The Death Factory by Greg Iles Read Free Book Online Page A

‘You’re a celebrity lawyer now, hobnobbing with the Hollywood crowd. We’re still fighting down in the street. We don’t need your help, and we don’t want it.’
    “‘Come on, Mitch. I know you don’t want a guilty man going free. What are you so afraid of?’
    “‘Okay, screw it,’ he said. ‘We’ve got a big case coming up. Huge. A conspiracy case. We’re going to nail one of the biggest traffickers bringing weight over the border.’
    “‘Who?’
    “‘Victor Luna.’
    “That stopped me. Luna was a cartel lieutenant. He owned a house in Houston, and he was seriously bad news. ‘What do you have on Luna?’ I asked.
    “‘We’ve got him for killing an informant. He pulled the trigger himself. There’s DNA evidence critical to that case. So the last thing we need is somebody calling the integrity of the HPD lab into question, especially the serology section.’
    “‘I get that,’ I told him, ‘but the Avila case was just a simple fuckup. Dr. Kirmani should have done a chemical test and didn’t. That’s easy to explain.’
    “Gaines only grunted. I felt like I was missing something. ‘I don’t get it,’ I told him. ‘Is this like the tip of an iceberg over there?’
    “‘Wake up, Opie!’ he snapped. ‘There were problems in that lab when you were trying cases here. Anybody who didn’t see that was wearing blinders. We all know they operate on a shoestring. And like everything else, you get what you pay for.’
    “‘That lab work is deciding whether or not people go to the injection chamber,’ I said.
    “But Gaines had heard all he wanted to hear. ‘I don’t have time for your holier-than-thou bullshit,’ he said. ‘I still work for a living. You want to stick your nose in this, go ahead. But the boss is liable to break it for you. You might have been his heir apparent back in the day, but you quit the team. Joe’s got his priorities, and he wants Luna locked in the Walls Unit, waiting for the needle. See how far you get trying to screw that up.’ And then he slammed down the phone.”
    At the top of the hill, I turn left, then left again a block later onto Linton Avenue, the heart of Natchez’s Garden District. On both sides of the broad street, three-story Victorians sited on steep hills peer down at us like mansions in a child’s fairy tale. “Clearly I was going to be swimming against the current,” I say to Jack.
    “Did you kick it up the chain to your old boss, the DA?”
    “No. I decided to go down and see the Avila family—at least the mother—and to talk to Maribel if I could. I felt I owed them that much.”
    “Even with Sarah as sick as she was?”
    “The whole thing only took an hour. The Avilas lived down in Gulfton, which was just a few miles south of Tanglewood. Gulfton was one of the original areas of Hispanic settlement in Houston. By the late seventies, it was wall-to-wall apartment complexes, built for young singles who’d moved in during the oil boom. When the oil industry crashed, those complexes emptied out. The ones that didn’t go bankrupt filled up with Latino families. By the late eighties, a lot of Salvadorans were moving in. Crime skyrocketed with overcrowding, and the rest of Houston started calling it the Gulfton Ghetto. This was a stone’s throw from an ex-president, right down Chimney Rock Road. I drove down there while Sarah was dozing and Annie was watching a movie with Mom.”
    Jack has leaned back against his door and is staring at me with something like wonder. “You’re your father’s son, you know that?”
    “I hope so.” I close my eyes for a second, blotting out my anxiety over my father and letting that long-ago pilgrimage fill my head. “They still lived in the same apartment complex, Napoleon Square. When he was murdered, Dominic Avila had been working hard to earn the money to move his family out of there and over to Northside, where some Hispanics were making inroads into safer neighborhoods. But after Dom was