Seventy-five

“Yes, I was there that night, at Saint Rose,” Alvarez said, shaking his head, bouncing his gaze between her and Vega. “And I saw what had been done to that girl—but I never saw the guy who did it.”

He was talking about her. Melissa. Alvarez was admitting to being a witness to what happened to her that night but denying he ever saw Wade. It didn’t make sense.

It’d make perfect sense if you’d just listen to me, darlin’. He ain’t the guy.

“That girl had a name.”

Sabrina looked up and over to see Val standing in the doorway, hand rubbing over her protruding belly in a circular motion. She was looking at Alvarez like she wanted to deck him. He must have seen it too because he started to stutter. “I know, I just—I mean—”

Sabrina jammed the Kimber back into the holster on her hip and wiped a hand over her mouth. “Ms. Hernandez, please, if you would just go back—”

“No.” Val shot her a look that said she was seconds away from blowing her cover before she wheeled around and pinned Alvarez with her dark gaze. “Her name was Melissa Walker and she was my friend.”

“I know,” he offered. “I remember and I’m sorry.”

“Never mind that,” she said, shooting Val a stay out of it glare. “Why were you there? What were you doing inside a church in the middle of the night?” she said. She’d gotten the story from Father Francisco but she wanted to see if Alvarez’s account lined up with his.

“I …” He trailed off, his gaze skittering across the table, stopping when it landed on Vega. “I was hiding from my uncle,” he said, his admission followed by a humorless laugh. “At least I thought he was my uncle. I was told he was my only family.”

“Why were you hiding from your uncle?” Sabrina said, leaning her hip against the counter before crossing arms over her chest.

“Because his favorite hobby was getting drunk and beating me until I couldn’t walk.” Alvarez looked away. “And that was when he was feeling generous.”

“Is that why you killed him?” Sabrina said, forcing her tone to remain as flat and emotionless as possible. “Because he beat you?”

He looked at her then, gazed as rigid and fixed as his jaw. “The beating I could handle. It was the other stuff I couldn’t take.”

It wasn’t an admission of guilt but it wasn’t a denial either.

“What his name?” The question came from Vega. “Your uncle —who was he?”

“Tomas Olivero.” Alvarez followed his answer with a short bark of harsh laughter. “He worked for your uncle as a field foreman for years. He was the right-hand man.”

Tomas Olivero was the field foreman who’d found Rachel Meeks chained up in that abandoned pump house. They’d given Magda’s second son to a trusted employee. One who’d never question his origin. Santos had mentioned Olivero was dead, but he hadn’t told her how.

This is all sorts of fascinating, but how the hell is any of this gonna help?

“Did you kill him, Alvarez?” she said, tuning Wade out completely. “Did you kill your uncle?”

Shame lowered Alvarez’s eyes, anchoring them into the table’s smooth surface. “I wanted to, but—”

“But you didn’t do it,” she said, shaking her head. “You didn’t kill him. You couldn’t.”

“It was a Friday night—payday. He’d gone out drinking … I found him in his truck after midnight, my field knife sticking out of his chest.” Alvarez shook his head. “I was eighteen and I already knew how it’d go—everyone knew what he did to me. No one would believe I didn’t do it.”

You remember what that’s like, don’t you? Running away … only, the way I remember it, you really did kill the guy who got after you.

“You ran.” This came from Vega, who was listening to the story with a mixture of guilt and relief planted on his face. He’d been the lucky one. The chosen son, while his brother had been discarded and abused.

Alvarez nodded. “Yeah—Father Francisco gave me money and I bought a ticket to Tucson.”

“That’s when you became Mark Alvarez,” she said, filling in the blanks. Buying fake papers was easy enough if you knew where to look. “Why did you come back? Why not stay in Tucson?”

“Ellie,” he said, giving her a shrug. “She was in Tucson for training and recognized me. I worked with her father in the fields. She would come see him sometimes. After he died, she kept coming to see me in the fields until I left. She believed me when I told her I didn’t kill my uncle and she convinced me to come home. Said no one would remember me and she was right—no one did.”

“But someone did remember you.” She looked at Vega, directing her next question at him. “What was your relationship with Father Francisco like?”

“It was an open family secret that he was my father,” Vega shrugged. “But we never talked about it,” he said, looking at Alvarez. “We never really talked at all.”

“Together, the two of you had everything our killer wanted.” She pointed at Vega. “You had the money, the prestige of being a Vega,” she said, before shifting her focus onto Alvarez. “And you had a father’s affection. He believes he’s Magda Lopez’s lost son—but Father Francisco, the man he believes is his father, rejected him in favor of you. That’s why he raped Rachel and killed Olivero. He was trying to take those things away from both of you.”

Look at you, talking like a real-life profiler. Our daddy’d be so proud.

Something Alvarez said earlier snagged on her brain and she reached for it, prying it loose. “You said, I saw what’d been done to that girl—but I never saw the guy who did it,” she said carefully. “But you did see someone, didn’t you?”

“Yeah.” Alvarez shook his head. “But he’d been at Saint Rose all night, same as me. And he was just a kid—no older than I was, really.”

“Wade Bauer was barely eighteen years old when he killed his first victim,” she told him. “He was ‘just a kid’ when he took Melissa Walker. He raped and tortured her for eighty-three days before he was even old enough to legally buy beer.”

Aw, darlin’, you say the sweetest things.

Alvarez nodded. “He was an altar boy. Always at the church. Probably more than I was, but …”

“But what?”

He shrugged. “I don’t—I got the feeling Father Francisco didn’t like him much.”

That had to be their guy. “What was his name?”

“I can’t remember his name, but it was him,” Alvarez insisted. “He was the one I saw standing over Melissa Walker that morning, right before she started moving.”

She pushed, tried to remember that night, but couldn’t. “What was he doing?” she said quietly, not sure she wanted to hear the answer. “When you saw him standing over her?”

Alvarez looked away for a second before he met her gaze. “He was smiling.”