CHAPTER THREE
1926 Words
CHAPTER THREE
Alexa should have felt surprised that Jeronimo Cortez turned out to be telling the truth, but after the look he gave her the previous night, her gut told her they’d find the body.
Phoenix P.D. got the call early the next morning after the La Paz County Sheriff’s Office went out to investigate. They found the dead g**g member’s body exactly where Cortez said it would be, and the initial report from the coroner’s office put the time of death by gunshot wound to the back of the head at approximately 48 hours previously.
Now Cortez, sitting tall in his handcuffs and orange jumpsuit, conferred in whispers with his lawyer as Alexa entered the interrogation room.
With her came Stuart and Phoenix Homicide Detective John Rebstock.
“Hola Jero, cómo estás?” Rebstock asked in fluent Spanish as he settled his heavy frame into a chair across from the prisoner. The chair squealed in protest at having to take his 300+ pounds. The man stood six-five, with a drinker’s nose, a wrinkled summer suit, and gave off an air of cheap aftershave and too many cigarettes.
Jeronimo Cortez looked him over.
“The pigs are sending out the big guns, eh?” the g**g leader said. He did not say this with any trace of sarcasm. Everyone in the Phoenix criminal world knew how capable John Rebstock was.
Alexa and Stuart sat down on either side of him, both having to edge their seats away to get room.
“We dug up your friend,” Alexa said. “So now that you’ve gotten our attention, we’d like to know what you have to offer.”
The attorney made a small hand motion to Cortez and spoke.
“My client is willing to share information on an individual in his organization who has committed a series of murders in Arizona and plans on continuing his killing spree over the next few weeks. In return, we’d like all murder investigations connected with my client dropped and he’ll plead guilty to the d**g charges.”
Rebstock snorted. “Selling out one of your compadres in order to not get the chair? That isn’t going to go down well in prison.”
Alexa nodded. Like all the major gangs, Los Diablos Auténticos had a lot of people on the inside. Snitches did not prosper behind bars. And if their leader snitched? That would be ugly. Really ugly.
And he hadn’t asked to be sent to a different state, something a lot of snitches did in his situation.
“This guy ain’t no Diablo,” Cortez said.
“Your lawyer just said he was,” Stuart said.
Cortez looked him over. Stuart wore the black suit and tie common among FBI agents, a completely inappropriate mode of attire for the Desert Southwest that Alexa still hadn’t convinced him to shed.
“Who the hell are you?”
“Agent Stuart Barrett, FBI.”
“Am I supposed to be impressed?”
“No. You’re supposed to talk.”
Cortez leaned back in his chair. “I will if I get a deal. And hurry up. Time is ticking. That hombre is going to kill again pretty soon.”
“Giving us one body isn’t enough to drop charges of this magnitude,” Alexa said. “And we have to get the D.A. to sign off on it. You’re going to have to give us more.”
“I can give you directions to more bodies.”
Rebstock frowned. “You know where all the bodies are, and you claim you didn’t have anything to do with it? Come on, Jero. I thought you had more brains than that.”
“I know because he calls me.”
“Calls you?” Alexa asked. This was getting weirder and weirder.
“Or one of my people. He likes to brag.”
“You never answered my question,” Stuart said. “Your lawyer said he was a Diablo and you say he isn’t.”
“Un Diablo Auténtico,” Cortez corrected. “We got nothing to do with those gringos on bikes.”
“Whatever. Answer the question.”
Cortez looked at his lawyer, who gave him a slight nod.
“He was an Auténtico, but we burned him on the altar.”
Alexa felt a chill go through her.
“Huh?” Stuart said.
Cortez laughed and pointed at him.
“Where did you get this gringo? D.C.?” he asked Alexa.
“As a matter of fact, I did,” she admitted.
“Tell him what burning on the altar means. You’re Arizona born and bred. I can tell. Also tell him to change his clothes. He looks like he’s going to a funeral.”
“It will be yours if you don’t give us something.” Alexa turned to Stuart. “Burning on the altar is something the Latino gangs do to kick someone out. They make an altar and decorate it with a cross and pictures of saints, then burn a photo of the person on it. Then everyone in the g**g swears to kill him if they ever see him.”
“They haven’t done a very good job,” Stuart said.
“Some tried,” Cortez replied. “That’s why the body count is so high.”
“And you’re saying this guy is going to kill again?” Detective Rebstock asked. “Not many of your people out on the streets after last night.”
“You know that ain’t true. And he ain’t just going after my people. He’s going after anybody he feels like.”
Alexa traded looks with the detective and the FBI man. Cortez sounded sincere. Sure, he wanted to avoid the death penalty, but he also knew that was all he would get. With his priors, and the several kilos of meth and h****n they had seized, he would spend the rest of his life behind bars.
Rebstock seemed to think the same thing, and representing the city, who had officially made the bust, it was his call.
“Give us details on those bodies and I’ll talk to the D.A.,” he said.
“Just so I know you play straight with me, let me tell you that I got more information. Information on how to catch the guy. You’ll get that if we make a deal.”
“All right,” Rebstock said. “Spill.”
“There’s a construction site on the west side of Arizona City. Luxury apartments. ‘Enjoy the desert sunset’ and all that crap. Except the developer went bust. So it’s only half built. Been abandoned for months. He buries them there. I don’t know where exactly. You’ll have to search the site.”
“We’ll do it,” Alexa told Rebstock. Stuart nodded.
“All right,” the homicide detective said. “I’ll send you with a K9 unit trained to sniff out bodies.”
Cortez snorted. “With the number he killed, you won’t need dogs to smell it.”
* * *
Arizona City was one of the many new developments dotting the sides of Interstate 10 between Phoenix and Tucson. When Alexa had been a kid, you could drive the 110 miles between the two cities and see only desert, the occasional ranch house, and a couple of small towns. No more. More and more towns had popped up, and outlet centers, and rest stops. Pretty soon, she feared, it would be a continuous stretch of concrete.
Stuart drove with Alexa in the passenger’s seat. Behind came the police K9 unit van with two officers and a friendly German Shepherd named Nosey. Not the most original name for a sniffer dog, but Nosey knew her job.
They found the development easily enough, well off the Interstate and at the end of a half a mile of paved road with nothing on it. Desert stretched out on all sides, except for Arizona City to the east.
Beyond a chain link fence stood a series of large townhouses, each one alike. Their roofs had been put on, but their walls hadn’t been surfaced and the doorways and windows remained empty rectangles. No construction equipment was in sight. This place looked like it would never be finished. Instead, it would just stand as a useless blight in the desert.
“There,” Stuart said, pointing. He parked in front of a large hole cut in the fence.
They got out. The male and female officers from the K9 unit parked and got out behind them. As they opened up the back of the van to get Nosey, Alexa ducked through the hole in the fence and started walking toward the construction site.
The hard-packed earth didn’t show any footprints, and she was surprised not to see the beer cans and graffiti one usually found at abandoned sites. The local kids must have preferred someplace a little closer to get drunk and cause trouble.
Alexa walked across a barren stretch of desert, the wind rustling a few dry clumps of grass. Otherwise, there was no sound. A playful bark from the dog sounded alien in this bleak landscape.
She came to the first of the townhouses and peeked through a window. The place wasn’t even half finished. No wiring, no plumbing. The stairs were a set of concrete treads.
Alexa moved to the next one. It looked the same.
“Spooky place,” Stuart said.
Alexa jerked. She hadn’t realized he was behind her. Two tours of duty in Iraq had made him pretty good at walking quietly, even in dress shoes.
“Wouldn’t want to be here at night,” Alexa agreed.
“Jeronimo’s friend would, though.”
“You think he’s telling the truth?”
“My gut says yes.”
“So does mine.”
Something beyond the gap between the second and third houses caught her eye. A rough patch in the soil, situated between a heap of dirt left by some backhoe and a concrete platform that would have served as the base for something that would now never get built.
Alexa walked toward it. Yes, the soil was definitely disturbed here, and recently.
She stopped at the edge of it, an area about ten feet to a side. She could see where someone had used the flat part of a shovel to tamp down the earth in an attempt to make it look undisturbed, but her desert-trained eye spotted a slight difference in the soil color. The topsoil layer in Arizona gets so baked by the sun that it’s lighter than the soil beneath, even if the lower layer is equally dry. So whoever had dug up the soil had left a large, darker rectangle on the desert floor.
He or she or they must have known this would happen, because they dug in an area blocked from view on three sides. If she hadn’t looked at just the right angle as she passed between the houses, she would have missed it.
“What you got?” one of the K9 team called as they came up to them.
Nosey pulled on her leash.
“Find something, girl?” the other cop asked. He let her go, and Nosey rushed over to the darker section, circled, and barked.
“That was quick,” the K9 officer said.
The dog kept circling the disturbed area, and it would not stop barking.
Alexa let out a long, slow breath. This was going to be a tough day.
- Writer
