The queen, p.1
The Queen, page 1
Praise for A.M. Pascarella
Nourish, hard-edged, and memorable Las Vegas procedural.
Booklife.com
In Maria, A.M. Pascarella has created a heroine with uncommon depth.
Bestthrillers.com
Maria and Carla are captivating figures, and readers will be eager for them to return.
Kirkus Reviews
The Queen
A Maria Varela Mystery
Book 3
A.M. Pascarella
Copyright © 2024 by A.M. Pascarella
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
This is a work of fiction. Unless otherwise indicated, all the names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents in this book are either the product of the author's imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Created with Vellum
Contents
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Epilogue
Excerpt from The Reporter: A Maria Varela Mystery #4
About the Author
Prologue
One more day.
Wyatt looked down the railroad tracks. He’d been clean for six days, and he just needed to get to tomorrow. That was his deal with the priest at the mission. Seven days without drugs, and the priest was going to line him up with some work. They’d given him a room for the detox since kicking on the street would have been brutal, but once the worst of it had subsided, they’d let him go and told him to come back after two more days. These two nights sleeping under the stars would be the evidence of his seriousness. That’s what the priest had said at least. Wyatt wondered if maybe they needed the bed for someone else. Not something worth stewing about. He just needed to get through tonight.
Tomorrow, he’d get up as soon as the sun popped over the horizon, and he’d walk down the railroad tracks until he reached the truck stop. A cousin who worked there was going to let him in. A shower, a change of clothes and then over to that priest, and he’d be working and be able to rent himself a room. He didn’t care what job the priest had in mind. Wyatt would clean up dog shit with his bare hands if that’s what it took.
Life was going to change for the better.
It had to.
Sure, the last few years had been rough, and every time he seemed to get on an upswing, things went sideways, but he was clear-headed now.
Didn’t matter what his brother said or thought.
Didn’t matter his son couldn’t stand to look at him.
Wyatt knew he could turn it around, and by this time next year, he’d be allowed to see his grandkids again.
He walked out from under the overpass and looked up at the quarter moon hanging low. She shone bright and silver against the black sky. On the other side of the overpass, the Las Vegas strip was turning night to day, but Wyatt preferred that sliver of a moon.
A truck passed overhead, shocks hissing.
Wyatt crouched down on his haunches. Maybe he could head over to the gas station a few blocks away and sit outside. Scrounge up some change and buy a beer. It’d be easier to sleep if he had a beer. Maybe if he was lucky, he’d get enough for a bottle of wine. Nothing made a man sleep more soundly than a bottle of wine.
He could almost see the gas station lights from here. The kid behind the counter, if you let him talk to you about guns, he’d let you sit there all night. Sure, it’d be better to get to sleep early, but how well was he going to sleep on these rocks anyway?
No. He just needed to make it one more day.
Once he was paid, his first paycheck in, damn, he didn’t even know how long since a real paycheck, but once he had it, he’d buy his own wine. Wouldn’t need to panhandle for nothing ever again. But he needed to make it through tonight. He was going to make everything right this year.
Finally.
Wyatt walked back under the overpass and huddled underneath his blanket.
Two cracks rung out. Gun shots and only a few blocks away. Las Vegas could be dangerous away from the glitz and the glamor, but he felt safer under his overpass than he’d feel in an apartment. When a man has nothing worth stealing, he’s rarely worth killing.
Weird the things a human can get used to.
Wyatt curled himself up into a ball in his sleeping bag. He thought about the shower he was going to take in the morning. He wasn’t going to screw this up.
Not this year. This year was different.
Footsteps along the tracks.
Wyatt looked up and saw a shadow getting closer and closer.
1
The woman could have been asleep.
Head tilted back and to the right. Mouth slightly open.
She could have been a young mother wore out from her child, catching a few solitary moments alone in her car. But she wasn’t. The bullet holes in the driver’s side car window and the crime scene techs scouring the parking lot for evidence revealed the truth.
This woman was never opening her eyes again.
Detective Maria Varela wondered how this as yet unidentified woman had ended up on Colorado Street, an industrial area of Las Vegas just a few blocks from the strip.
The car, a white Porsche Cayenne, was parked in front of a warehouse loading dock. The car had been backed up, whether expecting to receive something or hiding, Maria couldn’t quite figure out. Maybe the killer could tell them, but finding him or her wasn’t going to be easy.
Her partner, Michael, was inside asking about video cameras and if any of the workers knew the woman in the car, but Maria was sure all of Michael’s questions would lead to nothing.
This woman went to the kind of hair stylist Maria couldn’t afford; the highlights so impeccably done they might as well have been placed there by God. Her shirt was a sheer silk button down that cost over three hundred dollars. Maria knew because Carla had wanted to buy one just like it at Neiman Marcus the week before. Not to mention how much the car cost. No, this woman dead in the car wasn’t here to see any of the warehouse employees.
She had been lured here to be killed.
Maria wasn’t sure of much, but she was sure of that.
Michael walked out of the warehouse. Held his hand up to shade his eyes from the sun. He was wearing black slacks and a purple button-down shirt. His badge hung around his neck on a lanyard. He was the much better dresser of the two and liked to point that out to her, regularly.
He stood there on the steps taking in the scene for a good long beat before walking over and telling her nobody inside knew anything, and there were no cameras to review.
“Remind me again why we didn’t bet that going inside was a waste of time,” Maria said.
“Because I didn’t want to lose any money,” Michael said.
“Did you ask them why they don’t have any cameras on the outside of the building?”
“They told me they have plenty of cameras inside and getting in was about as easy as getting into a casino vault,” Michael said.
“What do they have inside?”
“Consumer electronics. They’re exporters. Everybody in there is Chinese,” Michael said.
“And if you’re exporting stolen electronics to China, you definitely don’t want to have cameras on the outside of the building taking pictures of the trucks making unauthorized stops,” Maria said.
“That was my impression,” Michael said. “You figure her for a working girl? Maybe came here to meet a client?”
“Did you take a good look at her? What high end escort meets clients in industrial districts? Those girls only go to expensive hotels and get on private airplanes,” Maria said.
“Maybe she came by with someone who does business with the people running the warehouse and was caught up in something bigger than her?” Michael said.
Maria walked a little closer to the car. Looked through the windshield.
“If she came here with someone else, where are they? Did you see signs of anything being off inside?” Maria asked.
“Nah, they just want to know when we’ll be done so they can get back to deliveries. And as far as cleaning goes, it doesn’t look like the inside has received anything other than a sweeping in a few years. No smell of soap or bleach or anything else you’d need to use to hide a killing,” Michael said.
“I haven’t seen any bullet casings. The techs are looking, but I have a feeling whoever did this knew what to leave and what to take,” Maria said.
“They mi ght have footprints beside her door,” Michael said.
“I already asked. Whoever it was backtracked over his footprints and dragged his feet as he went. Might as well have been a skier,” Maria said.
“Did they run the plates?” Michael said.
“It’s registered to some company. Millie has someone back at headquarters trying to get them on the phone,” Maria said.
A tech walked up with a wallet in a plastic bag. “Found this on the victim.”
Maria put on gloves and pulled the wallet out. Flipped it open to the driver’s license. Jasmine Olivera. Twenty-seven years old. Her birthday was March 4, and she was five foot three inches and one hundred and ten pounds. Her address was an apartment complex off of Fremont Street.
From over by the car, a uniformed officer let loose a low whistle.
“I knew I recognized her,” he said, “that’s the Queen of Crypto.” The officer had his phone out and facing toward Jasmine’s corpse.
“What the hell are you doing?” Maria said.
The officer looked up, confused.
“Are you out of your mind? Taking pictures?” Maria said.
“What’s the big deal? She’s dead,” the officer said.
Maria snatched the phone out of his hand.
“Give me my phone back,” the officer reached for it, but Maria turned her back to him.
The first photo she saw could have been taken for the front page of a newspaper. The framing was that good. The background was the tractor trailer covered in graffiti. The foreground had the sun gleaming off the hood of the Porsche, and the center of the shot was Jasmine’s corpse in the front seat. The second photo was zoomed in, and what it lacked in composition, it made up for in graphic detail. The third photo was from so far away that you almost couldn’t tell someone had been murdered, the only giveaway was the techs in their crime scene outfits.
Maria erased all the pictures and handed him back the phone.
“Have your sergeant contact me and get the hell off of my crime scene,” Maria said.
The officer, a kid really, maybe twenty-four or twenty-five, squared up on Maria like he was ready to fight. His partner grabbed him by his shoulder and pulled him back.
“Who the fuck does she think she is?” the officer said.
“She outranks you, and she’s right. Now let’s go,” the partner said.
“I need your name, now,” Maria said.
“Adam Dunleavy,” the officer said. He spit the words at her like she was going to regret having asked.
“Have your sergeant contact me, and sooner rather than later,” Maria said.
Maria watched them go, Dunleavy wanting to turn around and argue with her, his partner pushing him towards the car. As they drove away, Dunleavy was staring at her. Maria met his eyes and didn’t let them go until the car had turned around and driven off.
“There we go making friends again,” Michael said.
“Screw that guy. He should know better.”
“Yeah, he should. You going to have his sergeant write him up,” Michael said.
“Did you see the way he squared up on me? He’s the last guy who should be a cop.”
“We teach them to take control of every situation. That instinct doesn’t go away easy, even when it should,” Michael said.
“Men like that shouldn’t be cops.”
“Maybe, or maybe he’s young and malleable,” Michael said.
“Malleable? Since when did you start using fancy words?” Maria said.
“At least he identified her for us. Let’s go see what exactly being the Queen of Crypto means,” Michael said.
* * *
Finding Jasmine’s socials didn’t take long. All they had to do was type Queen of Crypto in the search bar, and she showed up. Her last Instagram story was an advertisement for a crypto trading platform named NeXXXus. In the video, Jasmine was sitting at a patio table. She was wearing a skin tight white mini dress with spaghetti straps. Her long black hair fell down over her shoulders. On the table was a computer, and as she typed on the keyboard, the voiceover said, “The best part about using NeXXXus for all my trading is its crypto-friendly deposits and withdrawals. Whatever coin you’re using, NeXXXus will take it, and you can buy and sell your crypto right on NeXXXus.”
A man came into the photo. Perfect beard, button down shirt hanging loose over pants creased as if they were right back from the dry cleaner. He put his hand on Jasmine’s shoulder and eyed the screen. She looked up at him, as if to say, “What do you think?”
He nodded his head.
The voiceover continued, “Slate and I can trade from anywhere all over the world without the restrictions of most trading exchanges. The freedom to make money from wherever we are has changed everything.”
“Something tells me people weren’t watching her videos just to learn about cryptocurrencies,” Michael said.
“She’s smart though. She’s not trying to look like a hooker. Showing enough skin to keep them interested, but not so much that people lose interest, and have you noticed anything else about her?” Maria asked.
“I hope you aren’t going to ask me about her eye color,” Michael said.
“She’s totally natural. I’m sure she’s using a filter, nobody’s body looks that good, but she has no implants, no liposuction or lip implants. She wants to be ogled but taken seriously,” Maria said.
The rest of Jasmine’s Instagram profile matched one of three categories: Jasmine, wealth, or travel. The photos and videos that centered on Jasmine were mostly shot by pools as Jasmine lounged in various string bikinis, but she was never bending over for the camera or looking longingly like she was dying to blow whoever was looking. The angles and lighting were great, and the shots were classy, at least as classy as a photo can be when a person was wearing dental floss for a bathing suit.
The photos that highlighted her wealth showed her in fancy cars or climbing the steps to a private plane. The cost of the restaurant meals the woman had eaten in the last month would easily have far outstripped Maria and Michael’s salary together.
When she wasn’t lounging by a pool or driving a six-figure car, she was standing in front of the Eiffel Tower, sitting in a gondola in Venice, or meditating in front of a Buddhist temple in Thailand.
Maria clicked through a set of videos that were thirty second infomercials with Jasmine asking questions of her boyfriend, Slate, about crypto. Slate made “It’s really complicated” facial expressions before launching into a pitch that was more psychobabble and hard sell then actual information.
In one particular video, Slate discussed something called the Ethereum merge in a word salad so incomprehensible that Maria felt like she was listening to an Alzheimer’s patient. Throughout Jasmine nodded along like Slate was dispensing wisdom from the gods.
“Please tell me people don’t really believe the bullshit coming out of his mouth,” Maria said.
“I guess that’s one of the things we’re going to have to find out,” Michael said.
“I’m hardly ever on these sites. What do you make of her account?”
“A little over four hundred thousand followers. One hundred thousand likes, yeah, she’s not the highest level of influencer but she’s up there. She probably has closets full of free swag that various companies want her to feature. I guarantee you, whoever is setting up that exchange was paying her to hawk it,” Michael said.
“I can barely turn on my laptop, and we catch the Crypto Queen murder,” Maria said.
“Maybe it’ll be something more analog,” Michael said.
“I hope so. Do you get into any of this crypto stuff?”
“No, but I wish I had. One of my friends tried to turn me on to it like a decade ago. He’s off living on a private island somewhere, and I’m stuck looking at your resting bitch face all day long.”
