Blood of Saints

by Maegan Beaumont

  Her plan was derailed the moment she made the third-floor landing. Detective Mark Alvarez, Santos’s partner, was there to greet her. Looking freshly showered and pressed despite the early hour, in his office casual short-sleeved polo and breathable cotton Dockers, he stood at the top of the stairs like he’d been waiting for her, a thin stack of case files in his hand. “Morning, Agent Vance—” He looked at his watch before offering her a quick smile. “Will had a late night so he’s not in yet. Coffee? I just made a fresh pot.”

  It was barely six a.m. She hadn’t expected either of them to be here yet. Santos had disappeared directly after mass was over, following Paul Vega down the aisle in the wake of whispers and stares, and she hadn’t seen Alvarez since she’d left the primary scene yesterday afternoon. “Sure,” she said returning the smile Alvarez gave her. “Coffee’d be great.”

  He led her to a small, windowless breakroom that held a soda and snack machine. Seeing them made her smile, a small chuckle escaping her. Strickland used to call the bags of potato chips and canned soft drinks they gave to suspects and witnesses snitch bait. He’d dig into that landfill he called a desk, coming up with loose bills to feed into vending machines, giving her a shit-eating grin that told her just how much he enjoyed the delicate dance between cop and suspect.

  She was good at her job, but Strickland was a thing to watch. Underneath those stained ties and neglected haircuts was an interrogator so slick, so cunning, he’d have you confessing every sin you ever committed before you even thought of asking for a lawyer. When Strick was in the room, there was always an audience behind the two-way—more than a few of them taking notes.

  Alvarez tossed the files onto the table as he passed it. “Something funny?” he said, aiming a look over his shoulder on his way to the coffeepot.

  “No,” she said, watching as he pulled a couple of paper cups off the stack and filled them with coffee from an industrial-sized urn. “It’s just been a while since I’ve been in a police station.” She leaned across the table to read the tabs of the files he’d tossed there. Trudy Hayes. Edward Sherman. Robert Delashaw. Sara Pike.

  “Missing persons cases.”

  She looked up to see him standing over her, a cup of coffee in each hand. He offered her one along with a lopsided smile. “Unfortunately, being a border town, we get more than our share.”

  Sabrina had a feeling there was more to the cases than that, but she didn’t press him. Instead, she took the offered cup, returning the smile with one of her own. “I remember that about Yuma.”

  “That’s right—you got your start in the Phoenix field office before making the jump to Quantico.” He gestured with his cup at a chair before sitting. “You do a lot of work with PPD before the move?”

  “I helped with a few cases,” she said, evasively. The last thing she had time for was to sit and chat over a cup of coffee with Santos’s rookie partner, but she smiled, accepting the cup while she slid into an empty chair. If partnering with Strickland had taught her anything it was that when it came to answers, there was more than one way to get them.

  Alvarez laughed a little, shaking his head at what he must have thought was modesty. “One of those was The South Mountain Killer, wasn’t it?” he asked, even though he obviously knew that, according to her file, it was the case that made her career. “Will says you pretty much solved the case single-handedly.”

  “There’s no such thing as single-handedly in investigative work,” she said. “All I did was give PPD a few ideas on what to look for. They did the heavy lifting.”

  Alvarez gave her a smile, this one telling her that evading his compliment while giving props to the locals had earned his respect. “Well, my partner isn’t usually free with the attaboys so when he hands one out, I tend to believe him.”

  “Tell me your story,” she said, changing the subject. If he noticed, he didn’t seem to mind. “How’d you end up a cop? You don’t really seem the type.”

  Alvarez shrugged. “I lost my scholarship. Dropped out of college and after a short What the hell am I gonna do now? crisis, applied to Tucson PD. Rode patrol for a few years before I made detective and transferred here.”

  She nodded. His story wasn’t much different than most she’d heard. “You and Santos haven’t been partners long.”

  “About a year now.” He laughed. “Is it that obvious?”

  Sabrina shrugged, thinking of Strickland. Wondering who had his back now that she was gone. “How’s it going?”

  “Actually, Will is the first partner I’ve ever had. I rode patrol solo …” He trailed off. “We’ve got different styles but he’s a great cop. I’m lucky to partner with him.” He said it like he was reading off a cue card. “How about you and Aimes? Been together long?”

  Too long. “Believe it or not, this is our first case together,” she said, tipping her cup in his direction before taking a sip. “The Bureau is all about sink or swim when it comes to field work.”

  “Ahh …” He laughed, nodding his head slowly. “That’s it then.”

  “That’s what?” she said carefully.

  “The tension I caught between the two of you.” Alvarez lifted a shoulder before taking a sip of his coffee. “You know, the awkward honeymoon phase—months of forced politeness and feeling each other out until one of you finally snaps.”

  “You and Santos seemed to get through it okay,” she said, steering the conversation back in his direction.

  “We’ve had our growing pains.” Alvarez gave her a sheepish grin. “Neither of us like to take orders, but he’s got the experience so I don’t mind playing the sidekick.”

  She grinned back, silently thanking him for finally opening the door. “Yeah, from what I hear, he’s worked a few high-profile cases.”

  Alvarez tilted his half-empty cup toward himself, pretending to gauge if he needed a refill. What he was really doing was deciding whether or not he wanted to slam the door he’d just opened in her face. “He had his fingers in the Vega case for a few minutes, back in 2000, but that didn’t last long.” His tone was flat, tinged with disgust, like just thinking about it pissed him off. “They closed ranks—surprise, surprise. Shut the whole thing down before Will could even take a formal statement.”

  She remembered Santos, the look on his face as he passed her by, following Paul Vega out of the chapel. It hadn’t been anger she’d seen; it’d been the look a predator gets when it catches the scent of wounded prey. And it hadn’t been about old wounds. It was the scent of fresh blood that brought Santos to the chapel last night.

  Santos believed Vega had something to do with what’d happened to Rachel Meeks, she was sure of it. Instead of pursuing it, she filed it away for later, giving Alvarez a small smile like she knew what he was talking about.

  “He was also the lead detective on the Melissa Walker case, wasn’t he?” Santos had stonewalled her yesterday when she’d asked. Alvarez was the back door and she kicked it in with a smile.

  The easy-going attitude he was throwing her went stiff around the edges. “Yeah, but that was way before my time,” he said, trying to keep it casual with a disinterested shrug “Will isn’t really the share your feelings type, you know?”

  She nodded like she understood and she guessed she did. That particular case wasn’t something she liked to think about. “So he doesn’t like to talk about it?”

  “Girl gets kidnapped, raped, tortured for months, and then murdered by her sicko brother on your watch …” he said, staring into his half-empty cup. “Would you want to talk about it?”

  “I suppose not,” she said, giving him a smirky half smile even though his casual summary of the hell she’d lived through made her want to throw up. She felt something inside her break away, burrowing deep inside her brain. She let it go, didn’t try to dig it out. It was an old habit, allowing herself to detach, and she clung to it now, grabbing at it with the desperate h
ands of a junkie. It was how she survived. The only way she could have this conversation without completely losing her shit.

  “Way Will figures it”—Alvarez stood up, making his way to the coffeepot to top off his cup; he didn’t ask her if she wanted a refill—“he could have stopped that freak before he even got started,” he said, sliding back into his seat. “He blames himself.”

  “So, your partner fancies himself a clairvoyant?” She smiled, felt the cold slide of it across her mouth followed by a numbness that wasn’t entirely unpleasant. “I read the reports. Wade Bauer tracked her across two states. Nearly fifteen hundred miles. Santos couldn’t have known that. He couldn’t have stopped him.” She believed that. No one could have stopped Wade. What happened. What he did to her.

  Alvarez let out a long breath, shaking his head at her perceived ignorance. “Maybe you feel that way because you don’t know the whole story.”

  Thirty-Seven

  Bingo.

  Sabrina’s eyes went wide, hands turned palms up. “So,” she said, throwing in a challenging smile for good measure, “enlighten me.”

  “Look,” he said, aiming a glance over her shoulder to make sure they were alone. She was suddenly sure he knew more than he’d originally let on, and that what he knew wasn’t necessarily something he was supposed to. “Melissa Walker was involved in a murder case a few weeks before she was abducted,” he said, picking at the pressed seam that ran the length of his paper cup. “Some jock kid from Gila Bend was here for a high school football game. Ended up stabbed to death in a gas station bathroom.”

  Andy Shepard. She remembered him. His arrogant smile and careless hands. The way he’d touched her like he had the right. “Did she kill him?” She remembered wanting to. He’d reminded her of Jed Carson, the boy back home who never gave her a moment’s peace. She’d hated them both, the way they thought that anything they wanted was theirs for the taking.

  “No.” Alvarez shook his head at her. “She was his waitress that night. He made a pass at her, grabbed her ass. She put him down pretty quick. According to Shepard’s friends, she was so angry about it she was sent home. Another waitress had to finish her shift.”

  She remembered that too. Val dragging her away from the table, the drunken chatter that’d surrounded her fading away. Her glare nailed to the back of Shepard’s head while he played the victim. That same night one of the bus boys told her that someone had been in the restaurant asking about her.

  Alvarez spoke again and she forced herself to listen, to hear him instead of what was happening in her head. “A few hours later, a car full of them stopped on the way home so Shepard could take a leak,” he said. “Five minutes stretched into ten … fifteen … twenty.”

  “Twenty minutes and no one went after him?” she said incredulously. “No teenager is that patient.”

  “Yeah, well … none of them were really watching the clock on account of the girl who was with them giving out blow jobs in the back seat to pass the time,” he said, shrugging. “The driver, who got his happy ending first, finally got tired of waiting. He goes after Shepard to tell him to hurry the hell up. He sees the blood leaking under the door and starts screaming his head off. Shepard was stabbed once—clean, between the ribs and through the lung. Bled out while his buddies were lined up for free hummers in the parking lot.” He shook his head at the ridiculousness of it. “Perp took his hand as a souvenir. No one saw him and if they did, they were too drunk or too busy getting their dick sucked to remember or care.”

  “I still don’t understand what this has to do with Melissa Walker,” she said, allowing irritation to creep into her tone. “Or why your partner blames himself from what happened to her.”

  “Will was part of the interdepartmental murder investigation—his first lead case. He questioned her, only he didn’t know it was her. She was living and working under a fake name. He knew she had something to do with it. He knew Shepard’s murder was connected to her somehow …” Alvarez sighed, sliding down in his chair until his slumped shoulders hit the back of it, leaving his cup behind. “But then out of the blue, the night clerk at the gas station confessed. Said he’d killed Shepard because he and his buddies had done a beer run there the weekend before and cost him his job. Took his hand for stealing. Evidence found in his possession supported his confession.”

  She remembered. Sitting in a back booth at Luck’s with Santos while he laid it out for her. He told her that the case was closed and thanked her for her time while she’d pretended to be relieved. Pretended to believe it was over. That she was safe.

  But it had been a lie. All of it.

  Wade took her two days later. Snatched her off the street while she walked home from work, leaving nothing behind but a box of leftover birthday cake dumped in the gutter.

  The store clerk who confessed was named James Toliver. He’d been convicted and sentenced to life in prison within months of his arrest. Because of his work on the Shepard case, Santos was made lead detective on her disappearance. He was a good cop; he must’ve seen the connection right away. He must’ve at least suspected that the confession was bogus, that he’d gotten the wrong guy. That maybe if he’d pursued it instead of swallowing the hook and allowing himself to get reeled in by the rush of solving his first lead case, he’d have been able to see the truth. A thing like that would eat at a cop like Will Santos. Keep him up at night. Haunt him like a ghost.

  “Will never got over it,” Alvarez told her, confirming what she’d just been thinking. “When that thing with Vega happened, he took it personal.” He must’ve finally realized that he’d said too much because his eyes narrowed into slits. “Why are you asking about her anyway?” he said, aiming a suspicious look her way. “Melissa Walker? It’s been twenty years—you’re a little late to the party.”

  “Am I?” she said, setting her own cup aside. “Because the report I read said there was DNA found on Stephanie Adams. She had Melissa Walker’s blood under her fingernails. Seems to me, I’m right on time.”

  Something close to embarrassment passed over his face. “How do you know about that?” he said, the words falling tight and clipped against her ears. “Those results were struck from the original report.”

  She smiled again, tapping a finger against the badge Church had given her. “FBI,” she said, relying on the initials to explain everything.

  “It was a mistake,” he said, his affable expression slammed shut. “Samples got contaminated. The tech responsible was reprimanded, corrective action was taken, and the tests were regenerated.” He fed her the party line before he stood, draining his cup. “If you’ll excuse me, I have some paperwork to catch up on.”

  “Who was it?” she said, looking up at him, unwilling to let him go until she got at least one of the answers she’d come for. The tech who’d taken the samples and run the test might know things that had been stricken from the report that even Ben hadn’t been able to get his hands on. “The tech who screwed up?”

  Alvarez bared his teeth at her in something that most people would mistake for a smile. “Does it really matter?”

  “I know you don’t know me very well, Detective Alvarez, but I can assure you”—she returned his smile—“I’m not in the business of asking unnecessary questions.”

  Alvarez crushed the cup in his fist before tossing it in the trash can on his way to the door. She was sure he’d ignore the question. That he’d leave without answering her, forcing her to go after him, but then he told her. “Elena Hernandez,” he said, forcing the name between clenched teeth just before he disappeared down the hall.

  As soon as Alvarez walked out, Sabrina tossed her own cup and followed him. By the time she reached the bullpen he was at his desk, head buried in a stack of files. He didn’t look up when she passed by on her way to the conference room she and Church had been assigned. Santos was still nowhere to be found.

  Installing herself behind
the computer, she turned it on, waiting for it to power up before she typed the first in a short list of names into the search bar.

  PAUL VEGA

  Barely a second after she hit enter, a message flashed across the screen.

  no matches to your search inquiry found

  Santos was a Major Crimes detective. Anything he’d been called to investigate would have carried with it a felony charge. The four majors were rape, murder, armed robbery, and kidnapping. Whatever happened, it’d been bad. What had Alvarez said? They closed ranks. Stopped a felony investigation in its tracks. That meant nothing about a felony crime involving Paul Vega would be in the system. But erasing Vega’s involvement didn’t mean they could turn back time. Whatever it was he’d been suspected of doing still happened. There’d still be a paper trail. She thought about it and tried again.

  MAJOR CRIMES, UNSOLVED, 2000

  A few seconds later, a row of file numbers tumbled down the screen. Nearly a dozen of them. Scrolling the mouse over the first number she clicked it, opening the file. Reports and case notes filled the screen. A drive-by shooting in her old neighborhood. She opened the next in line. An armed robbery at a Circle K. She opened the next one. A burned body found in the desert. The next one. A hooker strangled to death in Luck’s parking lot. That one looked promising, even though she had a hard time imagining Vega trolling for prostitutes. She closed it and moved on.

  The next file on the screen was an unsolved rape case. According to the case notes, it’d been brutal. The victim was a seventeen-year-old girl—a senior at Yuma High School. Cheerleader. Photographer for the school newspaper. Yearbook editor. Solid B student. She’d left home late Friday night, sneaking out of the house after her parents went to sleep. When they woke the next morning, she was gone, something both of them swore was against her character, despite the fact that they’d waited until after noon to call the police.