Mission Road Page 0,30

are the only thing you can see on this side of the hill at night. They think I'm a damn bull's-eye. I keep calling the Alamo Heights cops . . ."

Etch nodded sympathetically. He took another sip of atole.

Christmas, nineteen years ago, Lucia and he had found Franklin White's third victim. A community college student, Julia Garcia had been raped and strangled off Mission Road, abandoned like a used tire. The spot had looked a lot like the marshland below Santos' deck.

Julia Garcia had been a few months shy of her twentieth birthday. She was the first in her family to go to college. Alive, she'd had a radiant smile. She volunteered with the barrio literacy program. She wanted to be a teacher. All that was cut short because she'd let a well-dressed young man pick her up at a bar.

Etch remembered standing in below-zero wind, watching the forensics team haul a draped gurney from the weed-choked gully.

Lucia said: We'll get him, Etch. Don't worry.

The father got away with it, he had told her. Why not the son?

Lucia's face darkened. She couldn't offer him any reassurance.

Guy White had never killed his women, but the distinction didn't matter. It was still the White family proving their power, taking the women of the old mission lands like the Anglo cattle barons had before them and the Spanish alcaldes before that. The lords of San Antonio never changed. They had to find the heart of the city, the deepest foundation, and violate it. Possess it. Make themselves legitimate by proving that the oldest inhabitants of the land, families that had been here for three centuries, were defenseless against them.

Like Lucia, Etch came from mission blood. He'd grown up within the sounds of the bells of San Juan and San Jose.

He'd also been a cop long enough to know how easily justice could be bought and sold. He'd seen how reticent the homicide detectives were to approach the White family, how swiftly White's lawyers counterattacked.

No one could bring Frankie White to justice. At least not in the conventional way.

No one would make him pay for snuffing out Julia Garcia's life.

Etch took another sip of Santos' atole. "You suggest anybody else for Miss Lee to talk to?"

The old ME wouldn't meet his eyes. "Why?"

"Just curious." He decided to risk a bit of the truth. "I have a guy tailing her."

"You think that's worth your time?"

"She's a fugitive's girlfriend. I have to assume eventually she'll hook up with Navarre. Be stupid not to have her tailed."

Santos' hands trembled. "I don't recall. We talked for just a few minutes."

Etch couldn't help feeling sorry for Santos. If he was Etch's suspect, if this had been a formal interrogation, the old doctor would've been dead meat. "You remember Larry Drapiewski, used to be with the Sheriff's Department? He told Navarre the hit man theory - Titus Roe."

"Yeah?"

"I wouldn't be surprised if there was some truth to that."

"I . . . guess it's possible."

"Jaime, I don't want the killer to be a cop. I wouldn't like it if people were sending that message."

"We take care of our own."

"Used to be that way," Etch agreed.

"So," Santos said, moistening his lips. "How's the sergeant in the hospital doing?"

Etch forced himself not to make a fist. He thought about Ana in that hospital bed, the uneven bleep of the heart monitor. He had stood at her window for an hour, hating himself, his hand in his pocket, fingering a small glass vial.

"Thanks for the atole," he told Santos. "Maybe we'll play a few holes some time?"

The old medical examiner nodded, his eyes cautious. "I'd like that, Lieutenant."

As Etch drove across the dam, he got one last glimpse of Jaime Santos standing on his back porch, two cups of atole steaming on the rail in the afternoon cold.

DECEMBER 1986, THE SAME CHRISTMAS FRANKIE White murdered his third victim, Etch's abuela, the ninety-two-year-old matron of the family, had died of a bad heart. What was left of the Hernandez clan came unraveled.

Etch's parents had died three years before - his father staring down the barrel of his old military service revolver, his mother shortly afterward from an overdose of sleeping pills. Etch's siblings drifted away to other states. His cousins stopped going to mass at San Juan. Even Etch moved out of the old neighborhood, to a nondescript little house on the near West Side where he could do his target practice in the surrounding fields.

His abuela's funeral hit him harder than he expected. He