J. Jance - Fire and Ice

“As in legible surveillance videos?” Joanna asked.

“Of course they’re legible,” Delahany declared. “Why wouldn’t they be? It’s my belief that it pays to buy the very best.”

That’s something the Savages have yet to learn, Joanna thought.

“All right,” she said. “Detective Ernie Carpenter is my lead investigator on the Attwood case. I’ll have him be in touch.”

With that she ended the call.

I had awakened that morning in a strange bed in a Best Western in Ellensburg. If you had told me that a few hours later I’d be heading for Gig Harbor and chasing a fellow cop across the Tacoma Narrows Bridge, I would have said you were full of it.

By the way, I’m not exactly wild about the Tacoma Narrows Bridge, and my jaundiced opinion has nothing to do with the fact that it’s now a toll bridge. My dislike goes all the way back to the time when I was a little kid growing up in Seattle. I was born only a few short years after the original Tacoma Narrows Bridge, otherwise known as Galloping Gertie, crashed into the drink. The bridge had been open for only a few months when it started swaying uncontrollably and then collapsed during a fierce windstorm during the winter of 1940. It took ten years to build a replacement. When that one opened in 1950, newsreels in theaters replayed the flapping demise of Galloping Gertie over and over. For me, seeing that film footage left a lasting impression.

These days and as someone who crosses Lake Washington’s floating bridges on a daily basis, I’m well aware that they can sink, too-especially if you allow water to rush inside the hollow concrete pontoons, as a careless workman did on I-90 back in the early nineties. But at least if one of the floating bridges sinks, whoever happens to be on it at the time won’t be hundreds of feet in the air when it goes down. If I had to choose, I’d rather swim than fall.

That’s what I was thinking when my phone rang. I thought it would be Mel calling to let me know if she was ahead of me or behind me on the bridge. But the caller wasn’t Mel.

“It’s me again,” Joanna Brady announced. “It turns out Marcella’s husband, Marco Andrade, was a snitch. He was delivering the goods on some bad guys to the DEA.”

“The Cervantes Cartel?” I asked. “Out of someplace in Mexico?”

“So you know about them?” Joanna asked.

“Only as much as Jaime Carbajal told me this morning.”

“Anyway,” Joanna continued, “it sounds like the cartel found out about Marco’s participation and took him out. That probably explains why they came after Marcella, too.”

“Jaime told me about the cartel,” I said, “but I doubt he had a clue about Marco turning on them. Where did you hear that?”

“From Bruce Delahany, the DEA agent in charge in Tucson,” she answered. “They’ve been putting together a massive takedown that’s supposed to happen within the next few weeks. Unless…”

“Unless Jaime screws it up?” I asked.

“Exactly,” Joanna replied. “Delahany is afraid that if Jaime spooks Rios prematurely, a lot of the other people involved will go to ground, but that’s his concern. I’m a lot more worried about Jaime. I can’t imagine him being pushed so far that he’d even think about going after Rios on his own.”

“I can,” I replied. “There are times when revenge sounds a whole lot better than whatever the justice system might get around to dishing out. Think about it. Jaime’s sister is dead and, most likely, so is the triggerman, the guy who actually killed her. From Jaime’s point of view it probably looks as though the guy who’s ultimately responsible for his sister’s death has a good chance of walking.”

“But what about the other cases?” Joanna asked. “The ones you’re working on, those other dead prostitutes? According to Delahany, Miguel Rios runs the cartel’s prostitution interests in your part of the country. He’s also supposedly the cartel’s chief enforcer. So maybe if one of his girls doesn’t toe the line, the next thing you know, she’s gone.”

I could see where this was going, and suddenly I felt like we were on to something. Maybe our dead prostitutes were actually Miguel Rios’s dead prostitutes, and if they had been imported by the cartel-smuggled across the border and brought north, like the girls Lupe Rivera had told us about-no wonder no one in this country had ever bothered reporting them missing.

During my momentary lapse in attention, Joanna had gone right on talking. “With any kind of luck we’ll be wrong,” she was saying when I tuned back into the conversation. “You’ll get there and Jaime won’t be. But I did ask Tom Hadlock to check with the car rental agency. Jaime is driving a blue Chevy Cobalt with a GPS. Do you want the license number?”

“I can’t write it down right now. If you could text it to me…” There was a buzz in my ear. “Sorry,” I said. “Another call’s coming in. Gotta go.”

This time it was Mel on the phone. “I’m just coming up on the bridge.”

“Good,” I told her. “You’re only a couple of minutes behind me.”

“Wait for me at the Gig Harbor exit,” she said. “I’ll catch up with you there.”

I stopped on the far side of the first gas station I saw. Then I got out, went around to the trunk, and dragged out my Kevlar vest. It was while I was putting it on that I noticed for the first time that it had stopped raining-completely. The sky was clearing. The sun was out. It had turned into a bright spring day.

A beautiful day, I thought. Too beautiful for someone to die.

Because if Jaime Carbajal had come to Gig Harbor bent on taking out Miguel Rios, it seemed likely to me that someone was bound to die. Maybe even me.

What if that one trip to Disneyland is all I’ll ever have? I wondered. What if that’s all Kayla remembers about me-that I took her to Disneyland once and got sick on the teacups?

Once inside the office, Joanna went straight to the bull pen, where she told Ernie he needed to be in touch with the folks from the DEA for information on the Lester Attwood homicide.

“They may try to put you off,” she said, “but let them know that we’re going to be dogging their heels until they give us what we need.”

“What about me?” Deb asked as Ernie reached for his phone.

“For you I have another whole problem,” Joanna said. “Take a look at what’s on this and then we’ll talk.” She plucked the memory card out of her pocket and tossed it to her detective, who caught it in midair.

“Great catch, by the way,” Joanna added. “Not just the memory card-the bridal bouquet, too.”

Looking embarrassed, Deb shook her head. “Catching that bouquet was a freak accident,” she said. “It was coming straight at me. If I hadn’t caught it, it would have hit me full in the face. Trust me, I have zero intention of getting married again. I tried it once. I’m not very good at it.”

Joanna disappeared into her office. The place was unnaturally quiet. There were no ringing telephones. No people talking. She wanted desperately to call Beau and find out what the hell was going on with Jaime, but she didn’t dare interrupt. If he was caught up in a life-and-death situation, the last thing he needed was a ringing cell phone.

When Deb appeared in Joanna’s doorway a few minutes later, her face was decidedly pale, and she was once again holding the memory card.

“These pictures are awful,” she said. “Where did you get them?”

“From Norm Higgins,” Joanna answered. “From the mortuary. They were taken by his grandson, Derek. While Norm and his sons were out of town, Alma DeLong evidently showed up with another dead client and bullied him into cremating the remains in a hell of a hurry. Once you see the photos, it’s no wonder she was in such a rush.”