Chapter 14
The last person I wanted to find in the Brooke Army Medical Center waiting area was a homicide detective.
Ana DeLeon was leaning against the reception desk, talking to a couple of uniforms and another plainclothes detective.
She might’ve been mistaken for a young professional—a hospital administrator being hit on by the three male cops—unless you noticed the sergeant’s badge clipped to her belt, or the shoulder holster under her blue silk blazer. Or unless you knew, like every guy in SAPD, that the last cop who tried to hit on Ana DeLeon pul ed desk duty for a month and stil had trouble sitting down without pain.
She saw me approaching, told her col eagues something on the order of: Here comes Navarre. Get lost or I’ll make you talk to him.
They got lost.
“I stayed at the office until seven last night,” she told me. “I keep wondering—if you’d showed, would we be here now?”
“What’s the word?”
“No change in condition. And no leads on the shooter, unless you’re bringing me something.”
I used to have a martial arts instructor who could press his hand very softly on the center of my chest, and no amount of effort could dislodge him. I’d swear he was barely making contact, but after thirty seconds, his touch left a bruise. DeLeon’s eyes were like that.
“I’m going upstairs,” I told her.
“No visiting hours for ICU.”
“The hel with visiting hours.”
She studied my face. “I suppose I’l chaperone, in case you need arresting.”
After a few conversations with nurses and some badge-waving from DeLeon, we were admitted to the gunshot ward.
J. P. Sanchez lay cocooned in linen and bandages, hooked up to so many tubes and monitors the machines seemed to be feeding off him rather than keeping him alive. His eyes were bruised, his skin as gray as his hair.
“They’re trying to stabilize him,” DeLeon told me. “They’l do another round of surgery if he makes it through the night.”
“Did he talk at al ?”
“Tres, he flat-lined in the ambulance. He wasn’t in a talkative mood.”
I touched the guardrail of his bed. Even through the hospital odors, I could smel his cologne.
I imagined his wry smile. Give me a chance, Tres.
“Come on.” DeLeon’s hand gripped my shoulder. “Buy me coffee.”
She steered me toward the elevator.
In the hospital food court, I was vaguely aware of the other plainclothes detective—an Anglo guy built like a linebacker—fal ing in behind us. He kept his distance, out of earshot.
I bought two tal coffees. DeLeon and I took a corner booth. I drank while DeLeon emptied sugar packets into her cup, three at a time.
“That’l kil you,” I told her.
“I’ve been promised faster deaths.” She stirred, sipped without even making a face. “So where is Stirman?”
“Ask your Fugitive Task Force.”
“Yesterday, you said he was in town.”
I stared into my coffee.
My day had begun with Folgers and goat’s milk, prepared by a blind woman on a ranch. Here it was evening, and I felt like I was stil drinking from the same cup, no wiser than I had been before.
Erainya was missing. An innocent man was upstairs dying. Sam Barrera was cracking under stress. And I’d been asked to tel the police nothing.
“Around five this evening,” DeLeon said, “patrol got a cal . One of Erainya’s neighbors reported seeing her in her front yard with a gun. She was pointing it at Dr. Sanchez. Then Sanchez calmed her down. They left together before patrol could get there. Two hours later, we found Sanchez bleeding to death behind Paesano’s. Erainya was missing. One possibility: She shot her boyfriend and fled.”
“That’s absurd.”
“It’s also Major Cooper’s working theory.” She nodded toward the linebacker, who sat two tables away, feigning interest in the bluebonnet paintings.
“Major,” I said. “That’s a Department of Criminal Justice rank.”
“Fugitive Task Force,” she said. “I asked him to come with me. Just in case you had something to say.
For the record, Major Cooper does not believe Stirman would stay in San Antonio.”
“He wants a few more people to die?”
“He needs convincing.”
I tried to look her in the eyes, but it was damn uncomfortable.
In the year since I’d seen her last, her face had fil ed out. Her skin had taken on that healthy glow you see in new mothers, her hair cut short to keep little baby hands from grabbing fistfuls.
She seemed more confident, balanced. Maybe that came from the marriage, or the baby, or the promotion. I didn’t know. The fact that I didn’t know made me sad.
I told her about my encounter with Stirman at the soccer field, the videotape he’d sent to Barrera, the McCurdy Ranch, Barrera’s admission that Stirman had been framed.
DeLeon listened, and drank her coffee. I knew she was mental y recording every statement.
“Gerry Far,” she said, “the informant who sold out Stirman eight years ago. We found him this morning— or what was left of him—floating in the San Antonio River. I cal ed the FBI. They weren’t impressed. A guy like Far makes lots of enemies, they told me. Even if Stirman did kil him, he did it days ago, on his way north. Their most recent reliable sighting places Stirman last night in Kansas. They get a hundred leads a day, al of them north. Since the Oklahoma City shooting, every crime from Colorado to Missouri, some jittery witness decides he saw the Floresvil e Five. I’m just another paranoid local cop, in the city where Stirman’s least likely to be.”
“Stirman’s here. I didn’t imagine him.”
“You want me to cal Major Cooper over?”
“So he can dismiss me as paranoid, too?”
“Cooper’s good. Best they’ve got on the state task force. He’s skeptical Stirman would be so stupid as to stay here, but he’s wil ing to listen.”
“If the manhunt moves here in force, the media wil find out. They’l broadcast it. Stirman wil feel the net closing. He’l disappear.”
“Not if we do it quickly and quietly.”
We locked eyes. I wondered if she believed her own words. With a media circus like the Floresvil e Five, there was no way to handle it quickly or quietly. Every law enforcement officer in the state would want a piece. Catching Wil Stirman would be like chasing a speedboat with an aircraft carrier.
“Stirman won’t bother with a hostage if he’s forced to run,” I said. “Erainya wil die.”
“If she’s not already dead. I’m sorry, Tres.”
I shook my head. “If he wanted Erainya dead, he would’ve left her in that al ey along with Sanchez. He took her alive. She’s got something he wants.”
DeLeon stared at the elevator doors.
“You told me there were rumors,” I said. “About the night Stirman was arrested.”
“Maybe I didn’t give you the worst version.”
“How much worse can it be?”
“After Stirman was shot, he was ranting in the hospital, okay? A couple of cops who were guarding him heard the whole story. For one thing, Stirman claimed the PIs had stolen his money. He was this low-tech guy, you understand. Didn’t trust bank accounts or computers. He said he was about to leave on a chartered jet with two duffel bags ful of cash. The PIs supposedly took the money.”
“Assuming it existed, how much would we be talking about?”
“Don’t know. How much could you fit in two large black duffel bags?”
“Jesus.”
I remembered Stirman at the soccer field, his barely restrained rage as he looked down at Jem. Tell your mother— She knows what I want. She’d best give it back.
“There’s more,” DeLeon said.
“The woman who died was his wife.”
DeLeon looked momentarily impressed. “Yes, but not just that. Stirman claimed the PIs didn’t only shoot her. They shot their baby.”
I stared at her.
DeLeon curled her fingers over the stack of torn sugar packets on the table. “There was no baby at the scene. No sign there had ever been one. But according to Stirman, the mother and child were both kil ed.
Maybe accidental y. Barrow and Barrera let Stirman almost bleed to death while they destroyed the evidence and toted away the cash. There was no cash at the scene when the police arrived.”
“Did anybody believe Stirman’s story?”
“Why should they? Cons say shit about their captors al the time. Of course, Stirman also claimed he was innocent of supplying the women to McCurdy’s ranch. Nobody believed that, either.”
“Kil ing a child doesn’t sound like Sam Barrera’s style.”
“Neither does framing somebody.”
I glanced over at Major Cooper, who was stil admiring the bluebonnet pictures. “Why hide a child’s death and not the mother’s?”
“Kil ing an il egal immigrant woman is one thing,” DeLeon said. “Kil ing an infant—that’s something else.
Even the shittiest public defender could make use of that in Stirman’s trial. Let’s say Barrow or Barrera panicked. One stray bul et. You’ve just murdered a child. You’re going to live with that on your conscience forever. As soon as the media find out, you’l be publicly crucified. You can guess what happens. We get a dozen cases like this every year. The child’s body conveniently disappears. A lot easier to conceal that kind of murder than the death of an adult.”
I wanted to say it wasn’t possible.
Then I remembered Barrera’s haunted look as he toured the McCurdy Ranch, as if he needed to remind himself there’d been justification for what he and Barrow had done.
Erainya had kil ed Fred Barrow only a few weeks after Stirman’s arrest. Fred had been treating her like dirt for years. Maybe something besides the abuse had made her snap—some new proof Fred Barrow was a monster.
“No cop wants to believe a guy like Stirman,” DeLeon said. “None of them spread these rumors outside the department. By the time Stirman got to trial, he’d gone tight-lipped. He never mentioned the dead child or the money again. Like he’d already started planning his own revenge. But if you’re wondering why Barrera and your boss weren’t anxious to bring in the police . . .”
“Give me a few hours,” I said. “Let me talk to Barrera.”
“Major Cooper is wil ing to listen now. He might not believe you, but if he gets the idea later that you held back information—”
“I could deal with Stirman more effectively my way.”
“You mean Ralph’s way.”
I didn’t say anything. I didn’t need to tel her about her husband’s track record for finding his enemies, or what he did with them afterward. I knew she wouldn’t want Ralph to have any part of this.
She sipped her coffee, no doubt trying to contain her anger. “Tres . . . if somebody kil ed my baby . . . I wouldn’t care how much money they stole from me or where they hid it. Do you understand? I wouldn’t trust myself to keep them alive long enough to find out. And this is me talking, the law-abiding one. When I think about how somebody like my husband might react . . .”
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