‘Has she said or done anything to make you believe she could be involved with Agent Murphy’s disappearance? Think, son. Cast your mind back. It’s been a long time since that girl made her way to us. And Christopher always had a certain obsession with our Mariana, didn’t he?’
Dornan nodded. ‘Yeah. You could say that.’
Emilio brushed his palms off. ‘Think. And think some more. You can love somebody and still find the weak spots in their armour. You understand?’
‘Yeah.’
Emilio slammed his open palm on the table, making Dornan blink. ‘You’re not getting it, boy.’ It was funny being called a boy at forty-odd years of age, but damn if it didn’t make him feel like he was seven again.
‘I’m not asking you if you want her to be a part of this. I know you don’t. I don’t, either. Because if your little girlfriend is in on this – if she’s planning something with my fucking money – I go to prison.’ He pointed at himself, jabbing a finger into his own chest as his face flushed with anger. ‘You go to prison,’ a jab at the air in front of Dornan, ‘and the house of cards burns to the ground. You’ll last a day in prison before Sinaloa, or Medellin, or hell, the fucking FBI kill you to shut you up. Think of your sons. Think of your club. Do not think of her and how well she sucks your cock. Am. I. Clear.’
Dornan nodded. ‘Crystal.’
‘Right,’ Emilio said, apparently satisfied. ‘Let me ask you again. Do you think there is any chance Mariana is in on Murphy’s disappearance? Do you think she’s been talking to the FBI behind our backs? I will not act until I have proof, out of respect for you and only because of you.’
Dornan laughed. ‘You expect me to believe that?’
Emilio ran his tongue over his teeth, fiddling with his deep crimson tie. ‘You are my only son. I’m not getting any younger. All of this will be yours soon, and you’ll have to decide who you can trust to love your sons.’
A flash of Jason and Juliette came to him then. The girl he’d helped raise as if she were his own, and the boy who really was his own, but he’d never known existed. Of all his children, he thought of them, his son and John’s daughter, falling in love, and the thought gave him a small amount of comfort. At least out of the seven sons he had, he could trust one of their girlfriends. Even with the way he and John had grown distant over the years, he still thought of Juliette as one of his own.
‘You didn’t trust Celia,’ Dornan said wryly, referring to his ex-wife, freshly divorced and back in New York now with her family on an extended ‘trip’.
‘You didn’t love Celia,’ Emilio replied. ‘You love Mariana. Love is the thing that messes everything else up. Love makes us blind. Love makes us foolish.’
You got that right, Dornan thought.
‘One last time. Do you think Mariana has been compromised?’
Everything inside Dornan wanted to scream no. But he remembered the cellphone he’d found hidden in a bag of flour in Mariana’s kitchen cupboard, smeared with blood. How enraged he’d been at the fact she’d hidden it from him. Who had she been calling? Why didn’t she want him to know? He’d been in such denial that she could betray him, he’d never looked at the spot in her kitchen again to see if the phone was still hidden in there. He’d never checked the outgoing calls. Never tried to trace the phone back to a supplier, or a call list, or even asked her about it.
Because the moment he’d been about to ask her was the moment he’d instead lashed out with his fists, beat her until she was knocked out on the floor, and then he’d gotten the call that she’d lost their baby.
The secret phone had been relegated to an uncertain fate. He hadn’t wanted to deal with it. If it were bad? He’d kill her. He’d wrap his hands around her neck and fucking kill her. He’d watch the life drain out of her face, squeeze harder as she choked and begged silently for him to stop. It was a fact that if she’d betrayed him by fucking somebody else, or by feeding information to the FBI, or by funnelling money to Murphy – he would destroy her.
But if Dornan destroyed Mariana, then he’d be all alone. So he didn’t ask about the phone.
Now, though, now it was time to get some fucking answers.
‘I don’t think she’s been compromised, no,’ Dornan said to his father, choosing his words carefully.
Emilio nodded. ‘Thinking is one thing. I want you to know one hundred and ten per cent, son. Will you do that for me?’
‘Yes,’ Dornan replied, his chest feeling like someone had parked a truck on top of it.
‘Tell me if you can’t,’ Emilio persisted. ‘Right now. There’s no shame in honesty, my boy. If you can’t do this – beat the answers out of her, if you have to, violence goes a long way in drawing out the truth from a woman – then I’ll step in and I’ll be the bad person.’
‘No,’ Dornan said quickly, imagining all of the horrible torture devices he’d seen his father employ in the past. He’d once seen Emilio hammer nails into a woman’s forehead while she was fully conscious, in an effort to torture the truth out of her. No. Emilio could not have his twisted way with Mariana.
‘Give me a couple of days,’ Dornan said, standing quickly. ‘I’ll prove she’s not a threat.’
‘How’s the sex?’ Emilio asked suddenly.
‘What?’
‘The sex. She still a little whore for you in the bedroom? Because if she’s not, she’s getting it from somewhere else. Question is – is she getting it from our friend Murphy?’
Dornan just blinked at that question. He imagined Murphy’s stupid grin as Mariana bobbed in his lap. No. He’d kill them. He’d slaughter the pair of them.
‘She has never betrayed this family,’ Dornan said defiantly. ‘She’s loyal. Always has been.’
But the phone, his mind urged. Why does she need a secret burner phone? Is it to call Murphy? Is it?
Is she in with the FBI?
Has she been tainted?
Is Mariana a fucking snitch?
‘Loyalty doesn’t always last, son,’ Emilio added, on a more serious note. ‘They might be loyal at the beginning, but it doesn’t mean they’ll be loyal until the end. Beat a dog and that dog will bite you, given the chance.’
He took the vial containing the bullet between his thumb and forefinger and held it up for Dornan. ‘Beat a woman like Mariana, kill her unborn child, and who knows what she’ll do to make you pay?’
Emilio grinned, flesh pulled back over pointed teeth as he shook the bullet in the vial for effect. He’s a sadistic fuck, Dornan mused to himself. And then he thought, but so am I.
CHAPTER NINE
LINDSAY
Somewhere close by, another man was studying another bullet. But the body that had held this bullet hadn’t survived the impact. Allie Baxter’s cold, dead corpse lay naked on a metal gurney, the flesh around her hairline slipping from her scalp as the medical examiner sawed off the top of her skull.
After dropping his suitcase back at his apartment in Silver Lake, changing into a fresh shirt and making the obligatory pre-autopsy stop for coffee, Lindsay had walked into the deserted LA County Department of Medical Examiner-Coroner. For such a long name, the place was depressingly simple – it was the place where dead people kicked around, for a brief period of time, where they were sliced and sawed and sewn back together, before they were either reduced to ash or interred in the ground, or sometimes both.
From the outside, the building itself was quite beautiful – old, rendered with limestones and reds, not quite Spanish architecture, but close. It annoyed him that he couldn’t place the name for such a building. Lindsay Price liked to think he knew a little of everything.
It was after hours, and he’d had to be buzzed in. A guy dressed in janitorial garb led him through a maze of corridors, down a tiny elevator, and into the partially submerged basement that housed the city’s morgue.
Not all bodies came here, of course. Just the suspicious deaths. There were already too many suspect deaths for the building to accommodate, and la
rge refrigerated shipping containers sat in the parking lot out back, housing the overflow in neatly stacked shelves. Lindsay had spent a lot of time in these walls over his career, and he was always glad to leave.
It was going to be a long night.
The janitor guy pointed to a small room and Lindsay grimaced internally. He’d been in this room only once before – a shady guy, small-time drug-dealing type, had died in his apartment and nobody had noticed the stench of decay for months. It was only when the neighbours started hearing strange noises – what turned out to be swarms of blowflies battering the windows, trapped – that the police knocked his door down and discovered the guy face down at the dinner table, gun still beside his head, as his flesh broke away from his face and started to puddle on the table in front of him, like rancid candle wax. This particular room had been installed with a sophisticated ventilation system meant to draw out gases and odours, but some deaths just insisted on overpowering all your senses, no matter how well the fans extracted the rotten air.
Lindsay had never been able to forget that guy, but he had a feeling this was going to be much worse.
As if on cue, the door opened an inch and a gloved hand came out.
‘Detective,’ a female voice called out. ‘You want to see this?’
Not really, Lindsay thought, steeling himself as he entered the small autopsy suite. He almost gagged when the taste of rotten flesh stuck to his tongue like glue. A smell so bad you could actually taste it in the air. Lindsay mentally calculated how many years until he could retire.
‘Here,’ Kathryn said, handing him a surgical mask. It was lined with scented cotton, unlike regular masks, the eucalyptus smell masking about three per cent of the stench that filled the room like poison. Kathryn was good about things like that. Some other medical examiners were known for their penchant for making cops throw up.
‘Coffee’s outside,’ Lindsay volunteered. ‘Extra hot, extra cream.’
Kathryn nodded, not wasting any time as she began cutting a Y-shaped incision into Allie’s bare chest. The image of the crab came into Lindsay’s mind again, and he wondered if it was still burrowed into her hair.
‘Any idea on cause of death?’ Lindsay asked. Kathryn nodded, lifting her scalpel long enough to gesture to a small vial on the counter behind Lindsay. He turned, grateful to put space between himself and the body, and picked up the small evidence jar carefully.
‘Somebody shot her?’ Lindsay asked.
‘At that angle, she didn’t shoot herself,’ Kathryn replied, resuming her incisions. ‘The decomp’s too advanced for me to tell if she was still alive when she was put in the river, but the bullet was in one of her lungs. So either she drowned in her own blood from being shot, or she drowned shortly afterwards in the water.’
Lindsay nodded. ‘You mind if I call one of my guys in ballistics, get an early report on this bullet?’
Kathryn nodded. ‘Go for it. Miss Baxter and I need some girl time to bond, see if I can’t get any more secrets out of her.’
Kathryn powered up a Stryker saw and brought it down to Allie’s skull. Lindsay’s shock was still fresh. Whenever he’d imagined that skull over the past months, he’d always imagined it lying on a beach somewhere tropical, its owner grinning smugly as she sipped from a cocktail and leaned back on her hand. He’d seen the money in her bank account, watched as withdrawals were made over and over again. He’d genuinely believed that she was alive and sticking the middle finger to every law enforcement agency that existed as she lived on her drug cartel money with her equally corrupt partner.
Lindsay swallowed thickly, adjusting his plastic goggles as bits of skin and skull made a sheen of dust in front of Kathryn’s intensely focused face.
This part was always the worst.
He had to wait, staring at the wall, as Kathryn cut the top of Allie’s skull clean off. How somebody could do that to another human being – even a dead one – was beyond him. Lindsay could reach into a person’s past, into the darkest recesses of their mind, and figure out what they’d done. But he couldn’t reach inside their bodies and figure out how they’d met their maker.
After what seemed like an eternity, the loud whining noise stopped. Kathryn placed the saw on the bench beside her and used two hands to gently wiggle the top of Allie’s skull free. That was the moment Lindsay decided he had about three minutes in him before he needed to puke.
Lindsay made a face under his mask, pocketing the vial that held his precious bullet of evidence. He stripped his gloves off, trying not to look directly at the hideously decomposed brain Kathryn was lifting out of Allie’s open skull. Now. Got to leave, right the fuck now. The worst part of leaving this room was knowing his clothes would still smell like death long after he’d left the building. He should have thought ahead and changed into a less expensive suit.
‘Next time, don’t wear your Armani,’ Kathryn said, apparently reading his mind.
‘I’ll call you from the lab,’ Lindsay replied, swallowing back coffee and stomach acid. ‘Have fun.’
Kathryn snickered.
Lindsay was about to high-tail it when he noticed the two cups of coffee sitting on a filing cabinet in the hallway, probably stone cold by now.
‘Your coffee’s going cold out here,’ he called through the remaining crack in the door.
‘It always does,’ Kathryn replied. ‘You enjoy yours.’
He wouldn’t; he left it where it sat, a sacrificial lamb left on a filing cabinet altar. He rushed outside, taking the stairs two at a time, and just made it to the bottom and outside before he heaved his stomach up, all over a rose bush that was thriving despite the dry Los Angeles climate.
***
Back at the Bureau’s main office downtown, Lindsay lucked out. It was late, but a ballistics tech was still kicking around the lab, blasting some pop shit at a volume that made Lindsay want to jump out of a window, or smash the computer it was coming from, all distorted and tinny. Nobody appreciated quality these days. They didn’t even buy their music, just downloaded it from torrent websites, and they were the fucking FBI.
Nothing was the way it used to be. Lindsay was only forty, but he felt old. Worn out. Twenty years in the force kind of had that effect.
‘Hey,’ Lindsay called from the doorway of the laboratory. He didn’t want to walk in unheard and spook the lab tech – this was a room full of guns and bullets, for Christ’s sake – but the dude working at his computer was totally oblivious.
Lindsay rolled his eyes, marched in and slammed the specimen jar on the desk so hard the whole thing rattled.
The guy jumped so high, Lindsay was surprised his head didn’t hit the fucking ceiling.
Lindsay blinked, his patience fraying, as the lab tech scrambled for the mute button.
‘I need a bullet run.’
The guy started typing, barely glancing at Lindsay. ‘I’m off the clock in five,’ he said. ‘I’ve got a booking at Romera’s. Leave it with me and I’ll add it to the pile.’
Lindsay ran his tongue over his teeth, tasting the faint remnants of coffee and vomit. No. He would not add it to the pile.
‘A cop was killed. She washed up in Long Beach this morning. This bullet’s the only thing we have. I guess Romera’s is gonna have to wait.’
The tech paled, his eyes meeting Lindsay’s as he held out his palm. Lindsay smiled congenially, smacking the jar into his hand.
‘Give me thirty minutes,’ the tech said.
Lindsay nodded. ‘I’ll be back in ten.’
Time enough to get coffee from the Starbucks down on Westwood and drive around in the peace that one could only enjoy in downtown LA in the quiet of the night. He drove as he sipped his Americano, all the while theorising how Alexandra Baxter had met her death. He was betting on a certain DEA agent called Christopher Murphy, who hadn’t been seen or heard from in the same time that Allie had been missing. Had he killed her? Dumped her body and fled, keeping their shared steals to himself?
Or was it just a matter of time before his body washed up, a matching bullet hole for a crab to burrow into and make a home?
***
Fifteen minutes later, Lindsay was carrying two cups of coffee back to the lab. He’d decided to be nicer to the lab tech, in hopes that it’d speed up the process. At first, when he walked in, the lab was empty, and Lindsay almost threw his second cup of coffee at the fucking wall. That bastard had left? Gone to keep his dinner reservation?
No. He hurried back into the lab a few moments after Lindsay, skittish and almost excited. He was waving around a printout that looked like a series of lines and going on about striations and barrels.
‘Here,’ Lindsay interrupted, handing him coffee.
‘Is it black?’ the guy asked breathlessly. ‘I’m vegan.’
He frowned. ‘Romera’s is a steakhouse.’
The guy tore the lid off the coffee – which was black and steaming hot, luckily for him, the vegan steakhouse frequenter – and started pouring sugar packets into the brew. ‘My girlfriend likes to eat dead animals. I see enough dead people to never eat meat again.’
Lindsay thought of Allie’s skull. ‘Fair call.’
The lab tech handed Lindsay a piece of paper with those irregular lines again.
‘You want the good news or the bad news?’
‘Just start talking.’ Before I throttle you.
‘See these striations? They’re rare.’
Lindsay’s ears pricked up. ‘How rare?’
The guy grinned. ‘Only four hundred and twenty of this model were ever made with the extended barrel.’
It was like fucking Christmas.
Lindsay almost forgot to ask. ‘What’s the bad news?’
‘They’re made in Italy. There’s only ever been a few recorded in the United States. Course, doesn’t mean it didn’t come here illegally.’
Like Christmas and a blowjob all at once. He knew a man who favoured Italian weaponry. His name was Emilio Ross. Could it really be that easy?
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