She said, “Something’s bothering you.”
He resisted uttering the biggest “duh” ever vocalized in the history of the world.
“Not that,” she said, as if she could read his mind. “Faith didn’t call you for help because she knew that she was going to do the wrong thing.”
Will looked out the window.
“You would’ve made her wait for backup.”
He hated the relief her words brought.
“She’s always been headstrong.”
He felt the need to say, “She didn’t do the wrong thing.”
“That’s my boy.”
Will watched the trees along the highway blend into a sea of green. “Do you think there’s going to be a ransom?”
“I hope so.” They both knew that a ransom pointed to a living hostage, or at least the opportunity to demand proof of life.
He said, “This feels personal.”
“How so?”
He shook his head. “The way the house was torn up. There’s mad, and then there’s furious.”
“I don’t imagine the old girl sat by quietly while they performed their search.”
“Probably not.” Evelyn Mitchell was no Amanda Wagner, but Will could easily see her taunting the men who were tearing up her house. You didn’t get to be one of the first female captains on the Atlanta police force by being sweet. “They were obviously looking for money.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Clams—the last word Ricardo said to Faith before he died. You said it’s slang for money. Ergo, they were looking for money.”
“In the silverware drawer?”
Another good point. Cash was nice, but it was cumbersome. A pile worth kidnapping an ex-Atlanta police captain for would fill several silverware drawers.
He said, “The arrow was pointing into the backyard.”
“What arrow?”
Will suppressed a groan. She wasn’t usually this obvious. “The arrow drawn in Evelyn’s blood underneath the chair she was duct-taped to. I know you saw it. You hissed at me like an air compressor.”
“You really should work on your metaphors.” She was silent for a beat, probably considering the most circuitous route to take him to nowhere. “You think Evelyn has buried treasure in her backyard?”
He had to admit this was unlikely, especially considering the Mitchell backyard was on full display to the rest of the neighbors, most of whom were retired and seemed to have ample time to spy. Besides, Will couldn’t picture Faith’s mother out with a shovel and a flashlight in the middle of the night. Then again, it wasn’t like she could put it in the bank.
“Safe deposit box,” Will tried. “Maybe they were looking for a key.”
“Evelyn would have to go to the bank and sign in to get access. They’d compare her signature, ask for her ID. Our kidnapper had to know her picture would be on every television station the minute he took her.”
Will silently conceded the point. Besides, the same rule applied. A large amount of cash took up space. Diamonds and gold were more for Hollywood movies. In real life, stolen jewels fetched pennies on the dollar.
She asked, “What about the crime scene? Do you think Charlie got it right?”
Will went on the defense. “Mittal did most of the talking.”
“Okay, you’ve covered Charlie’s ass. Now answer my question.”
“The Los Texicanos in the trunk of the Malibu, Evelyn’s gentleman friend. He throws it all out.”
She nodded. “He wasn’t stabbed. He died from a shot to the head, plus, he’s B-positive. That still leaves us with our B-negative out there with a nasty wound.”
“That’s not what I’m talking about.” Will resisted the urge to add, “and you know it.” Amanda wasn’t just tying his hands behind his back. She was blindfolding him and sending him toward the edge of a cliff. Her refusal to talk about or even acknowledge Evelyn Mitchell’s sordid past wasn’t going to help Faith and it sure as hell wasn’t going to get her mother back in one piece. Evelyn had worked in narcotics. She was obviously in contact, almost daily, with a higher-up in Los Texicanos, the gang that ran the drug trade in and out of Atlanta. They should be back in the city talking to the gang units and putting together the last few weeks of Evelyn’s life, not making a fool’s errand to visit a guy who had nothing to lose and a history of stubborn silence.
“Come on, Dr. Trent,” Amanda chided. “Don’t make me pull teeth.”
Will let his ego get in the way for a few more seconds before saying, “Evelyn’s gentleman friend. His wallet was missing. He didn’t have any ID or money on him. The only thing in his pockets was the key to Evelyn’s Malibu. She must’ve given it to him.”
“Keep going.”
“She was making lunch for two people. There were four slices of bread in the toaster. Faith was late. Evelyn didn’t know what time she’d be home, but she would assume Faith would call when she was on her way. There were groceries in the trunk of the Malibu. The receipt says Evelyn used her debit card at the Kroger at 12:02. The gentleman was bringing in the groceries while she fixed lunch.”
Amanda smiled. “I often forget how smart you are, but then something like this happens and it makes me realize why I hired you.”
Will ignored the backhanded compliment. “So, Evelyn’s making lunch. She starts to wonder where her gentleman friend is. She goes outside and finds his body in the trunk. She grabs Emma and hides her in the shed. If she’d grabbed Emma after cutting her hand, like Dr. Mittal said, there would’ve been blood somewhere on the car seat. Evelyn’s strong, but she’s not Hercules. The car seat, even without a baby in it, is pretty heavy. She couldn’t dead lift one of those things off the counter with one hand—at least not safely. She’d have to cup the bottom with her free hand. Emma’s little, but she’s got some heft to her.”
Amanda supplied, “Evelyn spent time in the shed. She moved the blankets around. There’s no blood on them. She dialed the combination lock on the safe. There’s no blood on the dial. The floor is clean. She was bleeding after she locked the door.”
“I’m not an expert on kitchen injuries, but you don’t generally cut your ring finger when you’re slicing something. It’s usually the thumb or the index finger.”
“Another good point.” Amanda checked the rearview mirror and changed lanes. “Okay, what did she do next?”
“Like you said. Evelyn hides the baby, then gets her gun out of the safe, goes back into the house and shoots Kwon, who’s waiting to ambush her from the laundry room. Then, she’s overpowered by a second man, probably our mystery blood type B-negative. Evelyn’s gun gets knocked out of her hand during the struggle. She stabs B-negative, but there’s a third guy, Mr. Hawaiian Shirt. He gets Evelyn’s gun off the floor and stops the struggle. He asks her where the thing is that they’re looking for. She tells them to go to hell. She’s duct-taped to the chair while they search the house.”
“That sounds plausible.”
It sounded confusing. There were so many bad guys that Will was having a hard time keeping track of them. Two Asians, one Hispanic, possibly two—maybe a third man, race unknown—a house being searched for God only knew what and a missing sixty-three-year-old ex-cop who had her share of secrets.
Then there was the even larger question that Will knew better than to ask: why hadn’t Evelyn called for help? By Will’s count, she’d had at least two opportunities to make a call or run for help: when she first heard the noise, and after she shot Hironobu Kwon in the laundry room. And yet, she had stayed.
“What are you thinking?”
Will knew better than to give an honest answer. “I’m wondering how they got her out of the house without anyone seeing.”
Amanda reminded him, “You’re assuming Roz Levy is being forthcoming.”
“Do you think she’s involved in this?”
“I think she’s a wily old bitch who wouldn’t piss on you if your hair was on fire.”
Will supposed the venom i
n her tone came from experience.
Amanda said, “This wasn’t spur-of-the-moment. Some planning went into it. They didn’t all walk there. There was a car somewhere, maybe a van. There’s a dogleg alley jutting into Little John Trail. They would’ve gone out the back, exiting into Evelyn’s backyard. You follow the fence line between the neighbors and you’re there in two minutes.”
“How many men do you think were there?”
“We’ve got three dead on scene. There’s the injured B-negative and at least one able-bodied man. There’s no way Evelyn would’ve gone to a second location without a fight. She would’ve risked being shot first. There had to be someone there who was strong enough to tie her up or subdue her.”
Will didn’t add that they could’ve just as easily injured or killed her and removed the body. “We’ll know for sure when we get the fingerprints. They all must’ve touched something.”
Abruptly, Amanda changed the subject. “Have you and Faith ever talked about your case against her mother?”
“Not really. I’ve never told her about the bank account, because there’s no reason. She assumes I was wrong. A lot of people do. My case was never made in court. Evelyn retired with full benefits. It’s not a hard conclusion to jump to.”
She nodded as if she was giving her approval. “The man in the trunk, the one you call Evelyn’s gentleman friend. Let’s talk about him.”
“If he was bringing in groceries, that implies they had a personal relationship.”
“That’s certainly possible.”
Will thought about the guy. He’d been shot in the back of the head. His wallet and ID were not the only things missing from his person. He didn’t have a cell phone. He didn’t have the thick gold watch he’d been wearing in the picture Mrs. Levy had taken. His clothes were nondescript—Nikes with Dr. Scholl’s orthopedic inserts, J. Crew jeans, and a Banana Republic shirt that had cost a lot of money considering he hadn’t bothered to iron it. There was a smattering of gray in the black goatee on his chin. The stubble on his shiny head indicated he was hiding male pattern baldness rather than making a bold statement in style. Except for the Los Texicanos star on his forearm, he could’ve been a stockbroker having a midlife crisis.
Amanda said, “I’ve checked with Narcotics. There’ve been some grumblings about the Asians making a play for the powder cocaine trade. It’s been up for grabs since the BMF went down.”
The Black Mafia Family. They had controlled coke sales from Atlanta to LA, with Detroit in between. “That’s a lot of money. The Family was pulling down hundreds of millions of dollars a year.”
“Los Texicanos was calling the shots. They’ve always been suppliers, not distributors. It’s a smart way to play it. That’s why they’ve survived all these years. Despite what Charlie thinks about race, they don’t care if the dealer is black or brown or purple, so long as the money’s green.”
Will had never worked a major drug case. “I don’t know much about the organization.”
“Los Texicanos started back in the mid-sixties at the Atlanta Pen. The population demographic back then was almost the exact reverse of what it is now—seventy percent white, thirty black. Crack cocaine changed that overnight. It worked faster than forced busing. There were still only a handful of Mexicans in the joint, and they ganged up to keep from getting their throats cut. You know how it goes.”
Will nodded. Just about every gang in America had started as a group of minorities, be they Irish, Jewish, Italian, or other, banding together for survival. It generally took a couple of years before they started doing worse than was done to them. “What’s the structure?”
“Pretty loose. No one’s going to chart like MS-13.” She was referring to what was often called the most dangerous gang in the world. Their organizational structure rivaled the military’s, and their loyalty was so fierce that they’d never been successfully infiltrated.
Amanda explained, “In the early years, Los Texicanos was on the front page of the paper every single day, sometimes in both editions. Shootouts in the street, heroin, pot, numbers, prostitution, robbery. Their calling card was branding children. They didn’t just go after the person who crossed them. They’d go after a daughter, son, niece, nephew. They’d cut open their faces, once across the forehead, then a vertical line down the nose to the chin.”
Without thinking, Will put his hand to the scar along his jaw.
“There was one point during the Atlanta Child Murders investigation when Los Texicanos was at the top of our list. This was early on, the fall of ’79. I was the glorified assistant of the senior liaison for Fulton, Cobb, and Clayton. Evelyn was on the Atlanta task force, mostly fetching coffee until it was time to talk to the parents, then it all fell to her. The general consensus was that the Texicanos were trying to send a broader message to the clientele. It seems ludicrous now, but at the time, we were hoping it was them.” She switched on the blinker and changed lanes. “You were around four then, so you won’t remember, but it was a very tense time. The entire metro area was terrified.”
“Sounds like it,” he said, surprised she knew his age.
“It wasn’t long after the Child Murders that one of the top Texicanos was taken down during an internal struggle. They’re tight-knit. We never found out what happened or who took over, but we know the new guy was much more business-oriented. No more violence for the sake of violence. He prioritized the business, taking out the riskier component. His motto was to keep the coke flowing and the blood off the streets. Once they went underground, we were glad to ignore them.”
“Who’s in charge now?”
“Ignatio Ortiz is the only name we have. He’s the face of the gang. There are two others, but they keep an incredibly low profile and you’ll never find all three of them together in the same place. Before you ask, Ortiz is in Phillips State Prison serving his third year of seven without parole for attempted manslaughter.”
“Attempted?” That didn’t sound very gangbanger.
“Came home and found his wife tossing the sheets with his brother. Story goes he missed on purpose.”
Will assumed Ortiz had no trouble running his business from prison. “Is he worth talking to?”
“Even if we had cause, he wouldn’t sit with us in a room without his lawyer, who would insist that his client is just an average businessman who let his passion get the best of him.”
“Has he ever been arrested before?”
“A few times in his younger days, but nothing major.”
“So, the gang’s still under the radar.”
“They come out every now and then to school the younger kids. Do you remember the Father’s Day murder in Buckhead last year?”
“The guy who had his throat slit open in front of his kids?”
She nodded. “Thirty years ago, they would’ve killed the children, too. One might say they’ve gotten softer in their old age.”
“I’d hardly call that soft.”
“Inside the joint, the Texicanos are known as throat slitters.”
“The gentleman in the trunk is high up on the food chain.”
“Why do you think that?”
“He’s only got one tattoo.” Young gang members generally used their bodies as a canvas to illustrate their lives, etching tattoos of teardrops under their eyes for every murder, wrapping their elbows and shoulders in cobwebs to show that they’d done time. The tattoos were always rendered in blue ink culled from ballpoint pens, what was called “joint ink,” and they always told a story. Unless their story was so bad that it didn’t need to be told.
Will said, “A clean body means money, power, control. The gentleman is older, probably early sixties. That puts him in on the ground floor of Texicanos. His age is his badge of honor. This isn’t the kind of lifestyle that ensures longevity.”
“You don’t get old by being stupid.”
“You don’t get old by being in a gang.”
“We can only hope the APD shares the gentleman’s identi
ty with us when they manage to track it down.”
Will glanced at her. She stared ahead at the road. He had a niggling suspicion that Amanda already knew who this man was, and exactly what part he played in the Texicanos hierarchy. There was something about the way she’d folded Mrs. Levy’s photograph in her pocket, and he was pretty sure that she had given the old woman some kind of coded message to keep her story to herself.
He asked, “Do you ever listen to AC/DC?”
“Do I look like I listen to AC/DC?”
“It’s a metal band.” He didn’t tell her they’d created one of the bestselling albums in the history of music. “They’ve got a song called ‘Back in Black.’ It was playing when Faith pulled up. I checked the CDs at the house. Evelyn didn’t have it in her collection, and the player was empty when I ejected the tray.”
“What’s it about?”
“Well, the obvious. Being back. Wearing black. It was recorded after the original lead singer of the group died from a drug and alcohol bender.”
“It’s always sad when someone dies of a cliché.”
Will thought about the lyrics, which he happened to know by heart. “It’s about resurrection. Transformation. Coming back from a bad place and telling people who might’ve underestimated you, or made fun of you, that you’re not taking it anymore. Like, you’re cool now. You’re wearing black. You’re a bad guy. Ready to fight back.” He suddenly realized why he’d worn out the record when he was a teenager. “Or something like that.” He swallowed. “It could mean other things.”
“Hm” was all she would give him.
He drummed his fingers on the armrest. “How did you meet Evelyn?”
“We went to Negro school together.”
Will nearly choked on his tongue.
She chuckled at his reaction to what must have been a well-used line. “That’s what they called it back in the stone ages—the Negro Women’s Traffic School. Women were trained separately from men. Our job was to check meters and issue citations for illegally parked cars. Sometimes, we were allowed to talk to prostitutes, but only if the boys allowed us, and usually there was some crude joke about it. Evelyn and I were the only two whites in a group of thirty that graduated that year.” There was a fond smile on her lips. “We were ready to change the world.”
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