Mission Road

Page 19

“But?”
Flume tugged at his apron. “I didn’t exactly swear that particular night was routine. They came in a little late.”
“Both of them?”
He nodded.
“Together?”
“Separate. Lucia beat Etch for once. She rushed in about nine-fifty, couldn’t believe Etch wasn’t here. When he did come in, Lucia looked at him real angry, asked him where he’d been. He just stared at me and said, ‘Mike, I got here the same time as usual tonight, right?’ ”
Maia cursed. “When did Hernandez come in exactly?”
“Ten o’clock. Maybe one, two minutes after.”
Maia stared across Presa Street, at the brown Acura waiting in the dark.
The fry cook followed her gaze. “Aw, hell. You got a police tail? You didn’t tell me that.”
Maia pulled the rubber band off the old man’s key, unfolded the piece of paper. “What am I going to unlock here, Mr. Flume?”
He shook his head. “Sorry, miss. My onion rings are burning.” Fear was building in his eyes.
The old cook hobbled back toward the diner, leaving Maia alone with the key and a two-line message:
342 West King’s Highway
Used to be Lucia’s.
MAIA DROVE SLOWLY, SETTING HER PACE to the Dvoák on the classical station.
She knew the best way to lose her tail wasn’t a high-speed chase. It was to bore him into a stupor.
She thought about Franklin White and the patrol nightstick that had killed him.
It was conceivable Franklin would’ve agreed to meet someone he knew well on the side of a rural road at night. Someone like Ralph Arguello. But it was also conceivable that he would pull over for a cop.
Kelsey had been on medical leave. Etch Hernandez and Lucia DeLeon had weak alibis for the murder time. But motive? The idea that Kelsey, even Kelsey, would kill because Frankie White had hurt his hands and endangered his job just didn’t sit right with Maia. Neither did the idea that either Etch or Lucia would kill because Frankie White was murdering women on their beat.
Mike Flume was right. It took intense, personal rage to hit someone seven times in the head, to destroy their face. Whoever killed Frankie White had seen something in him that they hated deeply. They didn’t just want to stop him killing. They had wanted to obliterate his image completely.
Maia meandered through Southtown, circled the blocks, braked to look at street numbers even though she knew the neighborhood.
She studied traffic patterns, counted the timing on lights, checked out side streets until she found what she wanted.
Her third time through the South Presa–Alamo intersection, where the traffic backed up, she put a delivery truck between herself and the Acura. Then she swerved into an alley between two cafés and shot through the back parking lot.
A moment later she was three blocks away in the residential neighborhood of King William. No sign of the tail.
“Amateur,” she murmured.
She supposed there was no reason to have shaken the police. She wasn’t about to lead them to Tres. Still, the idea of having a baby-sitter pissed her off.
The Dvoák piece ended.
Maia was about to change the channel to rock ’n’ roll when a news break came on. An Alamo Heights resident had been found shot to death on his porch overlooking the Olmos Basin.
The sedate voice of the classical DJ sounded totally wrong to deliver such news: The victim, a retired Bexar County medical examiner, had been killed from a distance by a single rifle bullet. Police would not speculate whether the shooting was accidental or the work of a sniper, but stressed there was no reason to believe the general public was in danger. The name of the victim was being withheld until—
Maia turned off the radio.
The .357 in her shoulder holster suddenly felt heavy.
She thought about Jaime Santos’ gnarled hands on his golf club, the sad smile he had given her.
Maybe the news was about someone else. How many retired MEs could there be?
She remembered Mike Flume’s look of fear when he realized a cop was watching. Detective Kelsey’s already gonna kill me for talking to you.
Don’t think that way, Maia told herself. Just drive.
She turned on Guenther Street. In her rearview mirror, an old gray Volvo sedan pulled out from the curb.
Had she seen the same car at the Pig Stand? She’d been so focused on the obvious tail . . .
No. She was being paranoid. The police wouldn’t have the time or manpower to pull something as devious as tag team surveillance.
She took a detour anyway—a sharp left out of King William, onto a nice straight stretch of South Presa, lined with stucco nightclubs and taquerías. She drove south until the buildings fell away and the landscape changed to country. She kept watch behind her, but the Volvo had disappeared.
She was about to reverse course when she noticed the street sign at the intersection ahead. The name hit her like a blast of cold air.
Mission Road.
Before she could give herself time to waver, she took the turn.
Half a mile south along a stretch of crumbling blacktop, she recognized the twisted live oak from the crime scene photos. The barbed wire fence had fallen down, the shrubs were a little thicker, but otherwise the place hadn’t changed.
She pulled over, stepped out of the car.
It was getting dark. The wind was cold and sprinkled with rain. The smell of wild licorice drifted up from the nearby creek bed.
Or not a creek bed, Tres would’ve corrected her. An acequia.
He’d taken her on a picnic somewhere near here. The waterways in this part of town were man-made, two-hundred-and-fifty-year-old aqueducts that had once irrigated mission fields.
Maia shivered.
She remembered Tres’ words on that picnic, three months ago, right before she’d made her huge mistake.
Or had it been a mistake? The changes in her body were mixing her up so badly she could hardly remember. At the time, Tres’ comment had seemed so insignificant. Just another one of his quips. Nothing worth changing their lives over.
She forced her thoughts back to the problem at hand. Franklin White. Frankie had died here—right where she was standing.
How far from the Pig Stand? Five minutes, max.
Witnesses?
She turned three-sixty.
Nothing but trees, fields and the road. The only light was a single streetlamp maybe half a mile north. Eighteen years ago, the place would’ve been even more remote, if that was possible.
She made a mental note to find out where Etch Hernandez lived back then. She wondered if this road was a route from his residence to the Pig Stand.
The wind picked up. Maia shivered again. Too many tragedies, too many lives ended here on Mission Road.
Somewhere along this stretch of blacktop, in the Sixties, Guy White had allegedly raped a twenty-two-year-old named Delia Montoya. The old newspaper article had been discreetly vague about the facts, but Maia got the idea. Delia and Guy had met at a bar. They left together. Delia was a fiery woman, a civil rights activist. She considered herself liberated. She could date anyone she damn well pleased, but she hadn’t planned on being beaten up and raped by Piedras Creek. She filed a report with the police, but two weeks later, she abruptly withdrew the charges. She appeared at the police station, shaken and wild-eyed, and gave a new statement. She claimed she’d made up the whole rape story to get attention. Guy White was off the hook.
A similar story, five months later—a Latina secretary at a local law firm accused White of raping her at Mission Park. White produced an alibi for the night in question. He hired a private investigator to prove that the young woman had a sordid past with men. She was mentally unstable. Charges went nowhere. One month later, the young woman lost her job.
Twenty years later, in the 1980s, all of Franklin White’s victims had been found within a square mile of this spot. Six young women, just as Jaime Santos had said—all six sweet and pretty, just entering college with bright futures. All of them strangled to death and abandoned in the woods.
Like father like son? Maia was tempted to think so, but Frankie’s victims were so different from his father’s, as were the ways the two men had destroyed those women . . .
Maia looked down the dark stretch of road. She imagined roadside memorials that might’ve decorated this barbed wire fence over the years—crosses made of flowers, bleached memorials moldering in the darkness.
A glint of metal drew her attention. To the north, at the very edge of the streetlight’s glow, a car made a U-turn and headed away.
Maia tried to convince herself that the mist and gloom were playing tricks on her eyes.
It looked like a gray Volvo had pulled out from the shoulder of the road, as if the driver had been parked there, watching her.
TITUS ROE FOCUSED HIS BINOCULARS.
The Lee woman had nice legs.
Concentrating on that helped keep his mind off the pain in his hand—his first stupid mistake of the night.
Damn meat cleaver.
He’d assumed Lee would be at the San Antonio address. If she was making trouble for Hernandez, he figured, she was probably in town. Besides, the house was right down the street. Titus had started his search there.
For his trouble, he’d gotten squirted in the eyes and hacked.
He never even got a shot at the gray-haired woman, but he hoped the old Latino was dead. Titus was pretty sure he’d nailed that bastard.
Good trick, though, he had to admit—the old guy yelling FBI! and pulling a water gun.
Probably been pretending for years, rehearsing in front of the mirror. Old man sounded so convincing he threw Titus off balance.
The water smacked Titus right between the eyes and the old lady jumped at him with the meat cleaver, chopping his left hand as he tried to defend himself. Nursing Home of the Living Dead.
Titus had felt lucky to get off one shot and get the hell out of there.
Now, he watched the Lee woman standing in the middle of Mission Road. She turned a slow circle, hesitating as she looked in his direction. No way could she see him, but her eyes seemed to stare straight into the binocular lenses.
She was clever. He’d already decided that.
He’d been heading out of Southtown, feeling sick from blood loss, when he spotted Lee’s BMW cruising slowly down Presa Street like she was looking for an address. At first he didn’t understand what she was doing. Then he spotted the policeman in the Acura.
Titus couldn’t help but smile. If Lee hadn’t been wandering around the neighborhood, trying to lose her tail, Titus never would’ve caught her.
He’d watched with admiration as she pulled the parking lot trick and disappeared. The cop was history, but Titus had killed half a dozen people here in the King William neighborhood, back in his glory days. He picked up Lee on South Guenther and gave her plenty of room.
Now that she’d stopped, he could shoot her. Mission Road was nice and deserted. Drive up, do her, drive away. But so much open ground made him nervous. She’d see him coming. He hated giving his victims time to think.
If he had a rifle . . . but he hated rifles, too. Rifles were for cowards who sat in deer blinds with six-packs of beer and pretended to be real hunters. A handgun was the only respectable tool for killing a human being.
He raised his good hand, tried to hold it steady. Damn arthritis. God had thrown him some cruel punches in his life, but the arthritis was the ultimate—payback for a guy who’d made his living with a steady hand, pulling the trigger on other people’s enemies. Now he could barely aim. He had to keep his hands in an ice cream freezer all day to deaden the pain. He figured it was safer not to mention that small problem to Hernandez.