Mission Road (16 page)

“There
is
something wrong,” I said.

“God, I wish I knew if it was wrong, Tres. Do you remember, a long time ago, I told you about my mother—”

She was interrupted by a woman’s scream. Down on the lawn, the crowd parted. A bedraggled, bloody man had burst from the kitchen’s service entrance and was loping across the property. He wore a torn flannel shirt and jeans, cut pieces of rope dangling from his wrists. Titus Roe.

Several of White’s security men started to converge, but the crowd worked against them. The tuxedoed guests were surging away from the man and White’s goons couldn’t very well muscle their way through. Long before they could close the distance, Roe had reached the back of the lawn and disappeared into the woods.

“I couldn’t do it,” Ralph said.

I looked back and found him standing behind me, his face pale, slick with sweat. He wasn’t holding a gun anymore.

“I know . . . he tried to hurt Maia,” he stammered. “But I told him about the kitchen entrance. I told him to run.”

I’m not sure who was more surprised—Ralph or me—when Maia threw her arms around him and kissed his cheek.

Ralph stared at her blankly. “He didn’t shoot Ana. He convinced me of that. But I knew Mr. White . . . he would’ve had him killed anyway.”

Mr. White, in fact, was standing by his buffet table down on the lawn, glaring up at us. Alex was whispering in his ear. I doubted he was advising hugs and kisses for Ralph.

I decided it was best not to wait for them to come to us.

“Stay with Ralph,” I told Maia. I headed down the marble staircase.

I intercepted White and Alex at the bottom step.

“Inside,” Mr. White ordered. “We need to discuss this.”

“Titus isn’t our guy. Ralph’s convinced.”

“Perhaps I did not make myself clear.”

“You left the choice up to him,” I said. “Isn’t that right?”

White was having too much excitement for his condition. His complexion was turning gray despite the makeup. His breathing was shallow.

Alex put his hand on his boss’s shoulder. “Let me deal with them, sir.”

White trembled with anger. He kept his cold blue eyes on me. “Mr. Navarre, I seem to have been mistaken about your friend. I do not understand him any better than I do you.”

“We’ll leave then.”

“I don’t think so,” the old man said. “We’ll have you as our guests tonight. And in the morning . . . we’ll talk.”

He turned and walked back toward his crowd of guests, who were getting barraged with a new round of champagne and appetizers, security guards circulating amongst them, assuring everyone they could forget the rude interruption of the escaped prisoner.

I caught Madeleine’s eye in the crowd. She appraised me coldly, then turned back to the crowd of young men who wanted her attention a lot more than I did.

“Quite a show,” Alex told me, amused. He raised one hand, and a heavyset security goon materialized at my right arm. “Virgil will show you to your room.”

I had a feeling Alex would’ve said
your coffin
with the same good humor.

I looked up at the balcony. A couple of other goons had already found Ralph and were marching him inside.

And Maia was gone.

MAIA DIDN’T WANT TO HOLD THE BABY.

“Just ten minutes?” Ralph’s sister pleaded. She looked like a woman who’d just crawled through a wind tunnel full of baby food. “So I can take a shower? You’re a lifesaver.”

She handed over Lucia Jr., a bundle of grunting, kicking unhappiness, then disappeared down the hallway.

If Maia were in her place, she would’ve headed out the back door and driven away.

“Hey, sweetheart,” Maia told the baby.

“Ah-ba!” Lucia Jr. complained.

Maia wondered if her head needed supporting. No, that was with younger babies. Lucia was almost a year old. She could sit up, use a cup, all of that.

Maia had been reading so many damn baby development books, hiding them in the dirty laundry hamper whenever Tres visited, but she couldn’t remember anything. Law school had been a snap compared to studying babies. Babies made no intuitive sense.

Lucia Jr. kept kicking and squirming.

Maia propped her over one shoulder, holding her by her terry-cloth-covered bottom. She got out her key chain. Babies loved keys. She put Lucia on the sofa and sat next to her and offered the keys.

“Ah!” Lucia went straight for the pepper spray canister.

“No,” Maia said. “Not that.”

She detached the pepper spray and put it in her pocket and Lucia started crying.

“Aw, come on, honey. Look, keys.”

Lucia was having none of it. She wanted dangerous stuff or nothing. She was, apparently, her parents’ child.

Down the hall, plumbing shuddered. Water began to run.

Hurry,
Maia thought.

She bought a few seconds showing Lucia the handcuffs she kept in her purse. Lucia seemed to think they tasted pretty interesting.

Maia cursed herself for promising Ralph she’d stop by. The sister was clearly doing fine with the baby. But Maia hadn’t been able to resist. Maybe it was her exhaustion, her frazzled state of mind, but earlier that evening, for the first time, she’d actually come close to liking Ralph Arguello.

•                           •                           •

THEY’D BEEN STANDING TOGETHER ON THE
back veranda of Guy White’s mansion. Without the glasses, Ralph looked older, weathered, like a Native American in a nineteenth-century photograph, staring across a landscape that was no longer his.

“I screwed up,” he said, “cutting Titus loose.”

Maia felt so relieved she couldn’t speak. Never mind that Titus Roe had tried to kill her. Ever since she pulled him out of his Volvo, she’d known he was as much of an unwilling victim as she. She’d been foolish to bring him to White’s house—a sure death sentence. Ralph had spared him. He’d lifted a huge weight from her conscience, and she was completely unprepared to feel so indebted to a man she so disliked.

On the lawn below, Tres was arguing with Guy White, trying to keep the old man and his henchmen from Ralph.

Maia knew Tres would stand in front of a tank if it meant saving Ralph or her.

“Hell of a way for me to repay him,” Ralph said, following her eyes. “Tres kept me going, the last twenty-four hours. I haven’t done shit but cause him trouble since high school, and he still risks his neck.”

“I don’t think Tres would see it that way.”

“Stupid bastard,” Ralph agreed. “Doesn’t matter what I do wrong, he still backs me up. Covered my ass a million times. He makes me nervous.”

Under different circumstances, Maia might’ve found that funny. Ralph Arguello, nervous of Tres.

“Did Roe tell you anything?” she asked.

“He wasn’t going to. Said to go ahead and kill him, knew he was dead either way. Two years, three years ago, I would have shot him.” Ralph leaned against the marble railing, rubbed his face with his hands. “Having a family, Maia . . . I don’t know. First day I held Lucia Jr., it was like part of me went into her. Like she tapped me out. I can’t kill people anymore. Even with Johnny Zapata, I hesitated. I kept seeing my baby. Does that make any sense?”

Maia reached over and squeezed his hand.

At the base of the steps, Guy White was not getting any happier. His men were closing ranks around Tres, like they were about to put him under house arrest.

“You need to go,” Ralph told her. “Tres and I will manage. You gotta get out before White decides you’re his guest, too.”

“I can’t leave you two.”

“Keep searching. Check on the baby for me.” Ralph looked over, and Maia was surprised by the sadness in his eyes. “I’d do anything for Tres. Used to figure he would be the one with the normal life—marriage, kids. I figured he’d have those things and I could kind of enjoy them through him.”

Ralph reached into his shirt pocket, unfolded a thin piece of printed paper, like an oversized receipt. He handed it to Maia.

One glance and she understood what it was, but she was mystified how Ralph got it.

“In Titus Roe’s pocket,” he said. “Gave it to me after I cut his ropes. He wouldn’t tell me who he got it from, but he said I’d figure it out. Said he owed me that much.”

Men were coming around the edges of the veranda now, working their way toward Ralph.

“Take it,” Ralph said. “Figure out who’s left that we can trust.”

Who’s left we can trust.

For the first time, when he used the word
we,
Maia realized that Ralph trusted
her.
He approved of her. And when he talked about Tres having a normal life, having a family, he was including Maia as a given.

She didn’t want to leave, but she knew Ralph was right. She had no choice.

She pecked him on the cheek, promised to see his child, and slipped into the mansion as Guy White’s men came to secure their disobliging guest.

•                           •                           •

THE BABY HAD THOROUGHLY SLIMED UP
the handcuffs and was now checking out Maia’s knee, tiny fingers grabbing at the fabric. Her wispy hair was braided and tied with plastic clips. The front of her jumper was stitched with a seal balancing a ball on its nose.

Maia could see the DeLeon family resemblance in Lucia Jr. She looked like her namesake—dark eyebrows knit with determination, as if everything was a challenge, and by God she would beat it.

Part of me went into her.

“You like my dress, huh?” Maia asked.

The baby looked up. Her mouth was open, drooling from intense concentration. Maia traced her finger over the baby’s ear.

Ana had looked like this, in her baby pictures. Maia wondered if Lucia Sr. had sat on a couch with her, offering police paraphernalia to keep the serious little drooler quiet.

“I’m going to have one like you,” Maia told the baby. “I’m in serious trouble, huh?”

The baby watched her lips move, but offered no advice.

Lucia Jr.’s eyes reminded Maia of someone. Not Lucia or Ana or even Ralph. She tried to figure out who.

Maia thought about her picnic with Tres in Espada Park. They had watched a mother and her toddler son walking by the old waterway. The little boy stumbled along, chasing a duck with a piece of tortilla.

“Cute kid,” Maia had said.

Tres nodded, smiling at the boy’s attempt to feed the duck by throwing wads of corn tortilla at its retreating butt. The mother chased after, herding the boy away from the water whenever he strayed too close.

“Count your blessings,” Tres said. “That could be you.”

Maia wasn’t sure why he said that. Maybe because the woman was about Maia’s age, a little old for having children.

Tres and she never discussed marriage, much less having children. But last summer, during a particularly dangerous case, Tres had brought Maia a friend’s child for safekeeping. He had told his friend that she was perfect for the job. Maia had wondered, ever since then, if he’d been trying to tell her something.

Count your blessings.
He sounded almost regretful.

Or maybe she was projecting.

“Hard to imagine,” she told him.

The mother and child moved on downriver. The moment passed.

But the next week, Maia forgot to get her birth control prescription refilled. She kept putting it off. She told herself it was just because she was busy.

Two weeks after, she spent the night with Tres. She told herself she wasn’t taking a risk.

She had sworn never to have children. She had sworn when she was nine years old, watching her father weep by a makeshift funeral bier.

Pregnancy itself was far from her worst fear.

And yet . . . here she was.

The faucet in the bathroom squeaked shut.

Maia tried to imagine what Lucia Sr. had felt like, in her position. An unwed mother. She thought about Ana on the day she married Ralph, how happy she’d looked despite the naysayers, the disapproving looks from her police friends.

Maia understood, for the first time, why Ana had fallen in love with Ralph. Whatever else one might say about him, Ralph was
present.
He was like Tres in his fierce commitment to people. Ralph had been the man in his family since he was an early teen. Maia knew that. It was impossible to imagine him being an absentee father, being an absentee
anything.

She stroked Lucia Jr.’s cheek.

Something about the baby’s face still bothered her . . . some resemblance, but before she could give it more thought, Ralph’s sister came out of the bathroom, toweling her hair dry, bringing with her a cloud of jasmine-scented steam.

“Thanks a million,” she said. “I forgot how good that feels.”

Maia nodded. She picked up the baby in spite of her squirming protests and gave her a hug. She kissed her forehead.

“Cute, isn’t she?” Ralph’s sister said. “But
hijo,
tons of work. You got kids?”

“No,” Maia said. “No kids.”

“Still time.”

Maia said her goodbyes. She had another stop to make.

The paper Ralph had given her was still folded into her pocket—a police printout with her name, her address, Tres’ address. Everything one would need to give instructions to an assassin.

It was high time she paid the police another visit.

•                           •                           •

THE SAPD EVIDENCE ROOM, LIKE MOST
that Maia had been in, was a cold basement, perpetually lit by corpse-colored fluorescents. A chain link wall separated the outside from rows of metal shelving, cardboard boxes, trunks and refrigerators.

A bored-looking supervisor sat behind a Dutch door, filling out paperwork. On the counter next to him was a logbook for signing in and out.

Maia had freshened up in the car while she was putting together her cover story. She couldn’t do much about the bandage on her cheek, but she’d fixed her makeup otherwise. She’d made sure she was wearing enough perfume.

She leaned against the Dutch door, a little closer to the supervisor than was necessary, and smiled. “Long night?”

She got the desired effect.

In his haste to stand up, the supervisor dropped his clipboard. “Oh, um, no.”

He was about thirty. Pale. Dark hair and chewed cuticles. Like most cops who gravitate to lonely jobs in the bowels of the department, he looked like a classroom pet that was used to being alternately ignored and terrorized.

Maia offered her hand. “My name’s Lee, from Austin. They tell you I was coming down?”

“Um, no, ma’am . . . I mean, I would’ve remembered if they mentioned somebody like you.”

His hand was cold and damp, but Maia gave it a nice firm shake—friendly, uninhibited. “It’s about the Orosco case. I hate to bother you, but I wanted to see the evidence. It is here, right?”

She handed him a slip of paper with a case number written on it. Finding a believable cold case to investigate, and the accompanying file information, had taken her all of five minutes—one phone call to an acquaintance in Austin.

The supervisor looked at the number. “Oh . . . oh, yeah. Been here for years. Yuck.”

“Would it be okay if I—” She gestured to his side of the door, gave him a smile that was just a bit playful. She was overdoing it. No female cop would flirt like this. But she was betting the supervisor wouldn’t object.

He didn’t.

“Just let me—um, here, sign in . . .”

He opened the gate while Maia scanned the logbook, saw the entries she wanted to see, then signed herself in as
Minnie Mouse
and put the incorrect date and time. The supervisor didn’t notice.

Once inside, he was more than happy—thrilled, he insisted—to walk her back to cold storage.

“Thanks, these places are such mazes,” Maia gushed gratefully. “I don’t know how you keep it all straight.”

“Oh, well, yeah . . .”

Maia figured it was time to make her point. She asked the supervisor if she could make a quick cell call.

“Oh, sure,” he said. “Don’t know if you’ll get a good signal in here.”

She got a signal. She was just calling upstairs.

“This is Maia Lee,” she said into the phone.

Momentary silence, then the man on the other end said: “We need to talk to you in person.
Now.
”

“I know,” Maia said. “I’m in the basement.”

“What do you mean you’re in the basement?”