Donnally didn’t smile back. “Sometimes true character is revealed in a time of crisis.”
“Perhaps crisis is also the explanation for why his brother disappeared.”
Donnally shrugged. “I wouldn’t know.”
The smile remained fixed on the captain’s face. “Of course you would.” He then removed a printout of a San Francisco Chronicle article from his desk, spun it around, and slid it toward Donnally and Janie. It was the account of Donnally’s shooting of an unidentified Hispanic male on Janie’s doorstep. “What do you suppose we’ll discover when we send the fingerprints of Jago’s brother to San Francisco?”
“When you send them?”
Felix laughed. “Very shrewd. You’re right. If we decide it’s in our interest to send them.”
Donnally fixed his eyes on the captain’s. “My experience is that people usually find what they expect to find.”
“You’re just full of homilies, aren’t you?”
“It’s the wisdom of the ages. I’m merely its vehicle.” Donnally glanced at the news article. “There’s no way you’ll send the prints to the U.S. The last thing you want to see in the media is a report that one of your officers was moonlighting as a hit man.” He pointed upward. “You’ll have enough trouble explaining to CNN what happened at White Sands this morning.”
Felix rose from his chair and walked to the window, his narrowed eyes telling Donnally that he was imagining how the fiction of the rescue attempt would play in the Mexican and U.S. press.
Donnally became conscious of the traffic passing by on the street two floors below and thought of the U.S. president arriving in a few days. Perhaps what would’ve been a sex-trafficking expose could be transformed into a victory of the police against the traffickers.
“I’ll make a deal with you,” Donnally said.
Felix turned back toward him. “You’re not in a position to bargain.”
“That depends on what I have to offer.”
“Tell me what you want, and I’ll decide whether there’s anything you can do to pay for it.”
Donnally pointed his thumb over his shoulder toward the door that led to the waiting room where Corazon and Lalo waited under guard.
“You drop the defamation charges against Corazon and I’ll give a press conference describing Cruz as a hero who died rescuing Janie and me from Sherwyn.”
Janie gripped his arm. “Don’t do it.”
Donnally laid his hand over hers, then looked from her to Felix and said, “We’ve got no choice. It’s the only way.”
“W hat did you mean it was the only way?” Janie said to Donnally as she walked into the Cancun airport terminal where he was waiting for her. It was less a question than an accusation, and it was the first time they had spoken since Donnally had gone with Captain Felix to the press conference and she had returned to the hotel to pack for the flight.
And the accusation tore at him.
Janie stopped and gazed through the windows at Corazon pulling away from the curb. She seemed lost amid the streams of passengers flowing past her toward the ticket counters, as though she was feeling submerged in the tide of events.
“She wanted the case dropped,” Janie said, “but not by misleading the Mexican people about what’s really happening here and who’s responsible.”
Donnally wanted to say, No one was misled. Mexicans aren’t stupid. They may not have understood why I told the lie, but they’ll know that’s what it was.
But he didn’t because he knew she was right, and in that moment understood where he’d gone wrong: He’d been swept away, caught in the updraft of his father’s brilliant deception, and it had seduced him into committing another.
Corazon had deserved better. Just as Mauricio and Anna had deserved better-
And he cringed at his arrogance.
It wasn’t up to him to take Corazon’s life out of her hands. It was hers to decide what sacrifices to make and what risks to take.
“You’re right. It wasn’t my place.”
Donnally paused as a fragment of an idea came to him to set things right, but it dissolved under the pressure of the countdown toward their flight’s takeoff. He turned to her and said, “We’ll find a way to fix it.”
Janie looked up at him and nodded, then she smiled and said, “And maybe we can fix something else at the same time.”
Donnally stared at her for a moment, until his mind caught up with her, and he smiled back. “That, too.”
Then his smile died and he looked toward the check-in counter. “There’s just one thing we need to do along the way.”
“What’s that?”
“Go after the man behind White Sands before he makes a run for it.”
Chapter 65
But Albert Hale wasn’t running.
Donnally found him wrapped in a wool blanket, sitting on the veranda of his Hillsborough mansion. He was gazing out at the cloistered garden, the high walls on either side covered by avalanches of vines and the far end cushioned by a private forest of oaks and eucalyptus. The Kaposi’s sarcoma lesions on the old man’s face and neck made it seem that AIDS was pummeling him to death, not draining the life out of him.
“How’d you get in?” Hale asked, after turning toward the sound of Donnally’s footsteps behind him.
“Over the river and through the woods,” Donnally said, using a children’s rhyme to take a first jab at Hale. “How else?”
“Ah, yes.” Hale half smiled and then added a line, “Spring over the ground like a hunting hound.”
Donnally settled into a wrought-iron chair next to Hale’s, then studied his withered hands holding a china teacup in his lap, and his eyes that had sunk into their gray sockets. From those alone Donnally understood that there would be no justice for Anna Keenan or Charles Brown, or even Deputy Pipkins, whose body had yet to be found. Hale had chosen a slow suicide years earlier by making his life an experiment in pathology.
Hale gazed at Donnally as if into a mirror.
“As you can see,” Hale said, “you’re too late. The cosmos has exacted its punishment. My HIV finally mutated into forms far outside what the drugs were designed to control.”
They sat in silence for a few moments, then Hale set his cup on the table and reached for a silver bell.
Donnally grabbed his arm. “Don’t even think it.”
Hale laughed. “You need to relax. I merely thought you’d like some tea.”
Donnally released his grip, then pulled aside his jacket, exposing his semiautomatic in a shoulder holster.
“You think I have goons lounging in my billiard room,” Hale said, “waiting for the call to charge out here, guns blazing?”
“Your guns were blazing last week.”
“Sherwyn was behind that. He still had something to fear.”
“What about you?”
“Dead men don’t have that problem.”
Hale reached again for the bell.
This time, Donnally didn’t stop him.
“H ow did you figure out it was me?” Hale asked after the butler had delivered Donnally’s tea.
“The law firm representing Sherwyn inadvertently let on that there was someone behind him. It was in their phrasing. They said that they’d been hired on behalf of Sherwyn, not by Sherwyn himself.”
“And you sensed an invisible hand.”
“It dipped in, just like it did in the Brown case. But I couldn’t figure out why it never seemed to form itself into a fist.”
Hale extended his manicured fingers and examined them like they were instruments that had an additional use he hadn’t considered.
Donnally swung past the unconvincing gesture. “Until Sherwyn told me.”
Hale smirked at Donnally. “That’s something that Sherwyn certainly would not do.”
“The kids at White Sands referred to El Mandamas,” Donnally said, “The Man with the Last Word, and a woman in Cancun talked about a wealthy man behind Sherwyn, and he confirmed it was you.”