MacKinnon 02 Dead Copy

by Kit Frazier

  He laughed bitterly. “Since I have become Chairman, we have organized. I don’t wish to draw close scrutiny. Organization is the key to our future.”

  “The Syndicate’s future or Austin’s Latino future?” I said, getting my voice back.

  “They’re one in the same, no?”

  They weren’t one in the same, at least I hoped not. I thought about what Soliz had said about the Syndicate: blood in, blood out.

  I chose not to bring it up.

  “And,” he said over his steepled hands. “I give you this favor. Perhaps you will do the same for me sometime.”

  My heart stuttered as I stared back into his lionesque eyes. He may be well dressed, handsome, and have a killer office, but Diego DeLeon had become a very dangerous man.

  “Word is you’ve got some rogue cholos on your hands. And Selena Obregon may have disappeared, but she’s still out there,” I said. “And so is John Fiennes. El Patron may not be as leaderless as you think.”

  A slow smile spread across his face. “Not to worry. I have people working on those little problems as we speak.”

  He hit a button, and Thug One came back into the room. Diego nodded, and the guy handed me my purse. Still in a daze, I got up to leave. Marlowe pressed in close beside me.

  “Cauley,” Diego said. “Do you know how to use a weapon?”

  I blinked. “I took the Concealed to Carry classes.”

  He nodded like I’d passed some sort of test. “Do you own a gun?”

  I frowned. “Someone wants to shoot me, they’re going to have to bring their own gun.”

  He chuckled at that, but he pulled out his top drawer and produced a little .38 Smith & Wesson similar to the one Mark Ramsey had given me over the summer. The one Van Gogh had wrested from me and tried to shoot me with.

  “Consider it a gift,” he said, coming around the desk to give it to me. “There are dangerous men about,” he said, and everything inside me went horribly still.

  I’d heard those words before.

  Right before I was shot at, stabbed, and nearly bled to death.

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Under the suspicious, powdered-sugar-fogged gaze of Harold the heavyset guard, I got to work early and called Cantu.

  I timed my call carefully an hour before elementary school started, so he would be smack-dab in the middle of his cereal-pouring, hairbraiding, shoelace-tying, pre-school extravaganza. Up to his elbows in rugrats, he wouldn’t have time to yell at me for what I had to tell him.

  “Cantu,” he growled when he picked up the phone. The television blared Bob the Builder in the background, in unison with various shrieks, cries, and something that sounded like banging on pots and pans.

  “Oh,” I said. “I’m sorry. Is this a bad time?”

  He snarled audibly. “Just wait. Your turn will come, and then we’ll see who’s laughing.”

  The thought of that gave me a moment of slight horror, followed by an unexpected tug somewhere near my solar plexus.

  “That’ll be the day,” I said. “I’ve got some stuff to tell you. Did you send the fax on Faith’s fire?”

  “Of course,” he said. “I got nothin’ better to do than leg work foryou.”

  I smiled. “You know I appreciate this, right?”

  He grumbled. “Faxed the prelim report this morning. Should be on your machine.”

  “Thank you,” I said. “And now I’ve got something for you.”

  In the middle of his youth-infested melee, I filled him in on my misadventures with my new law-and-order-challenged friend.

  “You got in a car with two of Diego DeLeon’s carnales? Alone? Without calling me?” His voice rose in pitch with each sentence fragment, and I could practically hear him pound his head on the perennial pile of Cheerios on his kid’s highchair as the oldest reprobate screamed something about flushing the hamster down the toilet.

  “That kid’s gonna be an exterminator,” I said.

  “Only exterminator around here is DeLeon. We’ll talk about this later. And for God’s sake, stay out of trouble,” he said.

  “Say hey to Arlene,” I said, but he’d already disconnected.

  “If I knew how to stay out of trouble, don’t you think I would?” I muttered to no one.

  I booted up my computer, and while it chugged and churned and sputtered to life, I got out my to-do list and checked off:

  Walk dog, Feed cat, Call Cantu, Get fax

  I looked up at the clock above the Cage. Eight o’clock. I smiled smugly, checking Cantu off with a flourish. Now all I had left was:

  Answer email, Compare Faith’s report with Puck’s arson report, Call Junior Hollis re: why the hell he locked up Josh Lambert, Make appointment to talk to Josh Lambert, Face time with Tanner, Lust after Tom Logan…

  I sighed. I could go ahead and check Logan off, too.

  I wandered back to the fax and dug through the pile of printouts, mostly composed of useless press releases, cheap trips to Disneyland, and a couple of notes from our friendly neighborhood conspiracy theorist.

  I retrieved Faith’s report, refilled my iced tea in the break room, and headed back for my desk to compare the report to Puck’s. Both Fire Scene Investigation Reports were more than twenty pages long. Both had excruciating details about contributory factors, incendiary indicators from the accelerant-detection dog, forensic lab findings, and a five page list of additional information, which included enough firearms to give Charlton Heston multiple wet dreams. The rest of the report required massive additional doses of caffeine.

  Faith’s preliminary report was longer and more tedious, but in a sordid way, more interesting.

  The part about the damage to Tiffany’s body made my stomach slip into a queasy knot. The rest of it was almost as bad.

  The words incendiary device jumped out at me like a rattlesnake at a gerbil farm.

  The device was simple but well thought out, constructed of fertilizer, cotton, diesel fuel, and, of all things, a newspaper.

  In a short, brief blight of professional narcissism, I wondered which newspaper the arsonist had used. I hoped it wasn’t ours.

  I placed the reports side-by-side and stared at them. On the surface, they looked the same.

  Puck’s trailer fire was arson, but it was set ablaze by a frenzied dousing of kerosene inside and out. The incendiary device wasn’t identified, but the investigator surmised that it was probably common, most likely a match or cigarette.

  Faith’s trailer fire was arson, but the accelerant found was trace amounts of diesel fuel.

  I skipped the part that detailed the condition of Tiffany’s clothes, shoes, and person, although I glanced at her location inside the trailer when the fire started. Apparently, the point of origin was in the back bedroom. What was left of Tiffany was found in a pile of rubble outside the kitchen area. Her body, it appeared, had been thrown nearly twenty feet.

  Taking a deep breath, I continued. There were no copious amounts of chemical fuel; however, the investigators found residue from a commonly used chemical fertilizer, with slight traces of diesel residue. The incendiary device, the investigator concluded, wasn’t complicated, but it was professional and matched the MO from a string of East Austin arsons dating back eight years.

  “A fertilizer bomb,” I said softly, about to Google the subject when a voice said, “Who’s got a bomb?”

  “Jeez, E! You scared the living crap out of me.”

  He dropped into the swivel chair next to my desk and toed it forward so that he was squeezed in beside me.

  “You got anything?” he said, and I told him what I’d found so far, ending with the arson reports.

  He nodded grimly. “But Faith’s report is preliminary, right?”

  “Yeah, but Cantu sent it. That’s enough for me.”

  Ethan blew out a lot of air. “Has Tiffany’s family been notified?”

  I nodded. “Yes. Her mother’s staying at a motel near the burn center in San Antonio.”

  “No da
d?”

  “There’s a dad. Hasn’t spoken with her since her life started slipping downslope.”

  E’s eyes went cold. “Maybe he’s part of her slip.

  We sat quietly, staring at the report as though if we stared long enough, it might change.

  It didn’t.

  “You think the same person set both trailers on fire?” He took Jessica Alba off her paperclip perch and ran his thumb over her full head of plastic hair.

  “Trick question,” I said. “I think the same person’s behind it, but I don’t think the same person did it.”

  E’s brows pinched into a frown.

  “The first fire is sloppy. Almost like a rage. Anybody watches the Discovery Channel for an hour knows an investigator’s gonna know in seconds in an arson. And anyone can get ahold of kerosene.

  Faith’s fire was planned out. It wasn’t a sophisticated incendiary device, but it does take a working knowledge of arson to pull it off without blowing yourself up. The tools take at least a day to drum up unless you’ve got access to the right kind of fertilizer.”

  “Like Josh,” Ethan said. “He’d have fertilizer on the farm, right?”

  “Anybody can get fertilizer,” I said. “But the kind of fertilizer will narrow it down.” I sighed. “He’s in jail, so he’s already at the top of Hollis’s suspect list.”

  “Who else you think is on the list?” he said.

  “Usually they start with family, friends, and boyfriends, but you have to have motive and opportunity, too.”

  I got out my little red notebook and started scribbling.

  Ethan nodded. “Her brother’s gone. You think they’re looking at her mother?”

  “I wouldn’t doubt it. Her mother lives in a big house by herself and sent Faith off when she was just a girl. Motive could have been all kinds of mother/daughter Greek tragedy stuff, or it could be as simple as wanting her new husband and her new life, and her children wouldn’t assimilate.” I shook my head. “I just can’t see the The Kitty Litter Queen starting trailer fires.”

  “What about the old lady?” he said.

  “Pilar?” I shook my head. “She seemed to care for Faith and Puck. Felt sorry for them, I think.”

  Ethan frowned. “And you don’t think it’s El Patron or Syndicate?” I shook my head. “I just told you what Diego said.”

  “And you believe him? Just like that?”

  “I believe you when you tell me the girls I set you up with are too geeky for you.”

  He stopped short of sticking his tongue out at me. “What about that sheriff Hollis, right? I didn’t like the way he looked at her that night at the Pier.”

  “I don’t like Hollis much either, and the girls said he was a regular at the club when he wasn’t raiding the place for drugs and minors.”

  “Yeah, but wasn’t Faith a minor when she started there?”

  I felt like one of those little cartoon light bulbs went off over my head. “Yes, she was.” I scribbled in my notebook.

  “What about friends?” E said.

  “Haven’t been able to track down friends. She said all she had was Puck in the whole world. And like it or not, Hollis is right about her working at Boners. It widens the suspect pool exponentially. Any one of the guys who visited the club could be a potential suspect.”

  Ethan’s brain whirled so hard I could almost hear it. “But what about a motive? Wouldn’t someone from the club have to have a motive?”

  “Let’s see, what are the usual motives for crime?” I said, ticking them off in my notebook. “Love, greed, revenge, envy.”

  “Obsession,” Ethan added, and my hand stilled as I wrote.

  “Don’t you think Josh is obsessed with her? Obsession can be a powerful emotion,” Ethan said.

  “Yes,” I said, looking at Ethan. “It is.” As I said the words, a chill ran up my spine. I thought about Ethan and how emotionally invested he’d been with Faith since he’d met her. I knew I wasn’t the only one who’d noticed. Watching Ethan, I said, “Obsession can be a real bitch.”

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Ethan’s cell went off and he scuttled back to IT to single-handedly save the cyber world, or at least the Sentinel’s little corner of it.

  I called Logan and got his voice mail.

  My nerves settled a little at the recorded sound of his deep Fort Worth drawl.

  Waiting for the beep, I wondered if he was okay and any closer to finding Selena Obregon.

  I worried about his safety. Not just because he was chasing a murderous femme fatale, but because this woman could charm the pants off a priest.

  I knew Logan thought he was keeping me safe from her, but with God as my witness, if she laid one manicured finger on him, she’d have me, my mama, and all the MacKinnons to pay.

  I left him a message about what was going on in my end of the world and reminded him that, though he was an FBI agent, he was also an attorney, and any information I gave him was quid pro quo.

  Clicking the off button, I drew a deep breath and settled in to get back to work, unable to tamp down the feeling of unease slipping around my insides.

  Turning to my old computer, I accessed email, which took another five minutes of chugging and churning to bring my messages onscreen.

  Rather than sit and swear over all the time lost to the Internet, I decided to use my time productively to access my actual paper files of stuff I’d been working on, which were available the moment I pulled them out of my messenger bag. Go figure.

  I spread the papers on my desk and separated them into piles. I retrieved the notes I’d made post mortem of my interview with Diego DeLeon and looked for connections.

  While I was jotting related notes, my email beeped. Fifteen death notices from area funeral homes, seventy-eight press releases from PR firms who for some unknown reason pitched me an obituary writer articles on everything from a chiropractor participating in a local health fair to rabies vaccination day at City Park. In retrospect, the rabies thing might actually have been sent to the right person.

  I saved one of the two jokes from Mia and deleted the snippy one from Human Resources saying I’d used up my flex days.

  I was about to forward Mia’s joke to Ethan when my phone beeped; the caller ID said Caller Unknown. All the cells in my body lifted at my first thought…Logan…

  I flipped open the phone with a whole-body smile. “Well hello, stranger,” I said in my best Lauren Bacall.

  There was a short, confused pause, and then a female voice said, “Perdon? I must have the wrong number,” in a melodic Spanish lilt.

  My heart dropped and my cheeks went three shades of red over my Bacall impression. I snapped into professional mode and cleared my throat. “Um, this is Cauley MacKinnon. Is there something I can help you with?”

  After a long silence, the voice came back, but it was very small. “Missus MacKinnon, I—I need to talk to you…”

  My breath caught as I recognized the voice. Pilar, Kimmie Ray’s housekeeper. Juggling the phone, I pulled out my little red notebook, steadying my voice. “Yes, yes, I’m here, Pilar.”

  Her voice went lower, like she was ducking for cover. “This was a mistake. I should not call you…”

  “Wait,” I said, “you said you needed to talk to me, and I’m listening.”

  Silence.

  I took a deep breath. “I think Faith is in trouble, and I think you do, too. Pilar, whatever you say to me stays between you and me. You’ll be covered as a journalist’s confidential informant, and I swear it on my grandma MacCauley’s grave.”

  I rarely swear on my grandma’s grave. But she was one of the last of the big-shouldered broads, and I was pretty sure she wouldn’t mind.

  Daddy used to take me fishing, and he taught me the value of endurance of holding back so you can reel in the big one. He also taught me there’s a time for swearing grandma’s grave or not.

  With my ear to the phone, I heard the woman’s breath quiver. “Not here,” she whispered.
“No puedo hablar aqu‘.’

  Pilar hung up.

  “Arrrrggghhhh!” I growled, flipping my phone shut with enough force to void my warranty.

  She said she couldn’t talk right now. I didn’t want to scare her, and I surely didn’t want to get her in trouble. So, the trick was to track her down somewhere where we could talk in private before she backed out.

  She’d been calling from a cell with an unlisted number probably one of those disposable over-the-counter jobs you can get at the gas station so that was a bust. I Googled Pilar Hernandez. The search got me 330 sites that had nothing to do with a Latina housekeeper in Westlake.

  Sighing, I flipped through my notebook, looking for clues.

  What did I know about Pilar? She lived in a gated house in Westlake Hills, took care of Kimmie Ray Puckett Ainsworth a woman who had checked out on her children and her life with a couple cases of booze several years ago and she carried rosary beads. She also apparently cared about Wylie and Faith, the children who had been in her charge for only a few short years. I shook my head. I didn’t even know Pilar’s last name.

  I took turns twirling my chair, thrumming my fingers, and tapping my feet dangerously near my surge protector, waiting for a brilliant thought. Nothing happened. I was about to get up to freshen my iced tea when my computer binged. I had mail!

  From phernandez@ainsworth.com. My fingers stilled over the mouse, and then I opened it:

  Dear Ms. MacKinnon,

  I have to speak with you about los ninos pobres.

  I have been reading about your search efforts for Faith. Please come this afternoon. Alone.

  She’d given an address off of Chicon Street, an old neighborhood in the southeast quadrant of old downtown. The area was going through the growing pains that included class wars and gentrification.

  I scrolled back through the email. There was an air of desperation in the short missive, and I could practically feel it pulsing on my monitor.

  But meeting this afternoon? I had to wait until this afternoon?

  Did this woman even know who she was talking to? I’m the girl who stands in front of the microwave and screams, “Hurry, hurry, hurry!”