Rosarito Beach (5 page)

B
y the time Kay finished dealing with all the issues related to removing the corpses of Cadillac Washington, Tyrell Miller, and Leon James from Logan Heights, and processing Ángel Gomez and Jesús Rodríguez into the Metropolitan Correction Center, it was six a.m.—approximately thirteen hours after she arrested Tito Olivera. When she arrived at the DEA office on Viewridge Avenue, she saw that Wilson had gotten there ahead of her and the little prick was sitting in the boss's office, still dressed in fatigues, giving Davis his version of everything that had happened—and everything that he thought Kay had done wrong. Fuck him.

Kay went to her desk, dropped her sidearm into a drawer and locked it, then went to the restroom, washed her face, and made an attempt to comb her hair. She gave up on the hair after a couple of minutes, but looked into the mirror and smiled. She had just busted the brother of Caesar Olivera. This was even bigger than what she had done in Miami.

When she walked back into the bull pen, her boss yelled, “Hamilton, get your ass in here.”

His office was where she'd been headed anyway.

Wilson was still sitting there, and the first thing she did was point at him and say, “I want this asshole transferred out of my unit.”

“Shut up, Hamilton,” Davis said. He made a motion with his head for Wilson to leave, which Wilson did after smirking at Kay.

“Close the door,” Davis said.

Kay thought that Jim Davis was actually a pretty good guy and a decent boss. He was fifty-six and was planning on retiring next year. He was tall and had played guard at Wichita State; he hadn't been a superstar but a solid team player, a guy who made more assists than baskets—and the same could be said of his career at the DEA. His hair was short, thick, and white, and he wore a neatly trimmed white mustache. Kay thought he looked like the good town marshal in an old Western movie.

“Hamilton, I don't even know where to start,” Davis said. “I received a call from the warden at MCC telling me that you called him at his home, accused his people of being corrupt, then—”

“They are corrupt. By now Caesar Olivera knows exactly how his brother's being guarded and probably everything else he needs to stage a jailbreak.”

“I know that, Hamilton, but until we can make different arrangements we're going to have to trust Warden Taylor and we're going to have to work with him.”

Kay just shook her head. It wasn't a matter of trusting Taylor, and Jim Davis knew that. It was going to be almost a year before Tito Olivera went to trial, and there was a very good possibility that Caesar Olivera would try to free his brother before the trial. Caesar had so much money he could bribe almost anyone—he could certainly bribe a few low-level correctional officers—and if he couldn't bribe them, he would kidnap members of their families and force them to do what he wanted.

“John Hernández also called me,” Davis said.

John Hernández was the San Diego chief of police.

“He was appropriately outraged that we didn't notify him in advance of the operation and—”

“But you agreed we shouldn't notify him.”

“I know that, Hamilton. But did you have to compare his department to the Pakistanis? I mean, couldn't you have been just a little bit diplomatic with his fuckin' guy?”

Kay shrugged. Diplomacy wasn't her strong suit.

“I also got a call from a lawyer representing some kid, some girl. The girl's mother said you traumatized her daughter when one of your guys, looking like Darth Vader dressed up in riot gear, ordered her into a building and wouldn't let her and three other kids leave for three hours.”

“I couldn't let them leave,” Kay said. “If one of Tito's guys had started shooting—which one of them eventually did—one of those kids could have been hurt.”

“You could have had the San Diego cops escort them safely out of the area.”

“Well, the truth is, boss, I actually forgot about them for a while.”

“Jesus, Hamilton.”

“Hey! They weren't hurt and they weren't traumatized. Donovan said they had a great time, drinking beer, listening to shit on a boom box.”

Finally, Davis got to the real point of the meeting. “Hamilton, did you know Tito Olivera was going to kill Cadillac?”

Kay looked at him for a long moment, then said, “Do you really want to know if I knew?”

“What?” Davis said.

“You heard me,” Kay said. “I got the warrant for putting cameras in that bar based on a confidential informant telling me a deal was going down between two major drug dealers. What do you think would have happened if, hypothetically, I told the judge that I knew that Tito might execute Cadillac? Do you think, maybe, the judge would have told us we needed to do something to protect poor Cadillac, a subhuman piece of shit who's been killing people for thirty years? I mean, do you really care that Cadillac's dead? I don't. What I do care about is that I have Tito on video shooting the guy, and I have a witness to back up the video. And Tito is either going to get the needle—assuming they ever execute anyone in this fucking state—or he's going to give me information I can use against his brother. So I don't know why you're ragging my ass here. You ought to be congratulating me.”

Davis sighed and shook his head.

“Hamilton, I don't know what to do with you. You just suck with people. You piss off everyone outside the agency and, as bad as that is, you piss off the guys who work for you, the guys who ought to be loyal to you.”

“They don't like me because I got the supervisor's job instead of Wilson.”

When Kay was transferred from Miami to San Diego two years earlier, she was immediately placed into a vacant supervisor's slot. And in spite of what she'd done in Miami—and there wasn't a person in the entire Drug Enforcement Administration who didn't know what she'd done in Miami—the people who worked for her, particularly Wilson, resented that she got the job. No one had the balls to say to her face that she'd slept her way into the position—although, in a way, she had.

“That's not true, Hamilton,” Davis said. “Your guys don't even like Wilson. Wilson's a prick. But they don't like you either, and the reason why has nothing to do with Miami or the fact that you're a woman. They don't like you because you don't trust them and you don't include them when you're planning something. They don't like you because you refuse to recognize that they have wives and kids and can't work twenty-four hours a day. They don't like you because you're a constant hard-ass and you never cut them any slack when they don't measure up to your standards.”

“That reminds me,” Kay said. “I'm giving Jackson a two-day suspension.”

“Jackson?”

“The geek. The one who was supposed to hook up the video cameras in the bar. He didn't check his equipment before he went in, and one of the cameras didn't work.”

Davis shook his head again. “This is exactly what I'm talking about. Jackson's young. What you should do is take him out for a beer. Tell him you understand he was nervous and under a lot of pressure, but that what he did put people's lives in danger and how next time he needs to do better. You give him a suspension, he's going to find all kinds of reasons why you didn't give him enough time to do his job right and he's going to hate you for the rest of his career. And when you need geek help in the future, he's not going to give it to you.”

The hell he wouldn't. She'd fire Jackson if he didn't do his job.

But she didn't say that. Instead she said, “So what are we going to do about Tito? You know we can't leave him in MCC, and we have to do something before they arraign him.”

“Yeah, I know,” Davis said, but she could tell he was irritated over the way she'd changed the subject from her management style to Tito. “I've got a meeting set up with the judge, SDPD, the warden at MCC, and the senior U.S. marshal in San Diego. It's scheduled for one p.m., so you have time to go home, get a couple hours' sleep, and take a shower and change.”

“What time is the press conference?” Kay asked.

“Three.”

“I want to be there.”

“Yeah, I know you want to be there.”

“Well, can I come?”

“Yeah, I guess.”

Not exactly
I'd love to have you standing by my side
, but good enough.

Kay rose to leave.

“But, Hamilton—”

“Yes, boss?”

“I'll do all the talking at the meeting with the judge and at the press conference. Do you understand?”

“Yes, boss.”

Just as long as I get credit for the bust.

—

A
s Kay was leaving to go home, she swung by Wilson's desk. He should have been on his way home, too, after having been up all night, but instead he was using two stubby fingers to type up a report—a report that would put Kay's actions in the worst possible light while still being accurate.

“Wilson, do you know who Colleen Brandon is?”

“No.”

“Well, she's just been put in charge of the Far East Division and we're pals. You know how us girls stick together.”

“Why are you telling me this?” Wilson said.

“Because Colleen needs a guy for Mongolia, and I told her you were the perfect man for the job. Colleen owes me.”

Kay walked away, leaving Wilson sitting there with his mouth open.

Kay actually did know Colleen Brandon. The DEA has eighty-five regional offices in sixty-five foreign countries, and Brandon was the newly appointed head of the Far East Division. Kay hated to admit it, but Brandon had risen through the ranks faster than her because she had the political skills to impress people in Washington. She was good at sucking up. What Wilson didn't know was that Colleen Brandon hated her and wouldn't piss on her if her head was on fire.

She figured Wilson would be in Jim Davis's office, wailing like a baby, before she left the building.

A
s Kay was driving to her house in Point Loma, she was thinking she should do what Jim Davis had said: take a shower and sleep for a couple of hours before their meeting with the judge. But she didn't feel like sleeping. She was still too energized from busting Tito. No, she didn't want sleep. She wanted sex.

She took out her cell phone and punched in a number.

“What are you doing this morning?”

“I have a meeting with Julian Montgomery's lawyer in an hour.”

Kay knew who Julian Montgomery was: a guy worth a couple hundred million bucks who'd never worked a day in his life. He'd made his money the old-fashioned way: He inherited it. He was on San Diego's A-list, gave generously to the arts, was on the boards of several charities, and attended every exclusive social gala in the city. He was also a degenerate pervert, and he had just been arrested for having a computer full of child pornography.

Julian's gardener, who lived on Julian's estate, had caught Julian taking nude photographs of his nine-year-old son. The gardener—a normally gentle man from Honduras who barely spoke English—tried to split Julian's head open with a machete. He missed Julian's head, but did manage to slice off part of one of his ears. When the police arrested the gardener for attempted murder, they didn't believe him at first, but eventually they obtained a warrant to look into Julian's computer and his camera's memory chip, where they found hundreds of pictures of children.

“Do you think Julian's lawyer would mind if you kept him waiting a bit?” Kay asked. “I need someone to wash my back.”

“I'm sure he would mind. Your place?”

“Yes.”

—

K
ay lay there with her eyes closed, waiting for her heartbeat to slow down to something approaching normal. She finally opened her eyes and looked over at Robert Meyer. He smiled at her and said what he always said after they finished having sex: “Wow.”

For a man who depended on his communication skills to make a living, Robert tended to be less than original when it came to postcoital pillow talk. He was, however, a beautiful human specimen. He was a muscular six foot two, had rugged features and a perfect profile—the kind you might see on old Grecian coins. He also had the same waist size he had in college, because he worked out four days a week to stay in shape. He was marvelous in bed; he wasn't the best lover Kay had ever had, but he was currently number three on her list.

Robert Meyer was an Assistant United States Attorney for the Southern District of California. One day, and probably not that far in the future, he would be
the
U.S. Attorney for the district, and Kay wouldn't be surprised if he ended up being the Attorney General of the United States. He had money, looks, political connections, and brains.

He also had a beautiful wife and two beautiful daughters. A Meyer family portrait was the perfect campaign poster.

“I gotta get going,” Kay said, and rose from the bed. She didn't bother to put on a robe; Robert Meyer had seen her naked often enough.

“Me, too,” Robert said. He didn't move, however. He continued to lie there, his head propped against a pillow, a small content smile on his face. If people still smoked, he would have been having an after-sex cigarette.

Kay started to walk toward her bathroom, but Robert said, “Hold it a minute.”

“What?” Kay said.

“Just stand there. I want to look at you.”

“Oh, for Christ's sake,” Kay muttered.

“You are definitely the best-looking woman I've ever slept with.”

What a bullshitter.
Kay knew his wife was actually better-looking than she was. Well, she wasn't as stacked as Kay, but she was definitely a stunner.

When Kay came out of the shower—this one she took by herself—Robert was still in bed.

“I thought you had a meeting with Julian Montgomery's lawyer,” Kay said.

“I do. But he'll wait until I get there, and he'll charge Julian about seven hundred bucks for every hour he waits. What are you going to do about Tito Olivera?”

“We're meeting with Judge Foreman and a bunch of other bureaucrats to talk about that at one. We're going to try to impress upon the judge that Tito needs to be held someplace where his big brother can't get to him. I just hope he'll listen. If he doesn't, we're going to have blood running in the streets of San Diego.”

She didn't need to explain why this was so to Robert Meyer. He knew about her yearlong investigation leading to Tito's arrest, and he knew the capabilities of the Olivera cartel. That was another thing she liked about Robert: They could talk shop when they weren't screwing, and he was the type of man who could keep what she told him to himself. Being a prosecutor, he was usually on her side of the game, although he tended to be a little persnickety about following the rules.

Kay met Robert when she first came to San Diego two years before. At the time he'd been working in the Narcotics Section in the U.S. Attorney's Office, and they met on one of Kay's first cases in the region. It didn't take long before he asked her out for a drink—she was hardly the first extramarital affair he'd had. He now ran the General Crimes Section of the Criminal Division. General Crimes was a catchall section dealing with bank fraud, organized crime, counterfeiting, weapons offenses, identity theft, computer crimes, and public corruption. And child pornography. Robert had asked for the job in General Crimes to round out his résumé—particularly as it related to computer crimes—and he was going to personally prosecute Julian Montgomery because it would be a high-profile case. Robert Meyer always prosecuted the high-profile cases.

In addition to being able to talk shop with Robert and his skills in bed, the other thing Kay liked about him was that she would never have to face the day when he came to her, a mopey expression on his face, and said he loved her so much that he was going to leave his wife and marry her. He would never do that. He was married to his career, and he knew divorcing his wife would be political suicide. He also knew that Kay Hamilton would never be the ideal mate for a politician.

And all of this was fine with Kay. She had no desire to get married again, or at least not anytime soon; she'd been married once, for almost a year, and didn't wish to repeat that experience in the near future. For that matter, she had no desire to have a live-in boyfriend right now. She liked her life the way it was. She liked living alone—at least most of the time—and she liked the fact that she wasn't tied to any person or place. If the DEA decided to reassign her, she had no emotional attachments to keep her from moving and advancing. Robert Meyer was the perfect lover, as far as she was concerned.

Kay normally dressed in pantsuits for meetings with other agencies or when she had to go to court, and she usually wore her hair in a practical ponytail. Today, however, she knew she was going to be on camera at the press conference—and she wanted the cameras on her. She let her long, sun-streaked blond hair fall to her shoulders and wore a dark blue suit with a white blouse and a skirt that clung to her ass and stopped just above her knees. She had good legs and she knew it. The cameras would be on her.