Beautiful Sacrifice Read Free Page A

personal use, but not really a blip on DEA’s radar. But they were real eager to hand the artifacts over to Mexico for a big gold star in their good-neighbor file. So was our very own AIC Brubaker.”
    Hunter shook his head and spit out a single word. “Politics.”
    “Oh yeah. There was the usual pushing and shouldering. Then we cut a deal. DEA got the drugs and ICE got the artifacts. Since they weren’t evidence of anything prosecutable—the driver was dead—Brubaker fast-tracked the artifacts for the repatriation photo op.” Jase breathed out from the soles of his feet, deflating. “Man, I wish I’d given them to the feds. They’re politically radioactive.”
    Hunter sorted through what he’d been told. “So the coke was the driver’s payday for taking everything over the border?”
    “That and the lives of his family. You know how it works.”
    Hunter grimaced. He knew. He just didn’t like it.
    “The artifacts,” Jase continued, “weren’t carelessly wrapped like the coke. They were all tight and in sacks of concrete mix just like the kerosene-laced dope was. At first we thought the packages were opium tar or something else thrown in for the trip up. The shapes were really odd.”
    “What about the address the driver gave you before he was shanked?”
    “We checked it out.” Jase swallowed hard, remembering what he really wanted to forget. “I saw things in that place I’m not ever going to un-see.”
    For a few moments Jase stared at his coffee cup, trying not to remember the unspeakable. He did anyway. “It wasn’t a single psycho rocking out. No bodies. Just blood everywhere, places you can’t believe blood would get. Blood from more than one person, more than ten. Fresh. Old. Blood and candle wax and rotting flowers.” He shook his head, hard, trying to throw off memories. “That place was…evil.”
    “What’s the theory? Gang bloodbath? Death cult? Killing ground for rent?”
    “ICE will take bets on any of those. We’re assuming the bad guys got word that the shipment had been popped, figured that the house was next on the list, so they ran like the cockroaches they are.”
    “And resumed business in another place,” Hunter said grimly.
    “Don’t they always? Hell, for all I know, they have lots of places like that house. The drug business lives on blood as much as money.”
    For the space of several long breaths, Hunter tried to plug Jase’s new information into the framework of his own lifetime knowledge of the Texas borderlands. It didn’t fit. “Anything connect to cold cases?”
    Jase drank some coffee, rinsed it around, and swallowed. “I don’t know. We handed the death house off to the sheriff’s department with the understanding that ICE wanted info on anything covered in our mission statement. All they told us was that something was taken off the wall, and there were signs that a table had been moved.”
    “Or an altar?”
    “I don’t like to think about that, but yeah, I wondered.”
    “Okay. You busted artifacts and small-time coke. Followed an address to a bloody dead end. Cataloged the artifacts into the ICE warehouse.”
    “With that Maya apocalypse 2012 all over the media, Brubaker was practically lap-dancing about the chance to add the artifacts to the pool of stuff that’s being repatriated to Mexico on the twenty-first. It’s a big-ass deal. Vice president, governor, senators, everybody under the Homeland Security umbrella will be there, shaking hands across the border and giving Mexico back pieces of its history as we walk shoulder to shoulder into the future, blah blah blah.”
    “But the artifacts go poof from ICE storage,” Hunter said. “Then what?”
    “I don’t have to tell you the theft has ‘inside job’ written all over it.”
    “I remember the warehouse. Cameras, locks, finger pads, guards, everything but the ever-popular alien butt probes.”
    Jase smiled faintly. “Brubaker was thirty-two flavors of pissed off. He looked