Empire Read online

  He chuckled. ‘That was before. This is now. Do you have any idea how fucking marvellous you are at what you do? I was going to shoot you that night, and you insisted on coming with me. You’ve only got yourself to blame, dear.’

  I couldn’t stop crying. The pain! I just wanted him to get his hands away from me.

  ‘You try and leave, and I’ll find you, Ana,’ he continued. ‘I’ll find you and I’ll make you watch while I kill that boy in front of you.’ He returned his black eyes to me and grinned.

  It wasn’t over. It would never be over.

  Solemnly, Guillermo and I stood over the suitcase; over the dead infant lying on his side in a swathe of blankets, dressed in a pale yellow jumpsuit, already cold, his skin waxy and pale in death, face frozen in an eternal sleep, on his side, as if someone tucked him up in his bed and left him to die.

  Only, I know he hadn’t just been left to die. He’d been killed. Smothered, probably. And I knew who was responsible.

  Somewhere in the background, a phone started to ring. It was mine. In slow motion, I reached for it.

  I pressed answer and switched the phone to speaker mode, holding it in front of me so that Guillermo could hear. I didn’t speak. I couldn’t speak.

  ‘I take it by your screams that you opened your gift,’ Emilio said, the only things filling the room his voice, and death.

  ‘Why?’ I asked, my voice anguished beyond recognition.

  ‘Your gift, Mariana. A lesson.’

  ‘What lesson?’ I cried. ‘What lesson!?’

  ‘An important lesson. Are you ready?’

  I didn’t answer. I was reeling.

  ‘Don’t ever try to tempt fate,’ Emilio said coldly. His words barely broke the surface of my reality. Because there was a fucking suitcase on my kitchen table with a dead baby inside it.

  I dropped the phone, and the screen cracked, turning black. Guillermo’s fingers were on my arm, I realised, digging in painfully. I looked down at his hand as if I were moving in slow motion, feeling the way he trembled violently against my flesh.

  ‘I didn’t sign up for this,’ he said hoarsely. ‘Nah, man, no fucking way. I didn’t sign up for this.’

  I tilted my head to the side, getting a better look at the baby boy.

  Button nose.

  Dark hair.

  Rosebud lips.

  Dead.

  I reached my hand out to touch his cheek, knowing it’d be cold but unable to stop myself. I was a mother, after all. My instinct said to nurture, to protect, even if this child was too far gone. Guillermo tugged my arm back forcefully before I could make contact.

  ‘What?’ I asked dumbly. That ringing in my ears – the buzzing noise that wouldn’t go away for weeks after Murphy – it was back. It filled my head with a reverberating whine that was as excruciating as it was bleak.

  A car revved loudly outside, and Guillermo left the suitcase long enough to peer out of the window next to the front door.

  ‘He’s gone,’ he said.

  Emilio had gotten what he came for. My horror. My screams. Now he could continue his day, having ticked the box Fuck with Mariana’s head.

  Guillermo slowly folded the suitcase lid shut, the tiny body disappearing from view.

  ‘Wait,’ I said weakly. ‘We have to call the police.’ An image of Lindsay Price floated somewhere in my racing thoughts, the FBI agent who’d accosted me in the women’s showers at my gym. I had to call him.

  Guillermo glared at me with bloodshot eyes. ‘The fuck did you just say?’

  ‘The police. The FBI. We have to call someone. Guillermo, it’s a baby!’

  He eyed me wearily. ‘You want to get killed?’ he asked, abandoning the suitcase midway through zipping it up. There was a baby in there. Fuck. The room was starting to spin and I wanted to be sick.

  ‘Please don’t close it,’ I whispered.

  ‘What the fuck is wrong with you?’ Guillermo snapped. ‘You want to get him out and read him a fuckin’ bedtime story before we put him in the ground? He’s DEAD.’

  I knew it was illogical, but . . . ‘If you zip it, he won’t be able to get any air.’

  ‘Get in the car,’ Guillermo hissed. ‘Now. Kid’s cold. He’s been dead for hours. Days, even. He ain’t ever gonna need fucking air.’

  ‘Wait,’ I stalled, desperate. ‘Why are we going in the car? Where are we going?’

  Guillermo looked like he was about to rip my head off. ‘We gotta get rid of this, Ana. Your DNA’s all over it. Mine, too. If this is a set-up, then they set us up good. No cleaner purification than fire.’

  ‘We’re going to set him on fire?’

  Guillermo made the sign of the cross and murmured some silent prayer to the ceiling. ‘Crematorium.’

  Oh.

  ‘Why would they set us up?’ I asked, bile rising in my throat. I put a hand to my chest and made a gagging sound. ‘Guillermo, why would they set us up?’

  He glared at me as he keyed in the combination for the front door lock. ‘Maybe they think we’ve been disloyal.’

  I couldn’t be certain, but I was pretty sure the tone in his voice was accusation.

  I thought about that as Guillermo yanked the front door open with his right hand, the suitcase in his left. I thought about all of the ways I’d been disloyal to the cartel, and there were plenty. A carefully constructed web of deceit. I thought of the blood on my own hands, the blood on John’s, the sins we’d indulged in, both collectively and apart.

  I followed Guillermo from the apartment, unable to speak, unable to rip the image of the poor child from my mind.

  CHAPTER THREE

  LINDSAY

  Agent Lindsay Price was eyeing a plate of mystery meat when a call came through on his cellphone. He was at the FBI’s training facility in Quantico giving a lecture on interrogation techniques, and briefly considered going back into the cafeteria kitchen and interrogating the chef until they told him what he’d be puking up in about three hours.

  In the end, he was relieved that he’d gotten the call, for two reasons.

  One, because even airplane food was better than this shit, and he’d be calling his day short to high-tail it back to Los Angeles.

  Two, because of the reason he was being summoned back to LA.

  A body had washed up on the banks of the Los Angeles River – the part that was actually flowing, way up near Long Beach – badly decomposed and virtually unidentifiable.

  Except they’d already run a preliminary swab of DNA sample through CODIS and come up with a match.

  A DEA agent by the name of Alexandra Baxter.

  ***

  Eight gruelling hours of cabs, turbulence, shitty plane food and LA traffic later, and with a Venti Americano in hand from the Starbucks inside LAX, Lindsay was standing on the edge of the Los Angeles River, watching as police divers searched the bay for anything that might provide clues as to how this woman had come to her end. It was already night back on the East Coast and Lindsay was tired, but giddy, at the same time. He’d been tracking Baxter and her crooked partner, Christopher Murphy, for over a year, their roles in a wider web of corruption and compliance with the Il Sangue drug cartel something he was determined to crack. The problem was, the further he dug into the case, the wider the hole got, filled with tip-offs and trafficked women and missing persons that stretched across the globe. It was a case that saw him come up against brick walls every single day, and so this body was like someone finally taking a sledgehammer through one of those walls and saying, ‘Here, step on into this crazy shit.’

  There’d been no leads, save for that one woman. Mariana Rodriguez. She was definitely involved in the bigger picture somehow. Lindsay had spent countless hours combing through her life, her history. Had it not been for the frequent visits Christopher Murphy made to her apartment in the weeks before his death, Lindsay wouldn’t have even known she existed.

  But she did exist.

  And her father had once worked for the cartel, many years
ago, before he and the rest of his family turned up dead in a house fire, their hands and feet still bound in death, despite the flames demolishing everything else. Even the walls of their small house in Villanueva hadn’t survived the fire, but the bindings on their hands and feet had. A painful way to die.

  Drowning was meant to be much more peaceful, but the after-effects on a corpse could be horrific. Lindsay scanned the river’s edge, locating a white tent that was no doubt shrouding the body in question.

  He made his way over to the tent, the afternoon sun warming his face. Despite being November, it was like a spring day in Los Angeles, much different to chilly Virginia, where he’d been hours earlier. He didn’t walk too quickly as he approached the plastic tent the medical examiner had erected. Nobody needed to see what he was about to see a moment sooner than was absolutely necessary.

  He was already on good terms with Kathryn Donovan, the city’s Chief Medical Examiner, having worked many cases together over the years he’d served with the FBI’s organised crime division in LA. Squatting beside the body, she greeted him with a raise of her eyebrows, the rest of her pale face obscured by the surgical mask tied tightly to her head.

  ‘I figured you’d be at the morgue by now,’ Lindsay said by way of greeting.

  Dr Donovan tilted her head, stripping her gloves and mask off and dropping them into a makeshift trash can as she stood. ‘That for me?’ she asked, practically prising the lukewarm coffee from Lindsay’s hand and pouring a slug into her mouth. Lindsay watched, amused, as she made a face and let the liquid pour back out of her pursed lips and into the cup.

  ‘That’s terrible,’ she said, handing the now useless brew back to Lindsay as she motioned an assistant for fresh gloves. She snapped hers on before handing a pair to Lindsay. No face mask? he wanted to ask her, but didn’t dare. He tossed his beloved Starbucks cup in the trash and pulled his own set of gloves on, finally looking head-on at the long-lost body of Alexandra Baxter.

  It wasn’t a pretty sight.

  ‘Guess she’s not been sunning herself in the Virgin Islands like we thought,’ Lindsay mused, standing near enough to Kathryn that their shoulders almost touched. It was close quarters in a small tent like this.

  ‘Nope,’ Kathryn said beside him. ‘And by the way, the only reason we’re not back at the morgue already is because we’ve been waiting on you. So thank you. I now get to spend all day and all night with this delightfully perplexing young woman.’

  Lindsay was grateful for the small talk. It distracted from the grisly image at his feet.

  Allie had been a pretty girl in life, but death had stripped that beauty away. Her long red hair was missing large chunks, and her face looked as if it had melted like a candle left in the midday sun. Features flattened, merging into one another, lips pulled back over teeth that looked entirely inhuman from the damage the water and elements had done. The clothes that still clung to her body had fused with her skin, and one of her feet was gone. Somebody might’ve removed it prior to her death, but more likely the fish or some sudden impact would have taken it clean off underwater.

  Lindsay had seen bodies pulled from the water before. They often looked intact until you touched them and flesh started to come away in your gloved hands. Water and dead bodies didn’t mix well, and nobody ever wanted to attend them. Fishing suicides out of the LA River was something they made rookies do.

  But this wasn’t suicide.

  This was a cop.

  A cop who had mysteriously come into possession of tens of thousands of dollars six months ago, and promptly disappeared.

  ‘Sorry,’ Lindsay said. ‘You know the drill. Federal case, they make me walk the crime scene before the body’s allowed to leave.’

  Kathryn nodded, crouching again beside the body and motioning for Lindsay to do the same. Reluctantly, he squatted on his haunches, feeling the burn in his thighs from his weight training that morning. 6 a.m. now seemed like it had been years ago.

  ‘You okay there?’ Kathryn said, side-eyeing the way Lindsay’s legs were trembling.

  He nodded. ‘Thanks for sticking around, Katie. I owe you hot coffee on the way back to the office.’

  ‘Huh,’ she said. ‘You owe me dinner at the Roosevelt and a night of mind-blowing sex, at the very least.’

  Lindsay stifled the urge to laugh, only for the fact that there was a dead body about five inches from his leather shoe. He’d never slept with Kathryn. She was as dry-witted as they came, as inappropriate as a foul-mouthed teenage girl looking to get a reaction out of her parents. She possessed no filter. The thing about her job, though, was that she didn’t need one. It wasn’t as if the dead could take offence, much less speak back.

  Luckily, she was damned good at her job. Lindsay had long since suspected that her sarcastic, inappropriate comments were a way of trying to lighten the heavy film of death that covered her existence.

  Kathryn launched into a long spiel of clinical observations and hypotheses about the body. She lifted one of Allie’s arms – gently, so it didn’t detach from her bloated corpse – and showed Lindsay just how advanced decomposition was.

  Allie had been submerged, or floating along currents, for what looked like several months. It was a miracle she’d remained intact, what with the water and the weather, not to mention the sea creatures that were all looking for a free meal. As if on cue, a tiny crab crawled out of a neat hole in Allie’s chest and darted along her collarbone before disappearing underneath her ragged red hair.

  Lindsay’s stomach turned at the thought the crab had just been eating whatever was left inside her.

  After they’d examined the body, Kathryn and Lindsay walked the scene in a grid, starting on the shore and ending up barefoot and wading out into the shallows.

  There was nothing, of course. Nothing to signal what had happened, or where. Allie could have been dumped in the water hundreds of miles away, or a few hundred feet. If this had been Florida, Lindsay’s last port of call, gators would have found Allie long before any human did. The sneaky fuckers found bodies and stashed them deep underwater, in small caves or under logs, macabre keepsakes until their hunger stirred again and they decided to eat their catch.

  But they weren’t in Florida, and Allie Baxter had not been made into swamp feed, and now it was up to Lindsay to figure out how this young fellow officer had found her watery grave.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  MARIANA

  ‘Guillermo,’ I said.

  He didn’t answer.

  ‘Guillermo.’

  He white-knuckled the steering wheel. ‘What?’

  We drove along the freeway, windows down, my hair flying around my face wildly in the breeze. It was the weekend and the I-5 was relatively clear, a small mercy.

  ‘I’m going in,’ I declared boldly.

  Guillermo ripped his eyes from the road and stared at me until I was squirming in my seat, wishing he’d pay attention to where he was driving.

  ‘To Emilio?’

  I shook my head. ‘With the . . . baby.’

  ‘To the crematorium? No fucking way.’ He slapped his hand against the wheel, agitated. ‘My life was never this complicated until you turned up. You got a way of pissing people off, you know?’

  I might have grown a skin of steel, but his words found chinks in my armour and sliced deep. I sagged back in my seat, deflated, feeling the last bits of my strength bleed out through the cracks.

  I squinted against the bright sun, a sun that sat bloated and accusing in the sky. I’d forgotten my sunglasses. The sunlight hurt. Everything hurt.

  I rested my elbow on the sill of my open window, feeling warm air as it whipped past us. Any other day and this might be an enjoyable outing. Sunday was normally the one day when I could do something outside of the cartel. Go to the beach. Swim. Or, more frequently, lie on my bathroom floor and stare up at the exhaust fan as it turned lazily in the ceiling, for hours, as I recounted every single moment of Murphy’s death. The moment he took his last
breath, exhaled it, and breathed into me the reality that I was a killer. As the tiles chilled my skin, I’d think about how much blood he’d had inside him, the way it had soaked into my sheets and the carpet on my bedroom floor, his life force, gone, because of me. About how it would look to be slid into an oven, a bloodless corpse, and now I was about to see just what it looked like.

  ‘How could anyone do that to a child?’ I whispered.

  ‘He didn’t just do it to no child,’ Guillermo said. ‘He did it to you.’

  I leaned forward in my seat, pressing my palms against my eyes until it hurt. The physical pain was a welcome relief from the way my heart was shattering into a million bloody pieces inside my ribcage.

  ‘You know,’ Guillermo said, ‘maybe it’s better this way. That kid, he’d be put to work in a fucking kiddie porn house, or worse.’

  I took my hands away from my eyes and sat up, facing Guillermo. ‘There’s worse?’

  He fixed me with a stare. ‘There’s always worse.’

  I sagged in my seat, wiping more tears from my cheeks. My pores hurt where the saltwater had seeped in. I’d only been awake a few hours, but I was exhausted. One look at Guillermo told me that he looked how I felt.

  ***

  It took too long to get to where we were going. I counted three police cruisers on our journey and wondered each time if we’d be pulled over. Guillermo’s car was nondescript, a late-model Nissan that looked more like a soccer-mom vehicle, but the window tint wasn’t quite dark enough to hide the gang tattoos that had been etched across his neck and all over his arms for the world to see and judge. He was like a magnet for attention, and so each time I saw a police car I cringed and waited for the flash of lights to tell us to pull over.

  But of course, nothing happened. Nothing ever did when you were expecting it to. It was only when you were caught off-guard that the nightmarish realities happened.

  I thought about calling John. Realised that would mean Guillermo would hear. Decided that was too risky.

  Shit.

  Guillermo pulled into the back of the funeral home and cut the engine, neither of us saying anything for a moment. I kept having paranoid thoughts that I could smell the death that sat on the backseat, encased in a plastic sarcophagus, but it was just my mind playing tricks on me. I think.