A Desperate Silence (Dr. Sylvia Strange Book 3) Read Online Free PDF Page A

Range Rover loaded with corpses. He exhaled a stream of rank smoke and sighed. The faint scream of sirens sounded in the distance. Why hadn't he listened to his mother and become a famous mariachiador?
          Inside the Range Rover—no longer fighting against the duct tape that bound their hands and feet and covered their eyes—three dead men lolled against the bloodstained seats. Their features had been distorted by a severe beating; their cut and tortured bodies had bloated from three days' heat. A fourth man lay unbound, akimbo, oblivious to his bed of filth and dirt outside the vehicle.
          Victor thought he knew the identities of the corpses. Rumors had flowed like tainted water down the information pipeline—there had been a big hit four nights earlier. Part of an ongoing war between factions: those who pledged allegiance to the ruling drug lord against those who did not. It was all very simple—and very, very complicated. A classic gangland tale of Chicago in the 1920s, only this was Mexico, this was the roaring nineties.
          The rumors had named the victims of the hit: a district chief of Mexico's federal antinarcotics agency, his two bodyguards, and a formal federal police officer known to consort with narcotics traffickers. The quartet had been missing for five days, since arriving at the Juárez airport via a flight from Mexico City. Tonight they would be confirmed dead.
          One of the corpses inside the Range Rover was almost certainly the district chief. The man on the ground at Victor Vargas's size-8 feet was the former federale .
          Wearily, Vargas ran a hand through his close-cropped beard. Since the mid-1980s, when federal authorities closed down Florida as the Colombian-drug-cartel port of entry into the United States, Mexico had gained a reputation as the newest narco-state. There was no denying that tons of cocaine, marijuana, amphetamines, and heroin flowed across the border—much of it through the El Paso-Juárez gateway. Mexican drug lords had effectively divided the nation into feudal territories, buying the services of politicians and police, ruling with tyranny. Antidrug agencies had followed a trail of bribes to the toes of Mexico's president and a trail of money into the States, where it was sent around the world by the arbitrageurs.
          The most powerful lords remained virtually inviolable.
          And that scared Victor Vargas. The cop gazed up at the night sky; the reflection of the city's lights doused the stars, leaving only faint whispers of silver behind a dense polluted haze. He refilled his lungs with the Negrito's fumes. During the past six months, two dozen officials had been murdered in the drug wars. Victor sighed, expelling smoke. He had promised his wife he would not join the ranks of the dead; he had made the same promise to his mistress. For a street-smart cop, a veteran with cojones who walked the tightrope between warring factions, that was not an easy promise to keep.
          Victor Vargas had heard another rumor: more antidrug agents were set to die, and his name topped the list.
          He glanced at his watch; the illuminated dial fringed the hairs on his wrist in green shadow. It was almost midnight. The sirens were minutes away. He was first on the scene because his informants—his grimy, louse-infested street urchins, his junkies and his whores, his grand network of snitches, singers who would do the opera proud—worked overtime. But soon he would not be alone. He took one last hit of rank tobacco and gazed at the corpses.
          He knew why they were dead. These men had been murdered because they came looking for Snow White. And now Victor Vargas was looking for Snow White, too.

CHAPTER FOUR
    "Y OU LIED TO me." Sylvia managed to direct an ominous look at Albert Kove before the force of her leashed terrier pulled her forward along Griffin Street; the Malinois heeled stiffly by her side. She was dressed