HELLO BEAUTIFUL

Rating: NC17  for violence, murder, gunplay, adult themes. For safety’s sake, this will apply to ALL chapters. There will be no smut in this fic. There will be references, but references only, to rape, murder, mutilation in places

Copyright © December 2006 xxxevilgrinxxx

Ch 7

It’s was harder to check for tails, I’ve never done that drunk and, to be honest, hadn’t done it that often sober either. It was late at night and there was very little traffic and still I doubled back a few times just to be sure.

I pulled the car into an abandoned spot a short distance from Amy’s trailer, out of sight of the dirt path that ran in front of it. The thought of what I was about to do sobered me up quickly. It was one thing to look at the sight of a murder from the coldly rational distance of an observer but I wasn’t there anymore. And I needed to be, or I would miss something important.

I had to think things I didn’t want to be thinking, which was the deeper drive when I got Adriana and the kids out of the way. I didn’t want to think that Danno had been involved, and in my heart I knew that he couldn’t have hurt those women, but this wasn’t about what my heart felt. I had his keys; I had to think that somewhere out there, some dirtbag could have mine. I needed my head for this. One way or another he was involved, and people had been willing to kill him for it.

I looked down at the shirt I was wearing and wondered how that might look to anyone else. I had put on this disguise in order to slip into Danno’s world for a while but I hadn’t put an awful lot of thought into how it would be seen by anyone else. If I played my cards right, someone might think that Danno was still alive and walking around, which might just draw out whoever else was involved. Danno was supposed to be dead, not up and walking around. Somebody could get pretty pissed off if I was still wandering around alive when I wasn’t supposed to be.

The more I thought about it, the more I knew I could pull it off. He had only been here six months after all, how well known could he really be? He had known a lot of women but how many really knew him? I didn’t even really know him.

I think that if the people that killed him knew he was a DEA agent they would have taken more care with it. Danno was dumped, like the rest of the women, in the abandoned factories close to the border. He was killed here. I wondered if the rest of the women shared the same fate, or if Danno died here because he had come here that night for some purpose. Maybe to do what I was doing now. I think he came to Amy’s trailer after she died for the same reason I ended up in his apartment; to try to understand what had happened to her.

With a last look around I walked to the front and slipped inside. Nothing had changed since I was last here but it still hit me like a fist. I turned the penlight I had brought with me down to the floor, so it couldn’t be seen from the window and took a quick look around the living room. Nothing had changed; the blood was splattered in dark stains across the carpet, dry now, and furniture lay broken everywhere.

I had noticed before that there were no signs of premeditation. No restraints or attempts to keep the blood off the floor. It was as though whoever had killed him had no worries about being caught, at least not here. That meant that the killers expected not only privacy but discretion from the people around them. Somebody kept those people quiet.

I wondered why they were being quiet now. No one had come to interrupt me. Not now, and not the first time. Was it habit, or was it something else?

Someone had already rifled through a small stack of decorative boxes in the living room, and its contents were strewn all over the floor. I made my way back to the tiny bedroom to find that it was in the same state. Drawers turned out and their contents scattered. It didn’t look as though someone were looking for something so much as just looking.

I thought of Adriana and where she would keep things to keep the kids out of it. Those two could get into everything; there was no lock that could stop them. We just laughed at the idea of childproofing. Adriana just got really good at hiding things in places you’d never expect. I wondered if Amy had done that too, if she had hidden things she wanted to keep secret.

I started with the bedroom first. The contents of her nightstand were scattered all over the floor and I ran my hands through them but didn’t spot anything interesting. It either wasn’t ever there, or it had been taken already. There was no way for me to know which so I moved on. Nothing under the bed. She didn’t have an awful lot of things in her tiny closet; a couple of inexpensive dresses and one pair of high-heeled shoes that were worn out at the sole.

I checked the bathroom; peeked in the medicine cabinet and under the sink. I even lifted the lid behind the toilet. There was nothing there and this place was too small to really hide anything. From the looks of the place she hadn’t been here too long either. Everything looked temporary; just enough possessions to throw in a box, if you didn’t count the furniture and for all I knew that came with the trailer.

Her kitchen was neat and clean and I got the feeling that she liked to spend time here. There was a small table with two mismatched chairs pushed under a window. She had a small glass jar with flowers in it, dying now. It looked out of place with the destruction in the rest of the trailer. I looked in the freezer but there was nothing but ice cube trays in there. Nothing but a mismatched set of cutlery in the one drawer; nothing under the sink.

I thought of Adriana and pulled over one of the chairs to take a look on the tops of the cupboards. There was a small tin at the back, pushed up against the wall. I looked around the kitchen again before I took it down and moved back to the small table to see what I had found.

Danno had boxes of papers and personal effects at his apartment; all Amy had was this one small box. ‘Anna Maria Velasquez’ was her real name after all. She had been a Mexican national, born in Cuidad Juarez, right across the border from El Paso. I didn’t see anything to show that she had emigrated legally. Half of the other women that had been killed had also apparently come from Mexico. Half didn’t prove much.

She had a mother, a father, and a little brother. She had her own pictures of Danno that she kept amongst the things she prized enough to hide. False identification, poorly made, in the name of ‘Amy Sanchez’. Her life summed up in a few scraps of paper. Taped carefully to the bottom of the lid of the tin was a folded piece of paper with a single name, ‘Rodriguez’, followed by a number, four thousand dollars, and a telephone number. The number had the same prefix as all of the numbers on Danno’s fridge, so I assumed it was somewhere within the area of the trailer park, there wasn’t much else in the area.

At first glance I figured the name and number was for her coyote, the person that smuggled her into the US. For a fee of course. Although four thousand wasn’t much as far as these things go, the going rate is usually a lot more. I closed my eyes and put everything back in the box. It wasn’t a lot of money to smuggle someone across the border, but it looked about right for another sort of sale altogether.

Amy didn’t have a penny to her name, she had nothing, just a few scraps that she had managed to piece together. What she did have was her body. The four thousand was likely what she had to work off in order to clear her debt. It made me wonder about all those other women, if they had identical pieces of paper they kept somewhere that showed what some dirtbag thought their lives were worth.

Holloway stepped out of the shadows beside my car; I didn’t jump this time. It’s not that I expected him to be there, but I wasn’t surprised to see him either. He took a hard look at what I was wearing, assessing, and approved with a curt nod. I had passed muster. “You find what you were looking for.”

He didn’t know how to ask a question. I debated whether or not to answer him, but I got the impression that he knew already, or he wouldn’t have asked me in the first place. There isn’t much that would escape him. “I don’t know what I have yet.” I didn’t, all I had was disjointed theories and a few slips of paper.

That hard assessing look again before he calmly lit up another cigarette, the light flaring briefly against stony features. “You might want to check out Trailer 19. It belongs to the trailer manager. One ‘Rodriguez’, no last name.” Another hard look from Holloway. “Be careful, Alvarez.”