Gate 76

by Andrew Diamond

  “That’s a nice observation. Hartwell, you said?” This guy’s got a face like a poker player. Doesn’t give away anything. I like him.

  “Yeah,” I say. “He’s a private investigator up in DC. Former FBI.”

  “How former?”

  “What’s that?”

  “How long’s he been out of the FBI?”

  “A little over four years,” I say.

  He taps the pen gently on the desk in a quick steady rhythm, but he hasn’t taken any notes yet. He doesn’t even have a pad to write on.

  “Hey,” I say, “when you get those guys down to lockup, do you ever have to separate them?”

  “’Scuse me?” He stops tapping the pen.

  “I mean these guys you’re picking up for distribution. If they’re in rival gangs, do you have to sort ’em out down at lockup? Or you just throw them all in one big cell and let them fight it out?”

  “They sort themselves out,” Jiménez says, and he never takes his eyes off my face. “You’re full of questions, aren’t you?”

  “I thought Highway Patrol was just speeding tickets and accident scenes and overweight trucks.”

  “It’s a lot of that,” Jiménez says. “You got a number I can reach Ed Hartwell?”

  “Yeah, but I’m interested in a guy you picked up yesterday. Ramón Ramírez. Where’d they get him again?”

  Jiménez lays his pen on the desk and leans back and takes a long hard look at me. Finally, he says, “Longview.”

  “Another drug bust for the Highway Patrol.”

  “A big one,” Jiménez says.

  “I want to talk to that guy.”

  Jiménez frowns and shakes his head.

  “Why not?”

  “You watch the news today?”

  “No.”

  He watches me for a moment and I wait for him to continue.

  “He died overnight in holding.”

  “How’d that happen?” I ask.

  “Balloon full of fentanyl burst in his colon.”

  “No,” I say, shaking my head.

  “No what?”

  “That doesn’t make any sense.”

  “Really?” The way he’s looking at me, I can’t tell if he thinks I’m stupid, or he doesn’t like me, or he just doesn’t trust me.

  “Yeah, really,” I say. “Why would he have swallowed a balloon with a few grams of fentanyl when he’s carrying two kilos in his car? You swallow a balloon if you’re expecting a body search. Like if you’re going through airport security. Not when you’re driving a car with two kilos of the shit in the trunk.”

  Jiménez takes a deep breath and leans back in his chair. He lets out a little frustrated “Goddammit” under his breath, and then just sits there quietly, looking troubled.

  “What’s Ed Hartwell’s number?” he asks.

  I give him the number. He doesn’t write it down, but I can see him make a mental note. Then he says, “You want some coffee? Water or anything?”

  “Some water would be nice.”

  He leaves the room, leaves his empty coffee cup there on the table, and I’m alone for the next twenty minutes, listening to the buzzing of the overhead fluorescent light and the echoing conversations of the cops in the hall.

  When Jiménez returns, he unlocks my cuffs and gives me my wallet and smart phone. He says, “Call an Uber, or Lyft, or whatever you use. I can’t drive you anywhere.”

  He gets back up on the chair, pulls the sticky note off the camera, and fiddles with the mic.

  I rub my wrists. “I’m free to go?”

  “You’re free to go. Your buddy Ed Hartwell seems to know the right people.” If Trooper Aikman had said those words, he would have spoken them with bitterness. But Jiménez seems more relieved than annoyed.

  I check my phone. There’s an Uber just a few minutes away. Jiménez says he’ll walk me out. On the way out, we pass a wall of photos of officers who have fallen in the line of duty. Jiménez stops and points out a young white guy, no more than twenty-six or twenty-seven. “This guy was shot by a crazy man. Execution-style while he sat in his cruiser. Only lately I’ve been thinking the guy who shot him might not have been crazy.”

  I look at the face in the photo. He doesn’t look like a cop. A little too gentle in the eyes. I could see him managing a pharmacy or a movie theater.

  As we exit the station through the double glass doors, Jiménez says, “There’s two more who aren’t up on that wall.”

  “Who’s that?” I ask.

  “A patrolman named Manuel Martínez, and a captain named Brandon Robertson.”

  The names sound familiar. A green Toyota Prius pulls into the lot and heads toward us.

  “Were those recent?” I ask. “You didn’t have time to put the photos up?”

  The driver of the Prius rolls down the passenger window, leans his head toward us, and says, “Airport?”

  “They were recent,” Jiménez says. “They might never make the wall. But I want to make sure they get their due.” And then he hands me the flip phone and tells me to have a nice flight.

  When I’m in the car, he leans his head through the window and says, “What kinds of contacts does Ed Hartwell have in the Bureau?”

  “Plenty,” I say. “Why?”

  He nods and says, “I took a card from your wallet, and I put in one of mine.” Then he tips his hat and walks away.

  * * *

  I get to the airport just before my flight boards. Inside, I make the gate in no time, since I don’t have a bag. It’s still in the trunk of that rental car.

  After the stewardess finishes the safety demonstration, she tells everyone to turn off their laptops and put their phones in airplane mode. I shut off the smart phone, and I’m about to turn off the flip phone when I notice the little exclamation point up in the corner of the screen. It’s a text from Anna. The timestamp says 6:43 a.m. That was the unfamiliar buzzing sound that woke me at the motel this morning. I open the message. My password is JULIA, it says. And the names of the other two passengers on the Hawaii flight: Manuel Martínez and Brandon Robertson.

  26

  October 6

  When I got back to DC last night, I called Anna, but she didn’t answer. I called again this morning, three times, and texted too. No response. That asshole cop must have spooked her. I wonder if she blocked this number.

  I’ve been sitting outside Lomax’s apartment since six-thirty, waiting for him to appear. If he comes out on foot, I’ll recognize him. If he’s driving, he’ll be in a silver 2016 Chevy Impala. That’s what he’s got registered, anyway.

  A little before ten I see his car drive up from the underground garage. That’s him behind the wheel.

  He drives out Wayne Avenue, past Sligo Creek Parkway, then turns right on Bradford Road. This is a middle-class residential neighborhood. He parks in front of a small yellow house with a spotty lawn and a pink girl’s bicycle leaning against a concrete birdbath. He sits there for a while, looking at his phone, as a FedEx truck makes its way down the street.

  The truck stops halfway down the block, at a house that’s for sale. The driver gets out, dashes up the walkway to the porch, and drops a flat box in front of the door. He stands there for a few seconds, punching the keys on his hand-held tracker, then returns to the truck and drives off.

  Lomax opens his door just as a guy in painter’s overalls comes around the far side of the for-sale house carrying a ladder. Lomax eyes him for a few seconds, then closes his door and stays in the car. The guy with the ladder crosses the front yard and goes around the corner of the house. He returns without the ladder and fetches a bucket of paint, a brush, and a rag, and carries them back to where he left the ladder.

  Lomax waits a couple of minutes, then gets out of the car. He walks up to the porch, picks up the package, and carries it back to his car. When he drives off, I follow him, keeping about a hundred and twenty yards behind. The painter is out front, wiping
his hands with a rag. He looks toward the street just as I pass, and he gives a little nod to someone behind me. In the rearview mirror, I see a blue Dodge Dart fifty yards back. I follow Lomax, and the Dart follows me, straight down Bradford, right on Manchester, left on Wayne.

  When we get back to the big buildings in the center of Silver Spring, I figure Lomax is headed home. He’ll go straight to East West Highway and turn left. I turn left on Fenton and keep my eyes on the rearview, waiting for the blue Dart to follow. But it doesn’t. It continues straight down Wayne, following Lomax, with two cars in between.

  I make a few turns and come up toward Lomax’s building from the opposite direction. From a block away, I see his car go back into underground parking. The blue Dodge Dart is a block farther up the street, coming toward me. We both pass the building at the same time, me going north and the Dart going south. The Dart has a dashcam. The driver is black and the passenger is white. They’re both clean-cut.

  OK, what the hell was that all about? I stop a couple blocks past Lomax’s building and sit there, tapping my fingers on the dashboard for a few seconds.

  Then I head back up to the house where Lomax picked up the package. I park out front and walk around the side where the painter went. He’s standing at the foot of the ladder, typing something into his phone. He looks Salvadoran or Guatemalan, with copper-tan skin, dark hair, dark eyebrows, and a mustache.

  I walk up and tell him I live in the neighborhood. I was just passing by and my house needs painting. Can he give me a business card? He hands me one that says Delgado Brothers painting. I don’t like the look he gives me. It’s not a mean look. It’s the look of a guy who takes notes on everything he sees. Like he’s getting all the details down, in case he has to describe me later.

  An hour later, when I walk into the office, Bethany says, “Hey, Freddy. Where you been?”

  “Out,” I say, as I head to my desk. “You make any progress on those names I gave you? Brown, Dorsett, Midland-Odessa Custom Hauling?”

  Leon doesn’t even look up from his computer. “Still digging,” he says. “This shit’s like a maze.”

  “What’s like a maze?” I ask.

  He looks up and says, “One business owns another owns another. Like those Russian dolls you keep opening up and finding more dolls.” He turns back to his monitor.

  “How was Texas?” Bethany asks.

  “Hot. Can I use your computer?”

  “What’s wrong with yours?”

  “It’s still in Texas.”

  She gets up from her chair and lets me sit. I can feel her eyes on me, even though I’m looking at the monitor.

  “You not feeling chatty today?” she asks.

  “Sorry, Beth. I got something I want to look into here.”

  I look up the owner of the house in Silver Spring. The guy is ninety-six. I call the realtor, a cheerful-sounding woman, and pretend to be a concerned neighbor. I tell her the owner, Mr. Kowalczyk, should have his mail forwarded, so people don’t steal it. She says his mail is being forwarded to his daughter up in Gaithersburg. Mr. Kowalczyk is in an assisted living home up there, two minutes from his daughter’s house.

  I ask her about the painter. Is he reliable? Does he do good work? She says she doesn’t know about the painter. Kowalczyk’s daughter must have hired him.

  I can’t get ahold of the daughter. No one answers the phone, and she has no voicemail. Maybe she rejects calls from unknown numbers.

  The painter’s card says Roberto Delgado. He and his brothers have been proudly serving the DC area for six years. At least, that’s what their website says. But the Wayback Machine over at the Internet Archive says different. The Wayback Machine takes snapshots of every site on the Internet every few months. You can go there and see what Yahoo looked like in 1998. But you can’t see a snapshot of Delgado Brothers’s website from six months ago, because it didn’t exist.

  This is another one of those data problems, like the one where all the credit bureaus had the exact same addresses for our friend Mr. Charles Johnston. Somebody downtown has been slipping up.

  What kind of package would Lomax be picking up at a house that isn’t his?

  Ed Hartwell told me of a case a couple years ago that some of his former colleagues at the Bureau helped to crack. A guy was selling drugs through the dark web. Coke, fentanyl, ecstasy, OxyContin. You go online and place an order through a site that looks like eBay. The buyers and sellers are rated on a five-star system, so you know if the person you’re dealing with is reputable. This seller has a couple hundred five-star ratings, with lots of comments about the purity and quality of his goods. The FBI and the DEA thought he was operating out of California, but they weren’t sure.

  They had one agent posing as a buyer online. He had a hundred or so transactions under his belt, and a good buyer rating. He spent a lot of time in the user forums answering questions: how to cut fentanyl so you don’t kill your customers and don’t piss them off too much, which ecstasy was the best, whether the cocaine with the pinkish hue was worth buying.

  The agent was placing two or three orders a week, having it all sent to different addresses in the DC area. The packages would always show up on time, but they were postmarked from different places in Colorado, Missouri, Louisiana, and Kansas. The Feds couldn’t track the source.

  Finally, they got a break. The postal service told the FBI that a lot of drugs were coming through a post office in Columbia, Missouri. All the packages were being sent to houses that were for sale, and every package had a different name on it.

  The FBI looked into it and found the realtor who was the selling agent for all of the properties. Any mail that showed up at the houses, he carried in and left on the kitchen counter. If a special package showed up—say, for example, a few ounces of cocaine, or a couple hundred ecstasy tablets—the guy would look up and down the street for cops before he took it home with him. If there were any cops around, or anyone who looked like they might be watching, the guy left the package on the counter and tried again the next day.

  If the cops ever did show up at one of those houses and found the package, what could they do? It wasn’t the realtor’s house. The package didn’t have his name on it. How could they tie it to him?

  Each package might contain ten different orders for ten different customers in ten different states. The realtor repackaged the orders into ten parcels and handed them out to guys who got paid a couple hundred bucks a day to drive around to other towns and drop the parcels one by one into neighborhood mailboxes.

  The dealer—who was, in fact, based in California—had hooked up with realtors in several states and was paying them a hefty fee for their distribution services. Eventually, they all went down. But the FBI guys who worked the case were impressed with the ingenuity of the scheme.

  Lomax, I assume, had also heard the story. Seems like he didn’t want to have a realtor in the picture. And he wouldn’t need one for a FedEx package. Their tracking system tells you right when they’re coming, and FedEx packages don’t get forwarded like regular mail so you can just sit outside and wait.

  So what’s in the package? And who would want to follow him?

  My phone chimes as a few new emails come in. One of them is from that cop who questioned me in Dallas yesterday.

  27

  The email from Alfonso Jiménez has no text, just links to some old news stories in the Austin Statesman.

  The first is about a woman named Wilma Juarez. There’s a video of her from a year and a half ago in front of the statehouse, screaming at lawmakers, reporters, and passersby. When she pulls out a cigarette lighter and tries to light her skirt on fire, the cops arrest her. It’s really kind of pathetic seeing a woman try to immolate herself without gasoline. She was clearly distraught.

  The article says Juarez wants to sue the State Patrol because they intercepted a car loaded with drug money, which her husband was driving. When the car failed to make it to the border, t
he cartel sent someone up from Mexico to pump thirty bullets into her husband. She wanted to sue the State Patrol for the money they stole, plus a few million for the emotional distress of losing her husband in such a violent way. Juarez was undocumented, and by drawing all that attention to herself on the steps of the statehouse, she got herself deported.

  I dig a little further and find that the local stations in Austin got a lot of play out of the story. They actually covered it with a straight face—mostly, anyway. They interviewed a captain from the State Patrol about Wilma Juarez’s story, which he dismissed. The cop said the woman was out of her head with grief. When the reporter asked if it was true the car was loaded with drug money, he said the seizure amounted to $20,000.

  If it had been a major bust, he said, they would have invited every camera crew in Texas to come film the piles of cash. “People tell us all the time we’re not doing enough to earn their tax dollars,” he said. “Believe me, when we have a big money bust, that’s a win for us. We let everybody know.”

  But the cop looks uneasy. I don’t know why. They aren’t throwing him any hardball questions. He looks like the kind of guy who puts his heart into his work. Maybe he doesn’t like the way the media is making fun of the woman he described as distraught. I rewind the interview to where the cop first appeared. There’s his name on the bottom of the screen. Captain Brandon Robertson. One of the cops on the Hawaii flight.

  The second article in Alfonso Jiménez’s email is about an incident that occurred a little over a year ago, just south of San Antonio. A guy walked up to a State Patrol car parked beside a highway diner where a trooper sat drinking coffee and, without provocation, put a bullet through the trooper’s head. One of the cooks had just finished his shift at the diner and was leaving the parking lot when he witnessed the shooting. He aimed his car at the assailant and knocked him down.

  When the police interviewed the assailant in the hospital, he admitted shooting the patrolman and said it was retaliation for the cops stealing money from his cousin. A lot of money. The article wrote the guy off as delusional, and noted that he had a long history of drug use.