Fire and Ice (30 page)

Tom sighed. “All right, then,” he said. “Come on in. It’ll break Mama Rose’s heart, but she’ll want to know.”

This time we walked across the veranda and entered the house through the front door. We found Mama Rose Brotsky sitting on a sofa in the massive living room. She had been watching her rose-planting crew with avid interest, but when I walked into the room, her face hardened.

“It’s about Marina,” she said before I ever opened my mouth. “And it’s bad news, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” I concurred. “I’m afraid it is.”

Mama Rose wept as I related my news. I found it oddly comforting to realize that someone besides Marcella’s immediate family mourned the young woman’s passing. When I finished, Mama Rose dried her tears and squared her shoulders.

“How much money was that exactly?” she asked Tom.

“Right at forty-five thousand,” he answered.

“We’ll need to write a check for her son,” Mama Rose said. “His name is Luis, right?” she asked me.

I nodded.

“No matter how Marina…Marcella…came by that money, it wasn’t ours to give away. With her gone, it needs to go to the boy.”

Nodding, Tom Wojeck left the room. He returned a short while later carrying a business-style checkbook. “What’s his name again?” Tom asked.

“Luis,” I told them. “Luis Andrade.” I spelled it out for him.

“Go ahead and make it for a full fifty,” Mama Rose said. “He’ll need it.”

When the check was written, Tom tore it out and handed it to Mama Rose. She examined it for a moment before passing it along to me.

“How old is Luis again?” Mama Rose asked.

“In high school,” I said. “Fourteen or fifteen.”

“If he wants to go on to college, that should help,” she said.

“Yes, it should,” I agreed. I folded the check and put it in my pocket. “But tell me this. According to her brother, Marcella didn’t leave Arizona until sometime last summer. She couldn’t have been here more than a few months before she died. How did you happen to meet her?”

“That’s easy,” Mama Rose said. “I’m the whole reason she came here in the first place. Working girls from all over the country know about me. When they’re finally serious about getting off the streets and out of the business, Mama Rose Brotsky is often the only game in town—the only game in any town.”

I would have asked more about that, but my phone rang just then. I was glad to hear Joanna Brady’s voice until I heard what she had to say.

“What the hell do you mean, he’s taken off from the hotel?” I demanded. “He doesn’t have a car. Where would he go?”

“He rented a car,” she said. “And I think he may be on his way to find someone named Miguel Rios who lives in a town called Gig Harbor.”

“Crap,” I said. “Why the hell would he pull a stupid stunt like that?”

But I already knew the answer. Jaime was on the trail of the man responsible for his sister’s death, and he didn’t give a damn about possible consequences. That’s how young guys think—that they’re invincible and that might makes right. With guys like Jaime, the painful lessons taught by the passing of time—the ones
people like Tommy Wojeck and I have already learned—have yet to sink in.

“He isn’t armed,” I said. “He flew up with carry-on luggage only.”

But after a moment’s thought I knew that idea was bogus. The last time I saw Jaime Carbajal, he hadn’t had a car, either. If he could get himself wheels, he could lay hands on a gun.

“Okay,” I said. “I’m on my way. I’ll need a description of his rental car along with license information.”

“I don’t have that right now,” she told me. “But I’ll have it by the time you call me back.”

I called Mel as soon as I was out of the house. “You’re going to have to cancel that mani-pedi after all,” I said. “I need you to meet me in Gig Harbor.”

“Why?”

“Because Jaime Carbajal has gone off the reservation,” I said. “He’s on the warpath and looking for Miguel Rios.”

“He never should have been a part of that first interview,” Mel said. “We both knew better. We should have put a stop to it.”

That was true, of course. It was also too little too late.

WHEN JOANNA CHANGED CLOTHES, HER FIRST WARDROBE CHOICE
that early April afternoon would have been a pair of comfy jeans and a sweatshirt, but the way things seemed to be going, she settled instead for a freshly laundered uniform. On her way back out the door, she stopped in the office long enough to grab Derek Higgins’s memory card out of her home computer.

She was backing her Crown Victoria out of the garage when Agent in Charge Bruce Delahany called her back.

“What the hell is going on down there?” he demanded. “I thought you told me a little while ago that you were working on a case over in Bowie. Now you say it’s Washington State. Which is it?”

“Both,” Joanna said. “The answer would be both.”

“Who’s going to see Rios? And why?”

“Jaime Carbajal is one of my homicide detectives. His sister, Marcella, was found murdered a little over a week ago. Jaime is
under the impression that Rios may have been responsible for what happened.”

Joanna’s comment was followed by a long stark silence. It went on long enough that she began to wonder if she had lost the connection.

“Hello,” she said. “Agent Delahany, are you there?”

“I’m here,” Delahany said at last. “Are you telling me Marcella Andrade is dead?”

It wasn’t the response Joanna had expected, and she didn’t remember having mentioned Marcella’s last name. That meant the agent in charge of the DEA’s Tucson office was in on all this.

“When did it happen?” Delahany asked. “Where?”

“Somewhere outside Seattle,” Joanna said. “In the mountains east of there. She had been dead for months with her body buried under the snow. They found her last week when the snow melted. The M.E. up there made the identification day before yesterday using computerized dental records.”

“Damn,” Delahany muttered. “I kept hoping like hell that she’d made it, but they got to her, too. Damn!”

“What do you mean, ‘got to her, too’?” Joanna echoed. “And who is ‘they’?”

“The cartel,” Delahany said. “The Cervantes Cartel. Who do you think I meant? They apparently have people everywhere, including inside the California State prison system. That’s why I pulled the task force out of the field and back into my office. I wanted to be able to control who had access to what we were doing and how. I didn’t want people to know where we were getting our information.”

“And where was that?” Joanna asked.

“Marco, of course,” Delahany replied. “Who else? The intel he gave us was invaluable. We heard rumors that the cartel had wised
up about his turning against them. Then we heard rumors that they were planning a hit on him down in Lancaster. That’s why we moved him to Wild Horse Mesa.”

“In hopes of taking him out of harm’s way?”

“Yes,” Delahany said. “You can see how well that worked out for us and for him. They still managed to get him. Marco had told us that he was worried about Marcella’s safety, but by then she had already gone underground. Since we couldn’t locate her, I didn’t think they’d be able to find her, either.”

Wrong again, Joanna thought. “I still find it difficult to believe that Marco Andrade was working with you.”

“Well, he was,” Delahany declared. “The information he gave us was just a starting point. We’ve been building on it and putting the pieces together for months now. We’ve been planning a major takedown. In the next few weeks we expect to hand down a series of indictments that will take key players out of the Cervantes organization all over the country. And that’s what your detective—what’s his name again?—may be putting at risk.”

“Carbajal,” Joanna said. “Jaime Carbajal.”

“If he happens to spook one of them, he could spook them all. By the time we have our warrants in hand, the crooks will have disappeared.”

“Is Miguel Rios part of all this?”

“Of course he’s part of it,” Delahany said impatiently. “Miguel Rios is a major player. From what we’ve been able to learn, he pretty much runs the cartel’s prostitution interests in the Pacific Northwest. He also has the reputation of being the organization’s chief enforcer. Never caught and never indicted—up till now.”

Joanna thought about that. Wasn’t that what Beau and his partner were investigating—a whole series of dead prostitutes in Washington State?

“What do you mean, enforcer?” she asked aloud. “I’ve heard that the Washington State Attorney General’s office is investigating a series of murders involving prostitutes. Might this Miguel Rios be involved in those?”

“If they were his girls and they stepped out of line? Absolutely,” Delahany replied. “I’m telling you, Rios is a very dangerous guy and we’re close to shutting him down, but we can’t afford to have a Lone Ranger trying to take him out prematurely. Please, Sheriff Brady, talk to your detective. Ask him to back off. Beg him to back off. You can tell him from me that I swear we’ll nail Rios and his pals eventually, but we need some time—a few more days. A week at the outside. But right now, today, we’re not ready.”

Delahany’s words made sense, but Jaime Carbajal was already in motion. If he’d made up his mind to go after Rios, Joanna doubted there was anyone on the planet who could dissuade him.

“All right,” she told Delahany at last. “I’m not making any promises, but I’ll see what I can do. In the meantime, I need to make another call.”

But Agent Delahany wasn’t ready to hang up. “About Marcella,” he said. “Where exactly is the body?”

“In Ellensburg, Washington,” Joanna said. “In the morgue at the Kittitas County medical examiner’s office. I believe the remains are due to be released on Monday.”

“Will the family be bringing the body back to Arizona?” Delahany asked.

“Yes,” Joanna answered. “That’s why Jaime flew up there yesterday—to bring her home to Bisbee for burial. Why?”

“Regardless of what happens with the brother and Miguel Rios, please let the family know that my people and I deeply regret their loss. You can tell them from me that we’ll help with bringing Marcella home. It’s the least we can do.”

Joanna was surprised to hear the sound of genuine regret in his voice.

“All right,” she said. “I’ll let them know.”

“And one more thing,” Delahany added. “About that homicide situation over in Bowie—the one your guys are working on?”

“The Lester Attwood case?” Joanna asked.

“Yes, that’s the one,” Delahany said. “Once the dust settles on all this other stuff, you can let your detectives know that I’m pretty sure we have some surveillance videos that will help you sort out what happened there.”

“As in legible surveillance videos?” Joanna asked.

“Of course they’re legible,” Delahany declared. “Why wouldn’t they be? It’s my belief that it pays to buy the very best.”

That’s something the Savages have yet to learn, Joanna thought.

“All right,” she said. “Detective Ernie Carpenter is my lead investigator on the Attwood case. I’ll have him be in touch.”

With that she ended the call.

I had awakened that morning in a strange bed in a Best Western in Ellensburg. If you had told me that a few hours later I’d be heading for Gig Harbor and chasing a fellow cop across the Tacoma Narrows Bridge, I would have said you were full of it.

By the way, I’m not exactly wild about the Tacoma Narrows Bridge, and my jaundiced opinion has nothing to do with the fact that it’s now a toll bridge. My dislike goes all the way back to the time when I was a little kid growing up in Seattle. I was born only a few short years after the original Tacoma Narrows Bridge, otherwise known as Galloping Gertie, crashed into the drink. The bridge had been open for only a few months when it started sway
ing uncontrollably and then collapsed during a fierce windstorm during the winter of 1940. It took ten years to build a replacement. When that one opened in 1950, newsreels in theaters replayed the flapping demise of Galloping Gertie over and over. For me, seeing that film footage left a lasting impression.

These days and as someone who crosses Lake Washington’s floating bridges on a daily basis, I’m well aware that they can sink, too—especially if you allow water to rush inside the hollow concrete pontoons, as a careless workman did on I-90 back in the early nineties. But at least if one of the floating bridges sinks, whoever happens to be on it at the time won’t be hundreds of feet in the air when it goes down. If I had to choose, I’d rather swim than fall.

That’s what I was thinking when my phone rang. I thought it would be Mel calling to let me know if she was ahead of me or behind me on the bridge. But the caller wasn’t Mel.

“It’s me again,” Joanna Brady announced. “It turns out Marcella’s husband, Marco Andrade, was a snitch. He was delivering the goods on some bad guys to the DEA.”

“The Cervantes Cartel?” I asked. “Out of someplace in Mexico?”

“So you know about them?” Joanna asked.

“Only as much as Jaime Carbajal told me this morning.”

“Anyway,” Joanna continued, “it sounds like the cartel found out about Marco’s participation and took him out. That probably explains why they came after Marcella, too.”

“Jaime told me about the cartel,” I said, “but I doubt he had a clue about Marco turning on them. Where did you hear that?”

“From Bruce Delahany, the DEA agent in charge in Tucson,” she answered. “They’ve been putting together a massive takedown that’s supposed to happen within the next few weeks. Unless…”

“Unless Jaime screws it up?” I asked.

“Exactly,” Joanna replied. “Delahany is afraid that if Jaime spooks Rios prematurely, a lot of the other people involved will go to ground, but that’s his concern. I’m a lot more worried about Jaime. I can’t imagine him being pushed so far that he’d even think about going after Rios on his own.”

“I can,” I replied. “There are times when revenge sounds a whole lot better than whatever the justice system might get around to dishing out. Think about it. Jaime’s sister is dead and, most likely, so is the triggerman, the guy who actually killed her. From Jaime’s point of view it probably looks as though the guy who’s ultimately responsible for his sister’s death has a good chance of walking.”

“But what about the other cases?” Joanna asked. “The ones you’re working on, those other dead prostitutes? According to Delahany, Miguel Rios runs the cartel’s prostitution interests in your part of the country. He’s also supposedly the cartel’s chief enforcer. So maybe if one of his girls doesn’t toe the line, the next thing you know, she’s gone.”

I could see where this was going, and suddenly I felt like we were on to something. Maybe our dead prostitutes were actually Miguel Rios’s dead prostitutes, and if they had been imported by the cartel—smuggled across the border and brought north, like the girls Lupe Rivera had told us about—no wonder no one in this country had ever bothered reporting them missing.

During my momentary lapse in attention, Joanna had gone right on talking. “With any kind of luck we’ll be wrong,” she was saying when I tuned back into the conversation. “You’ll get there and Jaime won’t be. But I did ask Tom Hadlock to check with the car rental agency. Jaime is driving a blue Chevy Cobalt with a GPS. Do you want the license number?”

“I can’t write it down right now. If you could text it to me…” There was a buzz in my ear. “Sorry,” I said. “Another call’s coming in. Gotta go.”

This time it was Mel on the phone. “I’m just coming up on the bridge.”

“Good,” I told her. “You’re only a couple of minutes behind me.”

“Wait for me at the Gig Harbor exit,” she said. “I’ll catch up with you there.”

I stopped on the far side of the first gas station I saw. Then I got out, went around to the trunk, and dragged out my Kevlar vest. It was while I was putting it on that I noticed for the first time that it had stopped raining—completely. The sky was clearing. The sun was out. It had turned into a bright spring day.

A beautiful day, I thought. Too beautiful for someone to die.

Because if Jaime Carbajal had come to Gig Harbor bent on taking out Miguel Rios, it seemed likely to me that someone was bound to die. Maybe even me.

What if that one trip to Disneyland is all I’ll ever have? I wondered. What if that’s all Kayla remembers about me—that I took her to Disneyland once and got sick on the teacups?

Once inside the office, Joanna went straight to the bull pen, where she told Ernie he needed to be in touch with the folks from the DEA for information on the Lester Attwood homicide.

“They may try to put you off,” she said, “but let them know that we’re going to be dogging their heels until they give us what we need.”

“What about me?” Deb asked as Ernie reached for his phone.

“For you I have another whole problem,” Joanna said. “Take a look at what’s on this and then we’ll talk.” She plucked the mem
ory card out of her pocket and tossed it to her detective, who caught it in midair.

“Great catch, by the way,” Joanna added. “Not just the memory card—the bridal bouquet, too.”

Looking embarrassed, Deb shook her head. “Catching that bouquet was a freak accident,” she said. “It was coming straight at me. If I hadn’t caught it, it would have hit me full in the face. Trust me, I have zero intention of getting married again. I tried it once. I’m not very good at it.”

Joanna disappeared into her office. The place was unnaturally quiet. There were no ringing telephones. No people talking. She wanted desperately to call Beau and find out what the hell was going on with Jaime, but she didn’t dare interrupt. If he was caught up in a life-and-death situation, the last thing he needed was a ringing cell phone.

When Deb appeared in Joanna’s doorway a few minutes later, her face was decidedly pale, and she was once again holding the memory card.

“These pictures are awful,” she said. “Where did you get them?”

“From Norm Higgins,” Joanna answered. “From the mortuary. They were taken by his grandson, Derek. While Norm and his sons were out of town, Alma DeLong evidently showed up with another dead client and bullied him into cremating the remains in a hell of a hurry. Once you see the photos, it’s no wonder she was in such a rush.”

“What do we do now?” Deb asked.

“I want you to go see Bobby Fletcher,” Joanna said. “Take your computer and that memory card with you so you can show Bobby the photos. It’s one thing for him to put his foot down about exhuming his mother out of respect for her or even because he’s at war with his bossy sister. But if Bobby realizes that exhuming his
mother’s body might prevent some other poor patient’s suffering, I think he’ll step up and give us the go-ahead.”