'Oh, my car is up there, Torres, just not my body.'
'What?' She felt a massive headache coming on and reached for the bottle of Excedrin in her top drawer. 'Do I need to ask how that happened?'
'Better if you don't. Here's the airport info. Got a pen?' Without waiting for an answer, he rattled off an airline flight number and time for tomorrow.
'Wait, slow down,' she muttered, writing furiously. 'Why the delay? What happened?'
After a lengthy pause, she heard the quiet hiss of expelled breath like a groan of pain over the line. 'Lupe's dead.'
She scanned her memory, recognized the name along with the mixture of grief and anger in his voice. She'd heard it often enough in her mother's voice after Maria disappeared. 'Lupe,' she repeated.
'Rodriquez, my confidential informant on the Vargas case.'
A shudder rippled through her. A storm was gathering, and Mama would've said someone was walking over her grave. Whatever was brewing, Bella sensed trouble and pressed two fingers against her temple.
'Lupe was the guy who knocked you down at Stuckey's.' The softness in his voice was gone now, replaced by sharp angles. 'Remember him, Isabella?' The words burned her ears with their intensity. 'Well, he's dead now.'
Bella easily recognized the displacement of anger and the shifting of blame. In her family, there'd been plenty of that, too. 'I'm sorry,' she whispered.
'Me too. Just be there tomorrow,' he ordered and hung up.
The corpse lay under a small clump of trees in Obegon Park, where North Mariana intersected with East First Street in East Los Angeles. The public display of the body, coupled with the viciousness of the attack, told Rafe that Lupe Rodriquez's death had two purposes: the murder of a suspected informant and the sending of a message.
The area had been cordoned off, and yellow and black crime scene tape dangled like last year's party streamers. Max had used his department connections, and the medical examiner had just now arrived at the crime scene. With the assistance of several officers, a second perimeter, approximately fifteen yards from the inner perimeter, held a growing group of onlookers at bay.
Rafe lifted the tape, moved inside the first area, and stared down at the body. He hardly recognized the mass of bloody contusions and swollen flesh as the carefree face of his informant. Lupe had been severely beaten, his neck slit open, and his tongue pulled out through the neck opening.
'Colombian necktie,' Max stated unnecessarily.
Dr. Horace Gaitan looked up from where he crouched over the body. 'Actually, the Colombian necktie, although attributed to Pablo Escobar and his drug cartel, has been around much longer than the Colombians as a method of punishment and warning.' He glanced at Rafe. 'But you probably know this, right, Agent Hashemi?'
Rafe shook his head. 'No, sir.'
'Humph, you'd think a high-ranking DEA agent would know something about the history and origin of drugs and their associated terms.'
Max rolled his eyes behind the M.E.'s back.
Dr. Gaitan was something of a medical history buff and liked to be treated with old-fashioned courtesy, so Rafe always approached him with respect. 'I take it that Escobar didn't invent the Colombian necktie.'
'Right you are, Agent Hashemi.'
Rafe squatted down beside the doctor. 'Lupe Rodriquez was a friend of mine, sir. I appreciate anything you can tell me about his death.'
The doctor snapped on latex gloves. 'How are you so sure this is your friend? Not from his face, I imagine.'
'No, sir. I recognize the tattoo.' He indicated the black and red design of kissing angels on the right thigh, with the name Francisca in a banner below the design. 'His girlfriend's name.' Three lives destroyed he thought, and sighed heavily, thinking of the pregnant Francisca.
'Well, we'll confirm with fingerprints. He's in the system?' Gaitan lifted the hands one at a time, inspecting them carefully, and Rafe saw what he hadn't noticed before. Every finger on both hands had been broken or smashed at the joints, and most of the fingernails were missing.
'Perhaps not fingerprints then,' the doctor corrected. 'Dental records maybe. Or DNA.'
'COD?' Max asked.
'Judas priest, any number of possibilities for cause of death.' Gaitan indicated the man's crotch where a dark stain pooled in the genital area. 'When you look around, maybe you'll find the rest of him. He was alive when they removed it.'
He pointed to the slit throat. 'Obviously this wound. But, until I get him on the table, I won't know if he died from that or from the beating.' He touched the spot where a white shard of bone poked through the blue-tinged flesh.
He looked at Rafe solemnly, his large rheumy eyes droopy with sad knowledge. 'I'll get to your friend as soon as possible. I'll back-burner my other cases.'
Rafe nodded and then watched as the emergency techs loaded the body into the van for transport to the morgue. After they'd left, he and Max scoured the area surrounding the body with a member of the forensic team, but the persons who killed Lupe Rodriquez had left little evidence.
One of the new crime scene technicians, a woman, shouted, 'Over here!' and they rushed to the area farthest from the street on the Marianna Avenue side.
At first, it looked like a shriveled hot dog, liberally smothered with catsup. But upon closer inspection, Rafe saw that the lump of mangled flesh lying in the grass was the missing appendage that had belonged to Lupe.
The female tech looked queasy. 'They castrated him.'
To Rafe the message was loud and clear. Back off or you're next. And the earlier phone call made it clear who the next person was. Gutsy son of a bitch, to threaten a federal officer. How had the killers gotten wise to Lupe?
'Come on, man.' Max tugged at Rafe's arm. 'Let the techs do their job.'
Fifteen minutes later, they sat in a local bar near the Federal Building. The place, normally frequented by cops and other law enforcement officers, was almost empty today. Max ordered two beers on tap and when they came, led the way toward a corner booth.
Music from the juke box wailed about flying too close to the ground, which Rafe found remarkably apt, considering his current situation. For the last five months, he'd felt like he was a bird of prey swooping down to capture another, larger bird of prey – Diego Vargas.
Now he wondered if he'd been flying dangerously close to a fast-moving terrain he hadn't realized was so treacherous. 'Goddamn it,' he ground out after taking a deep swig of the beer. 'Lupe deserved better than to die like that.'
Max looked hard at him. 'You're not gonna go all loose cannon on me, are you?'
Rafe raked a hand through his hair. 'God knows, I'd like to… but, no, I'm cool.' He glanced at his watch. 'How long, you think, before Gaitan calls?'
'We could observe the autopsy,' Max offered.
'No… no.' He took another pull and emptied his drink, then spun the bottle around on the table. 'I don't want to see him like that again. I trust Gaitan. He won't miss anything.'
Max looked around, caught the bartender's eye, and held up two fingers.
Rafe thought of Lupe's pregnant girlfriend again. 'Jesus, Francisca. We have to talk to her.'
'Why? You think she knows something?' Max shifted in his seat. 'Why would she?'
Rafe tightened his grip on the bottle. 'She was pregnant. Lupe kept saying what a lucky man he was.' He slanted a sidelong glance at Max. 'Besides, wasn't she the last person to see Lupe alive?'
'Hell, no, Hashish, the killer was the last person to see him alive,' Max muttered. 'And before that… you.'
Rafe stared at his friend and realized something was wrong. Max was edgy, nervous, not his usual easy-going self. 'Lupe was on his way home. Either he made it to Francisca's apartment and went out again, or he never got
