The Gods of Guilt(56)

“I’ll search his name through court records,” Jennifer said. “State and federal. Pull out everything I can find and start from there.”

“I’ll ask around,” Cisco added. “I know some people who know some people.”

“And I’ll take the Fulgoni boys,” I said. “And Mr. Moya. They might now actually be assets to our case.”

I could feel the stirring of adrenaline in my veins. Nothing like having a sense of direction to get the blood moving.

“Do you think this means it was the DEA who jacked your car?” Jennifer asked. “And not Moya or Fulgoni?”

The thought of a rogue DEA agent monitoring my moves froze the adrenaline into tiny icicles in my veins.

“If that’s the case, then Fulgoni calling Trina last night when I was there was just coincidence,” I said. “Not sure I believe that.”

It was one of the conundrums of the case that would need to be cleared up before we had full understanding.

Jennifer gathered up her notepad and files and started to push back her chair.

“Wait a minute,” I said. “We’re not finished.”

She resettled and looked at me.

“Lankford,” I said. “He was tailing Gloria the night she was murdered. If we’re looking at Marco, then we have to look for a connection between him and Lankford. We find that and we’ll be close to having everything we need.”

I turned my attention to Cisco.

“Everything you can find on him,” I said. “If he knows Marco, I want to know from where. I want to know how.”

“On it,” Cisco said.

I looked back at Jennifer.

“Just because we’re looking at Marco doesn’t mean we take our eyes off Moya. We have to know everything there is to know about his case. It will help us understand Marco. I still want you on that.”

“Got it.”

Now I turned to Lorna and Earl.

“Lorna, you keep the boat floating. And Earl, you’re with me. I think that’s it, everybody. For now, at least. Be careful out there. Remember who we’re dealing with.”

Everybody started to get up. They were all silent as they moved. It hadn’t been the kind of meeting that drew any kind of lasting jocularity or camaraderie out of the troops. We were going off in separate directions to conduct a sub rosa investigation of a possibly dangerous federal agent. There weren’t too many things more sobering to consider than that.





19





On the way downtown I had to tell Earl to cool it with the single-handed effort to determine if we had a tail. He was weaving in and out of traffic, accelerating and then braking, moving into exit lanes and then jerking the wheel to pull out at the last moment and get back on the freeway.

“Let Cisco handle that,” I said. “You just get me down to the courthouse in one piece.”

“Sorry, boss, I got carried away. But I gotta say I like all this stuff, you know? Bein’ in the meeting and knowin’ what’s going on.”

“Well, like I said, when things happen and I need your help—like yesterday, for example—I’ll bring you into it.”

“That’s cool.”

He settled down after that and we made it downtown without incident. I had Earl drop me at the Criminal Courts Building. I told him I didn’t know how long I would be. I had no business in court, but the District Attorney’s Office was up on the sixteenth floor and I was headed there. After getting out, I looked over the roof of the car and casually scanned the intersection of Temple and Spring. I didn’t see anything or anyone out of the ordinary. I did catch myself checking the rooflines for Indians, however. I didn’t see anything up there either.

After I made it through the metal detector, I took one of the crowded elevators up to sixteen. I had no appointment and knew I might be in for a nice long wait on a hard plastic chair but I thought I needed to take a shot at getting in to see Leslie Faire. She had been a key player in the occurrences of eight years before, yet she had barely come up for discussion lately. She had been the deputy DA who made the deal that resulted in Hector Arrande Moya’s arrest and Gloria Dayton’s freedom.

Leslie had done well for herself in the years since that deal was struck. She won a few big trials and chose correctly in throwing her support to my opponent Damon Kennedy in the election. That paid off with a major promotion. She was now a head deputy DA and was in charge of the Major Trials Unit. This made her more of a manager of trial attorneys and court schedules, so it was rare to see her standing for the people anymore. This of course was fine by me. She was a tough prosecutor and I was glad I didn’t need to worry about crossing paths with her again in court. I counted the Gloria Dayton case as the only victory I ever scored against her. Of course, it was a hollow victory in my eyes now.