Page 31 of Jessica, Not Her Real Name
She paused, sensing Oates sitting up a little straighter in his chair.
“And he wasn’t alone,” she went on. “He was with a young blond woman. Heavily intoxicated.”
“So…his girlfriend?”
Belinda made a skeptical sound. “From what I’ve gathered, Monaghan wasn’t exactly the girlfriend type. But whoever she was, they arrived at the party together, then, at some point, made their way out to Castaño’s trailer. The witness said they heard several gunshots sometime later.”
“So that was the cause of death?”
Belinda nodded, even though the AUSA couldn’t see her. “Two bullets to the head. Close range.”
“Execution style.”
Belinda made a sound in the affirmative.
“Hmm,” Rigg said. “So, I’m guessing Castaño didn’t take kindly to trespassers.”
Belinda didn’t respond. It was the same conclusion she’d drawn.
Rigg said, “Have we found Blondie yet?”
She caught the missing but implied part of that sentence:have we found Blondie’sbodyyet?“No. We do have the security footage from earlier in the night of her leaving the club with Monaghan. But it’s black and white and grainy as hell.”
“Can they clean it up and run facial rec?”
“They’re trying.”
Another long pause down the line.
“And do we know why Monaghan was at the house party in the first place? Was it to buy drugs?”
“Probably,” she said, “he might have gone there to pick up some weed, a little coke. Maybe some pills. He had a couple of priors for possession, but it doesn’t look like he was dealing in a big way. What he did have was a lengthy list of sexual assault charges leveled against him, going back a decade. Two attempted rapes, one rape, and an indecent assault. None of them made it to trial, but there’s a pattern there.”
“Hmm,” Oates said again. “Maybe not such a great loss to humanity, then. Catchy Bee Gees covers notwithstanding.”
Neither of them spoke for a minute, having exhausted their evidence and theories. Finally, Oates said, “So, now what?”
Belinda uncrossed her arms and blew out a breath. “What now is that I’m desperately fending off CPD. They have their body, their ID, their ballistics and their witness. All the probable cause they need. They’re champing at the bit to get a warrant and raid Castaño’s trailer. And if they find their murder weapon, that will be that.”
Daniel Castaño would be in police custody, staring down the barrel of a life sentence for murder. And the case that they had been working for the past eighteen months would be in tatters. A case that they hoped would net a much bigger fish than Daniel Castaño.
She looked across at the two other whiteboards facing the table in their operations room. Both were also covered with taped photos, but these had been placed in a much more deliberate order. The one nearest her had the words LA MANO NEGRA—CHICAGO scrawled in her own untidy handwriting at the top. Below it, they’d laid out the gang’s hierarchy, as far as they knew it. Daniel Castaño’s mugshot was there, as well as ones of Paquito Vasquez, Che Cardenas and Milo Bidois. About ten others joined their names at various levels of their criminal family tree. And at the very top, beside the scrawled acronym “CPOT”, was the frankly terrifying visage of Terry “La Araña” Bidois.
The other whiteboard showed the wider criminal enterprise, extending fromLa Mano Negrain Chicago to the Sinaloa Cartel in Mexico. It represented the pipeline of heroin that ran from the poppy fields of the Sierra Madre Occidental, under the border at El Paso, then spread like veins on the back of a hand across the East Coast and Midwest.
There were a lot of holes in that hierarchy, a lot of black silhouettes standing in for photos and initials substituting proper names. Some were just big hand-drawn question marks. They’d tentatively placed the names of the Russian Sokolov brothers in Philadelphia in the far-left corner. But the biggest question mark had been reserved for the identity of the one they called “El Merc”. He was the one who got the product over the border and into the hands of the likes of Castaño.
And all this work, all this combined intel from their multi-agency task force, would be for nothing if the Chicago Police Department went wading in with their dirty boots and took down Castaño. He was the only piece on this board that Belinda believed she could get through to. The only one who had lost enough to know he didn’t want to lose any more. Castaño’s life story was a cautionary tale if ever she’d heard one. A story in which he was both the villain and the victim. The problem, and—potentially—the solution.
“You want me to make a call?” Oates said. “Tell CPD to back off?”
She pictured him sitting in his brand new, plushly furnished office, in his thousand-dollar suit. The Justice Department considered Oates a rising star, and he could probably accomplish much with one phone call.
But Belinda was the one in the trenches with this case. If anyone was going to be making any calls, it would be her.
“They’re backing off,” she said. “For now.”
“So, what’s our next move?”
