Mission Road (Tres Navarre #6)(13)

She hated hopeless cases.

For years, she’d known that Ralph Arguello was bad news. She had never understood how a woman like Ana DeLeon could get involved with him. And she’d been secretly relieved when Tres and he had started to drift apart.

She focused on DeLeon’s corkboard—a picture of Ralph and Ana with their baby girl standing in front of a bronze elephant at the zoo.

She felt horrible for that poor child. Her mother dying in the hospital. Her father a fugitive.

But she couldn’t get drawn into that.

She didn’t care why Ralph Arguello had bludgeoned a mobster’s son eighteen years ago.

The question was how to extract Tres—how to get him untangled when the fool kept throwing himself into the most dangerous situations he could find, to help a friend who shouldn’t have been his friend in the first place.

“Miss Lee?” Kelsey asked.

On the corkboard just above Kelsey’s head was another photo, circa the Seventies, of a woman in patrol uniform, obviously DeLeon’s mother, Lucia. She was standing next to another patrolman—a much younger Lieutenant Hernandez.

Maia hated this town. Everything was connected. Everybody was somebody’s cousin or childhood friend. A city of a million-plus people, and they still operated like a little country town.

There was a sticky note attached to the photo—the name White, then Timing is wrong, and a few more words Maia couldn’t read from where she sat.

Why hadn’t Kelsey taken that note down?

“Miss Lee?” he asked again. “Are you going to help us out?”

The back of Maia’s neck tingled. She suddenly doubted Kelsey had even seen the note. He wouldn’t bother looking at DeLeon’s family pictures. It would not occur to him that anything of value could be there. Sentimental bullshit.

She forced her eyes back to him. “How is it that you expect me to help?”

“Obvious, isn’t it? Convince your boyfriend to bring in Arguello.”

“Assuming I know how to reach him.”

“Navarre called you. He got you here.”

“He called from a pay phone.”

“And you made arrangements to talk again. Let’s not play games. We’ve known about the DNA for two days. Lieutenant Hernandez ordered us not to act on it until Ana had time to do the right thing, turn over her case notes to me so I could make an arrest on her husband. Obviously, Ana didn’t cooperate. She must’ve told Arguello, and Arguello shot her. If it was up to me, we wouldn’t be doing him or Navarre any more favors, but Hernandez has told me to offer you a deal.”

“What kind of deal?”

Before he could respond, a detective with a bleeding cut over his eye came to the door. “Yo, Kelsey, a little help, man.”

Kelsey scowled. “What, still the elf?”

The other detective turned pink around the ears. He was mid-twenties—young for homicide detail. He was the one Maia had noticed with the loose holster. It was still loose. “Hey, man. We figured we had him secure.”

Kelsey sneered. “A roomful of cops, and you can’t lock down a damn elf?”

“He’s on speed or something. We mentioned sending him back to Missouri and he went ape-shit on us. I know you were in SWAT and all . . .”

The young detective’s eyes were pleading. His voice verged on panic, which played Kelsey just the right way.

Kelsey smiled like a sadist anticipating a bar fight. “Miss Lee, if you’ll excuse me.”

The moment he was out of the room, Maia moved around DeLeon’s desk and read the note on her corkboard.

White——Timing is wrong.

Santos—ME——retired

2107 Dunbar

864-9719

Maia simply could have memorized the information—she was good at that—but some instinct made her peel the note off the board, along with the photo of Lucia DeLeon and Etch Hernandez.

This is crazy, she decided.

But she slipped the photo and the note into her coat pocket. She moved another picture to cover the blank space—the photo of Ralph and Ana and their baby at the zoo.

Another wave of nausea swept over her, leaving her shivering and weak-kneed against the sergeant’s desk.

Last night, she had come so close to telling Tres what was wrong with her. Now he was on the run, protecting a murderer.

Damn him.

She should’ve left Tres where she found him, tending bar in Berkeley. The most impetuous thing she’d ever done: slipping a business card across the bar to a guy she barely knew, just because he had beautiful green eyes and a smile that doubled her heart rate.

You might make a good investigator, she’d told him. Give me a call.

Fifteen years later, her judgment was still rotten. She’d quit her job in San Francisco, moved to Austin to be closer to him, left everything behind. She would do anything to help him. But when it came to making responsible choices, he was hopeless.

Ralph Arguello embodied everything Maia resented about Tres’ hometown—dangerous, suffocating roots that had been pulling Tres away from Maia as long as they’d known each other. She’d almost lost him once before, when he’d first moved back to Texas. Now, when she needed his full attention more than ever . . .

If she’d told him the truth last night, what would he have done?

An explosion of voices from the cubicle area brought her back to the present.