Michael Connelly - The Gods of Guilt

There was a pause while my team considered the complicated setup. Jennifer was the first to dive in.

“Marco couldn’t be seen as attached to it,” she said. “For some reason he had to be removed from this and wait until it was brought to him. The DA makes the deal with you, the LAPD gets the bust, but then Marco jumps in with the outstanding federal warrant that trumps everything. It looks like it just fell into his lap but he orchestrated the whole thing.”

“Which only brings us back to why,” Cisco said.

“Exactly,” I said.

“Do you think Marco knew Moya and didn’t want him to know he’d set it up?” Jennifer asked. “So he sort of hid behind Gloria and you?”

“Maybe,” I said. “But he still eventually got the case.”

“What if it was because of Moya?” Cisco said. “He’s a cartel guy, and they’re the most violent people on the planet. They’ll wipe out a whole village just to make sure they get one informant. Maybe Marco didn’t want to draw the target on himself for bringing Moya down. This way he just sat back and the case came to him all signed, sealed, and delivered. If Moya started looking for somebody to come down on, it would stop with Gloria.”

“That’s possible, I guess,” I said. “But then if Moya was looking for revenge, why did he wait seven years to hit Gloria?”

Cisco shook his head, unconvinced by either argument. That was the trouble with spitballing ideas. More often than not you found yourself talked into a logic corner.

“Maybe we’re talking about two separate things,” Jennifer said. “Two things separated by seven years. You have the bust and the unknown reason for how Marco set it up, and then you have Gloria’s murder, which may have happened for an entirely different reason.”

“You’re back to thinking our client did it?” I said.

“No, not at all. In fact, I’m pretty convinced he’s a patsy in this. I’m just saying seven years is a long time. Things change. You yourself just asked why Moya would wait seven years to exact vengeance. I don’t think he did. Gloria’s death is a big loss to him. His habeas suit claims the gun was planted in his hotel room. So he needed Gloria to make his case. Who’s he got now? Trina Trixxx and her secondhand account? Good luck putting her before the U.S. District Court of Appeals.”

I stared at Jennifer for a long moment and slowly started to nod.

“Out of the mouth of babes,” I said. “And I don’t mean that in any derogatory way. I’m saying you’re the rookie here and I think you just nailed something. Moya needed her alive for the habeas. To tell the court what she did.”

“Well, maybe she wouldn’t tell the truth and so he had her whacked,” Cisco said, nodding afterward to help convince himself.

I shook my head. I didn’t like it. Something was missing.

“If we start with Moya needing her alive,” Jennifer said, “the question becomes who needed her dead.”

I nodded now, liking this logic. I waited a moment, spreading my hands to the others for the obvious answer. None came.

“Marco,” I said.

I leaned back in my chair and looked from Cisco to Jennifer. They stared back blankly.

“What, am I the only one seeing this?” I asked.

“So you’re choosing a federal agent over a cartel thug as our straw man?” Jennifer asked. “That doesn’t sound like a good strategy.”

“It’s no longer a straw man defense if it is a true defense,” I said. “Doesn’t matter if it’s a tough sell if it’s what really happened.”

There was a silence as my words were considered, and then Jennifer broke it.

“But why? Why would Marco want her dead?” she asked.

I shrugged.

“That’s what we have to find out,” I said.

“Lot of money in drugs,” Earl said. “It bends a lotta people.”

I pointed at him like he was a genius.

“Right there,” I said. “If we believe the story that Marco made Gloria plant the gun, then we’re dealing with a rogue agent already. We don’t know if he breaks the rules to get bad guys or if it’s to protect something else. Either way, is it that far a leap to think he might kill to protect himself and whatever his rogue operation is? If Gloria became a danger to him, then I think she was definitely in the crosshairs.”

I leaned forward.

“So this is what we need to do. We need to find out more about Marco. And this group he’s in—the ICE team. Find out what other cases they’ve made before and since Moya. See what kind of reputation they have. We look at other cases to see if anything at all looks bent.”

“I’ll search his name through court records,” Jennifer said. “State and federal. Pull out everything I can find and start from there.”

“I’ll ask around,” Cisco added. “I know some people who know some people.”

“And I’ll take the Fulgoni boys,” I said. “And Mr. Moya. They might now actually be assets to our case.”

I could feel the stirring of adrenaline in my veins. Nothing like having a sense of direction to get the blood moving.

“Do you think this means it was the DEA who jacked your car?” Jennifer asked. “And not Moya or Fulgoni?”

The thought of a rogue DEA agent monitoring my moves froze the adrenaline into tiny icicles in my veins.

“If that’s the case, then Fulgoni calling Trina last night when I was there was just coincidence,” I said. “Not sure I believe that.”

It was one of the conundrums of the case that would need to be cleared up before we had full understanding.

Jennifer gathered up her notepad and files and started to push back her chair.

“Wait a minute,” I said. “We’re not finished.”

She resettled and looked at me.

“Lankford,” I said. “He was tailing Gloria the night she was murdered. If we’re looking at Marco, then we have to look for a connection between him and Lankford. We find that and we’ll be close to having everything we need.”

I turned my attention to Cisco.

“Everything you can find on him,” I said. “If he knows Marco, I want to know from where. I want to know how.”

“On it,” Cisco said.

I looked back at Jennifer.

“Just because we’re looking at Marco doesn’t mean we take our eyes off Moya. We have to know everything there is to know about his case. It will help us understand Marco. I still want you on that.”

“Got it.”

Now I turned to Lorna and Earl.

“Lorna, you keep the boat floating. And Earl, you’re with me. I think that’s it, everybody. For now, at least. Be careful out there. Remember who we’re dealing with.”

Everybody started to get up. They were all silent as they moved. It hadn’t been the kind of meeting that drew any kind of lasting jocularity or camaraderie out of the troops. We were going off in separate directions to conduct a sub rosa investigation of a possibly dangerous federal agent. There weren’t too many things more sobering to consider than that.

19

On the way downtown I had to tell Earl to cool it with the single-handed effort to determine if we had a tail. He was weaving in and out of traffic, accelerating and then braking, moving into exit lanes and then jerking the wheel to pull out at the last moment and get back on the freeway.

“Let Cisco handle that,” I said. “You just get me down to the courthouse in one piece.”

“Sorry, boss, I got carried away. But I gotta say I like all this stuff, you know? Bein’ in the meeting and knowin’ what’s going on.”

“Well, like I said, when things happen and I need your help—like yesterday, for example—I’ll bring you into it.”

“That’s cool.”

He settled down after that and we made it downtown without incident. I had Earl drop me at the Criminal Courts Building. I told him I didn’t know how long I would be. I had no business in court, but the District Attorney’s Office was up on the sixteenth floor and I was headed there. After getting out, I looked over the roof of the car and casually scanned the intersection of Temple and Spring. I didn’t see anything or anyone out of the ordinary. I did catch myself checking the rooflines for Indians, however. I didn’t see anything up there either.