The Silent Widow

Nikki’s face fell.

‘It’s early days,’ Williams reminded her. ‘We’ll get to the girl eventually, believe me. And what I do have for you,’ he looked at her proudly, ‘is a pretty awesome start, if I say so myself.’

‘OK,’ Nikki sighed. She could use a shot of awesome right now. ‘Impress me.’

Derek Williams cleared his throat. ‘So I read everything you gave me, all the information. And I decided to start with Trey Raymond.’

He told Nikki about his trip out to Westmont, which began as a simple tail on Detective Johnson. ‘Luckily for me, our favorite racist cop made things real easy for me, throwing his weight around and antagonizing everyone from the Raymond family to the neighborhood dealers he was trying to pump for information. It won’t come as any surprise that no one told him anything. After that, all I had to do was walk in and be civil and the floodgates opened.’

Nikki waited for him to go on.

‘Trey stopped using two years ago, shortly after he met your husband.’

‘That’s right,’ Nikki confirmed. ‘Doug brought him back from the brink.’

‘He did,’ Williams agreed. ‘But things weren’t that simple. Before he got clean, Trey had been dealing to feed his habit. Heroin, mostly. But later, at the end, he was pushing a new kind of desomorphine. It’s codeine-based and it’s incredibly nasty stuff. The street name for it is Krokodil.’

‘I know what it is,’ said Nikki. ‘Doug’s partner, Haddon Defoe, says they’re running into it all the time at the clinic. It’s horrific. He said the Russians introduced it.’

‘That’s right,’ said Williams, impressed. ‘Well, Trey had been working for a Mexican cartel, in competition with the Russians, before he met your husband. The guys he was working for back then, they don’t believe in “fresh starts”. I don’t think they ever had any intention of letting him walk away.’

‘But he did walk away,’ Nikki insisted. ‘Doug took him under his wing and Trey totally changed his life. I gave him a job. Trey came to work in my office every day, always on time, always professional.’

‘That was his day job,’ Williams said bluntly. ‘I don’t doubt your husband was a good man, Nikki, but for someone who worked closely with addicts, I’m afraid he was incredibly naive about the business side of the narcotics world. Trey’s “other” boss was a Mexican drug lord by the name of Carlos de la Rosa.’

He looked up at Nikki, but the name obviously meant nothing to her. She was still in shock at the idea that Trey had been dealing drugs behind everyone’s back.

‘Do you think this man was the one who killed Trey? Or had him killed?’

‘I don’t know for sure. But I’d say it was a fairly safe bet, especially if Trey was trying to walk away, like you said, or had defied him in some way. De la Rosa is a big fish in Westmont,’ Williams explained. ‘But he’s small fry in the world of the cartels. His boss is a far, far more dangerous man. And that’s where this gets really interesting.’

‘Who’s his boss?’ Nikki asked.

‘Believe it or not, Dr Roberts, it’s someone you know. Or at least know of. Luis Domingo Rodriguez.’

Nikki frowned, trying to place the name.

‘Your patient Anne Bateman is his estranged wife,’ said Williams. Turning around his laptop, he showed Nikki a picture on Google Images of a suave, attractive, Latin man with black hair graying at the temples and intense, watchful eyes.

Nikki looked confused. ‘I think you must be mistaken, Mr Williams. Or gotten your wires crossed somehow. Anne’s husband is a real-estate developer.’

‘Please, call me Derek,’ Williams reminded her. ‘And I’m not mistaken. Luis Rodriguez married Anne Bateman in a private ceremony in Costa Rica eight years ago. I can show you a copy of the marriage certificate if you’re interested. I was interested because I’ve run across Luis Rodriguez before on an old case. It was a missing persons case officially, although unofficially everybody knows the girl was murdered. Have you ever heard of Charlotte Clancy?’

Nikki closed her eyes and rubbed her temples. Her conversation with Gretchen a few weeks ago suddenly came back to her. Charlotte Clancy, the au pair? The one Valentina Baden had been looking for? Nikki felt as if she’d somehow slipped into the twilight zone, some bizarre alternate universe where everybody’s lives were joined together by mysterious dark forces in a spider’s web of misery. A world where Trey was a drug dealer, and Anne’s husband was a drug lord. None of it made any sense at all.

‘But … Anne told me her husband worked in real estate,’ she repeated numbly, trying desperately to cling to reality. ‘That’s how he made his fortune.’

‘No,’ said Williams. ‘It’s how he invests his fortune. He made it twenty years ago, flooding Western US cities with cocaine.’

For the next fifteen minutes, Derek filled Nikki in on the case that had turned his life upside down – Charlotte Clancy’s disappearance. He told her how he’d hoped Luis Rodriguez might lead him to Charlotte’s secret, married lover, the Jaguar-driving American who Williams felt sure had had a hand in her disappearance. But how, instead, he’d been abducted by Mexican cops, beaten severely and deported back to the States. He told her how Valentina Baden and her charity had purported to ‘help’ the Clancys, paying for TV adverts about their daug

hter’s disappearance, but had in fact been investigating all along in Mexico City and hiding information from the family. And how once he got back home he’d been visited by the FBI and ‘warned off’ from looking into the Badens or Rodriguez, again and again and again.

‘Rodriguez wasn’t even my main focus at that time,’ he explained to Nikki. ‘I don’t think Luis was directly responsible for Charlie Clancy’s disappearance, only that he might have known the man who was. And Valentina Baden might have known him too. But when everybody’s telling you not to look at someone, not to ask questions … you get curious. At least, I do. So over the years I learned a lot about Luis Rodriguez.’

‘Such as?’ Nikki asked. She’d long been fascinated by the strange, Svengali-like hold Anne’s husband seemed to have over her. Perhaps Williams could fill in the blanks?

‘Well, for one thing, the man is basically two people. A real Jekyll-and-Hyde character. He came up from nothing, which makes him a hero to a lot of the poor over there. They see him as some sort of Robin Hood figure, and in a way he is. He gives away a ton of money, especially to drug-related causes. The whole of Mexico knows the story of his sister’s death from heroin addiction, how it changed his life.’