Driven by that thought, she stood up and began searching through boxes for more on Jasmine Cruz’s telephone. She found a box labeled JASMINE CRUZ PHONE-SEARCH PHOTOS AND EVIDENCE and yanked the cover off. The first few folders held photographs taken by the search team after they raided the apartment. She leafed through the piles of eight-by-ten glossies. They all showed different views of a large living room, empty except for folding tables placed end to end to form a crude assembly line. The apartment itself looked dingy and run-down, with peeling paint and naked lightbulbs hanging from the ceiling. In the photos, folding chairs sat askew or lay on the floor, telling the story. Their occupants had leaped up and tried to run when the feds kicked the door in. Close-ups showed piles of packing materials for heroin: tiny glassine bags, rolls of stickers, dispensers holding coveted “spoons”-the same long-handled white plastic McDonald’s coffee spoons Melanie recognized from her childhood. McDonald’s had discontinued their use years ago, but the black market for them remained strong; the spoons measured a perfect single dose and deposited it easily in a glassine. A table in the corner of the room held several digital scales and at least twenty kilo-size “bricks” of raw heroin, still wrapped in tape and waiting to be processed.
She pulled another folder, labeled SEIZED PHOTOS FROM JASMINE CRUZ APARTMENT, from the box. Different from the large, uniform glossies taken by the cops, these were snapshots of all different sizes and qualities, taken by the gang members themselves. Left lying around the apartment, they were seized as evidence during the raid. Melanie’s hopes rose at this typical sloppiness. Drug dealers and killers loved to record their exploits. She couldn’t count the number of times she’d shown a jury the defendant’s own pictures-posed holding his favorite gun or sitting in front of a big pile of cash. Her heart beat faster as she riffled through the contents of the folder, shuffling snapshots like playing cards. This might be something.
Most were pictures of young men she didn’t recognize, in baggy clothes, flashing gang hand signals and covered with home-drawn gang tattoos, some brandishing their guns. None of them was Slice, but she hadn’t expected to find him. From what she’d heard, he would never be careless enough to let himself be photographed. She leafed through these pictures hurriedly, impatient for something better.
Then, about halfway through, she came across several Polaroids of tortured animals. A cat and a chicken at first, their bodies mangled, torn to shreds. Something about the violence in the pictures seemed significant, although she couldn’t have said why.
The rabbit Polaroids were buried at the bottom of the folder, the very last pictures she found. In the first one, she couldn’t identify the animal. The copious blood threw her off, bits and pieces of fur awash in crimson muck, unrecognizable. But there was no mistaking the next one. The severed head of a rabbit, one ear ripped away, lying in a bloody pool on the floor of Jasmine Cruz’s apartment. The next Polaroid was even clearer-the rabbit’s decimated corpse, limbs missing. And in the bottom-right corner of that one, she finally saw it, what she’d stayed late to find. The blood-specked muzzle and large paws of a black dog, toying with the rabbit’s severed head. The same dog. It had to be. The same black dog that Rosario Sangrador had seen, that had mauled Jed Benson and ripped his throat open. That dog was in Jasmine Cruz’s apartment. Somebody there had taught it how to kill, and had snapped these pictures as souvenirs of the lessons. She turned the stiff Polaroid over. On the back the phrase NO JOKE was scrawled shakily in black marker, the capital letters lopsided, childishly formed. She took it as a message of evil intent, and it sent a chill of fear straight through her.
Or was the chill real? Leaning forward, hair spilling over her shoulders, Melanie felt a small draft kiss the exposed back of her neck. She heard no sound, saw no change in the light. But the stirring of the air told her that somebody stood silently in her open doorway, watching her. She knew this exact feeling. Knew it indelibly. Frozen, paralyzed, something dangerous behind her. Her father did what he could to warn her. “¡Corre, Melanie! ¡Él tiene pístola!” She tried to run, but the man was too fast. Legs kicked out from under her before she knew it, carpet rushing up to meet her face. The flash, the thunder of the report. “¡Papi, noooo!”
Here and now, she knew somebody was behind her. Whoever it was, he might have been standing there for a long time, so absorbed had she been in examining the photographs. She knew that the best option was to face him of her own accord. Why proclaim her fear by pretending to ignore him? Slowly and deliberately, she gathered her courage and turned around to see who stood behind her.
13
“JESUS, ROMMIE, THEY SHOULD MAKE YOU WEAR A bell around your neck!” Melanie exclaimed. “You gave me a heart attack! How long have you been standing there?”
“Sorry, kid. Didn’t mean to scare you,” Rommie said from the doorway. “I stopped by to see your boss, but she was gone. Figured I’d check in on you.”
“Oh?” she asked. Rommie had never shown this much interest in her before. Was he meddling again?
“I hope I’m not bothering you or anything,” he added hastily, hearing the wariness in her voice. “It’s hard for me, being off the case. Jed was a good friend, and I’m close to the family.”
“So why get off, then?”
He walked in and half sat, half leaned against her desk, folding his arms across his broad chest, nodding approvingly as he eyed the open boxes and papers strewn everywhere.
“Hey, looks like you’re really earning your stripes here. Good, excellent. Why’d I get off the case? Your boss, hija. She says I have a conflict of interest. You know, because me and Jed were close. That’s what she says. But really she’s worried I’ll screw up a high-profile case, and it’ll be the last nail in the coffin of her hopes to make me a deputy chief. As if that’s in the cards.”
His dark eyes were downcast. Rommie looked like a soap-opera star, almost too handsome for a cop, with capped teeth that stood out blazing white against his coffee-colored skin, perpetually tan from the sunlamp, and a powerful physique that generated rumors of steroids. But he had a tentative way about him, as if he were afraid of being disliked.
“I’m sure she doesn’t think that!” But Bernadette had hinted as much.
“She tries to push me, you know, but what’s that saying about a silk purse and a sow’s ear?”
“Don’t get down on yourself, Rommie.”
“Whatever. I do my best, but I don’t have any delusions of grandeur. Anyway, I’m grateful to Bernadette for looking out for me. She’s a tough cookie, your boss, but she’s a softy underneath.”
The personal confidences were beginning to make Melanie uncomfortable. Too much information, thank you very much. She didn’t need to hear what Bernadette was like underneath. Their relationship was one of those classic mutual-exploitation things, except gender-reversed. Rommie was hot-looking, in a flashy, obvious sort of way, and Bernadette was powerful. Then again, these days Melanie was hardly in a position to judge.
“So you came by for an update on the investigation?” she asked, changing the subject.
“Yeah, you know. See what’s going on, see if I could offer any advice. What’s that you’ve got there?” He held out his hand.
“Animal-torture pictures from this old Blades case.” She stood up and handed him the Polaroids she’d been looking at. “Now you understand why I jumped out of my skin when you snuck up on me?”