“Most grownups are good, kiddo.” Deck rescued Olivia from her own awful memories. “We are doing everything we can to find the bad man and to keep you and your aunt safe.”
Thomas wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and turned his summer-sky eyes to Deck. “How do you tell the good grownups from the bad ones?”
“The truth is, sometimes you can’t.”
Olivia leaned down into the open driver’s window of Emily’s car, frowning at her sister. Thankfully, Nick had already taken the hint and left. “I’m not done with you.”
“Are you ever?”
“I worry. I can’t help it. I don’t want you getting involved with Nick Spadoni and—”
“Spade.” Fire in her eyes, Emily keyed on the ignition. “We’re just friends.”
“I mean, professionally.” Of course, Olivia had meant both, but she knew when to pick her battles. “You need to steer clear of Dad’s case. You’re in over your head.”
“Who said anything about Dad?”
“Nick did. He also mentioned something about a black light.”
Emily’s face scrunched in confusion. The same way it had, years ago, when Olivia had tried to teach her little sister long division. That hadn’t ended well either, with Olivia frustrated and Emily in tears, her pencil broken in half. “No, he didn’t.”
Olivia raised her eyebrows, daring her sister to lie to her. Her own lie of omission—that she’d posed as Em on the phone—would never see the light of day.
“Even if he did, it’s none of your business.” She jerked the gear into drive. “That’s why they call him a private investigator. It’s private.”
As Emily screeched out of the parking lot and sped down Pine Grove Road, sending Olivia’s heart into her throat, Deck approached. A purple crescent-shaped bruise had already materialized beneath his eye.
“Don’t say a word,” she warned him, walking toward the Buick.
“Wasn’t gonna.”
“Can you believe she hired a PI? To look into our father’s murder?” She paused for a beat, gaining steam. She could still remember pulling one disgusting spitball from her hair, only to feel another thwack her head minutes later.
“Do you want me to answer, or—”
“A guy I went to high school with, at that? He wasn’t even that smart.”
Deck smirked at her, hands raised. “Just listening then. Got it.”
“I’m pretty sure he failed PE. How does anyone fail PE?”
“Uh…”
“And she’s been sneaking around with him. She likes him. I can tell. He’s exactly her type. Dark and mysterious. But trust me, he’s no Tom Selleck.”
Deck laughed. “So, you had a thing for Magnum PI, huh? Was it the mustache?”
She rolled her eyes at him, while she unlocked the Buick and climbed inside.
“I get it.” Musing, he put a hand on her door. “Us regular detectives are so boring with our policies and procedures. Our chain of custody.”
“That pesky adherence to the law.”
They both laughed, and the knots in Olivia’s neck loosened. Instant guilt followed, when she recalled Nora’s pale face as they’d driven away. Olivia couldn’t rid herself of the awful feeling that the bad man who haunted Thomas still walked among them, slippery as a shadow.
“What’re you thinking about?” he asked.
“Nora and Thomas. This whole ordeal. I overheard you talking to JB. Do you really believe you missed something?”
Deck’s sigh confirmed her own fears. “Nora agreed I’d stop by the house tomorrow to show Thomas a lineup with Graham and Pedro. I’m hoping that will shed some light on what really happened that night. You said yourself, people confess to things they didn’t do. Care to venture a guess as to how many fake Zodiac killers tried to turn themselves in to Homicide in San Francisco?”
“That many, huh?” But it made a sick kind of sense. Sometimes, the only way to be seen in the world was to claim to be a monster. “Where are you headed now?”
“To get inside the head of a man who confesses to not one, but four murders he probably didn’t commit.”
“Are you gunning for my job now?” she asked.
“I assumed you were coming with me.” Deck made his way around the passenger side and opened the door, smiling down at her. “Besides, I’ll need a ride back to the station.”
Forty
As the last orange slice of sunlight sank toward the horizon, Will directed Olivia back to Sunrise Canyon trailer park.
“Pull off here,” he told her, pointing into the ditch near the spot where they’d ordered Pedro down to the dirt. “By that big redwood.”
Olivia steered the Buick off the dirt road and cut the engine. “What’re we doing here?”
“Elvis Bastidas lives with Gabriella and Pedro in a trailer about a half mile up. When we arrived, Pedro was already down here in the trees, supposedly shooting at the Oaktown Boys, as they fled for their lives on their bikes.”
Will headed into the forest, wishing he’d marked the tree somehow. The fading light would make it harder to spot, and he couldn’t trust his adrenaline-soaked memories.
“Here’s the part that doesn’t make sense. There’s only one way in and out of Sunrise Canyon, and JB and I didn’t pass a single soul. Didn’t see anyone on the main road either. That means Oaktown had already headed west by the time we’d arrived. But we heard Pedro shooting off his AR-15 well after we found Bastidas.”
“Who was he shooting at, then?”
“Exactly.” Will produced his cell phone, activating the flashlight, and aimed it into the shadowy woods. Its thin beam swallowed by the thick canopy, the massive trunks stanchioned around them like the legs of giants.
Olivia followed behind him, her footfalls mirroring his own. “Did you find any shell casings?”
“Twenty-eight. All in Pedro’s pants pockets. Apparently, he collected them after he fired.”
“Sounds pretty criminally sophisticated then, if he knows how to cover his tracks.”
“Hardly. He talks a big game. But I don’t buy it. I think he was covering up something else.”
A twig snapped in the darkness, and Will shone the light at the sound. Two yellow eyes stared back at him, then vanished into the thicket. When he glanced back over his shoulder to catch Olivia laughing at him, he spotted it.
“There. That’s the tree.” Up close, Will could see the bullet holes in the redwood’s splintered flesh. He pressed his hand to the trunk, still warm from the sun.
“You think he unloaded the gun into that tree trunk?”
“I do.” Will walked backward from the tree, keeping his eyes trained on the ground. “He wanted to brag to his brother-in-law about being a tough guy.”
“Look.” Olivia crouched down a few paces from where he stood, spotting the brass of a shell casing in the weeds. “He missed one.”
Will peered through the forest in the direction of the main road, imagining himself as Pedro, unleashing a hail of bullets, the casings discharging as he fired. A slight slope of the terrain prevented him from seeing anything beyond the trees. “Assuming the shell casing dropped here when he fired the gun, there’s no way he had sight of anything. That hill blocks the view of the main road.”
Olivia stood beside him in the near dark, her gaze following his. “You’re right…”
“But?”
“But just because he lied about shooting at the Oaktown Boys, doesn’t mean he’s fabricating his story about the murders.”
Will had expected her to say that. If he hadn’t heard Pedro’s flimsy confession himself, he would’ve agreed. “Everything he knew was straight from the papers. He said he used gasoline. He thought the kid that got away was a girl.”
When Olivia hmmed, Will decided now was as good a time as any to tell her everything he knew about Pedro Mendez and his big brother, Javier. To call her on her crazy decision to therapize the creep. Out here in the middle of nowhere, she couldn’t run away fr
om him. She had to listen.
“There’s something else about Pedro that you should know.” He headed in the direction of the Buick, training his flashlight up ahead of them. “He and Gabriella have a brother in prison here at Crescent Bay. I think you know him.”
Olivia kept moving forward but he sensed her hesitation, the slight change in the weight of her footsteps in the brush.
“Javier Mendez. Ring a bell?”
“Should it?”
Will stopped short, and she almost ran into him. His hand steadied her, his frustration dissipating when he saw the panic in her eyes. “Why don’t you trust me? You don’t have to lie.”
“But I do.” She hung her head.
“What does that even mean?”
“I do trust you. And I do have to lie. Termite made that clear. Anybody who knows anything about my dad ends up dead.”
Just his luck. Will had managed to fall for the one woman as stubborn as him. “You decided you’d do it all by yourself then? You’d figure out who killed your father and why. You’d single-handedly take on the Oaktown Boys and the General. And you’d start by trying to squeeze information from Javier Mendez, a shot caller for Los Diabolitos, one of the Oaktown Boys’ biggest rivals. The guy who happened to choke out his last therapist?”
A strangled laugh escaped Olivia’s throat. “Yes?”
“Is that a question?”
“It’s just that it sounds so bad when you put it like that.”
“You mean, when I tell the truth.”
She groaned, exasperated, but he wouldn’t let her wriggle away from him. With nowhere else to go, she finally gave in, leveling him with a glance.
“I don’t want to risk you getting hurt,” she said. “I couldn’t live with that.”
Olivia’s eyes, glistening in the light from his cell phone, transfixed him.
“That makes two of us,” he said, reaching for her hand.
A sharp crack of gunfire shattered the stillness, sending them both scrambling for cover. Will reached for the Glock at his waist.
“That was a warning. You’re trespassing on private property.” Gabriella stood on the path alongside the Buick, clad in a bathrobe and men’s work boots. Her flashlight at her feet, she swept a shotgun across the trees. “Next time, I won’t miss.”
“Detective Will Decker. My partner and I stopped by this afternoon, right after Elvis was shot. Remember?” He stepped forward, his hands raised, hoping Olivia would stay hidden in the woods behind him. Setting his gun in the grass, he told her, “We’re just taking a look around.”
“You got a search warrant?” The frightened woman from the trailer had disappeared, leaving a force of nature in her place. Her dark hair fell around her face. Her eyes, two hollow pits.
“Your brother was arrested down here firing off rounds from an assault rifle. As far as I’m concerned, it’s still an active crime scene.”
She didn’t lower the shotgun as he’d expected, its sights aimed unnervingly close to his vital bits.
“Did Elvis send you down here?” he asked.
Her head tipped skyward while she cackled. “I sent that pendejo packing as soon as Pedro called from jail. I’m done with him. Acabado. I told him that he can get his own damn ride from the hospital. Do you know he actually believes my brother murdered that family? For him and his stupid gang.”
“What do you believe?” Will heard Olivia’s voice at his shoulder and dared to look at her, her hands raised like his own. “We want to hear your side of it, Gabriella. The only way you can help Pedro is to tell the truth.”
Finally, Gabriella lowered her weapon. She leaned against the Buick, her shoulders slumped. “Pedro moved in with me three years ago, after our mother died, back when Elvis was still in prison. I was so depressed that I needed help around the house, and Pedro needed to get away from our old neighborhood in Santa Barbara. Elvis promised me he wouldn’t let Pedro get mixed up in his nonsense. Next thing you know, Pedro’s his little errand boy, sending letters to that attorney. Since Elvis got out, he’s been pressuring Pedro to do his dirty work. All I do is feel guilty. It’s my fault he’s here in the first place. I’ve lost too damn much to that gang. First, my dad—gunned down in a shootout with Oaktown. Then, my older brothers—every one of them in prison or dead. And my husband. Now, Pedro too.”
Will took her sobs as his cue, making his way out of the redwood grove toward her and securing her weapon. He kept his sympathy locked in a box, knowing it would leave him vulnerable. She was still Bastidas’s wife, and he didn’t trust her.
“Pedro is a follower. Always has been. My brother Javier had him running drugs for the gang before he turned thirteen. That way, if he got caught, he’d only get a little time in juvie, a slap on the wrist. But Pedro isn’t like Javier or Elvis. He doesn’t have an evil bone in his body. This past winter, he rescued a litter of kittens, brought them all back to the house wrapped in his hoodie. He cried when the runt didn’t live through the night.”
Olivia nodded, taking a position beside Gabriella. In full therapist mode, she mirrored Gabriella’s tone. “Did Elvis ask him to do something to the Foxes?”
Gabriella sighed in reply. “Mind if I smoke?”
When neither of them protested, she slipped a pack of Newports from the pocket of her robe and held it up to Will—see, not a weapon—before plucking a cigarette and placing it between her pursed lips.
“Elvis and Javier don’t ask. They give orders.” In her shaky hands, the lighter sparked; the flame instantly doused. “All Pedro ever wanted was a man’s approval. Didn’t matter which man. Didn’t matter what he had to do to get it.”
“What did he have to do?” Olivia practically whispered the question, her voice no louder than the rustle of the leaves.
“They had a plan.” Gabriella struck the lighter again and again, the little flashes briefly revealing tear tracks in her makeup. “Javier and Elvis concocted the whole scheme in prison. All they needed was someone to carry it out.”
Will began to doubt his instincts. Maybe Pedro’s babyface was a clever disguise. After all, he had Mendez blood in his veins, and so did Gabriella.
“Let me.” He held his hand out, and Gabriella surrendered the lighter to him. With one firm rub of his thumb, a flame appeared. She leaned in toward it, taking a few desperate drags from the cigarette before she spoke again.
“Fox vacationed here every year. Elvis knew it. He thought it was fate, him getting out right before the Fourth. His personal Independence Day. I tried to tell him it wasn’t worth it. Revenge never is. But he had his mind made up. He bought that AR-15 for Pedro from an old buddy of Javier’s the day he got released from Crescent Bay. He told Pedro this was his chance to finally put in some real work for Los Diabolitos. Blood in, blood out, you know?”
“What happened?” Olivia asked.
Another long drag from the Newport. A thin smile. “Nothing.”
Will scanned the forest, peered down the dirt path into the unknown, starting to wonder if they’d been set up. “I don’t understand.”
“I think what Gabriella is saying is that they never got a chance to carry out their plan. The Foxes were already dead.”
“Chica muy lista. She’s right. I woke up on the morning of the fifth and heard the story on the news. Pedro had insisted on staying home from the fireworks that night; he doesn’t like crowds. But he lied and told Elvis he’d done the murders. Elvis made him out to be some kind of vigilante hero. Javier even called from prison to congratulate him. Venganza dulce.”
“How do you know Pedro was lying?”
“For a million reasons. A sister knows.” Gabriella dropped her cigarette, snuffing it out with the toe of the work boot. “But mostly because our father was a mean son of a bitch who burned us with cigarettes every time he had one too many cervezas. Pedro is deathly afraid of fire.”
Forty-One
Olivia piloted the old Buick back down the dirt road, letting Deck simmer in silence. When th
ey turned onto the highway, he swore under his breath, his anger at Bastidas slowly bubbling to the surface.
“What a coward, getting Pedro to do his dirty work. You would hope the man might’ve changed a little in a quarter century behind bars.”
Olivia understood better than she cared to admit. Before her father had been carted off to prison, he’d done the same, recruiting the Oaktown minions to get their fists bloodied. “Do you think Gabriella told us the truth?”
He shrugged. “Hell if I know. But Pedro had a bunch of scars on his arms. Looked just like cigarette burns. This case is a twisty road with no end in sight.”
Olivia nodded her agreement. Every lead seemed to wind up at a dead end with the bad man lurking unseen. And that miniature tourmaline horseshoe in the pool still nagged at her. “Who would’ve thought that a defense attorney could have so many enemies? It’s usually the DAs and the judges these guys go after.”
“That’s why I asked JB to keep digging through Fox’s old client files. With Thomas spotting this mysterious bad man, I can’t help feeling I missed something big.”
As they entered the downtown, Olivia tapped the brakes. Though it was only a little past eight, the streets had emptied. Even the grocery store parking lot stretched out like a vast ocean of unfettered concrete, with light pole shadows looming like misshapen monsters. All of Fog Harbor had been swallowed by the dusky quiet. “I’d be happy to help with the files. I’m sure it’s a lot for JB to manage on his own.”
“A lot for him to complain about, you mean.” He added, “I’ll send over the link to the files.”
Just then, Deck’s cell phone rang. They both startled, then laughed. Olivia’s heart pattered faster than a snare drum roll, while Deck listened to the voice on the other end of the line.
“Change of plans,” he said, with a sudden urgency. “Take me down to Little Gull.”
Olivia veered off the road, preparing to turn the Buick in the other direction. “What happened?”
One Child Alive: An absolutely gripping crime thriller packed with nail-biting suspense (Rockwell and Decker Book 3) Page 17