There was a big bag for Rivera, and a second small bag for the woman, and since Rivera had made no effort to introduce them, Lucas said to the woman, “I’m Lucas Davenport. I’m an agent with the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension.” She bobbed her head and gave him a quick smile and said her name was Ana Martínez. Lucas left them at the curb outside Baggage Claim, retrieved the Lexus, pulled around and loaded them up.
“I need to know about the Criminales,” Lucas said as they left the terminal. “Who they are, what they want. What their reach is.”
As he was talking, Martínez pulled an iPad out of her bag and began typing into it.
Rivera said, “They are not quite the worst of the worst, but they are close. They began with a family, or a clan, in Sonora. At first, they were cross-border smugglers, mostly people, not drugs. What drugs they did smuggle, they took the other way, from the U.S. back to Mexico. Prescription medicine that was hard to get out in the countryside. Then, they began with the cocaine, going into the U.S. There were wars with other gangs, and their leadership got wiped out a few times, and they kept getting lower, and lower, and now they are like mad dogs. They will bite anything that moves. They have several hundred members, two-thirds on this side of the border, in distribution, one-third on our side, for acquisition, smuggling, and enforcement. There are still some members of the original family, but most of those are dead. It is not hard to find new management.”
Lucas mentioned the agent who was allegedly skinned alive and asked, “Did they really do that? Or is that mostly an urban legend?”
“The skin was sent to my superior—I saw it,” Rivera said. “Along with a movie. They did it, really.”
“Jesus.”
“He was not involved,” Rivera said. “I can tell you something else. You never want to smell a skin that has been three days in the mail.”
“So then what?” Lucas asked. “You went to war with the Criminales?”
“We were already at war—if we don’t kill them soon, the whole snake, they will be coming for me.” He looked out the window at the lush August landscape of the Minnesota River Valley. “I come here to the States as often as I can, to stretch out my life.”
Martínez passed the iPad over the seat and said, “E-mail from Luis.”
Rivera looked at it, then said, “I’ll call him later.”
She took the iPad back and typed something else into it.
Rivera had more background on the LCN, but it was all fairly standard gang stuff. “They are not innovative,” Rivera said. “They are just crazy, and what can you say about that? They don’t seem to care whether they live or die.”
His real information was not sociological or anthropological, but factual: he had names, fingerprints, DNA profiles in a few cases. “I can tell you who is who, what rank they hold, where they usually are, and what their job is, when we know that. I don’t have any secrets. I want everybody to know them.”
“I’ve got people from St. Paul shaking out Latino gang members. Let’s see if we can figure out who belongs to who,” Lucas said. “If we find a Criminales clique, that’d be a step in the right direction.”
“If these killers were doing what we think they were doing, they won’t be local, and the local clique won’t know them,” Rivera said. “They will be from Mexico, and they’ll go back to Mexico when they are finished here.”
“You don’t think they’re finished?”
“I hope not,” Rivera said. “If they’re not, you might catch some of them. If you do, we will ask for extradition through our embassy. Or, if there is no proof, we will ask that you deport them. Illegal aliens.”
Lucas said, “Huh.”
Rivera smiled at him. “We don’t get rough with them.”
“Good to hear it,” Lucas said. There was a little doubt in his voice.
“We pull down their trousers, then we bring in the garbage disposal,” Rivera said. “They always talk. Mexican men are very adverse … adverse, correct? … adverse to having their personal parts placed in a garbage disposal. So, as we work to get it plugged in and operating … we always have to work at it, we invent problems, to invent time for them to watch the machine … drop some walnuts in, to test it … They start talking. We never have to get rough.”
Lucas said, “Hmm.” Then, “We had three Mexican guys check into a hotel here a couple days ago, and then they took off.”
Rivera was interested.
AT THE BROOKS HOUSE, Rivera wandered away from the driveway, to walk slowly around to the back of the house to look out at the lake. “This is very nice. I could retire here, on this lake.”
“You’d freeze in the winter.”
“So, I go to Argentina in the winter.” He looked at Lucas and added, “I speak Spanish.” He looked back at the lake. “In the summer, this would be very pleasant. Sit on the grass with a fishing pole, catch some fish, throw them back. Get a hammock, take a siesta. Drink some Cuba Libres. Many Cuba Libres.”
Lucas let him talk, then followed him back around the house. Martínez, the assistant, was always three steps behind them.
THE DOORS of the house were closed against the summer heat, and when the Wayzata cop pushed the door open to let them in, they were hit by the odor, and by the cold. The odor was purely one of old blood and death, not decomposition—the inside temperature, Lucas thought, must be down in the fifties—but it stank anyway.
The dead looked as though they’d been carved from wax, all the blood having drained to the bottom of the bodies, that blood that wasn’t soaked into the carpet around them. As they stepped inside, Martínez took some tissues from her purse and passed two to Rivera, who held them to his nose. Martínez did the same, and Lucas could smell the thin floral scent of perfumed bathroom tissues.
Rivera and Martínez had some experience of mass murder: neither one of them flinched at the sight of the four dead. Lucas introduced Rivera to Shaffer, who said he was pleased to meet them, and then took the two of them around the room, to the individual bodies, working through the established murder sequence.
When they were done, Rivera asked Martínez, “Criminales?”
She nodded. “Yes, I believe so. That work that they did in Agua Prieta. That looked like this. Very exactly.” She pinched the tissue to her nose.
“What was Agua Prieta?” Shaffer asked.
“Agua Prieta is a city near the border,” she said. “There was another family killed like this. The Criminales learned, or thought they learned, that the family was spotting for another gang, and so they made an example of them.”
“You have any names associated with that?”
Rivera nodded. “Six names, although we think there were only three killers. We think it was three of the six, but we don’t know which three.”
“You have photos? Mug shots?”
“Of four, but we don’t know how many are correct,” Rivera said.
“We’ll take them all, put them on TV,” Lucas said. “If anybody shows up to object, we apologize and deport them.”
“That would be excellent,” Rivera said.
RIVERA SPENT a half hour prowling through the murder scene, and watched when the ME’s people pried the bodies off the floor and bagged them. Martínez turned away from that and went outside. Lucas followed and said, “It’s ugly,” and then, because TV Mexicans usually added it to their affirmative sentences, he added, “No?”
“Yes. I see so much. Inspector Rivera is called to many of these.”
“How long have you worked together?” Lucas asked.
“Well … four years. But we don’t work together. He works, I assist. I am good with the laptop and the iPad. He is the thinker.”
“Are you a policewoman?” Lucas asked.
“Technically. I am a sergeant, mm, how do you say it? First class, I think. But I do not arrest people. I have my iPad and a MacBook.”
“Like a researcher.” Lucas thought of his researcher, Sandy, who had little interest in street work, or be
coming a certified cop.
“Yes.”
“Inspector Rivera … sounds like he really has some personal antagonism … for these Criminales.”
“Yes,” she said. She looked as though she might say something more, but then just smiled. Rivera came out the door at that moment and walked over. “I hope my hotel has a dry cleaning. I now smell like yesterday’s blood.”
LUCAS WALKED them back to the truck and walked around to get in, but Shaffer shouted at him and called him back. When Lucas got close, Shaffer asked, “We know anything about the inspector?”
“No. I was going to ask the DEA guys,” Lucas said. “Where’d they go?”
“Conferring. The accountants are going to look at the books, and O’Brien is over at Sunnie,” Shaffer said. He glanced past Lucas at the two Mexicans. “Anyway, you know, you read that half these Mexican cops are owned by the narcos. I’m a little reluctant to pass on any real secrets.”
“I hear you,” Lucas said. “You got any secrets that you’re reluctant about?”
“Not yet,” Shaffer said. “But I will have.”
RIVERA WAS on his cell phone, speaking in Spanish. A moment later he hung up and asked Lucas, “I don’t want to ask too much, but could we go to a Hertz car rental business in downtown St. Paul? Ana has the address and a map on the iPad.”
“Not a problem,” Lucas said. “I live in St. Paul, and our headquarters is there. Where are you staying?”
“In Minneapolis, by the university,” Rivera said. “The St. Paul Hertz has the car we require, with a, ah, autopilot?”
“Navigation system.”
“Yes. We were awake much of the night last night and have traveled all day, so we would like to get the car and then go to our hotel. Agent Shaffer has invited us to a strategy meeting tomorrow at nine o’clock.”
“Good. I’d like to get those names and photos from you, however we do that. I’ll get them out to the television stations.”
“Ana has a USB drive, with files translated into English,” Rivera said.
A moment later, she passed it over the seat-back. Lucas glanced at it and stuck it in his shirt pocket. “Mac or Windows?”
“Both,” Martínez said. “They are in the file called Agua Prieta. The other files, you can look in them, they are what we know about Los Criminales del Norte.”
“Gracias,” Lucas said.
4
The three Mexican killers were driving an Alamo rental car they’d gotten at El Paso International Airport. They’d driven it hard, two days straight, north out of El Paso, up I-25 through Albuquerque and Santa Fe and Denver, then I-76 to I-80 to Des Moines, and I-35 north, the only car on the highway that never exceeded the speed limit. They’d stopped only for gas and to pee and eat at McDonald’s; they had a trunk full of guns and a couple of spare license plates. If a cop had stopped them and gotten too curious, they’d have killed him and gotten off the highway and changed the plates.
When they got to St. Paul they had intended to stay with a man who came from a village in Sonora, but when they got to the man’s home, the house was dark and locked up. Not knowing the neighborhood, or the level of local police surveillance, they walked away, made some phone calls, and wound up at the Wee Blue Inn.
The next day, they stole a van and switched plates with a similar van, as an extra layer of security, and the day after that, slaughtered the Brooks family. Nothing came of the murders, and they were told to sit tight.
They had been trying to get in touch with the Sonoran, and when they did, he was in Georgia, delivering some workers to a tire-recapping company. He said he’d misunderstood their arrival date. These things happen, hey? He told them a key was hidden under a rock to the right of the front door, and they were welcome to the house. They moved in after dark on their third day in the Twin Cities, the day after they’d slaughtered the Brooks family.
Then they sat and waited for more instructions. Every few hours, they’d go out to the backyard, turn on a satellite phone, and talk to a man they called the Big Voice. The Brooks family, they told the Big Voice from Mexico, hadn’t known where the money went. They were quite certain of that. If the Brookses didn’t know, they were confronted with a mystery. How should they work that out? They weren’t exactly detectives. Big Voice got back to them and said, “Stay out of sight, but be ready. We will send help.”
The three—El Uno, El Dos, and El Tres—had all been named Juan by their parents, and were all cousins to one another. Because they had the same job at the same time and place, they became El Juan Uno, El Juan Dos, and El Juan Tres, or One, Two, and Three.
They were young men, the youngest still in his teens, the oldest only twenty-four, but even the youngest had been killing for five years. They were not overly bright, were poorly educated and a long way from sophisticated. They knew four things well: guns, cars, road maps, and video games. In their temporary living quarters, they had a theater-quality television equipped with a PlayStation, and two cases of Budweiser.
They gathered around the PlayStation and wrecked a lot of cars, and shot up a lot of aliens, hooting and laughing at the chaos. They didn’t talk about the Brooks family, because the Brooks family was dead, and therefore irrelevant. Uno and Dos and Tres simply waited, in the cool of the air-conditioning, washed by the slightly stale breezes of Real Housewives of New Jersey and Dancing with the Stars reruns, the artificial excitement of the shooter games, a bagful of real guns by their feet.
TRES WAS the odd one out, the youngest, and the one for whom both the others had the greatest affection. Tres was not entirely of the world. He could kill as efficiently as anyone else, but he talked with God and other spirits, and went to church when he could.
The spirits lived in churches. All churches. He could find his dead baby sister in Dallas as easily as in Juárez. She was always there, playing around the feet of the plaster Virgin.
There were evil spirits in the churches as well, mean old priests and nuns ready to stick their claws in your neck. Tres was afraid of them, but he went anyway, and always to confession on Saturday afternoons. He confessed all of his sins, down to the smallest verbal transgression, with the exception of those committed on behalf of the LCN. Always, “I took the Lord’s name in vain, three times,” but never “I carved his eyeballs out with a pocketknife.”
When he was done, he scuttled out of the churches, sweating and shaking, but clean.
HIS UNCLE had brought him to the LCN when he was fourteen, said that he could do anything, but “This boy is a little crazy. Not a problem, but something you should know.”
A little craziness was not a problem with the LCN. So he talked to ghosts? There were worse things in the world. And, with a good pistol, the boy could shoot the heart out of a peso coin at twenty feet. Also, he loved his mother greatly, and knew that if he ever said a word to the Federales, his employers would cut his mother’s head off. He was ultimately trustworthy.
So the three Mexicans sat and played with the toys, and Tres would take his personal pistol out sometimes and stroke it and speak to it, and then Big Voice called and said they had another target.
“A gay boy,” Big Voice said.
INSPECTOR DAVID RIVERA inspected his room at the Radisson Plaza. It was okay, he decided, not great; a faint odor of disinfectant lingered in the air, mixed with the scent of thousands of Golden Gopher supporters, their beer and potato chips.
He had checked both himself and Martínez into separate rooms. After he’d looked at the first one, he turned and handed the other key to her and said, “I won’t need you anymore tonight.”
She’d nodded and left.
When she was gone, Rivera went to the window and looked out, then stepped back to his bag, unzipped the top compartment, and took out a cell phone. He carried it to the window, waited for it to come up: and he could see a satellite. He punched in a number and a man on the other end said, “David.”
Rivera said, in Spanish, “I’m here. I was taken to the crime scene.
The Americans already are looking for Mexican involvement, and Martínez told them that it looks like LCN. We’ve given them the six faces, which they will put on television.”
“Do they have any solid leads?”
“No. Not that they told me about,” Rivera said. “The team leader on the investigation does not like us. He thinks we are talking to the cartels. I think he will hold back information.”
“I have two names for you. Good people, I’m told. They will meet you at the Garzas’. They might have useful information, if you can get away from the Americans.”
“Getting away won’t be a problem,” Rivera said. “The Americans are polite, but they know almost nothing. They don’t care if we’re around, or not. I will go to any crime scenes they find, and to meetings in the morning. Otherwise, I will work on my own.”
“Call me often,” the man said. “The names, addresses, and telephone numbers of the contacts will be in your home file.”
“I’ll see to it.”
HE RANG OFF, plugged in his laptop, went online, went to a Facebook location, copied the names, addresses, and phone numbers to an encrypted file on the laptop. When he was done, he looked in the minibar, took out miniature bottles of rum and blended whiskey, and a bottle of Coca-Cola, mixed himself two drinks, and drank them both. Looked at the telephone.
The alcohol slowed him down a bit; he was hungry, he thought. He called room service, ordered a steak and salad, then went into the bathroom and showered. The food came, and he ate it, looked at the telephone, lay on the bed, and finally picked up the phone.
And sighed.
Another sin, he thought.
He called Martínez’s room and said, “I’ve changed my mind. I’ll need you tonight.”