Thirty-Seven

Bingo.

Sabrina’s eyes went wide, hands turned palms up. “So,” she said, throwing in a challenging smile for good measure, “enlighten me.”

“Look,” he said, aiming a glance over her shoulder to make sure they were alone. She was suddenly sure he knew more than he’d originally let on, and that what he knew wasn’t necessarily something he was supposed to. “Melissa Walker was involved in a murder case a few weeks before she was abducted,” he said, picking at the pressed seam that ran the length of his paper cup. “Some jock kid from Gila Bend was here for a high school football game. Ended up stabbed to death in a gas station bathroom.”

Andy Shepard. She remembered him. His arrogant smile and careless hands. The way he’d touched her like he had the right. “Did she kill him?” She remembered wanting to. He’d reminded her of Jed Carson, the boy back home who never gave her a moment’s peace. She’d hated them both, the way they thought that anything they wanted was theirs for the taking.

“No.” Alvarez shook his head at her. “She was his waitress that night. He made a pass at her, grabbed her ass. She put him down pretty quick. According to Shepard’s friends, she was so angry about it she was sent home. Another waitress had to finish her shift.”

She remembered that too. Val dragging her away from the table, the drunken chatter that’d surrounded her fading away. Her glare nailed to the back of Shepard’s head while he played the victim. That same night one of the bus boys told her that someone had been in the restaurant asking about her.

Alvarez spoke again and she forced herself to listen, to hear him instead of what was happening in her head. “A few hours later, a car full of them stopped on the way home so Shepard could take a leak,” he said. “Five minutes stretched into ten … fifteen … twenty.”

“Twenty minutes and no one went after him?” she said incredulously. “No teenager is that patient.”

“Yeah, well … none of them were really watching the clock on account of the girl who was with them giving out blow jobs in the back seat to pass the time,” he said, shrugging. “The driver, who got his happy ending first, finally got tired of waiting. He goes after Shepard to tell him to hurry the hell up. He sees the blood leaking under the door and starts screaming his head off. Shepard was stabbed once—clean, between the ribs and through the lung. Bled out while his buddies were lined up for free hummers in the parking lot.” He shook his head at the ridiculousness of it. “Perp took his hand as a souvenir. No one saw him and if they did, they were too drunk or too busy getting their dick sucked to remember or care.”

“I still don’t understand what this has to do with Melissa Walker,” she said, allowing irritation to creep into her tone. “Or why your partner blames himself from what happened to her.”

“Will was part of the interdepartmental murder investigation—his first lead case. He questioned her, only he didn’t know it was her. She was living and working under a fake name. He knew she had something to do with it. He knew Shepard’s murder was connected to her somehow …” Alvarez sighed, sliding down in his chair until his slumped shoulders hit the back of it, leaving his cup behind. “But then out of the blue, the night clerk at the gas station confessed. Said he’d killed Shepard because he and his buddies had done a beer run there the weekend before and cost him his job. Took his hand for stealing. Evidence found in his possession supported his confession.”

She remembered. Sitting in a back booth at Luck’s with Santos while he laid it out for her. He told her that the case was closed and thanked her for her time while she’d pretended to be relieved. Pretended to believe it was over. That she was safe.

But it had been a lie. All of it.

Wade took her two days later. Snatched her off the street while she walked home from work, leaving nothing behind but a box of leftover birthday cake dumped in the gutter.

The store clerk who confessed was named James Toliver. He’d been convicted and sentenced to life in prison within months of his arrest. Because of his work on the Shepard case, Santos was made lead detective on her disappearance. He was a good cop; he must’ve seen the connection right away. He must’ve at least suspected that the confession was bogus, that he’d gotten the wrong guy. That maybe if he’d pursued it instead of swallowing the hook and allowing himself to get reeled in by the rush of solving his first lead case, he’d have been able to see the truth. A thing like that would eat at a cop like Will Santos. Keep him up at night. Haunt him like a ghost.

“Will never got over it,” Alvarez told her, confirming what she’d just been thinking. “When that thing with Vega happened, he took it personal.” He must’ve finally realized that he’d said too much because his eyes narrowed into slits. “Why are you asking about her anyway?” he said, aiming a suspicious look her way. “Melissa Walker? It’s been twenty years—you’re a little late to the party.”

“Am I?” she said, setting her own cup aside. “Because the report I read said there was DNA found on Stephanie Adams. She had Melissa Walker’s blood under her fingernails. Seems to me, I’m right on time.”

Something close to embarrassment passed over his face. “How do you know about that?” he said, the words falling tight and clipped against her ears. “Those results were struck from the original report.”

She smiled again, tapping a finger against the badge Church had given her. “FBI,” she said, relying on the initials to explain everything.

“It was a mistake,” he said, his affable expression slammed shut. “Samples got contaminated. The tech responsible was reprimanded, corrective action was taken, and the tests were regenerated.” He fed her the party line before he stood, draining his cup. “If you’ll excuse me, I have some paperwork to catch up on.”

“Who was it?” she said, looking up at him, unwilling to let him go until she got at least one of the answers she’d come for. The tech who’d taken the samples and run the test might know things that had been stricken from the report that even Ben hadn’t been able to get his hands on. “The tech who screwed up?”

Alvarez bared his teeth at her in something that most people would mistake for a smile. “Does it really matter?”

“I know you don’t know me very well, Detective Alvarez, but I can assure you”—she returned his smile—“I’m not in the business of asking unnecessary questions.”

Alvarez crushed the cup in his fist before tossing it in the trash can on his way to the door. She was sure he’d ignore the question. That he’d leave without answering her, forcing her to go after him, but then he told her. “Elena Hernandez,” he said, forcing the name between clenched teeth just before he disappeared down the hall.

As soon as Alvarez walked out, Sabrina tossed her own cup and followed him. By the time she reached the bullpen he was at his desk, head buried in a stack of files. He didn’t look up when she passed by on her way to the conference room she and Church had been assigned. Santos was still nowhere to be found.

Installing herself behind the computer, she turned it on, waiting for it to power up before she typed the first in a short list of names into the search bar.

PAUL VEGA

Barely a second after she hit enter, a message flashed across the screen.

no matches to your search inquiry found

Santos was a Major Crimes detective. Anything he’d been called to investigate would have carried with it a felony charge. The four majors were rape, murder, armed robbery, and kidnapping. Whatever happened, it’d been bad. What had Alvarez said? They closed ranks. Stopped a felony investigation in its tracks. That meant nothing about a felony crime involving Paul Vega would be in the system. But erasing Vega’s involvement didn’t mean they could turn back time. Whatever it was he’d been suspected of doing still happened. There’d still be a paper trail. She thought about it and tried again.

MAJOR CRIMES, UNSOLVED, 2000

A few seconds later, a row of file numbers tumbled down the screen. Nearly a dozen of them. Scrolling the mouse over the first number she clicked it, opening the file. Reports and case notes filled the screen. A drive-by shooting in her old neighborhood. She opened the next in line. An armed robbery at a Circle K. She opened the next one. A burned body found in the desert. The next one. A hooker strangled to death in Luck’s parking lot. That one looked promising, even though she had a hard time imagining Vega trolling for prostitutes. She closed it and moved on.

The next file on the screen was an unsolved rape case. According to the case notes, it’d been brutal. The victim was a seventeen-year-old girl—a senior at Yuma High School. Cheerleader. Photographer for the school newspaper. Yearbook editor. Solid B student. She’d left home late Friday night, sneaking out of the house after her parents went to sleep. When they woke the next morning, she was gone, something both of them swore was against her character, despite the fact that they’d waited until after noon to call the police.

A field foreman name Tomas Olivero found her in a pump house four days later, chained to the waterwheel, naked and badly beaten. Severely dehydrated. She’d been raped and beaten repeatedly. Sodomized. Forced to perform sex acts on her assailants before being left to die. The pump house she’d been found in was one of twenty-two belonging to Vega Farms.

The victim’s name had been Rachel Meeks.