LITMIR.BIZ

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been together or what others thought. I knew that I would love her forever.”

      Maria had been wonderful. She’d had warm brown eyes and a few wrinkles, no doubt the result of her quick smile, and a great heart. From the ladder, Brett observed her and made mental notes to help in his investigation. Her head was at an angle, and he had a feeling her neck was broken. One arm looked broken, as well.

      There was nothing in her hands, as far as he could see. Her face was scrubbed clean of makeup; it appeared she had been just about to go to bed when...

      She looked so alive—except that she was dead, of course.

      Instinct told him that she had seen her killer coming.

      Her open, glazed eyes showed disbelief and pure terror, and he couldn’t help wondering just who she had seen before she died to put that look in her eyes.

      “Anything?” Diego called to him.

      “Looks as if she was tossed off the balcony like a rag doll. As if she died when she hit the tree,” Brett said.

      “We’ll scrape beneath her nails,” Phil said. “If we’re lucky, she got a piece of her attacker.”

      Brett climbed down from the ladder.

      Diego set a hand on his shoulder. “You can’t take this on yourself, mi amigo,” he said. He had been born in Miami and grown up with English as his first language, but he liked to switch to Spanish when he thought the Spanish words sounded more “real” or appropriate. “Mi amigo,” he had once told Brett, was warmer than “my friend,” with more real meaning.

      “I’m not,” Brett said, but he knew that he was lying. “Diego, her eyes—you should see the look in her eyes.”

      “She was murdered, Brett, of course she has a look in her eyes.” Diego was quiet for a minute. “We’re lucky we got here before the birds,” he added softly.

      Brett had to agree. He’d come across victims who had been hidden by nature before. Nature wasn’t gentle on a corpse.

      “There’s just something disturbing about her,” Brett said.

      “Yeah, she’s dead.”

      Brett looked at Diego, trying not to show his aggravation at his partner’s callous comment, but then he saw that Diego was staring up at the tree, obviously upset by Maria’s death himself.

      Diego looked at Brett. “So we’re going to be lead on this? Despite Bryant and his crew having been on the Barillo thing so long?”

      “Bryant himself suggested to the powers that be that we take this on. I have to keep him advised, of course. He felt I deserved in on it. His team wouldn’t have had a lot of the information they used to bust a number of Barillo’s underlings if it hadn’t been for Miguel. They were all upset when he died, and not only because they lost a source, though I know that this will really affect Bryant and the team professionally, too. They were really hoping Miguel’s info could give them enough to arrest Barillo, or at least his immediate lieutenants.”

      “We will find who did this,” Diego assured him.

      Brett nodded. “Yes, we will. I’m going to speak with the agent who was watching the house.”

      Diego nodded back. “I’m going to step out on the street, see if I can find anyone who saw anything odd, do a bit of canvassing.”

      “Great. By the time we finish we can see if the forensic teams came up with anything.”

      “I think we know who did this—the same people who murdered Miguel Gomez.”

      Diego was probably right. But it was impossible to just go and arrest Barillo or his people. Barillo himself usually kept his hands clean. The man had been trained as a doctor in his native country, but he’d found crime far more profitable.

      Brett followed Diego to the front of the beautiful old deco house. Some of the places around here were surrounded by big wood, stone or concrete walls. Not the Gomez home. The sides were fenced, as was the rear, but the front was open to the street.

      Agent Bill Foley, who had been on duty in his car watching the house, was still by his car and staring up at the place. When he saw Brett coming toward him, his ruddy face grew even darker and he shook his head in self-disgust. He started speaking without even pausing to say hello.

      “I wasn’t sleeping, I wasn’t on the phone, texting or even listening to music, Brett. I was watching that house. I don’t know how the hell anyone got inside. I tried to reach her on the phone for a prearranged check-in, but she didn’t answer. I went in and did a quick sweep and...no one. When I got upstairs and couldn’t find her I looked out, and I thought she’d jumped. She loved Miguel. She’d been depressed. Brett, I don’t know how the hell anyone got in there. If you don’t punch in the alarm code, a siren loud enough to wake the entire peninsula goes off.”

      “Someone knew the password,” Brett said. “All we can do is theorize right now. Someone had the code—somehow. I don’t know. We’ll check into the alarm company, make sure they don’t have someone on the Barillo payroll. Someone could conceivably have come over the gate in the rear, lipped around through the foliage to the front door and then keyed in the entry code.”

      “I don’t know how they got by me,” Bill told him.

      “We’re canvassing the neighborhood,” Brett told him. “We’ll see if we can find anyone who saw anything unusual.”

      Diego, he saw, was down the street, speaking with an elderly man who was walking a small mixed-breed dog. Diego motioned to him and he excused himself to Bill to join his partner.

      Diego looked at Brett with a grim smile. “This is Mr. Claude Derby,” he said.

      Brett nodded. “Special Agent Brett Cody, Mr. Derby. Thank you for speaking with us.”

      “Of course,” the elderly man said.

      Diego cleared his throat. “Mr. Derby says that he saw Miguel Gomez.”

      Derby strenuously nodded. “It was right around dusk last night. I was out walking Rocko here. I saw him and said, ‘Miguel! Thank God—we all thought you were dead.’”

      “Are you sure it was Miguel?” Brett asked.

      “Of course I’m sure!” Derby said indignantly. “I’m old, but I’m not senile, at least not yet! And my eyesight is probably as good as yours, especially when I was standing as close to him as I am to you.”

      “I’m sorry,” Brett said. “What did he say?”

      “Well, he didn’t,” Derby told him. “I’ve never seen anyone act so strangely in my life. He just stood there, as if he was completely unaware of me. Like...like a zombie.”

      “Like a zombie,” Diego repeated.

      “Did he shuffle when he walked? Was his flesh rotting off?” Brett asked.

      “Don’t be ridiculous!” Derby said indignantly. “I’m not a fool, and you’ve seen too many movies. He just wasn’t right. It was as if he didn’t even know I was there, that I was talking to him. I’d say he totally ignored me, but I don’t think he really even saw me. It was weird. I figured maybe he was heading home, except he didn’t head for the front door. I thought maybe he was going around to the side door, that he wasn’t dead and the papers had had it all wrong. I figured he could be on some kind of medication that was making him spacey. Anyway, I figured he’d get home and his wife could deal with him. Rocko and I, we just kept walking.”

      “Thank you, Mr. Derby, thank you very much,” Brett said, but some of his skepticism must have been evident.

      Derby wagged a finger at him. “Listen, Mr. Whatever Special Agent, I’m telling you God’s truth. I’m as sane as you are, and I’m not in the habit of seeing zombies around every corner. I saw Miguel Gomez, and he was not himself, not

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