Mission road - By Rick Riordan Page 0,57

swirl of red velvet, her blond hair and her angry expression. At the moment, she appeared ready to punch a young man who was trying to tell her a joke.

“Is she worth as much as your dead son?” I asked.

White set his champagne on the marble railing. His fingers trembled with rage. “I’ve done more to protect her than you can possibly know.”

“Protect her from whom? Her own family?”

“Fortunately for you, Mr. Navarre, tonight is about keeping up appearances. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have guests to greet. But be assured. When I find the one responsible for my son’s death, I will not be handing over the gun to someone else.”

He gestured at Alex to follow, then made his way carefully down the steps, where a city councilman was waiting to greet him.

Before Alex could leave, I took his arm.

“Where’s the Secret Service?” I asked. “They weren’t outside when we pulled up.”

He smiled. “I made a few calls. I explained about Mr. White’s party. Some of Mr. White’s friends applied pressure. It was agreed surveillance on the night of Mr. White’s party would be pointless. They could spare us for twenty-four hours so as not to embarrass a man of Mr. White’s stature while he entertains his guests.”

“You think of everything.”

“I try.”

I watched Mr. White hobble down the stairs, leaning on his silver cane. “This party was your idea, too, huh?”

Alex shrugged, trying to look modest, which immediately ruined his resemblance to Frankie. “As you heard, it’s important for people to see that Mr. White is still in charge.”

“No,” I said. “I think it’s important for you that they see firsthand how weak and old he is. And they see you walking behind him, directing him, calling the shots.”

“I help as much as I can.”

“And when the old man dies, there’s Madeleine. Marry her off to the right man, and the dynasty could be on a solid footing again.”

“Stranger things have happened.”

“Unless she doesn’t want to.”

“Choices,” Alex said regretfully. “We never really get to control our own choices, do we?”

“I hope they find your corpse floating in the river someday.”

Alex clapped me on the shoulder as if we were old friends. “If you’ll excuse me, Navarre. As Mr. White said, tonight is about appearances.”

• • •

I MET MAIA AT THE BOTTOM of the landing.

She was watching the party guests circulate across the lawn, chatting and drinking and pretending they weren’t freezing their asses off.

“Why do I keep listening to you?” she asked.

“My intoxicating charm,” I guessed.

She was as beautiful as ever in a blue wool dress, her hair loosed from its ponytail, falling in a silky sheet down her back. She had a bandaged cut on her face from her gunfight with Roe. She’d arrived at the mansion not realizing she had a two-inch splinter sticking out of her cheek, just below her eye. The bandage made her look a bit like a refugee, a noblewoman fleeing a war, battling to maintain her composure

“Ralph is down there killing a man I delivered,” she said. “If he doesn’t finish the job, one of White’s men will. Tres, you have to get out of here now. With me.”

“I can’t leave Ralph.”

“Ralph’s a criminal. He belongs here.”

“Where would we go, the police?”

She looked like she was contemplating socking me in the gut. Instead, she wrapped her arms around my waist and pulled me toward her.

She was shivering.

The familiar scent of her hair made me wish I could leave with her—head up to Austin and forget everything, especially my old friend in the sauna room with the borrowed gun.

I told her about my day—Madeleine, Zapata, Sam and Mrs. Loomis. She told me about the old scrapbooks she’d looked through in Lucia DeLeon’s garage, the women Guy and Frankie White had casually destroyed, the murder of the medical examiner Jaime Santos, the fry cook Mike Flume who’d had a crush on Ana’s dead mother.

I thought about it all, trying to put the pieces together. The pieces didn’t cooperate.

I tried to stay focused on Frankie White’s murder, to imagine the nightstick that had clubbed him to death, but I kept coming back to what Ralph had told me earlier in the evening—that I had stayed away from Ralph, not the other way around.

I remembered his wedding reception. I’d stood next to Lieutenant Hernandez, watching the newlyweds cut the cake, and I’d heard him mumble, “This is a bad idea.”

As Ralph’s friend, I should’ve risen to his defense. One look at Ralph and Ana and