“Mostly what you probably already guess: Amador and Flores seem to be the primary subjects, and people associated with them, which includes my family and Flores’ daughters.”
“One of whom is rather close to you, correct?” Longo interjects.
I give a sardonic laugh. “All of them are, but I think you mean Elle, my sister . . . half-sister.” I still have a hard time wrapping my head around the fact that Mom and Flores used to have a thing.
“How close are the others?”
My eyebrows shoot up. “Are you telling me you don’t already know?”
She shakes her head. “Part of our agreement with Flores included giving him more privacy to do his business as long as he keeps his part of the bargain. So no, we haven’t been aware of much connected with him for about the past five years. No more than he willingly shares.”
I debate whether to tell her everything but decide she’ll find out anyway. “Both my oldest and youngest brothers are pretty close to Flores’ two other daughters, Celeste and Toni. Celeste and Maddox were high-school sweethearts, you could say. He pretty much lives with her at the Flores estate now. Toni is my brother Sam’s boss at her tattoo shop in San Diego.”
“Interesting, and potentially valuable. We need to consider the possibility that all three are potential targets, especially if their faces showed up in the files Zavala has. What about the locations?”
Her suggestion that Elle might be a target has me distracted, but I rally and focus again, shaking my head. “The locations I couldn’t say. I’ve never seen Amador’s compound, so I’d only be guessing whether some of the shots were taken there. There were definitely some places I didn’t recognize. Some pretty unsavory stuff, though no worse than I saw working for Zavala.”
It occurs to me that we started this conversation with her about to reveal something, yet here I am being interrogated. I decide to go along with it out of curiosity, but Callie is somewhat less patient for her to get to the point.
“Mom! What do you need to tell us? Will you just come out with it already?”
Longo walks over to the fireplace and retrieves one of the photos from the mantel. She returns and holds it out to me. “Did you see this man in any of the photos?”
She points at the face of a twenty-something man with blond hair and eyes like Callie’s. He and Callie are standing arm-in-arm in front of a sparkling Christmas tree, wearing two of the ugliest holiday sweaters I’ve ever seen. My gaze only lingers on him for a second before sliding to her. She’s younger here, perhaps in her early twenties, and she looks so happy.
Callie’s intake of breath makes me turn to her, frowning. She reaches out a hand and snatches the framed photo from her mother. “That’s Chris. Why would he be part of this?”
I look at the man in the photo again, studying his face and flipping through the memories of the photos Zavala showed me. I barely had a few minutes with them, but typically that’s all I need for visuals to be fixed permanently in my mind. My memory for words isn’t quite as quick to embed—I usually have to read a thing before I can memorize it, I can’t just glance at a page filled with words—but it only takes one pass. It isn’t a talent I advertise, but it comes in handy more often than not.
“I remember him,” I say, nodding cautiously and looking back at Longo. “But what I saw wasn’t pretty.”
“Tell me what you saw.” Her voice hits a lower register and I notice she’s white-knuckling her coffee mug again.
“Mom . . .?” Callie begins in a tremulous voice, but Longo cuts her off with a sharp shake of her head, then nods at me.
I turn to look at Callie, whose face has gone ashen, then back at her mother. There’s no fucking way I’m getting out of this without telling them what I know, which admittedly isn’t much.
“I saw him in video surveillance stills, so the quality was for shit. He was hogtied and gagged . . .”
I trail off, remembering some of the marks on his half-naked body and knowing exactly where they’d come from, because I’d endured the same kind of torture myself. I spare a moment wondering whether Gustavo was working for Amador back then. Still, even if he wasn’t, he had to have learned that skill somewhere.
“And it was this man? My son, Chris?”
“Yes.”
“Was there a date?”
“June 30th, 2017. Four and a half years ago.”
All the air seems to leave the senator’s lungs and she closes her eyes. Beside me Callie wavers, and I slip an arm around her again to steady her.
“It was his birthday,” Callie whispers. “He’d just turned thirty-three.”
29 Callie
“Where is this picture? I want to see it,” I demand, looking between them both. Mom only frowns and shakes her head.
“It’s only up here for the moment,” Mason says, tapping his temple. “The sample intel Zavala sent me away with only included teasers about Amador’s operation. He let me skim through some of the rest, since he knew I’d remember enough of it to vouch for its existence.”
I stare up at him, overwhelmed and in awe and desperate for any reassurance he can give, any more proof. “You really do have a photographic memory, don’t you? You weren’t just joking the other night. What else do you remember?”
His lips tighten in a line and he shakes his head. “My memory isn’t proof of life. All it proves is that your brother was alive four and a half years ago.”
“Which was also a year and a half after we presumed Chris was killed in Colombia,” Mom says.
I whip my head around and glare at her. “You said he was dead! We had a fucking funeral, Mom! We scattered his ashes! Did you know all this
