Miguel’s quizzical look shifted to worry, his hooded expression tightening about his mouth. “Something wrong?”
“We would like you to come with us to the police station,” Cody said in a businesslike tone.
Miguel stepped back, his shoulders tensing. “Why? I’ve done nothing wrong.”
“Then you have nothing to be worried about.” Liliana poised herself on the balls of her feet. In the man’s eyes she saw a war raging: fight or flight. “We know about Anna Medina and about Carlos being here illegally. If you tell us everything you know about her and Carlos, we might overlook the fact you withheld evidence in a murder case.”
“I don’t know what—”
“Don’t bother denying you didn’t know.” Cody’s voice toughened to a steel thread. “You were going out to your cousin’s for a reason. How much time did you spend out at the ranch?”
“He called me that morning to come see him. He’s my cousin so I went. That’s all. I didn’t realize he’d come into the United States illegally until—”
One corner of Cody’s mouth lifted in a smile that didn’t reach his eyes. “Until what?”
“Nothing.” Miguel clamped his lips together, crossing his arms over his chest.
“We’ll continue this down at the station.” Cody gestured for Miguel to proceed first.
Again that look of indecision appeared in Miguel’s eyes. Liliana moved a few feet toward the edge of the stoop, ready to leap if he made a run for it.
Miguel’s chest rose then fell in a deep breath. He came outside, pulling the door closed and locking it. “I have to be at work in an hour.”
“That’ll depend on how well you cooperate.” Cody followed behind Miguel.
“Should I call a lawyer?”
“Should you? Are you guilty of doing something wrong?” Cody tossed down the challenge as though he already knew the answer.
“You two have no idea what’s going—”
The crack of a gunshot split the air at almost the same time Miguel stopped, remained standing for a second or two then crumpled to the ground. Instinct kicking in, Liliana drew her weapon and dove toward the other side of the SUV, putting the vehicle between her and the direction the bullet came. Cody ducked behind his car at the same time.
“I think it came from the park across the street.” Liliana pulled her cell out and called the station, her adrenaline pumping through her body. “This is Detective Rodriguez. We’re at Miguel Salazar’s house on Pecos Boulevard. He was shot as we were leaving.” She peeked around the SUV at the man lying on the ground, face down. “He’s not moving. May be dead. I think the shot came from the park across the street. Ranger Jackson and I are behind his car.”
“Sending everyone we have and an ambulance,” the dispatcher said. “Hang in there, Liliana. Help is on the way.”
When she hung up, she looked at Cody. “The shooter had a chance to shoot at least one of us before we got to cover. Why didn’t he?”
“We weren’t the target. Why Miguel?”
“To stop him from talking to us?”
“We may never know, but after the area is secured, we’re going to tear his house apart and see if we can find anything to tell us why him.”
The exhilaration of seeing Miguel Salazar collapse, a red stain spreading out from the shot to the chest floods me with power. The police can’t stop me. I’ll do their job for them—rid the town of its trash. No longer am I nobody. Before long criminals will fear me. Someone needs to do something about this town. And I’m that someone. When this is over with, they will look at me differently.
I’ll be somebody. Important.
Time to leave. The police will thank me one day for what I’m doing. After collecting the shell casing, I climb down to the ground and back away from the children’s fort on the playground in the park, then make my way toward the grove of trees. Each step I take feels light.
The power grows within me. Demanding justice. Demanding respect.
Cody positioned himself on the stoop, surveying the crime scene. The area was crawling with police. The ambulance had just left with Miguel—dead. He hadn’t had a chance. The shot hit him in the heart. From a distance like Carlos.
Liliana disengaged talking with Chief Winters and approached Cody. “Ready to check his house out? They’re going to scour every inch of the park. See if they can discover where the shooter was.”
Cody pointed toward the playground on the right side of the park near the line of trees. “It came from that direction. In an hour or so that place would have children playing on the equipment.”
“That’s what I told the chief. He’s going to start there.”
Having retrieved the set of keys from Salazar’s pocket, Cody used them to let himself into the house. “Let’s start with his bedroom.”
“What are we looking for?”
“I wish I knew. We’ll bag anything that might help us at all. When in doubt, take it.”
Liliana sniffed the air. “Do you smell that?”
“He burned something.” As he walked toward the hallway, he glanced back at her. “It’s stronger over here.”
Liliana slowed in front of the door to the kitchen to the right of Cody. “Nothing coming from here so it wasn’t food.” She continued toward him and trailed him into the largest bedroom out of two.
The top sheet on the bed laid in a wad at the bottom of it. Clothes were piled on a chair while a suitcase sat on the floor near it with a set of jeans in it. “He didn’t tell us he was going somewhere.”
“And where are his wife and child? Liliana inhaled a deep breath and moved closer to the door to the bathroom. “I think it’s coming from here.”
Cody went first into the bathroom, his gaze riveting to the bathtub, the shower curtain pulled back to reveal charred pieces of paper dampened with water. “We must have interrupted him. Maybe that’s why his hair was wet. He was burning this when we came.”
“Getting rid of evidence. This is not the act of an innocent man.”
Cody knelt down and carefully investigated the pieces of paper, most burnt beyond recognition or already turned to ashes and littering the white porcelain, the water further making it impossible to tell what had been destroyed.
Liliana hovered behind him, pointing toward the back part of the tub. “That looks like part of a map.” Leaning over the tub, she continued, “There’s part of it intact that’s lying against the side.”
Cody sidled to where she pointed and, taking out a pair of tweezers, carefully extracted the evidence from the bathtub and put it in a bag. “A map to what? Why would he burn it?”
“I hope the state lab can do their magic and preserve this as much as possible so we can figure out what it’s a map to. Then we might know why he went to the trouble of trying to burn it.”
Cody waved his hand over the black ash in the rest of the tub. “Because this will be useless to us.”
“Maybe there’ll be something else he didn’t have a chance to get rid of. I’ll check the second bedroom while you finish up in here.”
“We need to find his wife. She may know what Miguel was up to.”
“Which could put her in danger.”
Cody searched every place he could think someone would hide an item—in the toilet tank, in back of it, in all the drawers and cabinets, behind the one lone picture in the bedroom and the mirror over the dresser. He stripped the bedding off and inspected the mattress and all the parts of the bed. Nothing else.
Meeting Liliana in the hallway, he headed to the kitchen. Liliana opened the small refrigerator and freezer and went through all the packages and cartons. He did the same with the cabinets.
“It looks like Miguel ate better than his cousin.” Liliana set what she had finished going through on the table in the center of the room.
“I saw a couple of expensive items in his bedroom that a person with his job shouldn’t be able to afford. Two gold chains and a ring with a large diamond. I’m going to have them assessed to make
sure they are real and how much they’re worth. It looks like most of his wife’s clothes are gone.”
“The same with the baby’s bedroom. Most of the child’s clothes and toys were gone.”
“Did she have family she could go to?”
“I don’t know much about her, but I will by the end of the day.” Liliana frowned. “In the baby’s bedroom Miguel had a state-of-the-art computer system. If you ask me, a strange place to keep it unless you want to make sure no one knows you have it. We’ll need to check it out thoroughly. I couldn’t pull anything up on it. But I’m not very skilled in technology.”
“I’ll have the tech boys look at it. Even if he deleted files, they might be able to recover them.”
Liliana knelt on the tile floor to check underneath the refrigerator. “So he’s making good money somewhere and spending it. But I’ve never seen him wear a gold ring or chains. Neither has his wife worn any expensive jewelry, at least not to church where I’ve seen her.”
“An investment?”
Liliana pulled out the tray under the refrigerator and wrapped in plastic was a lot of cash. “Or this is his bank and he took a withdrawal to buy his toys.” Setting the tray with the large stash of money on the counter, she whistled. “The top one is a hundred dollar bill. If they all are, then Miguel was rich. He certainly could afford a house better than this five-room one.”
“Let’s finish and get back to the station and tear this guy’s life apart. There’s got to be something there we’ve overlooked that will help us.”
“I hope so, because this is the fourth murder in less than two weeks. Was he killed to shut him up or is there another reason?”
“If we can figure out what he was into, then we might find the person behind his murder and maybe the others.”
“So you think they may all be connected?”
“We have three possibilities. They are, they aren’t, or a couple of them are.”
Her chuckle floated to him. “We have one to four murderers to hunt down. I think we aren’t gonna get much sleep in the days to come.”
“Sometimes I do my best thinking while I’m asleep.”
Liliana turned toward him, both eyebrows raised. “So do I. I can wake up in the morning with a solution to a problem that I had wrestled with the day before.”
“A kindred spirit.” When he said that, her eyes sparkled. Her reaction ignited his interest even more.
But before he could say anything else, movement out of the corner of his eye pulled his attention away. Chief Winters came into the kitchen.
“We couldn’t find for sure where the shooter was. There wasn’t a shell casing. But around the fort which is in the right location we found adult footprints—boots—in the sand. Now that could have been a parent watching his child or the killer. We followed the direction the person went. It was into the trees, but we couldn’t find anything there either.”
“He probably left when we ducked behind my car.”
“We will process the fort and maybe come up with something. Taking a casting of the footprint.” Chief Winters’s gaze latched onto the stack of money in the tray.
“It doesn’t look like Miguel is who he said he was.” Liliana began putting the food back into the fridge.
“We also found where he was burning some papers in his bathtub.”
“And we think he wiped his computer,” Liliana added.
Chief Winters frowned. “That sounds like a guilty man. Guilty of what?”
“Killing his cousin?” She shut the refrigerator door.
“This is the first time in a week I feel I might have good news for the mayor. I’ll be outside finishing up the search of the park just in case we are off base with the fort.”
“When we get back to the station, I’d like to go through what we have and what we need to follow through. I’d like to be able to answer if these murders are connected or not. If so, we’ll know we need to focus on Anna Medina. She started it all.” Cody strode toward the living room. “I’ll take the right side, you the left.”
A knock sounded at the door to the back room where Liliana had set up the white board and tacked up the photos of the crime scenes. One on each wall. “I hope that’s Sean with our food. I didn’t have breakfast this morning and it’s three now. A late lunch or an early dinner.” She opened the door to find the kid from the cafe across the street. The scent of hamburgers wafted from the sack in his hand. After taking the bag and the holder with two coffees in it, she said to Sean, “Let me get my purse. Wait right here,” then to Cody. “You are gonna love these hamburgers. The best in town.”
Liliana crossed the small room and placed the food on the table where papers and photos were scattered at one end. When she grabbed her purse and turned back to Sean, the young man’s eyes grew round.
He stared at the crime scene pictures at Carlos’s ranch, opening and closing his mouth. But no words came out.
Liliana scooted out into the hallway and shut the door quickly behind her. “I’m sorry. Those photos can be rough.” Digging into her handbag, she withdrew some money to pay Sean.
“H—h—ow do—do you . . .” His face pale, he snapped his jaw together, his teeth clicking.
“Just forget it, Sean,” she said, stuffing the dollar bills into his hand, then rummaging in her purse for more money for a larger tip. “Thank you.” She started moving toward the end of the hallway, hoping that the young man would follow.
He didn’t for a moment, then blinked and whirled around, hurrying past Liliana as though a rabid dog nipped at his heels.
She went back into the room she was using to lay out all the evidence on the cases. “I can remember the first set of crime scene photos I saw of a murder victim. I think I dreamed about them for months. I’m afraid Sean is going to do the same thing.”
Cody glanced up from studying a report. “It’s sad that we get used to seeing murder victims.”
“If I had a reaction like I did the first time, I would never be able to function as a police officer.”
“The same here. I wouldn’t want Kyle to see any of these photos.”
“What if he wants to be a police officer like you?”
“That’s not gonna happen. He’s never had any interest in what I do.”
Liliana dug into the sack and pulled out the wrapped hamburgers then the two orders of fries. “We’d better eat before it gets cold. But I have to say their hamburgers aren’t bad cold. Now the fries are a different story.”
She sat at the table while Cody took the seat across from her. “So what do we know?”
“The man Maria saw had an evil eye, a tan cowboy hat, an old black pickup, and speaks Spanish.”
“But we don’t know what the child meant by an evil eye. We know two of the murders were done by someone who is a good shot from a distance. Sniper training?” Liliana popped a fry into her mouth, then another.
“Anna and Carlos were both here in the country illegally. Ruiz wasn’t nor Miguel.”
“Anna was pregnant. Was Carlos the father? Was she coming to be with him?” Liliana peered at the right wall that held the pictures of that crime scene. “Do you think we need to concentrate on Anna’s killing? We have more evidence in that murder.”
“If indeed it started all this, we need to know why. I’ll call my contact and see when they’re interviewing Anna’s friends and coworkers. She came into this country illegally. That would take some money. We need to know where it came from. Or was she a mule carrying drugs across the border and that got her killed?” Cody gathered the trash from their meal and tossed it into the garbage can.
Liliana rolled her head and arched her back. “Until we get the forensics back on the evidence you sent to the lab today and we hear about Anna and Carlos from the Mexican authorities, we don’t have much we can do other than find Miguel’s wife.”
“We need a break. We’ve been staring at this for hours, and I promised Kyle we would go back home tonight. Let’s call it quits. It’s
nearly three and we’ve been putting in fifteen-hour days for the past week and a half.”
Liliana rose and continued to stretch. “That sounds good. Might give us a different perspective if we take the rest of the day off and start back first thing in the morning.”
“I need a day off. Maybe I’ll think better. Especially with all that has been going on.”
Maybe that was what she needed. She felt like the people with Moses, aimlessly wandering around in the desert. No direction. No purpose. “Maybe you should spend the whole day with your son. This move can’t be easy for him.”
He considered all the time he hadn’t been able to spend with Kyle since moving to Durango. “When this is over with I intend to. I can’t afford more than an afternoon away. What do you do for fun around here?”
“That’s easy. Hike and take photographs.”
“Let’s spend the afternoon doing that. We can get a fresh perspective on these cases.” He closed the folder before him.
Five minutes after Cody left, Liliana climbed into her car and started toward home. Halfway there, she made a U-turn and drove into Rancho Estates. Seeing the subdivision’s sign a minute ago prompted her to pay the Martinez family a visit. She hadn’t in a while. Maybe Mr. Martinez would change his mind about Maria talking to the police further. Liliana parked on the street and walked up their drive to the house.
Frowning, Mrs. Martinez answered the door. “We don’t know anything,” she said before Liliana could speak.
“I thought I would say hi to Maria and check to make sure she was doing all right. It’s hard for an adult to witness what she did, let alone a child.”
“She is not here. She hasn’t remembered anything. Now if you would please leave, I have work to do.” Mrs. Martinez started closing the door.
Liliana stuck her leg and shoulder into the opening. “If she remembers anything, please tell us. She may know something and not realize it.”
“She doesn’t know anything. Good day.”
As she moved back, the door slammed in Liliana’s face.
Shattered Silence: Men of the Texas Rangers Series #2 Page 21