Mission road - By Rick Riordan Page 0,42
and cool. But hitting Frankie White the way he was hit? I mean, no. No way. I told the homicide detectives Etch and Lucia were totally in the clear. I explained their routine.”
“But?”
Flume tugged at his apron. “I didn’t exactly swear that particular night was routine. They came in a little late.”
“Both of them?”
He nodded.
“Together?”
“Separate. Lucia beat Etch for once. She rushed in about nine-fifty, couldn’t believe Etch wasn’t here. When he did come in, Lucia looked at him real angry, asked him where he’d been. He just stared at me and said, ‘Mike, I got here the same time as usual tonight, right?’ ”
Maia cursed. “When did Hernandez come in exactly?”
“Ten o’clock. Maybe one, two minutes after.”
Maia stared across Presa Street, at the brown Acura waiting in the dark.
The fry cook followed her gaze. “Aw, hell. You got a police tail? You didn’t tell me that.”
Maia pulled the rubber band off the old man’s key, unfolded the piece of paper. “What am I going to unlock here, Mr. Flume?”
He shook his head. “Sorry, miss. My onion rings are burning.” Fear was building in his eyes.
The old cook hobbled back toward the diner, leaving Maia alone with the key and a two-line message:
342 West King’s Highway
Used to be Lucia’s.
• • •
MAIA DROVE SLOWLY, SETTING HER PACE to the Dvořák on the classical station.
She knew the best way to lose her tail wasn’t a high-speed chase. It was to bore him into a stupor.
She thought about Franklin White and the patrol nightstick that had killed him.
It was conceivable Franklin would’ve agreed to meet someone he knew well on the side of a rural road at night. Someone like Ralph Arguello. But it was also conceivable that he would pull over for a cop.
Kelsey had been on medical leave. Etch Hernandez and Lucia DeLeon had weak alibis for the murder time. But motive? The idea that Kelsey, even Kelsey, would kill because Frankie White had hurt his hands and endangered his job just didn’t sit right with Maia. Neither did the idea that either Etch or Lucia would kill because Frankie White was murdering women on their beat.
Mike Flume was right. It took intense, personal rage to hit someone seven times in the head, to destroy their face. Whoever killed Frankie White had seen something in him that they hated deeply. They didn’t just want to stop him killing. They had wanted to obliterate his image completely.
Maia meandered through Southtown, circled the blocks, braked to look at street numbers even though she knew the neighborhood.
She studied traffic patterns, counted the timing on lights, checked out side streets until she found what she wanted.
Her third time through the South Presa–Alamo intersection, where the traffic backed up, she put a delivery truck between herself and the Acura. Then she swerved into an alley between two cafés and shot through the back parking lot.
A moment later she was three blocks away in the residential neighborhood of King William. No sign of the tail.
“Amateur,” she murmured.
She supposed there was no reason to have shaken the police. She wasn’t about to lead them to Tres. Still, the idea of having a baby-sitter pissed her off.
The Dvořák piece ended.
Maia was about to change the channel to rock ’n’ roll when a news break came on. An Alamo Heights resident had been found shot to death on his porch overlooking the Olmos Basin.
The sedate voice of the classical DJ sounded totally wrong to deliver such news: The victim, a retired Bexar County medical examiner, had been killed from a distance by a single rifle bullet. Police would not speculate whether the shooting was accidental or the work of a sniper, but stressed there was no reason to believe the general public was in danger. The name of the victim was being withheld until—
Maia turned off the radio.
The .357 in her shoulder holster suddenly felt heavy.
She thought about Jaime Santos’ gnarled hands on his golf club, the sad smile he had given her.
Maybe the news was about someone else. How many retired MEs could there be?
She remembered Mike Flume’s look of fear when he realized a cop was watching. Detective Kelsey’s already gonna kill me for talking to you.
Don’t think that way, Maia told herself. Just drive.
She turned on Guenther Street. In her rearview mirror, an old gray Volvo sedan pulled out from the curb.
Had she seen the same car at the Pig Stand? She’d been so focused on the obvious tail . . .
No. She was being paranoid. The police