Best Laid Plans(80)

“Let me know when you have the report. I promise—I’m not nagging you. We have a line on the injured shooter.”

“Is he talking?”

“He’s dead. But we still may get something out of him yet.”

Brad hung up and turned off the highway.

The Atascosa County morgue was housed in the basement of the lone county hospital. If the county had a complex homicide, they’d send the body to Bexar County and their state-of-the-art facilities. Brad might still ask them to do so once he and Ryan examined the evidence.

The coroner, Frank Hernandez, doubled as a staff doctor. He was a small, wiry older man with sharp eyes behind thick glasses.

“Thought this might be one of yours,” Dr. Hernandez said after Brad showed his DEA identification. “This smacks of drugs and gangs.”

“Thank you for contacting our office so quickly,” Brad said. “The body was found this morning?”

“At dawn, a trucker pulled off the highway to take a leak. Found the victim in the ravine. Two days later, there’d have been nothing left but bones. As it was, the only reason the trucker saw anything was because a couple coyotes were chomping down on the corpse. Hope you haven’t eaten, ’cause it ain’t pretty. I’m not planning to do the autopsy ’til morning—I just came off a twenty-four-hour shift, stayed late to meet you boys.”

“We appreciate it,” Ryan said.

“But you examined the body?” Brad asked.

“Course I did.” He pulled open one of the drawers and unzipped the body bag. The victim hadn’t been cleaned, prepped, or undressed. “I need an assistant to help prepare the body and preserve the evidence, ’cause this is a homicide. Know you need everything you can get.”

The victim was a Hispanic male approximately twenty years of age. His face was beaten and swollen. The doctor pulled on gloves and motioned toward the box for Brad and Ryan to do the same. Then he turned the victim’s head. “First, the swelling is from decomp, though you can probably see he’d been beaten pretty bad.”

Hernandez gestured to the dried blood on the back of the head, then he pulled at the matted hair to reveal a hole.

“Gunshot. The bullet’s still in there—I did a full body x-ray when he came in. Looks fragmented, though. Don’t know if you’ll be able to match it with anything.”

“Caliber?”

He shrugged. “Small caliber—probably a nine millimeter, maybe a thirty-eight. The left leg had, I believe, two gunshot wounds.”

“You can’t tell?”

“There’s one bullet still inside, a higher caliber round, that’s lodged in his bone. The other is gone—and with the coyote bite marks, it’s hard to tell, but I think there was a second lower on the leg. Could have been a clean shot, through and through, or the coyotes swallowed it. I should know after the autopsy.” He looked up from the mangled leg. “Unless you want me to send the body up to Bexar.”

“We don’t want to step on your toes, doctor.”

He waved them off. “No interagency bull crap from me, boys. Our sheriff thought you might want everything, already signed the paperwork so as I don’t interrupt his poker night.”

“Did you search his body? Any ID?”

“Pulled out a wallet. No ID inside, but there are cards and photos, you might be able to find out who it is. We pulled prints from his fingers, they’re with the sheriff’s department. Probably be scanned tonight.”

“Anything else?” Brad asked. “Identifying marks? You mentioned tattoos over the phone.”

“Got a couple of tats. I photographed the visible ones, but like I said, we haven’t stripped and cleaned the body.” He zipped up the bag and pushed the drawer back in. “I’ll call Bexar and tell them to expect the body tonight.”

“Thank you.”

The doctor walked over to his desk and opened the bottom drawer. He took out a sealed plastic bag and handed it to Brad. “That’s everything that was in the victim’s pockets,” he said. He handed a folder to Ryan. “Those are copies of the x-rays of the bullets, and the tats on his arms.”

Brad signed for the evidence, then unsealed the bag and examined the wallet.

Photos of the dead kid with what Brad assumed was his family—multigenerational, like many of the Hispanic families in the area. Grandparents, parents, siblings. This kid wasn’t that old. Twenty, tops. Brad hated that so many young men turned to gangs. Many blamed it on poverty, and that certainly had something to do with it—the allure of drug money was hard to resist. If Nicole Rollins, an educated, middle-class federal agent was attracted to it, why did he expect a kid with nothing and a family to support would turn his back?

But it was more than simple poverty that turned these kids into drug runners. The thrill. The violence. The gang that became their family. Threats. The idea that they would somehow be bigger, more powerful. It was depressing, and Brad had long since put aside trying to reason it out.

Ryan tapped on the photo of a tat from the victim’s right forearm. “Know what that is?”

The skull, crossbones, and rosary were clear and well done. Not a cheap tat.

“The San Antonio Saints,” Brad said. “Well, shit.”

The SAS were run by a thug named Reynardo Reynoso, a wily little prick who’d been in and out of prison. Reynoso had been on Brad’s target list during Operation Heatwave two months ago. They’d never found him to haul his ass back to prison—he was wanted on multiple charges including drug distribution, attempted murder, and grand theft auto. Word on the street was that Reynoso now answered to Marquez, a rising star in the drug underworld—bigger now with Sanchez out of the picture.