King’s County Sheriff’s Department had descended on the room like a pack of ants at a picnic. One of those ants, Deputy Brookhurst, approached him with a wide grin.
“Quite a haul for you DEA boys, huh? Crank, cash and Johnny Diamond.”
“Now we just have to piece together the rest of the puzzle. Where’d he get it, where was he going with it and who were his contacts? Oh yeah, and who offed him?”
With the toe of his boot, Cole prodded the black duffel bag on the floor, containing hundreds of thousands of dollars of methamphetamine, bagged and ready for the street. Then he wedged his hands on his hips and surveyed the room. What had Diamond been doing in this flea trap?
Why risk stealing a car, murdering the owner and stuffing her body in the trunk with this much cash and product on hand? Diamond had been a slick adversary from the day he’d burst onto the drug scene four years ago. He’d managed to keep out of their clutches precisely because he’d avoided missteps like this.
Maybe Diamond had been planning to cash out and head for a tropical island somewhere. Cole smoothed his gloved hands over the pile of money stashed in the other duffel bag and frowned.
“Brookhurst, are you sure your guys didn’t touch the cash?”
“Hold on.” Brookhurst widened his stance and hooked his thumbs in his pockets like some movie star cowboy. “Are you accusing my boys of something?”
“Stealing? No. Did they move it around? Reposition it? Run their hands through it?” Cole held up his own hands. “Hey, I wouldn’t blame ’em.”
Brookhurst’s puffed-up chest deflated. “I don’t think so. Why do you ask?”
Cole traced the uneven grid of the money stacks with his fingertip. “The bills are stuffed into the bag in tight rows, but those rows are messed up at the top—as if someone thumbed through the money. You checked Diamond’s pockets?”
“I told you—a set of keys with a flower key chain in the front pocket, wallet in the back pocket. Had maybe a hundred bucks in his wallet.”
The county coroners parked a gurney next to Diamond’s body. “We’re ready to take him if you’re done with him.”
“Copy us on the autopsy and toxicology reports. You still think it looks like poison?”
One of the coroners held up a plastic bag containing the bottle of water that had been on the floor, and shook it. “Smells like bitter almonds.”
Cole whistled. “Cyanide.”
“Along with the foaming at the mouth and his reddish skin color, that’s my guess. But it’s just a guess and we have a lot of tests to run.”
“Poison.” Cole drummed his fingers against his chin. “The murder weapon of choice for women, but the motel clerk said Diamond checked in as a single.”
Brookhurst nudged him and chuckled. “Maybe his old lady mixed up a little something special for him when she caught him cheating, or maybe she was cheating and wanted to bypass the divorce. I should start sniffing the drinks my wife mixes for me.”
Cole’s jaw tightened and he nodded once. Cheating-spouse jokes didn’t hold much humor for him anymore.
Hearing a commotion outside, Cole strode to the door of the motel room. A deputy had stopped two women outside the yellow tape. One of them, speaking Spanish, kept pointing at the car with the dead body in the trunk.
Cole joined the knot of people. “What’s going on, Deputy?”
The officer jerked his thumb between the two women. “This one’s saying the other one saw a woman here this morning.”
They’d already questioned one of the women, who was a maid at the motel, but hadn’t seen the second woman yet.
“Espera.” Cole sliced his hand through the air. “Wait. Habla inglés, señora?”
“Sí, yes, I speak English.”
“What were you doing at the motel this morning?”
“Trabajo. I work here as a maid. I have the overnight shift.”
“What time was this?”
“After seven o’clock, señor. I was almost done with work.”
“Where did you see this woman? What did she look like?”
“By this car. I thought maybe she came out of the room. She walked past the car and she was pulling a suitcase.” She twirled her finger in the air. “One with wheels.”
“Did you see what she looked like?”
The maid put her hands about six inches apart. “Flaca. Skinny. Not tall, not short. She was wearing dark pants, maybe jeans, and a dark jacket.”
The woman was observant. “Hair?”
“No, señor.” She shook her head.
His brows shot up. “No hair?”
“Under a hat.” She put her hands on top of her head. “Like una...gorra.”
The other maid spoke up. “Like a knit beanie, pulled over her head.”
Cole’s pulse ratcheted up a notch. Like she was trying to disguise herself. “Did you get a good look at her face?”
“No, sorry. I notice because there was nobody else outside. I don’t think she saw me. She walked past the car, fast, and then turned the corner up there.” The maid pointed to the front of the motel.
“Toward the road.” They’d already questioned the motel clerk and he hadn’t seen or heard a thing. Had this mysterious woman poisoned Johnny Diamond, taken some of his cash and hightailed it out to the road to hitch a ride?
Cole got the contact information for the two women, thanked them and returned to the motel room, where the coroner had already loaded Diamond onto the gurney. The DEA and Cole personally had been trying to nail Diamond for four years. It figured that Diamond’s death would provide even more questions than answers. Nothing had been easy with that guy.
What had Diamond been doing back in his old stomping grounds instead of plying his trade in Arizona, where he’d been wheeling and dealing for four years? Had that woman lured him this way?
Cole turned to Deputy Brookhurst. “Did you find any other fingerprints besides Diamond’s in this room?”
“We barely found any of Diamond’s.”
Cole narrowed his eyes. “Wiped clean?”
“Looks like it.”
“How about his phone? Did your guys search the Dumpsters and bushes for Diamond’s phone? There’s no way a man in Diamond’s business would be without a cell.”
“We looked. We’ll try to track his number through the different providers and see if we can locate his phone by pinging.”
