Slow Kill - Michael Mcgarrity [72]
“I’d better go get Alice ready for all of this,” Parker said.
“Thank you, Ms. Parker.”
“Please, it’s Penelope,” Parker replied with a girlish, teasing tone. “Although I must say I like a gentleman with good manners.”
Kerney laughed politely, got the fax number, disconnected, and called Alice Spalding’s lawyer.
Ramona Pino and Matt Chacon rolled up to Griffin’s house to find the front door ajar and nobody home. They did a quick visual room check, and found clothes missing from the master bedroom closet and a laptop computer gone from a desk in the home office.
Ramona stood in the middle of the living room and gazed out the open front door. “Okay, he’s running,” she said. “But why? What for? And where?”
Chacon wandered around the room pulling furniture away from the walls, kicking over scatter rugs, pummeling the pillows on the eight-foot-long couch. “Drugs,” he said. “It’s gotta be drugs.”
Ramona walked to the telephone, punched in the code to connect to the number of the last incoming call, listened to a clerk answer at a local building supplier, and disconnected. “He’s dealing pharmaceuticals and weed,” she said. “What else?”
“Harder stuff,” Chacon suggested, “or maybe a heavy volume of grass.”
“Ten pounds isn’t exactly lightweight.” Ramona listened to the messages on the answering machine. One from a slightly pissed-off homeowner, demanding to know why Griffin hadn’t yet fixed the tile caulking on the kitchen backsplash, caught her attention.
“But let’s assume,” she said, “he has a really big stash warehoused somewhere. Do we know where Griffin is building houses? Supposedly, it’s nearby.”
Chacon shook his head. “There are new houses going up all around La Cienega.”
Ramona played back the message again, wrote down the irate homeowner’s number, called, and got a busy tone. “Think upscale houses,” she said as she flipped through a phone book. The homeowner wasn’t listed.
“Willow Creek Estates,” Chacon said, “near the interstate.”
Ramona dropped the phone in the cradle. “No listing.” She pawed through a file drawer in the desk and pulled out a copy of the construction contract for the homeowner. “The guy who called Griffin lives on La Jara Way.”
“Which means scrub willow in Spanish,” Chacon said.
Ramona headed for the door. “Let’s take a tour of Willow Creek Estates.”
The subdivision covered a lot of territory and was so new none of their maps included it. They divided it up into halves, and cruised the paved streets. Once a ranch owned by a former governor, it was slowly being transformed into a gated residential community. There were large faux adobe houses on five- and ten-acre lots. Some were nestled along a tree windbreak that shielded the highway from view, while others were tucked out of sight behind low hills. Occupied homes were scattered here and there between houses in various stages of construction. All of them were typical Santa Fe style, with flat roofs, enclosed courtyards, portals, earth-tone stucco finishes, two or more fireplaces, and attached garages. Although not as expensive as the more exclusive foothills houses favored by the very rich, Ramona figured they had to be selling in the mid-to-high six-figure range.
She topped out on a hill and saw four unmarked vehicles, all with emergency lights flashing, parked in front of an unfinished house covered in a plaster scratch coat. Griffin’s pickup truck stood next to a small construction trailer. Men wearing Windbreakers were going in and out of the house and trailer.
By radio, she gave Matt Chacon the word, gave dispatch her twenty, and asked what was up at her location.
“We have no reported activity in your area,” dispatch replied.
“Well, get ready for some.” Ramona hit her emergency lights and drove toward the house. The man who stopped her at the driveway had a DEA ID attached to a lanyard around his neck.
“This is as far as you go, Sergeant Pino,” Special Agent Evan Winslow said.
“What a surprise,” Ramona said. “Shouldn’t you be at the brokerage office