A Tracers Trilogy

by Laura Griffin

  Elaina knelt down and pointed at something on the ground. She waved over a ranger who was standing nearby and exchanged words with him.

  “She the fed?” Ketchem asked.

  “Yeah.”

  He grunted something that could have meant anything from “She’s hot” to “She looks like a pain in the ass.”

  Elaina stood up, and Cinco watched her talk to the ranger, then the sheriff. He had to admire her, just wading into the fray like that. She didn’t act intimidated, even though he would’ve thought she would be. The only other woman around lay naked in that ditch, gutted with a hunting knife.

  The smell alone had to be unbearable.

  “This guy’s a twisted fuck.” Ketchem shook his head and turned his back on the scene. He looked pretty gray, and Cinco decided he probably had booted up his breakfast.

  A second crime-scene van pulled up, and two men got out. They opened the back doors, and Cinco watched as they zipped themselves into some white coveralls. One of them took a stretcher from the back and the other grabbed a body bag. A white sedan pulled up beside it. Frank Cisernos. The ME wore khaki pants, a blue golf shirt, and a grim expression. Whatever plans he’d had for his Sunday afternoon had just been canceled. They’d do the autopsy today. Soon, most likely, before the body got any worse.

  Cinco wiped his brow with the back of his arm. He gazed up at the sun. Not noon yet, but it was a hundred degrees, at least.

  “Fuckin’ heat’s not helping,” Ketchem said.

  “Yeah.” Cinco glanced over at Elaina, who had to have a strong stomach to be standing there just a few feet from the body.

  He won’t stop. She’d told him that yesterday as they’d sat in that stuffy conference room pulling together the suspect list. He’ll either get caught or get killed, but he won’t stop.

  Cinco gazed up at the white-hot sun again. A pair of buzzards circled overhead, all the time in the world, just waiting for another turn. Meanwhile, he was about to spend the next three hours picking through grass and muck, looking for clues, while the techs spooned that poor girl out of the ditch. Cinco didn’t want to be here again. Not today, not tomorrow, not next week. He wanted to nail this guy.

  He watched Elaina. She met his gaze briefly, and he knew she felt the same way.

  “Come on,” he told Ketchem. “Let’s do something useful.”

  Elaina sat in the Taurus and cursed the GPS. “Invalid Address,” it told her for the third time. She took a deep breath and keyed in the letters again.

  The passenger door jerked open.

  “God, don’t do that!”

  Troy slid into the car and pulled the door shut. “Do what?”

  She shot him a glare and turned her attention back to the navigation system. “I can’t talk right now,” she told him. “I’m on my way out.”

  “Field trip to the mainland?”

  She glanced down at the GPS and muttered another curse.

  “You don’t need that thing,” he said. “You got me.”

  Elaina rested her head back against the seat and sighed. She gazed through the windshield at the inn where she’d spent the past two nights not getting any sleep. Her energy was completely sapped. She felt irritable. It was after eight, but she’d skipped dinner because the mere thought of food repelled her.

  “Rough day?”

  His voice was quiet, and for some reason her eyes started to sting. Shit.

  She cleared her throat. “You can’t ride in my car. It’s against regulations.”

  “We can take mine.”

  “Forget it. I’m not pulling up to this woman’s house in a Ferrari.”

  “I brought the pickup.”

  She glanced at the rearview mirror and saw his black F-150 parked in the row behind them. Her resistance flagged.

  She turned to look at him. “Why are you helping me?”

  “Damned if I know.”

  “If you quote me in your book—”

  “I won’t.”

  “—I’ll be forced to hurt you.”

  His eyes sparked at the threat.

  Elaina looked away. She chewed on her lower lip and debated the wisdom of accepting help, once again, from a ridiculously attractive man who was practically a reporter. There wasn’t much to debate. It was a bad idea.

  “Come on.” He patted her hand and got out of the car.

  She sighed again. Then she grabbed her purse from the backseat and shoved open the door.

  Her vehicle was a piece of crap. The navigation system inside it was a piece of crap. And she wasn’t up for another challenge tonight. She crossed the parking lot to Troy’s truck, stepped onto the shiny chrome running board, and hoisted herself inside.

  “How’d the autopsy go?” he asked as he fired up the engine.

  She shook her head.

  “Any chance of getting an ID soon?”

  Elaina clenched her teeth as she recalled the ME actually removing the skin from the victim’s hand to get a set of prints. It had been so decomposed, it had just slid off like a glove, and Elaina almost had to duck out of the autopsy suite and throw up.

  She swallowed the bile in her throat now. “Nothing confirmed yet. But we recovered some jewelry. A dragonfly pendant her parents had told us about. We’re fairly sure it’s her.”

  “Valerie Monroe?”

  “Yes.”

  Troy pulled onto the highway and headed north, toward the bridge leading off the island. It was getting dark out, and the neon signs were starting to light up at the bars and restaurants lining the road. Tourists crowded the sidewalks, undeterred by some sick freak and his hunting knife.

  “Her parents were at the station house this afternoon,” Elaina said.

  “Valerie’s?”

  “Yeah.” She paused, remembering the woman sitting in that reception room, staring blankly out the window. “I guess no one would give them any news, everyone was avoiding them. Anyway, her father saw my badge and pulled me aside. There wasn’t much I could tell him, but I promised to keep him updated, told him we’re doing everything we can.” A knot formed in Elaina’s chest. “I’ve never felt so inadequate in my life.”

  The truck filled with silence. As they crossed the causeway, Elaina gazed out over the water. The setting sun made it shimmer with gold, but the postcard-perfect scene did nothing for her. She felt flat.

  “Been doing some poking around,” Troy said.

  She looked at him.

  “Some folks in Bay Port remember a rash of break-ins about ten years ago. Someone was rifling through women’s underwear drawers, taking stuff here and there.”

  “Is this on record?” she asked.

  “No one ever called the cops. He wasn’t taking valuables or anything, so I guess it seemed harmless. And maybe the women were embarrassed about it at the time.”

  Elaina shook her head. One of those “harmless” break-ins could have turned tragic if some woman had come home and found a man in her bedroom. Cops had a tendency to shrug off panty raids, but those crimes were often warning signs. It was all about patterns of behavior—persistent, disturbing patterns that got worse over time.

  At least her father believed so. And Big Mac McCord was known for being right. His conclusions about violent offenders were based on hundreds of jailhouse interviews and years of painstaking research.

  Elaina shifted in her seat. Thinking of her dad made her feel anxious. She hadn’t talked to him in weeks and she tried to tell herself it was because they’d both been busy. But she was beginning to feel hurt by his lack of interest in her new job. Somehow she’d always thought that when she finally joined the Bureau, they’d have lots in common. But their relationship was as silent now as it had ever been, maybe even more so.

  Elaina’s mother had been the talker in the family. Julia McCord could go on and on, a mile a minute, in a hyper way that made people uncomfortable. But for all her chatter, she’d never found a way to talk about what really mattered to her—which was one reason Elaina and her dad
had been stunned when she’d packed up one day and simply walked out. Elaina had suspected she was unhappy, but she’d never considered that she might leave. It had seemed so unreal. Mothers did not just walk out on their eleven-year-old daughters, their husbands, their lives.

  “You okay?”

  She glanced at Troy. Straightened her shoulders. “Fine, why?”

  “’Cause you look like hell. No offense.”

  Elaina bit back a retort because she knew he was probably right. She flipped the vanity mirror down to confirm it. The scalding shower she’d taken after the autopsy hadn’t helped much. She still looked pale and worn out. She hadn’t bothered with makeup tonight and she’d left her hair down around her shoulders instead of pulling it back like she typically did.

  “You should eat something,” Troy said. “We can stop after this.”

  “My appetite’s on vacation. I just want to wrap up this interview and crash.”

  He shrugged noncommittally as they took the Bay Port exit just north of the causeway.

  Elaina tried to muster some energy. She was investigating here. She needed to pay attention. “Tell me about your hometown. What’s it like?”

  “You’ve never been here?”

  “Only the refinery,” she said.

  “Well, that’s pretty much it.”

  Elaina glanced around. This was it? She saw mostly empty fields and a few low buildings up ahead in the distance.

  “And how come you’ve been to the refinery?” he asked.

  “I took a trip up here to destroy evidence.”

  He cast a curious look in her direction. “You wanna explain that?”

  “Weaver and I. It was one of our more interesting assignments, actually. We spent the morning filling up a van with coke and marijuana that had been used at trial. Drove up with a police escort. Then supervised everything as TexOil burned it up in one of their jumbo incinerators.”

  “A full van, huh? Sounds like a party.”

  “Not really. It took all day, but at least it was a break from the routine.”

  They drove in silence for a while as Elaina took in the town. She spotted a supermarket, a gas station, a Dairy Queen.

  “You and Weaver, you seem like more than just coworkers. You two pretty close?”

  She glanced over at him, surprised by the question. “You could say that. He kind of took me under his wing on my very first day.”

  She remembered meeting him in the break room. Special Agent McCord. Welcome to Brownsville. He’d looked her up and down and smiled. I see you just graduated from the Academy.

  How’d you know that?

  Because you look like Batman. You might want to think about leaving some of that gear at home. Not a lot of runnin’ and gunnin’ your first year.

  Weaver’s advice had prompted her to stash her pepper spray and handcuffs and extra magazines in her desk that first day, and she’d trusted his guidance ever since.

  Troy slowed as he neared what looked like one of only two stoplights.

  “Where do people hang out?” Elaina asked.

  “Most head for the island. Not the tourist strip, but the bay side. For shopping, there’s Corpus. The nearest steak house is in Brownsville.”

  The light turned green and he passed a small strip mall with beige awnings that badly needed replacing. A liquor store. A Laundromat. No bank. No Target, no Chili’s, nothing that even hinted at coming prosperity. The town had a certain defeated aura about it, as if it had already come to terms with its fate. She glanced at Troy and sensed something. Was it embarrassment? She didn’t know him well enough to be sure.

  “Cinco says you started out in newspapers?”

  He glanced at her. If he was surprised she’d been asking around about him, he didn’t let on.

  “He didn’t say where, though,” she continued. “I’m assuming Bay Port doesn’t have its own paper.”

  “The Lito County Register. They operate out of that building up there, just past the post office.”

  Elaina looked past the other stoplight to the plain brick structure just beyond the government building with the telltale flagpole out front. As they passed the Register office, she noticed the darkened windows, the empty parking lot. Not exactly a hive of activity.

  She glanced at Troy as he hung a left onto a state highway. The simple act of driving through his hometown reinforced her impression that he hadn’t come from privilege, that he’d earned what he had. “Bootstrapism,” her father would call it. Elaina called it a strong work ethic, something she deeply admired in a man, more than money or fancy degrees or good looks. She’d met way too many men in college and grad school who had been handed everything on a silver platter, and they hadn’t impressed her in the least.

  She looked at the strong set of Troy’s jaw, at his large hand on the steering wheel.

  He glanced at her. “What?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Sunday night, things get pretty quiet,” he said. “The refinery operates twenty-four-seven. Everything else closes at six, except the gas station and the Dairy Queen. I take it you called ahead to the house?”

  Elaina pulled her purse into her lap and flipped open her notepad. “I spoke to someone named Ronnie Dupree.”

  Troy smiled.

  “You know her?”

  “She coached drill team up at the high school a couple eons ago. Probably still does.”

  “She sounded kind of old on the phone,” Elaina said.

  “That’d be the smoker’s cough.”

  The truck slowed, and Troy turned onto a two-lane road. Elaina didn’t see a street sign. Maybe it was good that she’d come here with a guide.

  He slowed once again at another turnoff, this one leading into a pocket of one-story brick homes. The houses were fairly spread out, yet they all resembled one another except for the various lawn ornaments.

  But “ornaments” was a euphemism. Elaina squinted into the falling darkness and made out a car up on cinder blocks, an overturned swing set, a septic tank. Troy pulled into a driveway, and the headlights swung across a yard dotted with pink flamingoes. He cut the engine, and Elaina heard a bark in the distance. He pushed open the door, and the light above them came on.

  She caught his arm. “I will conduct the interview,” she said sharply. “And whatever she tells us is off the record, as far as you’re concerned.”

  He gave her a “get real” look.

  “I’m serious. You need her for a source, come back later. This is my meeting. If you’ve got a problem with that, stay in the car.”

  “Truck.”

  “Whatever.”

  He leaned closer and rested his forearm on the back of her seat. “Anyone ever tell you you’re kinda bossy, McCord?”

  “I’m not kidding. I need you to keep it zipped.”

  He smirked. “I’ll do my best,” he said, clearly lying.

  She slipped out of the truck. An enormous black thing hurled itself at the chain-link fence, and she jumped backward, pressing herself against the truck.

  “Easy, there. Just a dog,” Troy said.

  She tried to ignore the ferocious barks as it lunged, again and again, at the fence lining the driveway. The front porch light went on, and a screen door squeaked open.

  “Bear! Knock it off!” A woman with a pile of blond hair leaned outside. She squinted at Troy as he approached. Elaina cut a wary glance at Bear, who was still barking, and rounded the hood to the footpath leading up to the door.

  “You from the FBI?” the woman asked Troy.

  “No, ma’am. I’m Troy Stockton. Agent McCord’s right here.”

  “Troy Stockton?” She stepped out onto the concrete stoop and fisted her hands on her hips. “Well, my lordy, look at you! It’s been years!”

  She gave him a heavily lipsticked smile. She had to be at least sixty, but the T-shirt and leggings showed off the body of a much younger woman. She wore white Keds and socks with those little pom-poms on the back, and Elaina wondered if she�
��d ever been on a drill team herself.

  “Troy Stockton.” She shook her head. “The famous author. I can’t believe it.”

  He shot a look at Elaina. “This is Special Agent Elaina McCord.” He moved aside to make room for her in front of the welcome mat. “Elaina, this is Ronnie Dupree, coach of the Bay Port Wranglerettes.”

  The woman beamed. “Former coach,” she said, evidently delighted by this introduction. At last she turned her attention to Elaina. “Nice to meet you. Y’all come on in.”

  Troy leaned back against the screen door and ushered Elaina inside. She shot him a warning look, which he ignored.

  She stepped onto mauve carpet that recently had been vacuumed, judging by the marks. A rose-colored sectional sofa dominated the living room, and on every available tabletop sat a silk flower arrangement. The air smelled like vanilla-scented Glade and cigarette smoke.

  “Nice place you got here,” Troy said.

  “Well, thank you. I like it.”

  “And is it just you now?”

  “Just me and Bear.” She smiled at him. “Sabrina’s been gone since graduation.” She glanced at Elaina. “Can I get y’all some tea?”

  “That would be great, thank you,” Elaina said.

  Ronnie vanished into the kitchen, and Troy ambled over to the mantel and picked up a framed photograph. It showed a blonde in a drill team uniform.

  “Sabrina still live in town?” he called into the kitchen.

  “She’s married, lives in Corpus. I’ve got three grandbabies now. Can you believe it?”

  Elaina heard the back door open, and Bear came tearing into the house.

  “Now, you behave,” Ronnie scolded him.

  The dog trotted into the living room, and Elaina held out a hand for him to sniff. He was some sort of German shepherd mix, she guessed. She crouched down and scrubbed him between the ears.

  “You’re a dog person.”

  She glanced up, and Troy was smiling at her.

  “You have something against dogs?”

  “Not at all. You just seemed pretty scared back there.”

  “He took me by surprise, that’s all. I love dogs.” She stood up and tucked her hands in her pockets, much to Bear’s disappointment.