Mission Road by Rick Riordan Page A

“Guy White isn’t what he used to be, Miss Lee, but he’s still vicious. Maybe more so now that he doesn’t have much time.”
    “What do you mean?”
    He shrugged. “You can’t be evil as long as Guy White’s been evil without it catching up with you. Rots you from the inside. That’s my medical opinion.” He tapped the ball. “If I were you, I wouldn’t stir up the Whites. I see a lot of directions this might go. I don’t like any of them, after what happened to the sergeant.”
    “DeLeon wrote something about the timing being wrong.”
    “I don’t know about that. The timing . . . I told Ana she should ask Mike Flume out at the Pig Stand. He could probably tell you about that, if the old bastard is still alive. Mike vouched for Lucia and Etch Hernandez that night. They had to have a clean alibi, see. All the cops involved did.”
    “Why?”
    Santos pulled back his nine-iron. He hit the ball much too hard and watched it roll past the hole.
    “Hell with it,” he murmured. “Seemed so important at the time. That’s the problem with getting old—you stop caring about secrets. The weapon marks—”
    “Detective Kelsey said the murder weapon was a tire iron.”
    Santos’ mouth twitched. “Kelsey knows better. But, yeah. That’s the story we decided to go with.”
    “You lied in the report?”
    “I was . . . vague. Had to be, or we would’ve had a war on our hands. Those marks were consistent with a very specific type of bludgeoning device. Murder weapon was never recovered, mind you, but the match was pretty damn exact. Police nightstick. The type most patrolmen carried back then.”
    Maia felt as if the rain and the cold were soaking into her bones, turning her to ice water. “Did Kelsey work the scene, too?”
    Santos shook his head. “As I recall, he was still on medical leave, but you better believe he scrambled to get an alibi.”
    “Medical leave.”
    “Few months before the murder, Kelsey had had a run-in with Frankie White. Frankie was brandishing a knife in a bar on the Riverwalk. Kelsey was a rookie, straight out of the academy. He made the mistake of trying to take Frankie’s knife away.”
    “The scars on Kelsey’s hands.”
    “Almost lost several fingers. Afterward, Guy White took Kelsey apart in front of his superiors. White’s lawyers turned the whole incident upside down, claimed Kelsey was responsible for using excessive force. Nearly got Kelsey kicked out of the department.” Santos sighed. “There weren’t many cops back then who
hadn’t
had run-ins with the White family, Miss Lee, but I’d appreciate it if you’re more careful with this information than Ana DeLeon was. I don’t like young ladies getting shot.”
    Maia watched the cold rain drifting across the hills. She imagined Frankie White, the blond preppie from 1987, as a rapist-murderer, not so different from the elf who’d attacked her that morning. She imagined the same wild light in Frankie’s eyes, the same foul breath. She could easily put herself in the place of those women Frankie had murdered, his hands closing around her throat.
    “Thanks, Jaime,” she said. “I’ll tell Tres you said hello.”
    “You sure you’re feeling all right?”
    “I’m fine. Probably just something I ate.”
    He smiled in a sad way, like he’d just come across a tender love note in the pocket of an autopsy subject. “One more question, Miss Lee, just because you can’t fool an old doctor. Does Tres Navarre know you’re pregnant?”

REMEMBERING RALPH’S SECOND COUSIN was a stroke of inspiration, if I do say so myself.
    Like many San Antonians, Guy White ordered large quantities of tamales for his Christmas celebrations, and Ralph’s cousin from Mama’s Cocina delivered to all of the biggest accounts. The rich Anglos loved this. It gave them the flavor of a Tejano Christmas without the trouble of actually going to the West Side and mixing with Hispanics.
    At any rate, hiding in the back of the cousin’s