Rick Riordan - The Devil went down to Austin

By the time we adjourned, West Mall foot traffic was starting to pick up outside. The air smelled of clove cigarettes and the eggroll vending carts on Guadalupe. The cute Asian girl with the Henry James novel had staked out a bench in the shade by the entrance to the Student Union.

Down at the crosswalk, Vic Lopez was talking to a street musician.

Lopez was dressed in fatigue pants, combat boots, tight blue shirt. His face was pasty and grim, his sunglasses reflecting the sidewalk.

The musician wore a poncho instead of a shirt, pants the colour of bread mould. He had one Birkenstock planted on a small amp, a harmonica holder and a Gibson acoustic strapped around his neck. Written in black across the face of the guitar was Australia or Bust.

As I walked up, the musician was telling Lopez, "Yeah. It's really nice down there this time of year."

"Barrier Reef?" Lopez asked.

"Dude!" To emphasize his excitement, the musician sucked a few notes out of his harmonica. "I'm telling you, this friend of mine-his first nightdive and shit, they told him to watch for green eyes. And he gets down there and this Great White glides past him not five feet away. Oh, man. A little more spare change, and I'm there!"

I thought of green eyes underwater, tried not to shudder.

Lopez patted the musician on the shoulder. Dust poofed from the poncho. "You take it easy. Professor Navarre and I-we got to talk, now."

The musician wagged all his fingers at me. "Yeah, you're that new dude. Yeah. My friend said your class is fucking awesome."

"Fucking Awesome 301," I said. "That's me."

"Teach it again next summer so I can audit, okay?"

"You promise you will?"

"Hey, man, right after Australia, I'm there."

Lopez grabbed my shoulder. "Let's talk."

We followed a herd of pigeons toward a table under a live oak.

"Nice fatigues," I told Lopez. "Expecting a war?"

He leaned back in his chair, picked his sunglasses off, hung them from the collar of his Tshirt. "In one already. I've been put on paid leave."

"For finding Ruby?"

Seeing Lopez without his usual smile, I realized how big he was. I felt like I was back in high school varsity, looking across the scrimmage line at a fulltackle behemoth patiently waiting for the signal to pulverize me.

"We don't have a positive ID, Navarre. I want you to hear that. The brass-they're willing to assume it's Ruby McBride, but things were done… I don't know how much you noticed underwater, but things were intentionally done to the body to make the ID hard. It'll be days before we get enough medical records together, call in the forensic anthropologists to be sure."

"You can't have any doubt," I said. "You saw the way she was. Right at the base of that tree. She was… placed. Displayed. And you know Garrett didn't do that."

"Which is why I'm on leave," Lopez said. "I told my bosses we were chasing the wrong guy."

"You told the truth."

Lopez laughed without humour. "Good old truth. Ain't what the brass wants, especially when they've got a fugitive suspect with no alibis, solid ballistics work to place him at at least one homicide. Good motives for both homicides. A friend that works the docks for McBride, could give him access. The DA likes all that just fine. His point of view-it doesn't take much to dump a woman's body overboard. Even a guy in a wheelchair could do it. Especially with the drugs in her system. It would look very bad on the Channel 4 news if the department backed down, reconsidered pressing charges."

"Drugs."

Lopez brought out a sheaf of papers.

"I wasn't even supposed to get these. A guy I know in Toxicology, he ran me a copy."

He flipped a few pages, handed me one. "Check the spike graphs."

I couldn't tell much about the chemical names, the abbreviations, the numbers, but one thing was clear. "They're the same."

Lopez nodded. "The one on the left shows the levels of the alcohol and tricyclic antidepressants in Jimmy Doebler's blood. The one on the right shows the levels in the female victim. They match. Now check the next page."

Another match. The date on this one was much older-May 1995.

"Clara?"

"I had my friend pull that out of the archived records. That's her tox report."

"Three people," I said. "Virtually identical graphs."

Lopez nodded. "Taken separately, they can be explained. Jimmy and Clara both were on medication. If victim three is Ruby, she was on the same stuff. But taken together-we've got a poisoner. He's doing an extraction process with the amitriptyline, dissolving it down to lethal concentration, mixing it with alcohol for quick dissemination. These three people were poisoned with the same recipe. Ninetynine to one-by the same person."

I looked across the plaza. The musician was playing Pete Seeger. Even the pigeons made a wide arc around him.

"Jimmy's past," I said. "Clara's missing child."

Lopez stared at the pigeons. "I don't know, Navarre. I still don't like it. But let's say the killer uses drugs to make the victims pliable. They get sleepy, almost comatose-they follow simple instructions. He can manipulate them. My bosses would tell you this explains a lot about how your brother could do this. Me, I'd agree with your friend, Miss Lee. I think this bastard wants to talk with his victims. He wants to get intimate before he kills them. I think the old guy in Waco, Ewin Lowry, I think that was our boy's first attempt. It left a bad taste in his mouth, didn't satisfy his urges. So he refined his strategy."

"He started drugging them."

The musician kept playing his harmonica music.

"W.B. Doebler," I said. "Has anyone interviewed him since Jimmy's death?"

"No need," Lopez said. "W.B. calls the sheriff every other day for updates. I don't know what gets said. I know Sheriff's an honourable person."

He didn't need to say more. We both knew the reality-a rich family, heavy political connections. Getting the Sheriff's Department to expand a criminal investigation to include W.B. Doebler would take incontrovertible proof and signatures in triplicate from God, Jesus Christ, and the Holy Ghost.

"Something else, though," Lopez said. "Pena's girlfriend, the night she drowned. We know now that his alibi is for shit. One thing the witness statements all agreed on: Adrienne Selak had had too much to drink. She kept slurring her words, losing her balance. Pena himself stated that he had to support her several times to keep her from falling over. She got very drunk very fast."

"As if Adrienne Selak had been given an amitriptyline cocktail."

Lopez nodded.

"But it's all still speculation," I said. "Garrett's been missing over twentyfour hours. I have to find him before your colleagues do. If he could trace the Techsan sabotage to Pena-it's a long shot, but it might be some leverage."

Pena picked at the knee of his camouflage pants. "Which brings me to my last point. I put out feelers on Garrett's whereabouts early yesterday. This morning a CI of mine, local biker-he gave me a tip where your brother might be. Of course, he didn't know I'd been pulled off the case. Ethically, I should hand the information over to my superiors."

"Ethically."

Lopez's eyes glittered like a crocodile's. "My CI tells me your brother's hiding out with the Diablos. They got a whole network of safe houses. As of this morning, they moved him into a place where they figured nobody will look for him-the marina."

"You must have that place under surveillance."

"Boats go in. Boats go out. You know the guy who runs the docks, it would be pretty easy to come and go unseen. We can't search every boat, not without cause. I should tell my sergeant what I know, let him make the call."

I thought about what Travis County would do, how they would proceed against a suspected murderer hiding out with a motorcycle gang. They would activate SWAT.