The Trial (Women's Murder Club 15.50)
“Ready,” I said to Brady, Conklin, and Barry Schein, the new rising star of the DA’s office. “No better time than now.”
Chapter 8
When Kingfisher began his campaign against me, I read everything I could find on him.
From the sparse reports and sightings I knew that the five-foot-six Mexican man who was now sitting in Interrogation 1 with his hands cuffed and chained to a hook on the table had been running drugs since before he was ten and had picked up the nickname Martin Pescador. That was Spanish for kingfisher, a small, bright-colored fishing bird with a prominent beak.
By the time Sierra was twenty, he was an officer in the Los Toros cartel, a savage paramilitary operation that specialized in drug sales up and down the West Coast and points east. Ten years later Kingfisher led a group of his followers in a coup, resulting in a bloody rout that left headless bodies from both sides decomposing in the desert.
Los Toros was the bigger loser, and the new cartel, led by Kingfisher, was called Mala Sangre, a.k.a. Bad Blood.
Along with routine beheadings and assassinations, Mala Sangre regularly stopped busloads of people traveling along a stretch of highway. The elderly and children were killed immediately. Young women were raped before execution, and the men were forced to fight each other to the death, gladiator style.
Kingfisher’s publicity campaign worked. He owned the drug trade from the foot of Mexico to the head of Northern California. He became immensely rich and topped all of law enforcement’s “Most Wanted” lists, but he rarely showed himself. He changed homes frequently and ran his business from a laptop and by burner phones, and the Mexican police were notoriously bought and paid for by his cartel.
It was said that he had conjugal visits with his wife, Elena, but she had eluded attempts to tail her to her husband’s location.
I was thinking about that as I stood with Brady, Conklin, and Schein behind the mirrored glass of the interrogation room. We were quickly joined by chief of police Warren Jacobi and a half dozen interested narcotics and robbery inspectors who had reasonably given up hope of ever seeing Kingfisher in custody.
Now we had him but didn’t own him.
Could we put together an indictable case in a day and a half? Or would the Feds walk all over us?
Normally, my partner was the good cop and I was the hard-ass. I liked when Richie took the lead and set a trusting tone, but Kingfisher and I had history. He’d threatened my life.
Rich opened the door to the interrogation room, and we took the chairs across from the probable mass killer.
No one was more primed to do this interrogation than me.
Chapter 9
The King looked as common as dirt in his orange jumpsuit and chrome-plated bracelets. But he wasn’t ordinary at all. I thought through my opening approach. I could play up to him, try to get on his side and beguile him with sympathy, a well-tested and successful interview technique. Or I could go badass.
In the end I pitched right down the center.
I looked him in the eyes and said, “Hello again, Mr. Sierra. The ID in your wallet says that you’re Geraldo Rivera.”
He smirked.
“That’s cute. What’s your real name?”
He smirked again.
“Okay if I call you Jorge Sierra? Facial recognition software says that’s who you are.”
“It’s your party, Officer.”
“That’s Sergeant. Since it’s my party, Mr. Sierra it is. How about we do this the easiest and best way. You answer some questions for me so we can all call it a night. You’re
tired. I’m tired. But the internet is crackling. FBI wants you, and so do the Mexican authorities, who are already working on extradition papers. They are salivating.”
“Everyone loves me.”
I put the driver’s licenses of Lucille Stone and Cameron Whittaker on the table.
“What were your relationships to these two women?”
“They both look good to me, but I never saw either one of them before.”