breezily. “That is that.”
• • •
LATE THAT NIGHT, DELIA SAT IN her bathtub, warm water lapping against the porcelain, a candle burning on the sink. She watched the watery reflections of flame dance off her shower curtain and felt herself floating away.
She had betrayed herself.
No amount of washing could cleanse her. There was no way to stop the poison White had planted in her. Nothing to do but cut it out.
She used a razor—a momentary sting, then no pain in the warm water. She closed her eyes and willed herself not to cry, the water spiraling red around her naked body like firecracker smoke.
MAIA WAITED BY THE CONCRETE PIG.
It was one of the more ridiculous places she’d ever been asked to rendezvous—a fifteen-foot-high grimy pink goliath of pork at the edge of the diner parking lot.
She glanced at the brown Acura parked across the street and prayed her police tail wouldn’t decide to take her picture. Her only consolation was that the cop inside the car was probably as cold and bored as she was.
After eleven minutes, the old fry cook Mike Flume emerged from the diner. He wiped his hands on his apron and trudged toward her.
“Sorry, I got busy,” he said. “Here.”
He tossed her a house key rubber-banded to a slip of paper and started walking away.
Maia caught his arm. “Whoa, wait a minute.”
“I got less than a minute, miss. There’s nobody watching the oil.”
“How’d you get the key?”
The old man glanced toward his diner.
He reminded Maia of a geriatric leprechaun—small, wrinkled and nervous, thinning orange hair, ears and eyebrows and nose all a bit too pointy.
“I rent the property from Ana. I put the stuff in the back. Figured she would come get it eventually, you know? She never did.”
“What stuff?”
“Look, miss—Detective Kelsey’s already gonna kill me for talking to you. He came by, you know, after Ana . . .” He shook his head. “Damn. I can’t believe she got herself shot.”
“If you want to help her,” Maia said, “tell me what was wrong with the timing on the Franklin White murder.”
The old man winced. “Hell, I only told Ana because it was her mom, for Christ’s sake. It’s probably nothing.”
“You don’t believe that.”
“My waitress can’t cook. I got meat on the grill.”
“Mr. Flume—”
“All right, damn it. Etch and Lucia used to stop here before their shift. Every night, like clockwork. Etch parked his own car in the lot. Few minutes later, Lucia would bring the patrol unit around. Nine-thirty, every night, I’d give ’em both dinner on the house. Two cheeseburgers with rings. Lucia liked Big Red. Etch took a vanilla malt. They went on duty at ten.”
Maia fingered the paper-wrapped key.
She stared at the signs painted on the diner windows—FISH PLATTER, CLASSIC CAR FRIDAY. She imagined two uniformed officers sitting inside at the counter.
She had spent the last few hours at the San Antonio Express-News, buried in the news morgue, reading about the White family, Mission Road and any case involving Hernandez and DeLeon. What she’d learned had depressed the hell out of her, but it hadn’t made things any clearer.
“The 911 call about Franklin White’s body came in at just after ten,” she recalled. “The ME’s report placed the time of death at not very long before that.”
“That’s why Etch and Lucia asked me to talk to homicide for them. You look at their regular routine, they couldn’t have killed Frankie White. They would’ve been here eating dinner.”
“They were suspects? News reports said nothing about that.”
Flume shuffled from foot to foot. “Look . . . Etch and Lucia were frustrated about Frankie White, okay? This was their beat. Kid kept coming down here, picking up women at the bars. Later, those women turned up dead. How would you feel? Longer the detectives went without arresting him, the more Etch talked about intimidating Frankie. He knew Frankie’s car. He knew the bars Frankie liked. Sometimes Etch would follow Frankie around, to discourage him. Etch even told me . . . well, he said what he’d do if he ever caught Frankie on a dark street somewhere.”
“And when Frankie turned up dead,” Maia said, “Etch and Lucia were first at the scene.”
“They couldn’t have killed him,” Flume insisted. “Etch might’ve talked about it, but Lucia never would’ve let him. She was the most even-keeled person I ever met.”
“She killed a man once,” Maia recalled. “Right in your diner, wasn’t it?”
“That was different. Lives were at stake. She did what she had to—one clean shot. Calm