Chapter 21

Ranger had been suspiciously quiet during Lester's monologue. I glanced at him and he was in full blank-face mode. I figured that wasn't in response to Lester's news as much as it was just his normal business-as-usual face. He was more interested in what Lester had to say about Paloma, because that's where the real potential for helpful information would come from.

"I'd planned on introducing myself to Paloma as a business associate of Rafael's. I had an entire backstory figured out. I was going to say I'd looked for him at Toma and when I hadn't found him, I took the chance to come to his apartment to see him. None of that was necessary. First thing next morning, I stopped at a little coffee shop near her apartment and she came in while I was there. A nice coincidence."

"I don't believe in coincidence," Ranger said.

"Well, then it was serendipitous," Lester answered. "And before you say you don't believe in that, it really was a chance meeting. She was in for coffee and we started to chat. I didn't recognize her at first, she's a little rougher than her pictures show. When I did, I couldn't believe my luck. I waited for her to introduce herself to me and then I feigned surprise and said that I was in the coffee shop gathering my courage to call on her brother."

"And she introduced herself to you why?" Tank asked.

"I saw her give me the once over when she came in and I knew she'd make a move. If she hadn't, I'd have introduced myself to her. This way worked better because she made the move and it took away any suspicion of why I was there. Both Diego and I have a certain…charm. I could tell she noticed it right away."

"Shit," Tank said.

"Continue," Ranger said.

"As soon as she heard I'd been looking for him at Toma she assumed I was gay, so it took a bit to get past that. Pretty soon she figured that I, uh, walked on both sides of the street, too."

Lester glanced at me in time to see another eye roll. "What?" he asked.

I sighed. "Nothing, go on with your story."

"It's not a story, Beautiful. It's a report."

"Santos." Just his name uttered in soft tones but it was both an order to continue and a warning. Ranger in his quiet way reminding everyone, he was the boss.

"Paloma was sad to inform me that I wouldn't be meeting up with Rafael as he had relocated, temporarily, to the United States."

"Temporarily?" Ranger asked.

"That's what she said," Lester answered. "We talked for a few minutes and I asked if she'd be willing to share a meal with me. She agreed and went on to say she'd be happy to show me some of the nightlife since I was going to be missing Rafael. We went our separate ways and met back up around two in the afternoon. We went to a restaurant also near where she lived, had a great meal and I ended up spending the rest of the day and night with her."

"It must have been a great lunch," Tank said. "You left that receipt in my office, too. Over three hundred for lunch!"

"In my defense, there were no prices on the menu and lunch was the main meal of the day…and there was some wine included on the ticket," Lester said. "I was trying to loosen her up so she would talk and talk she did. Bottom line she is one effed-up chick. She hates her brother, and she pops pills like they're candy. She told me much more than she probably realizes."

"She hates Rafael?" I asked.

"Yeah, but I didn't get that bit of info until much later in the day. It took me most of the flight home to put together everything she said. And wait until you hear why she hates him. Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned. They were lovers. She and her brother were lovers…until they weren't."

Lester paused for a moment to let that unsavory fact sink in. "I mean, forget for a minute the whole grossness of that but think about it in practical terms. You can't break up with your sister. Well, you can, because Rafael did," Lester amended. "After the breakup it's hard to move on when you live in the same place. She's never forgiven him. She rambled on and on about it—she was a little messed up by this point. We went to a nightclub and she was drinking pretty good, and I don't know what else she was using, but her buzz wasn't from alcohol alone."

"No wonder she hates him," I murmured. "He abused her."

"Oh, hell no," Lester said. "It was incestuous all right, but it was consensual. She wanted to run away and marry him. Apparently, it's legal in Argentina."

"It's not legal in Argentina," Tank said. That stopped Lester for a moment. I could see he wanted to ask Tank how he'd come by that bit of information but once again, Ranger's simple command of "Continue," kept things from going off the rail.

"Well, she thinks it's legal," Lester said. "But she's got a screw loose. She figured they could get married and then come to live in the States. Her brother had a different idea. He told her he was going back to Trenton, and she needed to stay in the family apartment and wait for his return. He broke her heart and now she is out for revenge."

"What kind of revenge?" Tank asked. "Something we could use?"

"I dunno. She's a loose cannon. I think using her to get a confession from Acosta would be a last resort."

"So we've got nothing?" Ranger asked.

"I'm not sure," Lester said. "When I first met with Gaby after I arrived she supplied me with some Mexican valium, you know rohypnol, because I thought I could use it to knock Paloma out so I could search the apartment."

"The date rape drug?" I asked, astonished. I seemed to be the only one surprised.

"Well, yeah," Lester said. "I wasn't going to do anything nefarious, but I figured I could get into the apartment and introduce myself to her. Then I'd slip her the drug to give me access to go through the apartment. I'd need time to see if I could find anything. In the end I didn't use it though, because she'd been putting away the booze on a regular basis since our lunch and that did the job for me."

Ranger opened the folder in front of him. "Are these images of what you found?" he asked.

"Yeah. After lunch we went back to the apartment and let me tell you, it's a huge swanky place. There was money somewhere in the family long before Rafael started embezzling it. We, uh, spent some time there relaxing and then she wanted to take a shower before we went back out for the evening."

I knew how to translate 'spent some time relaxing' and from Tank's grunt I guessed he knew how to translate Lester speak as well.

"I did a quick run through of the place when she was in the shower," Lester continued. "It's a huge apartment, probably around 4000 square feet on two different levels, so there was a lot of ground to cover. I started in what was an office, presumably Rafael's. I found a wall safe behind a big painting. The door was shut but the lock hadn't been spun. I grabbed hold and pulled the door open and there was a treasure trove of sorts. Weed for sure and various other pills. Some poppers, some prescription oxy, and most likely some coke, although it could have been horse—heroin, I mean. I didn't look at any of it too closely because I knew we were after a paper trail.

"When we got back to the apartment later that night we had a nightcap, a shot of Stoli, which turned out to be the final straw for her. When she was snoring pretty good, I picked her up and dumped her on her bed and then I made as thorough an inspection as I could. I found several interesting things.

"You'd said that she originally cleaned out her brother's law office. I found quite a bit of that paperwork, I think. I photographed it all and sent copies to Silvio. He's going through it."

"He is," Tank affirmed. "He hasn't found anything incriminating at this point. There are copies of everything you photographed in the folders. Half the paperwork is in English and half is in Spanish but, so far, according to Silvio, nothing earth-shaking."

"I found something else interesting, but I don't think it's pertinent to this investigation. I noticed a small hole in the ceiling above the bed in Paloma's bedroom. The room may have been Rafael's at one time, because it was obviously a master suite. She was completely out by this time so I hopped up on the bed next to her and took a good look. It was a small digital camera, like the ones we use here, but more of a consumer product rather than for professional use. It had an SD card, which I pulled. I looked at it yesterday before I came home. It was empty."

Rafael had modernized his equipment. Paloma wasn't using it or Lester might have seen himself on the SD card. How long would it be before Rafael replaced the system he had in use at his home in Trenton? How many other women were going to be victimized? I was strong in my resolve to be the one to bring him down, and so far Lester hadn't given us anything we could use. Ranger was counting on the fact he would, and I was hoping he wouldn't. I knew somehow that I needed to be the one to wrest a confession from Rafael. I needed to do it for me, and for Ella and Louis.

With an effort I pulled my mind from thoughts of my personal mission back to what Lester was saying.

"I met up with Gaby the next morning at the same coffee shop where I'd met Paloma. I'd left a couple of bugs in her apartment and dropped a tracker into her purse before I left. We had to be close to pick anything up from the apartment, so we were gonna get as close as we could without alerting security, but…"

Lester paused and I wasn't sure if it was for dramatic effect or just to organize his thoughts. "She came back," he said. "She walked into the coffee shop looking pretty good considering what she'd looked like when I left her. She didn't look right or left, which is good because it's a small place, but we did try to hide in a corner booth and be inconspicuous. She had her purse, so we were able to track her to a day spa and, not to be mean, but she needed the day there."

There was another sigh, but this time it came from Ranger and not from Tank. Lester must have perceived it was a less tolerant sigh, because he got right back to the business end of his story.

"We decided that the security was too tight at her place to get in and I hadn't found anything significant the night before so Gaby said she thought we might be able to get into his office, which to the best of her knowledge was still intact.

"We went to the Paseo de Reforma, the financial district, not too far from the family apartment. We got in. Gaby's as good as you, Ranger, at getting past locked doors. There was no security. The office looked like he just left work one day and was expecting to come back, which I think is the same way he left his law office in Trenton all those years ago, isn't that right?" He looked at Ranger for affirmation and got it.

"He's not a lawyer in Mexico," Lester said. "It was more like a brokerage office. We contacted Silvio and he helped us get into Acosta's computer. We weren't sure what we were looking at, but Silvio was looking with us, from wherever the hell he was."

"Miami," Tank said. "He's been working from the Miami office. And he didn't see anything incriminating in the files. It would take a while to investigate to see if Acosta's running scams out of that office, but Silvio thought everything looked legit, at first glance."

"That's what he told us," Lester said. "There was one interesting thing. The office had a second room at the back. It was a bedroom with a separate exit, unmarked, into the hallway down from the main entrance to his office."

My skin goose pimpled. My heart rate had jumped and I was afraid if Ranger looked, he'd see my hands tremble slightly. I put my hands in my lap as Lester continued.

"That's the same weird setup he had at the Adams building downtown, wasn't it?"

"Yes," Ranger said tersely.

"I remembered that Paloma said he was only here temporarily, so maybe that's why his office is still intact," Lester said. "Or maybe he had her move down to clean up his mess once again, but if he did, he'll be surprised because she's really pissed at him. She'd probably like nothing better than to see his ass in jail, but I don't think we can count on her for any help. She's unstable."

"So, basically, you gave us nothing," Tank said.

"I gave you quite a bit," Lester said. "Just nothing you can use. I'm sorry, but there was just nothing."

"This is different from what you're usually called upon to do for RangeMan," Ranger said. "Thanks for the effort." He pushed back his chair and stood and the rest of us followed suit.

Tank returned to his office, Ranger to his, and Lester ambled off toward the break room. I followed Ranger into his office and shut the door. "We need to talk about this," I said.

"Not now," Ranger said tersely.

"Tank was right," I went on. "Lester gave you nothing you could use."

Ranger sat behind his desk and looked over the top of a large stack of folders at me. "We don't know that with certainty," he said. "We need to look carefully at all the information Silvio was able to get off Acosta's business computer."

"That's crazy, Ranger. You're not going to find incriminating evidence in any of those files. At least, not evidence incriminating Rafael for the murder of David Guzman."

"You're probably right," Ranger conceded. "I know you want to set yourself up to be used as bait to get him and that possibility isn't off the table."

"That's good to hear. That's not the impression you've been giving."

"A week ago, it was my plan," he admitted. "I didn't know then how you were involved with Acosta. I've had to reconsider. I want to make certain what ever we do when we go after him is well thought out, safe for everyone involved and successful. It takes careful planning. And speaking of planning, what are your plans for the rest of the day?"

"I'm not sure," I said. "Lula is out of commission and Vince isn't typically available during the afternoons."

"I'm going upstairs after I finish here. I have access to some first line facial recognition software and I'm going to utilize it to see if we can identify any of the women on the tapes you uploaded. Do you want to help?"

"Uh, sure," I said unenthusiastically. "I'm going to grab a drink from the break room and then I'll go up."

I left his office and walked to the door of the break room intending to grab a bottle of juice from the fridge. Lester was sitting at a table with Woody and a wide-eyed Binky listening intently to his story.

"The bitch was a maniac," Lester said. "Right in the middle of things she snapped a popper under my nose, you know right when I was shooting…" He looked up and saw me standing in the doorway and he looked guilty. He was remembering our discussion about toning down the sex talk at work.

"Beautiful, I…"

"What's a popper?"

Lester and Binky spoke at the same time. I could see Lester was upset, probably not for telling sordid tales at work, but probably for being caught doing it. I forestalled his attempt at an apology by answering Binky's question.

"Amyl Nitrite," I said. "Also known as poppers because if you pop the capsule under someone's nose at the point of orgasm it intensifies it, or so I'm told. Were you talking about Paloma?" I asked Lester.

"Uh, yeah," he said, not meeting my eyes.

"They probably belonged to her brother," I said. "They're popular with gay men because they also are muscle relaxers and it makes …uh, certain types of sex more comfortable…and you mentioned that he enjoyed other men." Binky's mouth dropped open and Lester's mouth snapped closed. I had achieved my goal, so I turned on my heel and left, only to bump into Ranger.

The intensity of his gaze seared me. Without speaking he put his hand against the small of my back and steered me toward the elevator. I recognized anger, but I wasn't sure if it was directed at me or Lester. The elevator door opened as we stepped in front of it, as if he had commanded it, and possibly he had. When the elevator door closed on us, he dropped his hand and didn't speak to me or touch me again until we were standing in the foyer of his apartment.

His eyes were still radiating anger, but the touch of his hand running through my curls was gentle and his voice was nuanced with compassion and pain.

"He sodomized you." It wasn't a question, so I didn't answer.