“You’ve done this before.”
Hadn’t she just told him?
Something was wrong between them. She pushed it out of her mind and got to work combining her notes. Rivera went down the hall to check on the coffee. You could smell it burning. She looked in his desk for a highlighter. There among the paper clips and Post-it note pads, the ruler and scissors, was a CD case for the country song he’d played for her, about not closing her eyes, looking straight at him, putting her past behind to be with him now.
She opened the plastic case. Instead of a disc matching the cover, she found a CD labeled in black marker. Yoga Zone: Blues and Greens, Wind and Rain. She pushed the drawer shut at the sound of footsteps and focused on the keyboard.
He returned with two cups of coffee and placed one by her keyboard.
“Do you have any more of that water you had in the car last night?” She didn’t turn from the screen. “It was good.”
“Sorry. That was it.”
“It had pineapple juice. Where have I tasted that before?”
She heard him moving behind her, pulling out a chair, exhaling a little too loud after testing the hot coffee.
“I’ll draft the section requesting a forensic examination of their computers,” he said. “It’s a little trickier than authorization to search a physical location. As for attorney files, we must establish prophylactic measures to avoid violating attorney-client privilege. It’s like minimization procedures on a wiretap.”
Prophylactic measures.
“Are you screwing Sun-Hi Breskin? Sunny?”
The sighing again, but not because the coffee was hot.
He had his eyes down, thinking what to say.
“Last night, I pull up in the truck,” she said. “No reaction. Every time one of us went through something terrible, faced death, dealt with it, I’d bring the truck. It was our signal we needed each other. Now, nada. Not even a hug after I was shot at by machine guns. The water, the pineapple stuff, we had at the Breskin place. That flaky music, I remember you said you liked it. Did she burn the CD before or after you finished your list of questions that cleared her husband?”
“Denise, let’s forget this for now. We have work.”
“We’ll get to work. It’s what keeps me going. You went out to Breskin’s alone. I thought maybe it was some new FBI procedure, letting you guys fly solo. You just wanted to be with her. You were there last night when I called.”
Rivera closed the door though they were alone in the building.
“You weren’t there for me,” he said. “I’d hoped it would get better.”
“I’d get better. That’s what you were hoping. Your magic touch would fix me.”
“You have needs. So do I. Maybe you were getting what you wanted.”
“I was giving.”
“And maybe that’s the problem. You were doing it just to make me feel better. To serve and protect, even in the back of your brother’s truck. What I needed was someone alive with me in the moment.”
“Not closing their eyes, not going back to somewhere else.”
“Someone else.”
“And that’s what you’re getting from her? This deep, meaningful relationship? She’s married to a porn king.”
“She doesn’t want to be. She was a programmer, helped him get started, then stepped back from her career when his took off. She’s watched him go crazy. She’s starting to see a new life for herself.”
“She’s sexy, with a great body and long black hair, alone in that big house with nothing to do. Why not ball an FBI agent? She ask to see your abs before she went for your zipper?”
“She didn’t ask to see my abs.”
“She asked to see mine. Hmm. Hey, it just hit me. You could be a star in one of Breskin’s movies and not know it.” Argon made the shape of a square with fingers from both hands and framed Rivera’s face. “Your face and ass already out there on the Internet, making it with Sunny and her making sure you face the camera now and then. An FBI Special Agent’s home video on some pay-for-view.” She snapped her fingers. “Or maybe you should watch for the blackmail demand. There’s a lot of that going around.”
“You’ve got her wrong. She’s a warm person who needs to talk. We talk about how we feel, Denise. Everything about you is hard, your body, your heart. I just bounce off.”
“Go to hell.” Aragon held his eyes until she felt him folding. “We need Thornton’s smartphone as well as her hard drive. Diaz, too. Can you handle that?”
“She’s not available,” Aragon said. “She’s married.” On the phone in her car outside Rivera’s office, guessing he was probably where she’d left him: at his desk, where he’d been trying to discuss business, explaining the difficulties of getting into a lawyer’s communication channels. But the both of them knowing that it wasn’t what they were talking about.
She started the engine, put the transmission into reverse and then back into park.
“And one more thing about your fuck buddy.” She waited for him to say Do you have to use that language? Even better: Don’t talk about Sunny that way. There’s more to our relationship than you know. That would have gotten them talking, her for sure. But nothing came back. Rivera had stopped talking in the office and she couldn’t get him going again.
She ended the call and looked at her phone, needing to talk to someone. Serena? Maybe if this had happened last week, before bullet holes in her daughters’ bedroom.
Javier? He’d be there for little sis. He’d come straight out of the mountains but was way the hell the other side of Santa Fe Baldy, deep in the wilderness, one of the blank spaces on the Verizon coverage map.
Lewis? Couldn’t do it. Dead girls, drive-bys, serial killers … they could talk for hours. Not this.
Roshi Buff? Christ, she’d light incense.
No, that wasn’t fair. Buff would listen. She was good at that. But talking about losing Tomas to the easy-lay Asian wife of a porn pig living in a white castle like the queen of Santa Fe? Seeing herself telling it at Buff’s place, the Buddhist temple and its meditation garden of smooth stones, gangbanger music thumping beyond the walls on Airport Road? No way. She’d be thinking about what those kids were up to in their war wagons ten yards past the cinder blocks instead of what was going on in her heart.
Shit.
Lotaburger time. Make that a double order and throw in a chili Frito pie.
Fager, in charcoal wool-blend pants, sharp crease, pale yellow shirt, maroon tie, no jacket in the morning sun, set up a card table and stretched an extension cord to power a thirty-cup coffee pot. He asked a uniformed cop to let him get his car out of the parking lot. The police had secured it, Thornton’s Aston and Durango parked in there. The cop called Lewis over. Fager said he was going out for pastries while the coffee brewed. Lewis let him through. While he was gone, the number of federal and state vehicles outside Thornton’s law office grew. Lewis went back to discussing with an Assistant US Attorney how to handle the search of Thornton’s file cabinets.
Aragon was inside, following Elaine Salas collecting fingerprints in the hope that they’d find proof Cassandra Baca had been here, though Montclaire hadn’t mentioned it. Aragon went straight for the dressing table next to Thornton’s desk.
She came outside with handcuffs in an evidence bag.
Fager had returned, a cardboard box now on the table next to the coffee pot. He was setting a folding chair when he saw her.
“Find something good?” he called across his yard.
She ignored him and told Lewis to spread the word no one was to step over there. Fager would pump them for information. At trial, Thornton would be wailing about cops being bribed cheap for a cruller and cup of joe.
A station wagon with two men and woman arrived. Aragon thought they were reporters as they unpacked video cameras from the back.
“They’re mine.” It was Thornton on the front step, emerging from the conference room where she’d been busy on the phone, while a young female officer watched her from the door. “I want my own record of this invasion of my rights and the rights of my clients.”
“Morning, Marse.” Fager, seated, legs crossed, raised a pastry and took a bite. Powdered sugar on his fingers, jelly on his lips. “O’Hori’s coffee, croissants, napoleons, and Danish from the French Pastry Shop in La Fonda. Join me watching the police dismantling your office and your life. C’mon, where’s that Marcy Thornton smile we’ve come to love?”
“I don’t have to let your team in during our search,” Aragon told Thornton. “You personally have the right to be present. It’s your property. You could have your lawyer inside. Too bad you got Walter Fager disbarred. He was damn good and he’s right over there, dying to be part of this.”
Aragon looked to the DOJ lawyer, the only person in a business suit besides Fager with his treats and coffee. The lawyer nodded his agreement and Aragon ordered two SFPD officers to block the video crew’s entry onto the property.
“You just made your second mistake, detective.” Thornton crossed her arms and waited for the obvious follow-up.
“Okay, I’ll bite.” Aragon said. “Tell me my first mistake.”
“I’ll save that for pre-trial motions.”
Aragon dangled the baggie with the handcuffs in front of Thornton’s face. “You use these on clients while you empty their pockets?”
“Where did you get those?” Thornton was holding it together, tucking her chin, trying to look puzzled and not pulling it off.
“Your dressing table.”
“Bullshit. I don’t keep handcuffs in my dressing table.”
“The search video will show you did. I’ll bet we find some interesting things on here. Your fingerprints. Judy Diaz’s, too. And probably Cassandra Baca’s DNA. You knew her as Andrea.”
That hit Thornton. “You found those in my dressing table?”
“With Chanel and Aveda eye cream.”
“And this is about Andrea? You think I had something to do with killing her?”
There was a look on Thornton’s face Aragon had never seen. In court, bluffing a plea deal, Marcy Thornton had never shown that look, not even when things came at her she never could have seen coming. This time the case was about her, not something she could pack away in a file cabinet and forget until tomorrow.
Maybe Thornton was thinking, I need a lawyer right now.
Aragon left her on the sidewalk with her look and went to Lewis. “Rivera’s at Diaz’s house?” she asked her partner.
“Roger. He’s in. But the FBI boys at her chambers are looking at a locked door with Diaz on the other side. They put one of those fiber-optic cameras under the door to watch until they get it open. She’s getting sloshed, hitting a gallon jug of vodka in a dressing table just like the one in Thornton’s office. She takes a slug, puts it back. Closes the cabinet door like she’s done. A second later she’s at it again.”
“Half of Thornton’s office is a dressing room. A closet full of silk suits, racks of shoes with heels, a full-length mirror she can see from her desk. Clients telling their tales of woe, getting the bad news on what it’s going to cost, she’s looking past them at herself.”
“Takes work to always look great.”
“I’ve got a hair trimmer and Ivory soap in my dressing room, the shoe box by the sink.”
They walked together to where Elaine Salas with the FBI’s Evidence Recovery Team was blowing black fingerprint dust on the Aston’s expensive leather. “We should find Cassandra Baca’s latents in the Aston,” Aragon said. “I’m more interested in the Durango. If you’re moving a body around, backing up to a dumpster, which would you use?”
“Something I noticed standing here.” Lewis nodded behind her, and she turned to face the State Capitol. “See all those cameras on the Roundhouse?”
“I like it. We might get Diaz coming to Thornton’s office, Thornton’s cases pending before her, opposing counsel nowhere to be seen. Maybe match the visit to a ruling Thornton wins the next day.” Aragon rubbed her face. “Man, I’m beat. How are you holding up?”
“The shade and grass under that tree look good.”
“I gotta keep moving or I’ll fall asleep. I’m going to swing by E. Benny’s place, check in with—who’s outside?”
“Rivera put Tucker there. I’ll get going on Thornton’s filing cabinets with the AUSA.”
“Let me know when the vehicles are ready for us.”
Lewis’s face told her someone was coming behind her. It was Fager, walking up with the pastry box.
“Look, guys. These are going to waste. I’ve PR work to get to down in Albuquerque.”
“PR work?” Aragon squinted at Fager. “You don’t need to advertise a law practice anymore.”
“I think the term is ‘earned media.’ Here. Have to run.”
She took the box. What the hell? The guys would love these. Ham and cheese croissants. And chocolate. Things with raisins and jam. It looked really good. But she had a bad feeling about what Fager wasn’t telling them.
“Employees arrived,” Tucker said, eating the pastry Aragon brought him. “Trucks going out, the kind that pick up dumpsters and turn them upside down. An empty flatbed coming in. Contractors are returning their rented dumpsters, those smaller models, stacking them outside the gate. Every once in a while a big forklift comes out to get one. We haven’t seen the Silva brothers.”
She was in the backseat with one of Fager’s ham-and-cheese croissants, steering clear of sugar and caffeine, knowing that meant a hard crash and burn later today.
“No van, shot up, the windshield blown out?”
“State Police are all over the Interstate and side roads in the canyon. Zip.”
Tucker’s partner in the passenger seat was a Chinese woman, short, round cheeks, hair pulled back tight. She’d declined Fager’s goodies. She was drinking from a tall, narrow bottle, one of those designer waters. Aragon thought of Sun-Hi Breskin and her pineapple water and was glad Rivera was somewhere else.
“How are you covering this?” She finished her croissant and dropped the wrapping on the floor.
“Six-hour shifts. Rivera’s on tonight.”
They watched one of Silva’s trucks stop at the gate. The driver put a cell phone to his ear.
“It’s always locked,” Tucker said. “The driver calls. Someone comes out to let him in, then locks it again.”
“We could pull over a driver, ask a few questions. It would get back to the Silvas, but so what? What’s in those dumpsters outside the gate?”
Benny Silva saw the bald lady detective getting into the brown Ford that had been sitting at the corner all morning. One of the cameras Abel had set up showed that part of the street beyond the gate.
He and Rigo needed to get out of here. The van was in the woods, safe for a while, Rigo said, at the end of an old logging road he’d blocked with branches and rocks. That’s where they’d parked his Olds, what he was going to drive back, Abel and Junior supposed to follow in the van, a father-and-son team finishing a night’s work. Instead, he’d returned with his son and grandson in plastic in the trunk.
Rigo came in and they watched the Ford together.
Then Rigo said, “Time to go.”
The flatbed was pulled into a garage so they wouldn’t be seen climbing into the cab. Rigo and Benny curled on the floor and passenger seat. One of their guys, he’d been with them for years, a straight-up sanitation engineer, no idea of the company’s other interests, took the wheel. At the gate another of their guys was waiting to let them out. No doors in the truck had to be opened, risking the people in the brown car seeing inside.
Rigo gave directions, head near the floor, talking to the driver’s shins. After twenty minutes
the truck stopped on an open stretch of Old Pecos Trail.
“Anybody following?” Rigo asked.
“We’re alone.”
“Go the other way now, to the casino. We’ll pick you up later. Here’s a hundred bucks for slots.”
That’s how they worked it. In the lot of the Camel Rock Casino west of town, Rigo got behind the wheel. He backtracked again, took St. Francis to St. Michael’s to Old Pecos Trail and got on the interstate heading east into the mountains.
Benny had been quiet, looking out the window, watching the smoke from the Los Alamos fire, trying to remember the last time he and Rigo had gone out on a job together.
“This truck, when did we buy her?”
Rigo drove with an elbow out the open window, the wind flapping his short sleeve. “So long ago they didn’t come with air conditioning.”
“When we were always looking to the future. Now I think we’re only going to look back. Abel and Junior, they were the future.”
“I still got something to look forward to. Killing that lawyer.”
“I been thinking about how you were ambushed. It had to be police, but they never identified themselves? And three against you?”
“The two in the woods we saw with the goggles. And a sniper. Whoever put that shot from nowhere right through Junior’s head.”
“I’m trying to figure who all we need to kill. That’s Aragon’s brother’s place. It was probably her in the woods, and her partner.”
“A mama bear and her cub. That’s what I thought we were walking up on.”
Compromised Page 24
