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Luisa remembered a recent raid on a Jaguar safe house in Tabasco that had resulted in the arrest of low-level Jaguars cartel member Hernan Cisneros and the seizure of cash and assets valued at well over five million dollars. Though the amount appeared to be exorbitant, it was thought to represent only a small fraction of the Jaguars’ wealth. The raid had created headlines, but it hadn’t resulted in a significant hit to the Jaguars’ cash flow. And to make matters worse, Cisneros had been killed in prison before he could be persuaded to testify against his fellow cartel members or reveal the identity of the Jaguars’ leader.

A prison guard had been arrested and charged for Cisneros’s murder. Despite the large cash deposit he had made a few days before the killing, he claimed not to have ties to the Jaguars, though it was widely assumed he had been contracted to ensure the Jaguars’ secrets remained intact and their leader’s identity remained a mystery. A mystery Luisa—and Carlos Ramos before her—was determined to solve.

Cisneros’s death was the latest murder attributed to the Jaguars. The first had not required a similar leap of faith. Their first victim was of one of the Sinaloas’ eight plaza bosses, regional leaders who managed the cartel’s operations along the Sonora-Arizona corridor and directed the flow of narcotics into the United States. The other seven plaza bosses soon fell. The Zs were initially thought to be to blame until the Jaguars claimed responsibility via a series of letters sent to the largest newspapers in all thirty-one Mexican states.

Investigative journalists had attempted to track the source of the letters, but neither the writer nor the senders had ever been found. Not even after Jaguars hit men began going after the Zs and their allies.

The inner circles of the main cartels were quickly decimated, leaving a sizable hole the Jaguars soon filled. Now their grip on Mexico’s lucrative drug trade was as firm as a vise. Their hold on Mexico’s citizens was just as tight. Most feared them. Some idolized them. But no one dared to cross them. Not if they wanted to live.

Luisa closed her eyes, but was unable to block out the images of the Jaguars’ victims. Images of men, women, and children with their throats slit, their bodies riddled with bullets, and identifying features such as their hands, feet, and teeth removed danced in her mind’s eye. One detail nagged at her. In a handful of the photos, some of the victims had had a small rectangular flap of skin removed from their forearms. Ramos’s notes revealed he thought it was a particular hit man’s calling card, but perhaps it was something else. Perhaps the action was not meant to identify the person who had pulled the trigger, but to obscure the identities of the victims. Were they connected in some way? If so, what did they have in common?

Had they been targeted by hit men working for the Jaguars, or were they Jaguars trigger men who had been killed by the opposition? If a rival cartel had committed the murders, they had yet to claim responsibility for them, an unprecedented move in a war fueled by hubris and testosterone.

The first thing Luisa needed to do was identify the four unnamed victims. One had “The World is My Barrio” tattooed in elaborate scripted letters across his stomach. Ramos’s notes indicated he had run an image of the tattoo through a database that tracked prisoners’ ink after they passed through intake, but Luisa couldn’t find a record of the result. She accessed the database she needed, pasted a copy of the image into the program, and ran the test again. The tattoo quickly came back as a match to Salvador Perez, who was currently serving five years in Santa Martha, notorious for both its overcrowding and its violence. His tattoo was an exact match to the dead man’s, but the corpse was estimated to belong to someone between thirty and forty years of age. Salvador Perez was only nineteen. Too young to be a contemporary of the dead man, but old enough to pay tribute to his dubious legacy.

Perez’s mother, Silvia, was listed as his primary contact. No phone number was provided, and her address was in the tiny village of Agua Dulce, some four hundred miles away. Perhaps a road trip was in order. Luisa would start with Salvador and, if necessary, drive to Agua Dulce to pay his mother a visit. She called the warden at Santa Martha to set up an appointment for later that afternoon.

“You look like you could use a break.”

Luisa looked up to find Ruben Huerta from Records Management standing in front of her desk. Slight, bespectacled, and prematurely balding, he was in charge of cataloguing and storing current and former case files. He gave her the third degree every time she asked for access to something from the archives, though she couldn’t decide if he was being thorough, possessive, territorial, or all three.

“May I buy you a burrito?” he asked.

After a day and a half of being iced out by most of her coworkers, Luisa was surprised to see one make a concerted—and very public—effort to invite her into the fold. Or was Ruben attempting to lure her into a trap? She was too hungry to care, and if it came down to it, she thought she could take him in a fight. He didn’t look strong enough to stay upright during a stiff breeze, let alone withstand an assault from someone trained in hand-to-hand combat.

“Sounds good to me.”

She locked her computer, pushed her chair away from her desk, and followed Ruben to Salon Corona. The restaurant was founded in the 1920s, but the dining area resembled a cocktail lounge from the 1970s. Despite the garish decorations, the food was good and the spot was a lunchtime favorite with the people who worked in or near the center of town.

“You seem surprised,” Ruben said after they placed their orders. “Were you expecting me to take you to a cheap
taquería
instead?”

“To be honest, I didn’t know what to expect.” Luisa spread her napkin in her lap. “I still don’t.”

Ruben pushed his glasses up on the bridge of his aquiline nose, but they quickly slipped back down to the pointed tip.

“Are you always this suspicious?”

Luisa angled her chair so she was facing the door instead of sitting with her back to it. She wasn’t expecting anything to happen in such a public place and in front of so many potential witnesses, but if it did, she wanted to see it coming instead of getting caught by surprise.

“It’s what makes me a good police officer.”

“Being a good police officer could also get you killed.”

“Is that what happened to Carlos Ramos?”

Ruben’s eyes widened behind his thick corrective lenses, and he nearly choked on the complimentary chips and salsa the waitress had brought out shortly after they were seated.

“I could speculate about what happened to Carlos,” he said, taking a sip of water, “but no one knows for sure. Have you found anything in the case files that might lead you to his whereabouts?”

Luisa leaned back in her seat to give the waitress room to place her loaded chicken burrito and side of guacamole on the table. Despite the presence of the fragrant food and boisterous diners, the outing was starting to feel less like lunch and more like a fishing expedition.

She had discovered a few potential leads that hadn’t already been released to the public—such as the missing flap of skin on the four unidentified murder victims’ forearms—but some were years old, and she wouldn’t be able to determine how promising they might turn out to be until she followed up on them. She decided to keep that information to herself, however. She couldn’t risk having her nascent investigation compromised—by internal or external forces.

“Not yet, but I’m working on it.”

Ruben’s burrito weighed more than he did, but he devoured half of it before Luisa had taken more than a couple bites of hers.

“I, for one, am rooting for you,” he said, reaching for more chips and salsa. “Carlos Ramos was a good man. He didn’t deserve what happened to him.” The sentiment held an air of certainty Ruben probably didn’t intend to reveal because he immediately backtracked from his statement. “Whatever that might turn out to be, of course.”

Luisa was tempted to ask him what he knew, but she didn’t want to be too obvious and scare away a potential source—or possible suspect. She took a sip of her bottled water to give Ruben time to burn off his nervousness but pressed forward before he could get too comfortable.

“Do you think it’s more likely Ramos was paid off or rubbed out?”

Ruben frowned like she had besmirched the dead man’s honor. “Like I said, Carlos was a good man. I know his family. I knew him. We grew up in the same town.” His voice shook with emotion, revealing ties that were personal, not just professional. “He wasn’t dirty. He was trying to get at the truth. In the end, I think the truth found him.”

The irony of Ruben’s words didn’t escape Luisa. The truth was supposed to set you free, but it might have gotten Carlos Ramos killed. And if she weren’t careful, she could very well be next.

“I’ll make a deal with you,” Ruben said. “I’m so far out of the loop in Records, I’m usually the last to know anything. But if I see or hear something you can use, I promise to share it with you.”

Luisa deliberately kept her expression blank so she wouldn’t betray either her excitement or her lingering doubts.

“What would you expect from me in return?”

“I want you to catch the bastards that most likely killed my friend.”

Luisa had been trained to tell when a suspect was lying to her. She examined Ruben’s face and body language for telltale signs he was being less than honest but found none. She tossed her napkin on the table and extended her hand.

“You’ve got a deal.”

❖

Finn checked the schedule. The day’s agenda was pretty light, most likely geared toward allowing the people who had signed up for optional excursions to feel like they weren’t missing out on something by being away from the hotel for hours on end. The pool games had just ended. She and the five members of her team had piled themselves on the same surfboard one by one and maneuvered it around the pool using only their arms and legs to propel them. They had finished a distant second to a bunch of ringers who had obviously played the game before. That was her excuse, anyway, and she was sticking to it.

With the pool games over for the day, her options for the rest of the afternoon included sitting through a presentation on SOS Tours’ upcoming vacations, taking a dance lesson in the fitness center, or trying her hand at speed dating on the beach. She could get a list of next year’s scheduled trips on SOS’s website, she already knew how to dance, and she still had nightmares from the last time she had tried to impress someone in sixty seconds or less. To save herself from further shame, she decided to take a walk on the beach in the hopes of capturing a few photographs to accompany her upcoming article and to see if she could make it from one end to the other before the tide rolled in.

The beach was narrower than she expected. The part closest to the water was hard-packed and easier to walk on, but the sharp angle made keeping her balance tricky. That left the soft-packed sand, which made for slow going and gave her a serious workout. Her calves and thighs were burning in no time. Perfect since her arms and shoulders were still numb from the thirty minutes she had spent trying to paddle a lesbian-laden surfboard around the pool.

“I used to think I was in pretty good shape until I started trying to keep up with these women.”

They not only partied hard. They played that way, too.

After she took a picture of two women walking hand in hand in the surf, she thumbed through some of the images she had already captured on her digital camera. The earliest photos she had taken after she arrived in Cancún were of her room, the hotel, and the surrounding grounds.

It was easier for her to focus on landscapes and animals rather than people. Money shots for the magazine subscribers who were as addicted to travel porn as she was.

The pictures of iguanas sunning themselves on the sidewalk and bath towels folded to look like cranes gradually gave way to more personal images. Jill pensively staring at the sea from her perch on a beachside cabana. Aurora floating in the water while her handlers held her aloft. Katie leading a group of Indies through a game of Twister during Happy Hour at the seafront bar. Sasha learning to fly on the trapeze as she rehearsed for tomorrow night’s amateur circus.

Finn felt a connection to these women. These five hundred strangers who were starting to feel like lifelong friends. Some were marginalized at home and weren’t able to be out year-round. But for this week at least, they were finally, utterly free.

Finn shook her head, marveling at how far the gay rights movement had come over the years—and how many strides still needed to be made. But she was proud to find herself in the company of these women and overjoyed she was able to address many of them by name. Who would have thought when she left San Francisco a few days ago she would end up here? Not alone or surrounded by strangers, but among friends.

Her assignment no longer felt like a job. It felt like coming home.

And then there was Luisa. Finn glanced at the picture Luisa had taken of her and Porky Pig in the airport bar in Dallas. Then she slid over to the photograph she had taken of Luisa at the hotel less than a mile away. Luisa was smiling and happy in the photo, her brown skin standing in sharp contrast to the white sheets tangled around her semi-covered body.

Finn hadn’t felt the need to define their relationship then, but she needed some boundaries now. Was Luisa a friend? Was she a lover? Or was she something else entirely?

Finn had never felt this way before. This strange combination of falling and flying she experienced each time she heard Luisa’s voice or called her image to mind. Was this what it felt like to be in love, or was Montezuma exacting an entirely different kind of revenge?

The only time she had felt something remotely similar was back in high school when she realized she couldn’t mend Nancy Everhart’s broken heart because she wanted to be the one Nancy was crying over instead of the quarterback who had dumped her for the head cheerleader. Then she had attributed the feeling to finding herself. Now it was due to finding someone else.