“How … romantic,” I said.
“My thoughts exactly.”
She picked up a glass of champagne that had been ready and waiting for her and took a sip before continuing, and I couldn’t help but wonder if she could be any more of a cliché.
“Once I showed him how impressed I was with his … abilities, he explained. He told me he hated being a cop. Hated the grayness of it all. He had a unique philosophy, you see. A person is either good or bad, but many cops are a lot of both. He didn’t like the ambiguity of it all, so he’d been looking for a career change, one in private security. He wanted to land a good job before he told me the truth.”
“A man after my own heart,” I said, not sure if I was supposed to know him at this point or not.
“When I told him who my family was, what we did for a living, he shrugged and said, ‘I was a cop, not a saint.’” She turned to him and ran a finger under his jaw as though he were her favorite pet. “That’s when I knew I had a keeper.”
“I’d say. And he told you all about me in the two minutes it took me to make it through the line? I’m impressed,” I said through gritted teeth.
He didn’t flinch.
“No,” she said, “his exact words were, ‘That’s the woman I told you about. Be careful.’”
He ratted me out? Wait, he’d already told her about me? I sat appalled.
“It seems you’re something of an urban legend.”
Resisting the urge to blow on my nails and polish them on my shirt, I shrugged.
“He said you help your uncle with his cases and that his arrest record is impeccable because of it.”
“I do what I can.”
She lowered her head to apprise me with more purpose. “He said you’re dangerous.”
“You know it’s funny. In all the time I’ve known him, he’s never mentioned you.”
She let a slow smile spread across her face to let me know just how unimpressed she was.
The neighborhoods ended, and we drove farther and farther into the country. This was not going to end well.
“I’m surprised your mother lets you keep him on,” I said, “considering his job history.”
“Please, some of our best assets are cops. Or ex-cops. Cops are people, too,” she said with a wry laugh.
“I suppose they are.”
“So, my question to you is, what did you mean?”
“Exactly that. I’m a god. It’s hard to believe, but there you have it. Just wanted you to know.”
“At the grave. What did you mean when you asked, what would my mother think?”
“Oh, right. I just wonder what she’ll think when she finds out you killed your brother—a.k.a., her son? You know, just one of those random thoughts I have. Why is the sky blue? Why is a green chile green? What will Elena Felix’s mother think when she finds out her daughter killed her son?”
The more I talked, the tenser Elena grew. A turbulent rage sparked inside her and then a vulnerability. She cast a sideways glance at Taft, who remained impassive, but I felt the jolt of shock rush through him. He didn’t know. She hadn’t used him to get her brother’s body to the country for disposal. Interesting.
“I just can’t figure out why,” I said, trying to keep her talking. After all, the more she talked, the more Cookie could record. If she hadn’t hung up on me.
Elena taking my phone worked out perfectly. I could hardly have stuck it down the front of my dress. A dress that fit like a condom. The outline would’ve shown clearly.
Of course, I had no idea if Cookie had actually picked up. Or if she’d turned on the recorder as was standard protocol anytime I seemingly butt-dialed her. We’d used the technique once before to catch a husband in the process of trying to hire a hit man to kill his wife.
But our approach was far from perfect. I seemed to possess some kind of disability when it came to butt-dialing people. Like the one time I butt-dialed Cookie, and she recorded an entire afternoon of me trying to learn to Jazzercise. Needless to say, she was not happy. She kept trying to figure out if I was really being attacked or if I was grunting and groaning from exertion.
“So, how about it? Why did you kill your brother?”
She scoffed, then raised her chin, annoyed. “Check her.”
Taft did as ordered. He leaned forward and frisked me, running his hands up my hips and along my waist before reaching between my breasts to check for a wire there. He ran his fingers along the edges of my dress, brushing his fingers along the tops of Danger and Will, who were quite scandalized.
With his face hidden from Elena, he let a half-second grin slip, letting me know he was having fun. Since Elena could still see my face, I couldn’t glare at him too blatantly, but I did stab him with my best scowl of annoyance.
Satisfied, he leaned back and nodded.
“As I was saying,” she continued, “I … I didn’t have a choice.” She looked at Taft as though she weren’t explaining to me but to him. “He’d been arrested. He’d made a deal. He was going to give the feds everything.”
Ah. Of course. The secret meetings Judianna had told me about. The ones he’d partaken in right before she’d tried to leave him.
“I had no choice,” she said, practically pleading with Taft.
He finally broke the stoicism and looked at her. Took hold of her chin and tilted her face up to his. “I would have done it for you, bunny. You should have come to me. But your mother can’t know.”
She nodded and snuggled against him. Her hero. He was better than I ever gave him credit for. Brad Pitt had nothing on this guy. Besides the fact that he was Brad Pitt.
“So, you poisoned him?”
She didn’t answer, but how did she know Hector had made a deal?
I began to worry there was a mole at the FBI. A mole who had tipped her off. “How do you know all of this?”
“Hector told me.”
Unexpected, but it made sense. If there’d been a mole, she would’ve known about Taft.
“He came to me, crying, saying Mom would never speak to him again. Please. She would never speak to him again?” She scoffed, embittered. “He was her baby boy.” Her pretty face twisted into a sneer at the thought of him. “Her favorite from the day he was born.”
“I take it you were older?”
“No matter.” She looked up into the face of her one true undercover love. Poor thing. “I’m taking over soon, anyway.”
“The family business? Mazel tov. Does your mother know?”
Taft smiled down at her, so good he almost convinced me. If I couldn’t feel every emotion pouring out of him, I would’ve bought it, too. “She won’t know what hit her.”
Elena’s smile turned to one of almost worship. I was certain she reserved that particular smile for when they were alone. Any woman that hungry for power would never flaunt her weaknesses so openly.
She reached over and knocked on her window.
The driver obeyed instantly. He pulled to the side and rolled to stop. “This is where you get out.”
The driver had taken a side road with little to no traffic. There wasn’t another car in sight. Or house. Or animal, for that matter. The Franklin Mountains rose to the north, and the Rio Grande sat to the west.
“Can you call me a cab?” I asked.
That calculated smile spread again. “You won’t be needing one.”
Uh-oh. Now it was my turn. For Taft’s sake, I had to make it good.
I pretended to just now catch on, as though reality were finally sinking in. I straightened and looked around, fear rounding my lids.
“You don’t have to do this,” I said. “They’ll know. Plenty of people saw me at the funeral. They saw me get in with you.”
“What people? You mean my family and friends?”
Pretty much. I began to pant, my gaze darting around, looking for an escape. “My car. My car is at the cemetery. They’ll find it.”
“Your car is being taken care of as we speak.”
No. Not Misery. She was innocent! “Taft, tell her. Tell her I can keep a secret.”
She raised her brows at him in question.
He scowled at me. “She’ll burn you the first chance she gets.”
Her grin turned triumphant. “Would you mind taking care of this, sweetheart?”
Relief flooded every cell in his body. He may have been worried she’d have the vault door up front do me. “Not at all.” He took hold of my arm and started to drag me out the door.
I put up as much of a fight as I could without actually damaging him. I did manage a punch to the side of Elena’s face. She totally deserved it.
Taft took a handful of my hair and slammed my head into the doorjamb, somehow managing to hit only his hand but making a loud enough thud to convince our audience that he’d knocked me out.
I collapsed, growing listless as he continued to drag me out of the car and into the desert surrounding us. I came to just enough to help him half walk, half drag me toward an incline of rocks where no one passing by would see my body.