Mission Road (Tres Navarre #6)(41)

Titus parked on the bank opposite the houses, in the Pioneer Flour Mill visitors’ lot, where the curve of the river gave him a good view of the street. He got out his binoculars.

Lee was climbing the steps of a denim blue cottage with peeling white trim. Whirlybird propellers decorated the dirt yard. Beer cans pocked with BB holes lined the porch railing.

She tried a key in the lock.

Titus liked her hair from behind, the way her ponytail snaked between her shoulder blades. He wondered how the T-shirt seller girl would look in an expensive wool dress like that. He decided she didn’t have the right figure for it.

Lee’s key didn’t seem to be working.

Titus wondered what she was up to.

Then he remembered it didn’t matter. He was supposed to be doing a job, and this was his chance. He would drive by with his window rolled down, his Colt ready. He’d call her name, wait for her to turn—

But before he could start his car, Lee stepped away from the door. She shook her head, muttering something as if cursing herself for being stupid. Then she marched down the steps and around the side of the house.

Titus refocused his binoculars. The gravel drive led back to a tiny garage.

“Not in there,” Titus murmured to her. “Come on back, honey.”

Lee’s key slid into the lock on the garage door. She rolled it open and stepped inside.

Crap.

Now Titus would have to get out of his car and walk up the drive.

At least he could shoot her out of sight from the street.

He wrapped the bloody rags a little tighter around his left hand. It hurt like hell, but it wasn’t his shooting hand. Even with the arthritis, he could grip the .45 just fine with his right.

He pulled his Volvo out of the Pioneer Mill parking lot and headed across Soledad Bridge.

No mistakes, this time.

The pretty lady would never feel a thing.

MAIA STEPPED OVER A PILE OF shattered beer bottles and worked her way toward the back of the garage.

Stuff was piled everywhere—dusty baskets of women’s clothing, plastic Seventies furniture, makeup kits and ammunition boxes.

In front of a grimy window overlooking the river, a worktable was spread with photo albums and scrapbooks—the only things not covered in dust.

Maia picked up a yellow legal pad scrawled with notes. She recognized the handwriting, the same shaky script as on the note Mike Flume had given her.

For some reason, in the not-too-distant past, the old fry cook had been making a timeline of Lucia DeLeon’s life. He’d arranged Lucia’s scrapbooks in chronological order, even marked certain pages with Pig Stand receipts.

First stop: A South San High School yearbook from 1964. Senior “Most Likely to Succeed” Lucia DeLeon looked uncomfortable in her bouffant hairdo, black dress and pearl necklace. Despite the requisite Sixties uniform, something decidedly rebellious flickered in her eyes—a challenge. Maia imagined the men back then would’ve picked her out of the crowd. They would’ve felt intrigued or threatened. Probably both.

The next album, Ana’s baby book, started only two years later. Mike Flume had noted this, too, on his legal pad: Ana born—1966.

He’d bookmarked a photo of Lucia in her hospital bed. The new mother looked exhausted, sweaty, blue around the eyes as if she’d just been pummeled in the delivery room. An elderly couple, probably Lucia’s parents, were holding the infant.

Standard childhood pictures followed: Ana with pureed yams on her face, Ana using Barbie dolls as drumsticks on her high chair tray. Ana with her first birthday cake. A family barbecue. The elderly couple again, looking frailer, holding toddler Ana up to a Christmas tree.

No pictures of Ana’s father.

Maia could figure out that missing piece easily enough.

Unexpected pregnancy. The boyfriend cuts and runs. Catholic family. Abortion not an option.

Lucia’s parents would’ve helped raise the child while Lucia completed her education, pursuing her dream of becoming a cop.

Maia looked out the filthy window at a clouded moonrise over the Pioneer Flour Mill.

What right did she have to turn coward?

She was older than Lucia DeLeon had been. Maia had money and a good career. She lived in a time when there was virtually no stigma for single mothers. Even if Tres took the news in the worst possible way, even if she told him her secret fear . . .

The memory rose up unbidden—the pale crippled body of a ten-year-old boy laid on a makeshift funeral bier, draped in the family’s only white sheet. In his dead hands, a rare photograph of Maia’s mother, dead since Maia’s birth eight years ago. As Maia’s father wept, her uncle—her only other living relative—pulled her aside. He smelled like incense and fish from the market stalls.

You’ll live with me now, girl, he told her. Your father will come for you soon.

Maia never saw her father again. A month after the funeral, he refused an order from the Red Guard and was taken away for reeducation. It took her decades to realize her father had done this on purpose, as a form of suicide.

She pushed those images away, opened another album from Lucia DeLeon’s life.

In this one, the time intervals between photos were longer.

There was a picture of Ana DeLeon as a young Air Force cadet, giving her mom an enthusiastic hug. Another picture at a policemen’s picnic—off-duty officers clowning around for the camera, Lucia holding a pork rib like a gun to Etch Hernandez’s head.