our house clean? It’s a constant battle.”

“Was there anyone in particular that you can think of who’d be looking to get back at her?” Villaverde asked Corliss, adroitly moving on. “Anyone with a vendetta that was so strong it could resurface after so long?”

“A couple,” Corliss replied. “No one likes being taken for a ride, especially not by a woman.” He looked like he was running a list of possibilities in his mind for a second, and Munro chimed in.

“I’ll need to look into her case history, but the last case she worked was a big one. Carlos Guzman. She did him some serious damage. Almost half a billion’s worth. And as you know, he’s still out there.” Munro shrugged. “Probably richer than ever.”

Villaverde and I exchanged glances. Neither of us had anything else to add. It looked like we weren’t going to get much more from them either when Corliss turned to me and asked, “Why’d she call you? I mean, after all this time, why you?”

Given what Corliss had floated about Michelle possibly being dirty, I didn’t feel like bringing up the fact that we’d had a kid together, not to him.

“She was scared and didn’t know which way to turn,” I replied. “And maybe she still believed in something old-fashioned called trust.”

He blew out a long, rueful hiss, then nodded, slowly. “Trust, huh?” He paused, then his expression clouded and he seemed to travel to somewhere far and dark.

“My wife trusted me when I told her my work would never put her or our daughter in harm’s way,” he said, then his distant gaze racked focus and settled on me. “Didn’t work out too well for either one of them, did it?”

There wasn’t much to say after that.