Mission Road (8 page)

“Enough, Madeleine,” Mr. White said.

The demon girl’s foot eased off my back. She yanked me to kneeling position, dragged me backward and shoved me into a plush armchair. Next to me, Ralph got a similar treatment from Alex the goon.

Guy White stood in front of us, staring out his library windows.

His back lawn spread to the horizon. The workers were everywhere, setting up the tent and the banquet tables and the Christmas decorations on the denuded grass.

“It’s been a long time, gentlemen.” Mr. White turned.

He had once been a handsome man—tan, blue eyes, trim figure. He loved spending time in his garden. He boasted of never being sick. At forty, he’d looked twenty-five. At sixty-two, when I’d last seen him, he could’ve passed for fifty. A local
curandero
once assured me
Señor
White had made a pact with the devil for eternal youth.

Now, as he was approaching seventy, it looked like the devil had decided to collect.

His gaze was as fierce as I remembered, but the skin under his eyes was translucent. His lips were colorless. He reminded me of a corpse with a light inside.

“Lymphoma,” he said, answering the question I didn’t dare ask. “I don’t make many public appearances these days. Not to worry, however. My doctors are quite optimistic.”

His eyes glittered as if this were deeply humorous. “Now, gentlemen, enlighten me. What do you claim to know about my son’s murder?”

“Sir,” Madeleine protested.

White held up his hand.

He gave me a smile that might’ve been mistaken as kind, if you weren’t used to dealing with reptiles. “You must excuse Madeleine. She believes I’m easily taken advantage of. A dying man, still doting over a dead, worthless son.”

“Sir, I never—”

“You’d never say so to my face,” he agreed. “You don’t need to.”

Alex cleared his throat. “I tried to tell her, Mr. W. I thought you should make the call.”

“Your sensitivity to my wishes is appreciated, Alex Cole.”

“Sir,” Madeleine said, now gritting her teeth, “the last private investigator—”

“Yes, my dear. The last private investigator took my money, taxed my health, played my hopes for nothing. But you paid him accordingly, did you not?”

White offered me another cold smile.

I wondered what lake that PI was floating at the bottom of.

“I understand from the news you are both wanted men,” White told us casually. “Shot your wife, did you, Mr. Arguello?”

“No,
patrón,
” Ralph replied. “I didn’t.”

Mr. White gave him a sympathetic look. “You put me in an awkward situation. I have my annual Christmas party tonight. I must keep up appearances, you know. Show my, ah, business associates I’m still alive. On top of this, I have the Secret Service hovering outside my house.”

“Secret Service?” I asked.

Ralph looked at me. “You owe me ten bucks.”

“My point, gentlemen,” White said, his voice a little frostier, “is that I have enough to worry about. Why should I not, as a law-abiding citizen, turn you in to the police?”

“We were friends of Frankie’s,” Ralph said. “You know that.”

White studied us. What Ralph said was technically true. In my case, “friends” was pushing it, but I tried to look, well . . . friendly.

“My wife,” Ralph said, “Ana DeLeon—”

“The homicide detective,” White said.

“—she was reopening Frankie’s murder case.”

White tugged the cuff of his Turkish bathrobe. “I knew nothing of this.”

“Ana had a fresh lead. She was getting ready to make an arrest when somebody shot her.”

“The police say
you
shot her.”

“’Course they do.” Ralph’s voice was raw. “The police hate my guts. They didn’t want Ana reopening your son’s murder case, ’cause they hate
your
guts, too. But Ana was my wife. I’d never shoot her. The person who shot her was the suspect. Frankie’s killer.”

Ralph’s gaze was so steady even I was impressed.

Guy White cupped his hand, as if to gather the pale winter light coming through the window. “What do you propose?”

“Sir, no,” Madeleine protested.

“I need to find this guy to clear myself,” Ralph told Guy White. “You want to find him, too. We have a common goal.”

Madeleine exhaled. “Sir, they have
nothing
to offer you. We’ve tried . . .
you’ve
tried for eighteen years. If there was a way—”

“All we need is some discreet help,” I put in. “Wheels. Clothes. Firepower. Your leverage to open a few doors. What have you got to lose?”

White pondered this. His face gleamed from the tiny effort of speaking with us. He looked impossibly ancient, nothing like the man I remembered. “Mr. Navarre, do you truly believe you can find my son’s killer?”

“I believe I have no choice.”

White’s eyes betrayed nothing. “I’ve been keeping tabs on you. You’re good. Probably better than you realize. I’ve heard you can find anyone.”

“This is bullshit,” Madeleine spat.

I wondered how Madeleine had kept her job and her life this long, with an attitude like hers. From her colleague Alex’s disdainful sneer, I figured he was wondering the same thing.

“My resources are at your disposal,” White decided.

“Sir!”

“However,” White said, ignoring her, “one of my people will be with you at all times.”

“I’ll do it, Mr. W,” Alex piped in.

“If I find you are using me, gentlemen,” White continued, “your life expectancy will be even shorter than mine. Alex, you stay here. Madeleine will see to their needs.”

“What?”
she demanded.

“Go with them,” White commanded. “Cooperate with them. Watch them.”

“Frankie isn’t worth the effort. I don’t want this job.” Her fists were balled, her voice simmered.

Guy White raised an eyebrow. “You don’t have any choice, my dear. After all, he
was
your brother.”

“SO YOU TOLD HER NOTHING,” ETCH SAID.

The old medical examiner, Jaime Santos, leaned against his porch railing.

Down below, winter mist filled the Olmos Basin. The pewter line of the dam cut through marshes and soccer fields, marching toward the hills where chimney smoke trailed up from the roofs of mansions.

“Nothing,” Santos agreed. “I mean . . . what would be the point?”

Santos met his eyes, then looked away.

He’s lying,
Etch thought.

Doctors were not cops. They couldn’t pull off a lie.

Santos had aged since retirement. His eyes had turned soft and desperate. His chest caved inward. His hair had worn down to gray patches like a bad coat of primer.

“Miss Lee seems smart.” Santos tried to sound casual about it. “She asked about the blood under Frankie White’s fingernails.”

Etch sipped his
atole.

It had been years since he had the stuff. The cinnamon and chocolate sent him back to Christmas at his
abuela
’s—stockings, presents, family dinners.

It had been a long time since he’d thought of Christmas as anything but sweep season for homicides.

“We got a DNA match,” he told Santos. “Ana’s husband—Ralph Arguello. Ana didn’t want to accept that. She claimed the test was tampered with.”

“One could fake something like that. You’d have to have access to the evidence room. You’d have to know what you were doing. But it’s possible. Look at that big scandal in Houston. They had to shut down their entire DNA lab.”

“What are you saying, Jaime?”

Santos shrugged. “Just that it wouldn’t be hard.”

Etch set his cup on the railing. There was a bullet hole dug into the rough-hewn oak. Etch put his finger on it. “Still the teenage snipers?”

“Damn kids,” Santos agreed. “They get on that utility road down there with a .22. My windows are the only thing you can see on this side of the hill at night. They think I’m a damn bull’s-eye. I keep calling the Alamo Heights cops . . .”

Etch nodded sympathetically. He took another sip of
atole.

Christmas, nineteen years ago, Lucia and he had found Franklin White’s third victim. A community college student, Julia Garcia had been raped and strangled off Mission Road, abandoned like a used tire. The spot had looked a lot like the marshland below Santos’ deck.

Julia Garcia had been a few months shy of her twentieth birthday. She was the first in her family to go to college. Alive, she’d had a radiant smile. She volunteered with the barrio literacy program. She wanted to be a teacher. All that was cut short because she’d let a well-dressed young man pick her up at a bar.

Etch remembered standing in below-zero wind, watching the forensics team haul a draped gurney from the weed-choked gully.

Lucia said:
We’ll get him, Etch. Don’t worry.

The father got away with it,
he had told her.
Why not the son?

Lucia’s face darkened. She couldn’t offer him any reassurance.

Guy White had never
killed
his women, but the distinction didn’t matter. It was still the White family proving their power, taking the women of the old mission lands like the Anglo cattle barons had before them and the Spanish
alcaldes
before that. The lords of San Antonio never changed. They had to find the heart of the city, the deepest foundation, and violate it. Possess it. Make themselves legitimate by proving that the oldest inhabitants of the land, families that had been here for three centuries, were defenseless against them.

Like Lucia, Etch came from mission blood. He’d grown up within the sounds of the bells of San Juan and San José.

He’d also been a cop long enough to know how easily justice could be bought and sold. He’d seen how reticent the homicide detectives were to approach the White family, how swiftly White’s lawyers counterattacked.

No one could bring Frankie White to justice. At least not in the conventional way.

No one would make him pay for snuffing out Julia Garcia’s life.

Etch took another sip of Santos’
atole.
“You suggest anybody else for Miss Lee to talk to?”

The old ME wouldn’t meet his eyes. “Why?”

“Just curious.” He decided to risk a bit of the truth. “I have a guy tailing her.”

“You think that’s worth your time?”

“She’s a fugitive’s girlfriend. I have to assume eventually she’ll hook up with Navarre. Be stupid not to have her tailed.”

Santos’ hands trembled. “I don’t recall. We talked for just a few minutes.”

Etch couldn’t help feeling sorry for Santos. If he was Etch’s suspect, if this had been a formal interrogation, the old doctor would’ve been dead meat. “You remember Larry Drapiewski, used to be with the Sheriff’s Department? He told Navarre the hit man theory—Titus Roe.”

“Yeah?”

“I wouldn’t be surprised if there was some truth to that.”

“I . . . guess it’s possible.”

“Jaime, I don’t want the killer to be a cop. I wouldn’t like it if people were sending that message.”

“We take care of our own.”

“Used to be that way,” Etch agreed.

“So,” Santos said, moistening his lips. “How’s the sergeant in the hospital doing?”

Etch forced himself not to make a fist. He thought about Ana in that hospital bed, the uneven bleep of the heart monitor. He had stood at her window for an hour, hating himself, his hand in his pocket, fingering a small glass vial.

“Thanks for the
atole,
” he told Santos. “Maybe we’ll play a few holes some time?”

The old medical examiner nodded, his eyes cautious. “I’d like that, Lieutenant.”

As Etch drove across the dam, he got one last glimpse of Jaime Santos standing on his back porch, two cups of
atole
steaming on the rail in the afternoon cold.

•                           •                           •

DECEMBER 1986, THE SAME CHRISTMAS FRANKIE
White murdered his third victim, Etch’s
abuela,
the ninety-two-year-old matron of the family, had died of a bad heart. What was left of the Hernandez clan came unraveled.

Etch’s parents had died three years before—his father staring down the barrel of his old military service revolver, his mother shortly afterward from an overdose of sleeping pills. Etch’s siblings drifted away to other states. His cousins stopped going to mass at San Juan. Even Etch moved out of the old neighborhood, to a nondescript little house on the near West Side where he could do his target practice in the surrounding fields.

His
abuela
’s funeral hit him harder than he expected. He finally realized he was alone. No family of his own. No wife or kids. Nothing but his job, and not many friends there.

Not that his colleagues disliked him. Everyone complimented Etch on his efficiency. Most of them trusted him to watch their backs. But nobody invited him for a beer. He did not radiate the kind of easygoing manner that made people want to hang out with him.

Except for Lucia. She went to the funeral with him. She held his hand during the lowering of the casket.

Afterward, they sat on her porch swing and drank tequila while inside the Spanish AM radio played old-fashioned
rancheras.

“You should take the sergeant’s test,” Lucia told him. “I can see you as a supervisor. A lieutenant, even.”

For a moment, Etch was too surprised to speak. “I’m a career patrolman, like you. You understand that.”

She poured another shot of Cuervo.

She was wearing a charcoal dress, silver earrings, even lipstick. Her hair was freshly washed and curled. She smelled like jasmine.

“People make a wide arc around you,” Lucia said. “They sense you’re not one of the guys. That’s okay. You’re . . . detached. You’re a born commander, Etch. You should stop worrying and play your strengths.”

A Santiago Jiménez song played on the radio, the sounds of accordion and
basso
guitar pulsing through the screen door.

Lucia’s daughter, Ana, was home from Lackland Air Force Base. It was her first weekend furlough after basic training. Etch could hear Ana inside, talking on the phone to a friend. A lot of twenty-one-year-old catch-up talk—
No way. Oh my God, you’re kidding! He did what?

Etch tried not to resent Ana’s presence.

Lucia looked good tonight. It felt right to just sit next to her.

He’d thought, once Ana was grown and out of the house . . . maybe there’d be time to get closer to Lucia. He’d been trying for so long, building up his courage for the eleven years they’d worked together. They spent every day together. In the field, they could read each other’s body language perfectly, finish each other’s sentences. Yet off duty, she still acted distant. Every time he edged toward telling her how he felt, she seemed to sense it and pull away.

“Lucia, I couldn’t work a job where you weren’t my partner,” he said finally.

She smiled, but there was sadness behind it. “You should do more than this, Etch. You could run things better than the brass we got now, for sure. You’re a good man.”

“No, I’m not. Just lonely.”

She said nothing.

“I know everybody in our beat,” Etch said. “I know their kids and grandkids. And I’ve still got no one. I just can’t—”

“Get close,” she supplied, when he faltered. “It’s like somebody stole that part of you—the part that lets you connect.”

There was no need to answer. She described him as perfectly as the day she’d named him “Etch.”

His heart pounded like a damn teenager’s. He reached over and rested his hand on her knee. She didn’t object. She laced her fingers on top of his.

Then Ana flew out the door, breathless. “Mom, can I borrow your car?”

Gently but firmly, Lucia brushed away Etch’s hand.

Ana took a step back. “Oh—”

“It’s all right, honey.” Lucia forced a smile. “Etch, did I tell you Ana is applying for special police?”

“That’s great.” Etch tried to sound enthusiastic, though his heart felt like crushed paper. “You thinking about civilian law enforcement some day?”

Ana studied him warily, then nodded. “Four years in the service, then college. Then apply to SAPD.”

She said it just like any twenty-one-year-old—as if life plans were carved in stone. It was hard for Etch to believe she was the same age as a monster like Frankie White.

“Uh . . . Mom?” Ana looked at the tequila bottle. “I thought you told me you’d stopped drinking.”

Lucia rolled her eyes. She was only drinking to commiserate with an old friend, she said. Everything was fine.

Car keys were provided.

Ana promised not to be out too late.

Etch tried not to resent the look Lucia’s daughter gave him—as if she thought he was
making
her mother drink. As if that was the only way Lucia would ever hold hands with him.

After Ana was gone, Lucia and he sat on the porch a while longer, but the moment for holding hands had passed.

A news break came on the radio, the Spanish DJ giving an update on Julia Garcia’s murder. The witness who’d provided the description of a possible suspect had now turned up missing herself. Police would not say if they had other leads.

Music came back on, a ballad about love in the desert.

“Who was it?” Etch asked.

Lucia frowned. “Who was who?”

“The guy who broke your heart. What’d you say: ‘stole a piece of your soul’?”

Lucia crossed her ankles. “That was a long time ago, Etch.”

She drank her tequila.

The song played through.

He was so close to Lucia he could feel her warmth, but she wasn’t with him anymore. Her thoughts were a million miles away.

For the first time, Etch felt the anger burning inside him. He resented Lucia’s past. He felt powerless, the way he’d felt watching the forensics team bring up the draped gurney with Julia Garcia’s body.

“I could do something about Frankie White,” Etch said.

Lucia set down her shot glass, leaned toward him. “Promise me you’ll never say that again. Not even a hint.”

“Lucia—”

“You become like them if you do that, Etch. It would eat you up. The only way to keep your soul from rotting when you deal with people like Frankie White is not to be like them. Don’t hate them. Just do your job.”

“Is that possible?”

Her eyes were intense, almost desperate. “It has to be.”

They sat on the porch swing in their funeral clothes, listening to love music from the Mexican desert while the phone rang cheerfully inside—Ana’s friends trying to reach her, optimistic young women all dying to chat about their wide-open futures.

•                           •                           •

ETCH WAS ON COMMERCE, THREE BLOCKS
from the office, when he pulled over to take a call.

“Bad news,” Kelsey said. “Ballistics can’t match the bullets from Ana’s leg with the gun we found at Navarre’s house. Slugs are too badly mangled.”

“Caliber?” Etch asked.

“Yeah. Right caliber: .357. But the blood on the shirt isn’t Ana’s. Could be Arguello’s. They’re still testing . . .”

His voice trailed off, wiry and nervous.