Vare just stood there, as if anything I said was illegitimate, but Peralta took out a cheap plastic pen and slightly lifted the tool from the floor. I was expecting to see a bolt and learn some new, unwanted information about torture, but no. Underneath was a ring. Vare knelt-her knees cracked-and lifted it in her gloved hand. Peralta gently let the drill down exactly where it had sat.
“Shit.” She said it quietly. Then she held it up for the sheriff to see.
He bent towards her, squinting. “It might be a copycat,” he said. “A wanna-be.”
“Maybe,” she said, unconvinced. “It looks like platinum. Not cheap.”
I moved over to them, bent down on my haunches. It was a man’s signet ring with a sharp engraving protruding from it.
It was an image of a rattlesnake’s head.
I said, “Kate, it’s you.”
“Asshole,” she said quietly.
“El Verdugo.” Peralta spoke with gravity and fluency. My Spanish was rusty but I knew the word. “The executioner.” Nobody said anything for at least a minute.
I held out my hands, waiting.
Vare sounded like my fourth-grade teacher lecturing the bad kids in the front row. “Pedro Alejandro Vega. Big-time hit man for the Sinaloa cartel. When he kills, he leaves the ring’s implant on the victim’s forehead. Like an artist signing a painting.”
“I’ve never seen Jax wear that ring.”
“That doesn’t mean shit,” Vare said. “There’s no photo of Vega. He’s never been arrested. He’s almost like a folklore legend in the narcocorridos.” She rolled her r’s, something I could never master, using the word for the songs that romanticized the exploits of the drug world. “Your Jax could easily be Pedro Vega. And then, I’ve got a whole list of new questions for you and this Robin Bryson.”
“Whatever.” Anger burned my throat. I processed, trying to see the world as it was, not as I wanted it to be. The foulness of the air was now in my taste buds.
“If La Fam killed El Verdugo…” Vare was talking to herself, tucking her head down, saying words that would confuse any Iowans who just moved to town but were obviously of great interest to the PPD. She dropped the ring into a plastic evidence envelope, muttered profanities. “What the hell was he doing in Phoenix, posing as a college professor?”
“That’s not my problem, Kate,” I said. “Sounds like a gang-unit deal, and you can go back to trying to close screwed-up cases from the eighties.”
