had left behind.
Life was good.
* * *
There was something strangely but beautifully surreal about the sight of Maria Gianni Gomez in the banyan tree.
It was almost as if she’d been posed.
Her arms were spread out almost gently, forming a casual arc over her head. Her face was turned slightly to the right.
Her eyes were open.
She was dressed in a flowing white robe. A small branch lay over her lower body, as if set there by a modest and benign hand that might have reached down with ethereal care. The great banyan with its reaching, twisting roots had grown in such a way that the center, where Maria lay, might have been scooped out to create a bed for her.
If it weren’t that death was so visible in her open eyes, she could have been a model posing for any one of the sometimes very strange commercial shoots that took place in the notoriously and historically bohemian section of Miami.
Brett Cody was standing next to his partner, Diego McCullough, and looking up at the tree, studying the body where it lay.
“Ladder?” he asked Diego.
“One of the Miami-Dade cops went to get one. He’ll be right here, along with the medical examiner,” Diego said. “You got here fast,” he noted.
“We’re not all that far from Virginia Street,” he reminded Diego. He lived right down from the mall that was more or less central to the area, almost walking distance to this North Grove area of nicer homes. “You got here pretty quick yourself.”
Diego nodded. “I was at the coffee shop,” he said glumly. “This is just...so wrong.”
“She should have been protected,” Brett said, a feeling of deep anger sweeping over him. But someone out there had killed Miguel—who, after all, had made his living in the drug trade, where violence was common—and now had come after his widow, it appeared.
But how?
“She had a state-of-the-art alarm system and steel bolts on the doors, and there’s no sign of forced entry,” Diego said.
“We need to talk to the fed who was duty in front of the house when it happened,” Brett said. “We knew Miguel’s killers might think she knew too much, so we were keeping a watch on her.”
“He thought she jumped,” Diego told him. “She was deeply depressed, devastated, after Miguel’s murder. You don’t think that’s possible?”
“No,” Brett said quickly. Too harshly. He understood how the officer might have gotten that impression; the tree was fairly close to the master bedroom balcony, which overlooked the pool and the patio area.
But, Brett was certain, no matter what kind of an athlete she might have been when she was young, there was no way she could have jumped from the balcony and wound up where she was.
It would have been possible, however, for someone to throw her over and cause her to land exactly where she had.
“Hey, I know how you feel about this one, how much you wish you could have seen it through,” Diego said quietly. “But if you want to keep the peace, don’t tear into the officer on duty.”
“Sorry,” Brett said quickly. “I didn’t mean to bark like that. And I don’t blame the agent. He didn’t see anyone go by, and should someone have gotten past him, the house has alarms and a top-of-the-line security system. No one broke into that house. How the hell she was killed, I can’t begin to imagine. Unless Miguel has a clone running around somewhere—a clone with his fingerprints and his memories.”
They were both quiet for a minute, looking at one another.
“He was burned beyond forensic recognition,” Diego reminded Brett. “No DNA left, even in the teeth or the bones.”
“Identified by the melted remains of his jewelry, and the fact that we saw him get out of his car and go inside, the only person in there,” Brett said thoughtfully.
“Maybe Miguel wasn’t killed in that oil-dump conflagration,” Diego suggested.
Brett shook his head thoughtfully. “Those were definitely Miguel’s things forensics took from the fire. And Miguel truly loved Maria. There’s no way on God’s earth that he would have killed his wife. Even if he didn’t die in the fire,” he added.
They both turned at the sound of footsteps. A uniformed police officer was hurrying over with a ladder. Dr. Phil Kinny, medical examiner, was just behind, followed by two forensic teams, one from the local Miami office of the FBI and one from the Miami-Dade homicide division.
“Let me get a quick look up the ladder first, okay?” Brett called to Phil.
“As you wish,” Phil told him. “I’m here, ready whenever. I can only tell you how she died. You’re the one who’s going to have to figure out how she got in that tree.”
“Thanks,” Brett said.
The ladder was set carefully next to the tree; Brett nodded his appreciation to the young officer ready to steady it. Brett could have climbed the tree without it, but he was trying to maintain a level of professionalism. Once he had studied Maria Gomez in situ, photographers would chronicle everything before Phil started his exam and told them the preliminary time of death and whatever he could about the injuries that had presumably killed her.
Studying the woman, Brett felt again the terrible pang of guilt about the entire Gomez affair. He hadn’t been assigned to the Barillo crime case; other agents and officers—both the feds and local law enforcement—had worked it for years. When Miguel Gomez had come to him, he’d made a point of going undercover to meet the family and find out what was going on, what Miguel had done and what he could give the authorities.
Basically, Miguel had been like a slave laborer, doing whatever his boss told him to do, letting them use his property, forced into the crimes he’d committed. He’d been minding his own business in a family where distant relatives had fallen prey to the lure of money and rewards. It wasn’t always easy for newcomers to trust in the United States government. Miguel’s son had been approached leaving school by a couple of Barillo’s toughs and warned about what happened when the “family”—meaning Spanish-speaking immigrants—didn’t work together.
Nothing had happened to the boy, but Miguel had known that his son being threatened meant that he was supposed to play the game. Only later had he learned that Barillo prided himself on never going after innocent family members, and by then it was too late. He was in too deep.
He had done so for years. Then he had seen a friend who had avoided running “errands” for the family wind up in a one-car fatal crash. Miguel had realized that he might be doing as he was told, but it was impossible to know when you might do the wrong thing, even by accident, and wind up in a car crash—or worse, have one of your children wind up dead, despite the fact that word on the street was that Barillo prided himself on “taking care of” only those who were guilty of betraying the family, never wives or children.
Oddly enough, rumor had it that Barillo’s own children weren’t part of the family. He had two sons and a daughter. They were all
