Blood of Saints Read online

  There’s more. There’s always more, darlin’. How’s that for truth?

  Santos nodded. “No worries,” he said as he started to walk in the direction Alvarez and Ellie had taken. “Body was found in a ravine by a couple of border militiamen this morning. Crime scene is a mess. Assholes damn near ran her over before they realized what she was. They figured it for a smuggling operations gone wrong and called border patrol. BP called us.”

  “In a ravine?” she said while she walked, keeping pace beside him. “That is different. You sure it’s our guy?”

  Santos jammed his hands into his pockets. “That’s not the half of it, and yeah,” he said, lifting the tape for her to step under, “I’m sure.”

  About five yards from the tape was a steeply sloped drop-off, shrubs desperately clinging to its face, a path trampled through the middle of them, like someone had slipped and slid their way down the side of it. “We think she came in here,” Santos said, confirming what she’d been thinking, pointing to a place where the mud and rock had crumbled away from the ledge. “No tire tracks, aside from those militia fucks, so we’re thinking she came on foot.”

  “On foot?” Sabrina turned, surveying the vast stretch of desert behind her. It was flat and brown, splashed liberally with varying shades of green. “From where?” she said, her skeptical gaze finally landing on his face. “There’s nothing out here.”

  Santos gave her a grim nod. “Yeah. But unless she was dropped from the sky, there’s no other explanation for how she got out here. I’ve got uniforms walking the desert, trying to pick up her trail, but I’m not holding my breath.”

  Neither was Sabrina. It’d rained again, the second wave of monsoon moving through at about four a.m. It’d come down pretty hard. Any foot trail their victim might have left had more than likely washed away. But if their victim came in on foot, she couldn’t have come more than a few miles.

  That meant that wherever she’d come from had to be close by.

  About twenty yards away, a couple of men in ball caps and long sleeves despite the warm weather stood next to a pair of all-terrain vehicles. They had rifles slung over their shoulders, too busy answering questions from a pair of Yuma County deputies to pay her much attention. They must’ve been the militiamen Santos had referred to earlier.

  “We’re about a mile from the city limits so Yuma PD is outside its jurisdiction here,” Santos told her while they picked their way down the slope. “YCSO called us in anyway.”

  It made sense since Yuma PD caught the initial case. They landed on the bottom of the ravine, a few feet from where Alvarez and Ellie stood, faces aimed at the form stretched out on the ground, face down. It had been burned beyond recognition, hair and skin seared away, leaving nothing but charred bone covered by patches of scorched muscle.

  Sabrina moved closer to the body, hunkering down beside it so she could get a better look. As soon as she did, she understood Santos’s certainty that despite the difference in MO and signature, they were dealing with the same killer. At the base of the victim’s skull was a quarter-sized hole. “She?” Sabrina said, looking for something that would identify the victim as a human, let alone a woman. “You’ve identified the victim as female?”

  Instead of answering her, Alvarez sank down across from her and reached over, placing a gloved hand on the charred shoulder of the body between them. Gently rolling her, he exposed the face. It was intact. Completely preserved from the damage done by the fire that had consumed the rest of the body. Sabrina looked up at Ellie, trying to catch a glimpse of recognition like she had with Rachel Meeks, but there wasn’t one.

  “You have any missing persons that fit her description?” she said, noting there wasn’t any clothing debris mixed in or melted to the victim. Whoever she was, she’d been out here naked, which lent to Santos’s working theory of her being on foot. It also told her that the escape attempt had been an impulse born of opportunity and panic. If she was running for her life, she wouldn’t have stopped to put on clothes.

  “We’re a border town, Agent Vance. Plenty of missing persons—unfortunately, more than a few of them young females,” Santos said, rubbing a gloved hand along his jaw. “Maybe the Bureau can run facial recognition. See if we can get a match.”

  Sabrina nodded. “I’ll have Aimes do it as soon as we get back to the office.”

  “What I don’t get is, why the deviation?” Santos said, crouching down next to the burned, human-shaped ruins. “Four victims left exactly the same way and then this? I don’t get it.”

  Whoever she was, she’d been left face down in the mud, killed, and then cast aside like a broken toy. No theatrics. No feigned remorse. This is what their killer really thought of the people he killed.

  Our boy got some anger issues he’s workin’ on, darlin’. Running from someone who’s got ’em ain’t such a good idea … but you already know that, don’t you?

  “She ran,” Sabrina heard herself say without bothering to raise her head. “Ruined his fun, and that made him very angry.”

  “His fun?”

  It’d been Alvarez who’d said it. When she looked up, she found him standing where she’d left him. He was watching her, his expression decidedly hostile.

  “Yeah, his fun.” She stood up, the movement bringing them nearly nose-to-nose. “The posing, the praying, the shrines—it’s all a game to him. None of it means anything.”

  That’s where you’re wrong, darlin’. Our Nulo is a complicated guy. It means something, you just gotta figure out what.

  “What makes you say that?” Alvarez scoffed at her. “Your FBI-issued Magic 8 Ball?”

  She smirked at him. “I left that at home—thought I’d rely on my training and experience for a change.”

  Alvarez opened his mouth to the fire off a comeback, but Santos rose from his crouch to drill a finger into his partner’s chest. “You need to—”

  “Uhhh, guys?”

  She looked over at Ellie and found herself gazing at the top of her dark head. Instead of watching her and Alvarez go toe-to-toe, Ellie was looking down at the body they were all standing around. “You find something, Ellie?”

  “Yeah …” Ellie looked up, a deep frown creased into her brow. “This isn’t the crime scene. Wherever this woman was killed, it wasn’t here.”

  Forty-six

  They all stared at Ellie for a moment, letting it sink it. When it finally did, Sabrina felt the hope she’d been harboring slip loose, cut free by the certainty in Ellie’s tone. It was the same tone she’d used earlier when she’d told her she was certain that the blood evidence found under Stephanie Adams’s fingernails hadn’t been a mistake.

  Santos didn’t give up so easily. “Sure it is,” he said, pointing at the obvious trail that tumbled down the face of the ravine. “She came in here—”

  “Probably a mule deer or cattle coming down for a drink of runoff left in the ravine.” Ellie shook her head firmly. “Whatever it was, it wasn’t the victim.”

  “How can you be so sure?” Santos said, stubbornly holding on to the illusion that they’d finally caught a break.

  “The sky opened up at about four this morning and poured buckets out here for a good forty-five minutes.” Now it was Ellie’s turn to crouch down, angling her gaze upward so she could see them standing over her. “This ravine would have been full of fast-moving water—I’d guess four to five feet deep. Water that deep and fast would’ve carried her down the ravine, no problem.”

  “Maybe he weighed her down?” Alvarez said, shooting his partner a nervous glance. “Or maybe she—”

  “Why would he do that? He’d want her carried away from the crime scene.” Ellie shook her head impatiently. “And he got what he wanted. This isn’t where she was killed. This is where the current left her.”

  “You’ve made mistakes before,” Santos said, ignoring his partner in favor of leveling a ca
ustic glare in Ellie’s direction. “Been dead wrong before too.” Sabrina was suddenly sure that Santos didn’t share his partner’s protective instinct when it came to the crime tech.

  “I wasn’t wrong then,” Ellie said, aiming a pleading look at her before continuing. “And I’m not wrong now.” Doing as Alvarez had done earlier, she wrapped a careful hand around the victim’s shoulder and rolled her, exposing her face and torso again. It was littered with debris. Leaves and a few pieces of trash that’d been left in the desert and swept into the ravine by the torrent of rain speckled her blackened belly. None of them were burnt but Sabrina had a feeling that wasn’t what she was showing them. “Her face is completely preserved. My guess, he was chasing her and managed to incapacitate her somehow and she fell face down in the mud,” she said, pointing to the hole that’d been punched into the victim’s skull. “That’s when he did this. Instead of taking her back to wherever he chased her from and risk getting caught, he set her on fire and let Mother Nature handle the rest. All her fluids settled to her front, making her heavier there. That’s why she resettled in the same position.”

  Sabrina looked at the ground. It was stony, covered in rocks washed there by the flood, stuck to the floor of the ravine with the thick, clay-like mud that it was carved from, creating a surface nearly as smooth as a mortared walkway.

  “Goddamnit,” Santos bellowed, snapping his gloves off with a frustrated yank that ripped the latex, causing uniforms and crime techs to cast wary glances in their direction. Seemingly oblivious to the concern his outburst caused, he turned away from all of them, walking farther down the ravine.

  Sabrina followed him. Removed her own gloves slowly before tucking them into the pocket of her slacks. Standing shoulder to shoulder with Santos, she aimed her gaze in the same direction as his, up the wide swath of the ravine, in the same direction the body would have come from. “We need to talk,” she said, her tone low and even. From the corner of her eye, she could see Santos nod.

  “I was wondering when we’d get around to it,” he said, the corner of his mouth lifting in a sardonic half smile. “To be honest, I’m surprised my CO hasn’t called us in for a sit-down to discuss my limitations yet.”

  His admission made her think of her old captain and his love of verbal abuse. Mathews had hated her—blamed her for everything from a colleague’s gruesome murder to the sour milk in his refrigerator. She imagined that attending her funeral had made his year. “I don’t consider your prior experiences to be limitations.” She smiled when he looked at her. “I see them more like insider information. The only reason I didn’t push it before now is because when I brought it up, you seemed a bit … tender about it.”

  “A young woman was tortured for nearly three months and then killed because of my sloppy police work,” Santos said, the line of his jaw drawing tighter and tighter with each word. “And then, to top it off, the sick asshole who does it slips through my fingers and skips on home … and keeps up with the raping and killing for another decade and a half.” He looked away, casting his gaze up the ravine again. “Tender isn’t the word I would use to describe how I feel about what happened to Melissa Walker.”

  “Is that why you have such a hard-on for Paul Vega?” she said plainly. “Because you think the same thing is happening now?”

  “Christ,” Santos muttered, shaking his head and shooting daggers at his partner over his shoulder before turning his gaze on her. “That punk needs to learn how to keep his mouth shut.”

  Sabrina turned, looking in the same direction. Behind them, Ellie and Alvarez stood close together, talking to each other in hushed tones. Neither of them looked happy. In fact, it looked like they were in the middle of a pretty bitter argument. Deciding to give them their privacy, she turned toward Santos. “Alvarez was less than forthcoming when it came to answering my questions,” she said, failing to mention that his partner’s helpfulness only ended when her questions about Ellie started. “All he did was mention that Vega was briefly involved in a particularly nasty case you worked a while back and that his family made it disappear. I put the rest together on my own.”

  Santos nodded, tipping his head slightly. “You sure you didn’t pack your Magic 8 Ball?”

  She cut him a slight smirk. “Trust me, if I had my Magic 8 Ball, finding this guy would be a hell of a lot—”

  Her phone let out a chirp and she gave Santos an apologetic smile while she unclipped it from her belt. It was a text from Church. Two words.

  Graciella Lopez

  Forty-seven

  “You want to explain what we’re doing here, Agent Vance?” Santos said from where he stood beside her, hand settled on the grip of his service weapon. Instead of answering, Sabrina knocked again, her knuckles stinging as she rapped them against the beveled glass set inside the door. She did want to explain. She wanted to tell Santos everything, to explain what was happening, but there wasn’t time.

  Shadows shifted along the glass and she took a step back, her hand finding the grip of her Kimber, wrapping around it, squeezing it like she was saying hello to an old friend.

  Admit it. You miss this. The hunt. The capture. The kill. We’re the same, you and me. Two rotten peas in a fucked-up pod.

  “I’ll explain later. For now, just follow my lead,” she said a fraction of a second before the door opened. She hadn’t expected Graciella Lopez to be the one on the other side of it but she felt the disappointment anyway when a woman she’d never seen before opened the door. “Good afternoon, we’re here to see Paul Vega.” She tapped the badge strung around her neck, causing the woman’s eyes to bug slightly. She hesitated for a moment before moving away from the doorway to let them in.

  “Please wait,” she said aiming her request at Santos before she hurried down the hallway that fed into the foyer.

  “Now can you tell me what the hell is going on?” Santos hissed at her as soon as the woman disappeared.

  “Have you ever had dealings with someone called Nulo?” she said instead of answering his question. “It would have been close to twenty years ago.” From somewhere inside the house, she heard a soft knock followed by the softer murmur of voices. “He would have been a teenager around the time Melissa Walker disappeared, used to hang around Saint Rose.”

  “Nulo?” Santos shook his head, looking confused. “No. Who is he?”

  That is the question, ain’t it, darlin’?

  “What about Tomas Olivero?” she said, remembering the foreman who’d found Rachel. If she could find him, maybe he’d admit to knowing more than what she’d read in the report.

  Now recognition flickered across his face. “What does he have to do with this?”

  “So you’ve heard of him?” she said, even though it was obvious who he was.

  Santos nodded. “He was a foreman for Vega Farms.”

  “I think we should bring him in—he might know more than he told police.”

  “Olivero is dead,” Santos said, his expression soured. “And even if he wasn’t, he wouldn’t tell us shit. He was old man Vega’s right-hand man. No way he’d—”

  “I thought I made myself clear, Agent Vance,” Vega said as he appeared at the mouth of the hallway. “I told you that I won’t be answering any of your questions without my lawyer present.”

  Sabrina nodded. “So you did,” she said, reaching into her pocket to pull out her cell phone and the card he’d given her yesterday. She dialed the number on the front of card and listened to it ring.

  “This is Arturo Bautista,” a smooth, deep voice came at her across the line, sounding almost as if he’d been expecting her call.

  “Mr. Vega, this is Agent Sinclaire Vance with the FBI. I’m calling on behalf of your client, Paul Vega,” she said. Vega opened his mouth and she held up a finger to keep him from talking. “He’s being taken in for questioning for the rape and murder of Rachel Meeks and he’d like very much for you
meet him at the station.”

  Forty-eight

  After depositing Vega in one of Yuma PD’s interrogation rooms, Sabrina took herself back to the conference room she and Church had been given as a base of operations to wait for his lawyer to make an appearance. It’d been over an hour since she called him to let him know that they had his client in custody and still no sign of him. She’d spent the time learning everything she could about Paul Vega.

  Through the open blinds that covered the window, she could see Santos and Alvarez. The young detective sat on the edge of his desk, arms crossed, head bowed while his partner stood over him, hands wadded into fists, jaw clenched so tight it barely moved while he spoke.

  As soon as they had Paul Vega stowed in the back seat of her car, she’d sent Church a text.

  Bring her to the station for questioning

  After a few seconds of thought she sent another one.

  Bring the box too

  She had no idea how Santos would react to finding out that not only had Wade returned to Arizona and committed multiple murders, but that there was evidence to support the theory that he’d also been involved in what had happened to Rachel Meeks in 2000. She knew how she’d reacted when she found out that what Wade’d done to her had been the beginning of a fifteen-year killing spree. If her experience was any indication, it wasn’t going to be pretty.

  She could still see Michael standing at the foot of her porch, glaring up at her, watching her fall apart after he told her that the man who’d spent eighty-three days raping and torturing her had continued hunting and killing even after she’d been presumed dead. That the monster had taken his little sister, Frankie.

  You think he still hates you for it, darlin’? You think maybe, sometimes when he looks at you and smiles, he’s thinking about killing you for what you did to poor little Frankie?