Nothing Stays Buried

by P. J. Tracy

  “I’m listening.”

  “Okay, this whole things starts with our serial killer. We found matching blood in two parks at two separate murder scenes. For the sake of argument, let’s say it’s for sure our killer’s blood.”

  “Fair enough.”

  “And that blood belongs to a son of Ernesto Cruz, a felon who got snuffed out in a cartel hit, a guy who did time for slicing up his buddy over a poker game. And now we’ve got Cather’s surveillance footage of a cartel thug playing poker at Eagle Lake Casino, the only casino in the state that cuts the tops off their cards, the same kind of cards found on all our serial kills. And size-wise, that dude in the casino matches up with the surveillance footage from Phalen Park the night Katya Smirnova was killed. Enter Global Foods and Cassie Miller, who was working there undercover on a drug bust before she got killed.”

  He started writing names and drawing swoopy lines between them, then drew an arrow that pointed to CARTELS. “There are more connections here than a Wi-Fi hub in Tokyo. I’m telling you, our serial has a day job as a cartel enforcer. He had to kill Cassie Miller under circumstances he couldn’t control, so he tried to frame himself the best he could to deflect attention from Global Foods.”

  “His serial killer self.”

  “Exactly.”

  Magozzi took a sip of scotch, thinking that as preposterous as it sounded, Gino actually might be onto something. Cartels had enforcers—the bosses sent them up to watch their operations, make sure nobody skimmed money or product off the top. And operations as big as Global Foods would definitely have at least one enforcer keeping an eye on things. And it was a good bet that those enforcers wouldn’t be model citizens or even remotely balanced individuals. They might even be serial killers in their spare time.

  He thought again about Monkeewrench’s missing persons case in Cottonwood County, where the Cruz family had a history, and about the blood on the road that belonged to another unsavory character with a cartel affiliation. “You’re right,” he finally said. “Things are piling up. But a serial killer with a day job as a cartel hit man? That’s pretty out there, even for you.”

  Gino huffed impatiently. “Are you kidding? It makes perfect sense. Growing up in that life? It’s a frigging training camp for sociopaths and serial killers. If you kill for a living, it’s not a very big leap to kill for pleasure. Just think about Ciudad Juárez, where Ernesto Cruz got executed and was operating in the drug trade, probably along with his son. Hundreds of women have been ritualistically slaughtered and dumped in and around there. And that doesn’t include the hundreds of women still missing. That’s not the work of just one guy. That’s not the work of ten guys. There’s a reason why it got the nickname Serial Killer’s Playground.”

  Magozzi swirled his scotch, listening to the soft, calming cadence of melting ice cubes colliding with glass. There were people who thought it was a mortal sin to dilute scotch with ice, but he wasn’t one of them. “I got you.”

  “I hope so. You were the one who started this whole thing, pulling out a possible cartel connection early. I just ran with it. So you’re with me?”

  “I’ll keep an open mind.”

  Gino chucked his marker into the whiteboard’s built-in tray. “That’s the kind of bullshit you say to your kids when they ask you if they can do something stupid.”

  “I’ll remember that for the future.”

  “Come on, Leo, look at the big picture. Sometimes you have to jump right from A to Z to see it.”

  “I’m feeling the big picture, and this is all great fodder for speculation, but in the end, all we’ve really got is an imaginary suspect with imaginary motivations and zero hard evidence.”

  Gino sagged into Magozzi’s favorite and only recliner. “You’re sucking the oxygen right out of the room.”

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  When Grace returned to the Chariot after taking Charlie for a walk—on-leash this time—Annie was waiting for her up front.

  “It’s about time you two came back. Harley was about to send out a search party.”

  “The rest of you should get away from your computer screens for a while and take a walk. It’s a beautiful night.”

  Annie folded her arms across her bosom. “Not on your life. There are bugs and cows and God knows what else out there.”

  “Frogs, crickets, a sky full of stars, a half-moon . . .”

  “All sinister in my book. I just made some tea if you want some.”

  “Thanks.” While Grace poured herself a cup of tea, she suddenly realized the Chariot was oddly silent. “Why is it so quiet? This is usually about the time Harley and Roadrunner start getting on each other’s nerves.”

  “They’re making headway on Ernesto Cruz and it’s keeping them out of trouble. Come on, let’s see what they’ve got.”

  Grace unclipped Charlie’s leash and followed Annie to the war room, where Harley and Roadrunner were hunkered in front of a computer screen.

  Harley looked up and waved them over. “Come take a look, ladies. We finally cracked into Mexico’s national law enforcement database, and damn was it fun.” He nudged Roadrunner’s arm. “We should do this more often.”

  Roadrunner scowled. “This is definitely not something we should do more often.”

  Grace pulled a chair between Harley and Roadrunner. It was getting harder and harder to fit her growing bulk into cramped spaces. In another month, it would probably be impossible. “Show me.”

  Roadrunner pointed to the monitor, which showed a split screen. “On the left is the enhanced composite Harley worked up from the surveillance footage of Gino’s and Magozzi’s suspect at Phalen Park and Eagle Lake Casino, along with a physical description. We ran it through the Beast’s facial and physical recognition database, which is basically every database indexed for search on the Web.”

  “You tried that earlier and you didn’t get any matches,” Grace noted.

  Harley nodded. “Right you are, that search didn’t turn up anything on the surface Web. So we decided to dive into the sewers of the darknet, and we got this.” He pointed to the right side of the screen. It showed a shot of a man who closely resembled the composite, standing on a crowded street in front of a taqueria, speaking with an older man.

  “My, oh my, that’s a match, if you ask me,” Annie said.

  “The Beast thinks so, too. This older guy is none other than Ernesto Cruz, and the guy who matches our composite is his son Angel—aka Angel de la Muerte.”

  “Angel of Death,” Grace said quietly.

  “Yeah, and he lives up to his name. He’s got a reputation in the cartel world for dispatching enemies in particularly gruesome and memorable ways, and that’s a pretty remarkable distinction in the company of raging sociopaths.”

  “How did you find all this out?”

  Roadrunner shrugged modestly. “Once Harley and I got into the Mexican military database through the darknet, it was easy going, because the database lists all the top secret information on cartels, their operations, and their operatives. This shot was taken by the Federales in Ciudad Juárez a couple years ago. Father and son were under surveillance.”

  Grace nodded slowly. “Of course. A lot of governments and law enforcement agencies stash sensitive material on the darknet because it’s totally anonymous.”

  “Created by our own government for that very reason.”

  “So how do we find Angel Cruz?”

  Harley deflated a little. “That’s the problem, I don’t know if we can. First of all, he’s presumed dead, at least according to the Mexican authorities.”

  “If he’s really Gino’s and Magozzi’s serial killer, then we know he’s alive and kicking and right here under our noses murdering women.”

  Roadrunner bobbed his head. “That’s what Harley and I thought, so we did some more digging. There is no record of any Angel Cruz entering the Unit
ed States. So he either jumped the border or came in on fake papers, which means we’re up against a wall. But at least we have a possible ID for Gino and Magozzi, maybe they can do something with it from their end. But to tell you the truth, they might be looking at an old-fashioned manhunt.”

  Annie touched Grace’s shoulder. “Marla’s journal. She thought she saw somebody named Angel, remember? Now we know who she was talking about. And she was right.”

  Grace nodded. “I’ll call Magozzi and let him know.”

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  Amanda White had ultimately chosen Pike Island Park for her last stop of the night and her shot at journalism greatness—after visiting eight different parks in the past two nights, she’d learned a couple of things. For instance, suspicious behavior truly stood out if you were paying attention, something most park visitors didn’t do, making them perfect marks. They were either running, biking, picking up their dog’s feces, or walking with their faces fused to their phones, absolutely confident that safety in a public space was an inalienable right granted by the Constitution and somebody else would take care of it.

  She’d also learned that serial killers were a lot like real estate agents. It was all about location, location, location. That’s why Pike Island had stood out after her first eight trips to less desirable parks—at least if you had killing in mind. First of all, it was still within the metro area, just on the fringes of Minneapolis, which offered easy ingress and egress; secondly, it was heavily wooded, surrounded by the Mississippi River, and didn’t ever have much visitor or park police traffic, offering terrific privacy. Tonight, her Camry was the only car in the lot, which didn’t mean there wasn’t a serial killer out there somewhere, long shot though it was. Not that she really wanted contact with a serial killer, but after her self-taught crash course in human behavior, she had the grandiose notion that she’d be able to identify him immediately, just by the way he acted.

  She double-checked her flashlight and phone batteries, her canister of pepper spray, then doused herself with a good amount of mosquito repellent before she hit the trail that circled the island.

  She could hear the dark waters of the Mississippi River lapping the shoreline all around her; barred and great horned owls hooted softly in the tree canopy; jet engines roared as they lifted off the tarmac at Minneapolis–Saint Paul International Airport a mile away. It was a bizarre contrast, trekking through raw nature while the noise of the modern world encroached from above. And maybe that’s how she would approach this piece.

  Moonlight filtered down through the trees, lacing the trail with a filigree of light, so she clicked off her flashlight and let her eyes adjust to the shadows. Her hearing began to compensate immediately for the partial loss of vision, sharpening and picking out the tiniest sounds, like a rodent or an insect stirring up leaves. Behind her, a twig snapped and she felt her heart rate jump to double time as adrenaline zapped into her bloodstream.

  Foolhardy. Careless. Stupid. Fearless. All adjectives that people had used to describe her throughout her life. She was maybe all of those things, but safety never got you anywhere. She knew that now, because she’d been on that route for too long.

  When another twig snapped loudly behind her, she stopped and pressed her back against a tree trunk along the trail, doing a three-sixty scan of the woods around her. It’s a deer. Keep walking. Right back to your car, you idiot.

  There were moments in life when self-doubt and uncertainty came crashing through when you least expected it, and those were the moments to fight. She didn’t have a gun, had never even shot one before, but she had pepper spray and a fourth-degree black belt, and also the additional advantage of being on high alert.

  She finally left the false safety of the tree trunk she’d been pressed against, reminded herself she was chasing a story, and started walking again, not to her car as better judgment would dictate, but onward, to the tip of the island, pissed off at herself for being scared by woodland sounds in a woodland setting. Animals did stuff at night, get over it, what are the chances your killer is here? Slim to none. Better off buying a lottery ticket.

  When she finally reached the tip of the island, she settled into a squat on the slender beach and watched the water flow south, wondering how long it would take it to get to the Gulf of Mexico. It was mesmerizing, thinking of the journey the water took, from the springs of Lake Itasca up north to the sea so far south—so mesmerizing, in fact, her temporarily distracted senses didn’t register the presence of the man behind her who wrapped his arm around her neck and started dragging her backward, into the woods.

  Her scream was stifled beneath his hand as she bucked her body furiously, scrambling for her pepper spray. As the pressure on her throat got tighter and she saw the flash of a knife in the moonlight, she felt one of her hands being yanked behind her back with an excruciating pop that made stars flash behind her eyes.

  You lack discipline! Pain your friend! This is fight to death! You see end, end finds you!

  Her sensei, a merciless bastard who was going to save her life tonight. Focus. Control. Calm. Discipline. She’d been in worse situations in class, except her sparring partners hadn’t been wielding a bowie knife and a clear motive to kill and leave her for dead.

  She almost went limp when she tore her attacker’s shirtsleeve and saw the tattoos, felt and smelled his hot, rank breath on her neck, saturated with seething violence as he dragged her deeper into the brush, choking her air supply, twisting her arm to the breaking point. He was strong, too strong . . .

  Almost. But suddenly, her black belt kicked in with a furious vengeance and she started thinking the right way—leverage, balance, the physics of martial arts. No pain. Reservoir of power. Survive.

  She dug her heels into the loamy earth beneath her, launched her body backward, and threw him off balance enough that he instinctively released her neck to catch his fall with the hand that wasn’t holding the knife. And that was all she needed—that, and a well-placed elbow and foot that crunched some bone audibly in the sick son of a bitch’s body.

  Her hands were slick on the pepper spray canister at her hip as she pulled it out of the holster, felt her racing heart sink as it slipped out of her hand.

  Don’t drop it, for God’s sake, don’t drop it . . .

  The man lurched up with a grunt of pain and dove toward her, and the world turned to slow motion as she rolled away, grabbed the lost canister, and watched aerosolized capsaicin shoot into his eyes.

  She wanted to hurt him. She wanted to kill him. But more than anything, she wanted to run, run, run before her legs collapsed beneath her. And so she did, tears streaming down her face, partially from the cloud of pepper spray, partially from the terror, but most of all from the uncertainty that she had cheated death tonight, because she could hear him crashing down the trail behind her. It was a vague sound, nearly drowned out by the pounding of her heart and the ragged gasps of her breath echoing in her ears as she tried desperately to pull air into her lungs through a damaged esophagus.

  —

  Angel’s rage always manifested as great, pulsating towers of ugly bruise-purple in his head, devouring his thoughts, his sense of his own body, and everything else around him. When he was swept up by it, he became impervious to pain, impervious to everything except exorcising the rage, which meant finishing off this bitch, punishing her while she was still alive instead of giving her the courtesy of killing her first.

  He didn’t feel his searing eyes or his throbbing foot, just pure fury and the electrifying flood of adrenaline as his legs pumped. He couldn’t really see, but he didn’t need to—he could hear her pounding footsteps ahead of him, could smell her terror sloughing off in intoxicating waves, which made him run even faster.

  GODDAMN FUCKING BITCH! he screamed in his head because he didn’t dare scream it out loud. She could not leave this park alive—his own life depended on it. She’d been close enough to
see his face, even in the dark. That would be enough.

  He felt his feet hit pavement, and realized she’d already made it to the service road out of the park. Two hundred yards, and she’d reach the hill that crested at the main road. He could see blurs of headlights even from here. He had to close in now, or he was done. . . .

  And then she surprised him. Veered off the paved road and bolted like a jackrabbit into the adjacent field, scrambled up the embankment that shortened the trip to the highway by at least a quarter mile.

  The purple pillars in his mind vaulted higher and he pushed himself hard, stumbling through the field and up the embankment behind her. He could see her blurry silhouette jumping up onto the berm of the road, windmilling her arms frantically at passing cars.

  Fuck fuck fuck. He retreated into the weeds and watched, felt like his life was draining out of him. It was over. There was nothing he could do now but watch that bitch get rescued, then try to ruin his life with her eyewitness description. His only hope was that he’d strangled her hard enough that she’d never be able to speak again.

  And then, a miracle happened. A car slowed down for her and as she bolted for the passenger door, it squealed away, left her standing there on the side of the road. He smiled in the weeds, held back an almost irrepressible shout of joy. Of course—she looked stark raving mad, flailing around—who would stop for a psychotic woman? He certainly wouldn’t. And there weren’t many cars on the road this time of night, he realized, inching his way closer. Once there was a break in the traffic, she’d be his. And this time, he wouldn’t make the same mistake and save his knife work for later.

  He was about fifteen feet from her now, his approach obscured by the roar of a jet above. Just a few minutes more, once this SUV passed her by, which it would, because it was going fast.