The Lost (Celestial Blues, Book 2) - By Vicki Pettersson Page 0,94
if you were a doctor?”
“Tough, even if you were the hospital director,” Dennis returned. “My hunch is the drugs were procured over time, in smaller increments.”
“Well, I have an idea,” Kit said, “but I don’t have the resources to follow it.”
“Something you can’t do?” Dennis huffed over the line. “Please, tell me.”
“Check with the gang unit. Just see if any of the old Mariel families have someone working in the hospitals or pharmacies. Particularly Marco Baptista’s gang.”
Alarm popped in his voice. “Have you been researching Baptista?”
Kit winced. She still hadn’t mentioned to him the run-in in Little Havana. “I’d start with records and administration,” she said, trying to deflect. “Maybe H.R.”
“Stay away from him, Kit.” The alarm was gone, this was pure warning from Dennis the cop, not her friend. Halting beneath an overgrown pine, Kit tracked a couple of ducks that’d strayed from the pond, but she didn’t really see them. She was remembering Baptista’s cold stare, and shivered despite the heat of the day.
“Shoulda told me that earlier, Dennis.”
A hissed curse came over the line, followed by a deep sigh. “I shoulda known better when you were popping off about the Marielitos at the burlesque show.”
“Just be careful,” she told him.
“Follow your own advice,” he shot back, and the line went dead.
Kit sighed as she put the phone away. “He’s mad.”
“He should be,” Grif said as they crossed a vast expanse of turf frying under the full Vegas sun. “You’re a damned nosy reporter, and he’s taken a liking to you.”
Kit looked away. Like a hound, could he sniff out the other man’s interest now that he considered her his marked property? She hoped not. Evie’s ghost shadowing their relationship was already problematic enough.
“You don’t think the Russians are distributing the krokodil,” Grif said, having overheard the conversation.
“I think it’s someone who wants to make it look like the Russians,” she said, as they crossed the sprawling park. But she couldn’t prove it. She certainly couldn’t go to the police and paper—or even say to Grif—that her biggest hunch that the Cubans were setting the Russians up was based on a pair of earrings. “And Bella is a much more common name in the Hispanic community.”
They made their way from shady tree to shady tree until the large pond came into view. “I don’t know, Kit. The old-school Marielitos are toughs, no doubt, but I was thinking on this, too, and I just can’t see them releasing this drug into their own community. Do you really think they’d allow their own kids to rot and die just to see the Kolyadenkos go down?”
Kit shook her head. “They weren’t their own kids. Jeannie Holmes and Tim Kovacs were as white-bread as they come. Even Jeap was considered an outsider. And, yes, I think they’d see the lives of a few junkie kids as a small price to pay to own the bulk of the drug activity in this city.”
Grif mulled it over as they headed toward the man-made pond. The park had been built before water restrictions were placed on the valley, and the recreation department was possessively hanging on to every blade of grass—no matter how brown and matted it might be. Grif—already sweating and less sanguine about the heat—angled her toward the shade of a tree that had been growing there for at least as long as he’d been dead.
“Look,” Kit said, pointing at a woman walking on the other side of the pond. The woman’s back was to them as she made her way toward a shaded concrete bench, but Kit was still sure. They’d followed the woman from the home that was Mary Margaret’s last known address.
“That don’t look like Mary Margaret,” Grif grumbled, pushing from the tree to join her side.
“She was twelve when you last saw her,” Kit reminded him.
“I’m walking next to an angelic human,” Kit returned wryly. “My definition of crazy is more expansive than it once was.”
“I’m not talking about you,” Grif said. “I’m talking about little Mary Margaret.”
“And Mary Margaret isn’t little anymore,” Kit pointed out, walking faster as they rounded the pond. “She’s a sixty-two-year-old, rather mentally disturbed woman.”
Grif wrinkled his nose. “She’d have to be, to believe in . . . what was it?”
“Hypnosis. And it doesn’t matter what you think of it,” she went on before he could speak. “You don’t know anything about it.”
“And you do?”
“Of course not.” Kit’s sidelong glance was askew. “But