for immunity from prosecution.”
“Why would anyone believe him?”
“Murray was Suárez’s right hand, and it’s easy enough to point to the missing cash if you’re the one who’s skimming it to begin with.”
Montez sighed deeply. “So that’s why we had to wait until today. Murray was trying to figure out how to get here to take credit for rescuing Lane while stalling us with this bogus plan to return Lane in exchange for whatever he was going to blackmail Brig Stanton with.”
“Yes. He needed you to believe Suárez was still alive.”
“Then he didn’t expect you and Maria Elena and the others to return.”
“Not the men, but Maria and me, certainly. He could have told you any story, that he was turning us out or using us for intel—whatever he wanted once he was a hero.”
“But we would have figured out who you were.”
“How? There’s no way he could’ve predicted that you and I knew each other. As far as he knew, he had plenty of time. And again, why would you have doubted him?”
“How did you even end up with Suárez and Murray to begin with?”
This was the part I wanted to know.
“I was stationed in Guadalajara, following the money that moved through the cartel. That’s what I do, I’m a forensic accountant, and I work for the Financial Management Division in the Office of Finance.”
I remembered that about her, her love of all things math, and how I was interested in figuring out the crime and how she wanted to prove it. Yet another reason why we’d made good partners; we had thrived together.
“A little more than a year ago, I caught a break and found that a shell corporation that had previously been tagged as belonging to Suárez, actually belonged to Jorge Silva,” she explained to all of us, scooching her chair a bit closer to me. “And Silva turned out to be Murray.”
Once she knew who she was looking for, she could figure out how he was skimming from the cartel and slowly build a case against him. The problem was, he knew it too. When he and his men attacked the DEA safe house in Guadalajara, they weren’t prepared.
“One of my friends,” she said, her eyes filling, “was shot when Murray’s men first breached. We both saw the men coming for us.”
I could guess what happened.
“I had my gun, and I was ready to––” She choked up, voice cracking. “To cover him as best I—but Murray hit me, he backhanded me across the face and…and yelled at me that I would pay for betraying my team.”
Letting go of her hand, I put my arm around her and leaned her into my side. “He knew the risks, El,” I soothed her. “You know it too.”
She was crying, her breathing doing the staccato thing where it catches and stutters.
“His sacrifice gave you the best chance to get justice for all of those guys.”
She nodded quickly.
Murray had murdered her friend right there in front of her, and then asked who she was. Her cover story was always ready to go at a moment’s notice. Very few people had access to DEA agent files, because so many of them went undercover, were stationed abroad, and moved in far too dangerous circles to not have an alias. So even when Murray checked on her in the FBI database, his clearance was only high enough to confirm her alias, Lucia Diaz. She was supposedly a DEA analyst, a lawyer on-site to make sure the agents didn’t run afoul of any Mexican laws. The note in her file said that she was under surveillance for possible obstruction and embezzling.
“He kept me at his mansion in Merida until he was sure I was who I said I was,” she explained, dabbing at her eyes with one of the napkins. “And then he said I could make money after I proved my loyalty, and if I did as he instructed.”
“How did you manage that?” Lund asked her.
“By the thinnest of margins. I told him I wouldn’t hurt anyone,” she said under her breath. “It was where I drew the line.”
“Understood,” Montez said with a quick glance around the table.
“He trusted me because I was a woman, because I was, he assumed, a former agent, and more importantly, he trusted my greed and my supposed willingness to commit a crime. I saved his business more than once, and his life on at least two occasions. He sent me here with Maria Elena as a test to see