Measureless Night (Ash Rashid Book 4)

by Chris Culver

  She forced a small smile to her lips. “Tino’s not dead yet. Please don’t talk about him as if he was.”

  He nodded and then pounded a fist to his chest before stepping inside. She couldn’t hear him through the warehouse’s brick facade, but he emerged a moment later, holding the door for her. “Miguel’s in his office. He said go right in.”

  She walked inside. Carla didn’t know what its original designers had intended that warehouse to hold, but it now held five shipping containers against the far wall, their doors thrown open and people freely milling about and talking in hushed tones while men from Barrio Sureño stood guard. Each container held four or five cots for individuals Miguel had smuggled across the border into the United States. He treated them relatively well as far as these things went—never beating them, never allowing his men to sexually assault the women, even feeding them three times a day—but no one left that warehouse without Miguel’s leave. For a select few of those people whose relatives and loved ones refused to pay the ransom, they’d never see the sun rise again.

  Carla ignored that scene and crossed the concrete floor to a small enclosed office on the other side of the room. Someone had closed the door but he hadn’t bothered drawing the window blinds shut, allowing her to see inside. The room had a desk, a couch, and a television on a wooden stand. Miguel sat at the desk, his hands behind his head and his feet up, while a Spanish-language soap opera blared from the television. As soon as she opened the door, he waved her in.

  “Come in, chica. You here to make sure we’re still treating the product well?”

  Carla walked to the nearest window and closed the blinds. “You’ve always handled this end of the business well, but we need to talk.” Once she had closed all the windows and doors, she handed him the iPad. “Someone sent me a link to a blog you should check out.”

  He glanced at her and then the iPad before reaching into his desk for a pair of reading glasses and tapping the home button to wake the device up. He thumbed through the document she had open for him, but then looked at her.

  “What is this?”

  “It’s a blog written by a journalist from Mexico City who’s hired coyotes to bring her from Nogales to the United States. She’s writing about her experiences along the way and submitting them via a cell phone.”

  In fact, Carla had written the blog the night before and had then edited the time stamps to make it look as if the posts had come in over a one-week period.

  “What’s she saying?” asked Miguel, leaning back.

  “Everything. She documents how your partners recruit clients in Mexico, how you bring them across the border in trucks, what happens to them along the way. It’s not good, Miguel. She’s one of yours.” Carla picked up the iPad, browsed until she found the posting she wanted, and began reading. “Their leader is a former soldier named Miguel. He has the blackest eyes I’ve ever seen and a hateful mouth.” She turned the screen toward him and pointed at him. “She’s talking about you.”

  “I can see that,” he said. He paused for a moment and then exhaled hard and long before nodding toward the nearest window. “Has she talked about this?”

  Carla shook her head. “She had to dump her phone before she could, but you know she’s going to. Her family’s going to buy her out, and she’s going to tell the world what we’re doing. This is going to hurt business, but worse than that, this is going to bring the federal government down on us. We can’t afford that right now.”

  Miguel tilted his head to the side and shrugged. “Then we’ll kill her. Who is she?”

  “If I knew who she was, I would have killed her myself. The fact is, we don’t even know if it’s a woman. Her first post, she says she has to conceal her identity. She might be a man pretending to be a woman.” She started pacing the small room. “We get FBI agents in here, we all go down. I told you this would happen.”

  He held up his hands, palms toward her. “Relax. I’ll deal with it.”

  She turned toward him. “How?”

  “We’ll ask around. People will talk, I’m sure.”

  Carla shook her head and then pounded her finger on the desk. “Not good enough, Miguel, not when our lives are on the line. You ever picked apples?”

  “When I was young.”

  “Then you know,” said Carla, nodding. “One bad apple ruins the whole bushel.”

  Miguel looked toward the window and then ran his hand across his face. “We’ve got almost a hundred people around the city right now. That’s a lot of meat to get rid of.”

  “Then throw a barbecue.”

  Miguel shook his head again and then took a deep breath. “I’ll take care of it.”

  Carla straightened and grabbed her iPad from the desk and then pointed toward the window in the direction of the shipping containers. “These people jeopardize our business. It’s over. Never again. Do you understand me?”

  His eyes narrowed. “Do you talk to your husband like this?”

  “No, but in a couple of days, my husband will be dead. I’m not going to join him. Clean this mess up.”

  Miguel agreed, and Carla left the building. More than likely, he’d try to weasel his way out of his responsibility, but it didn’t matter. As soon as she secured Barrio Sureño, Miguel would die.

  Chapter 25

  I left Brian in the basement of that soup kitchen, unsure what to do. Not only had Santino Ramirez not committed the crime we had convicted him of, my partner had known the eyewitnesses had lied. At the very least, Keith should have told me. We might have disagreed, and we might have fought over it, but partners don’t hold this sort of thing back from each other. Had he been alive, I think I would have found him and punched him. Of course, nothing changed what I needed to do.

  A cold wind ripped at my cheeks as I stepped back onto the sidewalk, but I ignored it and took out my phone to call Paul Murphy. His phone immediately went to voice mail, which meant he had either run out of battery, entered a low-service area, or had turned it off completely. Any way I looked at it, he wouldn’t call me back anytime soon. I left him a message to let him know Xavier Jackson was in St. Louis and that he should try to track him down, when he could, to make sure he was still alive. I called Captain Bowers next, and he answered on the first ring.

  “Ash. You’re not at home.”

  “Yeah, I stepped out for breakfast.”

  I could practically feel him grinding his teeth. “Your lawyer’s been trying to get ahold of you. Lot of people need to see you.”

  “Forget about that for a moment,” I said, walking west on Market Street. “First thing: Carla Ramirez definitely killed Angel Hererra. If you look at the evidence, you’ll see that we found her prints on the murder weapon and GSR on her clothes. We found the gun on a coffee table in her house, so we just assumed she had touched it. We also assumed she had the GSR on her due to contact with her husband. With Santino in Mexico at the time of the shooting, she’s our only viable suspect. Not only that, she told Brian Alexander that Santino would kill somebody in the basement of the soup kitchen two days before it happened. She knew because she planned to do it herself.”

  I could hear Bowers breathe, but he didn’t say anything. Indianapolis had gone through a lot of changes since my childhood, including a major revitalization of the downtown area. Unfortunately, that gentrification hadn’t spread much beyond the central core, leaving the landscape even a few blocks to the east and west mostly devoid of industry or life. I had parking lots to my left and right and a parking garage about a block ahead of me. Aside from the homeless shelter, no churches, stores, restaurants, or other businesses lined the streets. The wind whistled through the streets like an Old West ghost town.

  “Our surveillance team is still trying to track her down. When they find her, I’ll just have them pick her up and bring her in. We’ll see what she has to say.”

  I shook my head and kept walking, hoping I could shake off the chill. “She wouldn’t have gone on TV to protest her husband’s innoc
ence without some plan to deal with us. We pick her up now, she’ll pin it on somebody else. Besides that, she’s not doing this on her own. She’s got at least one partner. I say we follow her and see where she goes.”

  “It’s a risk. I’ll think it over. What else do you have to tell me?”

  “Santino Ramirez has a son named Jacob.”

  “What do we know about him?”

  I reached the parking garage and ducked inside the stairwell that led to the second floor to get out of the wind. “Not a lot. Keith and I crawled pretty far into Ramirez’s life when we investigated him for the murder of Angel Hererra, but we never found the kid. He was eight when Angel was shot, so Jacob would be eighteen or nineteen now. Carla Ramirez is too young to have an eighteen-year-old kid, so he’s not hers. I don’t know if he’s involved, but we should track him down. If nothing else, he might have heard some rumors.”

  “I’ll put Emilia Rios on that. She has contacts in Barrio Sureño’s neighborhood. Anything else?”

  “We need to start thinking about how we can keep Santino in prison. He gets out on the streets, he’ll be in the wind before the day is done and we’ll have bodies from here to Mexico.”

  “Okay,” said Bowers, drawing the word out, clearly growing tired of the conversation. “Anything else?”

  I looked at the concrete around me, debating whether to tell him about Keith’s subterfuge. If Bowers actually pushed this case, he’d find out Keith had known our witnesses had lied. I didn’t know how to handle it, and I was still too pissed off to figure it out.

  “That’s it.”

  “Good,” said Bowers. “Get over to your lawyer’s office. We’ll talk later. All right?”

  I started to say sure, but he hung up before I did. My heart sort of flip-flopped in my chest. One way or another, calling Randy, my lawyer, would change my life wholly and completely. Seven days had passed since my hearing, seven days since I tried to explain a judgment call, made in the midst of one of the most stressful situations of my life, to three police captains who hadn’t been there, who hadn’t studied the briefings, who hadn’t actually worked a case in a decade or more. It was a lot of power to give three political hacks—everyone that high in the department’s hierarchy was more politician than police officer—but that’s how the system worked. Those without a whit of understanding passed judgment, while those of us in the trenches, those of us with our arms elbow-deep in filth, were second-guessed at every opportunity.

  I didn’t want to talk to him, but I couldn’t avoid it any longer. I called his office and got his assistant.

  “This is Ash Rashid. I’m returning Randy Prather’s phone call.”

  She sucked in a breath. “We hoped you’d call. Randy is entertaining some guests right now. He wants you to come down here ASAP.”

  Entertaining some guests. How nice for him. He had company.

  “You can’t interrupt him so we can do this on the phone?”

  She hesitated. “You need to come down here, Mr. Rashid.”

  So now even the office assistant could order me around. Maybe that’s what life held for me in the future. I sighed.

  “All right. Tell Randy I’m on my way.”

  I hung up. Randy rented an office in a building on Ohio Street, just a couple of blocks north of me. On the plus side, I knew of a liquor store just a block away from his building, so I could go out and get sloshed in the parking garage if the worst came to pass. I left the parking garage and headed north on New Jersey Street and then west on Ohio.

  With the case going on, I had almost forgotten the heavy weight above my head. Now I felt it pressing down on me. I had passed the bar and I did have a license to practice law in Indiana, so theoretically, I could start applying at law firms. Of course, few corporate law firms would even look at the résumé of a thirty-five-year-old guy without prior legal experience. I could get a job at a criminal defense firm, but that’d feel an awful lot like I was betraying my old colleagues. I’d have to figure something out.

  Randy’s building had its own garage, and since I didn’t know how to get to his office except through the elevator in the garage, I walked inside, passing several cars along the way. A couple in a minivan argued loudly enough that I could hear them even with their doors shut and their windows up, making me hope they had come to see the marriage counselor who rented the other half of Randy’s floor. They—and I have no idea who “they” are—say that married couples argue about money more than any other topic. I wondered if Hannah and I would start arguing like that if the department fired me. Hopefully, if we did, we’d find a better place to do it than a parking garage.

  I took the elevator to Randy’s floor, steeling myself for bad news. I had only met her once, but the receptionist greeted me by name as soon as I stepped into the lobby. She said Randy would be right out, so I sat on an upholstered wooden chair and leaned forward, feeling my nervousness rise. With its stark white walls and gray Berber carpet, the office felt like the waiting room of a hospital, and I felt like a man awaiting the results of a cancer screen.

  When Randy came out, he gestured for me to follow him back to his office.

  “Good news or bad?” I asked, standing.

  “More unorthodox than anything else,” he said. “Let’s go to my office and talk. There are a couple of people here who need to see you.”

  Calling the ruling unorthodox did little to assuage my nerves. Like the lobby, the corridor that led to Randy’s office had white walls, gray carpet, and white acoustical tiles on the ceiling. I couldn’t imagine a more banal decorating scheme. Randy’s office, while similarly decorated, had a wall of windows overlooking Ohio Street and a wooden desk and lightly stained bookshelves. As he had said, we weren’t alone. Leonard Wilson, the prosecutor, stood beside the window, looking down at the city that had recently elected him, while Sylvia Lombardo, the recently appointed director of public safety, sat in a chair facing the desk.

  “Ashraf,” said Leonard. “It’s good to see you.”

  I looked at Randy. “Why is this asshole in the room?”

  Leonard actually chuckled. In my life, I’ve met a handful of truly despicable people, people the world would be better off without. Leonard landed somewhere in the middle of that list.

  “Don’t hold back now, Ash,” said Leonard. “Tell me how you really feel about me.”

  I looked at him. “How about we catch up later? We’ll pick up some underage prostitutes. I hear you’re into that sort of thing.”

  He smiled and laughed again.

  “Ash, let’s just stay calm for a minute,” said Randy, in a low, throaty tone. “Everyone is here because we have a difficult situation to deal with.”

  “And what situation is that? Am I fired or not? Or maybe Leonard wants to accuse me of a crime?”

  Sylvia Lombardo stood and turned to face me. “No, you are not fired. Early this morning, Mike Bowers rescinded the charges against you.”

  I furrowed my brow, confused. “Why?”

  “We’re not here to talk about the why,” said Lombardo. She folded her hands together in front of her sky-blue pencil skirt. “But we do need to talk about your future. You’ve put us in a tough spot. You’re an asset to this department, but your media profile is a little too high for most of our units.”

  I nodded and crossed my arms. “And by that, you mean I pointed a gun at Kristen Tanaka while she had a camera in her hands.”

  Leonard laughed. “Your phrasing leaves a bit to be desired,” he said, his laugh turning into a smile that translated into his voice. “But you got the gist. That’s why we put our heads together trying to find somewhere for you. Sylvia even suggested the prosecutor’s office.”

  I had worked as an investigator in the prosecutor’s office for a number of years and knew most of the staff, so it was a good suggestion.

  “You didn’t want that, though,” I said, glancing at Leonard and forcing myself to smile. “Who needs a watchdog?”

  Leonard forme
d one of his hands into a gun and shot me in the head. “Especially when I don’t know who’s holding the leash.” He smiled and glanced at Lombardo. “IMPD has received some bad press lately, some deserved, some not. Sylvia and I have gone back and forth on this all morning. We even butted heads a time or two. We both agreed that we need more than a good PR team. We need to get better, prove to the people who elected us—elected me, at least—that we’re taking crime in this city seriously. Together, Sylvia and I decided that we need a unit laser-focused on those cases that might prove too burdensome for our more inexperienced investigators. We need a dedicated major case squad composed of the best officers in the city. You, Lieutenant Rashid, are its inaugural commanding officer. Congratulations.”

  He held out a hand and shot me a knowing smile. There were certain power brokers in the city who wanted me to work in Leonard’s office to keep him in line. This was evidently his plan to keep me at bay. It was so transparent, I was almost a little disappointed.

  “You going to stop accusing me of things on TV now?” I asked.

  “I’ll never stop fighting for the people of Indianapolis, if that’s what you mean,” said Leonard, smirking.

  “How about cases of political corruption, then? Will I have authority to handle them?”

  His smile never wavered. “We’ll have to see about the extent of your authority as time progresses. For now, you don’t have a lot of resources. If you want a case, you’ll run it through Ms. Lombardo’s office. She and I will decide if it’s an investigation worthy of your squad’s time.”

  Which put Leonard in a position to deny everything I wanted, leaving me with a do-nothing job without resources, a staff, or any power of my own.

  “What if I refuse?”

  Leonard shrugged. “Then maybe IMPD doesn’t need you.” He stood and shook his head at me. “I don’t think you’re going to refuse, though. And whatever you do, don’t screw up. People are watching, and you’ve got nowhere to go from here but down.”