Page 318 of The Black Trilogy

Okay, how should I put this? I decided to try for vague.

“Our paths have crossed over the years. Often enough to say there are others we should put ahead of him when it comes to narrowing down our list of suspects.”

I should have known that wouldn’t wash with Nate. He gave me his grumpy, squinty look. “Precisely how well do you know him?”

“Well enough to believe he wouldn’t have done this to me. I mean to us. So can we please look at who else it might have been? Starting with his rivals?”

“Well enough? Emmy, he’s a drug lord.”

“So? I’m not exactly squeaky clean myself.”

“That aside, we can’t discount our prime suspect just because you say you don’t think he did it. We have to check into it a little more than that.”

“Fine. I’ll look into it. Leave it with me.”

“What precisely are you planning to do?”

“I’ll talk to him.”

“What, you’re gonna call him up? What are you going to say? ‘Hi, Mr. Garcia, I was wondering if you murdered my husband? And whether the fourteen men who came to kill me the other night were anything to do with you?’ If so, you’re even more out of your mind than I thought.”

“No, of course I’m not just going to call him up. That would be rude. I’ll go and visit him.”

In my head, I was already packing.

“You’re insane. What, you plan to waltz up and knock on his front door?”

“Don’t be ridiculous.” Eduardo didn’t have a knocker. If you got as far as his front door without being shot first, his butler opened it automatically.

“What, then?”

I could hardly explain I had a system for meeting Eduardo. That when he knew I was there to see him, he’d send somebody to collect me.

“I’ll find a way,” I hedged.

“You’re not going,” Nate told me.

“Yes, I am.”

“No, you’re not. You’re not going to fly to Colombia to have a chat with a violent, borderline psychopathic monster who’s suspected of trying to kill all of us. What if it was him? He’ll probably shoot you on sight.”

“All right, all right. I won’t go.” I hated being forced to lie to my friends. “But can we at least consider the alternatives? And for Pete’s sake, let’s not go wading into Garcia’s business and upsetting him.”

“That sounds remarkably sensible.” Nate seemed surprised I’d caved so easily, and I couldn’t blame him. After all, I wasn’t well known for taking the sensible approach. “Mack, Luke—can you look into other prominent drug dealers as well? There must be a couple of dozen with the cash and resources for this.”

A chorus of agreement followed before Luke and Mack carried on working at their screens, fingers hammering in a staccato rhythm, no doubt fuelled by adrenaline from the night’s events and the prospect of a resolution to the horror stalking us.

I didn’t share their enthusiasm. The idea of Eduardo being mixed up in this filled me with dread. Rather than sitting with them, I retreated to a quiet corner and wrapped myself up in a blanket, trying to get some rest but without much success. Instead of sleeping, I planned what I’d say to Eduardo, turning jumbled words over in my mind. Of course, I still planned to visit him, no matter what I’d said to Nate. It was perhaps the only way to get this mess cleared up.

And I was certain it wasn’t Eduardo. Well, almost. Ninety-nine percent, maybe. That other one percent? Well, if I was wrong, I’d be joining Black sooner than anticipated, wouldn’t I?

The theory that Eduardo was behind this bothered me for one main reason: he had no motive to kill me. The opposite, in fact. This was the man who’d once told me if he’d ever had a second daughter, he’d have wanted me to be her. The man who never forgot my birthday. The man who insisted his chef perfected the best recipe for macaroni and cheese because he knew it was my favourite. The man whose two sons treated me like a sister, threatening to take the head off any person who so much as looked at me funny.

The threat was quite literal, in Sebastien and Marco’s cases. They’d had enough practice at it.

We were working under the assumption that the motive for the killings was our investigation into the bad coke flooding New York and the surrounding areas, which also didn’t fit with Eduardo. While the two of us had never got into the specifics of his family business, we’d had several “what if” discussions over the years, some of which I suspected weren’t so hypothetical. From those, I’d gleaned most of his trade hit the West Coast and the Southern states. A little probably made its way east, but it didn’t make up a major part of his revenue.

Eduardo also prided himself on supplying a good quality product. I couldn’t recall discussing particular chemicals with him, but we’d talked about the cutting of drugs and Eduardo categorically told me he’d never do it before shipment. So if Black was right, and the levamisole got added before the coke arrived stateside, then that spoke against Eduardo’s involvement too.

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