A Desperate Silence (Dr. Sylvia Strange Book 3) (4 page)

CHAPTER THREE

T
HE DOG WAS
tiny, minus one ear, almost hairless, a sore-infested, mangy hot dog on legs who knew everything there was to know about getting kicked around. He raised his nose from the pile of rotting tortillas and putrid grease. Hackles standing at attention, he caught something stronger than the smell of decay on the warm evening breeze. He smelled fear.

     
Curious, the dog picked his way over a mound of ripe trash to the edge of a dirt bluff. When he was inches from the drop-off, he set his paws wide and peered down. Even a dog knew that the dark, gleaming vehicle below did not belong at this dump within the miserable slum of Anapra on the western edge of Ciudad Juárez, Mexico. At first the dog did not see the man who stood so quiet and still. When he did, he growled.

     
Victor Vargas, investigator with the federal judicial police Juárez, was scared. His fear nested in a cold hollow behind his solar plexus. He gazed intently at the black Range Rover and its unfortunate cargo, and he inhaled deeply on his Negrito. When he was at home, off duty, he savored the occasional Cuban cigar. At a days-old crime scene, he sucked hard on crude Mexican smoke.

     
Victor had a headache gnawing like a rat at the base of his skull. It had nothing to do with piss-cured tobacco. It was directly related to the scene in front of his eyes: a Range Rover loaded with corpses. He exhaled a stream of rank smoke and sighed. The faint scream of sirens sounded in the distance. Why hadn't he listened to his mother and become a famous
mariachiador?

     
Inside the Range Rover—no longer fighting against the duct tape that bound their hands and feet and covered their eyes—three dead men lolled against the bloodstained seats. Their features had been distorted by a severe beating; their cut and tortured bodies had bloated from three days' heat. A fourth man lay unbound, akimbo, oblivious to his bed of filth and dirt outside the vehicle.

     
Victor thought he knew the identities of the corpses. Rumors had flowed like tainted water down the information pipeline—there had been a big hit four nights earlier. Part of an ongoing war between factions: those who pledged allegiance to the ruling drug lord against those who did not. It was all very simple—and very, very complicated. A classic gangland tale of Chicago in the 1920s, only this was Mexico, this was the roaring nineties.

     
The rumors had named the victims of the hit: a district chief of Mexico's federal antinarcotics agency, his two bodyguards, and a formal federal police officer known to consort with narcotics traffickers. The quartet had been missing for five days, since arriving at the Juárez airport via a flight from Mexico City. Tonight they would be confirmed dead.

     
One of the corpses inside the Range Rover was almost certainly the district chief. The man on the ground at Victor Vargas's size-8 feet was the former
federale
.

     
Wearily, Vargas ran a hand through his close-cropped beard. Since the mid-1980s, when federal authorities closed down Florida as the Colombian-drug-cartel port of entry into the United States, Mexico had gained a reputation as the newest narco-state. There was no denying that tons of cocaine, marijuana, amphetamines, and heroin flowed across the border—much of it through the El Paso-Juárez gateway. Mexican drug lords had effectively divided the nation into feudal territories, buying the services of politicians and police, ruling with tyranny. Antidrug agencies had followed a trail of bribes to the toes of Mexico's president and a trail of money into the States, where it was sent around the world by the arbitrageurs.

     
The most powerful lords remained virtually inviolable.

     
And that scared Victor Vargas. The cop gazed up at the night sky; the reflection of the city's lights doused the stars, leaving only faint whispers of silver behind a dense polluted haze. He refilled his lungs with the Negrito's fumes. During the past six months, two dozen officials had been murdered in the drug wars. Victor sighed, expelling smoke. He had promised his wife he would not join the ranks of the dead; he had made the same promise to his mistress. For a street-smart cop, a veteran with
cojones
who walked the tightrope between warring factions, that was not an easy promise to keep.

     
Victor Vargas had heard another rumor: more antidrug agents were set to die, and his name topped the list.

     
He glanced at his watch; the illuminated dial fringed the hairs on his wrist in green shadow. It was almost midnight. The sirens were minutes away. He was first on the scene because his informants—his grimy, louse-infested street urchins, his junkies and his whores, his grand network of snitches, singers who would do the opera proud—worked overtime. But soon he would not be alone. He took one last hit of rank tobacco and gazed at the corpses.

     
He knew why they were dead. These men had been murdered because they came looking for Snow White. And now Victor Vargas was looking for Snow White, too.

CHAPTER FOUR

"Y
OU LIED TO
me." Sylvia managed to direct an ominous look at Albert Kove before the force of her leashed terrier pulled her forward along Griffin Street; the Malinois heeled stiffly by her side. She was dressed in a linen pantsuit and leather pumps from a very recent appearance at children's court, and the narrow two-inch heels of her shoes caught in the sidewalk's seams.

     
Kove jogged a few paces to keep up with his associate. "
¿Yo?
" They were outside the Santa Fe Judicial Complex, and this was the first time he'd talked to Sylvia since their late-night phone conversation more than thirty hours earlier.

     
"Heel," Sylvia snapped, and the Malinois reluctantly abandoned the narrow metal post of a
NO PARKING
sign. At the same time, Rocko, the terrier, veered after a windblown scrap of paper.

     
Kove took Rocko's leash thinking that it might help him get back in Sylvia's good graces, but she was already walking ahead with the Malinois.

     
Her words drifted back to Kove. "I was half asleep, and you told me my sabbatical was up when I actually had another week. My book is overdue, I've still got a hundred pages to revise, and my editors are threatening to come after me with a cattle prod."

     
"I had to get your attention." Kove's nose wrinkled as he caught a whiff of something that was very ripe, very dead, or both. "The child needed help."

     
"She still needs help, but that's no excuse. I'm not fond of cattle prods."

     
Eyebrows aslant, Kove said, "If you don't want to work with her, you don't have to."

     
"You are
so
obvious." As Sylvia waited for Nikki to finish peeing on the edge of a plastered wall, a sudden gust of air lifted her dark hair away from her shoulders. Overhead, a massive thunderhead threatened an abrupt change in the October weather. Gray light filtered through the branches of an elm tree and dappled the sidewalk.

     
Sylvia continued, "I just spent thirty minutes at the custody hearing—the state retains custody, the kid's been placed in a foster home, she's not talking, and I'm evaluating this afternoon."

     
"It's not autism?"

     
Sylvia shook her head. "It's not withdrawal. You and I have both seen enough autistic children to recognize the face they wear. This is different." She thought back, visualized the child. "I almost get the feeling her silence is a responsibility."

     
"To whom?"

     
"That's the question." Sylvia shivered as the thundercloud cut off sunlight and draped her shoulders in shadow. "The child wasn't in the courtroom today; she was too freaked out by the whole process."

     
"What's your read?"

     
Sylvia nudged her black sunglasses higher on her nose. "She's been through an ordeal, she's bright, and she's got plenty of chutzpah." She shrugged. "By the way, the foster mom's bilingual; she confirmed my feeling—the kid responds to English and Spanish."

     
Sylvia didn't say so, but she felt a kinship with a child she hardly knew; the feeling nagged at her insistently like a tiny yet formidable insect. She gave her head a small shake. "You know what interests me the most, Albert? Silence is not the normal response to trauma."

     
"Nobody says this kid is normal." Kove tweaked his eyebrows a la Groucho Marx.

     
Sylvia pressed her palms together, thumbs touching her chin. "The foster mom says the child prays a lot."

     
"She'll be a good influence on you." Kove frowned. "You think she was alone in that car?"

     
"I'd bet there was a driver—I'm guessing an illegal—who took off running after the crash. Maybe he or she figured the kid would be in good hands." Sylvia shrugged and glanced at her watch.

     
Albert Kove was in his midforties, with cropped hair, wire-rimmed glasses, and an almost completely unflappable demeanor. But not now. At the moment he seemed upset. Kove's sigh was a soft hiss of air. "You're right, I lied to you."

     
"Thanks for the confession."

     
Into the tiny opening of silence Kove wedged words. "I was afraid I'd never get you back to work at the unit if I didn't push."

     
Sylvia whirled around. "You were wrong," she said. "By the time I hung up the phone I'd figured out I had another week's sabbatical." She lowered her dark glasses and gave her friend a hard look; her left eye was ringed with a glorious purple-and-yellow bruise. "But I went to the hospital anyway."

     
Kove frowned. "Who gave you the shiner?"

     
"The kid."

     
Kove smiled. "Then you two hit it off?"

     
"Very funny. I'm great with children." Sylvia pushed her glasses back up her nose, suddenly self-conscious. "But I should have fucking ducked."

     
"You take your punches like a tough guy. You coulda been a contenda."

     
She shook her head and grudgingly returned Kove's smile. "I coulda been the champ." Abruptly, she snapped her fingers. "Sit!" Nikki sat.

     
Kove gave muffled applause. "I'm impressed. Four months ago you couldn't teach that dog to scratch a flea."

     
"We've been in training." Sylvia closed her bruised eye and made a show of assessing her colleague. "I'll consider forgiving you—on one condition."

     
"What?"

     
Sylvia clipped the lead to Nikki's collar, then slapped the leash into Kove's palm. "Finish their walk. I've got to meet with the kid and her foster mom in three minutes."

     
She was already striding back toward the offices of the Forensic Evaluation Unit when she heard Kove call out, "What do I do with them when we're done walking?"

     
"Give them water and put them in the back of my truck."

     
"What smells so bad?"

     
Sylvia held out both hands palms up. "The night I went to the hospital to see the kid? Rocko sneaked out his dog door."

     
Suddenly, the light dawned, and Albert inhaled sharply.
Skunk
.

B
EHIND TINTED WINDOWS
Renzo Santos was playing dead. Body resting against the seat back. Arms and legs immobile. Breath evaporated through the mind. From his parked Suburban, he watched the tall brunette wave good-bye to her friend. She'd left the
maricón
holding two dogs. Renzo didn't like dogs—not the mangy curs who roamed the barrios of Juárez, not the purebred guard dogs with their studded collars and shark eyes. Once he'd watched a rottweiler tear apart an ocelot—all for the enjoyment of a bored diamond-draped bitch who had a taste for blood.

     
Now the brunette turned into one of the old office complexes across from the courthouse. Renzo already knew that lawyers and psychologists worked in that building. The brunette was a psychologist. She was in her early thirties, well dressed, good body, dark eyes, dark hair—mixed descent . . . part Italian or part Indian? He'd noticed her for the first time when she walked into the courthouse with the C.P.S. social worker. Renzo didn't like psychologists any more than he liked dogs. He'd dated one once—she'd told him he had issues with his mother-the-
puta
.

     
Where is the girl?
When she didn't die, she'd changed his plans.

     
Without moving his head, he glanced down at the notepad tucked under his thigh. Four license-plate numbers were written on the page; the numbers belonged to the psychologist and the other people who had gathered for the custody hearing.

     
Renzo knew about the players—do-gooders, social workers, shrinks, court-appointed guardians, priests, nuns, doctors, nurses. He knew about the system—child protective services, welfare and food stamps, social services, shelters, Catholic charities. He analyzed the system out of professional necessity. He despised the system because he had survived it.

     
These people had all gathered to decide the immediate fate of the girl—Renzo's gloved fingers tightened into a fist—but the girl had been absent from the hearing.

     
Where would he find her?

     
Only Renzo's eyeballs shifted as he changed focus. The C.P.S. social worker was taking too long inside the courthouse. Maybe she'd exited through the other door. It was possible she'd gone to lunch on foot. Her parked car was in his sight lines.