“Morning,” he said, his voice croaky. “What time is it?”
“A little after seven. What time did you get here?” I figured he had come in really early, got tired, and was taking a catnap before the squad showed up.
Harrison stood, stretched, and rubbed the sleep out of his eyes. “Midnight.”
“Midnight? What brought you back here at midnight?”
He gave me a crooked smile. “Your friend Candice.”
“Huh?”
“She kicked me out.”
“She what?”
“She needs time,” he said dramatically.
“Time for what?”
“Time to think.” Harrison was now pacing his office and I could see that whatever had gone on between him and Candice the night before was still bugging him.
I held up my hand. “Hold on a sec. Can we back up? What happened between you two?”
Harrison sat down on the couch with a heavy sigh. “I took your advice, and it backfired.”
I thought back through the advice I might have given him and remembered the conversation we’d had about the proposal. “So, you asked her to marry you?”
“Yeah.”
“And she kicked you out?” None of this was making sense. Especially given how broken up Candice had been about the thought of Brice leaving her.
“The kicking-out part came later.”
I came all the way into Harrison’s office then and pulled a chair up to the couch. I then handed him my Starbucks coffee and ordered him to drink it. “Maybe after you wake up a little, you’ll start making sense.”
He smiled ruefully, took the cup and a big swig of java. “When I got home last night, I found Candice crying on the balcony. At first she wouldn’t tell me what was wrong, so I thought I’d just give her some space and go hang out in the bedroom. But then she accused me of walking away, so I went back to try and find out what was wrong. I finally managed to get it out of her that she thought I was having second thoughts and wanted out of our relationship.
“I tried to tell her she was crazy, but somehow we got into an argument and I sort of shouted the proposal at her, only I realized that I’d left the stupid ring here. And of course she then accused me of only proposing to her because she was upset, which I vehemently denied and I swore to her that I’d been planning this for a while but forgot the ring at work. She didn’t believe me and kicked me out.”
“Whoa,” I said when he took another sip of coffee. “What’re you gonna do?”
Harrison looked at me in disbelief. “What am I gonna do? Are you serious?”
My brow furrowed. “Uh . . . I thought I was.”
He shook his head and handed me back the coffee. “I’m not doing anything, Abby. You need to talk to her.”
That surprised me. “I do?”
He nodded vigorously. “Yes. Tell her about the ring. Tell that I bought it a week ago and that you saw us engaged in a vision or a dream or something. Tell her that she’s overreacting and being an idiot and to let me come home for Christ’s sake!”
I was suddenly regretting my decision to stick my nose into Candice and Brice’s personal business. “Okay,” I said meekly. “I’ll talk to her. But give me the day, all right? When Candice is really upset, she doesn’t listen so well.”
“Tell me about it,” Brice muttered. He then looked at his watch and stood up. “I gotta get cleaned up before the rest of the squad shows up. And do me another favor: don’t mention to anyone that I slept here, okay?”
“No problem,” I assured him. One look at the rumpled clothing he was wearing and they’d be able to figure that out all on their own.
Rodriguez arrived at eight a.m., and without even looking at me, he said, “You ready to head to Waco?”
“Yes,” I said, suddenly remembering that I’d left my iPod at home. I could only imagine what fun a two-hour joyride with Agent Ice Cube would be without my tunes.
On our way out we passed Dutch, who had no idea I was going along for the ride to find the missing car. “Wait a second,” he said, grabbing my arm. “You’re going out in the field?”
His face was lined with concern, so I tried to reassure him. “Harrison approved it. And we’re just going to try and locate the car used in that hit-and-run of the census worker. It’ll be perfectly safe.”
“I’ll take care of your girlfriend, sir,” Rodriguez said, and the way he said “girlfriend” made it clear that he didn’t approve that the boss’s main squeeze worked on the squad.
Dutch took one step forward, real anger in his eyes. “Her name is Ms. Cooper, Agent Rodriguez. I’ll thank you to remember that. We clear?”
Rodriguez swallowed, lowered his eyes, and looked chagrined. “Crystal clear, sir. My apologies.”
Dutch backed off and regarded me. “You stick close to Agent Rodriguez, understand? I don’t want to hear about you wandering off on your own and getting into trouble. And no interviewing suspects, Abby. You’re not cleared for fieldwork yet, and I don’t want you in any potentially hostile situations, capisce?”
Dutch knew me a little too well. “I promise,” I said. “I’ll be good. We’re only going to sniff around for the car.”
Dutch’s cold stare swiveled back to Rodriguez. “She gets so much as a bug bite and I’m holding you personally responsible.”
“I’ll keep her safe, sir,” Rodriguez assured him.
I didn’t exactly appreciate Dutch’s intimidation tactics. He wasn’t doing me any favors by bullying these agents into working with me. “Let’s go,” I said, and hurried out the door.
Rodriguez and I rode in silence for the first hour of the trip. I figured he wasn’t going to be much of a Chatty Cathy, so I’d managed to grab a few new files to work on before leaving the office.
One file from March of 2009 caught my attention, and it was eerie, because much of it read like a file I’d keyed in on the day before.
The paperwork was light—not much follow-up had been done—but the things I made note of were that it involved the beheading of a young Hispanic male named Felix Lopez from a south Dallas suburb who’d had a long list of minor criminal convictions. It looked like he’d spent far more time in prison than out in his short twenty-one years for things like assault, robbery, criminal trespass, driving while intoxicated, driving under the influence of narcotics, and the list went on and on.
He’d started his criminal career early, in fact, when he’d been tossed in the can at just seventeen for attempted rape of a fifteen-year-old. But what I couldn’t figure out as I sorted through the various other convictions for drugs, assault, and robbery was how this fairly small-town punk had ended up decapitated in a similar fashion as Jason Cushing—the almost unmistakable mark of a Mexican drug-lord hit.
The agent assigned to the case had documented the presence of Los Zetas, which later became La Familia Michoacana, in the area. Los Zetas was a well- known and particularly violent Mexican drug cartel. I remembered newscasts from the previous year describing a major FBI and local law-enforcement sting that had taken down many key members of La Familia.
This particular cartel were infamous for their style of killing. Their victims were usually beheaded and the bodies dumped in open fields or by the side of the road—and more often than not, their heads were discovered in separate locations—adding to the cartel’s ruthless reputation.
Back in early 2009, information about the cartel was still being gathered, and indications that La Familia was about to split off was evidenced by the infighting within the Los Zetas ranks, and the deaths of a few of their less loyal members.
The investigators determined that somehow Felix had ended up on the wrong side of one of those members during that surge in violence.
I wanted to connect these two murders, but there were quite a few discrepancies that didn’t make that connection obvious. To begin with, Felix was murdered four months after Jason. And Felix’s body wasn’t found on the side of a road, but in an abandoned warehouse, and
his head was never recovered. He’d been identified through fingerprints. It looked like he’d been bound and murdered, then decapitated. At least I hoped he’d died before he’d been made into a headless horseman. And while Felix was Hispanic, Jason was not. It could have been that both men were killed because of some unknown connection to Los Zetas, but every time I tried to confirm that through my radar—I couldn’t. The idea of Jason and Felix being taken out by the Mexican Mafia kept bouncing back at me—as if it was a false statement that I needed to reexamine.
And I was fully convinced that Felix and Jason were connected. Other than the possible Mexican Mafia connection, there was nothing in the files to indicate how—but when I thought about that possibility, it felt right—like two pieces of a puzzle you’re convinced don’t go together, but only because you haven’t discovered how they fit into the bigger picture yet.
Felix’s case was one I thought we might be able to solve—it had that completion energy about it—but no further clues came to my intuitive mind, so I didn’t have anything to recommend other than something about this file seemed very off, as in it felt unreal. I even wrote down the word “forgery” on my legal pad, but I didn’t know what was forged or what wasn’t real.
After ten more minutes of trying to come up with something else to jot down, I gave up and set it aside with a sigh, settling for staring out the window at the passing scenery.
“You really think we’re gonna to find this car?” Rodriguez asked into the silence, and I jerked a little at the sound of his voice.
“Yep,” I replied without looking at him.
He was quiet again and I didn’t try to make conversation. I’d pretty much had it with these testy FBI boys and their skepticism. I’d learned by now that you couldn’t tell them—you had to show them.
“My girlfriend called me yesterday,” Rodriguez said, again interrupting the solitude of the car. “Well, my ex-girlfriend called me yesterday.”
I couldn’t help it; I turned to look at him. “You don’t say?”
The corner of Rodriguez’s mouth lifted a little. “She broke it off with me about two months ago. We’d been together since high school, you know? It was rough.”
I wanted Rodriguez to get to the good part, because I fully remembered telling him that he’d hear from his ex. “What’d she say?”
Rodriguez allowed himself to smile a little more. “She misses me.”
“Gee,” I said lightly. “Where’ve I heard that before?”
The smile vanished and the agent next to me shifted in his seat. “Yeah, well, I gotta give you credit. That was way too freaky to be just a coincidence.”
“What’d you tell her?”
Rodriguez’s eyes swiveled over to me, then darted back to the road. “I told her that I’d been a real asshole and that I missed her too.”
I smirked. “Good boy,” I said. Then my radar kicked in and I knew how the rest of the conversation had gone. “You need to let her take her time,” I told him. “I know you were expecting to get back together right away, especially since she was the one who called you, but she needs to make sure you’ve changed and that you’re going to respect her enough to give her a little breathing room.”
His eyes zinged back to me in surprise. “That’s almost exactly what she said.”
“Dude,” I said seriously. “I’m no amateur, okay? I actually do this for a living. Well, I used to do this for a living before the economy went to pot.”
Rodriguez laughed. “Yeah, okay. I hear you. So maybe I’m a little less skeptical of you now.”
“Yippee,” I said woodenly. “Just the enthusiastic endorsement I was looking for.”
“Hey, you gotta cut us some slack, okay? How do we know you’re for real unless we see it with our own eyes?”
“Oh, I understand, Agent Rodriguez. It’s just, you have to remember, there are millions of skeptics out there, and only one of me. After a while, proving myself just gets old.”
Rodriguez nodded. “I get it,” he said. “And if we find this car today, I’ll tell everyone back at the squad room you’re for real.”
“Get your endorsement speech ready, then, buddy, because we are so finding that car!”
An hour later we were standing at the bottom of a dried-up riverbed at the opening of a huge pipe that carried runoff water away from a megasized subdivision a half mile away. Parked inside the huge pipe was one heck of a dirty, rusted-out car with noticeable fender damage that fit the description of the hit-and-run vehicle to a tee.
There were no plates on the car, but the VIN matched the one registered to our suspect. “I love it when I’m right,” I said to Rodriguez, who was peering inside the dirty windows.
He wiped his hands on his jeans and sent me another smile. “Okay, okay,” he said. “I’ve been converted. You’re psychic and I’m willing to tell everyone how good you are from now on.”
“Excellent. Now, do we haul this guy in or what?”
Rodriguez pulled out his cell phone and began to dial. “No way. You heard what Agent Rivers told us. No interviewing suspects with you in the field.”
I bounced my eyebrows and said, “He didn’t say we couldn’t haul him in, though, now, did he?”
But Rodriguez wasn’t biting. “We’ll have the car towed to the FBI yard for them to do their forensics and gather as much evidence as we can. I don’t want to arrest this guy until we’re one hundred percent positive it’s his vehicle and we know we’ve got a solid case against him.”
“But I already told you, if you just bring him in, he’ll give you a full confession.” I felt that in my bones.
“I’m not doubting you,” Rodriguez was quick to say. “But let’s make sure we have a reason to bring him in before we jump the gun, okay?”
I checked my radar to see if there’d be any harm in waiting, and it didn’t feel like there would be, so I let Rodriguez have it his way.
He called for the FBI’s tow truck and we waited for nearly an hour and a half before it showed up. The driver apologized, saying he’d had to come all the way from Dallas.
After the old car had been towed away, Rodriguez motioned for us to be on our way. “Hungry?” he asked.
I sighed in relief. I’d been famished for over an hour. “I am. And I hope you can find me some junk food, because Dutch has been on this health-food kick lately and I think it’s killing me.”
We found a Chipotle restaurant in downtown Waco and while I was chowing down on a burrito, Rodriguez slid a folder toward me. “What’s this?”
“It’s a cold case,” he said. “Something I was working when I was with the bureau in Dallas.”
“Did you pull it from one of the boxes?” I asked carefully. I remembered Harrison saying that the investigators weren’t supposed to audit their own files.
“No. Agent Cox pulled it and gave it back to me after he did the audit.”
I looked at the score at the top of the lengthy form. “Ooh,” I said. “It failed.”
“It failed the old audit,” Rodriguez corrected. “Which didn’t surprise me, because my old partner and I worked that case into the ground. We just came to a total dead end.”
I hadn’t opened the folder yet. I was still weighing what I should do with it. “What’s the case about?”
“Two kids named Wendy Hayes and Tyler Harvin were a couple of runaway seventeen-year-olds. They lived in Oklahoma and their parents were neighbors who’d never gotten along and forbidden the kids from seeing each other. The folks even had a lawsuit over the property line between their land.”
“Sounds like Romeo and Juliet,” I said.
“Something like that,” Rodriguez said. “Anyway, the parents wanted Wendy and Tyler to break up. But the kids had other plans, and they stole Wendy’s mom’s car and tried to drive it to Houston. They thought they could get lost in a big city like that. The problem was that the car broke down here in Waco. Tyler phoned the local auto repair, a shop called Clady’s, run by this sweet old guy Rus
sell Clady.
“Anyway, Russell was the one that notified the authorities the day after he fixed the kids’ car. He said he just didn’t buy that they were nineteen and on their way to visit relatives in Corpus Christi. He said that he’d called the number they’d given him once he’d made the repairs, but they never showed to claim the car. When the local sheriff discovered that the car was stolen, he went to the hotel where the kids were staying. Wendy and Tyler had checked in, but hadn’t checked out, and when the sheriff went to their room, he found their luggage there, but no sign of them.
“He then contacted us when he learned the kids were missing from Oklahoma and we’d have jurisdiction.”
I opened the folder and stared at the two photos of Wendy and Tyler. They both had soft doughy complexions and Wendy was a freckled red head. Tyler had eyes that were too small for his face, and a broad flat nose. The effect was that it made him look suspicious.
“They’re both dead,” I told Rodriguez. “They were abducted and killed someplace else.”
Rodriguez took a pull from his Dr Pepper. “You really think they’re both dead?”
“Yes.”
This seemed to unsettle Rodriguez.
“You thought they were alive?”
He shifted in his chair. “We thought they might have argued, and that Tyler could have killed Wendy, and hidden her body somewhere, then taken off without claiming the car to make it look like they might both still be alive.”
I shook my head and focused again on the photos in the file. “No. That’s not how it went down, although I’m sure there was a struggle. A third party killed your teens.”
“Who?” Rodriguez pressed.
I closed my eyes to concentrate, calling out to my crew for assistance.
“Was it the motel manager? He passed a polygraph, but I never believed that guy was telling the truth. I’ve always thought there was more to the story than he was telling us. He’s a creepy-looking dude, too. We did a background check on him and—”
Annoyed, I opened one eye. “Shhhh,” I whispered. “Psychic at work.”