“No fucking way.”
He knew what happened to bait. Bait was expendable, and they never came to good ends. At best, Elle would have to enter the witness protection program. If she was refusing protective custody, he didn’t want to think how she would react to that. “You owe me a lot of favors, and I’m calling this one in. You find a way of arresting Maldonado that doesn’t involve her life going down the drain.”
The detective’s lips thinned. “Jack, you, more than anyone, know how difficult it is to pin anything on this guy. Maldonado is extremely dangerous. This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity—”
“Not up for discussion. You won’t use her as bait. You keep her name under wraps. I don’t want anyone outside the investigation to know about her existence. Use her info to build your case. She didn’t have to tell you squat about Aalto boarding her plane, yet she did, even knowing it was going to mean trouble for her. You cut her some slack.” He’d wanted to get Maldonado for years; more now that the scumbag had relocated to Florida, but all the witnesses had the nasty habit of ending up dead. He wasn’t risking it.
“Let’s start with finding a link between Maldonado and Aalto.” Maldonado was a well-known narco and Aalto an old-school Republican obsessed with kicking out illegal aliens and cutting back on immigration and foreign import of goods. Why would Aalto agree to a meeting?
“So far we haven’t found one. His secretary knew nothing about the trip and there wasn’t a single reference on his agenda.”
No shit. Trips to Cuba for a cigar were off the record, which explained why Aalto had been sneaking around at the airport and no one at his office knew about it. Or maybe they did, but considering their political views, they weren’t going to admit to Aalto traveling to Cuba, much less in company of a well-known criminal.
“Someone at his office must have known. Men like Aalto and Maldonado do not talk without intermediaries. What about the bodyguards? What do we have on them?”
“Emiliano Ramírez and Jonathan Escudero.”
“Isn’t Ramírez Maldonado’s cousin?”
Mullen nodded. “Escudero has a niece with a drug habit and a rap sheet. As soon as he’s back on American soil, we’ll turn up the heat on him; let’s see if we can get him to snitch on his boss.”
Jack didn’t know which kind of trouble the niece was in, but it sure had to be a shitload of it for her uncle to risk crossing Maldonado.
“Get your men to pick up the girl. That should encourage Escudero to talk. What about the autopsy?” Maybe they’d get lucky and the coroner would find something.
Mullen cocked his left eyebrow. “Don’t get your hopes up. They had to scrape the body off the pavement with a shovel. After a car had run over it.”
Jesus Christ.
“We can’t let her walk out of here,” Mullen insisted. “Protective custody is the best solution.”
“I’ll watch over her.”
“Maldonado has long-reaching arms. He’ll find her in Boston.”
“Not if he doesn’t know she exists. Did you make every trace of her disappear in the reports?”
Mullen nodded. “The officer that first interrogated her at the scene was a rookie and got so nervous when she mentioned Maldonado that he didn’t fill out the paperwork. And we have restricted the access to her. No one knows about her.”
“Keep it that way until she has to testify.”
Jack just hoped Mullen found a way to get Maldonado that didn’t involve her taking the stand. Testifying against him was a sure death sentence. That, or enter the witness protection program and look over her shoulder forever.
Mullen stared at him, undecided.
“I will not back down on this.”
After a long, tense second, Mullen sighed. “Get her out of here and to Boston before I change my mind.” Shaking his head, he walked away. Then he stopped and turned around. “And, Jack? I hope you know what you’re doing.”
Jack hoped the same.
He opened the door and moved toward her quietly. Careful not to wake her, he took off his jacket and covered her up.
Fat chance. At the slight contact she jerked and blinked twice at him, disoriented. “You’re here. I thought I’d been having a nightmare.”
“Seriously, pet, what the fuck? You come to Florida for a short visit and you have to cross one of the worse criminals in the state?”
“How did you know? You stalking me?”
As if.
She gestured outside. “Did they send you in to arrest me?”
He ignored her snarky question. She’d find out soon enough that he was nobody’s errand boy. “Do you have any fucking idea how illegal what you did is?”
He could see his harsh tone was making her confrontational, but there was nothing he could do about it. She made him tense in the best of circumstances. Fucking tense. And this wasn’t anywhere near the best of circumstances.
“Which part, exactly?” Elle asked. “Because everyone around here seems to forget I came forward and helped them with Aalto’s murder.”