Southtown by Rick Riordan Page A

up. She told him about her parents, first-generation immigrants who’d been killed by a hit-and-run driver when Erainya was seven. She told him about the cold godparents who’d raised her, renamed her Irene, spent years trying to erase everything un-American and unladylike from her character. Fred listened sympathetically. He didn’t say no to a big family. She convinced herself he would make a good father. They were married two months later.
    At first, the partnership had gone well. Erainya had been prepared to take the back seat to a man. Her foster parents had prepared her for that ever since she was a child.
    Then Erainya made two startling discoveries. The first was that she liked investigations. Informants trusted her. They would tell her things they’d never tell Fred. She involved herself more in the cases. She was sure if she showed Fred what she could do, he would eventually see that it made sense to give her more responsibility.
    The more she did this, the more irritated Fred became. He began accusing her of butting in, messing up his business. And the more irritated he became, the more determined she was to try harder, and prove him wrong.
    The second discovery was worse. After three years of trying, she was still not pregnant. Fred didn’t want to talk about it. He began drinking, and yelling. Finally, the doctor assured Erainya that the fertility problem was not hers. Erainya’s friend Helen told her she really had to speak to Fred. It took Erainya a month to get up her nerve, but finally she broached the subject.
    That was the first night Fred ever hit her. It wasn’t the last. Erainya was slow, painfully slow, to realize her marriage and her dreams were incompatible.
    She slipped Fred’s photo carefully back under the .45.
    She looked at the clock. Sam Barrera was now twenty-two minutes late.
    She cursed herself for putting the old case files into storage, leaving Tres a key. Of course he would go through them. That was his nature. It had been stupid of her to leave him that opening.
    There wasn’t much he could find, unless he knew what to look for. But he was smart. Damn smart. She had to hope he wouldn’t look at the case from the right angle to see what was wrong about it.
    The doorbell rang.
    Sam at last. Or what if . . .
    Erainya reached for her gun.
    Fred’s picture stared up at her from so many years ago—a reminder of how quickly things could go wrong, how reckless Erainya could get when it came to protecting her secrets.
    She left the gun where it was, and closed the drawer.
    She went to answer the door, convincing herself she could handle whatever came without violence. As long as she was safe, and Jem was safe, nothing else mattered.

8
    “Dios mío,”
Ana DeLeon said when she came on the phone. “Thought the operator was kidding me.”
    “Long time,” I said. “How’s it going, Sergeant?”
    Ana hesitated, tacitly acknowledging the mention of her new rank. I hadn’t seen her in over a year, hadn’t called to congratulate her on the promotion, or any of the other news I’d heard.
    “Business is brisk,” she said. “Flood washed up some interesting corpses. Had one float out of somebody’s basement last night.”
    I pinched the cell phone to my ear, turned my pickup onto Erainya’s street. “So who’s handling the Floresville Five?”
    “Ugh. Not us, thank God. Department of Criminal Justice. Fugitive Task Force. They’ve got a command post here, though with the Oklahoma City shooting yesterday, the search has gone federal. Most of the manpower has pulled out and headed north. Why do you ask?”
    “What happened in Oklahoma City?”
    She told me about the sporting goods store manager and the off-duty cop murdered; a positive ID on two of the fugitives; fairly good evidence that Will Stirman led the robbery.
    “With a cop down,” she said, “you know how it goes. FBI, U.S. Marshals—everybody wants a piece of this now. What’s your interest?”
    “Stirman isn’t