The Trial Read Free Page A

were matched up with dead bodies. But I was pretty sure that the guns would not be registered, there would be no prints on file, and law enforcement might never know who owned the weapons that killed those women.
    I said, “Their car was found on Washington—stolen, of course. The two dead men had both Los Toros and Mala Sangre tats. We’re waiting for ID from Mexican authorities. One of the dead women knew Kingfisher. Lucille Alison Stone. She lived on Balboa, the thirty-two hundred block. Has a record. Shoplifting twice and possession of marijuana, under twenty grams. She comes up as a known associate of Jorge Sierra. That’s it for her.”
    “And the other woman? Whittaker?”
    “According to the bartender, who read their body language, Whittaker might be the girlfriend’s girlfriend. She’s a schoolteacher. Has no record.”
    Brady said, “Barry Schein, ADA. You know him?”
    “Yes,” Conklin and I said in unison.
    “He’s on his way up here. We’ve got thirty-six hours to put together a case for the grand jury while they’re still convened. If we don’t indict our suspect pronto, the FBI is going to grab him away from us. Ready to take a crack at the man who would be King?”
    “Be right back,” I said.
    The ladies’ room was outside the squad room and down the hall. I went in, washed my face, rinsed out my mouth, reset my ponytail. Then I walked back out into the hallway where I could get a signal and called Mrs. Rose.
    “Not a problem, Lindsay,” said the sweet granny who lived across the hall and babysat Julie Anne. “We’re watching the Travel Channel. The Hebrides. Scotland. There are ponies.”
    “Thanks a million,” I told her.
    I rejoined my colleagues.
    “Ready,” I said to Brady, Conklin, and Barry Schein, the new rising star of the DA’s office. “No better time than now.”

Chapter 8
    When Kingfisher began his campaign against me, I read everything I could find on him.
    From the sparse reports and sightings I knew that the five-foot-six Mexican man who was now sitting in Interrogation 1 with his hands cuffed and chained to a hook on the table had been running drugs since before he was ten and had picked up the nickname Martin Pescador. That was Spanish for kingfisher, a small, bright-colored fishing bird with a prominent beak.
    By the time Sierra was twenty, he was an officer in the Los Toros cartel, a savage paramilitary operation that specialized in drug sales up and down the West Coast and points east. Ten years later Kingfisher led a group of his followers in a coup, resulting in a bloody rout that left headless bodies from both sides decomposing in the desert.
    Los Toros was the bigger loser, and the new cartel, led by Kingfisher, was called Mala Sangre, a.k.a. Bad Blood.
    Along with routine beheadings and assassinations, Mala Sangre regularly stopped busloads of people traveling along a stretch of highway. The elderly and children were killed immediately. Young women were raped before execution, and the men were forced to fight each other to the death, gladiator style.
    Kingfisher’s publicity campaign worked. He owned the drug trade from the foot of Mexico to the head of Northern California. He became immensely rich and topped all of law enforcement’s “Most Wanted” lists, but he rarely showed himself. He changed homes frequently and ran his business from a laptop and by burner phones, and the Mexican police were notoriously bought and paid for by his cartel.
    It was said that he had conjugal visits with his wife, Elena, but she had eluded attempts to tail her to her husband’s location.
    I was thinking about that as I stood with Brady, Conklin, and Schein behind the mirrored glass of the interrogation room. We were quickly joined by chief of police Warren Jacobi and a half dozen interested narcotics and robbery inspectors who had reasonably given up hope of ever seeing Kingfisher in custody.
    Now we had him but didn’t own him.
    Could we put together an indictable