Time of Death

2

Gary slipped quietly into his office without visiting the bullpen, but Ren had seen his car drive into the lot. She paused outside his door. Despite her years at Safe Streets, there were still times when she took a moment before going in. Gary’s office was like a Dutch minimalist armchair — handsome and elegant, but you wouldn’t want to stay in it for too long. It was as if it had been designed as a quick stop-off on your way to solving a case.

Ren knocked. Gary didn’t respond. If someone said jump, Gary Dettling, wouldn’t say ‘How high?’ He would probably never jump again for the rest of his life.

Ren leaned an ear to the door.

‘Come in,’ said Gary.

He was sitting at his desk. Ren imagined him there on his first day in the job, carefully flattening out a sheet of graph paper and marking in the exact location of each piece of furniture and drawing red circles with Xs through them over any spot that would typically hold a personal touch. But Ren knew that the polished mahogany, the pristine blue carpet, the sharp lines, the austerity did not define the man. It masked him. Gary was not just head of the Safe Streets Task Force, he also trained the FBI’s UCEs — undercover employees. He had spent so long in deep-cover assignments that hiding his real life had become a habit. He had a wife, a teenage daughter, a house in the mountains, but his office gave no indication of who Gary Dettling really was.

After her own deep-cover assignment, Ren had gone the other way. Once it was all over, she wanted to reinforce who she was more than ever. The problem was, she had never worked out who Ren Bryce was. And somewhere along the way, she had given up. Now, her workspace was as impersonal as Gary’s.

‘Hey,’ she said. ‘How are you?’

Gary looked up. ‘What’s up?’

‘Uh…the Most Wanted, maybe?’

‘Late-breaking change of play.’

‘How did you let that happen?’ said Ren.

Gary stared at her. ‘It happened. US Marshals wanted it that way. I said, sure, OK.’

‘Right…’

‘Ren, it’s done,’ said Gary.

‘I know, but…’

‘You still get to highlight the Val Pando three. OK, so they’ve dropped a few places on the Billboard charts…’ He shrugged.

‘That’s not the point.’

‘Ren, here’s the deal. Last year, we almost had the Val Pandos. And it dead-ended. This new top two have had confirmed sightings in Denver in the last month…’

‘Ah, meaning it’s going to be easier to strike this top two off the list. So everyone looks better?’

‘Including you,’ said Gary.

‘I could give two shits,’ said Ren.

Gary looked at her patiently. And glanced at the door behind her.

‘Fine. OK,’ said Ren.

‘Where are the others?’ said Gary.

‘In various states of “on their way”.’

Back in the task force office, Ren checked her email, flagged most of the new messages, then ignored them.

‘Coffee, anyone?’ Colin Grabien walked in the door with an offer he usually didn’t make until at least two hours into the day.

Colin Grabien had transferred to Safe Streets from the FBI White Collar Squad and was the task force’s IT and numbers expert. He was five foot eight in the flesh, six foot eight in spirit and a ball of latent anger. He was the mosquito — Ren was the citronella candle.

Gary finally appeared in the office as Ren was walking out with her makeup bag hidden by her side. She didn’t wear a lot — sheer foundation, brown or gray eyeshadow, black mascara on her poker-straight lashes and clear lip gloss — but she couldn’t go without it, even when it meant applying it in the ergonomically challenged Safe Streets ladies room.

‘Nice makeup,’ said Colin when she got back.

‘Fuck you,’ Ren coughed into her hand.

‘OK,’ said Gary, ‘everyone’s here. I’m going to give the lowdown on one and two on our list. Ren will do three through five.’

‘Sure,’ said Ren.

Gary’s phone beeped. ‘Ren, go ahead. I need to take care of this.’

Ren stood up. ‘OK, gentlemen: here’s the lowdown on the Val Pando posse. If I’m repeating myself, please realize that I don’t care. First up, number three — Domenica Val Pando, Latina, DOB 10/02/64.

‘Domenica was head of a huge cartel operating in New Mexico in the nineties — people trafficking, drugs, weapons, branching into biological weapons. No one has actually seen her since she disappeared the night the compound was stormed, with her seven-year-old son, Gavino Val Pando and her fifty-year-old husband, Augusto Val Pando.

‘Domenica showed up on the radar again last August when she was attempting to set up a lab outside Brecken-ridge to make H₂S — colorless, odorless, fatal in seconds. We stopped her. But we couldn’t make any firm links to her, because she was, sadly, too fucking smart.’

Ren stood back. ‘This photo is eleven years old.’ The team followed her gaze to the noticeboard. Domenica Val Pando used to have an exotic beauty, but she had Americanized it, tweaked her features with surgery. Her hair was now the yellow-blonde that only very dark hair can be dyed. It was perfectly styled, but wrong. Her eyes were deep brown, slightly protruding, her lips full.

‘Not every psycho is dead in the eyes,’ said Ren.

Colin stared a little too long at the picture. ‘I’d hit it,’ he said.

‘Your standards are rising,’ said Ren. ‘Let me quickly give you the lowdown on Gavino Val Pando, Domenica’s son.’ She pointed to his photo, stapled under his mother’s.

Gavino had flawless dark skin and longish black hair that he pulled back off his face. He had strong bone structure and full but angular lips. His eyes were brown and lost. Ren stared at the photo. She had spent one year looking after six-year-old Gavino Val Pando and trying to deny how much she really cared about him.

‘Gavino’s eighteen years old,’ said Ren. ‘Our last encounter with him was last year in the Summit County jail, where he was taken in for under-age drinking. More significantly, he was paying for it with bait money from a robbery in Idaho Springs, of which he claimed to have no knowledge. We couldn’t prove otherwise, but it was definitely connected with Domenica. There is nothing to suggest that Gavino Val Pando is violent and a lot to suggest he was drunk and stupid that night. We had to release him and we don’t know his whereabouts, or whether he has remained in contact with Mommy Dearest.

‘His relationship with her is complicated. Her husband, Augusto Val Pando, was not Gavino’s biological father, but Augusto probably suspected that — he had no time for Gavino. So, while Gavino may be with his mother and therefore a very effective route to her, he definitely will not be with Augusto.’

‘And what about his real father?’ said Robbie.

‘James Laker — presumed dead,’ said Ren. ‘It is believed he was killed in the fire that destroyed the compound.’ A sweet, kind man, used and abused, first by life and then by Domenica.

‘Now to number four on our list,’ said Ren. ‘Another of Domenica’s minions: Javier Luis, born 1973, five foot two, one hundred and sixty pounds. First-degree murder, attempted first-degree murder, aggravated robbery; drugs; rape, sexual assault on a minor…he went MIA from Domenica’s compound in 1998, just before the shit hit the fan.’

Ren remembered Javier Luis. He was always dressed in concert T-shirts for bands he had never seen. He was not tall, so his shorts almost reached his ankles. His voice was nasal and whiny. He would look at Ren in a way that reminded her to shutter the windows at night and lock all the doors. She rarely spoke with him and, when she did, she kept it brief.

‘Finally,’ said Ren, ‘number five, Erubiel Diaz, Latino, DOB 12/10/58, one of Domenica’s shit shovelers.’

She pointed at the photo.

‘This roidy little man was involved in the H₂S lab — as a gofer, not a scientist, so that qualifies him for our hit list,’ said Ren. ‘He’s violent, a probable rapist and every daytime chat show’s favorite — a dead-beat dad. He was ratted out by his ex-wife four months ago for showing up in Denver, penniless, trying to see his kids. And off the record? He tried to assault me late one night in the parking lot of the Brockton Filly in Breckenridge and I-’

‘Kicked the living daylights out of him?’ said Robbie.

‘All the way to Frisco Medical Center,’ said Ren.

‘Where he told everyone he was attacked by a man,’ said Gary.

‘He was,’ said Colin.

Ren rolled her eyes. ‘Diaz obviously didn’t know at the time that I was an agent, but I let him know when I paid him a visit in the Summit County Jail, where he was being held for failure to pay child support. I couldn’t let the sheriff there know what Diaz had done to me because then the sheriff would know what I had done to him. So Diaz was released, we had nothing on him. But after he’d gone we found out that he had been working for Domenica Val Pando.’ She paused. ‘And probably still is. So, right now, although he is a little lower in the pecking order, I believe that Erubiel Diaz may well be our golden ticket.’