He didn’t say anything.
“But you also suffered,” she said, trying to find a way to understand him, to find some way to make sense of him just leaving her sister here. “It didn’t bother you at all that she was rotting a few feet away from you?”
He didn’t say a word.
“Instead, you just sealed up the room tight and left it. My God,” she said. “Did you kill her yourself, or did your son do it?”
He shifted uneasily at that.
“You know the cops will have questions for you,” she said. “No way they can shield you from it this time. This is way too big,” she said. “You can’t just fire your gun to scare them away. Not to mention the fact that another shooter was trying to kill the three of us. While you were out cold on the sidewalk, somebody from the other side of that wall over there tried to kill us.”
He looked at her with a sharp gaze at that point, and she realized he really was in there and listening.
She nodded. “Were they after your son Chico?”
He got an odd look in his eyes, but he shrugged. “I don’t know,” he said. “He’s a bad seed.”
“Do you know who Chico was working for?” she asked.
“Tristan.”
She looked at Cain and shrugged. “He says Chico was working for Tristan.”
“Ask for any details that you can get.”
Knowing they probably didn’t have much time, she quickly turned back and said, “Please tell me. What kind of work was he doing for Tristan?”
“Devil’s work.”
“Killing people?”
He just shrugged.
“Theft, drugs, burglary, anything? What was it?”
“All of it,” he replied.
She sagged back with a big sigh. “Right, a bad seed.”
Morgan nodded slowly.
“And Tristan? Do you know where they would meet?”
“No,” he said. “But all that was before Chico left, before Tristan left.”
“Do you know where Tristan is now?”
“No,” he said, shaking his head.
“Do you know how they kept in contact with each other?”
“Phone.”
Petra looked at Cain and asked, “Did you get Chico’s phone? Apparently Chico and Tristan communicated by phone.”
Cain frowned at that, pulled out his own phone and sent a quick text.
She looked back at the father, not nearly so imposing now. “He’s dead, you know.” The old man looked at her in surprise. “Your son, Chico,” she said. “He’s dead.” But instead of the sorrow she expected to see, there was what looked like relief. She thought about that for a moment. “He’s caused you a lot of trouble, didn’t he?”
The old man slowly nodded.
“Did he threaten to kill you?”
He nodded even slower.
“And, if you were to say anything about my sister, he’d put a bullet in your head too, right?”
He nodded again, even slower.
She groaned. “Well, I still wish you would have said something, but Chico’s dead, and he can’t hurt you anymore. He can’t hurt anyone.”
The tired old man just stared out into the horizon.
“Was he your son?”
“I don’t see how,” he said. “Bad seed.”
She looked up at Cain and shrugged.
*
Cain encouraged her to continue with her questions.
“What’s the deal with Tristan?” Petra asked Morgan, but the old drunk man just shrugged. “Who does he work for? Do you know company names or anything at all?”
She kept asking questions, now in English for Cain’s benefit, but the man had sunk into some drunken haze. It made sense now that he’d been drinking so heavily. But no way that dead body would remain undetected forever. Possibly until he died. Maybe the son—whether Chico or Tristan—would come back and take care of Morgan and torch the place. It was an incredibly sad scenario. Maybe Tristan still would resort to arson.
Cain looked back at the house, as he listened, and he realized how large the wing on that side of the house was. Cain looked at her and said, “I want to go back inside and look at the floor below Chico’s bedroom.”
She nodded. “The cops are inside. They may not let you.”
“Well, I’ll give it a try,” he said.
With Eton at his side, the two of them walked in, slipped past the cops, and headed directly to the rooms under the wing where the body was found. He couldn’t believe there wouldn’t be some kind of decomposition impacting the floor below. But the climate was so dry here, and, with the room sealed up like that, he didn’t know. As they headed to the room downstairs, he exchanged a look with his partner.
“Do you think something’s here?” Eton asked.
“It’s time to find out,” Cain said. Reaching forward with his gloved hand, he checked the knob. It was locked. He quickly popped the lock and pushed it open.
They stood in the open doorway, surveying the scene. The smell was strong down here, but nowhere near as bad as upstairs. Some people might not have known the difference. The room was completely empty, except for a series of large cupboards. They walked through to them and pulled open the doors, but nothing was here.
He looked behind the cupboards, wondering why these were even here. “I wonder if this was an office or something. He could have come up and down the stairs, and no one would have noticed anyone was working down here.”
“An office for what though?” Eton said. “Everything’s gone.”
“It wouldn’t take much to clean it out.” He motioned to a tiny piece of something white stuck behind a particular cupboard. Even with the two strong men, they had to put their backs into it in order to shift the big sturdy cupboard. After moving it, Eton reached down and pulled out a photo.
It was the gunman, Chico, from the museum, with someone else. The other man was slightly older and had a hand on Chico’s shoulder. They looked like they could have been related.
They both studied it, wondering where the picture was taken. It could have been anywhere in Europe. Cain flipped it over and saw the name Tristan written there. “Okay,” he said and immediately took a photo and sent it off.
“It’d be nice if we could get more on this Tristan guy,” Eton said. “And find out what he was into.”
They worked together to move the other cupboard slightly too. Behind it, they found a series of envelopes taped to the back.
“I wonder how long ago he did this,” Cain said. Hearing footsteps and voices on the stairs, he said, “We need to hurry.”
They quickly ripped everything off the back of the wardrobe cupboards and, along with the photo of Tristan, put it all together, and slipped out the side door, the police none the wiser. Walking around the front, they went to where Petra sat beside the old man.
Cain held out the photo to the old man. “Is this Chico?” they asked, pointing to the one from the museum.
He looked up at it and nodded.
“And Tristan?”
He nodded.
“They got along?”
He nodded and shrugged.
She quickly started to ask him questions. And this time he spoke in his native language.