ad been a paradise with snakes, indeed. It’s what kept my nostalgia for what had been lost from slipping into the lie of sentimentality. But I admitted to myself that I was way behind on the gangs of today, aside from knowing they were large, sophisticated, and deadly. That knowledge rarely penetrated my office in the old courthouse, where the crimes were as old as the architecture around me and where Peralta deliberately kept me segregated from the rest of the Sheriff’s Office.
“Did you know this subject, Sheriff?” Vare asked, tilting her sharp chin toward the corpse.
“I met him once. Seemed nice enough.” Peralta slid off the gloves and handed them to one of the young cops. There’d been a time, when the Arizona Dreams case was busted open, when I thought Peralta and Robin might actually become an item. It had never happened and I didn’t know why. That was fine with both Lindsey and me. It would have led to too many complications. And we still missed Peralta’s ex-wife Sharon. Mike as chief deputy and then sheriff, Sharon as a psychologist and best-selling author: They were a power couple without airs. It seemed impossible to imagine him with anyone else. Knowing him, I suspected he didn’t want anyone trying to get close now. The cops, that was what he was all about, and now even that was gone. Of course, he didn’t lack for job offers, all of them paying more than the post of Maricopa County Sheriff. I wondered for a few seconds where he might end up. It helped shave the edge off my emotions.
Peralta stepped back and thrust his hands into his pockets, pushing back his wide-cut suit coat enough so that I could see the .45 in his shoulder rig. He faced Vare. “So why would Professor Delgado here have ended up with La Fam? Unless he wasn’t who he claimed to be…”
“That’s the whole deal!” Vare’s voice trembled in agitation. I felt my chest grow tight. “He’s a fraud. There’s no Jax Delgado on the NYU faculty, contrary to what Mapstone and the girl keep telling me.” She glared at me. “Oh, you’re surprised?”
“How…?” It was all I could manage.
“He’s not on the faculty. Nobody by that name. Nobody matching his description. We emailed a photo. No, Mapstone, we didn’t wait. We woke people up. This is a major case. Somebody beheaded by La Familia in Phoenix, or a La Fam copycat—whatever—and the head shipped to a woman who lives in a historic district? If the media get hold of this it won’t be just another forgotten asshole-on-asshole homicide in Scaryvale.”
“What about this cat’s ID?”
“No wallet, nothing on the body. No clothes left.” She leaned toward him. “Sheriff, I hate to tell you, but the girl is lying and I wonder about Mapstone here.”
“We all do, Kate. But I’m going to give them a ride home now. You got your positive ID. You know where to find Mapstone and Robin.”
“What’s that under the drill?” I said.
I had been desperately searching for gravity as they were talking and my eyes had wandered. Something the color of dull silver was sitting beneath handle of the power drill.
Vare just stood there, as if anything I said was illegitimate, but Peralta took out a cheap plastic pen and slightly lifted the tool from the floor. I was expecting to see a bolt and learn some new, unwanted information about torture, but no. Underneath was a ring. Vare knelt—her knees cracked—and lifted it in her gloved hand. Peralta gently let the drill down exactly where it had sat.
“Shit.” She said it quietly. Then she held it up for the sheriff to see.
He bent towards her, squinting. “It might be a copycat,” he said. “A wanna-be.”
“Maybe,” she said, unconvinced. “It looks like platinum. Not cheap.”
I moved over to them, bent down on my haunches. It was a man’s signet ring with a sharp engraving protruding from it.
It was an image of a rattlesnake’s head.
I said, “Kate, it’s you.”
“Asshole,” she said quietly.
“El Verdugo.” Peralta spoke with gravity and fluency. My Spanish was rusty but I knew the word. “The executioner.” Nobody said anything for at least a minute.
I held out my hands, waiting.
Vare sounded like my fourth-grade teacher lecturing the bad kids in the front row. “Pedro Alejandro Vega. Big-time hit man for the Sinaloa cartel. When he kills, he leaves the ring’s implant on the victim’s forehead. Like an artist signing a painting.”
“I’ve never seen Jax wear that ring.”
“That doesn’t mean shit,” Vare said. “There’s no photo of Vega. He’s never been arrested. He’s almost like a folklore legend in the narcocorridos.” She rolled her r’s, something I could never master, using the word for the songs that romanticized the exploits of the drug world. “Your Jax could easily be Pedro Vega. And then, I’ve got a whole list of new questions for you and this Robin Bryson.”
“Whatever.” Anger burned my throat. I processed, trying to see the world as it was, not as I wanted it to be. The foulness of the air was now in my taste buds.
“If La Fam killed El Verdugo…” Vare was talking to herself, tucking her head down, saying words that would confuse any Iowans who just moved to town but were obviously of great interest to the PPD. She dropped the ring into a plastic evidence envelope, muttered profanities. “What the hell was he doing in Phoenix, posing as a college professor?”
“That’s not my problem, Kate,” I said. “Sounds like a gang-unit deal, and you can go back to trying to close screwed-up cases from the eighties.”
5
I stalked out into the sunlight where Robin was leaning against the hood of Peralta’s black Crown Victoria, her sunglasses on, staring down a street of bank-owned houses that was empty except for the police cars. A crime-scene van was pulling up. The two plainclothes deputies in Peralta’s security detail sat in another Crown Vic. They waved. I nodded. I felt like a chump. It was okay. It was a good feeling, in fact, like the clean air I was sucking in to get the smell of dead body to leave my head.