“Get the fuck out of the way, asshole. I’ll shoot you next time.”
I don’t know if the guy heard, but he might have. We passed cars so quickly, it was almost like a blur. I didn’t want to, but I glanced at the speedometer. We were doing 100. God help us.
Tip exited at Jersey Village and took the first turn so fast I thought we’d flip. We were only blocks away. He made the turn into the subdivision, falling in behind a Harris County cop car and an ambulance ahead. Smoke filled the air.
“The house is on fire,” I said.
When we turned the corner, my heart sank. The house was engulfed in flames. Two fire engines were working the blaze, and a couple of ambulances were parked near the house. Ribs stood on the side of the road. When he saw us, he rushed over.
Tip and I got out of the car. “What have we got?” I said, but I took one look at his face and knew: he was crying.
“They killed everybody. The deputies, the Sniders…” He took a breath, like he was trying to control himself. “And Cruz is gone.” And then he lost it.
Tip held Ribs up. He didn’t say anything, just held him.
I gave Ribs a hug. “How do you know Cruz is gone?”
For a few seconds, he didn’t say anything, and then he straightened and wiped his eyes. “When Cruz made the call, he said that an officer was down and he was under fire.” Ribs pointed toward the house. “Look at it. Nobody’s coming out of that alive.”
Ribs’ words started to sink in. Deputies dead. Cruz dead. And the Sniders…
Mother of God. This isn’t right.
“That was supposed to be me,” Ribs said. “Cruz took my watch so I could be with Rosalee.”
Tip patted his arm. “Don’t worry. We’re gonna get the fuckers who did this.”
I didn’t say anything, but I nodded my agreement. Tip was right; if nothing else, we’d get them.
More cops arrived at the scene, and a huge crowd gathered. Tip approached two officers from HPD and two more from County. “Take as many men as you need and canvas the area. Talk to everyone who’s here. I want every damn house accounted for. Somebody had to have seen something. We need to know what.”
***
Sahrina made sure to stay under the speed limit; the last thing she wanted was a cop pulling her over. She took back roads from 290 down to I-10. From there it was a short drive with little exposure. In ten minutes, she would be home. At least that’s how she referred to it for now. She had planned on taking the girl with her to Mexico; a sweet thing like her would fetch a good price from the right people. For one as sweet as Marissa, El Terrible might even get an auction going. But considering the heat this morning’s incident would generate, the girl had to be killed; smuggling her over the border would be too risky.
She turned left into the subdivision on Rolling Sands Drive and followed it south. About one block from where she would turn to go to her house, she reached for the turn signal but stopped herself before flipping it on. A cop car was parked beside the curb on the street by her house.
Do they know? Did they get a description of the car?
She had considered dumping this car, but that would have meant stealing a replacement—another risk. She glanced at the cop car again. Only one officer, and he appeared bored.
Maybe it’s nothing.
As she approached the corner, she flipped the right turn signal, came to a full stop, and then turned right. Just in case, she unzipped the bag on the seat next to her, providing her with easy access to the gun. After driving three blocks, she took another right turn. A quarter mile from here was a small shopping center with a coffee shop—a good place to wait this out.
***
Tip must have given orders to half a dozen officers before he returned, and when he arrived, he looked to be in a hurry. “We need to get to the station to figure out how to find that little girl.”
“And whoever did this,” I said.
Tip looked at Delgado. “You want to ride in with us?”
Delgado shook his head. “No sense in it. I could use the time by myself.”
“All right. See you there,” Tip said, and headed for the car.
On our way into the station, one of the officers called. Tip put it on speaker.
“A neighbor saw a young woman, early thirties, maybe, and carrying a gym bag. He said she drove off in a blue Honda Accord.”
“Plates?” Tip asked.
“He gave us a partial. The middle of the plate read ‘V-E-2.’ He didn’t get the rest.”
“That’s good,” Tip said. “Call it in and tell them to put it out on all channels. And send it to County, too.”
“You got it.”
After Tip hung up, I said, “A partial is something, at least. More than we’ve ever had on this woman.”
“If she hasn’t ditched the car, we may even get lucky,” Tip said.
We were at the station in twenty minutes. Delgado arrived five minutes later and found us in the coffee room. I had asked Julie for the recording on the radio call, and she brought it in.
“There are two separate calls,” she said. “The second one came in about a minute after the first.”
Tip and Delgado sat at the table, and I hit the play button.
Officer down at the safe house. Officers under fire. Repeat. Officer down.
After a brief pause, the second call followed.
Tell Delgado that they knew the password. Repeat, they knew the password.
Delgado balled his fist, but before he could say anything, Tip slammed the table. “It’s one of our own. It’s a goddamn cop.”
It didn’t seem possible that a cop could have done this. I felt like screaming No way! But I remembered how my old partners had betrayed me for a drug deal. How my own boss had set me up to die.
“We’ve got to figure out who the leak is,” I said.
Delgado stood. “Nobody wants to find that out more than I do,” he said, “but we have to find Marissa first. With the Sniders dead, El Terrible has no reason to keep the girl alive.”
Chapter 49
Where’s the Girl?
Every available officer was looking for El Terrible, but so far, no luck. We figured the best way to find Marissa was to locate the leak, so we retreated to a private room where no one could hear what we discussed. Julie brought us the case files from both investigations—Delgado and Cruz’s, and the one Tip and I had been working on. We laid the files out on the table and started going through the notes.
I separated the notes so we could look at them side by side in chronological order. “What we need is anything that points to a possible leak. No matter how simple it seems.”
I moved the file on Lipscomb, the first body we found, to the top left. “What do we have on this one?” I said. “Anything suspicious as far as leaks go?”
“Not much, unless we count Tiffany disappearing from her apartment.”
I shook my head. “She might have been spooked. We can’t swear that was a leak.”
“How about Martin getting killed in the hospital?” Delgado said. “Cruz and I questioned him one day, and the next morning, they killed him. Seems like more than coincidence now that we know about El Terrible and seeing how Martin was talking about her.”
I moved the file on Martin to the top right. “Who knew about El Terrible?”
Ribs thought for a moment. “When we heard the name El Terrible, I called it in to Julie. She checked it out for us.”
“And?” Tip said.
“And the next morning, Martin was dead,” Ribs said.
I saw the look on Tip’s face. “Don’t even think that,” I told him. “There’s no goddamn way Julie is the leak.”
“We don’t get answers by assuming everyone is innocent,” Tip said, and then he moved some papers to a spot below Lipscomb’s file. “Remember when we asked Julie to process the prints from the hotel room?”
“Nothing came up on the system,” I said.
“Exactly,” Tip said. “But n
ow we know that Tiffany had a car and a driver’s license. That means her prints were in the system. Why didn’t they show up?”
Delgado shook his head. “That doesn’t mean anything. Without a thumb print, it wouldn’t show up. They only take full sets of prints for a criminal offense.”
Tip moved another file below the one he’d just placed. “After Dewey reported spotting Tiffany’s car, it disappeared. The next day, they found Tiffany dead and her car burned up in El Campo.”
“Too many people had access to that information,” I said. “Same with the warrant for Cortes.”
“How about the biggest leak of all?” Delgado said. “The safe house. Nobody knew where that was.”
Tip moved that file to the top, above the others. “And they had the password. They probably weren’t counting on Cruz being able to tell us about that, but having the password is the clincher. It has to be an insider.”
***
El Terrible sat at an outside table, sipping a cappuccino. Every now and then, she took a bite from a cinnamon stick. This was her third cappuccino, and still no word from her contact. If she didn’t hear soon, she would have to improvise. Five minutes later, a call finally came in. It was Tico.
“Yes?”
“Ditch the car,” he said. “It’s no good.”
“Anything else?”
“Everything else is the same. Finish up and go home,” Tico said.
“And the girl?”
“Leave her. We’ll clean up later.”
El Terrible hung up and looked around, hoping to spot an easy target. It didn’t take long. With her gun tucked into the back of her pants, she followed a middle-aged man to his car. As he opened the car door, she approached him.
“Excuse me, sir. I was wondering if you could give me a ride. It’s not far.”
He looked at her with a combination of suspicion and lust in his eyes. Exactly the kind of man she hoped he’d be. “Where do you need to go?” he said.
“I’m supposed to be at a doctor’s appointment in ten minutes, and my car broke down. It’s only about three miles from here, but I’ll never make it walking.”
The man looked her up and down, smiled, and said, “Sure, I’ll take you. Get in.”
He started the car as she climbed into the passenger seat. She pointed a gun at him and said, “Do exactly what I say and you’ll live.”
***
Julie called as we were arguing over whether she was the leak.
“Connie, we just had a call from an officer about the car.”
“Who called it in?” Tip said.
“Officer Briggs,” Julie said.
“I know him, Julie. Patch me through.” Tip picked up the phone. “Briggs, it’s Tip Denton.”
“Tip, how are you? It’s been a long time.”
“Yeah it has, but we’ll have to catch up later. Tell me what you can about that car.” Tip put the call on speaker.
“I can’t swear it was the car you’re after. But when the call came in, it reminded me of a vehicle that passed by me not twenty minutes before.”
“Where are you?” Tip asked.
“On Shadow Lake Drive, over by Memorial.”
Tip said, “Briggs, here’s what you do. If you see that car again, call it in and request backup. Don’t try to take this woman by yourself.”
“A woman? Come on.”
“I’m not blowing smoke up your ass. If it’s who we think it is, she’s killed eight or ten people in the past few days. And she’s probably killed a lot more than that before.”
“No shit?”
“No shit, Briggs. Call it in.” Tip hung up and said, “Maybe we’re catching a break.”
“Now if we can find the leak…” Delgado said.
The whole time Tip was on the phone, I had been thinking. Something Briggs said…And then it hit me. “Forget the leak. What was Tiffany’s car doing down by Memorial Drive?”
“What?” Tip asked.
I looked at him and then Delgado. “Let’s assume the report from Briggs is accurate, that he really did see her car. What is El Terrible doing on Shadow Lake Drive?”
“How the hell do I know?” Tip said.
“Remember that cop Dewey? The one who said he saw Tiffany’s car?”
Recognition started to show in Tip’s eyes. I hurried on.
“Dewey said it was on Shadow Lake Drive. So what was Tiffany, a prostitute, doing in that part of Memorial Drive, around all those expensive houses?”
“And on the same street our shooter’s car might have been spotted,” Ribs said.
“Son of a bitch!” Tip said. “She’s hiding out. El Terrible has a house there.”
“Let’s go,” I said. “And we’re not calling it in. Nobody but us three will know.”
“We have to call Briggs,” Tip said. “I want him to stay there and keep an eye out.”
It took us twenty minutes to drive to Shadow Lake. When we arrived, Briggs stepped out of the car and reached out to shake Tip’s hand. He nodded to us. “Tip, it’s been a while.”
“Briggs, this is my partner, Connie Gianelli. I think you know Delgado.”
“Where did you spot the car?” I asked.
He pointed to an intersection not fifty yards away. “She was coming south and turned right on Shadow Lake. After I got the call, I checked to the end of the street but there was no sign of the car. Two other units have showed up since I called it in, but they haven’t seen anything either.”
Tip looked down the street both ways.
“It goes about eight blocks east,” Briggs said, “And maybe ten to the west.”
“We can’t knock on every door,” Tip said.
“Where did Dewey spot Tiffany’s car?” Ribs asked.
“Good question,” Tip said.
I looked up Dewey’s number on my phone. “Dewey, this is Connie Gianelli. Where did you spot that car we asked you about? The one on Shadow Lake.”
“Hang on a minute.” He came back on about thirty seconds later. “The kid I was taking home lived at 13115. The car in front of me was heading east.”
“Thanks, Dewey. That helps.” I pointed to the left, the opposite of where she’d turned. “East of here.”
Tip looked both ways. “What do you think?”
Ribs scratched his head and then looked right. “If she was coming back to her house and saw Briggs sitting there, what would she do?”
“Turn right,” Tip said, “Away from her house.”
“No sense in sitting around guessing,” I said. “Let’s start left and see what we find.”
“I agree,” Ribs said, “but in the meantime, we should get Julie to find out who owns any house where we don’t get an answer.”
“What’ll that do for us?” I asked.
“Maybe nothing,” Ribs said. “But if we figured this right, and El Terrible is working for Carlos, just maybe one of these houses will have a suspicious owner.”
“I don’t want Julie doing it,” Tip said.
“Bull,” I said. “We can trust Julie. If you don’t call it in, I will.”
Delgado nodded. “I’m with Connie on this one. I don’t give a shit what it looks like; there’s no way Julie’s the leak.”
“Fine. Let’s do it,” Tip said, “but we’re pairing up for this. We don’t know what we’ll find, and I don’t want any more dead cops.”
“I’ll go with Delgado,” I said. “You take Briggs.”
“Sounds good,” Tip said. “Briggs, time to go to work.”
They took the north side of the street, Delgado and I, the south. The first four houses were a bust. The people didn’t know anything about a woman and daughter new to the neighborhood. I began wondering how much people paid attention to their neighbors. Where I came from, everyone knew when you had visitors. New neighbors were greeted and grilled for information.
The next house brought no answer. I called Julie with the address, and she said she’d check it out. By the time we hit the end of the
first block, Ribs and I had two that didn’t answer. Tip and Briggs had one. The second block brought more of the same, as did the third. All in all, we had twelve houses with no answer, but so far, Julie hadn’t found anything that looked suspicious about them from the property records. We hit payday on the next block.
It was a two-story house with a detached garage and a fenced-in backyard. Curtains covered all the windows. When we didn’t get an answer, I called Julie with the address. We were two houses farther down when she called back.
“Something’s fishy about that last one, Connie.”
“Tell me about it,” I said.
“It was foreclosed on two years ago and bought at auction by Sentinel Properties.”
“What’s fishy about that?”
“Sentinel Properties owns several warehouses and businesses on Navigation Boulevard and quite a few houses on the East Side.”
I wasn’t all that familiar with Houston, but when Delgado heard Julie, he said, “That’s it.”
“What’s it?” I asked.
“Those other places are all in the Mexican district,” he said. “I’d bet money it’s Carlos who bought them.”
I called to Tip, and he and Briggs came over. “Let’s go in,” I said, nodding at the house.
“We need a warrant,” Tip said. “I don’t want anything screwing this up.”
“I’m not waiting, Tip. I’m going in.”
“Gianelli—”
“No way I’m letting that little girl sit in there one more minute. She could be dying.”
Ribs looked at Tip and said, “I’m with her, amigo. It’s a kid.”
We rang the bell a few more times then knocked as loud as we could, but when that brought no answer, we went around the back, where Tip broke a window to get us in.
Ribs climbed in first, gun drawn. Tip and I followed. Briggs stayed out front to guard the door.
I called for the girl as we cleared each room; there was no reason to be quiet. If anyone else was here, they knew we’d come inside. “Marissa!”
Tip led the way, clearing the kitchen, living room, dining room, and a sitting area. After that, we started up the stairs. We found her in the third bedroom, tied to the bed, blindfolded, with tape covering her mouth. She wasn’t much bigger than one of the pillows. And she was shaking.
Bullet From Dominic Page 26