number of hours? And weren’t the conditions found there something less than sanitary?”
“Yes, it was unstaffed,” Peggy admitted. “But when the nurse on duty arrived and tried to intervene, she, too, was waylaid and manhandled by Sheriff Brady’s overzealous deputies.”
That nurse was drunk, Joanna wanted to say. But she didn’t have to.
“Thank you, Ms. Whitehead,” Claire Newmark said, dismissing her. “That will be all. Now, is there any other new business?”
A few minutes after getting off the phone with Joanna Brady, I was speaking to Detective Gerald Lowell with the Shasta County Sheriff’s Department. When I identified myself, he didn’t sound any happier to hear from me than Joanna Brady had been. My lack of popularity was almost enough to give me a complex.
“Warden Willison told me you’d be calling, but there’s not much I can tell you. Marco Andrade’s dead and so is my investigation.”
“But-”
“I was ordered to back off,” Lowell told me, “and I have.”
“Who told you to back off?” I asked.
“My boss,” Lowell said. “That’s who. When he said drop it, I did.”
“Does Warden Willison know you’ve dropped it?”
“For all I know, Willison may be part of the problem. So, no, I haven’t told him, and I’d be much obliged if you didn’t mention it either.”
“Part of the problem-” I began.
“Look,” Lowell interrupted. “This is evidently a much bigger deal than some worthless punk getting his on a shower-stall floor. At least that’s what I was told by the people who took over.”
“What people?” I asked.
Lowell sighed impatiently, as though I were a complete idiot. “How do you spell F-E-D-S?” he asked.
“You’re saying the feds have taken over?”
“Yes, they have-lock, stock, and barrel.”
“What about Marco Andrade’s personal effects?”
“Gone,” Lowell said. “I already told you. They took everything I had. I was told this is all part of a much larger investigation into one of those new Mexican drug cartels. The DEA doesn’t want any of us local guys getting in the way of something they’ve been working on for months.”
“Did they give you any names?” I asked.
Lowell laughed outright at that. “You’ve got to be joking. They didn’t tell me anything-not a single damned thing. They told me that the case operates on a need-to-know basis only. I must have come up short in that department because so far they’ve given me nothing. So what’s your interest in all this? If the DEA finds out you’re asking questions, my guess is that they’ll send you your very own personal cease-and-desist order.”
For the next few minutes I told Gerald Lowell how I had run across Marco Andrade while working a series of Washington State homicides. I was telling him about Marcella Andrade’s murder when he interrupted me.
“Wait a minute,” he said. “What’s her name again?”
“Marcella,” I said.
“And where did you say she was from?”
“A town called Federal Way,” I told him.
“Just a sec,” he said. “Hang on.”
He was off the line for several long seconds. In my ear I heard what sounded like someone paging through pieces of paper. Eventually he picked up the receiver again.
“Here it is,” he said triumphantly. “I thought Federal Way sounded familiar.”
“What?” I asked.
“When the feds showed up here with a warrant, they went away with Marco Andrade’s personal effects, the evidence we had gathered, including the murder book. They’re planning to make a federal case of it, but they didn’t bother taking my trusty everyday notebook. You say her name was Marcella?”
“Yes.”
“In with Marco’s personal effects was a note from Marcella telling him she had met someone else and that she wanted a divorce.”
“Was there a return address?”
“There was no envelope,” Lowell answered. “Right, here’s what I was looking for. You might want to make a note of it. The address is in Federal Way.” He read off a street address complete with a zip code.
“Whose address is that?” I asked. I knew for a fact that it wasn’t anywhere near Silver Pines.
“Beats me,” Lowell said. “But it was important enough that Marco Andrade had it tattooed on the inside of his left arm. The M.E. found it during the autopsy. It’s a crude homemade job, just barely legible. My guess is that he did it himself. Before I got ordered off the job, I tracked it down through the reverse directory.”
“And?”
“Turned out to be a Denny’s restaurant. I spoke to the manager. He claimed he didn’t know anybody there named Marcella Andrade.”
Of course he didn’t, I realized. Because Marcella Andrade had worked there under an assumed name.
“Boy howdy,” Lowell said. “That would be a kick, wouldn’t it?”
“What would be a kick?” I asked.
“If that big federal case turned out to be nothing more than a little old romantic triangle. Marco wouldn’t give Marcella a divorce, so the boyfriend put out a hit.”
I signed off the call. I thought Lowell was barking up a wrong tree. I had met Mason Waters, Marina Aguirre’s grieving fiance. He didn’t seem like the type to put out a hit on anyone, most especially not a complicated in-prison hit. Besides, Marina hadn’t let on to Mason Waters that she was still married. She had claimed to be dodging an ex-boyfriend, not a current husband.
Knowing these background details caused a lot of other things to start making sense. Marcella had stayed in touch with her soon-to-be-ex-husband by using her work address instead of her home address. Worried about being found, she hadn’t told many people where she lived, including Mason. Once she disappeared, the poor guy had been reduced to hiring a private eye to find out where his missing fiancee had once lived.
It occurred to me that if Marcella’s killer or killers had snatched her from her workplace, that would help explain why the man who had come to Tom Wojeck in search of Marcella’s missing money had no idea where she lived, either. He might have uncovered the Silver Pines part, but he couldn’t risk breaking into one trailer after the other until he finally hit on the right one.
The conversation with Lowell brought me up against another realization-one I didn’t like. In all the busy hubbub-in finding out Marina’s real name and notifying Marcella Andrade’s family-I had forgotten all about Mason Waters. Down in Federal Way, Marcella had left behind one additional survivor, a not-quite-family member who had not yet been notified. My heart went out to the poor guy who still cherished the Seiko watch he had purchased as a Christmas gift for his missing fiancee. Somebody needed to go see him and let him know that the Christmas morning he had in mind was never going to come.
I picked up my car keys and headed for Mel’s office. She was on the phone. When she saw me standing there waiting, she signed off. “That was Detective Carpenter on the phone,” she said. “He went by that house in Tucson and picked up the wallet. The name on the driver’s license is Tomas Eduardo Rivera. He lives on North Wright Avenue in Cle Elum. There was money in the wallet-five twenty-dollar bills and six ones. Carpenter said that tucked in among the ones and written in pencil on what appeared to be the corner of a paper napkin was the name Miguel, along with a phone number that listed a 360 prefix. There were also school pictures of two dark-haired boys. I told Carpenter that I’d see what I can do to track Rivera down, find out where he works, et cetera, as well as what his connection might be to Marina.”
“Great,” I told her. “In the meantime, someone needs to have a talk with Mason Waters and tell him what we’ve learned.”
Mel doesn’t like doing next-of-kin notifications any more than I do, and she was happy to pass the buck. “Good thinking,” she said. “And since you’re going to be so close to the airport, maybe you could stop by and pick up Jaime Carbajal. His plane’s due in at two-thirty.”
I glanced at my watch. It was just past noon. “It should work,” I told her. She gave me the flight information and I headed out.
