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He eyed me wearily. ‘You want to get killed?’ he asked, abandoning the suitcase midway through zipping it up. There was a baby in there. Fuck. The room was starting to spin and I wanted to be sick.
‘Please don’t close it,’ I whispered.
‘What the fuck is wrong with you?’ Guillermo snapped. ‘You want to get him out and read him a fuckin’ bedtime story before we put him in the ground? He’s DEAD.’
I knew it was illogical, but . . . ‘If you zip it, he won’t be able to get any air.’
‘Get in the car,’ Guillermo hissed. ‘Now. Kid’s cold. He’s been dead for hours. Days, even. He ain’t ever gonna need fucking air.’
‘Wait,’ I stalled, desperate. ‘Why are we going in the car? Where are we going?’
Guillermo looked like he was about to rip my head off. ‘We gotta get rid of this, Ana. Your DNA’s all over it. Mine, too. If this is a set-up, then they set us up good. No cleaner purification than fire.’
‘We’re going to set him on fire?’
Guillermo made the sign of the cross and murmured some silent prayer to the ceiling. ‘Crematorium.’
Oh.
‘Why would they set us up?’ I asked, bile rising in my throat. I put a hand to my chest and made a gagging sound. ‘Guillermo, why would they set us up?’
He glared at me as he keyed in the combination for the front door lock. ‘Maybe they think we’ve been disloyal.’
I couldn’t be certain, but I was pretty sure the tone in his voice was accusation.
I thought about that as Guillermo yanked the front door open with his right hand, the suitcase in his left. I thought about all of the ways I’d been disloyal to the cartel, and there were plenty. A carefully constructed web of deceit. I thought of the blood on my own hands, the blood on John’s, the sins we’d indulged in, both collectively and apart.
I followed Guillermo from the apartment, unable to speak, unable to rip the image of the poor child from my mind.
CHAPTER THREE
LINDSAY
Agent Lindsay Price was eyeing a plate of mystery meat when a call came through on his cellphone. He was at the FBI’s training facility in Quantico giving a lecture on interrogation techniques, and briefly considered going back into the cafeteria kitchen and interrogating the chef until they told him what he’d be puking up in about three hours.
In the end, he was relieved that he’d gotten the call, for two reasons.
One, because even airplane food was better than this shit, and he’d be calling his day short to high-tail it back to Los Angeles.
Two, because of the reason he was being summoned back to LA.
A body had washed up on the banks of the Los Angeles River – the part that was actually flowing, way up near Long Beach – badly decomposed and virtually unidentifiable.
Except they’d already run a preliminary swab of DNA sample through CODIS and come up with a match.
A DEA agent by the name of Alexandra Baxter.
* * *
Eight gruelling hours of cabs, turbulence, shitty plane food and LA traffic later, and with a Venti Americano in hand from the Starbucks inside LAX, Lindsay was standing on the edge of the Los Angeles River, watching as police divers searched the bay for anything that might provide clues as to how this woman had come to her end. It was already night back on the East Coast and Lindsay was tired, but giddy, at the same time. He’d been tracking Baxter and her crooked partner, Christopher Murphy, for over a year, their roles in a wider web of corruption and compliance with the Il Sangue drug cartel something he was determined to crack. The problem was, the further he dug into the case, the wider the hole got, filled with tip-offs and trafficked women and missing persons that stretched across the globe. It was a case that saw him come up against brick walls every single day, and so this body was like someone finally taking a sledgehammer through one of those walls and saying, ‘Here, step on into this crazy shit.’
There’d been no leads, save for that one woman. Mariana Rodriguez. She was definitely involved in the bigger picture somehow. Lindsay had spent countless hours combing through her life, her history. Had it not been for the frequent visits Christopher Murphy made to her apartment in the weeks before his death, Lindsay wouldn’t have even known she existed.
But she did exist.
And her father had once worked for the cartel, many years ago, before he and the rest of his family turned up dead in a house fire, their hands and feet still bound in death, despite the flames demolishing everything else. Even the walls of their small house in Villanueva hadn’t survived the fire, but the bindings on their hands and feet had. A painful way to die.
Drowning was meant to be much more peaceful, but the after-effects on a corpse could be horrific. Lindsay scanned the river’s edge, locating a white tent that was no doubt shrouding the body in question.
