Amanda's Story (28 page)

A vision of Raul clutching his chest and falling into Adegbite's flower garden raced through Angel's head. “I'm gonna watch you die slowly, maricon,” he tried to scream, but the words caught in his dry throat. He tried again as he heard a body scrambling near him, but the best he could produce was an unintelligible rasping sound. He rolled back on to his side and saw Adegbite above him, spinning his head around wildly while cradling his right arm.

“I know it's you, bitch,” the old man screamed, and Angel looked for the bitch, but they were alone.

The pinche idiota is yelling at ghosts,
Diaz thought as he began to drag himself towards Adegbite. “I'm going to cut your balls off and make you eat them,” Angel whispered. “Then I'm going …” he paused his diatribe as his right hand slid along the length of a large kitchen knife. The blade was covered in dried blood, and somehow he knew it had come from his mutilated hand. “Yo cago en la leche de tu puta madre.”

Angel reached a leg of the patio table just as Adegbite stumbled into it. The old man twirled in place as if someone was behind him. Angel pulled himself to his knees, and just for an instant the world faded to grey. “Fuerza. Fuerza,” he began reciting his work-out mantra, and he found himself standing with a knife in his one good hand, facing the broad, unprotected back of Eldridge Adegbite. The old man began to scream at the invisible bitch again, and Angel buried the knife, then pulled it out and stabbed Adegbite a second time.

“I got you, pendejo,” Diaz whispered in the old man's ear. “You thought you could fuck with me,” and Diaz stabbed Eldridge a third time. He fumbled with the knife handle but didn't have the strength to recover it, and they both fell to the floor. He tried to sit up but fell across the gasping psychiatrist. He rolled onto his back and saw an angel bathed in golden light standing over him.

“Madre Maria,” he said and reached for her.

“He's gone,” Randi Garner said as an introduction.

“Who's gone?” Greg Flynn answered, balancing the phone on his shoulder as he brushed his teeth.

“Diaz. The Pueblo County DA signed off on the search warrant last night and they went in this morning, but the place was empty. No guards and no Diaz.”

A whole lexicon of words he would never say out loud raced through his mind. He put down his toothbrush and wiped his face of tooth paste. “Somebody tipped him off,” he concluded. A golden opportunity wasted.

“It's possible. I really don't believe that it took them three days to approve a simple search warrant.”

“Did they recover anything useful?”

“Apparently a great deal. Computers, ledgers, bank records, just about everything was on site except the man himself. Pretty strange, don't you think?”

“I do. Even with a few minutes warning, he could have at least destroyed some of it.” Greg was silent for a moment. “You think someone took him out?”

“I don't have a good feel for what goes on in Pueblo. For someone to take out Diaz and his entire security detail, they would need an awful lot of firepower.” It was unlikely in the extreme that such an operation could be run in Colorado Springs without it becoming front page news.

“Anything on forensics?” Greg was grasping now; Angel Diaz was gone and would probably never be heard from again.

“Nothing. No bullets, blood, or bodies. Maybe they all just got homesick and went back to Mexico.”

“Yeah, I'm sure he's sitting on a beach in Cancun at this very minute.”

“Sorry, Greg. I will talk with you later.” Garner hung up.

“Damn!” Greg yelled loud enough to pull Lisa out of a deep sleep.

“What's the matter?” she called from the bedroom, her voice full of early morning alarm.

“Sorry. Just something at work.” He opened the bathroom door and saw his sleepy wife sitting up in bed, her short hair pointing in several different directions and her face puffy. She blinked her eyes at the intruding light. “Oops, sorry again,” he said, and he closed the door. “I'll be out of here in a few.”

“Please don't forget again to call Ted Alam,” she said in a sleepy voice, and he could imagine hearing her head hit the pillow. Ted was a friend and occasional co-worker. He was normally stationed in the FBI field office in Denver, but for the last few months had been working out of Greg's office.

“You really want to push this,” he said from behind the closed door.

“Yes, I really want to push this. He likes her and she seems to like him. I don't want Amanda to be alone.” Her sleepy voice was gone, and her I-will-not-be-moved-from-this voice was in full force.

“Doomed to failure,” he said to his reflection.

That had been the high point of Greg's day. His unit averaged a little over one homicide a month, along with the usual load of property and other forms of violent crime. This morning brought their third murder in four weeks. The first two had been cleared reasonably quickly; a man killed his girlfriend, and then—to even out the cosmic balance sheet—a wife stabbed her husband. Fairly easy, but the legalities demanded dozens of man-hours to be expended upon witnesses, forensics, and most importantly, paperwork. When this morning's call came in, Greg was just settling into his office desk and found nobody left to take the case aside from himself.

“You aren't going to like this one, chief,” Courtney Pendleton, the dispatcher, said before handing him a yellow sheet of paper, a throwback to the original police blotter days. “It's at Memorial. A baby.”

His head dropped as he scanned the form. “Okay,” was all he could say. A devout Catholic, Greg was strongly against capital punishment, except in situations that involved children. “Five months.” He shook his head after reading the victim's age.

Thirty minutes later he was sitting across from a drained and angry neurosurgeon. “Any way this could have been an accident?” He asked for a tragedy rather than a crime.

The doctor shook his head. “None. Baby had a left parietal and right frontal skull fracture, separated just about the width of an adult hand. Then there's the fractured femur in a child who can't … couldn't walk yet.” He took a sip from his can of Coke.

“The mother reports that she picked the baby up from his father's house last night and that he was already asleep.”

“Or in a coma,” the surgeon scoffed.

“She says that she woke the baby up and fed him around seven …”

“Whoa! She said that she woke him up and fed him?”

“Yes.” Greg rechecked his notes. “‘He took a bottle around seven, and that's when I saw the bruise.' That's her statement.”

“She's lying. Whatever caused those bruises caused the skull fractures and the subdural hematoma. No way this kid ever woke up and took a bottle.”

“Subdural hematoma?” Greg questioned.

“Blood clot between the skull and the brain.” He shook his head and stood up. “So Mom says Dad did this last night. What a piece of work.” He drained his can and waited for Greg to stand. “Now I have to go tell those parents that one of them has killed their child.”

Greg would wait at least an hour before interviewing the parents. He'd start with the father, who was alone in a family room, probably praying for everything to be all right, and moments away from learning that nothing was right. The mother was in a larger family room, surrounded by pastoral care, outsiders, and hospital nurses, all trying to help her through a process that she herself had probably initiated. “Which way to the operating rooms?” he asked a passing orderly.

It took less than half an hour to review the hospital records and view the baby's body. He had called a forensic team to take official photographs, more out of routine than need. The skull x-rays and CT scan told the story better than any photograph. He stared at the boy's tiny, perfect fingers and knew that they would haunt his sleep, but he couldn't turn away. Minutes passed and he continued to stare at those pale fingers and their delicate nails, avoiding the rest of him, which had been desecrated by violence. Tiny little Andrew Watts would never fit in Greg's mental closet, and he accepted that. This life, no matter how small, would not be forgotten.

“We need to take him, Detective,” a voice said. A small black woman who he vaguely connected to the coroner's office tapped his shoulder. He turned away quickly after she unrolled an adult-size black body bag, and tried not to question whether the bags came in different sizes.

He took the stairs back to the ER, taking each step slowly. He paused at the last landing, needing even the briefest respite from the harsh realities of his job.

The murder of Andrew Watts was front page news, and the talking heads seemed to be on every television channel and radio station spewing facts and figures about the rise in domestic violence in a down economy. The entire country demanded an arrest, but the District Attorney, who had weighed in personally, waffled. Medical certainty had a habit of becoming somewhat murky under cross-examination, and without supporting testimony or forensics, the case against either parent was at best shaky.

“Day three of the ‘Andrew Watch,'” Linda Stout said as she approached Greg, who was busy scraping the grill in his backyard. The Flynns were naturally gregarious individuals and it didn't take much of an excuse for them to throw a party, only now it had the festive atmosphere of a wake.

“Did you see the news this morning?” It was Sunday, and Colorado Springs had taken a hit in the hometown newspaper editorial pages and then again on the Sunday morning network news programs.

“Weren't we the toast of the town a few weeks back?” Linda was Greg's only female detective. Tall, with the physique of a long distance runner, she had the ability to always make Greg smile.

“The DA has got to get off the fence, Stick.” Greg Flynn was the only person alive who could get away with calling her “Stick.” “There's no forensics outside of the medical, and there are no witnesses.”

“Did Diaz ever turn up?” Linda had been taking a course in Denver for the last week and was out of the loop.

“Nope. We are definitely going nowhere fast.” He hung up the wire brush and turned to Linda, who handed him a bottle. “A beer. For me!”

“Lisa thought you could use one.”

“Well, it's five o'clock somewhere,” Greg said just before he noticed the approach of Linda's secret guest of honor. “Have you met Ted Alam?” Linda turned and offered her hand to a tall, dark-haired man in his mid-thirties. “Ted works for the FBI, and their agents have been ordered by the Director himself to wear suits to all backyard barbecues.”

Ted grinned. “Sorry about that; I had to run up to Denver this morning. Hi Linda.” He shook her hand, although introductions were hardly necessary as they had shared an office for the past month. He turned to Greg. “I've got something for you,” he said in a slightly conspiratorial tone.

“Something besides a beer I hope,” Greg said as he raised his bottle.

“Pueblo PD found Angel Diaz, or at least what's left of him,” Ted said. Both Greg and Linda started. Ted shook his head and laughed. “You're not going to believe where…”

“Hi sweetheart …” Greg cut him off. Amanda skirted Ted and curled under Greg's outstretched arm. “You caught us. We were talking shop.” He gave her a squeeze.

“I won't tell Lisa, this time. What's up? The baby?”

Ted looked at Greg and then quickly at Amanda. “It's okay, Ted. She's definitely heard worse,” Greg assured him.

“He was at the neighbor's. They had a zoning issue over a fence, and from what Pueblo gathered, it got pretty nasty. Both dead, but here's the strange part: the old guy tortured Diaz. Cuts off his fingers and toes before Diaz manages to stab the guy. They both died four or five days ago.”

Greg stood dumbfounded. “What?” he finally said as the shock wore off and the inconsistencies began to surface. “Angel Diaz, drug lord and murderer, gets tortured by a neighbor, over a fence? That's like Pablo Escobar getting killed by the pizza delivery boy over a tip.”

“Believe it or not. In fact, the way we heard about it was because the old guy had assumed the identity of a psychiatrist who died back in the nineties. Truth is stranger than fiction.”

“Cheese it guys; here comes the cops,” Greg said in his best James Cagney as Lisa approached.

“NO WORK! You may talk about sports, the weather, the President, even religion, but no work.” She stood behind the four of them. “Greg, you have hamburger patties to make, and Linda, you can help.”

“Well, let's not let my wife's completely transparent motives delay us from pressing meat into patties, Linda.” Greg released Amanda, took Linda's hand, and followed Lisa back into the house.

“Well, that was a little awkward,” Ted said, and Amanda nodded her agreement.

“Yeah, Lisa is about as subtle as a bulldozer.” Amanda sidestepped over to the picnic table and sat. “Greg tells me that you're going to Washington for a while.” Even with her mental radar turned down to low, she could tell that her innocent statement had set off alarm bells in Ted's mind.

“Meetings, classes, work stuff.” He recovered quickly but still seemed pre-occupied.

“You don't really want to be here, do you?” She smiled and pretended to be insightful.

“Does it show?”

“Somewhere else to be?” Her question unlocked a door in the back of his mind, and more anxiety came spilling out. Intrigued, she traced it back to its source and turned on a tiny penlight. Ted winced and shook his head.

“Ow. I just had a brain freeze.” He rubbed his temples. “I'm sorry, Amanda, but I'm not very good company now; I think I should go.” He was suddenly very uncomfortable in her presence; he stood and unconsciously looked around to see if he was being watched. “Will you please pass along my thanks and apologies to Greg and Lisa?” She remained seated, and he gave her a half wave and then disappeared around the side of the house.

“Oh Ted, what have you gotten yourself into,” she whispered. When Lisa introduced them three weeks earlier, Amanda had sensed his checkered past and Greg confirmed it. Ted had been a rising star in the FBI ten years earlier, but disillusionment led to alcohol, eventually a less-than-discreet affair, and finally a very messy divorce. He managed to pull himself together in time to save what was left of his career, but only after he had been recognized as a security risk. Banished from Washington to the field office in Denver, he again found himself sinking into despair. Once the golden child living in the palace, now he was just an anonymous field agent living in a duplex. He managed to remain anonymous for several years, but eventually frustration took its toll and he found his way back down familiar streets. A drunken indiscretion led to another, and then more. After months of blackouts and sick-days, it took a bout of alcoholic hepatitis to bring him back around. Only this time it was without his integrity. The true cost of his indiscretions didn't become known until two weeks ago. It arrived in a large legal envelope that was delivered to his temporary desk in Colorado Springs, and inside were photographs of him with an unidentified Asian man. The following day a similar envelope contained copies of FBI files with a handwritten note: Southwest Corner, Washington Mall, April 12th, 2:00 PM, File: PLAX 7344963-8772. The same day, he received an email with the same message. An attached video showed him passing a thick file to the Asian man and laughing about how easy it was.

The party began to spill out into the backyard, and Amanda passed along Ted's apologies. Lisa was visibly disappointed, but the news that Angel Diaz had met a very timely and painful death seemed to have lifted everyone else. Greg had loudly assumed his role of master chef, and for the moment the murder of Andrew Watts was set aside.