13 Under the Wire

by Gil Reavill

  Remington told him no salt, and he sent one of the frosty concoctions in her direction.

  She worried about Caroline. Coming back, Remington saw her with fresh eyes. Her sinuses were clearly inflamed under the battering they were taking from Val’s coke. The real difficulty was that the girl actually looked more alluring when she was in her decadence. The quality of beauty ruined by excess was undeniably her best look. Remington wanted to say to her, “Oh, honey.” But when she went to speak, the words somehow got stuck in her throat.

  “¿Qué onda?” she asked instead, sipping the drink.

  Caroline laughed. “Listen to her, she’s all into the lingo now.”

  “What is up, dear Layla,” Ellis said, “is that Val has got a line on our quarry.”

  “César Montenegro turns out to be a very big man,” his sister added. “Muy chingón.”

  “Let me tell it,” Val insisted. He rose to his feet and gestured out the open doorway to the south. “If we had a strong enough pair of binoculars, we could probably see his compound from here. Or, at least, we could see the walls surrounding it.”

  “That’s Investigaciones Especiales?” Remington asked.

  “The address on the business invoice is a drop box at La Ocha, which is the main police station in town.”

  Remington nodded. “I know what it is.”

  “Montenegro is a former Tijuana police chief, head of policía municipal. He was turned out of office in a corruption scandal but has kept his hand in pretty much everything around here.”

  “So we go knock on Montenegro’s door,” Ellis said. “Ask him why Simon hired him.”

  “Not so fast,” Val responded. “From what I can tell, this Montenegro guy carries a lot of weight. We have to be careful.”

  “How about I call him?” Caroline asked. “Coming from a female, a little tug on his sleeve won’t seem so threatening.”

  “Call him and say what?” Val wanted to know.

  “You can tell him that you found a bill for five K among your brother’s effects,” Remington suggested. “You’re just wondering if it was ever paid.”

  “My BlackBerry works for crap around here,” Caroline said.

  “We should just go over there,” Ellis exclaimed, getting up and pointing vaguely in the direction Val had indicated.

  “You don’t understand, baby boy,” Val said. “That’d be like dropping in at the White House, say, or Fort Knox.”

  “Let’s do a drive-by, see what the place is like,” Caroline said.

  Val thought that was a pretty good idea. But then he took out a pipe, he and Ellis and Caroline smoked some of his fine dope, and the plans for the evening melted into the haze.

  —

  Sergeant Roger Lowell had encountered bad situations before during his service as a patrol supervisor at the City of Lake Geneva Police Department, but never one this level of bad. Catastrophe-bad, bad-dreams bad, TV-news-trucks-up-from-Chicago bad.

  The year before, the bodies of two women had been dumped along Como Road, beyond city boundaries. That was bad because the accused was a police officer from Kenosha who had been involved in some pretty unsavory sadomasochistic practices, including something sick called breath play.

  The way Sergeant Lowell knew that particular bit of business had been bad was that the press decided the killings deserved a nickname, the Suitcase Murders. The dead had been discarded on the roadside in a pair of suitcases. It wasn’t a matter of all the body parts of one victim being in one suitcase and the other victim being in the other. They were evenly distributed.

  But the Suitcase Murders had fallen outside the jurisdiction of the Lake Geneva force. The case was mainly handled by the Walworth County Sheriff’s Office. Lowell hadn’t had too much to do with it beyond gossiping around the shop.

  What happened along the south shore of Geneva Lake on October 17, on the other hand, he would take to his grave. The crime drew in patrol officers from the entire county, from Milwaukee, Kenosha, Beloit, and—because the vics were students at Illinois schools—as far away as Chicago.

  Three victims bludgeoned to death at a sorority retreat, the lives of three young ladies ending in circumstances of horror that Lowell had a difficult time comprehending. Somehow it made things worse that thirty-two other members of the Kappa Kappa Chi sorority were fast asleep nearby while their sisters’ skulls were being crushed.

  Then…then. Act two, the perpetrator, confronted by a whole battalion of police an hour and fifteen minutes after the murders were discovered, caught in a firefight in the parking lot of the Lake Geneva Forest Preserve as dawn came up. Though Sergeant Lowell had never personally seen anything as bad as the Kappa Kappa Chi murders, at least he had heard of similar things happening. But he had never seen nor heard of anything remotely like what went down in the forest-preserve parking lot. That beggared belief. That was turn-in-your-badge-and-hang-up-your-spurs horrific.

  The killer wouldn’t fall. He hadn’t made much effort to hide himself. He did what he did at Kappa Kappa Chi and then staggered off along the Lake Shore Path. They didn’t need dogs to track him. Sheriff’s office deputies had only to follow the goddamned bloody footprints on the pine needles. He didn’t get that far. A factory manager named Herb Weltz at the Badger Corrugated warehouse along the lake shouted at him.

  “He was walking slow, one step at a time, like he was sick or something,” Weltz later told the police.

  At the shout, the guy turned. In the rising light, Weltz saw that he was covered in blood, “like he had just gutted a deer.” He stood there in the middle of the empty trailhead parking lot, next door to the factory, swaying in place, not moving off the dime as the law-enforcement furies from four separate police departments screamed down.

  No matter what they threw at him, the guy wouldn’t fall.

  Sergeant Lowell’s dad told him that situations were like knives, because what you could do with them depended on whether you grabbed them by the handle or by the blade. But, Jesus H. Christ, this business was all blade.

  “I want you to make one of the calls,” Chief Rudolph told him. Lowell was sitting in his desk chair at the station, blood-numbed and exhausted. It wasn’t even eight o’clock.

  “Have Bridget do it,” Lowell said. “It’s better coming from a woman.”

  “She’s already assigned herself one. She can’t carry the whole load. It isn’t fair.”

  “For pity’s sake, they were nineteen years old!”

  Chief Rudolph placed an index card down on the desk in front of Lowell, giving the card a little snap as he did so. On it was the contact information for the family of one of the victims. The sorority people had made the ID.

  A West Coast address.

  “I can’t do it,” Lowell said. “It’s, what, six A.M. out there? You think I should wake someone up with this?”

  “Would you want to be contacted if it were your daughter? Make the call, Roger.”

  Victim No. 1, female, DOB 01-12-1987, hair blond, eyes hazel, height 5’7”, weight 142. Incised wounds, multiple contusions, defense wounds, skull fractures. ID withheld pending notification of next of kin.

  Victim No. 2, female, DOB 11-08-1986, hair brown, eyes brown, height 5’2”, weight 113. Incised wounds, multiple contusions, buttocks bloodied, skull fractures. ID withheld pending notification of next of kin.

  Victim No. 3, female, DOB 04-01-1986, hair blond, eyes blue, height 5’11”, weight 122. Multiple incised wounds, multiple fractures, right arm, right thumb broken, windpipe crushed, neck severed at cervical vertebrae C4 and C5, skull removed (recovered, lacking brain matter), cranium fractured along squamosal suture, orbit of right eye fractured, both cheekbones fractured. ID withheld pending notification of next of kin.

  Sergeant Lowell inherited the worst one, vic No. 3. He dithered. The phone number on the index card blurred in his vision. Female, blue-eyed blonde, an inch shy of six feet tall, one hundred and twenty-two pounds, nineteen years old. He had just seen a picture of the gi
rl in life. She looked like a real sweetheart. Someone, Lowell thought, he would have liked to know.

  A moment from the parking lot earlier in the morning kept churning up in his mind. The big perp, slumping forward but still upright, had to have been hit by at least a half-dozen loads. The hackles on the back of Lowell’s neck rose.

  E. J. O’Brien, a patrol officer with the Lake Geneva police, had stood at his shoulder. The fusillade of assault rounds had made Lowell’s ears ring, but he could hear E.J. reciting the Lord’s Prayer. “Our Father, who art in heaven…” The sacred words still echoed in his head.

  Finally, to exorcise the images of the day if for no other reason, Lowell picked up the phone and dialed.

  The person on the other end of the line surprised him by picking up right away. At a little before 6 A.M. Pacific time.

  “Yes?” The man’s voice crisp, fully awake, not sleep-ridden. Authoritative and cold.

  “This is Sergeant Roger Lowell of the City of Lake Geneva Police Department. I’m trying to reach Mr. Victor Loushane.”

  “Speaking.”

  Chapter 8

  As befitted Remington’s fifth-wheel status within the group, she had been assigned a room in the back of the big villa, overlooking not the golf course but the sprawl of Tijuana, the calles and colonias to the west. The morning after yet another party evening, Remington had awakened early but remained cloistered in her bedroom.

  She had made the decision to return to Los Angeles. The others could afford to burn whole days and entire evenings. She couldn’t.

  The night before, they had all loaded themselves into Val’s Lexus for a little jaunt south to the next neighborhood over, an equally upscale area called Hacienda Las Palomas. The streets were empty. They cruised slowly by the compound of César Montenegro, he of Investigaciones Especiales. It really was right there, a quarter mile away. They needed only to take a couple of turns in order to get to the place from the villa.

  The trip had been entirely useless. There was nothing to see. The walled compound was closed up tight. There was some sort of construction going on. As Val slowed the big SUV, he rolled down the window to take a closer look. A pack of dogs sent up a howl from within.

  “Great,” Caroline had said. “I’m not going anywhere near that place.”

  “Let’s get out of here,” Ellis had urged. “I hear a margarita blender calling for me.”

  When Remington finally emerged from her bedroom the next day, it was one o’clock. The villa was quiet.

  Carl, one of three servants who staffed the place, came out to her. “Do you know where everyone is?” she asked.

  “No, I’m sorry, miss. Señor Duran left in the truck. The others, Miss Loushane and her brother, I did not see. May I get you something to eat?”

  Val returned an hour later. Remington heard the SUV pull up. He came out to the terrace, where she was sunning herself. “Have you seen them?” he asked.

  “Caroline and Ellis? I was going to ask you where they were.”

  Val settled himself down beside her. “They’re gone.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Left. I got up a little late this morning, and they weren’t anywhere around.”

  “They probably just went up to La Revo, or Hidalgo Market.”

  “They cleared out, Layla. Got juiced, came unloosed and vamoosed.”

  Remington went inside, crossed the big living room and found the bedroom in which Ellis had installed himself. The bed was unmade. The faint imprint of Ellis’s body lay where it had formed. But none of the clothes, none of the personal items remained.

  Val followed her in. “They leave a note?” she asked.

  “Nothing. I can’t understand it.”

  They both had the same thought. Speaking over each other, Remington asked, “Did they have money?” and Val said, “I gave her some money.”

  It was awkward, but they laughed.

  “Have you…?”

  “I tried calling them,” Val answered. “Of course, I got nothing. You know how those two are with their phones. They’re out of battery life more often than not. Ellis hasn’t even set up his voicemail.”

  “I guess, let me try the family. Have you contacted them?”

  “No.”

  When Remington tried, at first she got a busy signal, and then the call dropped. She went out to the terrace, where coverage from the San Diego cell towers across the border was more certain. She still couldn’t get through. She couldn’t tell if it was an issue with her phone or on the other end.

  Remington felt vaguely betrayed. If the Loushanes weren’t going to stick around, she certainly wasn’t going to stay in order to accomplish their business. “Kind of rude of them.”

  “My sentiments,” Val said.

  “There’s some sort of explanation, has to be. Did they get frightened by that trip to Montenegro’s last night?”

  “The alliance has broken apart,” Val pronounced grandly. “The gang of four has been torn asunder.”

  He had brought a pitcher of margaritas out onto the terrace. Remington wondered when he’d had a chance to make it up. Carl probably had, she thought.

  “There’s just us left.” Val extended a margarita to her. “No salt, right?”

  They clinked glasses and drank. Too late, Remington realized what was happening. Val took the glass from her hand after she finished it. He set it and his own glass down on a small table beside one of the lounge chairs.

  Then he took Remington in his arms and kissed her.

  She amazed herself by not resisting, by actually returning the kiss. It was as if she had split in two, one part wondering where this was coming from and the other part hot to get it on. They fell back onto the chaise. He stripped off half of his clothes and all of hers and they made love right there. Later, she and Val moved into the main bedroom, occupied most recently by Val Duran and the love of his life, Caroline Loushane.

  She slept in again the next morning, also in Val’s room. The sun had angled into the bedroom by the time she woke, giving off a green sort of light that picked up on the foliage from the golf course outside. The sheets lay rumpled around her bare legs.

  Val came in with an espresso. “Hey,” he said simply, then kissed her.

  “Any word?” she asked.

  “The word is love.”

  “Of them, of them, silly.”

  “Them, who? All other people in the world have fled my mind.”

  Part of Remington rebelled at the corniness of it all, but she yielded to it. They made love again, and afterward showered together. Something was wrong. Thoughts of Ellis kept shooting through Remington’s mind.

  She sat on the bed, watching Val dress. He seemed to possess an endless supply of white linen shirts, not guayaberas but something straighter, almost corporate. Expensive, she realized when she felt the weave.

  Remington wanted to talk to Val about everything—his family, how he had spent his childhood, his friends. A brand of shyness held her back.

  “I thought we’d take a little vacation,” he said.

  “From all our heavy-duty work around here,” Remington responded, smiling.

  “I want to bring you to where I grew up.” As if he had read her mind.

  “Don’t you think we ought to at least find out where Caroline and Ellis are? Maybe they’re in trouble.”

  “Caroline who?” Making the same tired joke. “I called the policía—I have friends on the force.”

  “I bet you do.”

  “They aren’t in jail.”

  “That’s something, at least.”

  “I think they tucked their tails between their legs and went back home. But, look, let’s not think about them, okay? They didn’t think about us before they took off with not even a goodbye.”

  He tossed some clothes at her. “Come on, get dressed. I want to get on the road.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “Rosarito.” A little town on the ocean, he told her. “It’ll
be nice.”

  Remington didn’t realize it until they were spinning along Federal Highway 1, but she had left her BlackBerry back at the villa.

  —

  For the birthplace of a scion of a wealthy family, the small village looked humble, a hodgepodge of single-story houses just down the coast from the larger town of Rosarito. Modern condominiums designed for Americano retirees dotted the hillsides, among a warren of new streets above the Pemex station. Slotted into a draw off the beach, the older neighborhood of Playa de los Volcanes was out of another time—low, dusty and ramshackle. Remington loved it. Val conducted her into the village as though he were on a holy pilgrimage.

  On the ride south from Tijuana, the first gray cloud had scudded across their blue sky. They had been driving awhile and had fallen silent, the big Lexus SUV an air-conditioned cocoon. Remington stared out the passenger’s-side window at the unhappy landscape of Baja California. She felt that there was something missing, some fact or lurking secret she had to know, the pea beneath the feather mattress of the princess.

  “Caroline.” She murmured the name almost to herself, as if she hadn’t meant for Val to hear.

  He responded anyway. “She’ll come back.” His utter certainty struck Remington like a blow. Val’s whole story lay contained in those quick three words. She felt somehow that she had been abruptly put on notice. She’ll come back, and when she does…Remington’s affair with Val Duran would vanish as if a wand had been waved.

  She pushed back the thought. Sex represented obliteration for the two of them. They kept returning to it whenever the real world threatened. Val pulled the truck onto a dirt road off the highway and they screwed in the front seat. Remington had never had anything like it.

  But when she and Val weren’t having sex she had a chance to think. Which in the present circumstances—off on a Mexican fuck holiday with the boyfriend of a friend—she had been trying to avoid.

  Val had hopped onto Highway 10 as they approached the coast, then hopped right back off it to the south of Rosarito. The house, when they got there, lay almost wholly concealed behind a brilliant screen of flowers. Like the other structures in the little neighborhood, it was built of concrete blocks. Through the riot of native lilac and bougainvillea, the walls of the home were visible, painted a garish shade of green. The street in front was an unpaved trough of dun-colored beach sand that led directly west to the sea, barely a hundred yards away.