The Devil's Elixir

50

I didn’t get much sleep. My mind had been churning away all night, scheming and plotting, stress-testing different routes forward—anything to escape thinking about Tess and where I stood with her. I hadn’t come up with anything even remotely foolproof, but some were less harebrained than others. All the paths I had explored, though, had one thing in common: They were all centered around me setting myself up as bait to flush out our Mexican aggressors.

As you can imagine, I wasn’t exactly jumping up and down with glee.

By nine, I was showered, dressed, and walking into Villaverde’s office to go over our options. Munro arrived at roughly the same time. I knew Villaverde wouldn’t be thrilled about my thinking. I wasn’t looking forward to putting myself out there as a lure for a bunch of psychos who took pleasure in snipping off people’s privates, but I couldn’t think of anything else that might work. Unless Villaverde or Munro had a brilliant alternative to put on the table, I was pretty much committed to putting my plan in motion.

Maybe it was a half-assed way of trying to make up for what I’d done. I don’t know. All I knew was, I wanted the bastards gone and I wanted to know that Tess and Alex wouldn’t have anything more to worry about.

We started off by going through a round-up of whatever updates had come in concerning the previous days’ events. There was nothing in them that led to a eureka moment. The guy Jules had taken out at Balboa Park had nothing on him that would help ID him, and his prints didn’t get a hit either. The SUV they’d abandoned there was a dead end, too. So far, all we knew was that it had been stolen a couple of days ago. Detectives were on their way to interview its owner as a matter of procedure, but I knew it would prove to be a waste of time.

The follow-up reports on the multiple homicide at the Eagles’ clubhouse the day before didn’t give us anything to jump about either, although I’d had an idea about that.

“One thing worth doing,” I told them. “The guy Pennebaker told us about, the one Navarro went to work on. Pennebaker said one minute he was fine, then he just dropped to the ground like he’d been hit with a tranquilizer dart. Only he was still awake, just paralyzed.”

“What are you thinking?” Munro asked.

“Given that I don’t believe in voodoo, I’d say Navarro slipped him some kind of mickey. Which got me wondering about Walker. He was chopped up and left to bleed out, and yet there weren’t any signs of a struggle there. Like he didn’t resist. Which doesn’t make sense.”

“Unless he was drugged,” Villaverde added, getting my drift. “Okay. I’ll get the coroner to run a full toxicology workup.”

I’d already pretty much made up my mind on that one, and I knew what the tox report would confirm.

This wasn’t some lieutenant of Navarro’s.

It was him.

I just knew it.

Villaverde was picking up his phone when he handed me a sheet of paper.

“Michelle’s phone records,” he said. “There’s a Dean there, like you thought. Take a look.”

I looked at the printout. Several calls were highlighted, all made in the last six weeks to a number that was registered to Dean Stephenson. It had a 510 area code.

“It’s not local,” I asked.

Villaverde shook his head. “Berkeley.”

“And he’s a shrink?”

“Yes and no,” Villaverde replied. “He teaches psychiatry. Runs the department up at UCB.”

Which surprised and kind of worried me. Of all the shrinks Michelle could have taken Alex to see, she’d chosen someone who was undoubtedly a big hitter, despite the fact that he was basically an hour and a half’s flight away.

I called Tess and gave her his name and number while Villaverde spoke to the coroner, thinking she could run with it while we focused on figuring out how to get the bad guys to step into the limelight, ideally without my laying down my life in exchange.

Something else was nagging at me, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. In any case, I barely got a chance to float my proposal when one of Villaverde’s men burst into his office, his face all alight with urgency.

“You’ve got to see this,” he announced as he beelined across the room to Villaverde’s desk, grabbed a remote control, and used it to turn on the TV that sat on the bookshelves.

It was a local news channel. The banner read “Armed hostage situation in Mission Valley,” and the screen was showing some grainy footage that someone had filmed using their phone. There was a guy with a gun, holding someone by the neck, shouting and waving his gun around frantically while backing away from the camera.

I recognized him immediately from the small tuft of hair under his lower lip. It was Ricky “Scrape” Torres, aka Soulpatch—the biker with the bullet wound in his shoulder who’d been yanked out of the dead deputy’s car.

In living, breathing color.