Five minutes into the drive, Trejo took the exit for Newberry Hill Road. Long and flat, the exit allowed Tracy to keep an eye on the Subaru without getting too close. Trejo merged right. Tracy hoped to get behind another car, but did not see any headlights approaching when she stopped at the bottom of the exit. Not wanting to get too far behind and risk losing Trejo at another light, she turned right and followed. Newberry Hill was two lanes, one in each direction. At a bend, the road became Silverdale Way, and passed large single-family homes on the shores of Dyes Inlet. Tonight the water was a dark ink color with whitecaps churned by the wind and rain.
As the Subaru approached Bucklin Hill Road, the first major intersection, it slowed for a red light. Rather than get too close, Tracy turned into a strip mall with a large parking lot and continued across it. She exited onto Bucklin Hill, again behind the Subaru, when its taillights brightened unexpectedly and the car slowed and again turned right, this time onto an unmarked road. Signage indicated this was an access road to Old Mill Park, a dead end.
Tracy drove past the park entrance in case Trejo suspected he was being followed and was using the park to double back, or just taking precautions. Instead, she turned left into a shopping mall across the street and parked in a stall that allowed her to watch the entrance to the park. If Trejo exited, she’d see the car. When the Subaru did not emerge, she shut off the engine and pushed open her car door. She quickly slipped on her raincoat and pulled the hood over the baseball cap as she hurried to the sidewalk along Bucklin Hill Road. She let traffic pass and cut across the first two lanes to a center island. She waited again for an opening in traffic before jogging across the two westbound lanes to the park entrance. Water dripped from the bill of her hat and the rain, whipped by the wind, made it difficult to see. She picked up her pace down the access road. The Subaru was the only car parked in a dozen stalls. Trejo was not in it. Neither was anyone else. Just past the stalls she came to a concrete-block public restroom. She tried the door and found it locked.
She crept past the building to a fork in the dirt paths. One proceeded straight. The other branched off to her left. She had no idea which path Trejo had taken or where either trail ended. In the dark, with the heavy rain, she doubted she’d be able to pick up his footprints, but that was not her biggest concern. She had hoped Trejo would drive to an apartment or to a home, which would allow her to get an address and determine the owner. Alternatively, she had hoped he’d meet someone in a public setting, like a restaurant, where she could get a visual ID on the person. An outdoor meeting had not entered her mind. If this were some type of setup, she’d be walking into it blind.
CHAPTER 33
When Faz turned the street corner, Del saw patrol vehicles from the North Precinct blocking the road, and officers in rain gear redirecting traffic. He felt sick. The lights on the patrol cars illuminated the night in mournful strobes of red and blue. Del and Faz had been at Shawn O’Donnell’s finishing dinner when Del’s cell phone rang. Jeanine Welch had received the call that she’d been dreading for years.
A fire engine was parked at an angle in the street just behind an ambulance and the medical examiner’s van. Most of the activity centered on the garage at the back of the property, more specifically on the apartment above it.
“Hopefully the weather will keep the neighbors inside,” Faz said.
“I doubt it,” Del said. “This is like the circus coming to town.” He was right. A closer inspection revealed people already standing in the street dressed in rain gear and holding umbrellas, or looking out from the covered porches of their homes. But the invasion of Jeanine Welch’s privacy was not what was foremost on Del’s mind. Foremost was Stuart Funk’s warning of a highly potent heroin on the street.
Del lowered the window to speak to the officer directing traffic, and the rain spit at him through the gap. The officer, in full rain gear, bent down close to the gap. Del badged him. “Looking for the sergeant in charge,” he said.
The officer pointed to a Hispanic officer standing near the garage, then stepped to the side to allow them to enter. Once parked, they exited, pulling long raincoats tight and opening black umbrellas.
“Violent Crimes?” the sergeant said when Del and Faz introduced themselves. “This is an overdose.”
“We got an ongoing investigation,” Del said. “Where’s his mother?”
The sergeant gestured to the back of the house. Rain dripped from the brim of his hat, which was covered in plastic. “She’s inside. I have an officer getting a statement.”
Del looked at the house, knowing it would never be the same. “Is the daughter home?”
“No. The mother said she sent her to a friend’s house when she got the call at work.”
“When was that?”
The sergeant talked over the rain and wind, which had picked up in intensity. “About an hour, hour and a half ago. A friend came by and found them.”
“Them?”
“Young man and young woman.”
Del looked to Faz, then back to the sergeant. “Where’s the person who called?”
“Gone. Anonymous, apparently. No one here when the patrol units arrived. Medical examiner is in there now; said this is the twelfth or thirteenth OD already this month. It’s becoming an epidemic.”
Del thought of Celia McDaniel’s admonition in the donut shop. “It already is an epidemic,” he said.
A yellow light illuminated the staircase leading up to the apartment. At the landing, Del and Faz shook out their umbrellas and leaned them against the side of the building. They signed a log-in sheet presented by an officer at the door and stepped inside a twenty-by-twenty-foot room humid from the rain-soaked bodies huddled inside. Condensation covered the windowpanes, and the air held the pungent, sour smell of cigarettes. Clothes lay in heaps. Unwashed kitchenware, spent soda, beer cans, and other items lay strewn about the furnishings, which were sparse—a lone chair for sitting, no television or stereo. Del recalled Jeanine Welch telling them that Jack sold whatever he could in his never-ending quest to get high. He suspected the room had become little more than a place where Jack Welch crashed.
The assembled men and women, Funk included, were gathered around a mattress on the floor beneath a sloped ceiling, the night sky visible beyond two skylights. A young woman lay on her stomach, fully clothed, with her head tilted awkwardly off the edge of the mattress. A puddle of spit pooled on the floor. Jack Welch lay beside her, on his back. His drug-ravaged body looked as small and thin as a little boy’s. His eyes remained open, as if admiring the distant stars through the skylights. The friars had taught Del to believe that those he loved would be waiting at his death to welcome him into heaven. Del had always doubted the stories, until Allie’s death. It was easier if he believed that his father or mother had greeted Allie, and that she’d be taken care of. He hoped so.