Mission road - By Rick Riordan Page 0,43

wouldn’t have the time or manpower to pull something as devious as tag team surveillance.

She took a detour anyway—a sharp left out of King William, onto a nice straight stretch of South Presa, lined with stucco nightclubs and taquerías. She drove south until the buildings fell away and the landscape changed to country. She kept watch behind her, but the Volvo had disappeared.

She was about to reverse course when she noticed the street sign at the intersection ahead. The name hit her like a blast of cold air.

Mission Road.

Before she could give herself time to waver, she took the turn.

Half a mile south along a stretch of crumbling blacktop, she recognized the twisted live oak from the crime scene photos. The barbed wire fence had fallen down, the shrubs were a little thicker, but otherwise the place hadn’t changed.

She pulled over, stepped out of the car.

It was getting dark. The wind was cold and sprinkled with rain. The smell of wild licorice drifted up from the nearby creek bed.

Or not a creek bed, Tres would’ve corrected her. An acequia.

He’d taken her on a picnic somewhere near here. The waterways in this part of town were man-made, two-hundred-and-fifty-year-old aqueducts that had once irrigated mission fields.

Maia shivered.

She remembered Tres’ words on that picnic, three months ago, right before she’d made her huge mistake.

Or had it been a mistake? The changes in her body were mixing her up so badly she could hardly remember. At the time, Tres’ comment had seemed so insignificant. Just another one of his quips. Nothing worth changing their lives over.

She forced her thoughts back to the problem at hand. Franklin White. Frankie had died here—right where she was standing.

How far from the Pig Stand? Five minutes, max.

Witnesses?

She turned three-sixty.

Nothing but trees, fields and the road. The only light was a single streetlamp maybe half a mile north. Eighteen years ago, the place would’ve been even more remote, if that was possible.

She made a mental note to find out where Etch Hernandez lived back then. She wondered if this road was a route from his residence to the Pig Stand.

The wind picked up. Maia shivered again. Too many tragedies, too many lives ended here on Mission Road.

Somewhere along this stretch of blacktop, in the Sixties, Guy White had allegedly raped a twenty-two-year-old named Delia Montoya. The old newspaper article had been discreetly vague about the facts, but Maia got the idea. Delia and Guy had met at a bar. They left together. Delia was a fiery woman, a civil rights activist. She considered herself liberated. She could date anyone she damn well pleased, but she hadn’t planned on being beaten up and raped by Piedras Creek. She filed a report with the police, but two weeks later, she abruptly withdrew the charges. She appeared at the police station, shaken and wild-eyed, and gave a new statement. She claimed she’d made up the whole rape story to get attention. Guy White was off the hook.

A similar story, five months later—a Latina secretary at a local law firm accused White of raping her at Mission Park. White produced an alibi for the night in question. He hired a private investigator to prove that the young woman had a sordid past with men. She was mentally unstable. Charges went nowhere. One month later, the young woman lost her job.

Twenty years later, in the 1980s, all of Franklin White’s victims had been found within a square mile of this spot. Six young women, just as Jaime Santos had said—all six sweet and pretty, just entering college with bright futures. All of them strangled to death and abandoned in the woods.

Like father like son? Maia was tempted to think so, but Frankie’s victims were so different from his father’s, as were the ways the two men had destroyed those women . . .

Maia looked down the dark stretch of road. She imagined roadside memorials that might’ve decorated this barbed wire fence over the years—crosses made of flowers, bleached memorials moldering in the darkness.

A glint of metal drew her attention. To the north, at the very edge of the streetlight’s glow, a car made a U-turn and headed away.

Maia tried to convince herself that the mist and gloom were playing tricks on her eyes.

It looked like a gray Volvo had pulled out from the shoulder of the road, as if the driver had been parked there, watching her.

• • •

TITUS ROE FOCUSED HIS BINOCULARS.

The Lee woman had nice legs.

Concentrating on that helped keep his mind