THE SUN DROPPED BEHIND THE HOUSING PROJECTS ACROSS THE street from Jose's aunt's home, darkening the street. From an abandoned row house in the project, Jose watched the last police car pull away from the curb. He leaned back from the crack between the boards in what had once been the front window and let himself out the back door. To shield his face, he tugged down on the bill of the Astros baseball cap and turned up the collar of the sleeveless denim jacket he wore over his white tank top. With his tattoos and a pair of grubby jeans hanging low on his hips, Jose blended in easily in the barrio. He crossed the street, pausing for a broken-down Dodge Dart, its muffler scratching up sparks as it roared past.
When he came to the yellow crime-scene tape, Jose scanned the neighborhood. He noted a pack of punks on the corner, cigarettes slung low on their lips, sipping from drinks hidden in brown paper bags. A hooded banger sitting on a stoop slipped a vial to a hunched and sallow-eyed customer. A crooked old woman pushed a broken grocery cart full of potted plants.
Jose lifted the yellow tape and ducked under. He slit the police seal on the door and used his key to slip inside, pausing to survey the street before he completely shut the door. The reek of blood, urine, and excrement overcame the ubiquitous smell of mothballs coming from his aunt's coat closet. Jose swallowed and willed his legs to take him through the front sitting room to the kitchen, where pools of blood had congealed into a macabre pudding on the floor. Two human shapes in fetal positions had been marked in chalk where they had once lain.
He glanced around. Everything rested in its usual place. With no sign of a struggle, it made sense to Jose that the detectives had presumed the killer knew the women. On the floor, marked a and b, were the spots where the brass bullet casings would have lain before detectives tweezed them into plastic evidence bags. Dust from fingerprint powder coated the table and he could discern the chalk outline of the small snub-nosed.38, the same model as his own, the one that he'd given to his aunt for her protection.
He moved through the house slowly, carefully, examining details like a hunter in the woods, reading the story. As he worked, the light of day continued to fade until he needed to use the penlight from his aunt's kitchen drawer to finish his labor.
In the back laundry room he checked the door and saw the splintered wood where the killer, or killers, had entered. That alone should have excited doubt in his old boss, but Ken Trent had acted as though there were little question as to Jose's guilt. Jose continued upstairs, where the beds showed nothing more than that they were the unmade resting places of four people. Yet Trent had acted as if he hadn't known about Isodora and the baby. Jose ground his teeth together, sensing an obvious frame-up. He doubted his old boss would do something like this, but the reach of a US senator went far and wide and deep.
Jose returned to the front sitting room where he could watch the street. He flipped open his phone and dialed the police captain.
"You're only making it worse on yourself," Trent said, his voice tight. "You hit a cop? You think I can keep that quiet?"
"You're keeping other things quiet," Jose said. He let the silence hang for a moment before he said, "Why would I break into my aunt's house? Did anyone tell you someone broke in the back? I got a key. Why would I leave my own gun on the table?"
"How do you know the gun was on the table?"
"I still have friends," Jose said.
"I've got a bump on my head like an egg and you think I'm going to listen to you?" Trent said.
"Maybe it's just sloppy work your people are doing on this murder investigation and not corruption," Jose said. "Who's the lead? Cartwright?"
"Gibbons."
"Gibbons?" Jose said, shaking his head. "So maybe it's just incompetence. Have you even seen the crime scene? There are two people missing besides the ones who're dead. You can see where they slept. The people I asked you about, Isodora and her baby, the woman whose husband Senator Chase shot and their little girl. You want to find them and really know what happened at my aunt's house? Go find the person who broke in here and left you two bodies. Go talk to the senator. He'll know."
"I knew you dealt it," Trent said, "but I never thought you'd start smoking it."
"You're wrong on both counts," Jose said. "That what you believed all these years?"
"I was never sure until all I've seen lately."
"You think a man like Chase can't swing something like this?" Jose asked. "Taking out a handful of Mexicans, a crazy woman lawyer, and a cop like Gibbons? He's like a teenager playing with little kids, pulling quarters from your ears."
"You're the cop who went bad," Trent said.
"Nice try, friend," Jose said when he heard the metallic clicking sounds on the line. He snapped the phone shut to keep Trent from triangulating the signal.
Jose left through the back door, searching the dusty ground and worming his way through the spot in the faded fence where a slat board had gone missing years ago. On the other side he found several footprints around the edge of a mud puddle, some from combat boots and one from a cowboy boot. He knelt at the puddle's edge and poked at a Marlboro filter half buried in the mud. He traced the edge of the smooth flat boot print with his index finger to test its age. He stood and placed his own size twelve into the print, proving to himself that the man who had made it wore something north of a fifteen. It must have been Gage.
Jose headed off down the garbage-strewn alley and flipped his phone open again. He walked as he dialed, heading for his truck and listening to the steady ring, his heart knocking as he anticipated the sound of her voice.