“We’re chasing it up,” Munro told us. “We’re still leaning on every lowlife on our books and working it with ATF, but it’s like getting blood from a stone. These gangs, they’re all very tight-knit. The only time those dickwads let anything slip is to mess us around and screw with our heads by putting out rumors that it’s the dirty work of some rival. So you’ve got the Desperados saying it’s the Huns, the Huns saying it’s the Sons of Azazel, the Sons of Azazel saying it’s the Aztecas. It’s a fucking nightmare. The only way to get any kind of traction is to have someone in there undercover, and that takes time. Besides, we don’t even know what gang, let alone what chapter, we’re talking about.”
“What about the cartels?” I asked. “Any luck working it the other way around, from the top down?”
Corliss chortled. “Good luck with that. Our friends from the south have an even more rigid code of silence.”
“But if they are bikers, you still think they were hired muscle and not end users,” I pressed.
“My read? Yes. Absolutely.” Corliss hunched forward. He gestured at Villaverde and said, “We’ve all had great success in shutting down plenty of local meth labs, but you know as well as I do that all it’s done is move the production part of the equation south of the border. And that’s where these white coats are needed. Not here. Our narco friends down there, they’re now running superlabs where each one of them’s churning out three, four hundred pounds of meth a day. A day. That’s a lot of product, and it has to be done right. So when they get their hands on some hotshot chemist who can streamline their processes and give them a better quality product without blowing up their labs, they’re not letting him go.”
I felt like I was still missing a big piece of the puzzle. “I still don’t get what any of this could possibly have to do with Michelle. It’s been five years.”
“Who knows,” Corliss said, brushing it off casually, his tone growing weary. “She worked the cartel money trails. She caused some bad guys a lot of pain by taking away their toys and wiping out their bank accounts. Maybe one of them wanted some payback. These guys . . . they go to prison for a while, then they bribe or shoot their way out, they move around and stay under the radar . . . Maybe it took this long for one of them to track her down. Especially since she worked undercover.”
It didn’t sit straight with me, but right now, I didn’t have much else to go on.
“They did take her laptop,” Villaverde offered, giving me a sideways glance as if reinforcing Corliss’s point. “Maybe they’re looking for a way to reverse a trade? Get her to make some transfers their way?”
Corliss didn’t take too long to chew on it—a dubious eyebrow spiked upward as soon as Villaverde mentioned it.
I tensed up, knowing where this was heading.
“Her laptop?” Corliss asked.
Villaverde nodded.
Corliss shrugged, not saying it but signaling it clearly enough with a wry, skeptical expression.
“What?” I pressed.
“Well, she took away a lot of money from some of these guys,” he said, his mouth bent downward like he’d just sniffed some sour milk. “Maybe she kept some of it for herself. It sure as hell wouldn’t be the first time that happened.”
I felt my face flame up. “Michelle was clean,” I said in no uncertain terms.
“And you know that because you two had a fling?”
“She was clean,” I insisted.
“She’s a trained undercover agent, remember? She knows how to keep secrets. Even from whoever’s sharing her bed.”
I saw the look he and Munro exchanged and could feel the veins in my neck go rock hard. I had to fight to keep myself under control. Michelle wasn’t even in the ground yet and this damaged, bitter prick was already soiling her memory.
I flicked a glare across at Villaverde and back at Corliss. “She was straight. One hundred percent. No question.”
I waited to let the words sink in, ready to pounce on any retort from any of them, but none came. Corliss just held my gaze with his tired, vacant eyes, then shrugged, the edges of his mouth still sagging dismissively.
“Maybe she was,” he said. “Either way . . . it’s something that needs to be looked into. It could lead us to our shooters.”
I didn’t like the suspicion hanging there, but nothing I could say was going to change that. But there was something I could throw back at him. “If it’s about narcos tracking her down, you’ve got a leak in here. It’s the only way they could have found her.”
Corliss wasn’t moved. “Big fucking surprise. You know how much time and resources we spend trying to keep our house clean? It’s a constant battle.”
“Was there anyone in particular that you can think of who’d be looking to get back at her?” Villaverde asked Corliss, adroitly moving on. “Anyone with a vendetta that was so strong it could resurface after so long?”
“A couple,” Corliss replied. “No one likes being taken for a ride, especially not by a woman.” He looked like he was running a list of possibilities in his mind for a second, and Munro chimed in.
“I’ll need to look into her case history, but the last case she worked was a big one. Carlos Guzman. She did him some serious damage. Almost half a billion’s worth. And as you know, he’s still out there.” Munro shrugged. “Probably richer than ever.”
Villaverde and I exchanged glances. Neither of us had anything else to add. It looked like we weren’t going to get much more from them either when Corliss turned to me and asked, “Why’d she call you? I mean, after all this time, why you?”
Given what Corliss had floated about Michelle possibly being dirty, I didn’t feel like bringing up the fact that we’d had a kid together, not to him.
“She was scared and didn’t know which way to turn,” I replied. “And maybe she still believed in something old-fashioned called trust.”
He blew out a long, rueful hiss, then nodded, slowly. “Trust, huh?” He paused, then his expression clouded and he seemed to travel to somewhere far and dark.
“My wife trusted me when I told her my work would never put her or our daughter in harm’s way,” he said, then his distant gaze racked focus and settled on me. “Didn’t work out too well for either one of them, did it?”
There wasn’t much to say after that.
16
Tess felt uneasy as she crossed the threshold and stepped into Michelle’s house.
She’d left Alex with Jules at the hotel, happily drawing at the small dining table in the suite’s living room. Since Reilly needed to drive up to LA, he’d arranged to have a couple of PD guys escort her over.
It felt weird being there. On several fronts. It was weird being in the empty house of someone who’d just been murdered. That was a first for Tess, and it weighed heavily on her, with every hesitant step. It was also weird being at the home of Reilly’s ex-lover, the home of the mother of his son. Tess felt like she was intruding, like she was some kind of parasite picking at the carcass of the newly departed. It was nonsense, of course—Tess tried to remind herself that, really, Michelle would probably be nothing if not grateful that she was opening her heart to Alex. But the discomfort was hard to shake.
She didn’t plan on sticking around too long. She would just get what she thought would help Alex, then she’d be out of there.
She felt a shortness of breath as she stepped around the bloodstained floor and made her way into the living room, where some picture frames on a shelf drew her eye. She approached them almost solemnly and picked up a photograph of Alex and a brunette she knew had to be Michelle, given that she was also in several of the other pictures. It was the first time she saw what Michelle looked like. She was more than attractive. There was something highly appealing about her, a magnetism that shone through her eyes and jumped off the prints. Seeing her brought up another knot of conflicting emotions within Tess, a deep, heartfelt sadness and an empathy corrupted by a touch of jealousy.