"I don't buy it," Casey said, ignoring his smirk. "Some women just don't want to know. You heard about Senator Chase and that hunting accident?"

"It was all over. Everywhere."

"This part wasn't."

Casey told him the story, as much as she knew. Jose's dark eyebrows dipped farther and farther toward his nose as she went on. When the champagne came, the waiter popped the cork and she stopped talking.

The waiter filled their glasses. Jose raised his and said, "I didn't mean to be goofy about it. Cheers, anyway."

"I wouldn't believe it if I hadn't gotten that kind of reaction from Norman Case," she said before taking a sip and nodding at her glass. "That's good. He's supposed to be a straight shooter."

"You think Chase killed this guy over the wife?"

"If it was an accident," Casey said, "why the rush to get Isodora out of the country?"

"Embarrassment?" Jose said. "Isn't Chase big on sending every Mexican without a swimming pool back across the border?"

"He didn't support the Immigration Bill, but who did?"

"It's how he didn't support it."

"I didn't follow it that close," Casey said.

"I did," Jose said, sipping his champagne. "I ever tell you I got a degree in poli-sci from Angelo State? Anyway, that man's a xenophobe."

"But these people lived on his ranch."

"Funny how they do that," Jose said, forcing a smile, "use these people like slaves until someone catches them. Then they say they didn't know and start calling them thieves and talk about breaking into the country."

"How can we find out?" Casey asked.

"It'll be hard to prove that it wasn't an accident," Jose said. "They said the guy jumped right up in front of him. No one else was there."

"Pretend the wife was with Elijandro," Casey said, eyeing the plate of deep-fried oysters the waiter set down. "Go at it like that and how do you prove it wasn't an accident?"

"You dig in," Jose said, stabbing an oyster and drowning it in hot sauce. "You ask questions. You start from the start. Eventually work your way around to the wife, but I'd save that. First you got the arrest report. Autopsy. Visit the scene. Even if it is in the Triangulo de Bermudas."

"Even I speak that Spanish," Casey said. "The Bermuda Triangle's in the Caribbean."

"We have our own here," Jose said. "The Mexicans around here are real superstitious about that corner of the county. There's a chief of police who don't like Mexicans and supposedly people have disappeared going through there."

"What do you mean? Arrested? Kidnapped?"

Jose shrugged. "Don't know, but when I was doing some undercover work right before I left the force there were these two bangers who almost went to war over a missing container full of people. One of the guys ran the route and the other's cousins were in the thing and it just disappeared."

"Maybe they didn't make it across the border," Casey said. "Or they got lost in the desert someplace."

"Right," Jose said, swallowing his oyster and holding his fork in the air. "Only the truck driver made a call from just outside Wilmer, so they made it across. That was the last time anyone had a line on the truck. Twenty people. Poof. Vanished.

"Don't worry though," he said with a grin.

"Why not?"

"'Cause I'm not superstitious."

CHAPTER 16

ON MONDAY MORNING, CASEY WAITED FOR ISODORA ON THE fourth floor, in the central hallway by the immigration courtrooms. The court schedule was posted on a thick column in the middle of the hall, and a small crowd, composed mostly of family members, clustered around it. The din of Spanish-speaking voices echoed up and down the sterile hallway with a rhythm and life that reminded Casey of something caged. She detected only two other attorneys, both men, who stood out in their suits and ties. She pressed through the crowd and rolled her eyes when she saw that Isodora was the second-from-the-last case in courtroom number three.

A few minutes later, Maria appeared, out of breath and explaining that an accident had made her bus late.

"You'll get her out, Ms. Jordan?" she asked.

"It depends on what the judge had for breakfast," Casey said.

"Breakfast?"

"It's just a saying," Casey said, eyeing a commotion by the elevators. "It means these judges can pretty much do what they want. Sometimes it depends on their mood. You brought the money?"

"Everything I could get," she said, pulling an envelope fat with faded small bills from her purse. "Almost eleven hundred."

The elevators at the far end of the hall disgorged the prisoners, who marched forward in orange jumpsuits, handcuffed and chained together like a troop from death row. Casey twisted her lips in disgust, walking to meet the advancing prisoners. She scanned the bunch for Isodora and finally found her, the last of the female prisoners before the men came led by a four-hundred-pound Latino with tattoos and a greasy ponytail. The pretty young Isodora hung her head, and when she did look up, her big brown eyes sagged with despair.

"Will I get my baby, Miss Casey?" she asked.

"I'm going to try, Isodora," Casey said, falling in alongside her client on their way to the courtroom. "What can you tell me about your husband's brother?"

"Teuch?"

"You know him, then."

Isodora shrugged. "He's nothing like my husband."

"He's a gang member?"

"He's a King. The Latin Kings," Isodora said, shuffling along under the clinking of chains.

"And you and your husband aren't in business with him in any way?" Casey asked as they stopped just outside the courtroom.

Isodora's eyebrows shot up. "Never. They didn't speak."

Casey raised a finger into the air and said, "You say it to the judge, just like that."

The court had no wood paneling or carved balustrades. It was a big empty room filled up with rows of simple metal benches facing a dais with a desk flanked by the American and Texas flags. Behind the desk, a plastic ICE seal had been screwed into the wall. On the floor, to either side of the dais, rested a table for the government and another for the defense, each with three metal chairs. The ICE agent sat down at the government table. On the defense side, a young Hispanic interpreter already waited.

The prisoners were shuttled into the front row and the agents escorting them clanked and rattled the chains as they separated them one from another, the women on one side and the men on the other. Casey found a seat in the back with Maria among the family members and the two other lawyers.

The judge came in through a side door, followed by a sharply dressed young woman wearing her hair in a tight dark bun. Casey knew that she would be the ICE assistant chief counsel.

The judge, a thin, elderly man in a robe that had faded from black to dark green, peered down his nose, adjusting his glasses as he studied his morning slate of cases. With very little interest, the judge clicked on a small tape recorder, set it on his desk, and began calling the prisoners to the defense table to give an accounting of themselves. None of them spoke English and the judge directed his attention to the young man sitting beside them, the interpreter, glancing only occasionally at the prisoners and the family members appearing on their behalf.

During this process, the young woman with the tight hair would chirp respectfully at the judge from the other side of the room about the government's position. The two of them, despite their differences in age and appearance, worked together like cogs in a machine, grinding slowly through the roomful of prisoners. While the judge showed no emotion, Casey took it as a good sign that many of the prisoners were released to their friends and relatives, even though some-like the enormous man wearing the ponytail-were left to sit and scowl in their handcuffs.