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A lantern lit up the entire enclosed space. Cement floor, cement walls, cement ceiling. Another ping of water slipped down her face from the leaking pipe overhead. This place... She’d been here before. There was a slight charred smell sticking in her lungs.
The bomber leaned forward, letting the small source of light catch one side of his face.
Recognition sucker punched her square in the chest. “You.”
“Me.” There wasn’t any pride in that aged expression. No sense of victory in his voice. Just a statement of fact.
“I don’t understand.” Shaking her head, Jocelyn tried to make every piece of this investigation fit into place in mere seconds. “The reports... They all said you were dead. That there was no way you’d survived that car bomb.”
Andrew Trevino. The Ponderosa chief of police—alive and well—settled back in his chair. He’d aged significantly, or the months since his so-called death had been far crueler than she could imagine. Scar tissue shadowed across the backs of his hands. The skin hadn’t just aged but smoothed into rivers in some places and valleys in others. Chemical burns. Nitroglycerin?
“Reports can say a lot of things and leave out others depending on who’s writing it,” he said. “It’s all a matter of perspective, don’t you think?”
“How?” Jocelyn pressed one hand flat against the wall at her back. Looking for something—anything—that might help get through the zip ties. Though without the use of one arm she feared she was only drawing out the inevitable. Still, she wasn’t going to let her body be used to spark a war between the cartel and her team and Alpine Valley PD. She rushed to resurrect the details of that incident, a bombing of a chief of police’s vehicle. Authorities had attributed credit to the Ghost. “You built the bomb and blew up your vehicle, using Marc De Leon’s recipe. You faked your own death.”
“You military brats are a lot smarter than I expected, especially one assigned logistics.” Trevino hauled himself out of the chair. For a man closing in on his late fifties, he was surprisingly agile. No hints of wear and tear. Then again, one needed to be in tip-top shape to take on an entire drug cartel.
“Am I supposed to take that as a compliment?” Jocelyn took advantage of whatever he was doing on the other side of the room. Raising her wrists as one toward what felt like a mass of cement at her lower back, she clenched her jaw against a scream. Her abductor had removed her sling and strong-armed her wounded arm behind her back while she’d been knocked out cold. And now the pain had immobilized her altogether.
“Take it however you want. Doesn’t matter to me.” He stepped outside of the pool of white light given off by the electric lantern. “Not much does anymore.”
He was stalling. To what end? Didn’t matter. If she had any chance of avoiding a war, it was because she got herself out of this insane frame job.
Jocelyn rolled her lips between her teeth and bit down to pull her brain’s attention away from her shoulder. Sweat combined with whatever was dripping from the leaking pipe above and soaked into her shirt’s collar. “You wanted authorities to believe Sangre por Sangre had ordered Marc De Leon to kill you.”
“That was my first mistake.” Trevino came back into the weak circle of light, though her senses still weren’t adjusting to make out what he’d brought back with him. “Believing one soldier’s arrest could make a difference. Believing I could inflict any kind of damage against an organization like that, but it wasn’t enough.”
A thread of regret laced his words. Similar to the way Baker’s voice had changed when he’d trusted her with the loss he’d suffered at the hands of the cartel. Her insides twisted to the point it was hard to take her next breath. “They took someone from you. The woman Alpine PD hasn’t been able to identify.”
“That’s what the cartel does, doesn’t it? They take and they take until there’s nothing left and nobody willing to stand up and fight against them. They spread their misery and violence into whatever town isn’t strong enough to fight back with claims they’re offering protection against bastards just like them, but it’s all a lie.” Trevino dropped his chin to his chest, staring down into whatever item he had in his hands. Still impossible to make out. “My daughter was one of the first to speak out against them when they started selling their poison in the high school. All she wanted to was to make our town safe enough to raise my grandkids while keeping an eye on me. Always said I was no spring chicken.”
Dread pooled at the base of Jocelyn’s spine. “Marc De Leon was sent to kill her.”
“No. He didn’t just kill her.” The grief and sorrow in his voice was gone, replaced with a hardness she expected of a serial bomber instead of a chief of police desperate to protect the people he cared about. “He tortured her. For hours, right in front of me. He’d beaten me senseless. I couldn’t do anything to help her except hear her beg me to save her. And after De Leon had strapped an explosive device packed into a Kevlar vest to her and detonated it, he said he’d come for my grandkids next if I kept coming for them.”
Jocelyn pressed her skull into the wall behind her to keep her senses engaged in the moment. Investigators would’ve known about his daughter’s death at the time of the bombing that had supposedly killed the chief. Why hadn’t it come up in the past few days? The answer solidified. Because both his and his daughter’s deaths had been blamed on the cartel. “So you faked your death.”
“Victims die every day at the hands of Sangre por Sangre. The prosecutor’s office can’t keep up, but the truth is they can’t do a damn thing to get justice for my daughter or others like her.” Trevino took his seat in front of her.
Baker’s sister infiltrated her thoughts, and suddenly Jocelyn was seeing Alpine Valley’s chief of police in front of her. Beaten by the years of injustice, desperate to do the right thing, to make the cartel pay. Her heart hurt at the idea, but there were too many similarities between the man in front of her and the one she’d lost her heart to.
The words bubbled up her throat. “But the death of a police chief would get their notice—only Fire and Rescue never recovered your body. So you set about framing the cartel for as many crimes as you could. First with destroying evidence in Marc De Leon’s murder case. Then by trying to add Baker Halsey’s name to their victim roster.”
“I have to admit, I didn’t expect Halsey to team up with you, though.” The chief’s silhouette shifted, losing its caved-in appearance in the limited light. “You’ve certainly made my job a lot more difficult than I expected. I mean, you two just refuse to die, but then I had another idea. All this time I’ve been exhausting energy and resources trying to take down Sangre por Sangre alone when there is a high-skilled, highly funded organization equal to the very cartel I want gone.”
“Socorro.” Her mouth dried despite the building humidity inside the windowless room. “And Marc De Leon? You killed him for what he did to your daughter.”
“Son of a bitch got a promotion to lieutenant after that night,” he said. “Took me weeks to find him. Thousands of dollars paid in bribes. Nobody wanted to talk. They called him the Ghost. All I had to go off of was pieces of the explosive device in my daughter’s chest cavity, but my patience paid off.”
Jocelyn strained to angle her wrists against the protrusion from the wall, but her shoulder wouldn’t budge. “You found him.”
“The bastard didn’t even know who I was. Though to be fair, I didn’t give him a whole lot of time to recognize me seeing as I was there to kill him.” A hint of giddiness contorted the man’s voice. And right then she saw the difference between him and Baker. The man she’d fallen in love with wouldn’t have let his revenge get this far. “I had everything set up perfectly. Then you and Chief Halsey had to spoil my fun.”
Her shoulder ached at the memory of taking that bullet just before the bomb went off. “Right. Because bringing an entire cliffside crashing onto a small town is fun.”
“I didn’t mean for that to happen,” he said. “But I wasn’t going to let it distract me from what I was there to do.”
“So this is the part where I come in? You leave my body for my team to find. They gather all their federal allies and exact revenge against the cartel on my behalf.” The edge of the first zip tie caught on the lip protruding from the wall, and Jocelyn shoved her weight down on her wrists. “Which means you’d have to leave my body somewhere that implicates Sangre por Sangre.Making this the cartel’s abandoned headquarters.”
