“We don’t know for sure yet,” Shelley pointed out. “We need to question him.”
Craig opened the drawer of a filing cabinet and leafed through the contents before drawing out a piece of paper. “This is his parole address. You should proceed with caution. If he is mixed up in gang business again, he’ll likely have an entourage. He did time for the gang, so he’s gained some prestige. They’ll want to protect him. If you go in all guns blazing, they could react badly.
“Understood,” Shelley said. “If we go in alone, just the two of us? Show we just want to talk?”
Craig inclined his head. “Safer. But make sure someone knows where you are. Just in case.”
Shelley drew in an unsteady breath as she nodded. Zoe observed this, thinking that Shelley had probably never been in this kind of a situation before. With how well she handled herself, it was sometimes easy to forget that she wasn’t long out of Quantico. There were plenty of scenarios that would still be daunting to her, fresh and new.
When it came to gangs, Zoe couldn’t say she was altogether confident herself.
“You are a bit of a local expert on these gangs?” Zoe asked, directing her question toward Craig.
He looked up in surprise—it was the first time she had spoken during the whole exchange—and shrugged. “I guess you could say that. At least the closest thing on this side of the law. Why? Do you need some information?”
“It is about Clay Jackson, the man Cesar likely killed,” Zoe said.
“Oh, he killed him. Just did it smooth enough they couldn’t catch him,” Craig said. “I’ve heard next to a confession from him, though he’s too smart to come out and really say it.”
Zoe nodded, glad for the confirmation at least. “His aunt, Alicia Smith. She was questioned about the murder at the time.”
Craig narrowed his eyes and then flicked them toward the ceiling, thinking. “Not sure the name rings a bell.”
“Her son, John Dowling, is one of the murder victims that we are currently investigating.”
Craig took the hint. “You’re asking me about their relationship. Whether Cesar would murder this John Dowling as soon as he got out to make a point.”
“Precisely.”
Craig pursed his lips, drumming his fingers on his desk. “I just can’t see it. Clay Jackson was like a lot of these guys. The gang was his family. Real blood relations paled in comparison. As far as I remember, he wasn’t in contact with most of his relatives. His parents wanted nothing to do with a son that was in a gang.”
That was interesting. It was a hole in their theory, but then again, it wasn’t proof. Craig knew these men, but he wasn’t part of the gangs. Not anymore. There were things that they might be able to hide from his suspicion.
“Thanks,” Shelley said, reaching over to shake his hand. “We’ll be in touch if we need anything else.”
***
The address listed on the scrap of paper that Craig had written out for them was a rundown, single-story building with beaten up old cars parked across what should have been the front yard. One of them was on cinderblocks instead of tires. Not exactly what you might expect from the home of a drug kingpin.
Maybe Craig was right, and Cesar really was out of the game. That didn’t mean he was done with his revenge, Zoe thought, chewing her lip as she examined the view.
There didn’t seem to be anyone around who looked out to cause them any harm. No one watching them from windows or porches, no cars moving slow through the neighborhood. No sign of anyone stirring inside the house.
“We should go in,” Zoe decided, opening the driver’s side door and getting out.
Shelley followed her after a beat. It wasn’t a long delay, but it was a delay. Zoe wondered if Shelley was getting cold feet about going down this gang route. Whatever they did, they were going to have to investigate it somehow. No matter what kind of delay they instigated, they were going to end up here at some stage.
Zoe tried to exude confidence that she herself did not really feel as she walked up to the front door and knocked hard, three sharp raps that could not fail to be heard throughout the small home.
There was no response.
She exchanged a glance with Shelley, now standing close behind her, and knocked again. Harder. Five times. Not so easy to ignore.
There was nothing. Not the creak of a floorboard or a flicker of movement behind the flimsy curtains. The living room window, visible from where they stood, gave onto an empty room.
“No one is here,” Zoe said after a moment, deciding that it did not feel like they were simply being ignored.
“What now, then?” Shelley asked, looking back at the car. “Do we sit and wait?”
Zoe followed her gaze and saw an elderly Hispanic man who had come out to sit on the steps of a property on the other side of the street. Seventy-three years old, she estimated. “Maybe. Maybe not,” she said, setting off at a casual walking speed toward him.
It was always awkward, moving toward someone like this. The old man was watching them and knew that they were approaching him. Knew that they were coming to talk to him, but he was still too far away to yell a greeting. Where did you look? At the ground? Into the distance, ignoring the presence of the man, as if you were planning to just go on right past him? At his face, to create eye contact that would be awkward for the long stretch of time it took you to reach speaking distance?
Zoe settled for a mixture of all three, which was somehow even more awful, and ended up calling out to him as soon as she was halfway across the road just to make it stop.
“Excuse me, sir?”
He didn’t get to his feet, eyeing them both with a heaping of mistrust, but he gave them his attention.
“We are looking for the man who lives at this address. Do you know where he might be at this time?” Zoe asked, keeping her words somewhat neutral. No need to give everything away at once.
The old man grunted. “You mean Cesar?”
That cat was out of the bag, then. “Yes, sir.” Zoe kept it respectful. She had noticed that the level of cooperation one found from elderly witnesses was often directly correlated to the amount of times you called them sir or ma’am.
“Out at the pit.”
“The pit?” Zoe repeated. There was nothing like interacting with local knowledge as an outsider to make you feel stupid.
The old man grunted again, giving her an impatient shrug of his shoulders. “The pit. Where all them boys go.”
“Do you mean the gang members, sir?” Shelley took over, her tone low and soft.
The Hispanic man rubbed fingers gnarled with arthritis across the top of his head, almost bald but for a few lingering strands, and nodded. “All them boys. No secret around here.”
“Could you give us directions, sir?” Shelley asked. “We’re not locals.”
The old man looked her up and down, then burst into a laugh that exposed three missing teeth. “No, you ain’t,” he said, then laughed again, long and hard.
Zoe tapped on Shelley’s arm. “Better off calling the local PD,” she said, gesturing with her head back toward the car before setting off in that direction. Behind them, across the twenty-four steps back to the car, the old man’s laughter still pealed out, following them like a bad smell.
Zoe sank into the driver’s seat and slammed her door, perhaps harder than necessary.
“What’s the plan?” Shelley asked breathlessly. There was pink in her cheeks. This whole encounter had been out of her depth.
“I am going to call the station,” Zoe said. “We get some backup, and the location. The locals will know what it means. And then we go in.”
She dialed the number on her phone, already weighing up the amount of force they were going to need to ask for—and whether it was going to be prudent to ask for bulletproof vests, too.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Zoe adjusted the straps on her vest one more time, feeling the reassuring grip of the Velcro against its counterpart and how tightly they held together.
The back of the police van was cramped. Shelley sat opposite her, and then eight men and women from the SWAT team, all of them outfitted in full assault gear. Zoe was unused to the feeling of the helmet on her head, the way the padded sides pushed at her cheeks. Still, it was better than going in as an exposed target.
They were idling on a dead-end road a short distance from their target, the hangout that the gang members called home. The Pit. It turned out to be a bar, or at least a front of one, the kind of place where outsiders were very much unwelcome. Going in was going to be a full-out raid situation. The local captain had made it clear to them that there was no other option with men like this. Go in unarmed, unprotected, and as a cop, you’d come out dead.
They had a map stretched out between them, a printed plan of the venue. It amounted to little more than black square outlines, approximations based on what had been observed on previous raids in combination with city blueprints.
“There are three exits—here, here, and here.” The unit commander was pointing them out, one in all compass directions but south. “This one is the main entrance, where we will enter, off the road. The other two will both be used. From experience, the gang will split roughly half in each direction, trying to divide our forces as well.”
“What is this structure here?” Zoe asked, pointing to a rectangle within the building itself.
“That’s the bar area. Normally we will expect to see the highest concentration of bodies around there, with tables and chairs scattered around this area here. Back there, behind double doors, is the more private clubhouse. Senior members spend their time in there.”