I was holding on to her arms, and she was trying to pull free, but even then, as terrified as she was, her gaze met mine. “You don’t understand. The FBI is going to kill me! I can’t trust anyone and––”
“You can trust him,” I vowed, raising my voice. “He’s my partner.”
“You just said that he––”
“Not that kind of partner,” I told her.
She stopped trying to yank free, stopped struggling, and froze, her eyes wide.
“He’s the life kind of partner, not the work kind.”
And as soon as she understood what I was saying to her, that I was talking about someone I was in a relationship with, she let out a long, deep surrendering sigh right before she dissolved into relieved tears.
Ella Guzman was sitting beside me at the dining room table, holding my hand and sipping a calming cup of chamomile tea. Dallas, Ryder Lund, and Reina Montez, along with three DEA agents, had filled in the seats around us.
“Let me get this straight,” Montez began, “you’re telling us that Special Agent Andrew Murray is running a drug cartel in Sinaloa and is systematically killing DEA agents?”
“Yes,” Ella said, putting her cup down and taking a shaky breath. “He’s been deep undercover, as you know, for five years now, and during that time he became Ruben Suárez’s right hand.”
“So all the intel he’s sent us over the years has been bogus,” Dallas chimed in.
“Not bogus, just not incriminating to Suárez or anyone in his organization. He gave you the names of rivals, or those who’d double-crossed them, but no one important.”
“But now Suárez is dead?” Montez spoke again.
“Yes. Two months ago. When he kidnapped Lane Stanton, Murray wanted no part of that. He worried that her abduction would bring unwarranted attention.”
“Which it did,” Lund agreed.
“Which it did, yes,” she said, glancing at him before returning her focus to Montez. “So Murray executed a coup, relieved Suárez of his organization, and grabbed Lane and stashed her in a luxury villa in Puerto Vallarta for safekeeping. His plan was to show up, kill the men guarding her, and deliver her to you, making himself look like a hero in the process before returning to Mexico a decorated agent.”
“He would have killed his own men?” Montez asked Ella.
She nodded. “Yes. It would have been plausibly blamed on the FBI.”
“But the people back in…oh,” Lund said, understanding at once. “No one in Mexico has any idea he’s an FBI agent.”
“That’s right.”
“So to us, he’d look like a hero for saving Lane and killing Suárez and his henchmen, and to them, he’d have escaped the FBI’s clutches and saved the organization. He’d have been a hero to both sides,” I ventured.
“Exactly,” Ella confirmed. “Then, of course, he put out the hit on Suárez himself. His men finally found and assassinated him and his family, because Murray told them that Suárez had made a deal with the Guardia Nacional to become their informant in exchange for immunity from prosecution.”
“Why would anyone believe him?”
“Murray was Suárez’s right hand, and it’s easy enough to point to the missing cash if you’re the one who’s skimming it to begin with.”
Montez sighed deeply. “So that’s why we had to wait until today. Murray was trying to figure out how to get here to take credit for rescuing Lane while stalling us with this bogus plan to return Lane in exchange for whatever he was going to blackmail Brig Stanton with.”
“Yes. He needed you to believe Suárez was still alive.”
“Then he didn’t expect you and Maria Elena and the others to return.”
“Not the men, but Maria and me, certainly. He could have told you any story, that he was turning us out or using us for intel—whatever he wanted once he was a hero.”
“But we would have figured out who you were.”
“How? There’s no way he could’ve predicted that you and I knew each other. As far as he knew, he had plenty of time. And again, why would you have doubted him?”
“How did you even end up with Suárez and Murray to begin with?”
This was the part I wanted to know.
“I was stationed in Guadalajara, following the money that moved through the cartel. That’s what I do, I’m a forensic accountant, and I work for the Financial Management Division in the Office of Finance.”
I remembered that about her, her love of all things math, and how I was interested in figuring out the crime and how she wanted to prove it. Yet another reason why we’d made good partners; we had thrived together.
“A little more than a year ago, I caught a break and found that a shell corporation that had previously been tagged as belonging to Suárez, actually belonged to Jorge Silva,” she explained to all of us, scooching her chair a bit closer to me. “And Silva turned out to be Murray.”