Veronica stood up and went behind Mac’s chair, looking over her shoulder at the screen. What she saw sent her blood cold. Mac had pulled up a rap sheet detailing a list of El Oso’s alleged crimes. In the last decade, as the cartel wars steadily escalated in scope and violence, his people had been connected with a spate of butchery across western Mexico—bodies of rivals had been hung from streetlights or bridges with warnings tacked to their chests. Known hangouts of other cartels had been shot up, bombed, even gassed. In September of last year, someone had left thirteen severed heads prominently in a bin of soccer balls in the Estadio Caliente, Tijuana’s biggest soccer stadium. No one had been charged with the crime, but all of the victims were from the Sonora Cartel, which had been jockeying for position on the Milenios’ turf.
And while the Milenios used the worst of their torture and bloodshed to send a message to their rivals, they weren’t above using it to get what they wanted out of civilians who had nothing to do with the drug trade. Gutiérrez’s men took anyone from poor farmers to wealthy college students for ransom, killing anyone who didn’t pay up. There were stories too of women who’d been kidnapped from their homes and sold into slavery or prostitution.
“Well now,” murmured Veronica. “I wonder if they expanded their trafficking operations to Neptune.”
Mac looked up at her.
“You think they’d take an American citizen?” Wallace asked.
“Not likely. These guys aren’t stupid. They wouldn’t want to risk bringing the FBI down on their operations,” Mac said.
Veronica started to pace. “You’re right.” She ran her hands through her hair. The curls had almost entirely fallen out by now, the flower bent and oozing a sickly sweet perfume. “Okay. What about this? What if Hayley saw something she wasn’t supposed to at the party that night? What if she, I don’t know, overheard a conversation about illegal activities? Or saw something that could be used against them in court? They might have thought they had to get rid of her.”
“Get rid of her?” Wallace’s forehead creased. “You think …”
“I don’t know,” she said grimly. “But if Hayley somehow made herself a liability, they might have decided killing her was worth the risk.”
Silence descended on the room. Veronica went and stood by the window, looking out over the street. The traffic signal flashed red. A skinny cat wove its way between garbage cans. Otherwise, nothing moved. According to her watch it was almost two.
“We should go to Lamb with this.” Mac’s voice was slow and measured, but Veronica heard the strain in it. “We should tell him these guys are cartel connected, that Hayley was getting cozy with Federico.”
Veronica thought back to her conversation with Lamb. He’d done his telltale hair flick and avoided her eyes when she’d asked about the house. “I’m pretty sure Lamb already knows they’re cartel.” Mac bit the corner of her lip; Wallace furrowed his brow. “I mean, he hasn’t shut the party down yet—why is that? He has plenty of cause. The place is crawling with underage drinking, just for starters. But Lamb likes to be the biggest bully in the schoolyard. He wouldn’t want to take on someone like the Milenios.” She smirked. “He might even be in their pocket, for all we know.”
“Then what are we going to do?” Mac asked, her voice tense. “Cartel stuff is kind of outside our skill set, Veronica. These guys are really dangerous.”
She closed her eyes and saw Hayley there behind her lids—not as she’d been in the prim school photos on the billboards, and not as she’d been the night of her disappearance, sultry, sexy. Instead she saw her as she’d looked in the candid snapshots she’d seen in the Dewalts’ hotel room: mild, friendly, perhaps a little ingenuous. A girl who could find herself deep in trouble without quite knowing how she’d gotten there.
“I don’t know,” she said. “There’s got to be something I can do to draw them out. But I don’t know what it is yet.”
Mac laughed. The sound was shrill in the stillness.
“You’ll figure it out, though,” she said, and she sounded more scared than admiring. “It’s what you do.”
“Promise us you’re not going to do anything crazy,” Wallace said, looking nervous.
Veronica didn’t answer, not wanting to make a promise she wasn’t sure she could keep. There were answers in that house, and she might have to go back in to get them.