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‘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 wasaccusation.
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, despitethe 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.
He made his way over to the tent, the afternoon sun warming his face. Despite being November, it was like a spring day in Los Angeles, much different to chilly Virginia, where he’d been hours earlier. He didn’t walk too quickly as he approached the plastic tent the medical examiner had erected. Nobody needed to see what he was about to see a moment sooner than was absolutely necessary.
He was already on good terms with Kathryn Donovan, the city’s Chief Medical Examiner, having worked many cases together over the years he’d served with the FBI’s organised crime division in LA. Squatting beside the body, she greeted him with a raise of her eyebrows, the rest of her pale face obscured by the surgical mask tied tightly to her head.
‘I figured you’d be at the morgue by now,’ Lindsay said by way of greeting.
Dr Donovan tilted her head, stripping her gloves and mask off and dropping them into a makeshift trash can as she stood. ‘That for me?’ she asked, practically prising the lukewarm coffee from Lindsay’s hand and pouring a slug into her mouth. Lindsay watched, amused, as she made a face and let the liquid pour back out of her pursed lips and into the cup.
‘That’s terrible,’ she said, handing the now useless brew back to Lindsay as she motioned an assistant for fresh gloves.She snapped hers on before handing a pair to Lindsay.No face mask?he wanted to ask her, but didn’t dare. He tossed his beloved Starbucks cup in the trash and pulled his own set of gloves on, finally looking head-on at the long-lost body of Alexandra Baxter.
It wasn’t a pretty sight.
‘Guess she’s not been sunning herself in the Virgin Islands like we thought,’ Lindsay mused, standing near enough to Kathryn that their shoulders almost touched. It was close quarters in a small tent like this.
‘Nope,’ Kathryn said beside him. ‘And by the way, the only reason we’re not back at the morgue already is because we’ve been waiting on you. So thank you. I now get to spend all dayandall night with this delightfully perplexing young woman.’
Lindsay was grateful for the small talk. It distracted from the grisly image at his feet.
Allie had been a pretty girl in life, but death had stripped that beauty away. Her long red hair was missing large chunks, and her face looked as if it had melted like a candle left in the midday sun. Features flattened, merging into one another, lips pulled back over teeth that looked entirely inhuman from the damage the water and elements had done. The clothes that still clung to her body had fused with her skin, and one of her feet was gone. Somebody might’ve removed it prior to her death, but more likely the fish or some sudden impact would have taken it clean off underwater.
