He was right. Cheese was too smart at covering his bases not to expect Bubba might be involved. And Cheese also had to know that Bubba was capable of rolling a grenade into a group of Cheese’s men just on the off chance he’d kill the guy who’d piped him. So, if Cheese had given the order…again, why hadn’t he made it a termination contract? With Bubba dead, Cheese wouldn’t have to sweat reprisal. But by leaving him alive, Cheese’s only alternative, if he wanted to have any organization left by the time he got out of stir, was to hand over at least one of the players in the woods that night to Bubba. Unless he had other options I couldn’t envision.
“Christ!” I said.
“Got another mind-fuck for you,” Bubba said.
I wasn’t sure I could handle one more twist in my already knotted brain, but I said, “Shoot.”
“There’s a rumor going around about Pharaoh Gutierrez.”
“I know. He was teaming up with Mullen to take over Cheese’s action.”
“No, not that one. Everyone knows that one. Thing I’m hearing is that Pharaoh wasn’t one of us.”
“Then what was he?”
“A cop, Patrick,” Bubba said, and I felt everything in my brain slide to the left. “Word is he was DEA.”
21
“DEA?” Angie said. “You’re kidding.”
I shrugged. “Just what Bubba heard. You know street info: could be total bullshit, could be total truth. Too soon to tell.”
“So, what? Gutierrez was undercover for six years, working Cheese Olamon’s operation, and then he gets involved in the kidnapping of a four-year-old and he doesn’t pass that info on to his superiors?”
“Doesn’t add up, does it?”
“No. But what else is new?”
I leaned back in the kitchen chair, resisted an urge to punch the wall. This was one of the most infuriating cases I’d ever worked. Absolutely nothing made sense. A four-year-old girl disappears. Investigation leads us to believe the child was kidnapped by drug dealers who’d been ripped off by the mother. A ransom demand for the stolen money arrives from a woman who seems to work for the drug dealers. The ransom drop is an ambush. The drug dealers are killed. One of the drug dealers may or may not be an undercover operative for the federal government. The missing girl remains missing or at the bottom of a quarry.
Angie reached across the table and put her warm hand on my wrist. “We have to at least try to get a few hours’ sleep.”
I turned my wrist, took her hand in mine. “Is there one single thing about this case that makes sense to you?”
“Now that Gutierrez and Mullen have been whacked? No. There’s no one else in Cheese’s organization who could pick up the slack. Hell, there’s no one in his organization who’s smart enough to have pulled this off.”
“Wait a minute….”
“What?”
“You just said it yourself. There’s a power vacuum in Olamon’s organization now. What if that was the point?”
“Huh?”
“What if Cheese knew Mullen and Gutierrez were planning a coup? Or maybe he knew Mullen was, at least, and he’d heard whispers that Gutierrez wasn’t who he claimed to be?”
“So Cheese set all this up—the kidnapping, the ransom demands, et cetera—just so he could take out Mullen and Gutierrez?” She dropped my hand. “You’re serious?”
“It’s a theory.”
“An idiotic one,” she said.
“Hey.”
“No, think about it. Why go to all this trouble when he could have hired a couple of jack boys to pop Mullen and Gutierrez while they slept?”
“But he’s also pissed at Helene, wants his two hundred grand back.”
“So he tells Mullen to kidnap the kid, set up this elaborate child-for-money ruse, and then he has someone whack Mullen while it’s going down?”
“Why not?”
“Because then where’s Amanda? Where’s the money? Who was firing from those trees last night? Who knocked Bubba out? How did Mullen not know he was being set up? Do you realize how many people in Cheese’s organization would have had to be in on this huge, complicated conspiracy to pull it off? And Mullen wasn’t stupid. He was the smartest guy in Cheese’s crew. You don’t think he would have sniffed out a plan from the inside to kill him?”
I rubbed my eyes. “Christ. My head hurts.”
“Mine, too. And you’re not helping.”
I scowled at her and she smiled.
“Okay,” she said, “back to square one. Amanda is abducted. Why?”
“Two hundred grand her mother stole from Cheese.”
“Why didn’t Cheese just send someone around to threaten her? I’m pretty sure she would have buckled. They’d know that, too.”
“It could have taken them three months just to figure out the money wasn’t impounded by the police in the raid on the bikers.”
“Okay. But then they’d have moved fast. Ray Likanski had black eyes the day we met him.”
“You think he got them from Mullen?”
“Mullen would have given him a lot worse than black eyes if he thought he’d ripped him off. See, that’s what I’m saying. If Mullen thought Likanski and Helene had ripped the organization off, he wouldn’t kidnap Helene’s kid. He’d just kill Helene.”
“So maybe it wasn’t Cheese who had Amanda abducted?”
“Maybe not.”
“And the two hundred grand was a coincidence?” I tilted my head, cocked an eyebrow at her.
“You’re saying that’s a big coincidence.”
“I’m saying that’s a coincidence the size of Vermont. Particularly when the note found in Kimmie’s underwear said the two hundred grand equals a child’s return.”
She nodded, pinched her coffee cup handle, and turned the cup back and forth on the table. “Okay. So we’re back to Cheese. And all those questions about why he’d go to all this trouble.”
“Which, I agree, makes no sense and doesn’t sound like Cheese’s MO.”
She looked up from her coffee cup. “So where is she, Patrick?”
I touched her arm, slid my hand under the cuff of her bathrobe. “She’s in the quarry, Ange.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know.”
“Someone abducts that girl, ransoms her, and kills her. Simple as that?”