Cliff Diver (Detective Emilia Cruz Book 1) (26 page)

The guard looked
from Emilia to Silvio and slowly went back to his shack.

Emilia stuffed the
counterfeit bills back in her bag. “So now you tell me what you and Inocente
talked about and I’ll see if I believe you.”

Silvio scowled. “I
run a book,” he said. “Did it when I was suspended and just kept going. Isabel
and I use the money to feed some of the neighborhood kids. Inocente put down a
bet, lost, and paid up with counterfeit
norteamericano
dollars. Fake,
same as those.”

“He stiffed you?”

“The week before.”
Silvio nodded. “Tried to trace it with a couple of my informants but nobody
knew anything. I didn’t know what to do and finally decided we had to have it
out. I needed the money.”

“You needed it for
Monday,” Emilia said slowly. “If you don’t get the accounts settled on Monday
the kids don’t eat on Tuesday.”

“My wife is a good
woman,” Silvio said. “This means a lot to her. Things haven’t always been easy.
She . . . she lost a lot of babies over the years. So these kids on the street
. . . they’re like hers.”

Emilia didn’t
reply, her brain spinning.

“Look, I didn’t
kill him.” Silvio stared at her. “You can call Obregon if you want and he’ll
ruin my career but he won’t find any evidence that I killed him. I knew you
wouldn’t believe me about the phone call so I just kept my mouth shut figuring
we’d find the killer before the records came.
Rayos
, when was the last
time we got phone records that fast?”

Maybe it was the
street children or the way he’d seemed so surprised when he saw those bills.
“Your story better check out,” Emilia said, praying she wasn’t making a fatal
mistake. “You’d better pray that somebody saw you somewhere else besides Lt.
Inocente’s building after the time he took that boat out of the marina.”

“I just wanted
what he owed me,” Silvio said. “But what did you mean when you said this was a
ransom?”

“Do you remember
the day Rico and I got a reward for saving the kidnapped kid? Morelos de Gama’s
kid?”

Silvio nodded.

“It was the same
counterfeit.” Emilia shook the bills. “Just like this.”

“Inocente gave it
to you,” Silvio said slowly. “That’s why you thought he and I were doing shit
together.”

“The car we left
on the road was full of it and somebody knew,” Emilia said. She told him about
being assigned to take Kurt Rucker back to the hotel, finding the army
checkpoint gone, and the attack on the highway. “We took the car apart and
found the money. A bank told us it was fake,” she finished. “So we left it on
the side of the road and the next day the money was gone and the child was in
the car.”

“Morelos de Gama
paid his kid’s ransom with counterfeit?” Silvio had made no move to close the
car door and seemed genuinely confused by the details Emilia had laid out. “Is
that what this water company crap’s been all about?”

“I don’t know
exactly what happened.” The sun was setting and it would soon be dark. “The
Pinkerton agent who worked for the family turned the ransom over to somebody
who said he was Lt. Inocente. An accomplice, I guess. He was supposed to do the
actual handoff to pay the kidnappers. The Pinkerton agent turned over pesos.
But the ransom the kidnappers took in exchange for the child was in counterfeit
dollars.”

Silvio shrugged.
“So Inocente and his pal switched it. They knew where they could get
counterfeit at a discount, did a switch, and kept the real.”

Emilia’s jaw
dropped, as if he’d just proven that the world was round. “He switched it,” she
repeated. It made perfect sense. “He kept the real money. Arranged for the
counterfeit to be used to pay off the kidnappers. Kept both the real ransom and
some of the counterfeit to cover his gambling debts.”

“So who was the
accomplice?” Silvio asked.

I thought it
was you
, Emilia wanted to say but didn’t. Alan Denton had said that the man
who’d claimed to be Fausto Inocente had looked like a wrestler. Silvio wasn’t
the only man who looked like that. She didn’t know what to think.

“Maybe Morelos de
Gama found out and killed him.” Silvio pulled out his notebook and thumbed
through the pages.

“His alibi
checks,” Emilia said. “He was in Chicago with his wife and child at some
hospital for amputees.”

“He either
contracted it,” Silvio surmised. “Or the kidnappers took out Inocente because
they know he delivered fake cash.”

“But what about
Lt. Inocente having had sex right before he died?” Emilia asked.

“I didn’t bang
him,” Silvio exclaimed.

Emilia almost
laughed.

“Look,” Silvio
said. “My guess is that Morelos de Gama’s kid got snatched because he’s dealing
in somebody else’s territory. Inocente might have been his partner. Tidy source
of gambling money that he can’t squeeze out of his brother. Rivals snatch the
Morelos de Gama kid to shut down their operation. Inocente sees that there’s an
opportunity to get something out of the deal for himself, switches the ransom,
but never tells Morelos de Gama. Inocente also pockets a little of the fake
stuff thinking it will come in handy at some point.”

“What if he was
one of the kidnappers,” Emilia argued. “Morelos de Gama doesn’t know. Just
thinks he can help. Bruno Inocente’s brother and all.”

“Maybe.” Silvio
sounded skeptical. “But why call the police to deal with a kidnapper when they
have Pinkerton? No, I think they were partners and Inocente double-crossed him.
Or the accomplice who received the money from Pinkerton double crossed both of
them.”

Emilia sat
quietly, trying to process this new view of Silvio. He was smart, a linear
thinker. Had Obregon hoped to scare Emilia into keeping Silvio out of things,
not because he was a dirty cop as Obregon claimed, but because he knew Silvio
was a good detective? What part of all of this did Obregon not want them to
discover?

“What happened to
your partner?” she asked.

Silvio shrugged.
“As far as I can tell Fuentes is a calculating rat out to get what he can.”

“I meant Garcia.”

The interior of
the car grew very still. Silvio stared straight ahead.

“Besides my wife,
he was my best friend,” Silvio finally said.

Emilia waited.

“He was just in
the wrong place at the wrong time.”

“Inocente
questioned your judgment pretty strongly,” she said.

“Inocente was a
fucking asshole.”

Emilia thought
about Silvio’s wife, her concern for the
barrio’s
children and her open
manner in speaking with Emilia. Silvio’s wife didn’t live with a man who bashed
in skulls and killed friends and then tried to cover it up with layers and
layers--.

“
Por Dios
,”
Emilia blurted. The answer was like a bolt from the blue. “The Maxitunnel. He
was the partner and it’s their distribution point.”

Silvio turned to
look at her. “What the fuck are you talking about?”

“
El teniente
was interested in tunnel construction,” Emilia said rapidly. “He’d talked to
some specialist in hydraulic concrete. Built a strange prototype tunnel with
these ventilation holes.”

“The Maxitunnel is
the main artery,” Silvio said. “Into Zetas territory.”

“El Machete is a
feeder gang for the Zetas,” Emilia said. “There are connections. I’m just not
sure what.”

“Keep going,”
Silvio said.

The parking lot
guard approached the car. Silvio saw him in the side mirror and held his arm
outside the car, middle finger raised. The guard slunk back to his shack.

“You remember the
head we found?” Emilia said. “Alejandro Ruiz Garcia?”

“Yeah.”

“His cousin, the
one who bailed him out, is El Machete,” Emilia said. She took out her notebook.
“At first I thought that meant Ruiz was El Machete, too. Now I’m not so sure.
At any rate, Ruiz had counterfeit.” Emilia flipped to the timeline. “That’s why
he was at the bank when he was arrested so he could find out if it was real or
not. So he had it before the ransom was paid.”

Silvio flipped
another page in his notebook. “I handled a bank call last week,” he said. “Old
lady tried to pass the same counterfeit Inocente gave me. She said her grandson
gave it to her.”

“Is he named
Horacio?” Emilia clenched her fists in excitement. “He’s Ruiz’s cousin.
Definitely El Machete. I talked to him.”

“You went to Los
Bongos?” Silvio asked. He’d obviously followed the same trail.

Emilia gave a
laugh. “Told the bartender I was pregnant. Horacio was the father.”

Silvio lifted a
corner of his mouth in what Emilia assumed was a grudging smile. “So how’d the
driver get the ransom counterfeit before it got paid?”

“The Hudsons or
Lt. Inocente must have given it to him.” Emilia ran through the rest of the
information about the Hudsons, the Inocente’s coinciding hotel stay, and the
missing data from the files. They were finally getting close. “Let’s bring in
Horacio, get the rest of the story out of him.”

Silvio rubbed his
jaw. “Hold on. We got Inocente and Morelos de Gama pushing drugs into Zetas
territory. We don’t know exactly which side of this El Machete is working.
Maybe for them, flashing Inocente’s friends’ counterfeit and doing their own
double-cross. Or they’re working for the Zetas like we think. They snatch the
kid and Inocente double-crosses his partner by keeping the real ransom and
passing fake to the Zetas.”

“So either El
Machete killed Inocente because of the fake ransom,” Emilia reasoned. “Or one
of his own partners did.”

Silvio nodded.
“Bigger question is, did Morelos de Gama keep the business going? Or did the
kidnapping scare him into closing it down?”

It all makes
sense
, Emilia thought again. The more experienced detective was able to
deconstruct everything they had and put it back together in a way that worked.

“If Inocente went
to all the trouble to investigate tunnels and cement and shit, my guess is this
is too big of an operation for give up,” Silvio went on. “How do you know about
this tunnel thing?”

“
El teniente
built a prototype,” Emilia said. “His brother showed me. Said it was a house.
But it’s like a tunnel. A staging area in a tunnel. That’s why he was friends
with that cement engineer.”

“We need to figure
out how big and how many partners are involved. Gotta be pretty big to get that
many people to ignore construction near the Maxitunnel. You remember how to get
there?”

Emilia shook a
finger at him. “You’d better be playing straight with me.”

“You can believe
whatever the fuck you want to, Cruz.”

Emilia wondered if
she’d gotten too carried away. Doubt crowded in and pressed down hard.”

Silvio made an
abrupt come-on motion.

“I’m not supposed
to make any arrests in the case,” she said, like a diver going off the cliff
backwards, unable to see, everything on instinct. “Just let Obregon know when
I’m close to the killer. He’s supposed to take it from there. Gave me some
bullshit story about cleaning up Guerrero.”

“You’re not
sleeping with him?”

“No, you
pendejo
,”
Emilia snapped. “He’s the last man on earth I’d ever sleep with.”

Silvio nodded
thoughtfully then swung out of the back seat and got behind the wheel again.
Emilia threw herself into the front passenger seat.

“Tomorrow I’ll
bring the doughnuts,” Silvio said.

Chapter 25

Emilia told
Obregon that they were looking into Lt. Inocente’s gambling and sex habits as a
major motive for the murder. The detectives had turned up enough to spin a
fairly large story and there was probably more to be found if they just kept hunting.
Lt. Inocente had gambling tabs at six major casinos, one as far as Zihuatanejo,
and routinely bet on horses, dogs, cock-fighting and soccer games. Emilia also
played up the fact that Inocente used prostitutes in various locations,
inferring that
el teniente
had possibly run afoul of some of the girls’
keepers.

Obregon asked a
few questions but the meeting was brief and tense. If he felt that Emilia was
only telling him half a story, he didn’t show it. She came away feeling that
his amusement at her rebuff the night in front of the administration building
had given way to a dangerous disdain.

It was two days
after the visit to the defunct water plant and late afternoon foray to
el
teniente’s
concrete legacy in the middle of nowhere. Armed with a powerful
flashlight, Silvio had seen what Emilia had not; a ramp built into the side of
the odd concrete structure, the exact width of a sideways
garrafon,
grooved to keep the jugs from falling off. It was the only metal thing in the
structure and mimicked the rolling ramps of the functioning water plant. The
finding served to reinforce Emilia’s guess that the Maxitunnel was being used
as a transit point.

The next day,
after the squadroom had eaten Silvio’s doughnuts for a change, Emilia, Rico,
and Silvio met in
el teniente’s
office and decided to organize
surveillance on both entrances to the Maxitunnel. To do it, they’d have to pull
in most of the squadroom. At a special meeting with all the detectives later in
the week Emilia sat quietly as Silvio announced that the Inocente murder
investigation was taking a new turn.

Sharing the
risk,
Emilia thought as she listened to Silvio outline in terms everyone
could easily follow what they had so far and how it connected with Agua
Pacifico, the Morelos de Gama kidnapping, the Hudsons and the counterfeit, the
El Machete gang and the concrete structure outside the city. A quiet
surveillance was put on Morelos de Gama and word went out on the street that
there was a reward for anyone who could bring in Horacio Valdes Ruiz. Repeated
efforts to find the El Machete member had resulted in nothing. There was a new
bartender at Los Bongos. The apartment above the bar was empty but still
smelled of cat urine.

As if to remind
Emilia that the clock was ticking, a few minutes after the meeting broke up a
woman from Carlota’s office called and scheduled her for an “information
session.” This, as it was explained, would be all about positions in the
mayor’s administration.

☼

It took a week to
organize the unofficial Maxitunnel surveillance and place cops on both sides of
the tunnel. On the Acapulco side Emilia and Rico sold candy to drivers
approaching the toll booths while Silvio and Fuentes played toll takers,
wearing Maxitunnel employee polo shirts and making change.

It was grueling
work and all too familiar. Along with about eight other people, Emilia and Rico
stood wilting in the hot sunlight holding the small oblong boxes of guava jelly
candy. To hide her gun in its shoulder holster, Emilia wore a long man’s shirt
over a tee. Her gun was hot and heavy against her side as sweat trickled down
her back. Her cell phone was in her back pocket.

She and Rico were
much older than anyone else out there. The man who organized the workers and
provided the candy constantly eyed her. He was a fat, sweaty little man who
ruled over the vendors with an iron hand, bringing them to the tunnel around
6:00 am in a van and collecting them again long after dark. Rico, a sullen
red-faced presence one car row over, had already argued with him and Emilia had
had to smooth things over.

As the cars slowed
to pay the toll, the candy sellers lined up on the driver’s side of the cars.
There were four lanes of traffic approaching the tunnel and every seller
carried at least a dozen boxes.

Over the course of
three days a number of Agua Pacifico trucks paid the toll and entered the long
tunnel, the longest in Latin America. Emilia had read everything she could find
on it, length, width, how many water sprinklers and emergency stations and how
the rescue team trained. She’d found out a lot about its construction but
nothing about unauthorized branch tunnels.

Macias and Sandor
worked the toll booths on the Guerrero side, with a couple of uniforms posing
as vendors selling cell phone chargers and cheap covers. They made sure that
the Agua Pacific trucks came out when they should, communicating with Silvio
and Fuentes via radio. The trip through the dark tunnel took most cars about
ten minutes, depending on traffic. Every night Emilia got an earful how this
was the stupidest stakeout any of them had ever been on.

As she stood like
a zombie in the hot sun, Emilia tried out different scenarios, always coming
back to the timeline and
el teniente
having had sex. It was the only
piece that didn’t fit.

Emilia idly waved a
box of candy and to her surprise a car stopped and the driver rolled down the
window. It was an older man. “You want to get out of the sun?” he asked. “Maybe
we can have a little party in the dark. Fifty pesos and I’ll drop you off at
the other end.” He made a slight popping sound with his mouth.

“I’d bite yours
off, you
pendejo
,” Emilia said.

“
Puta
,” the
man said and hastily rolled up the window. As the car drove past her to the
toll booth Emilia memorized the
placa
number. She’d give it to Alvaro.
He’d be creative with it.

☼

“One more day,”
muttered Silvio darkly that night at the station. “They’re driving through the
tunnel and not stopping. That’s all we’re going to know unless we start
following every fucking water truck.”

“Three more days,”
Emilia argued. “We’ll do it for a week. If they have any sort of schedule,
it’ll be a weekly one.”

Emilia looked
around the squadroom. The 9:00 am meetings had turned into 9:00 pm. A few of
them had stayed on, almost too tired to go home. Foil taco wrappers and empty
paper cups littered the table they’d made out of two desks pushed together.

“I don’t care,”
said Macias. “It’s easy work.”

“A week,” Emilia
said stubbornly, looking at Silvio. “If nothing after a week we’re done.”

“And then what?” asked
Rico. He yawned and crumpled up a chip bag.

“I don’t know,”
Emilia said wearily. She pulled a trashcan over to the desks. “Anybody check
dispatches today?”

“Loyola and Ibarra
were up next. Took the one that came in,” Fuentes said, looking at the chart.

“Good.” The rota
was actually working. It had happened so naturally that Emilia had hardly
noticed.