PROLOGUE
Saturday, June 2, 7:25 p.m.
Even before she finished the Tecate, Roxene knew the informant wasn’t going to show. She could almost always sense the ones who would pan out and the ones who wouldn’t. She placed the can on the bar and looked at big Norm Flannigan next to her, his smug smile wet with tequila, still wanting to believe they’d luck out twice in one week.
In his bunched, bulky jeans, his sandy hair covered by a baseball cap similar to hers, he seemed to fade into the smoky room. She was sure she did, too. Invisible was attitude as well as attire, something she had learned back at Quantico and practiced every day since.
They’d picked a public place, not a tourist hive like Hussong’s, but with enough Americans that they wouldn’t attract attention. Sepia sketches of former patrons covered an entire wall. What kind of person, she wondered, would pay to leave a portrait behind?
The sad-faced bartender reappeared, as if he’d been waiting for her to take the last swallow, but, like a true macho man, he directed his question to Norm. “¿Una más?”
“Por favor.”
She cringed at Norm’s sucky Spanish. “Why bother?” she asked as the dreary fat man returned to his cooler. “I told you it was a dog call. A guy knows a guy who knows a guy who has a boat. Decides to be a hero, calls DEA, then has second thoughts.”
“Last time I checked, this was still Mexico.” Norm downed the rest of his shot with a swallow, then, with the glass still grazing his lips, gave her the senior agent smirk she hated. “Because you go at full throttle doesn’t mean the rest of the world does. Why not try to slow down a little?”
She decided to let the remark pass. This wasn’t the time or the place to discuss their differences.
In the corner behind them, a guy with a guitar sang Paloma Querida, doing a pretty fair impression of Pedro Infante and a less-than-fair job of accompanying himself. In spite of a couple of college-age girls at a back table taking a fast tequila ride to the nastiest hangovers of their lives, the air was tense with too much smoke and too little light. Something about the place—the music, the bartender with his mournful expression, the portraits left behind—unnerved her. It was too textbook Ensenada, too safe, on the surface, at least. The Glock pressing against the small of her back no longer felt uncomfortable.
“I think we should go.”
The bartender put another can in front of her, then refilled Norm’s shot glass from the Sauza bottle. Norm swept coins across the bar as if they were poker chips. Then he turned back to her. “One more cerveza won’t kill you. Then, if the guy doesn’t show, we can grab a late dinner.”
She pushed away the can. “Now,” she said.
Norm pulled all six-whatever feet of himself up from the barstool. “Whatever works.” He’d read the meaning in her words, and she knew he’d respect her request, even if this were just one of her crazy whims. They left as anonymously as they’d entered. Norm pulled open the door of peeling wood, and she stepped out. The air smelled of ocean and the deep-fried shrimp the taco vendors had been selling all day. But it didn’t revive her.
She leaned close to Norm, trying to shake the confusion out of her head. “Did that place creep you out as much as it did me?”
“No more than any of the others.” He took a deep breath. “Must have been the cigarettes. I think you’re right about the guy, though. He’s not going to show. Want to get something to eat?”
She shook her head again and walked around the building to the car. “I need to sleep.” The feeling wouldn’t let go of her. She tried to think, but even in the fresh air, she could still smell the smoke. What was wrong? What had changed? The music.
“That guitar player,” she said.
“What about him?”
“He stopped playing the minute I stood. But it was more than that. I couldn’t put my finger on the feeling, but that’s what it was. He was watching us.”
“You think…?”
Before he could finish, she heard a rush of footsteps behind them, the deadly metal-on-metal ka-chunk of a shotgun being rechambered. She whirled around. A shotgun, all right, aimed at her. The guitar player faced them.
“You left before we could talk,” he said in precise English. “Over there.” He motioned toward the alley less than a couple of feet away.
“We can talk out here.” Norm ignored the command and edged closer to him. “You’re the one who called in the tip, aren’t you?”
“Sí, but you left too quickly. Back there, por favor.”
Roxene scanned the street. Empty. Riddled with alleys where anything, anyone could be waiting. Their only hope was that someone saw them. She caught Norm’s eye in the moonlight and told him in that quick glint of connection to distract the bastard.
Norm moved a little closer. She stepped to the side. The moon seemed too intense, a vivid splash of light, almost blinding her. She jerked away from its glare. She had to focus on the man before them, try to get at the gun tucked into the waistband of her jeans.
“You son of a bitch.” Something was wrong with Norm’s voice. “What kind of games are you playing? What’d you put in my drink back there?”
His tequila, her too-bitter Tecate. The moon found her again. It played games with her vision, her equilibrium.
“Won’t do you any good.” The man motioned toward the alley again. “I don’t want to hurt you, but we have to talk. Let’s go.”
Norm rushed him. Roxene flew into combat mode, knocking the shotgun from his grasp, going for her own gun. Variegated colors danced before her eyes. She ignored the light show, steadied the gun.
Someone grabbed her from behind. There were two of them. She hadn’t counted on that. The man struggling with her felt larger, stronger, more dangerous than the other. Her strength ebbing, she kicked, jerked, tried to twist free, to connect with any part of the one who pinned her hands behind her back. In the jagged moonlight, she saw Norm’s big body fall before her like a bolt of fabric flung to the ground. Another blur of a man, as large, larger than Norm, knelt beside him.
Then Norm disappeared.
Fight it. She had to fight it. If she gave into the lights, to whatever they’d used to drug her, it could mean their lives.
Hoisted in a heavy grip, her body began to float toward the shadows. Somewhere she heard laughter, a faint humming, a song, Pedro Infante. She tried to hold onto the song as long as she could, but already it faded, softer, softer, more distant, as the silence and the darkness descended.
CHAPTER ONE
Sunday, June 3, 2:30 p.m.
The San Joaquin Valley in summer was hotter than Mexico and hell put together, Corina’s father always said. At that moment she would have settled for either locale, anywhere but the Valley Voice cafeteria, where thanks to the new management’s cost-saving measures, the heat was almost as stifling indoors as out.
Nothing warm about the way her coworkers were treating her though. Corina bought a glass of Chai tea, paid the cashier and looked around. If the studied lack of interest of the others in the café were any indication, nobody was going to invite her to share their table. Might as well take the tea back to her desk. At least she could get some work done without Matthew Henderson breathing down her neck.
She’d just started back down the hall when J.T. Malone, the metro editor, dashed out of the elevator.
He put on the brakes when he saw her. “Where’s Henderson,” he asked. Dressed down by his standards, in a white shirt and chocolate-brown slacks a shade darker than his skin, J.T. was the only person in the building who looked untouched by the heat. They’d been easy with each other once, almost friends, but that had all stopped when Ivy Dieser, the new managing editor, had promoted Corina to assistant investigative reporter.
“He’s off today,” she said. “It is Sunday, you know.”
“Where’d he go? He’s not at home, not answering his phone or his e-mail.”
“He’ll be in tomorrow. What’s so urgent?”
J.T. hesitated, then said, as if she’d forced it out of him, “Got a lead on something big. A body’s been uncovered outside of town. PD source says it’s the mayor.”
For a moment, Corina was taken aback. Wes Shaw, her Wes, was mayor now, but J.T. wasn’t talking about him. Her brain processed the scant information, and in the process, reminded her that Wes Shaw was no longer hers and hadn’t been for almost a year.
“You mean Tina Kellogg?”
“That’s what I said. The mayor.”
Shock gave way to emotion. Tina Kellogg dead. It wasn’t right, but it was what everyone suspected after she hadn’t returned from a trip to the coast, hadn’t made her house payment, and hadn’t contacted any of her friends. Corina fought the tears that came with the realization. “That’s so awful. She was such a decent woman.”
“Yeah.” J.T. studied her with even more intensity than usual. “If we can’t find Henderson, I guess I’m going to have to send you out there.”
I guess?
“We don’t have time to look for him.” She began walking as she spoke, heading for the stairs, adrenaline building. “Just tell me where they found her. I’m on my way.”
“Wait.” J.T. reached for the cell phone on his belt. “Let me try Henderson one more time.”
Corina turned to confront him, seeing it all there in his face, the suspicion, the distrust, the damned, rotten doubt. It was the way all the old-timers looked at her since the promotion, as if she were after their jobs.
“Your call, J.T. You want me to cover this, or do you want to stand here talking about it while the TV stations grab the story?”
Moisture glistened on his forehead. He glanced at his watch, then at her, a man without choices, she thought, an editor who knew that, live or die, the only real enemy was time. “Okay,” he said. “Get going.”
Even as she rushed for the door, she silently cursed him—he who should know better than anyone how she felt trying to prove herself in this world, that regardless of what anyone said or pretended, was still run by white males.
Sunday, June 3, 3:20 p.m.
The smell hit her first. Even across the field, it carried like the stench of the stockyards, only more cloying. Standing outside her car, sun hammering down, Corina fought the reflex to gag. She’d been so intent on getting a decent story and proving herself to Henderson and the rest of the staff that she hadn’t stopped to think how she’d react to the grim reality of murder. And now here it was, in a decomposed heap, just across the yellow tape a few hundred feet ahead.
A company station wagon pulled up beside her car, and Wally Lorenzo, the photographer, stepped out. He nodded to her on his way to unload his equipment, an old guy with a permanent frown that seemed to deepen when he looked at her. Talented photographer though, in spite of his dandruff-flaked thick glasses that didn’t stop him from seeing the story behind a shot. The editors always said you didn’t have to crop Lorenzo’s photos; he cropped them himself when he took them.
“How’d they get you out here?” she asked.
“Changed my hours a few weeks back. Needed one more person on weekends.” He ran his free hand through salt-and-pepper hair that was more salt than pepper these days.
“I’m sorry,” she said, then wondered if that were the right response.
“Doesn’t matter. A job’s a job. Better get to work.” He trudged ahead in the direction of the taped-off area, humming softly.
That smell. God, he must be faking it. This couldn’t be something one learned to tolerate. How many of these scenes had he photographed? How many bodies that used to be human, now mutilated and decaying in any number of unsavory locations?
Even the officers beyond the yellow tape wore masks. A group of them scribbled notes and clicked photos of something at the bottom of a dried-out canal. Corina watched them, not sure whether or not she was relieved she couldn’t see the body, as she followed in Wally’s path through the vacant field.
Who was she trying to kid? She was a business reporter. The closest she’d been to death was fleeting glances at the waxy replicas of her grandparents in the relative safety of a funeral home. She hadn’t asked for this promotion, but she had to prove herself, especially with old-timers like J.T., Wally, and Henderson, her own supervisor, waiting for her to fail.
She would prove herself, too. She just had to learn the ropes, and the sandy-haired officer guarding the site where Tina’s body was being unearthed was as good a place as any to start.
He looked up from his clipboard when Corina approached. His unlined face set his age at thirty, thirty-five maybe. His experienced eyes of appraisal told a different story.
“Hot enough for you?”
It was the usual greeting of two strangers meeting in the middle of a San Joaquin Valley summer, even two strangers meeting over murder.
“I hear tomorrow will be worse,” she said.
“We can count on more rolling blackouts, that’s for sure.” He did not appear bothered by either the weather or the nature of his job. He had the demeanor of a mortician. A smile, a friendly attempt at empathy. Then once the pleasantries were exchanged, a voracious return to business. “I’ll need to get your name.”
“Corina Casares Vasquez,” she replied, in a precise voice that just barely hid her distaste of the activity near the freshly dug earth a few hundred feet from where they stood. “Valley Voice newspaper.”
“That’s a mouthful.” He flashed her a perfunctory smile, then returned to his clipboard and the job at hand. “Corina,” he began. “You spell that with a C or a K?”
“C.” She walked him through the rest of the drill, explaining that, yes, both names were her last name, no hyphen, thank you very much.
“New to the Voice, are you?”
“Just to this beat.”
He glanced at the clipped-on ID that jutted out from her vest. His eyes darted back and forth as he compared the image there to the real thing.
“I guess it’s you, all right.” He studied her feature by feature, from straight hair to her jeans and vest, both of which suddenly felt too tight.
“Our security supervisor takes new photos once a year.” The solemn, swollen face on the laminated strip of plastic reminded her of how, for weeks after Wes left her, she’d cried every day—to work, from work, sometimes sitting at her desk, staring at her computer while trying to squeeze back tears. She thought she’d hidden it, but looking at her ID, she realized how obvious her pain had been, and how far she’d come. She looked away, vowing to ask Verna to take a new photo at once. “What can you tell me about what happened here?”
“There’s not a whole lot to tell. Two kids making out in the vineyard spotted the victim’s shoe sticking up from the dirt in the canal. They investigated and discovered the remains.”
Corina shuddered. “Man’s shoe or woman’s shoe?”
“You know I can’t talk about that. You guys have been hounding me around the clock, and we haven’t even taken the body to the morgue yet.”
To cops, all reporters were guys. She considered pointing out the fact but thought better of challenging him. Forcing the image of the skeletal foot from her mind, she cut to the chase. “We heard it was the former mayor.”
“Lots of former mayors in Pleasant View.”
“Last I checked, Tina Kellogg was the only one missing for three months. We heard belongings of hers were found at the scene.”
“I know what you heard,” he said. “That’s what happens when officers talk off the record. There’s no such thing. You guys don’t respect it.”
“We do respect it. It’s your guys who run their mouths and then try to change the rules on us.” His jaw stiffened, and she wished she’d kept quiet.
“I can’t tell you anything else right now,” he said. “You want any more information, you check with the coroner. Better get out of the sun too. You ask me you’re not cut out for this beat.”
The foul air closed in, threatening to prove him right. “I’ll get used to it.”
Something akin to sympathy crept into his pale eyes. “Takes a while.”
“I guess so. Thanks for your help.”
“Sorry I couldn’t give you more information. You know how it is.”
“I understand, but it would help a lot if you could just tell me why they’re withholding her name. Is it because they have to notify family members?”
He nodded. “Part of it. But in the case of a public figure, we have to take more precautions, even when we’re sure.”
“I didn’t mean to hound you,” she said, as if the interrogation were over and she were leaving. “It’s just that our source told us there’d been an absolute ID.”
“It’s not absolute until the coroner does it,” he said, as if lecturing a criminology class. “We still have to go through the motions, even in a case like this where we find ID on the victim.”
She jumped on it. “But if you have personal items of hers, a purse, say, a drivers license.”
“Takes more than that.”
“So,” she said, as if playing a game of speculation. “Who do you think killed her?”
He shrugged. “Pissed-off boyfriend? Who knows? I hear she had a few.”
She thanked him again and left. An ornate For Sale sign stood next to the entrance to the main road. The poor farmer who owned this vineyard wouldn’t be selling it any time soon now. On the road, she passed a Channel 5 van driving in. It didn’t matter. She’d learned what she was sent here to find out. She could go back to the paper and tell J.T. his source had been confirmed. The body in the field was their missing former mayor’s. But first she needed a shower. And she needed to shampoo the smell of death from her hair.
A few minutes past five, she parked her Corolla in the Voice parking lot. The sun-baked asphalt still radiated heat. She tried not to think about the source of her excitement, but it was there like a shadow she glimpsed from the corner of her eye. A woman was dead, a public servant who, despite her flaws, had done a fine job as their city’s first woman mayor.
A security guard on a bicycle stopped and walked Corina to the ramp leading to the side door. She lifted her ID to another uniformed man at the guard station, then followed the long, polished hall past the executive offices on her left, through the art and features departments.
Metro buzzed like a single engine made up of countless coordinated parts. The staff moved in sync, each a segment of that miraculous twenty-four hour machine called a newspaper. The front page was a last-minute job.
The above-the-fold piece covered the disappearance of two DEA agents, a man and a woman, in Tijuana. Norman Flannigan and Roxene Waite had uncovered a scheme by the drug cartels earlier in the week. No one knew if the kidnapping was related.
That’s all they needed. War hawks, especially Governor Craig Menlo, were demanding military intervention, claiming the Mexican government was involved. This would worsen an already volatile situation.
Metro staff members had made last-minute phone calls to highway patrol and fire department sources, checking to see if there were any stories grisly enough for the front page.
“If it bleeds, it leads,” they always said. For the first time, the meaning of the mantra hit home with Corina. Find a really gruesome story, and you’ll lead on A-1, above the fold, as she’d be doing tomorrow, unless something bloodier occurred somewhere else. Because a public figure was dead, she was getting a break. It was that simple and that complicated.
J.T. looked up when she passed his office, then waved her over. His closely cropped hair and expansive forehead exaggerated the arch of his eyebrows, giving him a cynical look he worked a little too hard to live up to. It was impossible to relax around him. She suspected Henderson maligned her abilities at every opportunity, and she had neither talent nor taste for sucking up to management, even when the management person in question was someone she had once liked and respected.
It was Ivy Dieser who had engineered her promotion a few months after stepping into the managing editor job, vacated when her predecessor made one of those convenient “lateral moves” that were so prevalent with new management. So clueless was Ivy that when she informed Corina of her new position, she immediately asked whether she wanted to be called Hispanic or Latina.
“Mexican,” Corina had told her, stunned that Poison Ivy, as they called her, could be so blatant as to the reason for her good fortune. “I’m Mexican.”
J.T. met her at the doorway to his office, a sparse room except for the numerous photos of his vacations to Jamaica. “You get it?” he asked as if he’d sent her to Starbucks for a latte.
She nodded. “Cop wouldn’t confirm anything on the record, but he made it clear.”
“Same here, but we can still say our sources believe the body is hers. Where the hell is Henderson anyway?”
“I can write the story by myself, J.T.”
“I’m sure you can. Matthew knew her is all. You never even met the woman.”
“Sure I did, right after I first came here. Remember that Hispanic Scholarship thing? You and I went together, in fact. I was still in the business department.”
He nodded and gave her a cryptic smile. “That’s right. Janie sent her entire minority editorial staff, you, yours truly, and Linda Woo in features.”
Finally, common ground. “Minority quotas, that’s all we are to them,” she blurted.
“And twenty years ago, when I started, we’d play hell getting a job here at all.” His eyebrow arched even higher, and he enunciated carefully. “I have been the first black at every paper I worked for, lady. It hasn’t changed that much. Dieser would have me out on my ass right now if it weren’t for those minority quotas.”
“I just meant—”
“I know what you meant. Now, stop feeling sorry for yourself and write that story. Henderson can fill you in on everything he has on Tina Kellogg later. For now, just cover the basics. Widow takes over husband’s construction business, forges a career in politics, leads the city at a time of unprecedented growth. What took her from there to—where’d they find her?”
“A vineyard,” she said, still stinging from his reproach.
“What took her from there to the dusty vineyard, her body unclaimed? Something like that.”
“You sound a little television, if you don’t mind my saying so.”
“That’s why I’m the editor, and you’re the reporter. Now go write it.”
“What about Henderson?”
He shrugged as if unaware of the silent war raging right under his nose these past two months. “He’s not here,” he said.
YOU CAN READ MORE HERE …
Thanks for the excerpts. I loved the line ‘if it bleeds it leads.’
augie
Author
Glad you enjoyed it Augie!