Mission Road (Tres Navarre #6)(40)

Twenty years later, in the 1980s, all of Franklin White’s victims had been found within a square mile of this spot. Six young women, just as Jaime Santos had said—all six sweet and pretty, just entering college with bright futures. All of them strangled to death and abandoned in the woods.

Like father like son? Maia was tempted to think so, but Frankie’s victims were so different from his father’s, as were the ways the two men had destroyed those women . . .

Maia looked down the dark stretch of road. She imagined roadside memorials that might’ve decorated this barbed wire fence over the years—crosses made of flowers, bleached memorials moldering in the darkness.

A glint of metal drew her attention. To the north, at the very edge of the streetlight’s glow, a car made a U-turn and headed away.

Maia tried to convince herself that the mist and gloom were playing tricks on her eyes.

It looked like a gray Volvo had pulled out from the shoulder of the road, as if the driver had been parked there, watching her.

TITUS ROE FOCUSED HIS BINOCULARS.

The Lee woman had nice legs.

Concentrating on that helped keep his mind off the pain in his hand—his first stupid mistake of the night.

Damn meat cleaver.

He’d assumed Lee would be at the San Antonio address. If she was making trouble for Hernandez, he figured, she was probably in town. Besides, the house was right down the street. Titus had started his search there.

For his trouble, he’d gotten squirted in the eyes and hacked.

He never even got a shot at the gray-haired woman, but he hoped the old Latino was dead. Titus was pretty sure he’d nailed that bastard.

Good trick, though, he had to admit—the old guy yelling FBI! and pulling a water gun.

Probably been pretending for years, rehearsing in front of the mirror. Old man sounded so convincing he threw Titus off balance.

The water smacked Titus right between the eyes and the old lady jumped at him with the meat cleaver, chopping his left hand as he tried to defend himself. Nursing Home of the Living Dead.

Titus had felt lucky to get off one shot and get the hell out of there.

Now, he watched the Lee woman standing in the middle of Mission Road. She turned a slow circle, hesitating as she looked in his direction. No way could she see him, but her eyes seemed to stare straight into the binocular lenses.

She was clever. He’d already decided that.

He’d been heading out of Southtown, feeling sick from blood loss, when he spotted Lee’s BMW cruising slowly down Presa Street like she was looking for an address. At first he didn’t understand what she was doing. Then he spotted the policeman in the Acura.

Titus couldn’t help but smile. If Lee hadn’t been wandering around the neighborhood, trying to lose her tail, Titus never would’ve caught her.

He’d watched with admiration as she pulled the parking lot trick and disappeared. The cop was history, but Titus had killed half a dozen people here in the King William neighborhood, back in his glory days. He picked up Lee on South Guenther and gave her plenty of room.

Now that she’d stopped, he could shoot her. Mission Road was nice and deserted. Drive up, do her, drive away. But so much open ground made him nervous. She’d see him coming. He hated giving his victims time to think.

If he had a rifle . . . but he hated rifles, too. Rifles were for cowards who sat in deer blinds with six-packs of beer and pretended to be real hunters. A handgun was the only respectable tool for killing a human being.

He raised his good hand, tried to hold it steady. Damn arthritis. God had thrown him some cruel punches in his life, but the arthritis was the ultimate—payback for a guy who’d made his living with a steady hand, pulling the trigger on other people’s enemies. Now he could barely aim. He had to keep his hands in an ice cream freezer all day to deaden the pain. He figured it was safer not to mention that small problem to Hernandez.

Damn Hernandez. Fucking cop had had Titus’ balls in a vise grip for years.

The irony was, eighteen years ago Titus really had been approached about killing Frankie White. The parents of Julia Garcia, one of Frankie’s first victims, had come to see him, desperate for justice. They’d even offered him a grocery bag full of twenty-dollar bills. Titus had looked into their hollow eyes and felt truly sorry. He knew the hope of vengeance was the only thing keeping them alive. If the target had been anyone other than Guy White’s son, Titus would’ve taken the job immediately. As it was, he asked for a few days to think about it.

Before he could give the Garcias an answer, someone else had taken care of Frankie White.

Titus took one last look at Maia Lee, standing in the middle of the dark road.

He put the Volvo into drive, swung a U-turn and headed back toward Presa. Lee would have to come back that way. The other direction, Mission, led nowhere but a dead-end cluster of trailer parks.

Titus pulled in behind the Loco Mart. He pointed the nose of his Volvo toward the street and waited.

Three minutes later, Lee’s black BMW drove by.

Titus followed, back toward King William.

Lee crossed the Arsenal Street Bridge and stopped on Titus’ favorite block—a row of bungalows hugging the limestone cliffs above the San Antonio River.

Upstream were Victorian mansions, warehouse art galleries, architectural offices. The river was smooth and placid, neatly walled by concrete.

But below the bridge, the water broke into a noisy stream. It spilled over the rocks and rushed, foaming, beneath the tiny run-down houses, as if the water were angry for being constrained so long, made to dress up for tourists.