Best Laid Plans

by Allison Brennan

  “Did you talk to Rollins?”

  Brad’s hands clutched the steering wheel until his knuckles turned white. “Sam told me she was a cold bitch, but she goes beyond cold. She wants witness protection. I just can’t figure out if she really has valuable intel, or if she’s just playing us.”

  “What did she say?”

  “If the remainder of the Trejo/Sanchez gang was taken out, Tobias allowed it or did it himself.”

  “Do you believe her?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Why would Tobias want to take out his own gang? And leave the drugs?”

  “Distrust, skimming, loyalty issues.”

  “They were Sanchez’s people. We know next to nothing about Tobias. We don’t know where he calls home base and have only a vague description. And,” Ryan continued, “if we think that Tobias has been neutered, we focus our attention on the shooters—not Tobias himself.”

  Brad’s knee began to tighten, and he shifted in the driver’s seat. He had a doctor’s appointment at the end of the day; he’d moved it up from Friday. He needed to be officially cleared for duty. The only reason Sam had let him work this case was because it was mostly a passive investigation at this point, he was officially “consulting” with the SAPD, and Ryan was assisting in the field.

  He really despised being babied.

  Brad said, “I really hate that the director and DOJ are considering Nicole’s request for witness protection, but Sam made a plea that she didn’t deserve to breathe free air. Nicole mentioned it to me again. She said our house isn’t clean.”

  “Did you tell your boss?”

  “I tried, but Sam cut me off. She said we can’t believe anything she says. That she’ll say and do anything to get out of prison.”

  “What do you think?”

  “I think Nicole knows more than she’s said, but not as much as she claims.”

  “She could have been goading you. If you think you can’t trust your team, you’re all at risk.”

  And that bothered Brad on a deep, indescribable level.

  His phone rang. It was Ash from the SAPD investigative unit. Brad had left three messages for him. “Donnelly,” he said. “It’s about time you got back to me.”

  “Don’t start with me. The ATF has been having me re-run every fucking test, including ballistics, then they took all the bullets we extracted. Then, I had to walk them through the entire scene at two this afternoon. Do you know how fucking hot it was at two? Hotter than hell. And they kept me for two hours when I have a shitload of work piled.”

  “You need a beer.”

  “Damn straight.”

  “Did ATF take the heroin?”

  “No.”

  “Have you tested it? Ryan and I are here, and we can’t figure out why the drugs were left behind.”

  “It’s still in evidence. We did the field test on one sample, confirmed for heroin, but I need to sample each brick, determine the purity, input the data, run it through the system to see where it came from—you know the drill.”

  “Let me know when you have the report. I promise—I’m not nagging you. We have a line on the injured shooter.”

  “Is he talking?”

  “He’s dead. But we still may get something out of him yet.”

  Brad hung up and turned off the highway.

  The Atascosa County morgue was housed in the basement of the lone county hospital. If the county had a complex homicide, they’d send the body to Bexar County and their state-of-the-art facilities. Brad might still ask them to do so once he and Ryan examined the evidence.

  The coroner, Frank Hernandez, doubled as a staff doctor. He was a small, wiry older man with sharp eyes behind thick glasses.

  “Thought this might be one of yours,” Dr. Hernandez said after Brad showed his DEA identification. “This smacks of drugs and gangs.”

  “Thank you for contacting our office so quickly,” Brad said. “The body was found this morning?”

  “At dawn, a trucker pulled off the highway to take a leak. Found the victim in the ravine. Two days later, there’d have been nothing left but bones. As it was, the only reason the trucker saw anything was because a couple coyotes were chomping down on the corpse. Hope you haven’t eaten, ’cause it ain’t pretty. I’m not planning to do the autopsy ’til morning—I just came off a twenty-four-hour shift, stayed late to meet you boys.”

  “We appreciate it,” Ryan said.

  “But you examined the body?” Brad asked.

  “Course I did.” He pulled open one of the drawers and unzipped the body bag. The victim hadn’t been cleaned, prepped, or undressed. “I need an assistant to help prepare the body and preserve the evidence, ’cause this is a homicide. Know you need everything you can get.”

  The victim was a Hispanic male approximately twenty years of age. His face was beaten and swollen. The doctor pulled on gloves and motioned toward the box for Brad and Ryan to do the same. Then he turned the victim’s head. “First, the swelling is from decomp, though you can probably see he’d been beaten pretty bad.”

  Hernandez gestured to the dried blood on the back of the head, then he pulled at the matted hair to reveal a hole.

  “Gunshot. The bullet’s still in there—I did a full body x-ray when he came in. Looks fragmented, though. Don’t know if you’ll be able to match it with anything.”

  “Caliber?”

  He shrugged. “Small caliber—probably a nine millimeter, maybe a thirty-eight. The left leg had, I believe, two gunshot wounds.”

  “You can’t tell?”

  “There’s one bullet still inside, a higher caliber round, that’s lodged in his bone. The other is gone—and with the coyote bite marks, it’s hard to tell, but I think there was a second lower on the leg. Could have been a clean shot, through and through, or the coyotes swallowed it. I should know after the autopsy.” He looked up from the mangled leg. “Unless you want me to send the body up to Bexar.”

  “We don’t want to step on your toes, doctor.”

  He waved them off. “No interagency bull crap from me, boys. Our sheriff thought you might want everything, already signed the paperwork so as I don’t interrupt his poker night.”

  “Did you search his body? Any ID?”

  “Pulled out a wallet. No ID inside, but there are cards and photos, you might be able to find out who it is. We pulled prints from his fingers, they’re with the sheriff’s department. Probably be scanned tonight.”

  “Anything else?” Brad asked. “Identifying marks? You mentioned tattoos over the phone.”

  “Got a couple of tats. I photographed the visible ones, but like I said, we haven’t stripped and cleaned the body.” He zipped up the bag and pushed the drawer back in. “I’ll call Bexar and tell them to expect the body tonight.”

  “Thank you.”

  The doctor walked over to his desk and opened the bottom drawer. He took out a sealed plastic bag and handed it to Brad. “That’s everything that was in the victim’s pockets,” he said. He handed a folder to Ryan. “Those are copies of the x-rays of the bullets, and the tats on his arms.”

  Brad signed for the evidence, then unsealed the bag and examined the wallet.

  Photos of the dead kid with what Brad assumed was his family—multigenerational, like many of the Hispanic families in the area. Grandparents, parents, siblings. This kid wasn’t that old. Twenty, tops. Brad hated that so many young men turned to gangs. Many blamed it on poverty, and that certainly had something to do with it—the allure of drug money was hard to resist. If Nicole Rollins, an educated, middle-class federal agent was attracted to it, why did he expect a kid with nothing and a family to support would turn his back?

  But it was more than simple poverty that turned these kids into drug runners. The thrill. The violence. The gang that became their family. Threats. The idea that they would somehow be bigger, more powerful. It was depressing, and Brad had long since put aside trying to reason it out.

  Ryan tapped on the photo
of a tat from the victim’s right forearm. “Know what that is?”

  The skull, crossbones, and rosary were clear and well done. Not a cheap tat.

  “The San Antonio Saints,” Brad said. “Well, shit.”

  The SAS were run by a thug named Reynardo Reynoso, a wily little prick who’d been in and out of prison. Reynoso had been on Brad’s target list during Operation Heatwave two months ago. They’d never found him to haul his ass back to prison—he was wanted on multiple charges including drug distribution, attempted murder, and grand theft auto. Word on the street was that Reynoso now answered to Marquez, a rising star in the drug underworld—bigger now with Sanchez out of the picture.

  “Marquez’s pet gang took out Sanchez’s people,” Brad said.

  “Reynoso wouldn’t act on his own?” Ryan asked.

  “Not from what I’ve heard, but I should talk to Jerry with SAPD. He knows more about the local gangs.” Brad stared at the photo, but wasn’t seeing anything as he tried to put the puzzle pieces together. “It doesn’t make sense, unless Marquez thought Tobias was rebuilding and wanted to wipe him out for good. Power grab, not retaliation like Rogan thought.”

  “Maybe Rogan was wrong,” Ryan said. “No one is right all the time.”

  But in the short time Brad had known Kane, he’d never been wrong. What was he missing?

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  Lucy always felt at home in a crime lab, just like she felt comfortable in the morgue. There was an organization and science to everything; evidence turned clinical. There were no victims in the crime lab, only pieces of a puzzle to put together.

  There’d been a time when Lucy thought she’d be better working behind the anonymity of the forensic sciences, where she didn’t have to face the victim or the criminal. Her fourteen months interning for the Medical Examiner in D.C. had been both challenging and satisfying; she could have seen herself working there for the rest of her life. It wouldn’t have been difficult, with her college degree and a master’s in criminal psychology, to continue in school, get a doctorate or a third degree in biology, and become a senior pathologist, or even go to medical school and become a medical examiner.

  But ultimately, she continued down the law enforcement career path. Her unique skill set enabled her to assess crime scenes with the eye of an experienced cop instead of the rookie she was, and her background in psychology added another layer to her abilities. Crime scene investigators collected and analyzed evidence, but they didn’t extrapolate or assign the human factor. They took facts and presented them; it was up to agents like Lucy and detectives like Tia to look at the evidence and add in the human equation.

  While she loved her job, she sometimes missed the lab environment, so when Tia asked if she and Barry could stop by the lab after their late lunch to look at the evidence from the Elise Hansen shooting, Lucy agreed before Barry could comment.

  The evidence was still in the main lab room being processed. They all donned gloves, gowns, and booties, then approached the table where a tech named Stuart was cataloging each item. Everything had been sealed and labeled in either paper bags—if there was biological material like blood—or plastic bags.

  Elise’s clothes were hanging in a special drying chamber in the corner both to dry the blood and preserve the evidence.

  Stu said, “The cell phone is a burn phone. We pulled down the data from the SIM card.” He handed a printout to Tia. Lucy looked over her shoulder. There wasn’t a lot there.

  “Can you shoot a copy of this to my computer and the FBI?”

  “Already done,” Stu said. “Your second canvass turned up a backpack in a ditch near the shooting site. Inside was a wallet, multiple IDs, makeup, a change of clothes, condoms, a flask of vodka.” He gestured to a series of plastic bags that had been sealed and labeled. “She had over five thousand dollars in cash on her. We also found an airplane ticket stub in the wallet.”

  Lucy picked up that envelope. Barry took a picture on his phone of the information.

  “She flew in to San Antonio from Dallas on May thirteenth. Under the name Elise Hamilton.”

  “Dallas is a major hub,” Tia said. “She could have transferred from another flight.”

  “But now that we have a name and date,” Barry said, “we can contact TSA and see where she originated.”

  “Did she have an ID in this name?” Lucy asked.

  Stu nodded. “She had several IDs. I made copies. A Nevada ID under Elise Hansen, age eighteen; a Nevada driver’s license under Elise Hamilton, age twenty-one; an ID from Virginia under Elise Harrison, age eighteen; another ID under Elise Hansen but from Texas, age eighteen.”

  “Fake?” Tia asked.

  “All authentic—but there are people who specialize in creating identities. But four authentic identifications? That’s odd—at least to me.”

  “Which ID was issued first?”

  “Elise Hansen in Nevada is a state ID that’s three years old. The newest is Elise Hansen in Texas—it was issued three weeks ago, the day after the airline stub.”

  “She got the card in three weeks?” Tia asked. “That fast?”

  “One day—the day after she arrived,” Stu corrected. “I don’t know how she did it or where she bought it. It has all the marks of being a God-honest Texas ID card, but the address is fake—they couldn’t have mailed it there.”

  “Meaning, someone has the ability to create authentic but fake identifications,” Brad said.

  “Bingo,” Stu said. “We’re going to run tests on it, but I ran the number—that is real. She’s in the system, under that address, posted on May fourteenth.”

  “Then wouldn’t there be a record of who created the ID?” Tia asked.

  “Yes and no. If it was created at a DMV, we can trace which one, and we can investigate further. There was a big scandal a few years back where one of the DMVs had a ring of employees who created false identification for illegal immigrants. The state clamped down on them, but that doesn’t mean that others couldn’t slip through. It’s a lucrative business. But it could still be a perfect forgery, especially if they use the same equipment and raw material.”

  “She’s from Nevada,” Lucy said.

  “Because that’s the oldest ID?”

  “That, and because she had a second ID with her being over twenty-one. Important if you’re hooking in bars or clubs. Nevada also has legalized prostitution,” Lucy said. “She could have started there.”

  “But she’s underage,” Barry said. “Legalized means regulated.”

  “And she had false identification,” Lucy repeated. “You don’t think she could be eighteen, do you, Tia?”

  “Slim to no chance. I talked to the doctor—based on x-rays, he put her age at sixteen, and he says that’s within six months.”

  Lucy tapped the Elise Hansen ID card. “I don’t know if that’s her real name, but I’ll bet that’s her birthday, plus two years. All these cards have her birthday on April fourteenth.” She also thought it was her real name because it was the first card issued.

  Tia said, “I’ll talk to my pal at NCMEC and run with that. We can focus on Nevada and the West. It gives us a place to start. Plus, I’ll narrow the missing-persons search to Nevada and surrounding states.”

  “She lied to us,” Lucy said.

  Barry and Tia turned to her.

  Lucy continued. “She said she’d been here a week before meeting with Worthington. But she came in three weeks earlier.”

  “Maybe,” Tia said.

  “Maybe?”

  “It could be she didn’t specifically lie, she was just being vague. These girls don’t like details. They don’t want to get pinned down on anything, so if they keep it vague, they can simply say we misunderstood, or they were being general.”

  Lucy wasn’t certain that was the case here, but considering that Elise had been shot and had just gone through surgery—with the requisite pain-killers—maybe she should give her the benefit of the doubt.

  “What’
s this?” Barry held up a plastic envelope with a sheet of stationery. On the paper was an address, date, and time. “This street is near where she was shot.”

  Stu said, “That’s not the girl’s handwriting. We found a black book in her bag. We’re making a copy because there may be information in there for your investigation—dates and times and clients. Assuming the black book is hers—and I’m pretty certain it is—I can definitely say she didn’t write down this address.”

  “So whoever gave her this note set her up,” Barry said.

  “Is it Mona Hill’s handwriting?” Lucy asked Tia.

  “I don’t know. But I have a statement she wrote at the office on an unrelated matter. I’ll check.”

  Stu added, “It’s expensive stationery—watermarked as well. We have a database of paper samples, and we’re running through it now. I should know at least what brand by the end of the day. If it’s as expensive as I think it is, there’ll be very few places that sell it. There’s also an interesting threading in the paper, which tells me that it’s a special order of some sort.”

  “Good job, Stu,” Tia said. “Anything else we need to know before you finish up your report?”

  “I’m waiting for the ballistics report, but we should have that by the end of the day as well. I did a fingerprint comparison, and her prints match the prints found at the Worthington crime scene. We’re running her prints wide now, but so far, nothing else in the criminal database.”

  Barry glanced at his phone and excused himself. He left the room to take the call.

  “There’s something missing,” Lucy said.

  “No, this is everything,” Stu said, looking at the log.

  “Keys. There’s no key. No hotel key card, apartment key, car key. Nothing. We don’t know where she was staying. This isn’t all her stuff—she was seen in different clothes Friday night, and those clothes aren’t here or in the dryer.”

  “Think she was staying with Mona?” Tia asked.