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I wondered if my mom could get more detailed information about foster families. Even though she was now a private practice lawyer, she’d spent the bulk of her career as a prosecutor and knew all the right people. But if she could, would she tell me?
Doubtful. My mom was willing to bend rules, but she didn’t break them.
I sat in my car and watched the street, pretending to read something on my phone in case anyone paid me any attention. I took pictures, not that I knew yet what I would do with them.
As I watched the house, the two skinny kids came out, Bruno and Javier, who I’d seen with Henry earlier. They said something to the man on the porch, then left. Their heads were together and they were walking my way.
I took a couple pictures of them from inside my car, and was about to leave when they crossed the street and headed away from me without a second glance in my direction.
I watched them go. A shorter boy approached them from the corner. It was Henry. They were a full block away, but I recognized his clothes. The three of them went off together. Even though they matched the builds of the kids in the video, proving it would be next to impossible. There were a lot of kids who hung around in threes.
I wanted to follow, but had to get to the bar for my shift. And what could I do? I had no proof they’d committed a crime.
Andy was right. Even if I proved that these kids had robbed eight businesses over the last month that didn’t mean they had robbed the Cactus Stop or killed Rodriguez. Sergio had confessed, and there was evidence on his person. Until we had solid proof he was innocent, he would remain in lockup.
I relieved Scotty at six. He’d worked all day, and I would close tonight. We had two servers until nine, but people didn’t come here to eat bar food—though it was decent—they came here for beer and ballgames. The Suns were playing the Kings away in Sacramento, so we had a decent crowd watching the game, which I put on all the screens.
What Andy and I had discussed rattled in my head, and while I worked the bar, I also worked on my laptop. I subscribe to several databases for personal information. All legal stuff. I had Greg Rodriguez’s address and birthday from Andy’s file, so that helped. I didn’t have data on Don Cruz, but after some searching around and narrowing down, I found him: Donald James Cruz. He and Greg were the same age: twenty-three. A little more digging and I found out they both graduated from the same high school—Sunnyslope—the same year. It was a large campus, but they could have known each other.
Social media was an investigator’s best friend. It was the one thing I had mastered when Gene took me under his wing; at least I had been able to teach him something.
Both Don and Greg had multiple social media channels and between pouring beer, chatting with regulars, and closing tabs, I made some interesting discoveries.
The two men did in fact know each other from high school. Neither was involved in sports, band, drama, or any other school clubs that I could find. They were both far more interested in posting about getting stoned and eating pizza. After high school, Don went to community college and lived at home; Greg moved into the dive apartment the month after he graduated, never went to college, and worked in a variety of jobs—his Instagram page had him working at nine different places in five years, some that overlapped. Could be more that he hadn’t posted about. They followed each other, which didn’t always mean something, but there were several posts where they were tagged together over the years.
Don had a TikTok page and posted mostly silly content. But one post caught my eye.
It was a fifteen-second video taken at night from one of the Piestewa Peak trails. I knew, because I’d hiked virtually every trail in the Phoenix Mountains Preserve dozens of times. It was posted two months ago and I could hear a voice—presumably Don’s—saying, “We’re on top of the world!” The camera spun around showing the stars, the horizon, a distinctive cactus. The park was closed at night, so they wouldn’t have been able to drive to the trailhead, but they could have easily walked or biked.
As the camera spun, I glimpsed another man—and I had to watch it six times to freeze it at just the right second to determine he was Greg Rodriguez holding something shiny. I couldn’t get a clear shot of the shiny object. They were both laughing. The text over the short clip read:
When you’re sitting pretty you feel like every day you’re on the top of the world.
What the hell did that mean?
I saved the video to my phone.
Then I went more carefully through Don’s hundreds of posts trying to re-create his life and just how close he was to a man he told me he barely knew.
One more video stuck out to me. It was posted only a couple days ago. Don was clearly standing in the parking lot of the Cactus Stop. His eyes were watery and red, his voice a bit slurred, and I suspected he was high. “Hey, bros, I gotta new partner.” He snickered. No one else was in the video, just Don. “A lot smarter than my old partner.”
Partner? For what? The Cactus Stop? Wouldn’t he say co-worker if that were the case?
Don continued as he walked from what might have been his car to the door. In a conspiratorial whisper he said, “If all goes well, I won’t be doing the daily grind here anymore. Wink, wink.” He giggled, said something too quiet to hear to someone outside the video range, then the video ended as he opened the door.
I watched again. There was a reflection of another person in the glass door, but it wasn’t distinct enough for me recognize him. But maybe someone better at computers could figure it out. Lu was pretty good at this stuff. I saved the video to my phone, then sent it to her.
Lu, you’ve always been a computer whiz. There’s a reflection at the end of this video, is there any way you can make it clearer?
Fourteen
I visited Sergio at the jail as soon as visiting hours started Thursday morning. Time was running out and while I thought I knew at least part of the truth, I didn’t have enough information to take back to Andy, nor could I prove anything. Besides, even if Andy believed my theory, he couldn’t do anything about Sergio’s confession unless Sergio recanted or I found hard physical evidence of his innocence.
When Sergio saw me, he looked resigned. He didn’t have to talk to me, but he still came out, so that told me that he really did want my help—even if he wasn’t going to ask.
He shuffled slowly to the metal table where I sat and slid onto the bench across from me.
“I told you to stay out of my life,” he said.
