Sudden Death

street.

Jack pushed Carlos to the dirt and straddled him, slamming his palm against the side of his head. “What are you running from, asshole?”

In rapid Spanish, Carlos said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Kincaid. I was just going to the store for my girl and-”

Jack pulled him up by his black T-shirt and slammed him back down. “Don’t fuck with me, Hernandez. Scout is dead and I want to know what you know.”

“Scout? Dead?” He tried to sound like he hadn’t heard, but Jack wasn’t buying it.

“I said don’t fuck with me.”

“I’m not! I swear I’m not!”

The girl from the house came running out, pulling on a T-shirt. “Let him go! Let him go!”

Then she saw Padre and her eyes widened. “Father Francis, I-”

He stared at her with narrowed eyes. “Emilia. I am sure your mother doesn’t know you are skipping school, does she?”

“I-no, I-” She turned and ran back into the house.

Jack silently thanked the power of Catholic guilt and focused his attention on Carlos Hernandez.

“Tell me about the boys from San Antonio.”

“I don’t know-” But he looked Jack in the face. “Look, it was nothing, a onetime sale, just-”

“They’re your mules, aren’t they?”

“I don’t- You’re fucking with the wrong person, Kincaid. You think you’re a saint? You think you’re the morality cop of Hidalgo? You’re an outsider, no matter how much money you throw around or how many kids you send to college. Your money is a drop in the bucket. Just because you got the priest on your side don’t think you’re indispensable. Or him.”

Jack changed his position, pinning Carlos with a knee firmly planted in his groin. Carlos twisted in pain, but the more he moved the more it hurt.

“Do not threaten me, puta. Tell me about Scout. Now.”

“I didn’t do nothing to him. I don’t know nothing about it. I swear to God, in front of your fucking priest, I don’t know nothing that happened to him.”

“Did you talk to a woman in the bar last night? Gringo? Thirties, wearing a ball cap?”

“Maybe-” Jack pushed his knee higher, and Carlos’s voice rose a pitch. “Yeah!” He was breathing faster. “Just passing through.”

“What did you tell her?”

“About what? It was chitchat. About owning a bar, shit like that.”

“Did she ask about Scout?”

“Naw, she didn’t ask questions, maybe how’s it going and crap. She bummed a cigarette off Enrique Roscoe. Yeah, right before she left. I swear he holds those cigs in tight fists, so she must have winked at him or something. Maybe he knows something. I don’t know, I just didn’t say nothing about no one, and you’d better get off me or I’ll call Perez and have you thrown in jail. And if you think I can’t, you’re a fool.”

Jack suspected Carlos was blowing smoke, but he didn’t want to test it. Perez would be livid when he learned Jack was asking questions about Scout’s murder. Delaying that revelation as long as possible was to Jack’s advantage.

He pushed off Carlos, who scrambled up and moved away while adjusting his aching dick. “Keep your bitch in line, Padre,” he said as he got back in his car and sped away.

“Jack-” Padre said.

Jack walked off his anger. Carlos Hernandez wasn’t worth it, but the asshole was messing with the wrong people if he thought he could be a major player in the drug trade. The kings down in Mexico would eat Carlos for breakfast. Jack could care less about the jerk, but he feared collateral damage. Naive girls like Emilia.

“You might want to turn up the fire and brimstone in your homilies,” Jack said. “Too many people are turning the other cheek-for the wrong people.”

Jack got back in the truck. “Let’s find Enrique. Maybe he can give us more information about this wayward Catholic brunette.”

* * *

It was after six that evening when Detective Vasquez drove Megan and Hans to Duane Johnson’s house.

Hans walked around the house alone while Megan stood in the garage and tried to put herself in the killers’ shoes. Waiting for their target to come home. It took a patient killer. Someone who planned. Three murders, no evidence yet that pointed to any specific suspect. Generalities only-likely someone affiliated with the military- current or in the past. Someone with a grudge against the army specifically, and possibly Duane Johnson and the others individually. Someone who had access to information about the veterans and where they lived, worked, their schedules.

The killers had to have stalked Johnson before killing him. And Dennis Perry. How had they traveled? Plane? Car? She could pull flight records for specific flights, but to pull multiple flight records without knowing the specific airline, both the destination and the origin, or the date of travel … it would be virtually impossible to find out if an UNSUB had been on flights to Austin, Las Vegas, and Sacramento. If Megan had only a name, they could get the information, but it would still take time.

It bothered her more than she’d let on to Hans and her boss, Bob Richardson, about receiving Price’s dog tag at her apartment. The killers had to have been watching the crime scene, otherwise how could they have identified her? She wasn’t a spokesperson for the department, though she’d had her moments in the limelight. Last year the Sacramento Bee had done a huge article on the serial killer she’d killed who buried his victims alive. Richardson had thought it had been a great idea for her to do an interview with the press; she had hated every minute of it. Her brother Matt, the district attorney, handled the press much better than she did. But it had been good P.R. and Richardson was all about the image of the bureau. And that led to the television interview and that would have led to a national spot, except Megan told her boss no more. She couldn’t do her job if she was too high profile, and she didn’t want to be the public information officer.

Vasquez joined her in the garage and said, “Find anything?” in a tone that said he thought being at the crime scene two months after the murder was a waste of time.

Megan walked over to where the garage floor looked bleached. “Is this where the paint can spilled during the scuffle? Where Johnson was hamstrung?”

“Yes, and I know what you’re thinking.”

“You do?”

“That the killer stepped in the paint and left nice footprints to identify. The killer may have done just that, but they scrubbed the floor before leaving.”

“Scrubbed?”

“There may have been footprints, but someone came in and used Johnson’s shirt to rub the paint over any possible prints.”

Megan frowned. “I didn’t see that in the report.”

“If it wasn’t there, I forgot. But it didn’t give us anything, except that the killers tried to clean up.”

She stared at the door. “The house was cleaned.”

“Of course.”

“There still might be-” She opened the garage door and called out for Hans.

He came from the back of the house. “Find something?”

“I don’t know. But the killer stepped in the paint. It could have been tracked all over the house, maybe invisible to the naked eye.”

“The house has since been cleaned by a biological clean-up company,” Vasquez said.

Megan sighed. Good biohazard companies wouldn’t have let anything slip by. “It was worth a try.”

“I’ll call the crime scene supervisor. Tell him what you’re thinking and see if he has any ideas.”

“We appreciate it,” Megan said. She was grasping at straws. She wanted a break, something that pointed to a suspect. She’d worked hundreds of murder investigations over her fifteen-year FBI career, so many that her boss in D.C. had suggested she get a job with local law