Southtown by Rick Riordan Read Free Book Online Page B

expensive—not even a hotel room, but a ranch-style bungalow with a mauve and crème bed, a canopied frame of rough-hewn oak and a Guatemalan rug on the flagstone floor. The fireplace was filled with dried sage and baby’s breath. A nest of birds chirped and echoed somewhere up in the old limestone chimney.
    Maia paid cash, signed our names Mr. & Mrs. Smith—her little joke, emulating so many Mr. & Mrs. Smiths we had tailed, photographed, strong-armed into divorce settlements back in the old days.
    We stood on the deck, Robert Johnson purring next to us on the railing.
    Beneath us, the cedars dropped away into a ravine, the red and silver ribbon of I-35 in the distance, heading north and south to our respective homes. I imagined some poor PI down below us, sweating in his car, pointing his telescopic lens this way, hoping to catch a clear, lurid, unmistakably guilty shot.
    I felt the need not to disappoint a hypothetical brother. I pulled Maia close. We kissed.
    “So how would it be,” she said, “if Erainya married this doctor of hers? Got out of the business. Got time to be a mother. That’s a possibility, isn’t it?”
    “A scary one, I suppose.”
    Our fingers laced. Down in the woods, a few late fireflies were blinking—something I hadn’t seen in San Antonio since I was a kid.
    “Then I’d only have the whole city of S.A. to contend with,” Maia decided. “Your roots.”
    She said the word
roots
like she might say
cancer
. If Maia believed in roots, she never would’ve had the courage to leave Shaoxing as a girl, smuggled aboard a Shanghai freighter by her uncle, who told her she would have to see America for both of them. If she believed in roots, she wouldn’t have left San Francisco, her adopted home, to be close to me.
    She never rubbed it in, never mentioned the fact that she’d left everything, come two thousand miles, followed me here because I would not stay in the Bay Area. She had resettled in the only palatable Texas port of entry for a Californian—Austin. Couldn’t I close the last seventy-five miles?
    “Six deaths,” I said. “All women, all illegal aliens.”
    It took her a moment to follow my thoughts. “You mean William Stirman.”
    “The accessory-to-murder charges. Six women were killed over a twelve-month period at a ranch in the Hill Country. Chopped to pieces with an ax.”
    “Stirman killed them?”
    “No. The murderer was a rancher named McCurdy. He ate a 12-gauge when the police surrounded his house. Stirman supplied the victims. He supplied slave labor to ranches all across South Texas. He promised immigrants safe passage north. Instead, they were worked to death. This case—the ax murderer—was the only one where Stirman got nailed. He knowingly sold those women to be victims of a killer.”
    Maia leaned against the railing, staring toward the distant highway. “Barrow and Barrera proved that?”
    “They worked from different ends, hired by different clients, but they cooperated. Barrow and Barrera broke the case, tied Stirman to the murderer and the victims, hand-delivered him to the police.”
    “Stirman won’t hang around,” Maia said. “He’s heading north, probably on his way to Canada.”
    I turned the idea around in my head, trying to believe it.
    “Besides,” Maia persisted, “why take revenge on the PIs? There must’ve been a lot of people involved in the case—police, attorneys.”
    I didn’t bother to answer. We both knew PIs made more satisfying targets—easier to hate, easier to get to. Policemen and lawyers were impersonal parts of the criminal justice machine. Your typical sociopath got little satisfaction from killing one, and then the wrath of the whole system came down on you.
    Nobody worked up much righteous indignation when a private investigator got smoked. PIs were everybody’s punching bag. In an average week, the Ortiz cousins had lobbed hand grenades at me and Quentin Yates had attacked me with a meat cleaver, all over trivial