URGENT. House belongs to Federico Gutiérrez Ortega and Eduardo Gutiérrez Costillo. Both students at Hearst. Both heirs to a Mexican drug cartel.
For a moment the shrieks and giggles around her seemed to mute, the colors to fade. She stared down at the phone.
Rico and Eduardo weren’t just college playboys. They were cartel royalty.
“Amber? Is everything okay?”
All at once the world came rushing back. She looked up to see Eduardo, who’d moved in next to her arm. His eyes flitted down to her phone. She locked it and shoved it back into her bag.
She shook her head. “I’m sorry, Eduardo, I have to run. Something’s come up.”
He leveled his dark hazel eyes on her face. “I’m sorry to hear that. I hope everything’s okay?”
“Yes, thank you.” She smiled at him, her pulse throbbing in her temples. Cocaine conspiracy. Human trafficking. Extortion. Kidnapping. Murder. The words streaked through her mind. “Thank you for the party, Eduardo. It’s been really fun.”
She felt his hands close on hers again. His fingers were cool and slightly moist. He lifted her hand to his lips.
“I hope we meet again,” he murmured.
Down below, Rico Gutiérrez Ortega danced with the girls on the stage. She gently retracted her hand from Eduardo’s, then turned and half stumbled back through the double doors.
Wallace. She had to find Wallace. She called him, hands shaking, as she pressed her way through the crowd surrounding the snack-strewn kitchen island. The phone rang a few times and then went to voice mail. The party was probably loud enough that he couldn’t hear it.
Where are you? she texted. She didn’t wait for him to reply but started down the hallway in search of him. The crowd had gotten denser, more frenzied over the course of the night, and at five foot two she was at a disadvantage for seeing through it. She stood on her tiptoes, straining to see.
She passed a bathroom where a girl was crying in huge, racking sobs. In the billiard room three hulking guys were wrestling on the floor—she couldn’t quite tell if it was in fun or not. There was no sign of Wallace. Her phone stayed maddeningly blank. She climbed the stairs to the second floor, where the hallway was slightly less crowded. Through an open bedroom door she saw a mass of writhing limbs on a king-size bed. In another, three kids sat around a lava lamp, jaws slack, while a fourth rocked herself on the bed.
Suddenly she felt a hand close around her wrist. She gave a little shriek and turned on her heel, her heart in her throat.
Wallace had come up right behind her. He jumped back just as she did, eyes wide.
“Breathe, woman!” He laughed, but he looked shaky. “It’s just me.”
People up and down the hall were looking at them. Most of them were partiers, but she caught sight of a tall, slender man in a Hawaiian shirt with a distinct lump beneath the armpit. Another, burlier and similarly armed, sat under a bay window, pretending to text on his phone. She caught his mouth tighten almost imperceptibly as he glanced at them.
“So much for a low profile,” she muttered. She grabbed Wallace’s arm. “Come on, we’re getting out of here.”
They wove their way through the crowd and to the door. It was just after midnight, and the party had reached critical mass. The acrid smell of spilled beer and sweat mingled throughout the house.
She gulped the cool night air as they stepped out onto the lawn. As soon as they were a few feet from the house, Wallace spoke in a low voice. “What happened?”
“I’ll tell you in the car.” She glanced into the bushes around the walk. “I’ll drop you off before I head to Mac’s. I think I’m working late tonight.”
“I’ll go with you.” He looked over his shoulder. The house thrummed with light and noise behind them. “Veronica, those guards were armed. I saw one adjusting his piece. Whatever’s going on in that house, it’s serious … isn’t it?”
She didn’t answer, and he didn’t seem to expect her to. They hurried the rest of the way across the lawn in silence.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
“So, the guy was right there when you got my text?” Mac stared at Veronica in horror over the edge of her laptop.
It was an hour after they’d left the party, and Veronica and Wallace sat on the sofa in Mac’s loft, describing what they’d seen.
Veronica nodded. “Yeah. I don’t think he saw anything, but still.” She sighed, taking a sip from her beer bottle and resting her head back against the couch.
Mac’s apartment—rented in the salad days when she’d worked for Kane Software—was located in a sleek building just a few blocks away from Neptune’s single art-house movie theater. It was sparely decorated: a dark red couch, covered in jacquard pillows, took up one wall, and a plasma-screen TV was mounted on the exposed brick opposite. Where most people would have put a dinner table, Mac had a high-tech ergonomic desk covered with monitors and computer equipment that changed height at the touch of a button. A half-dissected motherboard sat on the kitchen counter, surrounded by tools and chips.
Wallace frowned. “So these guys are, what, dealers?”
Veronica shook her head. “I don’t think so. They’re not soldiers—they’re higher up.”
“Way higher up.” Mac sat in an overstuffed armchair, still wearing the flannel pajama bottoms and gray T-shirt in which she’d answered the door. Her face was pale and clean scrubbed but lit by an almost feverish glow. Mac was nothing if not an information junkie, and she’d spent her whole night digging further and further into the Gutiérrez family dynasty. This was what she’d been hired to do—not to man the phones or even to do the business’s IT, but to dig. And no one was as good at it as she was.
“So here’s what I’ve found so far. Both Eduardo and Federico were born in TJ. Eduardo’s parents own an import/export firm. Federico’s dad—he’s a widower—owns some dude ranch in Rosarito, down on Baja.” Mac frowned at her screen. “Looks like both cousins went to boarding school in Switzerland. Now they’re at Hearst. They have clean records, in the States and abroad. They’re listed as the owners of Sun and Surf, Inc.—they have a whole string of luxury vacation rentals along the coast. Their houses go for as much as ten thousand a night.”
Wallace whistled. Veronica took another swig from her beer, the cold, bitter taste waking her up. “So other than blood ties, there’s no obvious cartel connection.”
“Well, I’m not an accountant, but there’s a ton of money moving through the coffers. I don’t know, maybe that’s normal for this kind of business. But it seems a bit over the top.”
“So it’s a front?” Wallace asked.
“If it’s a front, it’s a good one,” Mac said. “They have Yelp reviews and everything. And last year there was a blurb in Condé Nast Traveler calling the houses ‘exquisite.’ ”
“There was a horse ranch in Oklahoma that got busted last year for the same kind of thing,” said Veronica. “It looked totally legit. They trained racehorses, had a breeding program, and paid their taxes. They also happened to be funneling money through for the Zetas.”
Wallace shuddered. “Man, I saw something about those guys on the news a couple months ago. Scared the hell out of me.”
“Well, brace yourself,” Mac said. “Eduardo and Federico’s paternal uncle is Jorge Gutiérrez Trejo, aka El Oso, aka La Muerte Negro. Currently one of the DEA’s most wanted. He’s been in charge of the Milenio Cartel in Baja for almost twenty years. Again, I’m not an expert on these things, but twenty years is a long time. Most of the major cartels have gone through some kind of takeover or have splintered off into rival factions. Not the Milenios.” She looked a little queasy. “And he hasn’t stayed in charge by being a nice guy.”