by Louisa Luna
Otero smiled briefly.
“I have good news for both of you,” he said. “You’re not under arrest, and we see no need to recommend to the DA to bring charges against you.”
“What a relief,” Cap said, recalling the similar exchange with the Posada impersonator in the hospital. “What about Detective McTiernan?”
“That’s a little more complicated,” said Otero. “There’s a process he has to go through. He disobeyed direct orders from his commanding officer.”
Cap gnashed his teeth against his tongue so he wouldn’t talk.
“So,” said Vega, sighing. “Do you have our clothes?”
Otero chuckled.
“Sure, I have your clothes. I’ll have someone get them for you.”
“We’ve heard that a lot today,” snapped Cap.
“You get them bagged and tagged?” said Vega. “In that nice clean evidence room you showed me?”
“Bagged, not tagged yet,” said Otero.
Vega angled her head toward the painting, threw her line of vision at it for a quick second.
“You have a chance to get any other items from the Salton house yet?” she added. “Run any matches for prints or blood?”
Now Cap saw she was heading toward a target. He noticed Otero shifting his weight in the chair, still casual but concerned. Otero knew she was getting close too.
Vega’s phone buzzed on the table, and she picked it up, glanced at a text. The sound seemed to break Otero out of his disorientation.
“You know I can’t tell you about any evidence we may or may not have seized from the premises,” he said.
“Because we’re not on the case anymore, Alice,” Cap said, snotty as hell, suddenly confident.
He could afford to be an asshole; if Vega was sure, he’d bet his house, and whatever she had, she seemed sure. She set her phone back down and jerked her head toward the painting.
“Anyone watching us, Commander?” she said.
“No,” he answered straightaway.
“What about Boyce and Mackey?”
That gave Otero pause for a second, but then he answered, “They’re not here. We’re not being recorded either.”
Vega shrugged.
“I hope you’re telling the truth, but I don’t really care either way. I’m still going to tell you what I have to tell you.”
She leaned back in her chair, sat straight up.
“The knife that cut me, Ben Davis’s knife, is not the knife that was used to kill the Janes. That knife was a sixteenth of an inch—most knives are. Ben Davis’s knife is most likely an eighth of an inch thick. You can tell because my wound, even though it’s a straight-across slash, went a lot deeper than it would have with a sixteenth knife, even though he didn’t stab me.
“Also, the knife used to kill the Janes was serrated. The skin around their entry wounds shows a pattern of hash-mark-shaped abrasions. Ben Davis would have had to slice me open with precision without my resisting to get a clean cut if he’d had a serrated blade. That wasn’t the way it happened.”
She stopped talking, let all of it land. Cap didn’t try to analyze it yet, just kept watching Otero, who was remaining calm but was clearly trying to get in front of it, breathing accelerated, eyes narrowed.
“That’s interesting, but I’m not sure what it brings us,” he said.
“Ultimately I’m not either,” said Vega. “But I have some ideas.”
She paused.
“Care to hear them?”
Otero was quiet. Cap grinned like a fool, looking back and forth between them.
“I would,” Cap said, giddy.
Vega tapped two fingers hard into the table and leaned in again toward Otero.
“I believe Agents Boyce and Mackey told you they had some incriminating evidence that your boy had solicited and engaged in sexual activity with an underage undocumented girl,” she said.
Otero’s mouth twitched only once at the mention of his son. Other than that, straight flush poker face.
Vega continued: “And then you did whatever they wanted. Kept us prisoner in the hospital, put out a baby APB on us, let their people put the girls in Salton on a bus somewhere, put your own detective through the IA relay.”
Otero’s eyes scanned the room as he bit his upper lip. Cap expected that a bunch of little land mines were detonating in his head.
“I don’t know what their endgame is. But they have you right here,” said Vega, squeezing the tips of her thumb and index finger together. “And maybe they’d be interested to know that Davis didn’t kill the Janes. That is a piece of information we have that they may not.”
Cap made a tight fist and pressed it into his palm. He’d grown serious after the initial spark of joy he’d gotten from realizing Vega had a path forward. Looking at the profiles of Vega and Otero, both stalwart, he knew this was no longer a dogfight—it was a proposition.
Otero spoke first: “There’s really no one on the other side of that,” he said, nodding to the painting.
“That’s good,” said Vega.
She sat back in her chair again and folded her arms.
“It’s up to you which way this goes,” she said to Otero.
Cap didn’t dare breathe. Otero blew out some air and hunched forward, swept his hand along the side of his head.
“He’s got tape on my son,” he said.
“Who?” said Vega.
“Mackey,” answered Otero.
“What about Boyce?”
“He’s not involved. It’s all Mackey.”
Cap relaxed a little bit more, now trusting Otero that there really wasn’t anyone watching them from the other room or recording them from the fixtures.
“Is the tape from the Salton house?” said Vega.
Otero nodded slowly.
“There’s CCTV at the Salton house?” said Cap, finding it hard to believe.
“At least one camera in one hallway, clear enough audio to hear my son say his name and what he was looking for.” Then Otero became self-conscious. He spoke quickly and addressed Cap also, defending himself. “I didn’t know it was in Salton when I saw it, didn’t know where it was. Just knew it was my son.”
“What did Mackey say he’s going to do with it?” said Vega.
Otero flipped his palms up, like a magician showing nothing up his sleeves before the trick.
“Anything he wants. Right to local media. Take me and my son down in one hit. You were a cop, right?” he said to Cap, who nodded. “You know you’re a commander, a chief, a DC, you have mostly friends but you got a couple of enemies with grudges. You just can’t get up the line without pissing at least one guy off. Mackey knows who my guys are and they’d help him any way they could.”
Cap nodded again. He got it.
Vega paused before speaking, giving Otero a chance to say whatever else he wanted to say, but he was done. That had been the core of why he’d done what he’d done, the eye at the center of the cyclone.
“I can’t tell you what to do about your kid. You can talk to Caplan about it; it’s above my pay grade,” she said. “But you want your whole life, yours and your kid’s, to be in service to Mackey?” She didn’t wait for a response before she continued: “Like I said, it’s up to you. You keep letting Mackey run your shit, or you come with us, we come clean with Boyce, and we find out who runs Mackey.”
“How would we go about that?” Otero asked.
“Not sure,” she said. “But if I were conducting my own investigation, I’d have a good person to start with.”
Cap tried to read Otero but it was tough, partially because he didn’t know him, but also because Cap guessed Otero truly didn’t know what to do. He seemed smart, like he had lists of lists available in his memory bank at all times and right now he was thumbing through all of them,
trying to predict the outcome if he made one choice or the other.
It made Cap think of Nell’s first day of high school, how he said, “Just be yourself” to calm her nerves, and she’d looked at him like he had peanut vines growing out of his head. What he’d meant, of course, was follow your gut, but he knew then, and was reminded daily as a cop and a PI, what an impossible task that was. What if your gut was not a natural leader? And what if it was not to be trusted?
Cap saw that Otero was trying to get quiet and sort it through. Cap knew he shouldn’t speak but more than anything he wanted to communicate via ESP or brain waves and tell Otero what he himself had learned in the middle of the woods sixteen months before, that usually nothing ends clean but if he trusted Vega, he might have a shot at it.
19
otero told them no need to rush. they didn’t take the stairs down to the evidence room slowly, but they didn’t hustle either, acting like they belonged there. Otero did, of course, and he kept up a patter of professional chitchat to make their presence seem natural as other cops passed them.
They reached the vestibule at the bottom of the stairs and Otero kept talking to them, taking the tablet from the officer guarding the evidence room. Otero punched in his code and took six fresh gloves from the box beneath the transaction window. The officer pressed the button and buzzed them in, and Otero held the armored door open for Vega and Cap as they filed in.
Otero let the door close and dropped the gloves on the steel table nearest him.
He gestured for them to follow him, walking to the left-most set of shelves. There were four boxes on the floor without lids. Bagged, not tagged, thought Vega. Otero squatted and flipped through the contents.
“You worried about your surveillance in here?” Cap said, his eyes floating up to a camera in the corner.
“No one’s monitoring the feed unless the officer’s not there, which is third shift only. And only then as need be. These yours?” said Otero, holding up a transparent plastic bag of clothes, including shoes, to Cap.
Cap nodded, and Otero tossed him the bag.
“Yours is the Sig or the Springfield?”
“Sig,” Cap answered.
Otero handed him a baggie sized and shaped specifically for firearms, about ten inches in length, Cap’s gun inside. Otero handed Vega the bag with her Springfield and sorted through more bags until he came to a larger bag full of black clothes and boots.
“You?” he said to Vega.
She nodded, and he handed her the bag. She examined the contents for a second, saw specks and streaks of the dirt from the ground outside the Salton house, and even though she couldn’t see it with the shirt folded the way it was, she knew there’d be a dark, stiff patch with her dried blood directly over where Ben Davis had cut her.
“This is it,” said Otero, holding up a bag with Davis’s knife inside. “Looks like a handmade hunting knife, eighth inch thick.” He glanced up at Vega. “Not serrated.”
He offered it to her, in case she wanted to see for herself. She shook her head. Otero placed the knife back in the box and stood.
“There’s men’s and women’s restrooms off the lobby,” he said. “You can change there; I’ll meet you in the lot in ten, fifteen.”
“We don’t need to change,” said Vega. “I just want to put my boots on and holster up.”
“Commander,” said Cap. “What about McT?”
Otero pinched his bottom lip.
“We have to let him go through IA for now. He’s on our books, in our system. We can get him out later. You two,” said Otero. “You’re off the grid to begin with.”
“We’re not going to have any problem walking out of here?” said Vega.
“I could conceivably still be in the process of questioning you,” said Otero, who appeared to have thought it through. “Anyone asks, I’ll cover. The way it looks now, if Mackey asks around, anyone will tell him you’re in informal custody.”
“Informal custody,” repeated Cap. “To go along with the not-quite APB.”
“Mackey wants us invisible,” said Vega, her eyes wandering to the Salton boxes. “We’ll stay invisible. Did you reach Boyce?”
“Not yet. I’ll keep trying him but have to keep it a little discreet in case Mackey’s with him.”
Otero stood up and rubbed his chin with his palm, looked at the bags he’d given Cap and Vega.
“You have everything you need?” he asked them.
Vega’s eyes fixed on the handles of the bolt cutters, sticking up from a box next to the wall, behind the others. She smiled at them fondly, like she’d just opened her mailbox and found a letter from an old friend.
* * *
—
Rodrigo Villareal worked in a diner called Athena’s on the corner lot of a mall between San Diego and El Centro. Otero drove, Vega in the passenger seat, and Cap in the back. It was closing in on midnight, and Rodrigo was almost off for the night.
As they sat in the parking lot, Cap wrote and rewrote a text to McTiernan. He knew he had to be careful in the wording, not wanting to jeopardize McTiernan any more than he already was with IA, but he also wanted to run a flag up, let him know he wasn’t alone.
“Text when you can” was all he could come up with, and it would have to do.
He tapped Send and picked up on Vega and Otero’s conversation—she was asking about the events leading to the bust at the Salton house.
“So why the shield around Devin Lara?” she asked.
“Mackey’s story is that Lara’s under another investigation involving some big names down south. He didn’t want to spook him,” said Otero, watching the parking lot through the mirrors.
“So I level him out, he calls Mackey,” said Vega.
“That tracks,” Otero agreed.
“My memory after Salton’s patchy,” said Vega. “But before you shut the ambulance doors, I saw the girls. I saw them all get in a bus, like an inmate bus.”
“Mackey sent one of his guys and said he would move them to a safe house,” said Otero.
“What kind of safe house?”
Otero shook his head.
“I don’t know,” he admitted, sounding reflective, regretful.
Pull back, Cap thought, wishing Vega could hear him. We just got the guy on our side; let’s give him a chance at redemption before we beat him up. Cap watched Vega shoot Otero a brief, not necessarily withering glance and return her gaze to straight ahead.
“What about the hospital though, right?” Cap said in his best stand-up comic voice. “That was a few kinds of fucked up.”
Otero took a deep breath.
“All Mackey said was he needed to keep you two sequestered for questioning, and he needed some officers to stand guard until he could get there. We’d kept another high-profile injured suspect at the hospital a couple of months back, so we knew those floors were still technically under renovation, even though they’re functional.”
“Mackey never got there,” said Vega. “He never came to question us.”
“I think you probably broke that officer’s nose and escaped before he had the chance,” said Otero.
“But someone impersonating your deputy chief talked to Caplan,” said Vega.
Otero’s usually straight face shifted, a series of creases developing on his forehead as he turned in his seat to look at Cap.
“Posada?”
“That’s who he said he was, but I’ve seen the real Posada on TV since. It was not him,” said Cap. “And he told me to leave town.”
Otero clicked his tongue against the roof of his mouth as he thought.
Vega offered her theory: “I’m thinking it was someone else who works for Mackey’s boss. Maybe giving us one more chance before he tried another tactic.”
Otero turned to say another thing, and Cap saw a group of young Latin
o guys coming out of the diner. He recognized Rodrigo in the back of the group, standing apart.
“There he is,” said Cap.
Vega got out of the car and jogged over to him. Cap watched as she and Rodrigo exchanged some words, Rodrigo glancing toward the car. Finally it appeared as if Vega managed to convince him—he and Vega crossed the lot and got into the car, Rodrigo in the backseat next to Cap and Vega sitting shotgun.
Rodrigo looked from Cap to Otero and back to Vega and said, “Dónde está McTiernan?”
Vega answered him, and Rodrigo shook his head vehemently and placed his hand on the door handle.
“Please…wait, Rodrigo,” said Cap.
Cap thought the kid looked thinner than the day before, his eyes narrow and pinched at the edges. His shirt had grease and ketchup stains.
Then Otero cut in. He spoke for a minute or two, keeping his voice calm and quiet, and Cap gathered from his tone that he was trying to console Rodrigo and convince him of something at the same time. Rodrigo took a breath and nodded. Cap looked to Otero for the translation.
“I said it could help other girls like his sister if he tells us what he knows. That I’m not going to arrest him or turn him in to Immigration,” Otero said steadily.
Rodrigo appeared at least somewhat convinced. His fingers dropped from the handle.
“If you have something to ask, I would do it before he changes his mind,” said Otero to Vega.
Vega began speaking in Spanish quickly, trying to pass as much information as possible before Rodrigo’s patience ran out. Cap didn’t know many words, but he picked out “hermana” and “madre.”
“I asked about his mother,” Vega said to Cap. “The one who was shot on the street. I said if he knows anything about it not being an accident, now’s the time to say.”
Rodrigo looked at Cap, and Cap wished he spoke Spanish so he could tell him this was the right thing, that he wouldn’t regret it.
This seemed to be a problem for Cap lately. Restrained by various barriers, unable to say the thing he really meant, so his message had to be truncated, simplified, rolled out plainly with no extra explanation. But maybe, he thought, that wasn’t always bad. So now, all he said to Rodrigo’s young, pained face was “It’s okay.”