by Sean Black
‘No, thank you.’
She remained standing. ‘I have work in a half-hour, and I have to drop her at my mom’s, so if you could ask what you want to ask — I don’t mean to be rude but…’
Lock cleared his throat. A visit from someone like him was probably the last thing this woman needed but now he was here he would press on. ‘Mrs Brady,’ he began.
‘You can call me Sarah. Mrs Brady makes me sound old, and I already feel like a million,’ she said.
‘Sarah, Melissa Warner has asked me to find Charlie Mendez for her.’
Sarah bent over the playpen and picked up her daughter. ‘Two hundred grand is a lot of money, huh? But it’s no good to you if you’re not around to spend it.’
Lock guessed he had better get used to hearing that line. ‘This isn’t about money, I can assure you.’
She shot him a look of sheer scepticism. ‘Sure it’s not.’
‘I believe your husband had caught up with Mendez before he was killed.’
The little girl chewed at the building block and stared at him with wide blue eyes. Sarah tried to take it from her. She bunched chubby fingers tightly around it, refusing to give it up.
‘He had him in his vehicle. But they were pulled over by the cops and arrested before they got to the border,’ Sarah said. Twenty miles short. Twenty miles further on and he would still be here.’
This was news to Lock. ‘I thought he and the people he was with were abducted by narco-traffickers.’
‘Boy, you really don’t know too much about how things work down there, do you? Cops, gangsters. A lot of the time they’re the same thing.’
She was wrong in one regard. He wasn’t wholly naive about police corruption in Mexico. It was rife. That was all you needed to know. ‘You think the police killed your husband?’
She bounced the little girl in her arms and kissed her cheek. Distracted, the the child dropped the block, then struggled to get down, wanting to retrieve it.
‘They might have killed him themselves. They might have handed him over to the people who did. Either way, he’s still gone.’ She looked around the grubby apartment. ‘I begged him not to go down there but all he could talk about was what we could do with that money. Listen, I really do have to get ready for work.’
He raised a hand. ‘Did your husband leave any papers, any notes about Mendez?’
Sarah shrugged. ‘If he did they wouldn’t be here. He kept all that stuff at his office. I haven’t been back there since he left. He always paid a year ahead so I have a few more months before I have to deal with it. Guess I’m not ready to face it yet.’
He took a breath. ‘Would you mind if I did?’
‘Come on, baby,’ she said to her daughter, turning her back to him and walking through into the kitchen. She returned a few moments later with a set of keys, which she handed to him. ‘The alarm code’s written on the fob. Just drop them into the mailbox when you come back — I don’t get home from work until late.’
Lock felt the weight of the keys in his hand. A thought flashed into his mind that he should hand them back. But he didn’t. He thanked her, and promised to return them, then walked out of the dingy rooms into the mild California evening.
Fifteen
Bail-bond offices were generally grim, and Joe Brady’s was no exception. The final unit in a greying strip mall off a narrow two-lane road, its dirt-streaked windows were covered with metal bars, and there was a dent in the front door where someone had kicked it. A sign announced the nature of the business conducted within.
Lock fumbled with the keys until he found the one that fitted. He opened the door, and stepped inside. The alarm panel was to his right. He plugged in the code written on the key fob and the box chirped briefly, then deactivated. The interior consisted of a small reception area and a larger back office, a toilet and a small kitchen.
Posters adorned Reception, including one advertising the company’s services — ‘Brady Bail Bonds — Because Jail Sucks.’ A pen set, like the kind you find in banks, was secured to the long wooden reception desk with a couple of bolts, a reflection perhaps of the business’s client base.
In the main office there was a desk, a leather swivel chair and two regular chairs on the other side. A smaller table stood to one side with a PC and a printer underneath. Both pieces of equipment were secured to the wall with thick metal ties. Brady might have bailed criminals but he sure as hell didn’t trust them so he couldn’t have been entirely stupid. Three four-drawer filing cabinets sat against the far wall.
Lock checked the toilet (‘Employees Only ’), then the kitchen. A solitary Brady Bail Bonds coffee mug stood next to the sink. There were more mugs in the cupboard, and a pint of milk had soured in the small refrigerator. He held his breath as he took it out, poured it into the sink and rinsed it away.
Back in the main office, he found the key to the filing cabinet and started sorting through the drawers. Clients’ records were filed alphabetically. He flicked through a few, closed the cabinets and sat down on the swivel chair. On the desk in front of him he found a half-dozen glossy brochures, including one for a new housing development, Woodland Oaks. It showed large detached McMansions with dramatic entryways and sweeping staircases inhabited by the kind of smiling automatons only ever glimpsed in real-estate literature. He didn’t see any woodland. Or any oaks. Presumably they’d all been chopped down to make way for the houses.
The other brochures on the desk were split between cars (Mercedes and BMW) and boats. Rather than focus on the task in hand, Brady’d been spending the money before he had left his office. It was an approach to life that all but guaranteed disappointment. Do the job, then worry about the pay-off, was how Lock approached his work, and it had served him well.
He put the brochures to one side and sorted through the other papers on the desk. There were bills and invoices. Nothing leaped out as significant. He eased back in the chair and closed his eyes. Surely Brady wouldn’t have set off into the heart of narco-territory to find Mendez without some clue as to where the man was. For there to be nothing in the office relating to either Melissa or Mendez seemed remarkable.
The bills.
Opening his eyes, Lock grabbed the stack of papers and thumbed through them again. He looked for a phone bill but there was none. The most recent piece of paperwork dated back to a few weeks before Brady had left his office for the last time. There was no recent mail.
He got up from the desk and went to the front door. There was no mail slot and no mailbox immediately outside. There had been no fresh mail inside the door when he had walked in and none anywhere else.
Back in the office, he lifted the phone. Dial tone. It was still connected, and there was power, so the utilities hadn’t been cancelled.
Something else on the desk caught his eye. Lying under the brochures was a faux — leather desk pad. He slid it out. The top sheet of white paper was a mass of doodles. Long, curving lines swooped down and around the edge of the paper where they settled into a series of maze-like lines. There were faces too: a line drawing of a young woman Lock recognized as Melissa Warner, and a black-ink rendering of Charlie Mendez. Settled between them was another face, a caricatured devil’s face, complete with horns, demonic eyes and a neatly pointed goatee beard. Beneath the three faces inscribed in the centre of the paper there were three words. The handwriting matched Brady’s signature on the couple of invoices Lock had glanced at.
THE DEVIL’S BOUNTY?
That was it. Lock used his fingernail to lift out the piece of paper from the pad, folded it and jammed it into his back pocket. Then he checked the paper underneath. It was blank.
Back outside, he stood on the narrow concrete walkway and looked around. The next unit housed a dry cleaner’s. He pushed open the door and went in. A woman with grey hair and spectacles was sorting through a pile of freshly laundered shirts.
‘Excuse me, ma’am?’
She looked up.
He thumbed in the directio
n of the bail-bond office. ‘I’m helping Joe’s wife Sarah tidy out his office and I was wondering if you knew where his mail had gone. I don’t see a mailbox.’
‘The mailboxes are out back,’ she said, then shook her head. ‘You know who’s going to move into his office?’
‘No idea. Like I said, I’m just clearing it out.’
‘Well,’ she sighed, ‘he was a nice man but I hope it’s not another bond company. Draws the wrong kind of people, if you know what I mean.’
Lock did. If he had been in her position he wouldn’t have wanted a bail-bond company next door either. ‘Did you know him well?’ he asked.
‘Just to say hello to. He never used us,’ she said, a little sourly. ‘Guess his wife took care of his laundry for him.’
‘You haven’t seen anyone else around his place over the past few weeks, have you?’
‘Not apart from you,’ she said, turning back to the shirts, the conversation apparently over.
Lock walked around the side of the unit. Next to an air-conditioner vent, he found a mailbox with ‘Brady Bail Bonds’ stencilled on it. He sifted through the keys and found a small one, which looked like it might open the box. It did. He grabbed the stack of envelopes and a couple of flyers, and quickly sorted through them. There were two letters from the phone company, thick enough to be bills. He put them on top of the stack, went back into the unit, reactivated the alarm, locked the door, got into his car and drove back to Sarah Brady’s apartment.
She and her daughter had gone so he left the keys and the mail with a neighbour, who swallowed a full half-hour commiserating with him about Mrs Brady’s predicament. He kept the phone bills.
Sitting inside the Audi, he switched on the engine, turned up the air-con to maximum, and ripped them open. He scanned the numbers Brady had called. Halfway down the second bill, he found what he was looking for: a number in Mexico. He used the browser on his cell phone to search the area code. It was for a city just over the border: Santa Maria.
Lock scrolled through the menus on his cell phone and selected the option to withhold his number. He keyed in the Santa Maria number and listened to the foreign pulse of the ring tone.
Sixteen
Hunkered down in the dust next to the body of the dead girl, Detective Rafaela Carcharon studied the glowing cell-phone display. Number withheld. She could make a good guess as to who it was, and now wasn’t the time to deal with another of those calls. She hit the red button to kill the call, powered down her phone so that he couldn’t call back, and returned to the task in hand — eager to be done.
She wanted to be quick for two reasons. The first and most obvious was that statistics and probability dictated that the next murder would be called in soon. The second was that, these days, crime scenes themselves were places of danger for certain police officers. The cartels, militias and death squads, the hundred and one fragmented groups, knew that a crime scene drew their adversaries. In the past weeks suspicion had risen that the innocent and the not-so-innocent were being targeted precisely to draw people like her into the open.
She swiped away the flies that had gathered to feast on the young woman’s face, and took a closer look. Dark skin, big brown eyes, pretty and young, just like all the others. Rafaela would have placed her in her late teens or perhaps early twenties. A woman, perhaps, rather than a girl, but barely.
Rafaela already knew her story, even though she had no idea of her name, because all the stories were the same. That was part of what made the procession of dead women so exhausting. She would have been from one of the poorer parts of town. She would have worked at a maquiladora, a factory. She would have been snatched on her way home from her shift. That part Rafaela could be sure of because no young woman went out alone after dark now. Not any more. Not here. Too much blood had flowed. Too many women hadn’t made it home. Too many families had been broken.
But people had to go to work. They had to come home when they were done. And some of the shifts in the factories ended and began in darkness. The buses supplied by the factory owners weren’t always reliable or perhaps they set people down close to home but not at their door. There was always some small distance between leaving the bus and sanctuary. And that was when the women were spirited away.
By the time Rafaela reached the edge of the colonia it was close to sunset. Up ahead, an old yellow American school bus disgorged its cargo of women who were returning home. Rafaela pulled her car over to the side of the road, watching as they broke up into little groups of two or three and began the last part of their journey home. They shuffled past her car, exhausted after their twelve-hour shift sewing clothes or assembling products for a fraction of the wage the companies would have had to pay an American.
The bus coughed its way past her car in a cloud of dirty fumes, and the women disappeared. Rafaela took a deep breath. She could see her destination a few hundred yards away — a wood and corrugated-iron shack, originally painted a gaudy yellow, which had faded over time to mustard.
Out of all the tasks that Rafaela Carcharon was called upon to perform in the course of her duties, this was the worst. Back at her office, a well-meaning uniformed officer — as far as Rafaela knew, he hadn’t yet taken the cartel’s money — had offered to escort her out here. He was tall and handsome, with a warm smile, and in a different time and different place, Rafaela might have welcomed his company. But she had declined. It was better that she did this by herself. She didn’t want to give him the wrong idea. A relationship of any kind was out of the question.
Before she got out of the car, Rafaela checked her weapon. She was a woman alone in the colonia near dark. Walking to the house, she passed a tiendita, a tiny convenience store crammed from floor to ceiling with the kind of junk food you found in poor neighbourhoods — lots of fat and sugar to fill an empty belly. This one, like many others, was simply a tiny spare room in a house, with a rectangular hole punched in the wall to create a storefront. An older man sat on a stool by the counter and watched her pass. She said good evening. He pretended not to hear and began sorting through a box of loose candy.
She stopped for a moment outside the house and took a deep breath. Then she knocked at the door and stepped back. A radio was playing somewhere nearby, a song by a band called Los Tigres del Norte. Rafaela liked them. They sang about regular life, and that included the narcos. Many of their songs celebrated the gangsters, and Rafaela understood their popularity. The old-time gangsters were patrons of their communities and of the people. The politicians were neither.
A woman’s voice called from inside: ‘Who is it?’
‘Senora Valdez?’
The door opened a few inches and a middle-aged woman peered out, her face lined with fatigue.
‘May I come in?’ Rafaela asked her. ‘I have news about your daughter.’
The door closed again, there was the rasp of a chain being removed and then it opened. Rafaela stepped into a low-ceilinged room. There was a sofa, a coffee-table and a television set, which was switched on with the volume turned down. Rafaela recognized a couple of popular soap-opera stars. Her eyes settled on a table behind the sofa. It was covered with framed photographs. Rafaela’s heart sank as she saw that every picture was of the same young girl; only the settings and the age varied. There was one of her as a toddler, dressed in white for her confirmation; the most recent showed her in her late teens. An only child.
Senora Valdez’s hands grasped Rafaela’s arms. ‘Tell me she’s safe.’
In such circumstances there was a procedure to follow, a series of steps, a liturgy of words to mouth. Rafaela believed in none of this. When she had to arrest someone, or interrogate someone, or shoot someone, she was a cop. But at moments like this she was a woman.
Rafaela touched Senora Valdez’s hands, feeling the calluses on her palms and the tips of her fingers, the result of all those hours in the factory. ‘She’s with the angels, Senora. I’m so sorry.’
The woman’s body slumped, her chin falling
on to her chest as she began to sob. Rafaela put her arms around her. They stayed like that for a long time. Rafaela spoke to her gently, as she would to a child. She had never known what it meant to cry your heart out until she had made the first of these calls. Then she had been brittle, detached, professional. Afterwards she had realized that there was no harm in showing her humanity. If nothing else, she reasoned, it must comfort the bereaved a little to know that one other human being cared.
Slowly, the woman’s sobs ebbed away as, over her shoulder, the soap opera continued, with beautiful, wealthy people grieving over a missed promotion, perhaps, or an extra-marital affair. She peeled herself away from Rafaela, eyes puffy and glistening. She glanced at the photographs of her murdered daughter and something new came into her eyes, something far worse than the grief. Surrender. It disturbed Rafaela more than the blood and mayhem. Your daughter left the house. She never returned. And that was life in this city.
‘Shall I take you to see her?’ Rafaela asked.
The woman looked around the room, searching for her coat. Rafaela helped her put it on and then they walked out into the night.
Seventeen
Rosary beads clasped in her right hand, Melissa’s mother, Jan, sat quietly by her daughter’s bedside. Although her face was lined with worry and her eyes were pouched from lack of sleep, Ty could see where Melissa had got her looks from. Watching her vigil, he was glad that she had her faith to sustain her.
Part of him wished he believed more than he did. His mother was a churchgoer and, as a child, he had gone with her on Sunday, sitting there listening to the preacher, swinging his legs and counting the minutes until he could get home and change out of the suit she insisted he wear. He had never really taken to it.
A nurse flitted into the room to check on Melissa. She spoke to Jan, scratched some notes on the chart at the bottom of the bed and made for the door.