Mission Road (11 page)

Delia stopped at the doors of the police station. She took a shaky breath. She’d been here too many times over the last month, trying to get someone to listen.

Ever since her first visit, White’s men had been shadowing her. They appeared while she was shopping, or baby-sitting her little cousin, or taking flowers to her mother in the nursing home.

They never threatened her, never spoke. But she knew who they were.

We are as close as your jugular vein,
they seemed to say.
Don’t ever forget that.

Two weeks, three days, eleven hours since the attack. She’d been shattered like a vase, glued back together imperfectly. She could still feel his fingers tightening around her wrists, his whiskers scraping against her throat. She could still taste the blood—first from biting his arm, then from his fist against her mouth.

She couldn’t let him get away with it.

She’d spent two years fighting for other people’s rights in California. She’d marched with César Chávez, blistered her feet on the dusty roads of the Central Valley, helped translate the stories of migrant workers for the media.

At New Year’s, full of optimism and hope for the future, she’d come home to Texas to fight for
La Causa.
In that rush of confidence, she’d visited a South Side bar and felt comfortable rising to the challenge of a gringo who found her attractive. Why the hell not?

•                           •                           •

AN OFFICER ESCORTED HER INTO A
green-tiled room with harsh fluorescents. At one end of the table sat a grim-faced detective, smoke curling from the cigarette in his hand. At the other end of the table,
he
was there, looking the same as the night he’d picked her up—clean, elegant, commanding. To his right sat another well-dressed man, the lawyer who’d visited her a week ago to explain how much she had to lose.

Mr. White has a wife and little boy,
he’d told her.
Do you want to embarrass a man with a family?

Since then, the losses had been piling up. First, her new job. Her boss at
La Prensa
let her go, mumbling something about budget problems, but she’d seen the fear in his eyes. Then she’d lost her lease. She was given one month to move out, no explanation. Most of all, she’d lost her privacy. White’s men were everywhere she went.

She shouldn’t have agreed to this meeting. They couldn’t force her to make a statement with her attacker present. But even the police seemed to be playing by Guy White’s rules.

“Miss Montoya.” The detective was a grizzled man with a military haircut. The razor stubble on his cheeks was like frost. “We’ve made Mr. White aware of your accusations. We need to know now if you still want to press charges.”

His voice sounded weary, like he’d done all this before.

White’s eyes were a horrible blue.

If he’d shown any anxiety, she might’ve found her own strength. But there was nothing in his eyes but calm anticipation, as if he were patiently curious about what form of destruction she would choose.

She’d heard rumors about the previous victims. She knew she was only the latest in a long line of amusements. He had knocked her down the way a boy knocks down sand castles on the beach—just because he could.

She remembered his fingers around her throat, the taste of blood in her mouth.

Yesterday Delia had taken her seven-year-old niece to the playground. There’d been a man on the park bench, smiling at them. His eyes were dull with cruelty. Delia was certain the lump in his jacket pocket was a gun.

She remembered the lines White’s lawyer had suggested.
All you have to say . . .

She couldn’t let him get away with it.

“It didn’t happen,” she muttered.

Silence. Cigarette smoke curled into the ugly lights.

“Excuse me?” the detective asked.

“I made it up to get attention,” Delia said. “He never touched me.”

She was conscious of the detective studying her—her stitched-up lip, the blue bruises under her eyes.

Please,
she thought.
See that I’m lying.

The detective looked down. He gently closed the file in front of him, rested his hand on it like a Bible.

“Well,” Guy White said breezily. “That is that.”

•                           •                           •

LATE THAT NIGHT, DELIA SAT IN
her bathtub, warm water lapping against the porcelain, a candle burning on the sink. She watched the watery reflections of flame dance off her shower curtain and felt herself floating away.

She had betrayed herself.

No amount of washing could cleanse her. There was no way to stop the poison White had planted in her. Nothing to do but cut it out.

She used a razor—a momentary sting, then no pain in the warm water. She closed her eyes and willed herself not to cry, the water spiraling red around her naked body like firecracker smoke.

MAIA WAITED BY THE CONCRETE PIG.

It was one of the more ridiculous places she’d ever been asked to rendezvous—a fifteen-foot-high grimy pink goliath of pork at the edge of the diner parking lot.

She glanced at the brown Acura parked across the street and prayed her police tail wouldn’t decide to take her picture. Her only consolation was that the cop inside the car was probably as cold and bored as she was.

After eleven minutes, the old fry cook Mike Flume emerged from the diner. He wiped his hands on his apron and trudged toward her.

“Sorry, I got busy,” he said. “Here.”

He tossed her a house key rubber-banded to a slip of paper and started walking away.

Maia caught his arm. “Whoa, wait a minute.”

“I got less than a minute, miss. There’s nobody watching the oil.”

“How’d you get the key?”

The old man glanced toward his diner.

He reminded Maia of a geriatric leprechaun—small, wrinkled and nervous, thinning orange hair, ears and eyebrows and nose all a bit too pointy.

“I rent the property from Ana. I put the stuff in the back. Figured she would come get it eventually, you know? She never did.”

“What stuff?”

“Look, miss—Detective Kelsey’s already gonna kill me for talking to you. He came by, you know, after Ana . . .” He shook his head. “Damn. I can’t believe she got herself shot.”

“If you want to help her,” Maia said, “tell me what was wrong with the timing on the Franklin White murder.”

The old man winced. “Hell, I only told Ana because it was her mom, for Christ’s sake. It’s probably nothing.”

“You don’t believe that.”

“My waitress can’t cook. I got meat on the grill.”

“Mr. Flume—”

“All right, damn it. Etch and Lucia used to stop here before their shift. Every night, like clockwork. Etch parked his own car in the lot. Few minutes later, Lucia would bring the patrol unit around. Nine-thirty, every night, I’d give ’em both dinner on the house. Two cheeseburgers with rings. Lucia liked Big Red. Etch took a vanilla malt. They went on duty at ten.”

Maia fingered the paper-wrapped key.

She stared at the signs painted on the diner windows—
FISH PLATTER, CLASSIC CAR FRIDAY.
She imagined two uniformed officers sitting inside at the counter.

She had spent the last few hours at the
San Antonio Express-News,
buried in the news morgue, reading about the White family, Mission Road and any case involving Hernandez and DeLeon. What she’d learned had depressed the hell out of her, but it hadn’t made things any clearer.

“The 911 call about Franklin White’s body came in at just after ten,” she recalled. “The ME’s report placed the time of death at not very long before that.”

“That’s why Etch and Lucia asked me to talk to homicide for them. You look at their regular routine, they couldn’t have killed Frankie White. They would’ve been here eating dinner.”

“They were suspects? News reports said nothing about that.”

Flume shuffled from foot to foot. “Look . . . Etch and Lucia were frustrated about Frankie White, okay? This was their beat. Kid kept coming down here, picking up women at the bars. Later, those women turned up dead. How would you feel? Longer the detectives went without arresting him, the more Etch talked about intimidating Frankie. He knew Frankie’s car. He knew the bars Frankie liked. Sometimes Etch would follow Frankie around, to discourage him. Etch even told me . . . well, he said what he’d do if he ever caught Frankie on a dark street somewhere.”

“And when Frankie turned up dead,” Maia said, “Etch and Lucia were first at the scene.”

“They couldn’t have killed him,” Flume insisted. “Etch might’ve talked about it, but Lucia never would’ve let him. She was the most even-keeled person I ever met.”

“She killed a man once,” Maia recalled. “Right in your diner, wasn’t it?”

“That was different. Lives were at stake. She did what she had to—one clean shot. Calm and cool. But hitting Frankie White the way he was hit? I mean, no. No way. I told the homicide detectives Etch and Lucia were totally in the clear. I explained their routine.”

“But?”

Flume tugged at his apron. “I didn’t exactly swear
that
particular night was routine. They came in a little late.”

“Both of them?”

He nodded.

“Together?”

“Separate. Lucia beat Etch for once. She rushed in about nine-fifty, couldn’t believe Etch wasn’t here. When he did come in, Lucia looked at him real angry, asked him where he’d been. He just stared at me and said, ‘Mike, I got here the same time as usual tonight, right?’ ”

Maia cursed. “When did Hernandez come in exactly?”

“Ten o’clock. Maybe one, two minutes after.”

Maia stared across Presa Street, at the brown Acura waiting in the dark.

The fry cook followed her gaze. “Aw, hell. You got a police tail? You didn’t tell me that.”

Maia pulled the rubber band off the old man’s key, unfolded the piece of paper. “What am I going to unlock here, Mr. Flume?”

He shook his head. “Sorry, miss. My onion rings are burning.” Fear was building in his eyes.

The old cook hobbled back toward the diner, leaving Maia alone with the key and a two-line message:

342 West King’s Highway

Used to be Lucia’s.

•                           •                           •

MAIA DROVE SLOWLY, SETTING HER PACE
to the Dvořák on the classical station.

She knew the best way to lose her tail wasn’t a high-speed chase. It was to bore him into a stupor.

She thought about Franklin White and the patrol nightstick that had killed him.

It was conceivable Franklin would’ve agreed to meet someone he knew well on the side of a rural road at night. Someone like Ralph Arguello. But it was also conceivable that he would pull over for a cop.

Kelsey had been on medical leave. Etch Hernandez and Lucia DeLeon had weak alibis for the murder time. But motive? The idea that Kelsey, even Kelsey, would kill because Frankie White had hurt his hands and endangered his job just didn’t sit right with Maia. Neither did the idea that either Etch or Lucia would kill because Frankie White was murdering women on their beat.

Mike Flume was right. It took intense, personal rage to hit someone seven times in the head, to destroy their face. Whoever killed Frankie White had seen something in him that they hated deeply. They didn’t just want to stop him killing. They had wanted to obliterate his image completely.

Maia meandered through Southtown, circled the blocks, braked to look at street numbers even though she knew the neighborhood.

She studied traffic patterns, counted the timing on lights, checked out side streets until she found what she wanted.

Her third time through the South Presa–Alamo intersection, where the traffic backed up, she put a delivery truck between herself and the Acura. Then she swerved into an alley between two cafés and shot through the back parking lot.

A moment later she was three blocks away in the residential neighborhood of King William. No sign of the tail.

“Amateur,” she murmured.

She supposed there was no reason to have shaken the police. She wasn’t about to lead them to Tres. Still, the idea of having a baby-sitter pissed her off.

The Dvořák piece ended.

Maia was about to change the channel to rock ’n’ roll when a news break came on. An Alamo Heights resident had been found shot to death on his porch overlooking the Olmos Basin.

The sedate voice of the classical DJ sounded totally wrong to deliver such news: The victim, a retired Bexar County medical examiner, had been killed from a distance by a single rifle bullet. Police would not speculate whether the shooting was accidental or the work of a sniper, but stressed there was no reason to believe the general public was in danger. The name of the victim was being withheld until—

Maia turned off the radio.

The .357 in her shoulder holster suddenly felt heavy.

She thought about Jaime Santos’ gnarled hands on his golf club, the sad smile he had given her.

Maybe the news was about someone else. How many retired MEs could there be?

She remembered Mike Flume’s look of fear when he realized a cop was watching.
Detective Kelsey’s already gonna kill me for talking to you.

Don’t think that way,
Maia told herself.
Just drive.

She turned on Guenther Street. In her rearview mirror, an old gray Volvo sedan pulled out from the curb.

Had she seen the same car at the Pig Stand? She’d been so focused on the obvious tail . . .

No. She was being paranoid. The police wouldn’t have the time or manpower to pull something as devious as tag team surveillance.

She took a detour anyway—a sharp left out of King William, onto a nice straight stretch of South Presa, lined with stucco nightclubs and
taquerías.
She drove south until the buildings fell away and the landscape changed to country. She kept watch behind her, but the Volvo had disappeared.

She was about to reverse course when she noticed the street sign at the intersection ahead. The name hit her like a blast of cold air.

Mission Road.

Before she could give herself time to waver, she took the turn.

Half a mile south along a stretch of crumbling blacktop, she recognized the twisted live oak from the crime scene photos. The barbed wire fence had fallen down, the shrubs were a little thicker, but otherwise the place hadn’t changed.

She pulled over, stepped out of the car.

It was getting dark. The wind was cold and sprinkled with rain. The smell of wild licorice drifted up from the nearby creek bed.

Or not a creek bed, Tres would’ve corrected her. An
acequia.

He’d taken her on a picnic somewhere near here. The waterways in this part of town were man-made, two-hundred-and-fifty-year-old aqueducts that had once irrigated mission fields.

Maia shivered.

She remembered Tres’ words on that picnic, three months ago, right before she’d made her huge mistake.

Or
had
it been a mistake? The changes in her body were mixing her up so badly she could hardly remember. At the time, Tres’ comment had seemed so insignificant. Just another one of his quips. Nothing worth changing their lives over.

She forced her thoughts back to the problem at hand. Franklin White. Frankie had died here—right where she was standing.

How far from the Pig Stand? Five minutes, max.

Witnesses?

She turned three-sixty.

Nothing but trees, fields and the road. The only light was a single streetlamp maybe half a mile north. Eighteen years ago, the place would’ve been even more remote, if that was possible.

She made a mental note to find out where Etch Hernandez lived back then. She wondered if this road was a route from his residence to the Pig Stand.

The wind picked up. Maia shivered again. Too many tragedies, too many lives ended here on Mission Road.

Somewhere along this stretch of blacktop, in the Sixties, Guy White had allegedly raped a twenty-two-year-old named Delia Montoya. The old newspaper article had been discreetly vague about the facts, but Maia got the idea. Delia and Guy had met at a bar. They left together. Delia was a fiery woman, a civil rights activist. She considered herself liberated. She could date anyone she damn well pleased, but she hadn’t planned on being beaten up and raped by Piedras Creek. She filed a report with the police, but two weeks later, she abruptly withdrew the charges. She appeared at the police station, shaken and wild-eyed, and gave a new statement. She claimed she’d made up the whole rape story to get attention. Guy White was off the hook.

A similar story, five months later—a Latina secretary at a local law firm accused White of raping her at Mission Park. White produced an alibi for the night in question. He hired a private investigator to prove that the young woman had a sordid past with men. She was mentally unstable. Charges went nowhere. One month later, the young woman lost her job.

Twenty years later, in the 1980s, all of Franklin White’s victims had been found within a square mile of this spot. Six young women, just as Jaime Santos had said—all six sweet and pretty, just entering college with bright futures. All of them strangled to death and abandoned in the woods.

Like father like son? Maia was tempted to think so, but Frankie’s victims were so different from his father’s, as were the ways the two men had destroyed those women . . .

Maia looked down the dark stretch of road. She imagined roadside memorials that might’ve decorated this barbed wire fence over the years—crosses made of flowers, bleached memorials moldering in the darkness.

A glint of metal drew her attention. To the north, at the very edge of the streetlight’s glow, a car made a U-turn and headed away.

Maia tried to convince herself that the mist and gloom were playing tricks on her eyes.

It looked like a gray Volvo had pulled out from the shoulder of the road, as if the driver had been parked there, watching her.

•                           •                           •