"That bastard!" Anger and grief warred for a place in Isabella's expression. She dashed at the tears that spilled down her cheeks.
Rafe wrapped an arm around her shoulder and walked her toward the hospital exit doors. "There's nothing we can do about Slater now. He's in good hands."
She shrugged out of his hold and turned away as he reached for her again. "I'm not leaving him."
He stared at her back, thinking Isabella could easily have been at the safe house when the hit went down. She could've been talking to the girl, and right now lying in the operating room, fighting for her life or sprawled on the safe house floor riddled with bullets. He clenched his fists at his sides.
Goddamn it! He should've protected her better, protected them all. But he was too tunnel-visioned to see the rat scurrying around in his own house. And even though he suspected multiple rats were involved, he still had little more than an inkling who the rat in his own department was.
He ran through the list of names in his mind. Contacts Lupe might've revealed accidentally or under torture before he died, men below and above Rafe in rank, even his trusty administrator, Mrs. Roberts.
Five feet away from him, Isabella hunched over, her arms wrapped around herself as if holding in a terrible pain. He ached for her, for Esperanza's death, and for the possible loss of a good man like Ben Slater, but he fell back on rationale to reassure her.
"The surgeon said it would be hours before Slater came out of the operating room," he said logically, turning her around to face him. "Be reasonable. You need to get some rest."
He glanced at the black and white wall clock which hung unattractively over the nursing station – six-thirty in the morning. "You won't do Slater any good here."
"What if he…" Fresh tears started down her face and her nose ran.
He wanted to kiss her red cheeks and puffy eyes, but he handed her a handkerchief instead. "He won't. The man's too stubborn to croak on us."
Isabella laughed, a sad little attempt that sounded like a dying songbird. "Yeah, Slater's obstinate as hell."
He tried to coax a smile from her. "Must be where you learned it from."
She rarely swore, and he knew she was under a lot more strain than she admitted. "He's going to be okay, Isabella."
She nodded solemnly. "Yeah, sure."
He sighed heavily and tried to reason with her again. "If you don't want to leave the hospital, let's go to the cafeteria and get some coffee."
When they reached the lower level, the cafeteria's security gates were down over the kitchen area, and they settled for vending machine coffee and stale breakfast rolls. They chose a small table near the back exit doors of the nearly empty room. Several nursing staff sat across from them and a custodian mopped at a corner area to their left.
Isabella ignored her coffee and stared through the glass windows into the dark night where the security lights dotted the walks and parking lot.
"I told her she'd be safe," she finally whispered. "I told Esperanza everything was going to be all right."
"You couldn't have known."
"No, no, you're wrong. I know what kind of monster Vargas is. I should've anticipated this move."
She ran her fingers through her dark hair, loosening the knot at her neck until it fell messily around her shoulders. She looked young and vulnerable with her hair down and her face free of makeup.
"Slater's the expert," Rafe contradicted, blowing on his coffee although it was barely lukewarm. "He thought she was protected. Hell, I thought she had enough protection too."
"Poor Esperanza," she murmured. She looked exhausted, shadows under her eyes and lines around her mouth. "One minute she was a young schoolgirl, probably on her way to the market place, and the next minute her life was a living nightmare."
She covered her face with her hands and let the sobs take over.
"Ah, Bella, don't… please don't cry." He scooted his chair close to hers and pulled her into his arms. "I hate it when you cry."
The nurses across the way gave them a strange look, but Rafe supposed they were used to displays of grief in a hospital. Bella sobbed until her tears soaked the front of his shirt and then pulled back to look at him. "I keep thinking of Maria," she whispered.
"Ah, baby, don't do this to yourself."
"I can't help it. Maria left home just like Esperanza did. She kissed us and said goodbye, took a flight to San Diego and a bus across the border with a group of her friends." She wiped her nose with the heel of her hand.
"And that's the last we heard of her, the last we saw her." She clutched at his shirt sleeve. "Just like Esperanza."
"What did the police do to find Maria?" Rafe knew they wouldn't have done much, couldn't have done much except make official contact with the Mexican police.
And a young Mexican-American girl like Maria – she would've been easy to kidnap, easy to hide down there. The family didn't have a chance in hell of finding what happened to Bella's sister.
She shrugged. "They made a lot of noise, but in the end we knew that her being Latina was a disadvantage. No one was going to look for a poor immigrant man's daughter."
She smiled bitterly. "Maria wasn't even born in this country. They weren't going to search for her too hard."
"I'm sorry." Rafe rubbed her shoulders through her thin shirt.
She straightened up, a determined look on her face. "Vargas had something to do with Maria's disappearance."
Rafe's arm fell away. "Bella, be reasonable. You can't know that for sure."
She clenched her fist against her chest. "I know it here," she insisted.
"Even so, even if you're right, Vargas wouldn't remember one girl twenty years ago. And if by some chance he did, he'd never admit it."
She sighed deeply and slumped against him again. "You're right, but this thing just… sometimes it consumes me."
"You can't let what happened to your sister get in the way of nailing Vargas for what we know he's guilty of," Rafe reminded her.
She'd thrown on jeans and a long-sleeved shirt when they'd left her house, but she now shivered, whether from the cold room or the topic, Rafe couldn't tell. He draped his jacket over her shoulders, picked up their empty coffee containers, and threw them in the trash receptacle across the room.
When he walked back to their table, he sat down and searched her face intently. She seemed calmer now. "We have to talk about what this attack at the safe house means."
Nodding, she clasped her fingers together on the table top and leaned forward, all business.
"The hit was bloody and messy," he said. "They meant to kill everyone, including Harris and Slater, the other deputies, along with the girl."
She spoke solemnly. "No witnesses."
"Let's start with who had access to the safe house, hell who even knew about it."
She ticked them off on her fingers. "You, me, Slater, and the three deputies assigned to guard Esperanza. Six people," she said bitterly. "Harris is Slater's right-hand man; McKidd and Ruiz I don't know."
"What about the Nevada police?"
"They knew she was being transported, that Slater signed her out, but they couldn't have known where." She bit her bottom lip and clutched his hand. "Rafe, we didn't even know until an hour before we arrived at the safe house."
"They could've been followed from Nevada."
She began shaking her head before he'd finished. "Not with Harris and Slater riding shotgun. No one gets by Ben. He's too good."
Rafe remembered the bullets that Waylon took. "How is Harris recovering?"
"One bullet barely missed an artery and the other was a through and through. Lots of blood loss, but he was very lucky."
"The killers must've thought Harris and Slater were both dead. They wouldn't have left anyone alive," Rafe said. "McKidd and Ruiz were killed at the scene."
"Harris is out of surgery and stable now."
"We should talk to him again."
But an hour later, when they made their way up to the third floor, Harris was under sedation, a unit of the blood he'd lost pumping in through an IV tube. They decided to let him rest. Slater was still in the operating room, a team of doctors working feverishly over him, but a surgical resident came out and told them he was holding his own.
"You go," Bella told Rafe, standing close to him. "You've got work to do on the case. I'll wait here and call you when there's something to report."
Rafe nodded. He hated to leave her alone like this, but he needed to get to the morgue, see if they'd identified the dead bodies of the two intruders, and then call his DHS contact. Find out how the hell Vargas' team got to the safe house so fast, where they got their information.
He pulled her tighter and she didn't resist him when he lifted her chin, tracing his thumb along her lower lip. "You going to be okay?"
Her mouth quivered but she nodded bravely.
"That's my girl." He touched his lips to her mouth briefly and hugged her, liking the warm, full softness of her against him. "We'll get this son of a bitch, Isabella," he whispered in her ear, the hair at her temple soft against his cheek. "I swear to God we'll get him."
Rafe's cell phone rang as he was climbing into his car.
"Hashish, old man, where are you?"
"Max? What the hell?" He inserted the key in the ignition and fastened his seat belt with his free hand. "Where am I supposed to be?"
"Uh, at the airport? Picking me up?" Jensen laughed. "Dude, you forgot about me, didn't you?"
"Ah, Christ, Max, all hell broke loose here." He backed the car out of the parking space and headed toward Douglas Boulevard. "Yeah, I forgot. Okay, I'm about an hour away. Hang out till I get there, okay?"
"Nah, I'll get a taxi. Just give me your motel and room number and I'll meet you there."
"You sure, man?"
"Hell, yes. Don't worry about me, Hashish. I'm a big boy. I know how to make my way around."
Rafe stopped by the courthouse to pick up the coroner's report and a stack of documents. When he reached his motel over an hour later, Max was waiting inside the room.
He'd flashed his police badge and finagled the desk clerk into letting him in. Now he sat on the worn floral occasional chair, his feet propped up on a coffee table, a bottle of Jack Daniels in one hand and a glass in the other.
"How long you been here?" Rafe asked, surprised the detective had gotten there first, considering the distance from the airport.
"Just walked in." Max took a deep swallow and refilled his glass.
Judging by the near-empty bottle, Rafe knew it wasn't his first drink. Even though Max was close to being wasted, he didn't slur his words. Rafe remembered that in college, Max could drink his frat brothers under the table and still ace an early-morning exam the next day.
"So, what's the big disaster here in Podunk, California?" Max asked.
"Our sole witness in the Vargas case – the girl I told you about – was murdered this morning," Rafe said, suddenly bone-weary and wanting to sleep more than anything else.
"No shit!" Max exclaimed. "What happened?"
Max already knew about the hit on the transportation van and the deaths of the other eight girls and the drivers. Because the two men had California drivers' licenses, Rafe had asked Max to run their names through the L.A. databases. No hits, but Rafe had figured the licenses were fakes anyway.
"Long, sad story," Rafe answered, loosening his tie and slipping off his shoes.
He sat on the edge of the bed and stared at his linked fingers. "Christ, Max, I'm so tired of this crap. Vargas and his organization have destroyed so many lives." He thought of Isabella and her sister Maria, of the drug overdoses and the girls sold into prostitution. "If I don't nail this son-of-a-bitch soon, I'll go nuts."
"You will, old man, you will."
Rafe shrugged and flipped open his cell phone. "God, I hope so." He punched in the speed dial number for Agent McNally at the Department of Homeland Security.
"Excuse me just a minute." Rafe stepped into the bathroom, lowered the toilet seat, and sat down.
When McNally answered on the other end of the line, Rafe went through the security code protocol even though he felt like a fool. Through the crack in the bathroom door, he could see Max laughing and made a circle with his forefinger at his temple.
"Did you find anything on the prints?" Rafe asked when McNally paused long enough for him to get a word in. He'd called DHS to run the prints on the Mexican van drivers when Max hadn't come up with anything.
"Zip. Which is suspicious in itself."
"What about the girl Esperanza?"
"The Mexican police don't have anything on her, not even a missing person's report."
"Damn." Rafe rubbed at the growing pain in his right temple.
"You've got a leak on your end, Agent Hashemi, and you'd better plug it quick."
"Or what, McNally? Or you'll take over the case? Don't be an ass. And don't be so sure the leak isn't on your end." He snapped the phone shut, wondering just how long it'd be before his superiors pulled him off the Vargas case.
"Trouble?" Max asked when Slater left the bathroom.
"A shit storm," Rafe growled. "There's a leak from somewhere and I'm worried it's in my own department."
"Anyone in mind?" Max asked.
Rafe took three aspirin, downed them with a swig from the liquor bottle. "Not a single idea."
Rafe parted company with Max thirty minutes later, and on the way back to the courthouse, he ran the names over in his mind again. Who he'd talked to, even tangentially, about the case, who'd have access to his files, who could be bought off and who couldn't.
By the time he arrived at his temporary office, he'd narrowed the list down to two people, and he didn't think either one was capable of this kind of betrayal. The leaks had to be in one or both of the two county sheriffs' offices. Or Homeland Security.
Not in DEA.