King Peso: An Emilia Cruz Novel (Detective Emilia Cruz Book 4)

by Carmen Amato

  Silvio stopped and looked up at the sky. He drew a deep breath. “Tell Hollywood thanks for the shirt,” he said.

  Emilia thrust the badge at him again. “Take it, Franco.”

  “Let me do this my way, Emilia,” he said.

  “Your badge means access,” Emilia said. “Whatever turns up―.”

  Silvio grabbed Emilia by the neck of her shirt. For an awful second she thought he was going to punch her, too, but he just moved her to the side and kept going.

  “Franco, please,” Emilia called.

  A moment later he had found his truck and climbed inside. The vehicle started with a jolt, swung out of the parking space, and headed for the gate. As soon as the barrier rolled aside, Silvio gunned the engine and the truck shot into the street.

  Emilia stamped the tarmac in frustration. She stuck his badge in her back pocket and strode back to the squadroom. It was empty. Shards of Silvio’s broken mug were everywhere. The homicide photos from the trashed murder board were scattered by the copier. Some were spattered with blood. Emilia wondered if Loyola’s nose was broken. Maybe Macias and Sandor had taken him to the police clinic.

  His office door was ajar. Emilia rapped. When she didn’t get an answer, she peeped inside. The room was empty. She went inside and closed the door.

  Afternoon haze showed between the slats of the horizontal blinds covering the single window. Emilia went to the desk, looking for the file folder with her name on it. She rifled methodically through the clutter on top. The file wasn’t there. She moved on to the desk drawers and the trash.

  Footsteps and a garble of voices made her stop. Emilia realized that Castro and Gomez were back in the squadroom. Madre de Dios, but she didn’t want them to catch her in Loyola’s office. She was stuck there until they left.

  She moved noiselessly over to the safe, praying that the department’s usual inefficiencies meant that no one had changed the safe combination since she’d briefly occupied the office a year ago.

  The clicking of the dial seemed ridiculously loud as she spun it to the first number. The murmur of male voices continued through the closed door. She spun the dial to the left and settled on the second number; another spin to the right for the third. The handle didn’t pop the way she expected and she stood up before remembering that the dial had to be set to zero before the drawer would open. She squatted down again, carefully aligned the dial to zero and the handle popped with a clang.

  Castro and Gomez stopped talking.

  Emilia froze, her heart pounding in her ears. Castro laughed and their chatter resumed. She took in a lungful of air and slowly slid open the top drawer of the safe.

  The front was full of upright personnel files. There was a jumble of papers and folders at the back. She pulled out a handful and pawed through. The folder with her name was on the bottom. She put it on the floor and shoved the other folders back into the safe.

  There was a single rap on the door before it swung open. “Hey, jefe.”

  It was Gomez. The detective was tall and wiry, in fashionably torn jeans and a tee shirt advertising a local band called Muerte Guapo. In his mid-30’s, he wore his hair pulled back in a lank ponytail and had a thatch of chin hair struggling to grow into a beard.

  “Cruz,” he said. He leaned around the doorway to see if anyone else was in the office. Satisfied that they were alone, his lips curved into a half-smile. “Didn’t expect to find you here. Waiting for me?”

  “I was waiting for Loyola,” she lied.

  “You’re going to be a long time.” Gomez glanced at his watch. “Macias and Sandor took him to the hospital. We heard Silvio broke his face.”

  “I’ll head out,” Emilia said.

  Gomez took a step back but continued to block the doorway. “Oye,” he called over his shoulder. “Cruz has graced us with her presence.”

  Castro appeared behind Gomez. He was a shorter and swarthier version of his partner, also clad in jeans, tee, and ponytail. “How you doing, Cruz?” he asked.

  “Just leaving,” Emilia said.

  “I don’t think so,” Gomez said. The lazy half-smile spread into a sneer. “Seems to me that this is the perfect time for you to give us both a little sugar.”

  Castro snickered. Gomez came into the office, the other man on his heels. The latter shut the door. The office was suddenly much, much smaller.

  “Open the door, Castro,” Emilia said.

  He shook his head. “Scores to settle, Cruz,” he said.

  Gomez lifted his chin at Emilia. “Remember that day in the bathroom, Cruz?” he asked. “Just having a little fun and you spoiled it.”

  She remembered it all too well. He’d come into the detectives bathroom behind her and locked the door, saying that he’d waited long enough. It had been a raw fistfight between commodes and sinks that left the white tiled floor slick with blood. Emilia finally laid him out with a broken metal partition from the toilet stalls. She’d been stupid enough to think she was buying some goodwill with the department by not reporting the assault to the police union. Nor had she lodged a protest when Castro cornered her in the same bathroom in front of an audience and she’d rammed his head against a urinal so hard the porcelain cracked.

  “We’re past that,” Emilia said. Her gun was a reassuring pressure against her left side.

  Both men came toward Emilia as she stood near the safe. “Nah, it’s going to be different this time, Cruz,” Gomez said. “The best you ever had.”

  Castro snickered again.

  Emilia sidestepped, putting the plastic and metal chairs that fronted Loyola’s desk between herself and the two men. “Not going to happen.”

  Castro grabbed one of the chairs to pull it away. Emilia snatched at the top and they were suddenly locked in a ridiculous tug of war. Emilia let go and Castro overbalanced, the chair scything through the air and carrying him crashing into the opposite wall.

  She heard a click and the barrel of Gomez’s handgun swam into view, his face red and angry on the other side of the weapon.

  Emilia’s fingers closed around the neck of Loyola’s desk lamp and she launched it at him. The metal edge of the shade sliced into Gomez’s cheek. He gave a shrill yell, stumbled backwards, and his gun went off. Plaster rained from the ceiling.

  The office door opened, letting in light from the squadroom. “What the fuck is going on in here?”

  It was Ibarra. The scent of cigarettes preceded him. He stood in the doorway, taking in Castro on the floor, Gomez holding his gun in one hand and his bloody cheek in the other, and Emilia breathing hard as if she’d just finished a marathon. All were sprinkled with plaster dust.

  Castro picked himself up. “Hey, just letting off a little steam,” he said.

  “Get out, both of you.” Ibarra grabbed Gomez’s gun and spun him out of the room. Castro followed, grinning like it had all been a joke and slapping white dust off his tee shirt.

  Emilia brushed the plaster out of her hair and replaced the lamp on Loyola’s desk with a shaky hand.

  “What the fuck are you doing here, Cruz?” Ibarra asked.

  “I was waiting,” Emilia said.

  “What for?”

  “Waiting for Loyola.”

  “Why?” Ibarra righted the chairs.

  “To see if he’s okay.”

  “Why shouldn’t he be okay?” He caught sight of her badge on its lanyard around her neck. “What’s the deal with your badge?”

  “Loyola gave it back so I could go up to the bull pen and get Silvio.”

  “Shit, I told him not to do that.” Ibarra took a pack of cigarettes out of his shirt pocket. “Where’s everybody? The squadroom looks like a fucking war zone.”

  “When Silvio got here Loyola tried to give him his badge back,” Emilia informed him. “They had words. Silvio resigned and punched him. I think Macias and Sandor took Loyola to the hospital.”

  “Ah, fuck.” Ibarra paced a few steps in extreme agitation, rapping the pack of smokes against his thumb. “Oka
y, Cruz, here’s what we’re going to do. You’re going get out of here and stay out. I’m not your biggest fan, but I don’t like this kind of shit and neither does Loyola.”

  “Hey,” Emilia said hotly. “I didn’t ask for this―.”

  “Nobody said you did,” Ibarra said. “Go to your new job and be happy you made it out alive, okay?”

  Emilia looked around the room, wondering why she had been there in the first place, until her eye fell on the file lying on the floor by the safe. She picked it up.

  “What’s that?” Ibarra asked suspiciously.

  “It’s mine,” Emilia said. She showed him her name on the cover.

  He saw and nodded. “You okay to drive?”

  “I’m fine,” Emilia said.

  She grabbed her shoulder bag as they walked through the empty squadroom. Ibarra lit a cigarette as soon as they were outside.

  “Thanks,” she said when they got to the Suburban. “I probably would have shot Gomez if you hadn’t come in.”

  “The pendejo would have deserved it.” Ibarra greedily inhaled smoke. “Like I said, be glad you got a new job and don’t have to deal with this shit any more.”

  Emilia got into the Suburban. Ibarra slapped the door closed. She locked the vehicle and Ibarra nodded his approval. The sun had sunk below the roofline, darkening the parking lot. Emilia watched his dim figure and the glowing end of his cigarette recede as he returned to the building.

  It was the most interaction she’d had with him in three years. He was Loyola’s partner and one of the detectives who’d opposed a female becoming a detective. For most of the time they’d been in the squadroom together his attitude had been one of disdainful indifference, as if her presence was tolerated because it was also unacknowledged.

  She left the lot and turned the Suburban east towards the Palacio Réal. After a minute she realized that Silvio’s badge was still in the back pocket of her jeans. She pulled it out and dropped it into the console between the two front seats.

  Reality sank in as she drove. Somewhere in the back of her mind, she had always believed that when Silvio got out of the bull pen they would solve Isabel’s murder. Claudia and Las Palomas would be forgotten. Emilia and Silvio would go back to being the detective team with the highest solve rate in the squadroom, arguing through every investigation with that unique mix of mutual respect and outright exasperation she’d come to relish.

  Emilia never thought this was how it would end.

  She’d spent nearly three years in that squadroom, fighting to be accepted, refusing to be intimidated, learning as much as she could, and proving that she had the skills and guts to do the job as well as any of her male colleagues.

  Yet they were still ready to rape her in the lieutenant’s office.

  The road ahead blurred. Emilia started to shake and had to pull over.

  Chapter 10

  “Kiss me for luck, Em.”

  “What?” Emilia asked groggily. She pried her eyes open. The bedroom was dark, although the haze behind the drawn white drapes told her dawn was coming. “What’s going on?”

  “It’s the half marathon at Zihuatanejo, remember?” Kurt stood by the bed dressed in running shorts and a singlet with a number pinned to the front. “Jacques is waiting for me.”

  “Oh no.” Emilia struggled to a sitting position. “I said I’d go with you.”

  “You’re not going anywhere today,” Kurt said firmly. “You need a day off. I already ordered you breakfast for nine o’clock. Go back to sleep for another four hours.”

  Emilia put a hand on his cheek as he bent to kiss her. “I hope you win.”

  “No, hope that I beat my old time and don’t throw up at the finish line.”

  Emilia’s lips curved into a grin under his.

  She woke up again when room service rang the penthouse doorbell. Fortified with an omelet and clad in shorts and a tank top, Emilia took a cup of manzanilla tea and the folder from Loyola’s safe into the dining room.

  She opened the folder to find Silvio’s phone records, then the handwritten list of questions Loyola had given Macias and Sandor last Tuesday. The questions were not in Loyola’s nervous scribble or any other hand she recognized, in contrast to the terse answers in Sandor’s familiar block print. She lifted the memo aside to find copies of her last two annual evaluations, the personnel action promoting her to detective, and a letter of commendation from her old patrol unit.

  A copy of a posed group photo was stuck to the letter. About 20 men stood facing the camera.

  A few wore uniforms but the majority were in suit and tie. Emilia couldn’t think what relation the photo had to her; it certainly wasn’t her graduation from the police academy more than a dozen years ago, or a photo of the ceremony in which she’d been promoted to detective.

  There was nothing on the reverse. With the picture face up again, Emilia studied the faces. They were a diverse bunch; Latino, white gringo, Asian and black. The few uniforms were just as diverse. They could be police or military.

  One uniformed figure was slightly familiar. Emilia walked over to the sliding glass doors to hold the photo up to the light. The face was long, with a faint sneer. She couldn’t be sure, but it looked like Vega, the police captain from Chief Salazar’s staff who’d been the second El Trio victim.

  She went back to the table, laid the photo to the side and the next page stared up at her. It was the crime scene report of the murder of Captain Helios Vega Corona.

  “What’s going on, Loyola?” Emilia murmured.

  A parking garage security guard found Vega dead in his car shortly before dawn. Vega was killed by two rounds from a heavy caliber handgun, one of which had lodged in the driver’s side door. From the angle, the killer almost certainly had been sitting in the passenger seat when Vega was shot. No prints, fibers, or other evidence of the killer was found. The captain was last seen leaving Planet Hollywood the previous evening around 11:00 pm.

  She flipped to the next page and found Prade’s autopsy report. Time of death was between midnight and 1:00 am.

  Other pages appeared to be from Vega’s personnel file. A certificate of promotion to captain, with the date circled. He’d been a captain for almost three years. Certificate of achievement for a training program in El Norte. A letter of commendation from Chief Salazar for heading up a financial crimes task force last year. Again, the date was circled.

  The next thing in the file folder was a ballistics report.

  Three 9mm rounds had been extracted from the body of Isabel de Silvio, female, age 42. All rounds had been examined and tested to determine the profile of the firing weapon. This was obtained by the unique striations on the projectiles created by the imperfections on the interior surface of the weapon. The resulting profile was compared to the national database of all weapons profiles used in crimes in Mexico. A match was established.

  The weapon used in the murder of Isabel de Silvio matched weapons profile ACA-10258. The signature at the bottom was that of Orlando Hernandez Soto, head of the ballistics lab.

  Emilia caught her breath. Macias and Sandor claimed the ballistics report was negative. No match against anything in the database.

  She kept reading, not realizing that she was holding her breath. Weapons profile ACA-10258 was established three weeks ago. Known matches: 1.

  A second ballistics report showed that one 9mm round had been extracted from the body of Helios Vega Corona. Another had been extracted from the vehicle in which the victim had been found, which was registered to the victim. Both rounds had been examined and tested to determine the profile of the firing weapon. The resulting profile did not match any other weapons profile currently on record and so was assigned new number ACA-10258.

  The third page was a list of all crimes catalogued to weapons serial number ACA-10258. Murder victim: Vega Corona, Helio. Murder victim: de Silvio, Isabel. This report was also signed by Hernandez.

  There was nothing else in the folder.

  Emilia st
ood up, too agitated to stay seated. She went out to the balcony.

  Isabel and Vega had been killed by the same handgun. Loyola knew it. But if he knew, why didn’t Macias and Sandor know? Why have them chasing nothing when clearly they should be back to the El Trio murders, back to the theory that Silvio had been the intended target. Macias and Sandor would want to follow up. They were good cops who were clearly frustrated with the little they had to go on.

  She paced across the tile floor, hair ruffled by the breeze. If Isabel’s death was connected to the El Trio murders, did that mean Silvio’s missing bookie ledgers were irrelevant? Yet, it was hard to believe that it was mere coincidence that the ledgers went missing the same day his wife was killed.

  She didn’t know if she should call Silvio with the information or not.

  Emilia needed something stronger than tea or coffee. She headed back to the dining room and Kurt’s selection of expensive liquor displayed on the buffet. As she poured herself a drink, her thoughts circled back to the question of why Loyola would not have shared the ballistics report with Macias and Sandor.

  More than that, why did he hide information relevant to the El Trio murders by disguising it as her personnel file? Emilia thought back to her last conversation with the acting lieutenant. He’d been stressed to the breaking point.

  Was Loyola the El Trio killer?

  ☼

  She spent the rest of Saturday in front of Kurt’s computer, hunting online for reports of the El Trio murders. She’d read a few at the time of each shooting but now her purpose was different.

  After a few clicks, she realized how little real information was in the news. But she wasn’t surprised. Journalism was nearly as dangerous a profession in Mexico as being a cop. Every year journalists were murdered or made to disappear for reporting on cartel crime and government corruption. True investigative journalism was a death sentence. As a result, it was safer to publish speculation or sensationalism rather than real news.

  Most of the articles she found focused on politicians’ calls for action to end the drug gang violence in Acapulco and the state of Guerrero. Of course, as Acapulco’s popular standard-bearer, Carlota was quoted numerous times. Chief Salazar was quoted as well. Emilia even found an interview with Obregon as head of the police union for Guerrero. He was the master of saying nothing, but the interviewer had gushed over his crime fighting rhetoric and stretched the interview to a dozen paragraphs. The interviewer had probably been some clueless chica, tremendously impressed with his enigmatic smile and the mysterious persona he cultivated, like the way he always wore black. Obregon probably slept with her afterwards.