by Marc Cameron
“I really have no idea,” the trooper said.
“She has a little crush on Fitz Jonas. I’ve handled security on a shitload of these Alaska reality shows and if there’s one thing that’s a constant, it’s that the girls always fall hard for the talent.” He smiled in an all-knowing way.
“Was this crush reciprocated by Fitz?” the trooper asked.
Bright Jonas sauntered up from behind the fire. “Not even a little,” she said.
Benjamin had known the woman well before FISHWIVES! came along, back when she was just dull old Bright, the busybody checker at the AC store. Full, but not fat, she wore a tight orange tank top that revealed much more flesh than the trooper wanted to see from his local supermarket checker. She was always a close-talker, but the habit became more pronounced when she was drunk. She leaned in to the trooper, each boozy, breathy word hitting him full in the face. “My Fitzy has plenty of full grown women to keep him busy without going for some skinny little kid.”
Douglas took another sip of his beer. “It wasn’t just Fitzy. Millie had a crush on a lot of people on the set. She was what you might call a groupie—and I gotta tell you, she didn’t really discriminate.”
A slender man seemed to materialize out of the darkness beyond the fire. He looked to be in his mid-thirties and obviously hadn’t gotten the memo about older guys and skinny jeans.
“That’s a cheap shot, Kenny,” the man said, flipping back dark bangs with a toss of his head. He wore a black turtleneck that perfectly suited his doleful look, like a grown-up trying to be an emo kid. His pout was made even more pronounced by a night of drinking and staring into the fire. “Millie was far more than a groupie.”
The trooper held out his hand. “Sam Benjamin,” he said.
“Tucker Jackson, camera ops,” the other man said. He was certainly too old to be hanging out with a fifteen-year-old girl. “Millie spent time around the crew all right, but she turned out to have a real talent for this.” He shook his head, staring into the night. “I’ve never seen anyone her age with such a natural eye with the camera.”
Benjamin took out his pen and notebook. His vision had finally adjusted and the bonfire provided plenty of light to take notes. “So you’re saying Millie Burkett wanted to be an actress?”
Jackson pushed away his emo bangs again. “No, nothing like that,” he said. “She was a natural behind the camera, not in front of one. I showed some of the footage she shot to Carmen, our executive producer, and she let me loan her one of our small scout cameras to shoot B-roll.”
“B-roll?” Benjamin glanced up from his notebook.
“Beauty roll,” Jackson said. “The images we use in between the rest of the story. You know, shots of the ocean, misty mountains, that sort of thing. Millie had this way of keying in on the spirit of exactly the footage we needed.”
“When was the last time you saw Miss Burkett?”
“Yesterday morning around seven thirty,” Jackson said.
“Mind if I ask where you saw her?”
“Not at all,” Jackson said. “She dropped the memory cards to her camera by my apartment. She came in for a minute while I gave her replacements.”
Trooper Benjamin looked across the top of his notebook to study the man’s face while he talked. It was time to turn up the heat a little. Tiny micro expressions often spoke volumes more than any actual spoken words. “Seven thirty? Isn’t that a little early for a teenager to be up and about?”
“She wanted to catch the best light, I guess,” Jackson said.
“Who brought her?”
“She came by herself.” Jackson gave another toss of his head.
“How long did she stay?”
“Five minutes or so.”
“Did you talk about anything specific?”
“No,” Jackson said. “I mean . . . I don’t think so. I really can’t remember what we talked about. It was early and I’d worked late the night before.”
“Was anyone else there besides the two of you?”
Another flip of his bangs. “No. Just Millie and me.”
“Did she mention where she planned to go to catch the best light?”
“Are you telling me she never went home?” Jackson took a shuddering breath, swaying in place.
The trooper didn’t say anything, letting the reality of the situation sink in.
“Shit,” Jackson said. “Am I the last one to have seen her?”
“We’re still working on that,” Benjamin said. “She may be over at a friend’s house that we just aren’t aware of.”
“Hell, Trooper,” Kenny Douglas said from his perch on the log. “You don’t even sound like you believe yourself.”
“Hey, Trooper.” The young production assistant leaned in, cocking her head. “Do you think something bad has happened to Millie?”
Benjamin gave a noncommittal shrug. “That remains to be seen. How about Hayden Starnes? Did Millie ever hang out with him?”
Jackson looked up from staring at his feet and gave another toss of his head. “Who?”
Looking at Jackson, Benjamin took a momentary deep breath while considering taking out his pocketknife and hacking off that annoying flap of hair. Instead, he flipped back a few pages in his notebook for effect. Everyone around the fire seemed genuinely confused by the fugitive’s real name, so he decided to try the alias.
“Sorry,” he said. “That was a mistake. I meant to say Travis Todd.”
“Travis?” Douglas chimed in. “Sure. That little weirdo was sweet on Millie.”
“Why do you say he’s a weirdo?”
Douglas crumpled his beer can and started to throw it toward the water but thought better of it. “I don’t know,” he said. “He’s just weird, that’s all.” The security man looked around the fire. “Carmen was looking for him this morning, but I haven’t seen him in a couple of days.”
“Where is Carmen?” the trooper asked.
“She and Greg are back at the production house backing up today’s footage. She gave everyone else the night to blow off a little steam.”
“Was Travis especially close to anyone on the cast or crew?”
Douglas shook his head. “He got along well enough with everyone, I guess. But he did pay a lot of attention to the girls.”
The brunette production assistant giggled and elbowed Douglas in the ribs. “Like someone else I know.”
A small crowd had drifted over from where they’d been dancing around the fire and were now actively following the conversation.
Benjamin looked at each of them in turn. “Any of you know where Travis might have gone?”
Several looked at the ground. The crowd gave a collective murmur that they had no idea.
“Okay,” Benjamin said, deciding a truth bomb for safety’s sake outweighed operational security. Sometimes you just had to rattle a few cages. “Travis Todd’s real name is Hayden Starnes. He’s wanted for sexual assault and kidnapping—so it’s important you give me a call if anyone hears from him.“
The girl beside Douglas gasped. Her hand shot to her mouth. “I haven’t seen him in a couple of days. Millie went missing right after that. Do you think—?”
Benjamin cut her off. “It’s best not to jump to any conclusions. But I’m not ruling anything out.” He tapped the brim of his Stetson with his pen and said good night. The natural inclination of the cast and crew would be to close ranks and look after one of their own, but they were also television people, so their imaginations about what had happened to Millie Burkett would already be kicking in to overdrive. He’d let them stew on it overnight and question them again in the morning.
CHAPTER 16
CHAGO TORRES SHOT A GLANCE AT THE UNCONSCIOUS WOMAN IN the passenger seat and gave a forlorn shake of his head. She looked like his little sister, Lucia, which was going to be a real problem, considering what he had to do to her.
The hulking sicario gripped the steering wheel with large hands, locking his eyes on the dark road ahead. He’d di
sappeared dozens of people for his boss, close to a hundred by now. Some of them had been women—but no kids, not yet anyway. Luis had killed a kid, a ten-year-old halcón or falcon—a lookout for a rival cartel. He bragged about it every time he was drunk or high—which was at least once a week. Chago hoped he never had to kill a kid. Killing a kid would make him sad. He looked at the woman wearing flannel pants. This would be bad enough.
The woman gave a little moan. He’d never get used to the sounds human beings made when they died. When he went home and watched movies with his mother and grandfather, people just fell over or sometimes even gave long, passionate speeches. He wanted to tell them it wasn’t that way but he couldn’t. They didn’t want to know what he knew. He didn’t want to know what he knew.
Chago glanced at the woman again. Her chin hung to her chest and a line of bloody drool dripped from her open mouth. Luis had hit her hard with the leather strap so she’d be unconscious for a long time. Chago hoped Luis hadn’t hit her too hard. They needed information, and from the sounds of the guy in the backseat they were going to have to get it from the woman in the flannel pants.
The odor of urine and fear rose up behind Chago. The whimpering was constant, like a burbling buzz. The guy with the nasty hair was awake—and no doubt terrified of Luis. Chago couldn’t blame the guy. He didn’t even like sitting next to the skinny killer in broad daylight.
The Jeep’s headlights played along the white gravel road as he drove, cutting a sharp swath along the dark mountainside. Chago was not sure where he was going, other than away from civilization. On this island that seemed a fairly easy thing to do as the wilderness stretched out in just about any direction. The pressure in his ears told him they were going up, and Chago assumed that the old logging road was taking them over some kind of a pass toward more water. According to the Forest Service map, most roads eventually wound around to end up at the ocean. If he saw any sign of another person, he would just keep driving, or simply turn around.
The logistics of disappearing people on such a lonely island would not be hard at all. But logistics were never the hard part.
Chago had not become a killer for Los Leónes cartel by choice. Luis had grown up in the world, beginning work as a halcón for bosses in his neighborhood when he was just nine years old. It could be argued that Luis hadn’t chosen the life of a sicario either, but he’d certainly moved in that direction from a very early age. Where Luis was thin, quick, and scrappy, Chago was taller and thickly muscled. His heavy shoulders and long arms made him look stooped when he was not. At first glance people might think him to be slow—but those people would be severely mistaken. Garza always said Luis was the jab and Chago was the hook.
Chago had not even been in a fight until after he was a grown man—when he came to work for Los Leónes. He’d started working full-time for a drywall installer after graduating from the ninth grade. His grandfather said Chago was an artist, the best mudder he had ever seen. It was this same grandfather who suggested he might take his skills to Texas. There he could make a great deal of money and send some of it back to help his family. Maybe he could even marry a girl from El Paso. His grandfather said he had heard of such things happening many times before.
But nothing had happened the way his grandfather had imagined it. Chago had been caught in a border patrol sweep less than an hour after the pollero—or chicken herder—had walked them across the river and into the United States. It was his first time, so the process of deportation was swift and relatively painless. The pain did not begin until he was back in Mexico.
Chago had heard rumors that cartels recruited at the casa mi-grante, repatriation centers often run by local churches, offering work to strong or desperate men. In the end, it was his strength that was his undoing. A girl had approached him first, telling him she was staying at a nearby casa for recently deported women. Her cousins were coming up to get her from Mexico City. She was pretty, and hadn’t wanted anything but conversation. Naively, Chago had taken her to a nearby cantina and told her his name and where he was from over a bottle of Dos Equis. Her “cousins” had arrived at the repatriation center the next morning with photographs of his mother and sister. Chago was not so naive that he did not recognize the men for what they were.
The sicarios made it very clear that he had no choice but to submit to the will of Los Leónes or be disappeared—after he watched his loved ones debased and murdered before his eyes. He hated it still. But what could he do? Manuel Garza was not as volatile a boss as Camacho had been, but he was just as bloody—maybe even bloodier.
Chago had found the cameras and two media cards in the house when they grabbed the couple, but he suspected they had made copies. If he and Luis did not come back with every piece of footage that showed Camacho on the boat, Garza would not only point a gun at him, he would pull the trigger. Oh, the patrón might wait until they returned to Mexico where another sicario could catch him unaware and gut him like a pig to demonstrate to others what it meant to fail the patrón. No, Garza was not Camacho. He was smarter—and much worse.
Chago drummed thick fingers against the steering wheel. Anyway, the money was good—and he didn’t have to kill too many women.
Luis craned his head forward between the seats and pointed out the windshield. “You planning to drive around all night or are we gonna get out and do this thing?”
“The boss said to get them a long way out of town,” Chago said.
“Well,” Luis said. “You’ve gone far enough. Pull off at the next wide spot and I’ll ask this guy what he needs to be asked.”
“I’m going a little further,” Chago said.
Luis hit the side of the bucket seat and cursed. “The woods are plenty good for what we need to do!”
Chago ignored him. Luis was like a mosquito when he didn’t get his way, all buzz and nonsense.
Luis thumped the seat again, several times in rapid succession as if he’d seen something exciting.
“Is that water up ahead?”
“I think so.”
“If that’s water you drove us all the way over the mountains.”
The guy with the nasty hair carried on with his burbling whimper.
Chago flicked on the high beams. Beyond the gray forest of logged stumps and slender young trees lay a protected arm of the sea. A fat log, treated with creosote to keep it from rotting, lay at the end of the road, presumably to keep people from driving into the ocean. It was breathtakingly beautiful, even in the dark. Chago would have liked to camp here, to play his guitar with his grandfather, and listen to the wind. His grandfather knew the names of many stars and had never killed a woman. Chago put the Jeep in park and looked over at the unconscious woman bleeding from her nose—the nose that looked so much like Lucia’s nose.
“This is as good a spot as any,” he said.
CHAPTER 17
CARMEN DELGADO FROZE WHEN THE BIG MEXICAN LIFTED HER gently under the shoulders and knees. Carrying her to the front of the Jeep, he set her on the ground at the base of a large stump, just at the edge of the beam cut by the headlights. Her hands and feet were tied with duct tape. Her head and neck were on fire, but she willed herself to relax and let it loll. She prayed he would believe she was still unconscious.
Carmen let her chin fall back against her chest. The left side of her face was swollen—especially around her eye near where she had been hit. Even without touching it she could tell the bone around the socket was badly damaged. She could taste blood in her mouth where her teeth had cut her cheek and more blood was starting to crust under her nose. She tilted her head a little more so as to get a better look at her surroundings with her good eye, trying not to draw attention to herself.
The smaller of the two men had already dragged a screaming Greg from the backseat by the time the big guy got Carmen situated—and this one was not nearly so gentle. The big one—the little guy called him Chago—leaned back against the hood of the Jeep while his partner stood over Greg and put a boot on his
neck.
“Hey, hombre,” the little guy said in accented English. “We don’t really gotta talk to you, you know. This is just a . . .” He looked at Chago. “What do you call it?”
“A courtesy,” Chago said, sounding tired.
“W-wait, wait!” Greg said, his voice hoarse from the pressure of the boot. With his hands taped behind him, there was little he could do but squirm. “I can help you guys. I know I can. But you gotta let me g—”
The little guy bore down harder, causing Greg to gag. “I got to do nothing, asshole.” He looked at Chago, who sighed, and gave a slow nod.
The skinny one stepped back and lit a cigarette while poor Greg sputtered and writhed in the dirt. Carmen watched the ash on the cigarette glow brightly against the blackness. Chago stooped and grabbed Greg by the arms, hoisting him easily to his feet. Already beside the Jeep, Chago spun him so he stood bent over with his belly against the hood. Carmen never would have recognized Greg, his face a swollen mass of bloody bruises. As he was leaning there, the skinny one offered him the cigarette, which he accepted, despite the fact that he didn’t smoke. He coughed until spit ran from his cracked and bleeding lips, but miraculously held on to the cigarette.
On cue, Chago secured his arms while the skinny guy came up from behind and slipped a clear plastic bag over Greg’s head. The flame from the cigarette burned a hole through the plastic, but Carmen realized at once that the men had planned it that way. The hole in the plastic was much too small to get enough air and only gave Greg false hope. The cigarette fell inside the bag, smoldering against his cheek while he pressed his lips, carp-like, against the tiny hole. He jerked and thrashed against the Jeep’s hood, but Chago held him while Luis watched. They looked bored, almost disinterested in this part of their job.
When Carmen felt certain Greg could take no more, the skinny man removed the bag and stepped back.
“Please.” Greg hacked and coughed, trying to breathe, but bent on persuading the men not to hurt him again. “Please. I swear . . . I . . . can help. You just have to give me a—”
