Mission Road Page 0,43

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 cafes 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 Dvořak 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 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 taquerias. 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