Cliff Diver (Detective Emilia Cruz Book 1) (11 page)

“They’ve got a
head of security,” Rico growled. “Used to be some flash detective in Monterrey.
So he said. Kept on us like white on rice.”

Emilia grinned.
“Maybe he didn’t want you scaring the hotel guests.”

“Hell, he could do
that himself.” Rico waggled a finger at her. “Did you know they’ve got a fleet
of security? All disguised as bellhops in flowered shirts.”

“So what was this
security guy’s name? We might need to go back there.”

Rico flipped her a
card and Emilia just managed to snatch it out of the air. He hadn’t yet made
eye contact with her.

“So are you the
only ones coming?” Emilia asked.

“We talked to Gomez
and Castro. They didn’t have shit on the wife’s alibi, either.”

“Did you tell them
you’d pass that on?” Emilia felt herself beginning to steam. Castro and Gomez
had probably passed the afternoon in a bar.

“Yeah.” Rico knew
her well enough to recognize the clipped tone but this time he didn’t seem to
care. “Told them to head out, we’d come here.”

“He wasn’t shot?”
This was from Fuentes as he read text on his computer screen. “The coroner said
he wasn’t shot.”

“No,” Emilia said.
“He wasn’t.” She gave them the short version of what Prado had found.

“So sex, plastic
bag fun, head cracked like a melon, dumped on the boat,” Rico summarized.

Emilia nodded.
“That’s the working theory.”

“You like the
brother for it?” Fuentes walked over to the murder board.

Emilia shrugged.
She’d felt sympathy toward Bruno and Rita Inocente but that didn’t mean there
couldn’t be something there. “There were some hard things going on between
el
teniente
and his brother.” She recounted the conversation in the house in
Las Brisas. As soon as she mentioned the gambling debts Rico snorted. “We’ll
need to follow up,” Emilia went on. “I’ll look into their alibis and you check
out--.”

“We’ll look at the
business and the gambling shit,” Rico interrupted her.

“Okay.” Emilia
nodded, not sure if he was coming back to her side or not. “Bruno said they’d
sold off some assets to pay off
el teniente’s
gambling debts to the El
Pharaoh casino a while ago. Maybe he owed big money to somebody else again.”

“And they came to
collect.” Rico finally looked at her and she knew he was thinking the same
thing she was.
Or maybe he paid with funny money
. “Always wanted to see
what the inside of the El Pharaoh looks like.”

Rico’s eyes
flicked to Fuentes, who was now by the murder board, in a silent warning.
Emilia gave an imperceptible nod. “I’ll let the mayor know we’re following up
with what we have so far,” Emilia said. “I’m supposed to brief her tomorrow.”

Fuentes came back
to Emilia and Rico “You sure you don’t want me to go back to the hotel with
you, Portillo?”

“Head on home,
kid,” Rico said.

The younger
detective slapped Rico on the shoulder, nodded to Emilia, and turned off his
computer and desk lamp. He collected his jacket and left.

Rico stayed where
he was.

Emilia waited. The
squadroom felt dim and over-used. The smell of sweat and stale coffee lingered.

“Talking to people
in that hotel was a waste,” Rico finally said. “He kidnapped that kid.
Everything I’ve got says his death connects back to that and the stinking
money.”

“I know,” Emilia
said.

“Somebody got him
for it. Or those folks who had the money in the car. Who were they?”

“The Hudsons. From
Arizona.”

“The gambling and
his brother are long shots.”

“Maybe he
kidnapped the kid to use the ransom to pay off his gambling debts.”

“You think he
didn’t know the ransom was counterfeit?”

“I think he knew
it was fake,” Emilia said. “Otherwise he wouldn’t have given us so much. But
maybe he didn’t know it until after he’d already given the boy away.”

“So he pays his
debt,” Rico started to pace. “Knowing the money is fake. Thinks he’s tricked
the casino or the bookie or whoever. They find out and off him.”

Emilia nodded.
“Let’s start there.”

Rico rubbed his
eyes. “You know who’d be good to talk to?”

“Who?”

“Ruiz. The
driver.”

Emilia gave a wry
smile. “Sure.”

Rico grinned back
and for a moment they were partners again.

The phone rang in
el
teniente’s
office, making Emilia jump. Rico sat at his desk.

Emilia went into
the office and answered the phone with her usual “Detective Cruz.”

“Cruz?” a gruff
voice queried. “You have an appointment with the chief in 15 minutes.”

“What?” Emilia
glanced at her watch.

“There’s a VIP
parking space saved for you,” the voice went on. “Be there at 8:30 sharp.” The
connection broke.

“
Madre de Dios
,”
Emilia swore under her breath.

“Obregon?” Rico
asked as Emilia ran back to her desk.

“Chief Salazar,”
she said over her shoulder as she grabbed her bag and ran out.

☼

“So you’re Cruz.”

“Yes, sir.”

Chief of Police
Enrique Salazar Robelo had given Emilia her detective badge in the graduation
ceremony two years ago. Grudgingly, she supposed. He’d aged since then, lines
etched deep into a narrow face with a hawkish nose and a shiny hairless head.
He looked like an old sepia portrait of a Spanish don.

“Victor Obregon
says you’re my best detective.”

“Señor Obregon is
very kind, sir,” Emilia said.  “But there are more senior detectives who
would make a better replacement for Lt. Inocente.”

Salazar Robelo
looked vaguely annoyed.

“Like Franco
Silvio,” Emilia said.

“And did Obregon
say why he thought you should be acting lieutenant?” Salazar glanced away from
her and at some papers on his desk.

“He said women are
less corrupt that men,” Emilia said. She rubbed her palms on the thighs of her
jeans.

She’d made it to
the main police administration building in record time, the white Suburban
barreling through the old part of town to the more centrally located new police
administration building. As promised, there was a parking space for her and she
was escorted to the chief’s outer office by a pretty female cop whose uniform
had been tailored to show off every curve. The aide took her into the chief’s
inner office, served them both glasses of
aqua de jamaica
, and withdrew.

“We’ll see if he’s
right.” Salazar picked up a pen and scribbled something on his paperwork. “Keep
the department running and find out what happened to Inocente.”

Emilia couldn’t
read Salazar at all; didn’t know his relationship to Obregon and if he’d like
the directions that Obregon had given her to turn over information instead of
making an arrest. If they were enemies, she might be caught between them. If
they were friends—or even collaborators—Obregon would find out that she’d tried
to get him in trouble.

“One thing I’d
like to clarify, sir,” Emilia said to Salazar’s bent head. The expanse of
hairless scalp was like a shiny brown egg. “Señor Obregon--.”

“Is a very
powerful man.” Salazar looked up. “Use him before he uses you. Other than that,
I regard him as a friend of this police force.”

“Yes, señor,”
Emilia said.

“Send my office
the press statement tomorrow morning before the meeting with the mayor.”

“Of course.”

Salazar made a
flapping motion with his hand. Emilia scrambled out of her chair and left.

☼

An hour later
Emilia was back in
el teniente’s
office with every scrap of paper she
could find related to the kidnapping of 8-year-old Bernardo Morelos da Gama.
Acapulco hadn’t handled the case and there wasn’t much. The family had hired a
private security firm to negotiate with the kidnappers and deliver the ransom.
That wasn’t unusual; corruption was so endemic in most police departments that
police were either the kidnappers or joined in to get a piece of the ransom if
called upon to handle the case. Private security was much more reliable, better
paid and had often trained in
El Norte
or even Israel.

The only thing
that she figured out, which wasn’t exactly shocking, was that Fausto Inocente
had been in Acapulco, sitting behind his desk both when the child was snatched
from his piano lesson in Ixtapa and when the child had been dumped in the
abandoned Suburban on the highway above the Palacio Réal. If the kidnapper,
he’d had help. Or maybe he’d been the help, using his position to be a
facilitator for the kidnappers.

She leaned back in
the chair. It was strange sitting in his office, behind his desk, with the
squadroom empty on the other side of the doorway. Cleaners had been through,
startled to see her there, but they’d come and gone quickly.

Emilia lost track
of time as she dug into the other files that the squadroom had worked around
the time of the kidnapping, hoping to find something related. Each team of
detectives usually had a dozen or so open cases, the majority of which would
never be resolved. Volume, but little variety, with murder, missing persons,
and robbery topping the charts. The last was the most desirable as whomever was
robbed would usually pass along an incentive for the detectives to devote more
than the usual amount of attention to their case. Castro and Gomez got most of
those.

Halfway through
the stack Emilia came across a month-old murder report and a name jumped off
the page. A 20-year-old woman, Dion Urbino Cruz, was reportedly stabbed to
death along with her toddler daughter. According to neighbors, the perpetrator
was probably her seldom-seen husband, Yoel Ramos Martinez, 37, no known
occupation. Macias and Sandor had asked the usual questions and the file
contained a few statements from neighbors in a run-down apartment complex.
There had been no autopsy, no murder weapon taken as evidence, no next-of-kin
identified. Ramos Martinez was still at large.

Emilia got out the
binder of
las perdidas
, sure that the name was familiar. After all, Dion
was unusual and Cruz was Emilia’s own name. And there it was, a yellowed
newspaper advertisement asking for help from anyone who knew the whereabouts of
a teenaged Dion Urbino Cruz. A picture of the girl accompanied the ad. Dion had
been a sweet-looking thing with dark eyes and long hair. Emilia stared at the
picture, wondering at the path the girl had taken and the fear she must have
known at its end.

Her aunt had
placed the ad, Emilia recalled. All she’d been able to afford was a small one
near the masthead.

It took more than
the usual number of paper jams to finally make a copy of the death report.
Emilia tucked it into the binder with the ad. Only after she informed the aunt
would she cross Dion’s name off the
las perdidas
list.

Only 51 to go.
Unless there was another name tomorrow.

She got a cola out
of
el teniente’s
fridge to clear her head and turned to the case file on
Ruiz, the dead driver. Like so many drug-related cases that the detectives
handled, it had been suspended pending further information that everyone knew
would never be found. She combed through the gruesome forensics section of the
file. Prade had not done an autopsy on the head and the body had never been
found but there were descriptions of the burn marks and speculation on the type
of implement used to sever the head from the body and how many blows it had
taken. Prade suggested a dull axe. Ruiz had been alive when the first blows had
struck.

The file was thick
with useless statements from people whose car had been in the lot. Kurt’s
statement was in it as well, as was the paperwork about his own car and a copy
of the release that the secretary had taken so long to process.

Emilia leaned back
and remembered that evening, the way Kurt had been patient with the
bureaucracy. And concerned for her. She got the free drink coupon out of her
old desk drawer and stuck it in her wallet before reading on.

Silvio and Fuentes
had worked parts of the case. They’d done most of the interviews with car
owners. They were supposed to have contacted the next of kin but Emilia did not
see any record of that conversation.

Emilia found the
thinner file for Ruiz’s initial arrest for a foreign
placa
violation.
The cousin that had bailed him out was named Horacio Valdes Ruiz. She typed it
into the public database. The man’s
cédula
came up, with a grainy
picture and an address.

She was yawning
and the words were getting blurry as Emilia closed down her computer and
shuffled the papers back into the folder. The folder had several sections, each
one tabbed with a subject. She hadn’t noticed it before but the tab marked
“Owners” was empty.

Emilia tried to
remember what should have been in that section of the folder. The request memo
to contact the Arizona state authorities, the copy of the car title, the report
from Kurt’s first visit to the station to request Ruiz’s telephone number and
find out how to get the car back. She rubbed the fatigue out of her eyes and
went through every other section of the folder. None of the papers was there.

Maybe the
paperwork had been misfiled. With a sinking feeling she went through everything
related to the Morelos de Gama kidnaping and then the files of a dozen cases
that had been handled at about the same time.

It was long past
midnight when she understood that Harry and Lois Hudson of Flagstaff, Arizona,
had never been to Mexico.

☼

Emilia was almost
too tired to think when she stumbled through her own front door but she had her
gun out in record time when she switched on the light and saw a man on the
sofa.