Mission Road (19 page)

Etch wished them well. He hoped they died together some warm summer night, holding hands in bed. Nobody should die in winter. It was too depressing. Too cold and impersonal.

He looked down at the windowsill where he’d placed a few of his last possessions—a tiny black velvet box and an evidence bag.

He opened the evidence bag, brought out the vial and syringe—the same glass vial he’d had in his pocket the first time he visited Ana.

Etch hadn’t investigated homicides for fifteen years without picking up a few interesting methods of killing. The vial was a souvenir from a chemistry professor at Trinity University who used his postgraduate research to plan his wife’s perfect murder. If he hadn’t confided in his lab assistant, Etch never would’ve caught him.

Clear liquid. Damn near untraceable. Etch would need one minute to inject, no more. The effects would take maybe an hour to manifest. Coma. Organ failure. Everything you’d expect from a gunshot victim who suddenly took a turn for the worse.

He doubted the ME’s office would run toxicology, but even if they did, this stuff wouldn’t show up on a standard scan.

Etch’s first visit to Ana’s bedside, there’d been too many people. No opportunity. Then Maia Lee had shown up and rattled his nerves.

Etch turned the vial, watched a small air bubble float through the poison.

Maia Lee was becoming a major problem. She’d gotten to Titus Roe. She’d rattled Kelsey. She was putting together Ana’s line of investigation much too well. Depending on how much she’d told Navarre and Arguello . . . Etch needed a way to tie up all the loose ends at once.

He slipped the poison into his pocket. Today, one way or another, he would finish things.

He remembered sitting with Lucia on her porch, a few hours after they cleared the Frankie White crime scene. He’d wanted to tell her why he was late to their shift that evening. He’d been rehearsing in front of his bathroom mirror, practicing what he would say to her, worrying about whether he was doing the right thing.

But Frankie White had ruined everything. As usual, the Whites got in the way.

Etch picked up the black velvet box from the windowsill.

He opened it and stared at the white gold engagement ring, the small stone that was all he could afford, eighteen years ago.

He hadn’t had the courage to propose that night—not after the murder. And in the following weeks, Lucia started drifting away. He never found the right moment. He feared that she would say no.

Lucia never saw the ring.

Like so many of Etch’s dreams, the velvet box got tucked away, a secret
what if
he never showed to anyone. It was all Frankie White’s fault. The bastard had deserved every hit with the nightstick.

Lucia spoke to him:
It isn’t the Whites you’re mad at, Etch, any more than you’re mad at Ralph Arguello.

“You’re wrong,” Etch said.

You’re mad at me. Because I couldn’t be there for you, not one hundred percent.

“That wasn’t your fault.”

It’s still true, love. You meant to kill Ana. As soon as she looked into the case, you stole that poison from the evidence room. You were already thinking about how to stop her.

“No.”

Don’t kill her, Etch.

“She betrayed you. She left you. She doesn’t deserve anything from me.”

Ana’s words mixed with her mother’s:
Everybody is so goddamn busy protecting her reputation, they’re not helping
her.

Etch had no choice. He hadn’t chosen any of this.

He made Lucia a silent deal:
If you want it stopped, you’ll have to stop me. Otherwise . . .

He slipped the syringe in his coat pocket.

He closed up his empty house. As he walked toward his car, he imagined that his steps were erasing themselves behind him, leaving no trace of the path he’d walked for the last eighteen years.

SO MUCH FOR BIOLOGICAL CLOCKS.

When I woke up, it was already light outside. I was upside-down in Frankie White’s much-too-comfortable bed. The clock read 9:02.

I cursed and ripped off the covers. My head felt like it had been used as a guacamole pestle. I was still wearing the silk pajamas.

I grabbed the baseball bat, started to go for the door, but the tiled floor was like ice. I tiptoed my way to the closet and searched for shoes.

Frankie’s too-small football cleats? Wouldn’t fit.

My only other choice: the teddy bear slippers. I swallowed my pride. At least they were warm, and I figured they’d be quieter than cleats.

I went to the door and tried it—still open. Virgil was still standing outside, bleary-eyed, reading a NASCAR magazine.

He turned, stared at me in surprise.

I gave him my most disarming smile. “’Morning, Virgil.”

Then I rammed the baseball bat in his gut. He doubled over, allowing me to clonk him on the head and roll him into the room. He curled into fetal position on the tiles and moaned. Not quite unconscious, but he wasn’t going to be running relay races anytime soon.

I took his gun and his keys, apologized, and was about to leave when I thought,
Shoes.

I checked him out. No good. Feet way too small. For the time being, I was stuck with the teddy bears.

I locked Virgil in Frankie’s room and trotted next door to Ralph’s. No guard outside. The hallway was clear in both directions.

I suppose I should’ve felt honored Virgil chose my door to stand outside. He’d obviously concluded that I was the more lethal threat, or maybe he simply didn’t want to listen to Ralph snore. And Ralph
does
snore.

I rapped lightly on the door—
Para bailar La Bamba.

A muffled grunt, then silence.

I rapped again. Ralph doesn’t sleep much, but when he finally gets to deep REM, he tends to stay there.

Finally his voice: “You better have breakfast.”

“A .38 or a baseball bat,” I murmured. “Take your pick.”

“Thirty-eights give me indigestion.”

I found the right key and unlocked his door. He was wearing black sweatpants and a T-shirt. His hair was frizzy, tied in a haphazard ponytail like the Wicked Witch of the West.

He looked down at my animal slippers. “Nice.”

“There’s a story behind those.”

“When the mother bear catches up with you, it’s your problem.” He grabbed the bat. “Which way?”

We headed for the main staircase.

I was hoping several things: First, that I could find my way back to the service entrance in the kitchen. I mean, why mess with a classic strategy? It had worked for Titus Roe. Second, I was hoping the White household was mostly asleep, this being the morning after the big party. Finally, I was hoping we could find a car and get off the property alive.

All those hopes pretty much fell apart when we ran into Madeleine.

•                           •                           •

WE WERE CROSSING THE BALCONY OF
the main entry hall, heading for the final flight of stairs, when she emerged from a door right next to us.

I’m not sure who was more surprised, but her hangover must’ve still been slowing her wits. I had time to raise my gun.

Her jeans and oversized button-down were spattered with acrylic paint. She smelled of turpentine. She had three green freckles on her cheek and a slash of sky blue in her hair.

She stared at the .38 like it was a dead rat. “What are you doing?”

“Leaving,” I said.

“The hell you are.”

“Come on, Madeleine. Just . . . go take a shower or something. We’ll be out of your way.”

“You son-of-a-bitch. Where’s Virgil?”

“Upstairs with a stomachache and a headache. Look, you never wanted us here. It didn’t work out. We’re going to keep looking on our own.”

The scary thing was, I almost thought I’d convinced her.

She gazed down into the entry hall, as if thinking hard. Then I realized she was looking at the front door. Our favorite mafia boy Alex Cole had just come inside, carrying a Sunday paper, his car keys and a box of Krispy Kremes.

He was moving fast. Red-faced and scowling, he marched toward the stairs like he absolutely
had
to get his doughnuts somewhere important. He froze when he saw us.

“You bitch,” he said to Madeleine. “What are
they
doing out?”

Madeleine blinked. “What did you just—”

“It was on the car radio.” Alex pointed at Ralph. “It was
him.
The police have DNA. Arguello killed Frankie. That’s why he shot his wife. She was about to bust him.”

Madeleine looked like she’d taken an uppercut to the face. She turned toward me.

“It’s a frame,” I said. “Madeleine, we wouldn’t be here—”

“Hey, wake up!” Alex shouted at the house. “Security! Wake the fuck up!”

Madeleine’s fists clenched, but her eyes were brittle, the way they’d looked when she was ten, running under the high school bleachers to get away from her brother. “How. How could you—”

“It wasn’t me,
chiquita,
” Ralph told her. “I tried to help Frankie. You know that.”

“Wake up, somebody!” Alex yelled. “Aw, the hell with it.”

He dropped his keys and doughnuts on an end table and started up the stairs toward us. Footsteps behind us—at least two guys, running from the upstairs hall.

“Vato,”
Ralph yelled,
“vámanos!”

We pushed past Madeleine, who didn’t try to stop us. We ran toward the bottom of the stairs and Alex.

Two guards were coming behind us. Both were armed, but looked half asleep, baffled by what they saw.

“What are you waiting for?” Alex yelled. “Shoot them!”

One of the guards: “But—”

Alex started to say, “Shoot, godda—” when Ralph and I crashed into him. Not the most graceful takedown, but it worked. Alex crumpled backward in an unintended somersault.

Ralph and I burst through the kitchen doorway just as the guards opened fire.

•                           •                           •

RALPH RAN STRAIGHT FOR THE SERVICE
exit. A bullet came through the window and shattered a bottle of brandy on the counter.

He hit the floor, put his back against the door.

“One more guy outside.” He reached up, threw the deadbolt.

The interior door had no lock, but it was right next to the refrigerator. I dragged the fridge in front of it. With all the adrenaline coursing through my body, I probably could’ve stacked a stove and a couple of cars, too.

Alex was cursing in the living room. He told one of the guards to wake up Mr. White. Madeleine said something and he yelled at her to shut up. Somebody battered on the interior door. The beer bottles rattled in the fridge.

The wall phone was right next to me. I thought about calling the police, but I decided it wouldn’t do any good. We already had enough people on the premises who wanted to kill us.

Maia was my only other option, but I hesitated. As much as we needed her, as much as I wanted to hear her voice, I didn’t want to put her in danger. I had a bad feeling that if I called her, it might be our last conversation.

A guard’s face appeared in the back window. I shot at the pane just above his head, then scrambled over to where Ralph was sitting.

“We need a third exit,” Ralph said. “Maybe a distraction.”

WHUMP.

The interior door shuddered. The fridge moved a couple of inches.

Brandy from the broken bottle was dripping off the counter. There were maybe a dozen more bottles left over from the party. Right by the gas stove—and the window above the sink.

An insane idea started to form in my head, but Ralph was way ahead of me.

“Check that drawer by the oven,” he said. “Find me some matches.”

As Ralph was lighting what might be our funeral pyre, I gave in to desperation. I picked up the phone.

SUNDAY MORNING THE STREETS WERE DESERTED,
which was not good for Maia’s safety. When she was angry and nervous, she drove as fast as traffic would allow. This morning, that was very fast indeed.

As so often happened for her, the answers had woven together in her mind at 3:00
A.M.
Unable to sleep, dreading the onset of morning sickness, she had followed Ana DeLeon’s thought process through to the end. Maia knew who had shot Ana. An 8:00
A.M.
call to the hospital front desk, a few questions about the police security detail had confirmed Maia’s fears about what he would do next.

Etch Hernandez.

Two things had decided her. First, the look on Kelsey’s face last night had not been the look of a guilty man. Stubborn, angry, defensive, yes. But guilty men don’t look quite so lost. They tend to have a smug calmness somewhere inside—a certainty that they are right and will be vindicated. Kelsey didn’t know what the hell was happening to him. He looked like a hopelessly outmatched boxer who’d decided to tuck in his chin, squeeze his eyes shut, and throw as many blind punches as possible before he got KO’d.

The second factor was the photograph of Hernandez and Lucia from Ana’s bulletin board. Maia had studied it a hundred times. She kept trying to read the strange uneasiness, the tense body language between the two partners. The way they stood together, the way Etch seemed entirely conscious of Lucia . . .
Timing is wrong.

Maia wondered if Ana realized how ironic her notation was.

She suspected she knew more than Ana did. She thought she now understood the motive behind Franklin White’s murder, and that was the most disturbing puzzle piece of all.

She fishtailed into the hospital lot and took a reserved space.

She rummaged through the toolbox she always kept behind her driver’s seat—a few simple items that opened most doors. One was a stethoscope.

She tucked it in the front pocket of her blazer and headed toward the lobby.

As she walked, she thought about Tres.

She’d slept in his bed last night. The pillows smelled like him. The cat curled between her feet, but the sheets weren’t warm enough.

The longer Tres and she were together, the more she missed his warmth when they slept apart. He was always hot—always just a degree shy of a fever.

She woke to winter sunlight through bare pecan branches, the creaking of pipes and the smell of melting butter and fresh-baked cinnamon rolls downstairs.

Despite her uneasy stomach and her sense of foreboding, she ate breakfast in the kitchen with Sam and Mrs. Loomis.

Even with a bandaged ear, Sam was in an excellent mood. He ate three cinnamon rolls with bacon and had two cups of coffee.

He thought Maia was one of his operatives. He kept asking her questions about clients. Maia did her best to fabricate good answers.

Mrs. Loomis talked about her children—two boys, both grown and moved out of state. Her husband the policeman had died when the boys were very young. She’d raised them on her own, hadn’t seen either of them now for several years.

“That’s a shame,” Maia said.

Mrs. Loomis spooned scrambled eggs onto their plates. “Oh, it’s not so bad. I miss them . . . but mostly I miss them being young. They drove me crazy so many years. I can’t help getting nostalgic.”

Maia must’ve looked perplexed, because Mrs. Loomis laughed. “You’ll understand when you have a child, dear.”

When.
Not
if.

A decade ago, Maia would’ve protested. She’d fended off many such comments, resented the assumption that because she was a woman, she would someday be a mother.

The last five or six years, those comments had become fewer and fewer.

Maia was almost grateful to hear someone make the assumption again. It sounded . . . optimistic.

Maia ate her eggs. She tried to push away the image of her father grieving, his years of anguish and worry finally breaking him, turning his bones brittle as surely as the disease that had taken his ten-year-old son, Xian, wrapped in funeral white.

Maia knew she had to get going, but she didn’t want to leave the comfort of the kitchen. She felt safe here, part of the makeshift family of Tres’ foundlings.

She thought about her own apartment in Austin, the view of Barton Creek out the kitchen window. She’d only been away from it twenty-four hours, but she had trouble picturing what it looked like. She had even more trouble thinking of it as home.

“Undercover work on the loading docks today,” Sam told her. “Be careful nobody finds you out.”

“I’ll be careful,” she promised.

She met Mrs. Loomis’ eyes. The older woman smiled as if she’d just seen a photo from her own past—something simple and poignant, with faces of children who had long since grown.

•                           •                           •

“IS DR. GAGARIN IN ICU?” MAIA
asked, using a random name from the hospital directory.

The hospital receptionist looked up. What she saw: an Asian woman in an expensive black pantsuit, a stethoscope in her pocket and a confident, impatient expression—a woman who was used to having her questions answered. “I don’t know, Dr.—”

“Never mind,” Maia said. “I’ll go up myself.”

“I can page—”

“No, thank you. No time.”

Maia strode down the hallway to the elevator.

Nobody stopped her.

Maia wasn’t surprised. She’d played doctor numerous times. Never once had she been challenged. She liked to think that was because of her great acting skill, but she feared it had more to do with hospital security. They weren’t any better than police stations.

Maternity wards were the worst. Maia had already put that on her list of things to worry about, six months from now . . .

The elevator opened on the third floor.

As Maia feared, no police officers were stationed outside Ana DeLeon’s room.

Sunday morning, off-duty cops could make big bucks directing traffic for the local churches. It wouldn’t have taken much to convince the uniforms to take off this shift.

Maia walked toward Ana’s room. Halfway, she froze. At the far end of the hall, by the nurse’s station, Etch Hernandez was standing with his back turned, talking to an orderly.

If he’d already done something, if Maia was too late . . .

Morning sickness snaked its way through her stomach. She fought down the nausea and slipped into the room.

Ana’s heart monitor showed a strong pulse. Her eyes were closed. She still looked wasted and pale, but the improvement over yesterday was striking.

Her face had some color to it. Her chest rose and fell with regular breathing.

Maia suddenly felt foolish.

Perhaps she’d been wrong about Hernandez. He’d been here before her. He hadn’t done anything. Would he be in the hallway, casually chatting with an orderly, if he was planning murder?

Maia went to the bedside and held Ana’s hand. Ana’s gold wedding band felt warm against her skin.

Maia prayed Tres had gotten her phone message. It had been a desperate, stupid thing to do—trusting White’s daughter, but Maia had been shaken. She’d felt a compulsive need to explain Tres—to protect him. And she’d sensed something in the young woman’s voice—a receptiveness. God, if she was wrong . . .

The DNA match would be announced anytime. It wouldn’t be long before someone in White’s household heard the news.

The pain in Maia’s gut was getting worse. She wanted to lie down, curl into a ball, but she couldn’t give in to it—especially not
this
morning.

Ana’s eyes moved under her lids, as if she were dreaming.

“You’ll be okay,” Maia told her shakily. “You’re a tough lady.”

She heard footsteps coming down the hallway.

Maia slipped behind the bathroom door and aimed her cell phone camera through the space between the hinges.

Etch Hernandez came into the room.

He was well dressed as usual—a chocolaty wool suit, teal shirt, mauve silk tie. He regarded the woman on the bed with his usual sad expression, as if he’d simply come as a dear friend. Then he reached in his jacket and took out a syringe and a small vial.

Maia snapped a picture.

Hernandez moved toward Ana’s bed. Maia pulled her gun and stepped out of the bathroom. “Lieutenant.”

Hernandez turned, his eyes as glassy as a sleepwalker’s. He was right next to Ana. The syringe was full.

“I got a nice picture of you about to poison your protégée,” Maia said. “Try it and I’m going to blow a hole in your fucking Italian suit.”

Hernandez regarded Ana. The needle was three inches from her forearm. “I should’ve killed you first, Miss Lee. That was a mistake.”

“I think we can agree that your priorities are fucked up,” Maia said. “Now step away from Ana.”

Hernandez focused on a spot in the air, as if he were listening to some other voice. “Miss Lee, you don’t understand. I’m not interested in saving my own skin.”

“No,” Maia said. “You’re interested in saving Lucia’s memory. And if you don’t cap the syringe, I’ll tell everyone the truth about Frankie’s murder.”

She wasn’t sure she truly understood until that moment, when his eyes turned cold and bright. “You’ve shared your thoughts with Navarre and Arguello?”

“
You’re
going to do that,” she said. “We’re going to go see them right now.”

“And why should I agree?”

“Because you want the truth to come out. Deep down, you won’t be satisfied with someone else taking the blame. Part of you wanted Ana to pick up that cold case. You wanted to hurt her. You wanted Ana to know, Etch.”

She’d never addressed him by his first name before, and it seemed to unnerve him.

He lowered the needle. He wiped it with his handkerchief, capped it, put it back in his jacket pocket. “You plan to walk out of here holding a police lieutenant at gunpoint?”

“Not at gunpoint,” Maia said. “I’m taking your sidearm and putting mine away. We leave together. If you try anything, I’ll break your neck with my bare hands.”

•                           •                           •

THEY LEFT THE HOSPITAL TOGETHER. HERNANDEZ
was calm. Way too calm. He made no attempt to run or yell for help.

When they got to Maia’s BMW, he took the wheel without complaint. Maia got in the passenger’s seat and took out her gun. Second time in one weekend, she thought grimly, that she’d had a hostage chauffeur.

She doubted Hernandez would remain compliant once she told him they were going to the White mansion.

She was about to give him his driving directions when her phone rang.

The sound distracted her only for a second, but that was enough. Morning sickness dulled her reflexes. Before she knew what was happening, Hernandez had wrenched the gun out of her hand and was pressing the muzzle under her jaw.

The phone kept ringing.

Maia sat perfectly still, her heart pounding.

“Change of plans, Miss Lee,” Hernandez said. “You’ll be driving. This is going to end where it began.”

Without taking his eyes off her, he managed to find her purse and fish out the phone. He answered it on the fifth ring.

“Mr. Navarre,” he said. “What a surprise.”