“They were Sanchez’s people. We know next to nothing about Tobias. We don’t know where he calls home base and have only a vague description. And,” Ryan continued, “if we think that Tobias has been neutered, we focus our attention on the shooters—not Tobias himself.”
Brad’s knee began to tighten, and he shifted in the driver’s seat. He had a doctor’s appointment at the end of the day; he’d moved it up from Friday. He needed to be officially cleared for duty. The only reason Sam had let him work this case was because it was mostly a passive investigation at this point, he was officially “consulting” with the SAPD, and Ryan was assisting in the field.
He really despised being babied.
Brad said, “I really hate that the director and DOJ are considering Nicole’s request for witness protection, but Sam made a plea that she didn’t deserve to breathe free air. Nicole mentioned it to me again. She said our house isn’t clean.”
“Did you tell your boss?”
“I tried, but Sam cut me off. She said we can’t believe anything she says. That she’ll say and do anything to get out of prison.”
“What do you think?”
“I think Nicole knows more than she’s said, but not as much as she claims.”
“She could have been goading you. If you think you can’t trust your team, you’re all at risk.”
And that bothered Brad on a deep, indescribable level.
His phone rang. It was Ash from the SAPD investigative unit. Brad had left three messages for him. “Donnelly,” he said. “It’s about time you got back to me.”
“Don’t start with me. The ATF has been having me re-run every fucking test, including ballistics, then they took all the bullets we extracted. Then, I had to walk them through the entire scene at two this afternoon. Do you know how fucking hot it was at two? Hotter than hell. And they kept me for two hours when I have a shitload of work piled.”
“You need a beer.”
“Damn straight.”
“Did ATF take the heroin?”
“No.”
“Have you tested it? Ryan and I are here, and we can’t figure out why the drugs were left behind.”
“It’s still in evidence. We did the field test on one sample, confirmed for heroin, but I need to sample each brick, determine the purity, input the data, run it through the system to see where it came from—you know the drill.”
“Let me know when you have the report. I promise—I’m not nagging you. We have a line on the injured shooter.”
“Is he talking?”
“He’s dead. But we still may get something out of him yet.”
Brad hung up and turned off the highway.
The Atascosa County morgue was housed in the basement of the lone county hospital. If the county had a complex homicide, they’d send the body to Bexar County and their state-of-the-art facilities. Brad might still ask them to do so once he and Ryan examined the evidence.
The coroner, Frank Hernandez, doubled as a staff doctor. He was a small, wiry older man with sharp eyes behind thick glasses.
“Thought this might be one of yours,” Dr. Hernandez said after Brad showed his DEA identification. “This smacks of drugs and gangs.”
“Thank you for contacting our office so quickly,” Brad said. “The body was found this morning?”
“At dawn, a trucker pulled off the highway to take a leak. Found the victim in the ravine. Two days later, there’d have been nothing left but bones. As it was, the only reason the trucker saw anything was because a couple coyotes were chomping down on the corpse. Hope you haven’t eaten, ’cause it ain’t pretty. I’m not planning to do the autopsy ’til morning—I just came off a twenty-four-hour shift, stayed late to meet you boys.”
“We appreciate it,” Ryan said.
“But you examined the body?” Brad asked.
“Course I did.” He pulled open one of the drawers and unzipped the body bag. The victim hadn’t been cleaned, prepped, or undressed. “I need an assistant to help prepare the body and preserve the evidence, ’cause this is a homicide. Know you need everything you can get.”
The victim was a Hispanic male approximately twenty years of age. His face was beaten and swollen. The doctor pulled on gloves and motioned toward the box for Brad and Ryan to do the same. Then he turned the victim’s head. “First, the swelling is from decomp, though you can probably see he’d been beaten pretty bad.”
Hernandez gestured to the dried blood on the back of the head, then he pulled at the matted hair to reveal a hole.
“Gunshot. The bullet’s still in there—I did a full body x-ray when he came in. Looks fragmented, though. Don’t know if you’ll be able to match it with anything.”
“Caliber?”
He shrugged. “Small caliber—probably a nine millimeter, maybe a thirty-eight. The left leg had, I believe, two gunshot wounds.”
“You can’t tell?”