“Why not?”
Olivia sighed, tossed the envelope onto the coffee table. “The killer took their teeth.”
“What?”
Olivia shrugged.
“Okay, well, how about DNA?” he said. “You can test that, can’t you? I mean, we have to be sure this really is my parents, don’t we?”
“This isn’t CSI, Connor,” Olivia snapped, also getting to her feet. Then she seemed to catch herself, perhaps remembering Connor had just been told his parents were dead. “This case just isn’t that complicated. The killer told us where to find the bodies. You’ve identified your mother’s wedding ring and your father’s clothing. There’s nothing the lab can tell us that we don’t know already. I’m sorry. But we’re going to find their killer, I promise.”
“Well, you’ve done a bang-up job of the investigation so far, haven’t you?”
“Excuse me?”
“You tell me you’re going to talk to Carlos’s family—”
“How do you know the patient’s name?”
“—and it’s the only lead you’ve got. And I know you said it was probably a dead end, but still . . . who ends up talking to them? I’ll give you a hint. It wasn’t you. It was me. I talked to them.”
Blood rushed to Olivia’s face. “You what?”
“I mean—how hard is it to follow up on one lead?”
“Connor, we went by the house multiple times. I told you—they were out of town. When did you talk to them?”
“Today. Just now.”
“Then I guess they just got back.”
Connor took a deep breath. “You happen to notice that big dog when you went to their house?”
“Of course.”
“Did it ever occur to you that if they had a dog, they had to have somebody taking care of it? Because it occurred to me, so I parked at the end of the street and waited. It took a while, but eventually I saw—” Connor realized he was about to mention Rosa and revised his statement. He still wasn’t sure whether both of them were illegal, but he was sure Adriana did not want to get her daughter involved. “A woman. She was hauling a bag of trash out to the street. I caught up to her before she made her way back inside. She was Carlos’s wife, she said. She told me Carlos had gotten involved in some bad stuff, and that’s what got him killed.”
“You shouldn’t have gone over there.”
Connor didn’t hear her. He was too wrapped up in his own thoughts, overwhelmed by emotion. “She said my mom even came by to see her after it happened, told her she was sorry. So, yeah, you were right. There was nothing to it. But if you’d just been doing your job, maybe you would have gotten another idea after you talked to her, don’t you think? And maybe we’d be having a different conversation right now.”
CHAPTER 11
Olivia decided it probably wouldn’t have been hard for Connor to dig up Carlos’s name. Perhaps Kim had written about it in a diary or Connor had found it in notes she had brought home from the hospital. It didn’t matter. He was upset, and she didn’t see how it would do any good to ask again.
She did, however, chastise herself for not staking out the house like Connor had done. She could blame it on a long list of distractions: her ex-husband, who was suing her for custody of their child; the long hours; her decision to give up caffeine at this time. She could rationalize the choice by reminding herself she had other cases to work, and all of them demanded her attention. She could tell herself that from the beginning she hadn’t thought Adriana was involved. But she knew it really came down to her choices. It had been a mistake, and not one she could afford to repeat.
She let Connor rant until he was done. Everyone had their own way of grieving. Then she apologized again, assured him once more they would find the killer, and told him someone would be in touch when they were done with the bodies.
What Olivia didn’t tell him was the bad stuff Carlos Hernandez had gotten involved in. She knew about it because there was a file with his name on it.
According to the report inside, Carlos had entered the One Point liquor store in Windroff Park wearing a Halloween mask and carrying a Colt Python. He was barely through the door when the owner, Aden Tindol, had pulled a gun of his own out from underneath the counter and told him to get the hell out of there.
Seconds later, Aden had fired his weapon. A warning shot, he said, which was why the bullet had missed Carlos by a wide margin, instead drilling a hole into the far wall, only inches from the ceiling.
At that point, Carlos ran. Had he run out the store, Aden claimed he would have let the whole thing go. He had been robbed once before and the report he had filed with the police after that incident had led nowhere.
But the would-be robber hadn’t run out of the store. Instead, he’d sought cover down one of the aisles. Then there was more yelling—Aden telling Carlos to come out, Carlos telling Aden to drop his gun.
Eventually, Carlos had pushed over a metal rack of shelving, perhaps to create a distraction. It had crashed into another, and that one had crashed into a third. Thousands of dollars of product ruined, Aden said.
Then, finally, Carlos had come out, only he came out running. Gun drawn. It looked like, on the CCTV footage, they were both within sight of each other for a good second and a half. It would feel an eternity in that situation, Oliva knew. But, unlike Carlos, Aden hadn’t hesitated to pull his trigger. In fact, he’d pulled it four times. Each round had hit Carlos square in the chest.
During the interview, the report noted, Aden had repeatedly insisted he hadn’t had any choice, and that he wouldn’t have shot Carlos at all if he had just left the store when he’d told him to. Not
