The Devil's Elixir

  I’d been hoping for something, anything, but not this. I glanced over at Munro and back at Corliss. “That’s it?” I asked.

  “That’s it.” His features sagged with a distant, dejected finality. “Look, what can I tell you? You think I’m happy about that? It’s a goddamn embarrassment. I’ve had so much heat over this thing, I had the governor barking down my phone so bad I could smell his cigar breath through the handset. I didn’t mind. I was just as pissed off as he was. I wanted to fry those sons of bitches, but they didn’t leave us much to work with.”

  The room went silent for a moment while we digested the downer, then Villaverde asked, “What about the line of inquiry into them being three-patchers?” He was referring to members of outlaw motorcycle gangs and the three patches—the two rockers with the name of the club and its location, and the central patch with its logo—that they wear on the backs of their jackets and cut-offs. “Where are you at with that?”

  Villaverde and I had talked about that on the drive up. He’d told me about the “biker types” reference from one of the survivors of the raid at the institute, and the comment didn’t sit too badly with what I’d seen either. The crew that had come after Michelle at the hotel were hard-asses with alcohol-and-dope-corroded faces who could well have been bikers, but it was hard to tell given that they weren’t wearing their colors, and too much of them was covered up to expose any telltale gang ink, biker or otherwise. Outlaw gangs, though, were acting more and more as enforcers for the cartels north of the border, that much we knew. It wasn’t a stretch to imagine that if some narco from Michelle’s past wanted to get to her for some reason, like recovering money she’d helped confiscate or just plain revenge, using a biker gang was an easy option. Villaverde and I had agreed that I needed to spend some more time going through some mug shots, with a more focused range this time. The ATF—the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives—were the experts on the bikers, and Villaverde had already put in a call to his contact there to get some sheets readied up for me to look at.

  “We’re chasing it up,” Munro told us. “We’re still leaning on every lowlife on our books and working it with ATF, but it’s like getting blood from a stone. These gangs, they’re all very tight-knit. The only time those dickwads let anything slip is to mess us around and screw with our heads by putting out rumors that it’s the dirty work of some rival. So you’ve got the Desperados saying it’s the Huns, the Huns saying it’s the Sons of Azazel, the Sons of Azazel saying it’s the Aztecas. It’s a fucking nightmare. The only way to get any kind of traction is to have someone in there undercover, and that takes time. Besides, we don’t even know what gang, let alone what chapter, we’re talking about.”

  “What about the cartels?” I asked. “Any luck working it the other way around, from the top down?”

  Corliss chortled. “Good luck with that. Our friends from the south have an even more rigid code of silence.”

  “But if they are bikers, you still think they were hired muscle and not end users,” I pressed.

  “My read? Yes. Absolutely.” Corliss hunched forward. He gestured at Villaverde and said, “We’ve all had great success in shutting down plenty of local meth labs, but you know as well as I do that all it’s done is move the production part of the equation south of the border. And that’s where these white coats are needed. Not here. Our narco friends down there, they’re now running superlabs where each one of them’s churning out three, four hundred pounds of meth a day. A day. That’s a lot of product, and it has to be done right. So when they get their hands on some hotshot chemist who can streamline their processes and give them a better quality product without blowing up their labs, they’re not letting him go.”

  I felt like I was still missing a big piece of the puzzle. “I still don’t get what any of this could possibly have to do with Michelle. It’s been five years.”

  “Who knows,” Corliss said, brushing it off casually, his tone growing weary. “She worked the cartel money trails. She caused some bad guys a lot of pain by taking away their toys and wiping out their bank accounts. Maybe one of them wanted some payback. These guys . . . they go to prison for a while, then they bribe or shoot their way out, they move around and stay under the radar . . . Maybe it took this long for one of them to track her down. Especially since she worked undercover.”

  It didn’t sit straight with me, but right now, I didn’t have much else to go on.

  “They did take her laptop,” Villaverde offered, giving me a sideways glance as if reinforcing Corliss’s point. “Maybe they’re looking for a way to reverse a trade? Get her to make some transfers their way?”

  Corliss didn’t take too long to chew on it—a dubious eyebrow spiked upward as soon as Villaverde mentioned it.

  I tensed up, knowing where this was heading.

  “Her laptop?” Corliss asked.

  Villaverde nodded.

  Corliss shrugged, not saying it but signaling it clearly enough with a wry, skeptical expression.

  “What?” I pressed.

  “Well, she took away a lot of money from some of these guys,” he said, his mouth bent downward like he’d just sniffed some sour milk. “Maybe she kept some of it for herself. It sure as hell wouldn’t be the first time that happened.”

  I felt my face flame up. “Michelle was clean,” I said in no uncertain terms.

  “And you know that because you two had a fling?”

  “She was clean,” I insisted.

  “She’s a trained undercover agent, remember? She knows how to keep secrets. Even from whoever’s sharing her bed.”

  I saw the look he and Munro exchanged and could feel the veins in my neck go rock hard. I had to fight to keep myself under control. Michelle wasn’t even in the ground yet and this damaged, bitter prick was already soiling her memory.

  I flicked a glare across at Villaverde and back at Corliss. “She was straight. One hundred percent. No question.”

  I waited to let the words sink in, ready to pounce on any retort from any of them, but none came. Corliss just held my gaze with his tired, vacant eyes, then shrugged, the edges of his mouth still sagging dismissively.

  “Maybe she was,” he said. “Either way . . . it’s something that needs to be looked into. It could lead us to our shooters.”

  I didn’t like the suspicion hanging there, but nothing I could say was going to change that. But there was something I could throw back at him. “If it’s about narcos tracking her down, you’ve got a leak in here. It’s the only way they could have found her.”

  Corliss wasn’t moved. “Big fucking surprise. You know how much time and resources we spend trying to keep our house clean? It’s a constant battle.”

  “Was there anyone in particular that you can think of who’d be looking to get back at her?” Villaverde asked Corliss, adroitly moving on. “Anyone with a vendetta that was so strong it could resurface after so long?”

  “A couple,” Corliss replied. “No one likes being taken for a ride, especially not by a woman.” He looked like he was running a list of possibilities in his mind for a second, and Munro chimed in.

  “I’ll need to look into her case history, but the last case she worked was a big one. Carlos Guzman. She did him some serious damage. Almost half a billion’s worth. And as you know, he’s still out there.” Munro shrugged. “Probably richer than ever.”

  Villaverde and I exchanged glances. Neither of us had anything else to add. It looked like we weren’t going to get much more from them either when Corliss turned to me and asked, “Why’d she call you? I mean, after all this time, why you?”

  Given what Corliss had floated about Michelle possibly being dirty, I didn’t feel like bringing up the fact that we’d had a kid together, not to him.

  “She was scared and didn’t know which way to turn,” I replied. “And maybe she still believed in something old-fashioned called trust.”

  He blew out a long, rueful hiss, then nodded, slowly. “Trust, huh??
?? He paused, then his expression clouded and he seemed to travel to somewhere far and dark.

  “My wife trusted me when I told her my work would never put her or our daughter in harm’s way,” he said, then his distant gaze racked focus and settled on me. “Didn’t work out too well for either one of them, did it?”

  There wasn’t much to say after that.

  16

  Tess felt uneasy as she crossed the threshold and stepped into Michelle’s house.

  She’d left Alex with Jules at the hotel, happily drawing at the small dining table in the suite’s living room. Since Reilly needed to drive up to LA, he’d arranged to have a couple of PD guys escort her over.

  It felt weird being there. On several fronts. It was weird being in the empty house of someone who’d just been murdered. That was a first for Tess, and it weighed heavily on her, with every hesitant step. It was also weird being at the home of Reilly’s ex-lover, the home of the mother of his son. Tess felt like she was intruding, like she was some kind of parasite picking at the carcass of the newly departed. It was nonsense, of course—Tess tried to remind herself that, really, Michelle would probably be nothing if not grateful that she was opening her heart to Alex. But the discomfort was hard to shake.

  She didn’t plan on sticking around too long. She would just get what she thought would help Alex, then she’d be out of there.

  She felt a shortness of breath as she stepped around the bloodstained floor and made her way into the living room, where some picture frames on a shelf drew her eye. She approached them almost solemnly and picked up a photograph of Alex and a brunette she knew had to be Michelle, given that she was also in several of the other pictures. It was the first time she saw what Michelle looked like. She was more than attractive. There was something highly appealing about her, a magnetism that shone through her eyes and jumped off the prints. Seeing her brought up another knot of conflicting emotions within Tess, a deep, heartfelt sadness and an empathy corrupted by a touch of jealousy.

  She chose two frames that showed Alex and Michelle beaming with great smiles and slipped them carefully into one of the hotel laundry bags she’d brought with her. She knew it would be good for Alex to have them around. Then she advanced slowly through the house, trying to get some kind of idea of what Michelle was like and what Alex’s life there was like. She checked out the kitchen and scrutinized Alex’s drawings on the walls and the mosaic of postings on the fridge door, even looking inside the fridge to see what kind of things Michelle stocked, what Alex was used to.

  As the fridge closed, she glanced out the French doors into the backyard, where something snagged her attention. Small patches of color, on the lawn. Alex’s toys. She went outside, and a bittersweet smile dimpled her cheeks. The small, four-inch Ben 10 figurines Alex had asked her for were all lying there, untouched. She knew they were them, as Alex had shown her the images he called up on the tiny screen of his Omnitrix wristband, and she’d also done a web search and had Alex point them out to her online. Tess visualized Alex playing with them when the intruders had burst in, and felt a pang as she pictured Michelle and Alex running frantically, trying to escape. She shook the image away and picked up the toys, then went back inside.

  She checked out Michelle’s bedroom, then her study, where she found herself looking around the bookshelves, inspecting their contents to try to form a mental picture of what Michelle was like, what interested her. She had a lot of work ahead of her. If Alex was now part of her life, Tess knew that she owed it to him to try to get to know as much about his mother as she could. She would need to find ways of doing that, but a start would be spending more time going through her things and talking to her friends and family.

  Not yet, though. It was all too soon for that.

  Her eyes drifted across to Michelle’s desk, where Reilly had told her the missing laptop had probably sat. The desk was fairly tidy, with a couple of stacks of papers and bills arranged on either side of the empty, central space. She was about to step away when she noticed a drawing sticking out of one of the piles. She moved the other papers off it and found a small stack of drawings, more of Alex’s works, four of them.

  Tess studied them curiously, trying to figure out what they depicted.

  The first one showed some kind of tribal setting, with dark-skinned figures and huts and lush greenery around them under bright blue skies. The second was of another dark-haired figure surrounded by what looked like cacti that had red flowers sprouting out of them. The third was of a figure walking on ground that was bright orange, like it was on fire.

  The fourth one showed two figures, one on either side of the sheet, drawn in the comedically surreal style young children had: an elongated, jelly-bean-like shape for a torso, sticks for arms and legs, circles for hands and feet, short stick-like lines for fingers and toes. She smiled and was about to put it down when something about it kept her from doing that. One of the figures, the one on the left, seemed to be holding something, aiming it at the one on the right. It was barely recognizable, but it read like a gun. The figure’s torso had been colored in darkly. The figure on the right, though, was what had caught her eye. It was smaller and had brown hair, wide eyes, and a big, open mouth, like it was shouting. It was also holding something in its hand: something that looked like a tiny stick figure. Tess pulled the drawing into the light for a clearer view. The figure had a squiggle that looked like a depiction of brown hair, and green over its legs.

  Something about the image seemed oddly familiar, while the overall effect was, for some reason, unsettling. Then she understood. With the drawing in hand, she went back into the hall, found the bag she’d put the toys in, and rummaged through it before pulling out the figurine of Ben himself. He was a young teen with brown hair and wore a white shirt and oversize green cargo pants. Tess eyed the drawing again and felt pretty sure that the object in the hand of the figure on the right was the Ben figurine. Which meant the person holding it had to be Alex.

  But if that was the case, had he also drawn a larger, dark-clothed figure holding what could be a gun at him?

  Tess felt a prickle of concern as her imagination shot off in all kinds of directions, then she forced herself to stop and brushed the thought away, chiding herself for letting the setting and the circumstances of her being there get the better of her. He was a kid, and kids played with toy guns. She was reading too much into it.

  She put the toy back in the bag and went about collecting the things she and Alex had talked about: more toys, his blanket, and his pajamas—Ben again, of course—some clothes, his Buzz Lightyear toothbrush, and a few picture books. She also took the four drawings with her.

  Half an hour later, she was back in the police cruiser, heading back to the hotel.

  17

  It was around three in the afternoon by the time I left Villaverde in the parking lot outside his office on Aero Drive, got into my trusted LaCrosse, and headed downtown to look at some more tough-guy stares. Villaverde had called one of the SDPD homicide detectives from the car during our drive back from LA and given him the heads-up about what we were looking for so they’d have time to coordinate with ATF and have the database keyed in accordingly and ready for me by the time I got there.

  The more I thought about it, the more I thought this could be a real opening. It felt right—these guys weren’t black or Latino, and if you were looking for a crew of white bruisers in Southern California, a biker gang was a good place to start. I was starting to feel pretty good about our chances, despite the face that SoCal was rampant with one-percenters, which was what members of OMGs, to stick to the hip abbreviations—outlaw motorcycle gangs, not the more popular OMG that’s usually followed by four exclamation marks or a smiley face—called themselves. Most even wore a “1%” patch on their colors. The term was supposed to refer to something some upstanding official from a national motorcycle association had once said, something about ninety-nine percent of motorcyclists being law-abiding citizens, but the association in
question had long since denied anyone there ever having said that and it seemed to me that it was the outlaws themselves who had just plucked the number out of their own ass and were using it to talk up their mystique and their exclusivity. Given the swamp of mug shots I was about to trudge through, I thought that term had to be way off the mark, at least as far as Southern California is concerned.

  The ride downtown looked pretty straightforward, as per Villaverde’s instructions—south on the 15, then west on Route 94. I didn’t even bother using the in-car GPS. The freeway was running smoothly, with sparse traffic in both lanes. Barring the unexpected, the drive didn’t look like it was going to take more than half an hour.

  The unexpected, though, wasn’t about to give me a break on this trip.

  Its latest incarnation came in the shape of a maroon sedan with two silhouettes inside that seemed to be maintaining too constant a gap behind me. Now I don’t usually abuse my badged status by storming down freeways at autobahn speeds just to pick up my dry cleaning, but on this occasion I was keen to get to the mug shot gallery and see how generous a mood it was in. I was probably running fifteen miles per hour or so above the speed limit, and the car—a decade-old Japanese model, possibly a Mitsubishi, though I couldn’t really tell—was keeping up with me, although holding back about five or six car lengths. The good thing about traveling at that speed is that if someone wants to follow you, they’re going to have a tough time putting a small buffer of cars in between them and you, and so it was with these guys. I’ve had cars innocently trail in my wake before, of course, their thinking being that if there were to be a speed trap, I’d be the sacrificial lamb that would hit it first and get stopped while they’d sail on, but this didn’t feel like one of those. I guess my inner goon-dar had been cranked up to eleven ever since Michelle and I walked out of that hotel room, and over the years, giving it the benefit of the doubt hadn’t served me too badly.