Justice for Francesca (Six Paths to Justice #1)

6. A Principessa, A Coroner, and the FBI Walk into a Bar

6

A PRINCIPESSA, A CORONER, AND THE FBI WALK INTO A BAR

Francesca

T riumph wasn’t wrong. It was gruesome. She’d seen the initial photos Calder had sent Cruz, and she’d seen her fair share of dead bodies as NYPD and now an FBI agent, but even that didn’t prepare her for the in-person sight. She could only imagine how devastated Tilly had been.

Mila Sequeira, mafia principessa, was unrecognizable now. Her face was so beaten, all features were gone. One eye was missing completely, and the other was covered by the swollen skin surrounding it.

The body was stripped of all clothing. The arms were wrapped around the ropes of the trapeze just above the bar, allowing the body to hang free without being lashed with additional ropes.

“Hey, Frankie.” The muffled voice came from Calder, who was currently doing something at the victim’s back. He had a mask on to protect him from any contaminants the body might have.

Resisting the urge to snarl at the unwanted shortening of her name, she took a deep breath and counted to three. “Dr. Stonewall,” she returned.

“Frankie,” Cruz said in exasperation. “We’ve worked together before. How many times do we have to tell you? Cruz. Calder. We’re not going to answer to the formal anymore.”

She bristled a bit at his gentle rebuke. Like using the club names of her “friends” from The Library, the first names of her co-workers meant familiarity, and Francesca worked even harder to keep her distance from her colleagues. She made a promise to herself to try and work around using names at all and took out her notepad. “What have we got?”

Calder came around from the back side of the body, a swab in his hand that he sealed in an evidence bag and labeled. “What I can tell you is that she suffered multiple thin, surface slashes to her arms, front and back, in the form of hash marks grouped in counts of five. From her shoulders to her heels, she’s marked the same way. The front of her legs have what look to be deeper cuts, again in groups of five. There’s one puncture wound directly to the heart, but barely any blood.”

“The beating of the face?” she asked.

“Don’t know yet. I’ll know more when I get the body back to the lab.”

Both Cruz and Francesca gave a soundless huff response at the standard television coroner comment. While what happened to Mila was horrific, sometimes humor still invaded as a means to cope. It was never at the victim’s expense though.

“Do you mind if I take a closer look?” she asked.

Calder shook his head. “I was just finishing up. Knew you’d want to see her before we took her. Photographs help, but they’re never the same as in-person views.”

Francesca grabbed a pair of gloves and a mask from Calder. As he began packing up his gear and unfolding the body bag, Francesca did a slow circle of the body, making sure to stay outside of the oddly small circle of blood. She began to frown when she came full circle, and she stopped directly in front of the victim, her head tilted to the left.

“What do you see, Frankie?” Cruz asked.

“Some sort of residue. It has a slight sheen from certain angles.”

She grabbed two swabs and an evidence bag from Calder’s kit. Crouching in front of the body, her eyes were level with the victim’s hips. She used one of the swabs to push the flesh away from the girl’s outer labia and ran the second tip gently along the inner labia. She bagged the swab, sealed the bag, and filled out the seal.

“Know what it is?” Calder asked.

“I hate to guess, but based on the slight scent in the air layering over the blood? I’d say CBD-laced lubricant.” She looked at Calder. “You’ll probably find trace elements of THC in her body. Levels will be very, very small. I’ll write down some possible brand names when I take my gloves off, and I’ll put my best guess up at the top of the list. I’m pretty sure which one it is based on the smell.”

Calder’s surprise was evident. “How can you smell it over the blood and the mask?”

Cruz snorted. “Frankie’s got the nose of a bloodhound. Order a fancy coffee sometime, then ask her to name all the ingredients. She’s famous for that magic trick.”

She smiled apologetically. “You should know better than to wager against me. How many coffees do you owe me from over the last few years?”

“Twenty-six,” he grumbled. “Mickie teases me that I lose just so I can take you out for coffee. I hate to think how bad it would be if you worked in our office. She calls you my coffee-wife, you know.”

Francesca rolled her eyes, then turned to Calder. “This particular CBD lubricant has a distinct scent of mint and pepper. There’s also a hint of chocolate. The essential oils stimulate blood flow, making the flesh it touches hypersensitive, as well as lubricated.” She stood up, ignoring the look between Cruz and Calder, turning her gloves inside out as she removed them and disposed of them with the trash.

“I don’t want to know how you know that,” Cruz mumbled.

Ignoring his remark, she pushed for background. “So… Mila Sequeira. Fill me in. I had no contact with her in regards to the Dallas case, so my research on her was cursory.”

He popped off the wall he’d been leaning on while watching Francesca work and stood just to the right of the body. “Daughter of Lucy and Santiago Sequeira, only daughter of the Sequeira don. Thirty-two. Owns a house here in San Antonio, but her primary residence is in Chicago, and she works there for her uncle’s real estate law firm. She serves as a liaison of sorts. Part commercial realtor, part paralegal, part personal assistant.”

“Affiliated?”

“The family controls most of Texas, including San Antonio and Dallas-Fort Worth, of which you are aware of after the past seven months. She doesn’t associate much with her family other than the big holidays. Lives in the same apartment building as her uncle back in Chicago. He is not affiliated, nor is she.”

“He doesn’t represent them?”

“Nope. Has turned them down flat every time he’s asked.”

She hesitated for a moment. “So there are family ties to Chicago. There’s a Sequeira brother also in New York City. How is he affiliated?” She held her breath. Could this be the connection she was looking for from her previous case?

“Laundering through his art gallery. He rarely comes up on our radar as he’s considered ‘small fish’ compared to the don.” He turned his gaze to Calder. “Ready?”

“Yep.” Calder’s assistant bustled into the room. She’d been dusting all the door handles and keypads, and now she helped him load the body onto the gurney and wheel it away.

Francesca began a circuit of the room, stopping every few feet, committing the layout of the room to her notebook. As she did so, she considered the information Cruz had given her on the Sequeira family and filed it away as confirmation of one of the rare possible pieces of information she’d found useful in her computer searches.

Cruz met Francesca at the halfway point of the room, where she was staring up at the ceiling, squinting. “What do you see now, Frankie?”

She looked down again at the space, moved to the center of the room, and did a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree turn of the circle. Puzzled, she looked at Cruz and asked, “How did he raise and lower the trapeze?”

“Near the actual mechanism?” He looked around. “Maybe it’s in a booth somewhere behind the scenes.”

“So does anything seem weird to you about that?”

Cruz looked around the walls again, noticing they were a solid octagon with no breaks, only corners. Then he looked up at the ceiling where the trapeze motor was. “The ability to raise and lower it isn’t here, so he had to do that from somewhere else. That means he had to know where to go. He had to know how to use the system.” He looked at Francesca. “Screams employee.”

“Or former employee. Or someone who’s familiar with the space. For all we know, it could be a simple up-down switch anyone could operate, but they would have to at least know where the control room was and how to get there in this maze. More importantly, though, the murderer couldn’t have been in two places at once.”

“Right. Awkward. Did he rig her to the trapeze somehow and then kill her? Or did he kill her and then rig her? Or did he kill her somewhere else and stage her here afterward?”

“First two would take time either way. He took his time with her, and he didn’t have enough time between two thirty and seven to get here, do all this, and get out, given the severity of the torture. Third would have been extra awkward moving her. She’s not a heavy girl, but dead weight is still dead weight. Might account for the lack of blood here at the scene.”

Francesca continued mapping the room, with Cruz following a few steps behind. He cleared his throat. “Frankie… there’s something you need to know.”

Without picking up her head from what she was doing, she asked, “What?”

“One of the employees. Michael Murphy?”

Still not looking up, she then turned to sketch what she remembered of the body’s position.

“You know him too.”

“Really? Undercover cop or something?” She turned her back to Cruz as she finished the sketch.

“Ironically, he was a cop, for a brief while, but that’s not the primary reason you know him. Michael legally changed his name to Murphy thirteen years ago. Before that, his name was Michael McCabe.”

Francesca froze mid-doodle.

Cruz walked up behind her. “I just found out while I was walking down here, and you were talking with Evans. Frankie? Could he…?” He expelled an expletive and ran a hand through his crew cut to the back of his neck. “I’m sorry. I hate to ask you that, but… he’s here… and he’s a McCabe…”

Francesca went back to her sketching as if nothing had interrupted her train of thought. “If he was here, he’s a suspect. Just like the two who found her. Just like Evans. Just like every person who’s been in this building. It’s a wide pool of suspects right now.”

“Do you need me to talk to Ortiz? Get you off this? You shouldn’t be anywhere near him if he’s tangled up in this.”

She hoped her face remained as steady as her voice sounded, even if it sounded as if it was traveling down a long hallway. “Obviously, if the special agent in charge pulls me, I’m gone. If not, I’ll treat him the same as any other subject. I haven’t seen him in fourteen years, nor have I talked to him or any of the rest of my family. Does she know already?”

“I reported it by email because she was out of the office. She said that given your circumstances, she was allowing you to stay as long as you had no direct contact with him.”

“Fine with me. If the investigation seriously turns in his direction as a suspect, I’ll withdraw immediately.” Puzzled, she looked at Cruz. “Does it seem odd to you that she’d let me stay?”

“A little. Maybe she’s allowing it since I’m here to deal with him?”

She made a show of calmly flipping through the pages like she was reviewing her notes. However, all her eyes saw were hazy shapes of words and symbols. She went back to her drawing. “Does he know I’m here?”

“If he doesn’t already, I’m guessing he will shortly. We need to interview Tripoli further, plus Tilly, Triumph, and Michael. I’ll interview your brother with another agent present. Insurance to keep your contamination minimal.”

“You have nothing to fear, Cruz.” She shored up her armor, feeling the cold creep over her. “If my little brother was attached to this, he’ll pay. There’s no sympathy in me for my family.” With that, she closed her notebook, pocketed it, and as she left the room, her heels echoing in the quiet, she threw over her shoulder, “I’ll talk to Evans, then I’m going to interview Zelinski and Moll.”

In the elevator, Francesca’s brain was in chaos. Tilly’s abuse. Francesca’s own capture two years ago. Mila Sequeira. Her father. Michael. Her three older brothers. Tripoli. She tried to compartmentalize. Shove things back into their appropriate drawers in her brain to be locked away and never thought about again until she was ready to open the drawers and deal with the problems, one at a time.

Michael’s drawer was one she wanted to open only as a last resort. The rest of her family was the very last drawer she would ever open, and if she could, she’d never open it.

The older triplet brothers. Her father. Each of them a cop. Each one of them on the graft. The Dirty McCabes.