by Blake Banner
“No, no, no. No, he was asking for something. You know, I got the feeling he wanted me to supply him, and he was going to sell. He was telling me some long fockin’ story about his girlfriend’s dad, and he wants to get coke for him or some shit —forgive my language—you know? It makes me mad just remembering it.” He shook his head. “So I’m thinking, this piece of shit wants me to supply him. He wants to break into some territory—I don’t know where her and her dad live, right?—is he gonna maybe start a turf war, with my fuckin’ merchandise, just because this emaciated piece of shit wants to play bad boy?”
“Stupid kid.”
“Right?”
“So how did you handle it?”
“Well, I don’t want to upset Pam, but I want to put a scare into the little motherfocker; for his own sake, you hear me? So I told him go talk to my boys.”
There it was. I didn’t look at Dehan. I nodded and smiled, like I had grudging admiration for his street wisdom. “That sobered him up a bit?”
“I have no idea!” He leaned forward and laughed. “He vanished from my mind. Poof! A short while after that, the whole scene broke up. I was getting tired anyhow, wanted to move on, do other stuff. I’m thinking of putting money into movies, you know that?”
Dehan made a face of surprised interest. “Really? So what was that, about six months later?”
He tipped his head on one side. “Yeah, about that.”
I said, “Adolfo and Mateo?”
He looked at me sharply.
I said again, “Adolfo Davila and Mateo Bonilla? They were your boys, the ones you sent Charlie to?”
His eyes narrowed and told me he was still dangerous. “Yeah. How’d you know that?”
“I didn’t. I was asking.”
Dehan asked, “They died, right?”
He took a while to answer. “Yeah, they died. It all happened about the same time. You know what? Suddenly I am not comfortable with this conversation. How’s about you tell me why you’re asking me these questions. Or maybe, you know, you just get the fock out of my house? I have been courteous, and hospitable, and I have offered you coffee, and now you’re springing surprises on me about Adolfo and Mateo, and talking about killing people. You know what? I’m not comfortable with that.”
I sighed. “We are just trying to find Charlie and Amy, Mr. Camacho, and we are trying to trace their last movements before they disappeared…”
“So you thought you’d pin it on me. You were never able to pin anything on me before, so you thought you’d try and pin this on me now, right?”
“Wrong. All we want is a few facts.” I glanced at Dehan. She gave her head a small shake. “Either way, Mr. Camacho, we’ve taken up enough of your time. You’ve been very helpful.”
We stood. He remained sitting, examining us one after the other. Finally, he stood too. “Don’t come after me. I’m clean. I changed my life. I’m making amends for the wrongs I committed. You understand what I am telling you? Don’t come after me.”
Dehan leaned toward him, offered him a chilling smile, and placed her finger on his chest. “Right now, Felis, I have absolutely no interest in you. Keep threatening me and all that might change. Let’s be polite. We’ll do our jobs, and you keep doing your good works, and making peace with your god. Deal?”
He nodded and unexpectedly held out his hand. “You have a card? A cell where I can contact you? Maybe I can find something for you. I want to keep relations good, you understand?”
Dehan stared at him a moment, then shrugged, reached in her jacket and pulled out a card. He took it, examined it and put it in his pocket. Then he pressed a button on the mantelpiece above the fireplace. The door opened and the Dixon the Reservoir Dog put his head in.
“Si, Jefe?”
“Show Detectives Dehan and Stone out. They’re leaving.”
SIX
We came to the intersection of Sage Road and Sylvan Avenue. The light was red and I stopped. We were surrounded by woodland on all sides. Desultory cars demonstrated the Doppler effect down the avenue. The big old engine under the Jaguar’s hood rumbled. We hadn’t spoken since we’d left Camacho’s house and the silence persisted now.
The light changed to green. I glanced in the mirror. There was nobody behind me. I chewed my lip. Dehan said, “You going to go?”
I glanced at her and after a moment turned south onto the avenue. “Talk me through it.” She drew breath to answer and I started talking instead. “I said this would happen.” I glanced at her. “Remember? I said this would happen when we found the connection. Well, here it is. We have the connection. Charlie approaches Camacho. He wants a little action. It’s what he’s grown up with, it’s what he knows. Camacho is probably the ‘go to’ guy for his mother, so it is logical he will go to him for help. Right?”
I looked at her. She nodded. I went on. “But like Camacho said, who is this kid? A nobody. He doesn’t listen to him. He doesn’t even want to think about him. So he sends him away to his boys, to scare him, to teach him a lesson. Logical. Expanding into a new geographical area is a big deal. You may have to kill people. Like he said, you might start a turf war. You need to know who you’re going up against, and you need somebody you can trust and rely on, heading up the operation. Charlie is none of those things. Logical. Right?”
“Right.”
We had come to the bridge and I turned onto it. We picked up speed, high above the water, toward Manhattan. The wind battered at us and I had to raise my voice.
“So do the boys give Charlie a scare? Do they do what’s expected? No, not exactly. Instead they do the unexpected and beat seven bales of crap out of Amy’s father, and put him in hospital for the better part of six months. They know Charlie is off limits because Feliciano is friends with his mother, so instead they throw a scare into him by putting Karl in the emergency ward. Logical?” I shrugged. “Maybe. But now…” I shook my head. “Six months later, Karl comes out of hospital, and Adolfo and Mateo get executed…”
She had been using her whole body to nod for a few seconds. Now she said, “We need to get the date he was released.”
I said, “Fine, but really it makes no difference. Hear me out. At first glance it looks like one of two things happened: one, Karl got out and executed Adolfo and Mateo. But Karl had no priors for anything more serious than a domestic disturbance, much less murder or assault with a deadly weapon. Add to that the fact that he was fresh out of hospital, must have been weak, and that those guys were killed in a highly efficient, professional manner, and that scenario begins to look very improbable. Not logical.”
“OK…”
“Then, second thing, a short time later, Karl and Christen get murdered. And so, probably, do Charlie and Amy. Punishment from the Chupacabras for having killed two of their boys? At first glance, again, it would seem logical, until you remember that Feliciano Camacho had no idea who Amy and her parents were. Again, not logical.” She drew breath, but I cut across her. “And if you are going to suggest Karl was working with another gang, that doesn’t hold water either. Why would he get in bed with the very gang whose turf he was planning to invade?”
She was quiet, staring out the window. The river moved across her aviators and the breeze whipped her hair across her face. After a while, she shifted in her seat and turned to face me. “So, if it wasn’t Karl and it wasn’t somebody else…” She spread her hands, revealing the absurdity of the proposition.
I ignored it and said, “Bob must have got Amy and Charlie’s financials, phone records…”
“Sure, but they are a dead end. They stop the day of her parents’ deaths.”
“You’ve examined them? How long have you been looking at this case?”
She shrugged. “You know… on and off…”
“You could have told me. We’re a team, remember? We work cold cases. Let’s look at those records.”
“Sure, they’re in my desk. But I just told you…”
“Humor me. I have a hunch.”
She gave me a
n insolent smile. “You still get hunches at your age?”
“Yeah. I get all kinds of things at my age that I shouldn’t get.”
She raised an equally insolent eyebrow. “Yeah? Like what?”
“Molested by younger women with no sense of decency or propriety, for one.”
She made a grating noise in her throat which I figured was a laugh. After a moment, she wagged a finger at me. “I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking maybe they are not dead.” She nodded a few times. “You are thinking that maybe they escaped. And you want the bank records and phone records to see if there is some clue, in the weeks running up to Karl’s death…” She pulled a face and shook her head. “Large withdrawals of cash for stashing, phone calls out of state, unexplainable payments…”
I smiled at her. “There is something missing. Everything we have seen is…” I spread my hands. “Valid. It is part of the picture. But it is not adding up to the whole picture. There is something important missing. Charlie’s behavior is odd. He goes to Camacho looking for help. Camacho puts him onto his boys and that’s the last we hear about that. Charlie does not pop up on any radar selling dope. He just returns to his status quo for six months and then vanishes. There is something there, something about Charlie that we are not seeing.”
She nodded. “Yeah… Yeah, I agree.” She thought a moment longer. “How about you go through Charlie and Amy’s records this afternoon? Meanwhile, I want to take a closer look at Adolfo and Mateo’s activities in the weeks leading up to their death. Later we can compare notes, see if there are any coincidences that might confirm or deny they were engaged in some kind of activity together.”
“Sounds like a plan.” I turned it over in my head, then asked, “You hoping to connect Adolfo and Mateo to Arizona or New Mexico?”
She looked at me sidelong, then nodded. “I guess that’s the idea.”
We picked up the Bruckner Expressway and I drove for a while, sucking my teeth. Finally, I asked the question that had been playing on my mind. “What makes this case so different, Dehan? There must be a hundred cases you can pick up that, with time and patience, will connect the Chupacabras with Arizona or New Mexico and ultimately Mexico and Sinaloa. What is it about this case that has been playing on your mind for almost seven years?”
She began to shrug, like there was no special answer, but the gesture died and she turned away, to look out the window. She stayed like that until we were approaching the turn off for Sound View. Then she exploded into a torrent of words.
“You’re right. How many deals get struck every year? Must be thousands. How many shipments from the border to New York? Many hundreds. And any diligent fed or cop, working the system the way it’s supposed to be worked, should be able to trace a supply line from a Manhattan party to a cartel across the border in Mexico—and close that source down; the way El Chapo was closed down, the way Escobar was closed down, and others…” She sighed noisily, shrugged her shoulders and spread her hands in a gesture of helplessness. “So that the next guy can step into the boss’ shoes, take over the operation and start all over again. The boss is dead, long live the boss!”
By now I was frowning. “What are you saying?”
She made a noise like a raspberry. “The cartels and the gangs are living, breathing infections, Stone. They are like metastasized cancers, with tumors running from Mexico and Colombia all the way to Boston and Seattle. And El Chapo, Pablo Escobar, Zambada, they are just tumors in a body wracked by cancer. You cut out one, and another grows in its place. Because the whole organism is sick. And we, you and me, we can’t do anything about that. But we can do something about people. Karl, Christen, Charlie, Amy… They are not anonymous, they are people. Individuals who suffered an injustice. A really bad injustice. And they were forgotten because every day, this world deals more and more in big, anonymous generalities.”
She turned to look at my face as we peeled off onto Sound View and I slowed to turn onto Story Avenue.
“And somewhere along the way, between the New Order, the Mexican wall, the U.S. Government, the DEA, the FBI and the NYPD, Christen, Karl and Amy, and a million other individual human beings, fell through the cracks: got tortured, raped and murdered. Each one had a mother, a father, a family. Each one suffered as a person—not a statistic, class of person or a demographic.” She shrugged. “I just decided I wanted to do justice, for Christen and her family.”
I pulled into the parking lot opposite the entrance to the station and killed the engine. I sat a while drumming my fingers on the steering wheel, and she sat staring out the window. After a moment, I asked.
“Did you think this had something to do with Mick Harragan?”[1]
She offered the trees outside a rueful smile. “No. It was long after Mick had gone. But yeah, I was on a mission back then. I don’t know what reason Sanchez had for sitting on the case, but it was clear to me that there was a connection with big money, maybe big corruption, and I guess I saw myself in Amy to some extent.” She turned to look at me, and there was anger in her dark eyes. “People talk about tragedies, but nobody looks at the kids who are also victims of these tragedies. Amy, Charlie, they were just trying to get by, be together, find some happiness, and these parasites and predators, these bastards, destroyed them because they happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
I nodded. “OK.” Then I smiled. “Justice only makes sense when it’s for the individual. When it is delivered by anonymous institutions to anonymous masses, it becomes politics. I get that.” I hesitated a moment. “But stay objective, OK? Amy is not Carmen Dehan. It’s a different story.”
“I know.” She shrugged and smiled. “You asked. That’s all.”
Inside, Dehan went to our desk. I grabbed some polystyrene coffee for us and settled to work my way methodically through Amy and Charlie’s bank and telephone records from six years before. I had one question I needed to answer: were they dead, or still alive?
SEVEN
Outside, the shadows were growing long. Dehan stood abruptly, walked away and came back ten minutes later with a paper bag full of croissants and two cups of real coffee from the deli on the corner. She put the stuff on the desk, dropped into her chair, stared at me and said:
“What?”
I helped myself to a croissant, pulled over the cup and sipped. “How do you know I have something?”
“It’s on your face. Spill it.”
I sighed. “The records go back a year before Amy and Charlie disappeared. I was mainly interested in Charlie, because at the time Bob didn’t really look at Charlie. They were focused on Karl and Christen.”
“OK.”
“So I started at the beginning and two things struck me: one, there is practically no activity in his account, and two, he received a regular payment of one thousand dollars on the first day of each month. I called Pamela and asked her about it. She said it was an allowance that she gave him.”
She nodded. “I heard you. Nothing surprising so far.”
I leafed through a couple of pages, talking as I did so. “Every month he withdraws between five and seven hundred dollars in cash, leaving a balance of between five and three, obviously. Now, six months before he disappears, this begins to change.”
She leaned forward, frowning. “Good, how?”
“At the beginning of March, a couple of days after the money is deposited, he withdraws practically all of it, including everything that has accumulated over the months, a total of three thousand four hundred dollars, leaving only five bucks in his account. He then does the same thing every month for the next six months: almost immediately after the deposit, he withdraws everything.”
I glanced at her and sipped my coffee. She was looking smug. I went on.
“That made me curious. So I had a look at Amy’s records. Obviously she had no monthly allowance from her parents, but she did have sporadic payments from occasional part time jobs. Sometimes the payments were cash, sometimes they were deposits f
rom her employers. It looks like she never held a job for more than three months, but she usually had a job of one sort or another.
“So she makes a few cash withdrawals every month, pretty much what you’d expect, and then, six months before she disappears, she starts withdrawing everything, every month, just like Charlie.” I spread my hands. “This can only mean one thing...”
“They knew they were in danger.”
“They were planning to run. The question is, did they make it? They were smart enough to use cash—no credit cards and no debit cards—so they have not left an electronic trail.”
She looked smug. “I think they made it.” She rummaged on her desk. “I was going through the property that the Redferns left. Most of it was claimed by Christen’s sister, Ingrid… um… Njalsen. Ingrid Njalsen. Did you know that?”
“No. What do you mean, most of it? Who claimed the rest of it?”
She grinned. “That’s the point. I had a hunch, I still get them too, and checked the DMV for cars registered to Charlie Albright, Amy Redfern and Karl and Christen. It was a long shot, but it was worth a try, right? You never know how something like that will pay off. And whaddya know? The rest of it turns out to be a silver 2000 Chevy Impala, and it was never claimed. It was never reported stolen. It was never found. It never showed up. But the interesting thing is, Stone, neither did the keys.”
I flopped back in my chair, scowling. “How the hell was this missed?”
She shrugged and spread her hands. “Beats me. I guess it was established and agreed right from the start that the murder was not part of a robbery. So the focus was never on missing property. And, putting it bluntly, Bob and Sanchez just plain missed the fact that the Redferns owned a car! So the assumption at the time—their assumption, the chief’s assumption and my assumption—was that Amy had been abducted and or murdered. Whether they owned a car simply wasn’t relevant. Plus, there was nothing in the apartment to even suggest they owned a car.” She shrugged again. “And, like I said, the sister never reported it missing.”