“Hello,” she said. “Agent Delahany, are you there?”
“I’m here,” Delahany said at last. “Are you telling me Marcella Andrade is dead?”
It wasn’t the response Joanna had expected, and she didn’t remember having mentioned Marcella’s last name. That meant the agent in charge of the DEA’s Tucson office was in on all this.
“When did it happen?” Delahany asked. “Where?”
“Somewhere outside Seattle,” Joanna said. “In the mountains east of there. She had been dead for months with her body buried under the snow. They found her last week when the snow melted. The M.E. up there made the identification day before yesterday using computerized dental records.”
“Damn,” Delahany muttered. “I kept hoping like hell that she’d made it, but they got to her, too. Damn!”
“What do you mean, ‘got to her, too’?” Joanna echoed. “And who is ‘they’?”
“The cartel,” Delahany said. “The Cervantes Cartel. Who do you think I meant? They apparently have people everywhere, including inside the California State prison system. That’s why I pulled the task force out of the field and back into my office. I wanted to be able to control who had access to what we were doing and how. I didn’t want people to know where we were getting our information.”
“And where was that?” Joanna asked.
“Marco, of course,” Delahany replied. “Who else? The intel he gave us was invaluable. We heard rumors that the cartel had wised up about his turning against them. Then we heard rumors that they were planning a hit on him down in Lancaster. That’s why we moved him to Wild Horse Mesa.”
“In hopes of taking him out of harm’s way?”
“Yes,” Delahany said. “You can see how well that worked out for us and for him. They still managed to get him. Marco had told us that he was worried about Marcella’s safety, but by then she had already gone underground. Since we couldn’t locate her, I didn’t think they’d be able to find her, either.”
Wrong again, Joanna thought. “I still find it difficult to believe that Marco Andrade was working with you.”
“Well, he was,” Delahany declared. “The information he gave us was just a starting point. We’ve been building on it and putting the pieces together for months now. We’ve been planning a major takedown. In the next few weeks we expect to hand down a series of indictments that will take key players out of the Cervantes organization all over the country. And that’s what your detective-what’s his name again? — may be putting at risk.”
“Carbajal,” Joanna said. “Jaime Carbajal.”
“If he happens to spook one of them, he could spook them all. By the time we have our warrants in hand, the crooks will have disappeared.”
“Is Miguel Rios part of all this?”
“Of course he’s part of it,” Delahany said impatiently. “Miguel Rios is a major player. From what we’ve been able to learn, he pretty much runs the cartel’s prostitution interests in the Pacific Northwest. He also has the reputation of being the organization’s chief enforcer. Never caught and never indicted-up till now.”
Joanna thought about that. Wasn’t that what Beau and his partner were investigating-a whole series of dead prostitutes in Washington State?
“What do you mean, enforcer?” she asked aloud. “I’ve heard that the Washington State Attorney General’s office is investigating a series of murders involving prostitutes. Might this Miguel Rios be involved in those?”
“If they were his girls and they stepped out of line? Absolutely,” Delahany replied. “I’m telling you, Rios is a very dangerous guy and we’re close to shutting him down, but we can’t afford to have a Lone Ranger trying to take him out prematurely. Please, Sheriff Brady, talk to your detective. Ask him to back off. Beg him to back off. You can tell him from me that I swear we’ll nail Rios and his pals eventually, but we need some time-a few more days. A week at the outside. But right now, today, we’re not ready.”
Delahany’s words made sense, but Jaime Carbajal was already in motion. If he’d made up his mind to go after Rios, Joanna doubted there was anyone on the planet who could dissuade him.
“All right,” she told Delahany at last. “I’m not making any promises, but I’ll see what I can do. In the meantime, I need to make another call.”
But Agent Delahany wasn’t ready to hang up. “About Marcella,” he said. “Where exactly is the body?”
“In Ellensburg, Washington,” Joanna said. “In the morgue at the Kittitas County medical examiner’s office. I believe the remains are due to be released on Monday.”
“Will the family be bringing the body back to Arizona?” Delahany asked.
“Yes,” Joanna answered. “That’s why Jaime flew up there yesterday-to bring her home to Bisbee for burial. Why?”
“Regardless of what happens with the brother and Miguel Rios, please let the family know that my people and I deeply regret their loss. You can tell them from me that we’ll help with bringing Marcella home. It’s the least we can do.”
Joanna was surprised to hear the sound of genuine regret in his voice.
“All right,” she said. “I’ll let them know.”
“And one more thing,” Delahany added. “About that homicide situation over in Bowie-the one your guys are working on?”
“The Lester Attwood case?” Joanna asked.
“Yes, that’s the one,” Delahany said. “Once the dust settles on all this other stuff, you can let your detectives know that I’m pretty sure we have some surveillance videos that will help you sort out what happened there.”
“As in legible surveillance videos?” Joanna asked.
“Of course they’re legible,” Delahany declared. “Why wouldn’t they be? It’s my belief that it pays to buy the very best.”
That’s something the Savages have yet to learn, Joanna thought.
“All right,” she said. “Detective Ernie Carpenter is my lead investigator on the Attwood case. I’ll have him be in touch.”
With that she ended the call.
I had awakened that morning in a strange bed in a Best Western in Ellensburg. If you had told me that a few hours later I’d be heading for Gig Harbor and chasing a fellow cop across the Tacoma Narrows Bridge, I would have said you were full of it.
By the way, I’m not exactly wild about the Tacoma Narrows Bridge, and my jaundiced opinion has nothing to do with the fact that it’s now a toll bridge. My dislike goes all the way back to the time when I was a little kid growing up in Seattle. I was born only a few short years after the original Tacoma Narrows Bridge, otherwise known as Galloping Gertie, crashed into the drink. The bridge had been open for only a few months when it started swaying uncontrollably and then collapsed during a fierce windstorm during the winter of 1940. It took ten years to build a replacement. When that one opened in 1950, newsreels in theaters replayed the flapping demise of Galloping Gertie over and over. For me, seeing that film footage left a lasting impression.
These days and as someone who crosses Lake Washington’s floating bridges on a daily basis, I’m well aware that they can sink, too-especially if you allow water to rush inside the hollow concrete pontoons, as a careless workman did on I-90 back in the early nineties. But at least if one of the floating bridges sinks, whoever happens to be on it at the time won’t be hundreds of feet in the air when it goes down. If I had to choose, I’d rather swim than fall.
That’s what I was thinking when my phone rang. I thought it would be Mel calling to let me know if she was ahead of me or behind me on the bridge. But the caller wasn’t Mel.
“It’s me again,” Joanna Brady announced. “It turns out Marcella’s husband, Marco Andrade, was a snitch. He was delivering the goods on some bad guys to the DEA.”
“The Cervantes Cartel?” I asked. “Out of someplace in Mexico?”
“So you know about them?” Joanna asked.
“Only as much as Jaime Carbajal told me this morning.”
“Anyway,” Joanna continued, “it sounds like the cartel found out about Marco’s participation and took him out. That probably explains why they came after Marcella, too.”
“Jaime told me about the cartel,” I said, “but I doubt he had a clue about Marco turning on them. Where did you hear that?”
