Chapter 7
CHAPTER 7
AN UNDERGROUND GARAGE lay beneath the old stable yard at Riverley Hall, and it was into there that Nick drove the Porsche. As soon as he popped the trunk lid up, I unfolded myself, grateful to be standing up again as I cursed the ridiculously stiff suspension on Nate’s car. I tried to rub some feeling back into my arms and legs while Dan got out of the passenger seat.
“You okay?” Nick asked.
“I’ll live.”
A short tunnel led from the garage to Black’s basement, and we took that. It wasn’t a good idea to show my face above ground tonight seeing as the people hanging around hopefully thought I was dead by now. Although “Ghost sighting at local mansion” could have made an interesting headline.
I considered going up to Black’s house for the evening, but my heart lurched when I took a step in that direction. Too many reminders of him still lurked upstairs. I needed to keep my emotions firmly in check right then, so I headed for the longer tunnel leading to my own basement instead. When I reached the control room, Mack, Luke, and Bradley were frantically typing and clicking away while Alex calmly cleaned his gun. Seemed they’d been down there the whole time, which made sense. There was no point in giving the cops more people to get their claws into.
Had they found anything? I stepped closer, reading over their shoulders. Mack and Luke were researching the Colombian drug scene while Bradley looked at new dining tables.
“What happened in the dining room?”
“You don’t want to know,” he said.
“It was just a few bullet holes,” Alex tried to reassure me.
Oh, that’s okay then. As long as it was only a few. If Alex had been involved, then Bradley was right; I probably didn’t want to know.
“Bradley, you understand you can’t redecorate the house yet? The bodies are still warm.”
“That doesn’t stop me from planning.” He pointed at the bank of monitors, where half of the screens still showed grim pictures. “The place is a disaster.”
“The place is a crime scene. It’ll be weeks before you’re allowed back inside.”
“Which is about how long the Italian marble for your new kitchen will take to arrive. What do you think of Makassar Ebony for the units?”
“We’re in the middle of a murder investigation here. Do you think you could at least hold off on the renovations until we neutralise the guy who destroyed my house?”
“But—”
“What if the son of a female dog comes back and has another go? All your hard work would be wasted.”
“I suppose you’ve got a point.”
“How about you find me a coffee instead? Two sugars. Thanks.”
“Fine.” He huffed, but at least he went to hunt for caffeine.
As Bradley stomped off into the tunnels, Nate appeared, having escaped the clutches of the hordes upstairs. I watched them on the monitors, hanging around like vultures.
“Some of the cops tried to come in, so I turned the sprinklers on again,” Mack told me.
“Good thinking.” Downstairs was already ruined. Adding more water wouldn’t make much difference.
Nate stood next to me. “You’re looking remarkably good for a dead woman.”
“It’s amazing what a bit of make-up can do. So, what’s going on?”
“Alex got a name for Blanco out of one of them before he died,” Mack said.
Finally, a breakthrough! About fricking time, but the fact that it took the death of one of my men and the injury of another left me raw inside.
“Great. Who?”
“We’ve done some research, and it fits with your theory that drugs are behind the whole thing.”
“Who is it?”
Mack pushed back her chair and turned to face me. “He’s a Colombian drug lord. I’ve been pulling up everything I can on him, and he seems meaner than a wet panther. He’s been at the top of the pile for years, and one reason he stays there is because he does nasty things to anyone who tries to cross him. The man’s crazy by all accounts, not to mention bloodthirsty. He’s got two sons who work with him, and they’re just as bad.”
Luke clicked his mouse and read from the screen. “Last year, he was suspected of beheading six members of a rival cartel and impaling them on sticks outside their leader’s compound.”
“What’s he called?” I clenched my fists. Tell me, who do I need to kill?
“It’s believed he now controls a larger portion of the drug trade coming out of Colombia than anyone else, and his foot soldiers are totally loyal,” Mack continued. “That’s not surprising. It says here that when one of his henchmen betrayed him six years ago, he made the guy eat his own testicles.”
“His freaking name, Mack?”
“Oh, yeah, sorry. It’s Eduardo Garcia.”
Despite what Nick had said earlier, I really did feel dizzy at that moment. No way. It couldn’t be Eduardo.
In front of me, Mack continued to list his wrongdoings, but I tuned it out, turning her revelation over in my mind and reminding myself to breathe. On paper, yes, it all fitted. Eduardo Garcia was indeed one of Colombia’s primo drug lords, with a taste for violence and a small army at his beck and call. He certainly had the money and the connections to have arranged Black’s assassination and the little visit we’d had earlier in the night.
But I still didn’t believe it was him. Because what—or rather who—the others in the room didn’t know, was Eduardo Garcia. But I did.
“Alex, how exactly did you get this name?”
Alex looked up from his gun and leaned back in his seat. “I warmed the gentleman up by abusing a few pressure points, then when he started sweating, we held him down spread-eagled across the dining table.”
Bradley interrupted, his expression a mix of excitement and disgust. “He shot between the scumbag’s legs, and told him if he didn’t confess who sent him that instant, the next shot would go one inch higher.”
“And then he said it was Eduardo?”
Alex shrugged. “No, I had to shoot his testicles off first. Then he told me.”
Well, no wonder Bradley was looking for a new table.
“So at that point, if I were him, I’d have assumed I was going to die,” I mused out loud. “Everyone else on my side was already dead, so there was nobody to help me. I’d have spilled the name of someone I didn’t like very much and hoped the people who took out my team would also wipe out my enemy. Victory even in death.”
“I suppose that could have happened,” Alex admitted grudgingly.
“In that case, could we look for alternatives to Eduardo Garcia, please.” It came out as a command rather than a question, and all heads turned to look at me.
Mack spoke first. “What makes you so sure it’s not him? It could easily be Garcia, looking at this data. It’s not like any of us have ever met the guy, is it?”
Her questions were perfectly legitimate. In her position, I’d have asked them too. The trouble was, how should I answer her?
“Or have you met him?” Nate guessed the truth first. Darn it, he’d known me too long, and he realised I was holding something back.
Okay, how should I put this? I decided to try for vague.
“Our paths have crossed over the years. Often enough to say there are others we should put ahead of him when it comes to narrowing down our list of suspects.”
I should have known that wouldn’t wash with Nate. He gave me his grumpy, squinty look. “Precisely how well do you know him?”
“Well enough to believe he wouldn’t have done this to me. I mean to us. So can we please look at who else it might have been? Starting with his rivals?”
“Well enough? Emmy, he’s a drug lord .”
“So? I’m not exactly squeaky clean myself.”
“That aside, we can’t discount our prime suspect just because you say you don’t think he did it. We have to check into it a little more than that.”
“Fine. I’ll look into it. Leave it with me.”
“What precisely are you planning to do?”
“I’ll talk to him.”
“What, you’re gonna call him up? What are you going to say? ‘Hi, Mr. Garcia, I was wondering if you murdered my husband? And whether the fourteen men who came to kill me the other night were anything to do with you?’ If so, you’re even more out of your mind than I thought.”
“No, of course I’m not just going to call him up. That would be rude. I’ll go and visit him.”
In my head, I was already packing.
“You’re insane. What, you plan to waltz up and knock on his front door?”
“Don’t be ridiculous.” Eduardo didn’t have a knocker. If you got as far as his front door without being shot first, his butler opened it automatically.
“What, then?”
I could hardly explain I had a system for meeting Eduardo. That when he knew I was there to see him, he’d send somebody to collect me.
“I’ll find a way,” I hedged.
“You’re not going,” Nate told me.
“Yes, I am.”
“No, you’re not. You’re not going to fly to Colombia to have a chat with a violent, borderline psychopathic monster who’s suspected of trying to kill all of us. What if it was him? He’ll probably shoot you on sight.”
“All right, all right. I won’t go.” I hated being forced to lie to my friends. “But can we at least consider the alternatives? And for Pete’s sake, let’s not go wading into Garcia’s business and upsetting him.”
“That sounds remarkably sensible.” Nate seemed surprised I’d caved so easily, and I couldn’t blame him. After all, I wasn’t well known for taking the sensible approach. “Mack, Luke—can you look into other prominent drug dealers as well? There must be a couple of dozen with the cash and resources for this.”
A chorus of agreement followed before Luke and Mack carried on working at their screens, fingers hammering in a staccato rhythm, no doubt fuelled by adrenaline from the night’s events and the prospect of a resolution to the horror stalking us.
I didn’t share their enthusiasm. The idea of Eduardo being mixed up in this filled me with dread. Rather than sitting with them, I retreated to a quiet corner and wrapped myself up in a blanket, trying to get some rest but without much success. Instead of sleeping, I planned what I’d say to Eduardo, turning jumbled words over in my mind. Of course, I still planned to visit him, no matter what I’d said to Nate. It was perhaps the only way to get this mess cleared up.
And I was certain it wasn’t Eduardo. Well, almost. Ninety-nine percent, maybe. That other one percent? Well, if I was wrong, I’d be joining Black sooner than anticipated, wouldn’t I?
The theory that Eduardo was behind this bothered me for one main reason: he had no motive to kill me. The opposite, in fact. This was the man who’d once told me if he’d ever had a second daughter, he’d have wanted me to be her. The man who never forgot my birthday. The man who insisted his chef perfected the best recipe for macaroni and cheese because he knew it was my favourite. The man whose two sons treated me like a sister, threatening to take the head off any person who so much as looked at me funny.
The threat was quite literal, in Sebastien and Marco’s cases. They’d had enough practice at it.
We were working under the assumption that the motive for the killings was our investigation into the bad coke flooding New York and the surrounding areas, which also didn’t fit with Eduardo. While the two of us had never got into the specifics of his family business, we’d had several “what if” discussions over the years, some of which I suspected weren’t so hypothetical. From those, I’d gleaned most of his trade hit the West Coast and the Southern states. A little probably made its way east, but it didn’t make up a major part of his revenue.
Eduardo also prided himself on supplying a good quality product. I couldn’t recall discussing particular chemicals with him, but we’d talked about the cutting of drugs and Eduardo categorically told me he’d never do it before shipment. So if Black was right, and the levamisole got added before the coke arrived stateside, then that spoke against Eduardo’s involvement too.
My overriding hope was that by naming Eduardo, the man from last night had given us a big clue. Because surely whoever his real puppet master was, he had to be someone with a grudge against Mr. Garcia, didn’t he? That left me with one big question—would Eduardo be able to shed light on his identity?
I itched to get going, to go to Colombia and speak to him. Patience wasn’t something that came naturally to me. I planned to slip out the following evening, and having to squander a whole day before I could take what was, for me, the most logical next step in the investigation irritated me to no end. I smacked my head against the wall in frustration, but that achieved nothing more than a headache.
Time was precious, and every day I wasted was a day I’d never get back.
Tick, tick, tick . While the seconds marched by, I needed to catch up on sleep, give a statement to the FBI, and sling a few things in my suitcase.
It promised to be a long twenty-four hours.