Buena Rosa Chapter Six

Chapter Six
They managed to find the place Flip had told them about without any problem. Little white crosses and bouquets of marigold marked the spot better than police tape could. Snowflake pulled over to the opposite shoulder and threw the truck into a rumbling idle. Manuel slid out, then went around the front of the truck to the arroyo. He looked back the way they had come, then around the horizon, squinting against the sun.
He crouched and looked at the small crosses. “Muriel” was written on two of them in magic marker. Manuel looked back towards the factory, the smokestack and southern wall clearly visible around the side of a hill. “This isn’t the place.”
Snowflake looked skeptical. He was well versed in looking skeptical. “Isn’t this where the kid said they found the body? Do you think maybe he was lying to you?”
Looking closely at the memorial revealed marigold petals strewn all over near the site, scattered by the breezes. The flowers had been there several days. “You see this?” Manuel pointed to the petals. “These are cempasúchil petals. It’s a species of marigold, and these have been here a while, probably since the body was discovered. The Aztecs used them to remember their dead, thinking they would guide the spirits of their dead loved ones to their altars or home and then to the afterlife. A lot of people in Mexico still grow them just for use as offerings. Around el Dia de los Muertos, these things are everywhere.”
“So, this was where people were, um, told the body was found, then?”
Manuel looked down the steep embankment to the bottom of the arroyo six feet below. It narrowed there, and a sand bar created a tight bend. The body snagged there. That’s why it was found here. “No, they found it here, but it was dumped somewhere else. Didn’t you say they found it after a big rainstorm?”
“Yeah, the next day.”
“Then we need to look upstream from here.” Manuel looked towards the factory tower and adjusted the topography in his head to make the hill line up with the plume of smoke. “It might be a ways. Maybe a mile down the way we’re already pointing.”
“Boss, I don’t mean to burst your bubble, but there isn’t any creek to be downstream on. Its just a ditch.”
“It might just be a ditch now, but the night of the rainstorm it was a river, at least for a few hours. Then when it stopped raining, the water had either run off or been absorbed back into the ground. If someone buried the body close to the edge of the arroyo, then the water could have broken the body free, or coyotes could have dug it out prior to the rain. Either way, we aren’t going to find any clues here. We need to go back to the source.”
Snowflake sighed, recognizing that he wasn’t the detective of the two and it was best to let Manuel do what he did. But it frustrated him that the great detective wasn’t even watching the road and instead had his head turned back towards Buena Rosa until he called a sudden halt just over a mile later in an utterly unremarkable location. With little except scrub brush, dirt, and cactus, this stretch of road offered nothing distinctive, nothing worth notice, but Snowflake was along for support and pulled over as instructed.
Hopping out of the cab nimbly Manuel forgot that his legs couldn’t hold his weight in that way anymore, and he had to grab the door to keep from pitching into the sagebrush. He felt it as soon as the factory disappeared behind the hill, the darkness spreading beneath the soil. It was almost overpowering, and he knew this was it. This is where the dead spilled their secrets. This is where he had seen Muriel the first time, in that vision back at his desk in far off Cobalt City.
The scent of sun-baked dust, sagebrush, and piñon was unmistakable. A glance up the road showed a narrow bridge, allowing vehicle access to the vast emptiness. From his vantage point on the other side of the road, Manuel could see the burned down foundation of a small house, all but lost in an overgrowth of shrubs. It was a perfect dump site. Close, but with limited access, and in an area where no one was likely to discover the body for some time.
If not for the coyotes or rain or any number of random, unpredictable events that could have led to Muriel being found, she would still be out there.
Manuel made his way to the other side of the road with Snowflake at his side. “Look out over there and tell me what you see.” Manuel indicated the other side of the arroyo with a tilt of his chin.
Snowflake looked long and hard, opening his mouth a few times to offer an answer then stopping. Finally he had to trust his first instinct. “A whole lot of nothing.”
“A good place to hide bodies.”
Snowflake’s eyes narrowed. “You think there are more people buried out there?”
“This town has an awful lot of missing people. Some of them might have headed for the border, tried to make it to America. But if that were the case, I don’t expect that their families would want to draw attention to it by putting up fliers.”
They started walking up the side of the road towards the small bridge, Manuel watching the ground closely for any kind of tracks or other clue. Other than coyote and white-tailed jackrabbit, he wasn’t seeing much of anything.
“How many people, do you think?”
Manuel couldn’t answer. He wanted to think it was maybe a dozen, two dozen at most. But he had no way to know how long this had been going on. And his feeling was that the number was much, much higher. They had reached the bridge, and there in the dirt over the bridge were tire tracks, no more than a few days old.
“Those are standard all terrain tire treads for the Pegasus Motor trucks and SUV’s,” Snowflake said with authority. Manuel raised an eyebrow as if to question him. “Trust me. You know Mexico, I know tires. I’m not a mechanic for nothing, you know.”
“I’ll take your word for it.”
Snowflake’s attention had been drawn up, back towards town and his mouth tightened into a hard smile. “Speak of the devil. We have company.”
Directing his gaze casually back up the road, Manuel could clearly see the Buena Rosa sheriff’s vehicle rolling towards them through the heat haze on the asphalt. “Do you have a cover story you’ve been using?”
“Made a small fortune in investments, looking to retire somewhere cheap and buy some property.”
Manuel had to admit, that was a good cover. He wondered, however briefly, if Katherine had taken a hand in concocting it. “Good call. I just ran into you at the hotel and you agreed to be the Good Samaritan and drive me around, but you wanted to look at some property on the drive.”
“That’s what I was thinking. Now, smile big for the creepy police man.” Snowflake waved widely at the green and white converted SUV as it pulled to a stop behind his truck.
Manuel was not overly surprised to see Deputy Aldovar step out of the cab and walk across the road towards them. “Car trouble, gentlemen?”
Snowflake smiled. Nothing he ever drove would have car trouble, not as long as he had worked on it recently. “No, far from it. I was hoping to find out who owned this little parcel. I’m looking to buy some land and this little stretch has a lot of potential.”
Deputy Aldovar’s eyes went from Manuel to Snowflake and back again. He never lost his polite smile, but that same smile somehow failed to reach his eyes. “I don’t think it’s for sale.”
Undeterred, Snowflake went on. “Oh, everything is for sale at the right price. Do you know who owns it? Maybe I could get in touch with them and make them an offer.”
“I afraid I can’t help you. I don’t know who owns this parcel. It has been vacant for some time.”
“But you know it isn’t for sale.”
Detective Aldovar’s eyes grew flinty and dark. Manuel took the cue that his friend was so clearly missing. “I’m sure someone at city hall might know, Mr. Snow. I don’t see the potential, but I’m not the investor I guess.”
Deputy Aldovar gave Manuel his full attention. “No, you are a police officer, aren’t you, Mr. de la Vega.”
“I’m taking some time off to write a book, but yes, I’ve recently been a police detective.”
“Well, you’ll be pleased to know that I was looking for you.”
Snowflake licked his lips, trying to contain a nervous glance in Manuel’s direction. To his credit, Manuel kept his cool. He had been expecting something like this eventually, and it was good to get it out of the way early. “Well, I’m glad you found me. What is this about?”
“About? It is about your cousin of course. You can speak with Esther today. I have arranged it with Sheriff Bragga. I can give you a ride back to the station if you like.”
Every fiber in his body was screaming “No”, that this was a setup. But a turtle never got anywhere without sticking out his neck first. Manuel offered Snowflake his hand in a hearty thank-you and good-bye shake. “Good luck, Mr. Snow. I hope you find the owner without too much digging in public records.”
“Of course. And if you get tied up with your cousin, I’ll understand. Just beep me or whatever and we can get together some other night for dinner.”
Snowflake was in the truck heading back towards town in minutes, while it took a little longer for Manuel to get across the street and buckled in. He ran his fingers across the leather interior. “Very nice for a police vehicle.”
“It was donated by the manager of the Pegasus Motors plant. I think he meant to encourage faster response time to his hacienda.”
“Does he frequently need a fast response to his hacienda?”
Deputy Aldovar shrugged and started the truck. “I don’t know. He’s never called us. He has his own security to handle most of his police needs.”
That was somewhat of a surprise for Manuel. Two sets of cops meant double the fun and double the possibilities for corruption. This just kept getting better.
They arrived at the police station quickly, with Deputy Aldovar cutting through several side streets to a parking lot tucked behind a high wall topped with razor wire. The deputy indicated the security with a casual wave of the back of his hand. “Motor pool. If we parked on the street, these cars would be gone by morning. There are people here who have no respect for law. You should understand. I imagine it was the same in Mexico City.”
“There are similarities. Car theft wasn’t such a big priority, but it happened, certainly. Not to police vehicles so much.”
“Hm...maybe it is just here in Buena Rosa that they steal our cars or strip our tires?”
Manuel felt the urge to cry out, Maybe if you did your job, but a sense of self-preservation prevented him from saying anything. They pulled into a painted space alongside the building and stepped out onto the sun-hot asphalt of the parking lot. Already, a deputy that Manuel didn’t recognize was rolling the gate closed before retreating to the shade of his sentry booth. Whether it was a trap or not, they certainly had him where they wanted him.
The deputy selected a key from the mammoth key ring on his belt and unlocked a heavy, blue painted steel door at the back of the building. Manuel set his shoulders and propelled himself along after the deputy into the cool white interior of the police station jail. He followed Aldovar down several short halls, filled with solid doors with no windows, no bars – a jail full of solitary cells.
Shortly, they came to an interview room, the chipped avocado green paint of the walls more at home on an old refrigerator than in a police station. A broad mirror was along the left hand wall, and only an idiot would think it was actually a mirror. A pair of durable steel chairs was bolted to the floor on either side of a similarly secured steel table. A flickering fluorescent light fixture provided an intermittent, sickly light through the detritus of insect husks scattered inside plastic fronted light fixture.
His cousin, no surprise, was nowhere to be seen.
“Take a seat, please.” Deputy Aldovar indicated one of the seats and Manuel sat in the other one because he was feeling contentious. If this bothered the deputy, he didn’t react, which disappointed Manuel somewhat. He was relieved, however, that the visions didn’t come over him again. With some of the horrible scenarios running through his head already, the last thing he wanted to deal with in the face of a potential adversary was a vision of evil or pain. It felt that a vision like that couldn’t help but undermine his confidence, and that was one of the few things he felt he came into the room with.
“And my cousin Esther is where, exactly, Deputy Aldovar?”
The deputy sat in the opposite chair, a languid smile spreading across his broad face like spilled blood on linoleum. “Oh, she’s on her way. She should be here any second. I don’t suppose you would mind answering a few questions while you’re here?”
“I’ll play along for now, but if I don’t like the questions then the interview is over. Comprende?”
“Si.”
The deputy leaned forward, his hands clasped on the table before him. Manuel couldn’t help but notice that there was no stenographer, no cassette recorder, no note taking of any kind, which could mean two things: this “talk” was completely off the record, or the room was very well miked. He was leaning towards the latter.
“You left the Mexico City Police department three years ago, is that correct?”
That sent Manuel thinking. He did the math in his head and found that it had indeed been a long time since he left for Cobalt City. “Not quite three years, but pretty close.”
“What made you decide to leave the police force?”
“I didn’t leave the police. I merely left Mexico City. I was offered a job as a detective in Cobalt City, in America.”
Aldovar sucked at his teeth, a slight show of discomfort over Manuel’s answer. The detective decided then and there to remember the deputy’s reaction, treating it as a “tell” as though he were a poker player. Whether it ever paid off, only time would tell, but he wasn’t being thrown many bones. And in a pinch, he had learned to make due with what he had. “Cobalt City? Well, you must be very...”
“Proud?” Manuel ventured, knowing it wasn’t the word the deputy was looking for, but calculating it was the one which might irritate him more.
“I was going to say talented. It isn’t every Mexican police officer who is offered such opportunities in the U.S.”
Manuel leaned into the table as well, his hands crossed before him in a deliberate attempt to strike Aldovar’s same posture. “Well, I am very good at what I do.”
“And what is it that you do? What department have they put you in? Certainly not narcotics. Gang unit, perhaps? Vice? Internal affairs?” the last one said slowly, Aldovar’s eyes boring into Manuel.
So he had done his homework, Manuel thought. It was his cooperation with a major corruption investigation that helped finalize his decision to leave Mexico City. And it was more than simple finger pointing. Manuel had been building a case for well over a year, documenting every pay off, every drug transport with cops working security, everything. And then when he felt he had enough to send some people to jail, he took the file to the State Police, to someone he could trust.
There was no way he could ever be a cop in Mexico again. And not only because it wasn’t safe anymore, no, Manuel was a traitor. For all the public scrutiny on police corruption, all the big talk about cleaning up the department, it was just too widespread. There wasn’t a station that would hire him south of the border once they got his transfer paperwork.
“You might be surprised by this, but IA doesn’t have quite as much work to do in Cobalt City as it does in Mexico. So I work in homicide.”
Aldovar didn’t blink, his dark eyes locked on Manuel, his tone when he spoke utterly devoid of inflection. “Homicide. How exciting.”
“Yes. I catch killers, Deputy Aldovar. Real ones.”
The air between them reached a fascinating balance between ice cold and electric for a long moment, only to be interrupted by a knock on the door. Aldovar stood while the door swung open, revealing Esther Vega wearing an orange jumper, her hands cuffed before her. Deputy Attencio stood behind her, towering a good foot over Manuel’s hunch shouldered cousin.
Esther’s eyes brightened into sparks when she saw Manuel, but then nervously shifted to the deputies in the room. She was led to the chair and she sat without being directed to do so. She nervously licked her lips, forming the words “Thank you” without making a sound.
“Deputies, if I could have a few minutes alone with my cousin, please?”
Attencio sneered, then turned and sauntered out. Deputy Aldovar began to shake his head in protest. “I’m afraid that regulations state that she has to be accompanied at all times except when she is with a priest or lawyer.”
It was a show. Manuel could tell. “I assure you, deputy. My cousin and I won’t go anywhere. I think its probably okay to for me to talk to her, don’t you?”
Aldovar sucked on his teeth, looking at the two of them. It was more of the act, of course. Manuel was a cop in Mexico. He knew how it was played. Don’t leave your “suspects” the impression that you gave up too easily then leave, allowing the people in the room to talk freely. That was where the microphones and probably recording equipment became very handy, and Manuel had already established that the room was most certainly miked. And he knew that Aldovar would suspect that he knew. The dance was far too complicated for both of them to keep up for long, and in the end the deputy fell back to routine, and left with a satisfied nod of his head.
Once the door was firmly closed, Esther allowed a nervous smile to surface. “Manny...I can’t believe that you are actually here.”
“I was going to say the same thing.”
Fear blossomed in her eyes. “I didn’t do it, I swear, I didn’t even know what I was signing a confession for.”
“Then why did you sign it?”
The dam broke, and Esther started choking back sobs. Manuel wanted to get up from the chair and go to her, but he was afraid they were watching on the other side of the glass, afraid that Aldovar and Attencio would sweep in at the first sign of contact. “I thought they were going to kill me. God help me, Manny, I thought I was going to die. I’ve never been so afraid in my life.”
Manuel tried to catch his cousin’s eyes. “Hey. Look at me, okay?” He waited until she raised her tired, sunken eyes to his, he indicated the double-sided mirror on the wall with a slight twist of his head, and watched to make sure she got it. When he saw comprehension flicker in her eyes, he continued quietly. “Don’t say anything, but I need to know. Did they hurt you?”
Esther nodded so slightly he almost didn’t see it, but the look in her eyes was sufficient. They had dressed her in a long sleeved jumper. Any bruising, burning, scaring, whatever they did to her, it wouldn’t be visible. And anything that turned up later as evidence of torture would be dismissed as self inflicted anyway.
Manuel wanted to know how she had contacted him, who sent him the postcard that brought him here. But he couldn’t think of a way to ask Esther that wouldn’t give away that person’s identity to the police also. And when it came down to it, he wasn’t sure if she would even know who passed the information along. If she had been locked up in one of the solitary cells, it was probably jail staff. The other, far more likely possibility was that she had a friend in town who knew about him. In the end, he decided to save that mystery for another day.
“You trust me, don’t you?” He asked quietly.
“Of course.”
“I’m going to try and get you out.”
Esther’s eyes grew wide, this time with a potent alchemy of fear and hope. “How...”
Manuel spoke clearly, and in just enough of a stage whisper that he hoped the microphones could pick it up. “I have access to some money. It isn’t a lot, but it’s all I have. A few thousand dollars - U.S. dollars. I can get it here in a day, maybe two. I might be able to convince the police that this is all a misunderstanding and get them to let you go. But you’ll have to leave town and never speak of this again.”
There, he thought. The bait was out in the water. He could suggest a bribe in such a way that most anyone inclined to take it would hear the offer. He didn’t need the entire department to be crooked. He just needed one person. And finding a crooked cop in Mexico was easier than looking down and seeing ground.
But he was not prepared for the expression on Esther’s face. And he realized that he had badly, badly miscalculated how to play this game.
“You want me to WHAT?”
“I want you to forget this ever happened.”
It was too late. This was why he had always loved his cousin Esther. She was passionate. She believed in causes, usually ones she couldn’t ever win. They were her bread and butter. It drove Uncle Chui crazy. It drove everyone in the family a little crazy.
Everyone except Manuel de la Vega, that is. He was always supportive of her fire, if for no other reason than he felt she was a kindred spirit. And deep down, he believed that if enough people went tilting at windmills, then the world would be a better place.
Only now it was likely to get her killed.
And there was a better than good chance that he was going to get killed right along with her. “Please, Esther, just don’t say anything else.”
“Be quiet? Forget about it? I thought you got it, Manny! I can’t forget about this! Someone killed Muriel Cruz. She wasn’t a friend of mine, but I knew her, and she’s dead.”
“Please...”
Esther would not be deterred. “If I forget about this it all goes away. She goes away. And her death doesn’t matter. I can’t let her be one more silent victim. I need my day in court! I need you to help me expose...”
Manuel stood quickly, pulling himself up with the table for support. His voice hissed out from between clenched teeth, and he knew, he just knew, it wouldn’t do any good. It was too late. “For the love of God will you just shut up?”
With his dramatic movement, the show was over. They could both hear footsteps in the hall. Esther looked up at her cousin with the wretched expression of an animal in a snap-jawed trap. Somewhere in there, she realized what she had just done. Manuel told himself that. He had to, just to keep from hating her for the slightest second.
As the door opened, he leaned in close to her and whispered tightly in her ear so that the microphones couldn’t hear it. “Ok, so much for plan A. Sit tight and say nothing. I’m going to have to do this the hard way.”
Attencio and Aldovar were joined by two fresh deputies whose nametags read “Chavez” and “Ortega”. Manuel was separated forcibly from Esther, but he didn’t put up a fight. It looked like the fight had gone out of his cousin too, and as she was dragged slack-jawed from the room, he could only guess what she was thinking. What was the “hard way?”
Manuel sighed inwardly. He had really hoped he could avoid doing things the hard way, but that option had been snatched from his fingertips.
No. Manuel de la Vega had played his trump card and found it lacking.
It was time to see what Gato Loco could do.