Southtown (Tres Navarre #5)(23)

The second discovery was worse. After three years of trying, she was stil not pregnant. Fred didn’t want to talk about it. He began drinking, and yel ing. Final y, the doctor assured Erainya that the fertility problem was not hers. Erainya’s friend Helen told her she real y had to speak to Fred. It took Erainya a month to get up her nerve, but final y she broached the subject.

That was the first night Fred ever hit her. It wasn’t the last. Erainya was slow, painful y slow, to realize her marriage and her dreams were incompatible.

She slipped Fred’s photo careful y back under the .45.

She looked at the clock. Sam Barrera was now twenty-two minutes late.

She cursed herself for putting the old case files into storage, leaving Tres a key. Of course he would go through them. That was his nature. It had been stupid of her to leave him that opening.

There wasn’t much he could find, unless he knew what to look for. But he was smart. Damn smart. She had to hope he wouldn’t look at the case from the right angle to see what was wrong about it.

The doorbel rang.

Sam at last. Or what if . . .

Erainya reached for her gun.

Fred’s picture stared up at her from so many years ago—a reminder of how quickly things could go wrong, how reckless Erainya could get when it came to protecting her secrets.

She left the gun where it was, and closed the drawer.

She went to answer the door, convincing herself she could handle whatever came without violence. As long as she was safe, and Jem was safe, nothing else mattered.

Chapter 8

“Dios mío,” Ana DeLeon said when she came on the phone. “Thought the operator was kidding me.”

“Long time,” I said. “How’s it going, Sergeant?”

Ana hesitated, tacitly acknowledging the mention of her new rank. I hadn’t seen her in over a year, hadn’t cal ed to congratulate her on the promotion, or any of the other news I’d heard.

“Business is brisk,” she said. “Flood washed up some interesting corpses. Had one float out of somebody’s basement last night.”

I pinched the cel phone to my ear, turned my pickup onto Erainya’s street. “So who’s handling the Floresvil e Five?”

“Ugh. Not us, thank God. Department of Criminal Justice. Fugitive Task Force. They’ve got a command post here, though with the Oklahoma City shooting yesterday, the search has gone federal. Most of the manpower has pul ed out and headed north. Why do you ask?”

“What happened in Oklahoma City?”

She told me about the sporting goods store manager and the off-duty cop murdered; a positive ID on two of the fugitives; fairly good evidence that Wil Stirman led the robbery.

“With a cop down,” she said, “you know how it goes. FBI, U.S. Marshals—everybody wants a piece of this now. What’s your interest?”

“Stirman isn’t in Oklahoma.”

“No,” she agreed. “He’s heading north. They’re setting up roadblocks on every highway in the Midwest.

Problem is: The shit-bag specialized in human trafficking. He’s got contacts everywhere. Knows how to hide and move.”

“Stirman’s here in town.”

Next to me on the bench seat, Jem sighed. He turned over in his sleep.

I was halfway down the block before DeLeon spoke again.

“Okay,” she said warily. “Aside from the fact that San Antonio would be a very stupid place for Stirman to be, seeing how many people know him here—and aside from the fact that every law enforcement agency in the country places him as about halfway to Canada . . . Why are you tel ing me this?”

I pul ed in front of Erainya’s house. Two unwelcome surprises were waiting for me in the driveway—her boyfriend’s Lexus and an older BMW so god-awful yel ow it could only belong to Sam Barrera.

“Tres?” DeLeon asked.

It had taken me a mile of driving to decide to cal DeLeon, one of my few friends in law enforcement. I had to tel somebody about Stirman. It couldn’t wait until I spoke to Erainya.

I stared at the cars.

When I’d cal ed Erainya from San Marcos that morning, she’d encouraged me to take Jem out to lunch after soccer, let her catch up on some paperwork. She wouldn’t be expecting us for another hour at least.

She’d said nothing about a meeting with Barrera.

“I’m stil here,” I told DeLeon. “How much do you know about Stirman’s arrest eight years ago?”

There was a long pause. “Since the jailbreak, the old-timers won’t stop gabbing about it. Fred Barrow— your boss’s dead husband—he was involved. Erainya must’ve told you the story.”

“Pretend she hasn’t.”

I could almost hear DeLeon’s mental gears turning, trying to figure my angle, deciding how much she wanted to tel me.

“Al right,” she said. “A rancher named McCurdy tortured and murdered six il egal alien women over the course of about a year. The women were supplied as slave labor by Wil Stirman. Would-be victim number seven managed to escape. She got the county sheriff to believe her. When the deputies closed in, McCurdy kil ed himself. National media came in, started looking into al egations that the county knew about McCurdy’s slave ranch for months, had previous complaints about mistreatment, even returned one woman to his place when she tried to run away. The county needed a scapegoat before their asses got fried in federal probes and lawsuits, so they decided to find the guy who supplied the slaves. Sam Barrera and Fred Barrow both worked the case—Barrera for the county, Barrow for some of the victims’ families. Folks were laying bets the two would strangle each other before they found anything, but they ended up working together. They lined up three solid material witnesses who tied Stirman to the rancher—the il egal who survived and two members of Stirman’s smuggling ring who agreed to turn on their boss. The PIs delivered statements to the police, gave the district attorney more than enough for an indictment.”