She felt her insides shrivel up with dread as the unthinkable started to fall into place, and within seconds, she was gone, losing all sense of place and time as she read page after page, immersing herself in Stephenson’s work and the endless stream of information rushing at her while tying it back to what had been happening the last few days.
And then an impossible thought struck her.
Impossible, and yet . . . she couldn’t ignore it.
She went back to the news item about the heart treatment, noted the name of the plant it had been derived from, and ran a new search around the suspended cure. This time, she added the name Wade McKinnon to the mix.
Her finger was trembling as she tapped the screen to initiate the search.
The result drove a spear through her senses that pinned her in place, and she understood.
55
We arrived back at Aero Drive feeling shell-shocked and with morale sinking fast. The body count had risen still further, a viable lead had been wiped out before we could make any use of it, and Navarro had yet again proven himself to be both lethally effective and spectacularly audacious, with seemingly no sense of a line that he would not—or could not—cross.
I followed Villaverde into the large meeting room that had become the de facto operations center since Michelle’s death three days earlier. A couple of junior agents were co-coordinating with local law enforcement, trying to see whether Navarro had left behind any kind of trail before the siege started. One was reviewing traffic camera footage; another fast-forwarding through video from the two security cameras that surveilled the main parking lot at the mall. As Villaverde sat down, he looked from one to the other. They shook their heads in turn. Nothing yet.
After a moment, Munro joined us. He didn’t look any happier than Villaverde. In fact, if anything, he appeared to be even more frustrated than I felt myself. Villaverde hit the Intercom button and asked for sandwiches and coffee for everyone, then leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes. He was clearly gathering his thoughts, but there didn’t seem to be too many of them to gather.
“The guy’s a fucking ghost,” he grumbled. “We’ve got nada, and the way things have gone over the past seventy-two hours, I don’t expect that’s going to change much.” He turned to Munro. “Anything from your side?”
Munro shook his head. “No hits. We’ve talked to everyone from Border Patrol to informants on the street. Corliss is in direct contact with the PFM,” meaning the Mexican federal investigators. “He’s called in every favor he’s owed on both sides of the fence and come up empty-handed.”
There was only one hand left to play now. We needed to give the bastard exactly what he wanted. Or at least to make it look like I was within his reach for as long as it took to tighten a strategically placed net around him.
“I don’t think we have any choice,” I offered. “We need to flush Navarro out into the open. Or at least his soldiers. We know he thinks I have the information he wants. Let him come and get it.”
“If it’s him we’re dealing with,” Villaverde put in. “We still have no solid evidence that it is.”
“It doesn’t matter who it is for this to work. We just need to agree how to stage it so that he feels confident enough to make a play for me and I have some cover.”
Villaverde’s grim expression betrayed his lack of enthusiasm for my willingness to be the bait. He was clearly frustrated as hell—and unhappy at not being able to disagree with me on this.
“Anyone have any other ideas?” I let the question hang there for a long second. “Okay. So let’s talk about how we hook him.”
Munro—always the brutal pragmatist—jumped in immediately. “News conference. That woman from the sherriff’s department can lead. Lupo. Fugate’s widow. A psychiatrist, one from the army if we can get one. You can’t sit on the panel, but they’ve got to know you’d be there for something like that. Hold it somewhere with at least three ways in and out. Ramp up the police presence at two of the three, but leave the third light to the naked eye. Then you pop out to take a call or something, he makes his move, and we spring the trap.”
Villaverde shook his head, his face wearing a look of total disbelief. I could see that his fuse had just burned all the way down to the explosive. “After what just happened? You want to put that many people in his line of sight? No way.”
It was the first time since I’d met him that he’d looked anything other than totally calm.
The door opened, but instead of coffee, the junior agent who entered was carrying a thin brown file folder, which he held out to Villaverde.
“Tox report on Eli Walker.” He handed it over, adding, “There’s a rush on the same for Ricky Torres. The sheriff’s office has already called the mayor. We should have it by the end of the day.”
As he left, Villaverde opened the folder and scanned the single sheet inside. Then he glanced pointedly at me and handed it to me.
Walker had an organic paralyzing agent in his blood. A combination of spider and lizard venom, specifically the brown widow, Latrodectus geometricus, and the Mexican beaded lizard, or Heloderma horridum of the family Helodermatidae. Plus a third neurotoxin that the lab couldn’t identify.
I chucked the file to Munro. “Now tell me it’s not El Brujo we’re dealing with.”
Munro went over the sheet and, for once, kept his mouth firmly shut.
Closely on the report’s heels, our refreshments arrived and the three of us used the well-rehearsed rituals of shaking sugar into coffee and rewrapping an overfilled ciabatta without dripping fat onto our clothes to take a step away from the case and be in our own heads for a second. I was used to these moments being almost exclusively filled with thoughts of Tess, but the person who catapulted to the front of my mind this time was Alex.
He didn’t deserve any of this.
I finished a mouthful. “I’ll go on the morning news tomorrow. Alone. They can talk it up, make a lot of noise about how they’re going to have an exclusive with the FBI agent dealing with this investigation—whatever it takes to make sure Navarro has a chance to hear about it. I’ll drive there on my own and leave on my own. Full police presence in the studio, but none outside. None that they can see, anyway. We run multiple tails. I’ll be safe till he thinks I’ve told him everything I know and I’ll be sure to keep my mouth shut before we arrive wherever it is we’re going.”
Villaverde sipped his coffee and again shook his head, but this time it was clearly in resignation.
We were all out of alternatives, and if nailing the sick bastard meant that I was walking directly into harm’s way—tribal pharmacy and organ removal included—so be it. It was still, in real terms, nothing that hadn’t already been aimed at Michelle, or Tess, or Alex, or countless others since this goddamn mess had blown up.
I was ready to do it.
After all, you could only die once, right?
56
Tess wasn’t sure what to do.
She felt hyperalert, and her pulse was raging wildly. It was like an awakening, like her mind was suddenly unchained and set free to roam through uncharted territory. She’d spent a couple of hours roaming through Stephenson’s website, and by the end of it, questions were accosting her from all sides while competing insights jostled for supremacy inside her, all of them demanding she push them through to their rightful conclusion.
She didn’t know where to start. The one question that was foremost on her mind was the one she was too scared to ask—and yet, she knew she had to do it. She wasn’t sure she could. It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t right.