“Why’s that?” I ask.
“You know what happens when you get a real terrorist in interrogation?” he says. “The kind who’s capable of putting a bomb on a plane? At some point he tells you he did it. Because terrorism is an ideological thing. Those guys believe they’re right no matter what. In the end, they’ll answer to a God who already put his stamp of approval on whatever they’ve done. In their minds, they have nothing to hide. They’re proud of what they did.
“But this kid was terrified when they brought him in. You saw how scared he was when they paraded him in front of the cameras. He had no idea what hit him. If he’d planted that bomb, he’d have known they were coming for him. A Muslim with access to the plane’s cargo hold? He’d have known they were coming, and he would have gone down in a shootout, as a martyr. Or he would have confessed and made himself a hero of the cause. But he’s standing his ground, just like he did a year ago at his battery trial. The kid stands on principle, says he didn’t do it, and they can’t dig a single contradiction out of him, no matter how hard they push. Everything he’s said checks out. Besides, he has no motive and no mental health issues.”
“Yeah, well, what are they supposed to think, with ISIS claiming responsibility?”
“ISIS would claim responsibility for a solar eclipse. Anything for publicity.”
“What about the missing TSA agent? What’s his name? Welcher?”
“That’s what I called to tell you about,” Ed says.
“They find him?”
“Dead in his car, behind an auto repair shop that was scheduled for demolition. The foreman of the wrecking crew found him.”
“They know what killed him?”
“Alcohol and oxycodone.”
“So what are they thinking? He played a part in it, then had some regrets and took his own life?”
“He probably played a role,” Ed says. “That bomb didn’t go through any other TSA checkpoint. And maybe he had some regrets. But he didn’t take his own life, though the Bureau will tell the press he did.”
“How do you know he didn’t kill himself?”
“For one thing, he wasn’t much of a drinker. According to his girlfriend, he was a one- or two-beer guy who took a shot of bourbon every now and then. For another, the prescription he got when he injured his back last spring was for Vicodin, not oxycodone. They found the bottle still full in his trunk.”
“So they think it was staged?”
“Seems that way,” Ed says. “They’ll tell the press it’s a suicide. If the bomber thinks we bought his ruse and we’re on the wrong track, he might get overconfident and slip up. If we tell the press it’s a murder, he’ll know we’re onto him. He’ll be more cautious.”
“When did Welcher die?”
“The night of the crash.”
“So who’s the suspect now?”
Ed lets out a long breath. “Maybe Welcher. Maybe someone else.”
“But who?” I ask. “Who else do they have?”
“No one,” Ed says. “They have no one.”
“They going to release Obasanjo?”
“Not just yet. The press will jump all over the Bureau if they release one suspect without picking up another. And the public wants a lynching. With all this media coverage, the pressure on the Bureau is horrendous. Somewhere out there, the perpetrators are sitting back and watching it all unfold on TV.”
“Hang in there, buddy.”
“Where are you?” Ed asks.
“Just north of Galveston.”
“What the hell are you doing down there?” I can hear someone in the background calling his name.
“It’ll take me a while to explain.”
“Freddy, I have to go.”
“Yeah, OK. I’ll talk to you later, Ed.”
As soon as we hang up, I call Anna Brook, but still there’s no answer. I’m starting to worry about her. Maybe it’s time for another visit to Dime Box.
I ask the waitress for my check and as she walks off to get it, that cop pulls up in the lot outside. License plate 70707.
34
The guy who steps out of the cruiser is big, six five at least. Seven feet with that ridiculous cowboy hat. He takes a look at my car, and then glances up toward the diner. He’s got a folder under his arm.
When he comes inside, he scans the booths from left to right until his eyes land on me.
I can’t tell what he’s thinking as he approaches. When a cop wants to mess with you, you usually know it. This guy’s trying to size me up, but he’s not being confrontational. He seems a little tentative.
Finally, he says, “Freddy Ferguson?”
I stand and shake his hand. “That’s me. You are?”
“Chester Dixon, Texas Highway Patrol. You work with Ed Hartwell?”
“How’d you know?”
He called the rental agency after he copied the license plate number from my car, then he traced me back to DC and Ed’s agency.
“What case are you working with Ed?” he asks.
“A case for the airline. The one that crashed.”
He nods like I was just confirming what he already knew.
“What brings you to Texas?”
“I got off on a tangent.”
He nods again and says, “Anything you need help with?”
“Maybe. For the moment, I’m keeping it to myself. I have a client to protect.”
“You had a little run-in up in Dallas,” he says.
“Yes, I did. You want to have a seat?”
We sit on opposite sides of the booth. He lays his folder on the table and says, “You and I’ve been doing the same grand tour of the campaign money factory.”
“Seems like it.”
“None of those businesses are legit.”
“What got you looking into them?” I ask.
He says his friend is a tax auditor in San Antonio. “The guy spent a few weeks putting together a file of things that don’t look right. He asked me to go out and take a look.”
Dixon tells me he works in Longview, where Ramón Ramírez was busted.
He says, “Your friend Ed isn’t easy to talk to.”
“He is, usually,” I say. “But he’s in the thick of a big mess right now, and he doesn’t have a lot of time.”
“He’s former FBI, right? How close are his ties to the Bureau?”
“That’s funny,” I say. “You’re the second cop to ask me that. You know a guy in Dallas named Alfonso Jiménez?”
He shakes his head.
“Jiménez sent me some news stories the other day. I couldn’t quite make sense of them.” I tell him about Wilma Juarez, the woman who tried to light herself on fire in front of the statehouse, her complaint about the money that was taken, the arrest of her husband, and how the cartel eventually pumped thirty bullets into him. I tell him about the cop who was shot in the head while sipping coffee in his cruiser because some kid thought he had stolen millions from his cousin.
Dixon just nods and strokes his mustache. “Well, it’s nice to know someone else has their eyes open.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean I’ve been looking at those same stories.”
“What’s in the folder?” I ask.
He slides it across the table, and I see the same documents Ed sent me days ago: Ramón Ramírez’s record of petty crime, with the redacted arrest reports. I don’t bother going through it all again. But I ask Dixon why some of the record is blacked out.
“Was he an informant?” I ask.
Dixon nods.
A couple years ago, State Patrol picked up Ramírez with $3,000 worth of cocaine. He said he was delivering it to a party. They held him for about an hour. That much coke, along with his string of priors, should have gotten him locked up for a long time. The state cops told Ramírez they’d forget about the incident if he’d be willing to inform. The guy didn’t bat an eye. All he said was that if th
ey wanted him alive, he had to complete the delivery. So they let him go, and they followed him. He pulled up to Sheldon Brown’s mansion, where there was a party going on. He was in and out in two minutes, like he walked in, dropped the drugs on the table, and left. The cops followed him from the house, pulled him over a couple miles away, and did a thorough search to make sure he didn’t still have the coke.
They kept an eye on Ramírez for the next few months, and they hauled him in every now and then, but all he ever had to say was something big was coming down the pike. He never had any real news. It was always something’s coming, something’s coming, something’s coming. He did give them accurate information about some people on the street, so they weren’t ready to write the guy off completely.
Then one day he collars this cop at a gas station on Route 37. State Patrol. Tells him a burgundy Lincoln Continental will be coming past in a few minutes carrying cash down to South Padre Island, where it’ll go by boat back to Mexico. The cop calls a couple buddies, and they’re ready for the Lincoln, thinking it’s carrying maybe ten thousand bucks.
When the cop puts his flashers on, the Lincoln takes off. The other two cops are waiting down the road. They pick up the chase, and the passenger in the Lincoln starts shooting. The cops shoot out the tires, and the Lincoln goes off the road. Then the passenger comes out shooting. The cops kill him, and the driver surrenders. In the trunk, there’s a huge chest of cash.
Normally a bust of that magnitude unfolds over months. Lots of planning goes into it, and lots of people in the department know it’s coming. That’s not how this one happened. Three cops responding to an unexpected tip lucked into a big pile of money, and no one else knew about it.
Chester Dixon started getting suspicious because when cops shoot a guy to death on the side of the road, they usually file an initial report immediately. It may not be complete, but it gives a sketch of the timeline, the events, and who was there. An investigation later will flesh out the details.
But this time the initial report took five days to appear, which told Dixon there was some wrangling inside the department as to what the report should say. Cops usually like to play up busts like that for publicity, so everyone can see they’re out there protecting the public. But this one was just a blip in the news. A ten-second mention on local TV about a couple of dealers who tried to run and got shot. They were carrying $20,000 in cash, according to the news reports, and no one thinks about it after that.
The driver who surrendered was Wilma Juarez’s husband. A few days later, Ramón Ramírez showed up with money from the cartel to bail him out.
“Texas doesn’t usually give bail to guys who shoot at cops,” Dixon said. “To be fair, the driver didn’t actually shoot. It was the passenger who had the gun. But still, I didn’t like the smell of that.”
A few months later there’s a second bust, again on a tip from Ramírez. Only this time he gave the cops a couple days’ notice and they got to plan it out. So more people in the department should have known about it. People in the Criminal Investigations Division should have known about it.
But no. It’s the same three cops, only a smaller highway. And it’s the same blip in the news, only this time the cops killed everyone in the car, and they were a little more generous about the money, telling the press they took in a hundred thousand in cash. The governor even went on TV to praise the Highway Patrol for their work.
Dixon drums his fingers on the Formica tabletop and gazes out the window with a troubled expression. For a few seconds, he says nothing as he considers the next part of his story.
“I went through the academy with a cop named Manuel Martínez. He was friends with a guy named Moses Tate, who was involved in both busts. Martínez told me a different story.” Dixon leans in. “He said there was a lot more than twenty thousand in the trunk of that burgundy Lincoln, and a lot more than a hundred grand in the second car. He didn’t get to count it, but he did get a look at it. There were rumors going around that it was twelve million in the Lincoln, and six million in the other car. Those are major busts. Those are front-page headlines and lead stories on the evening news. I can tell you, none of that cash showed up in the evidence lockers, except the hundred and twenty thousand that was reported on the news. And I can also tell you it’s unlikely the cartels would spend fifty thousand dollars to bail a guy out so they could shoot him for losing twenty thousand. If he had lost millions, they’d do that for sure.”
“Manuel Martínez,” I say. “He was on the plane.”
“Yeah,” says Dixon. “Funny we keep crossing paths, huh? Hey, can you give me the contact info for that guy in Dallas? Alfonso Jiménez?”
“Yeah. He seems to have a few pieces of the puzzle. And you have some, and I have some. Maybe together we have enough to connect the dots for a grand jury.”
I give him Jiménez’s contact info, and we exchange cards as the waitress returns with my check and a pot of coffee.
She looks at me and says, “You still want to settle up, sugar? Or does your friend want something to eat?”
“You hungry?” I ask Dixon.
“No. Just coffee.”
“Go ahead and add it to my tab,” I say.
She nods and pours him a cup. When she leaves, I ask, “Why was Martínez going to Hawaii? And there was another cop on the plane too. A guy named Brandon Robertson. What were they doing?”
Dixon says they won the trips as part of a program Jumbo Throckmorton instituted to honor top lawmen. Robertson boarded the flight with his wife, Martínez with his wife and two children.
“Who decides which cops are honored?”
“The governor,” he says.
“You said you’re up in Longview, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Were you in on that big bust the other day? Ramón Ramírez and his two kilos of fentanyl?”
“No. They had me over on the other side of the county.”
“They don’t trust you on a bust like that?”
“They don’t trust me on something that looks like a setup,” he says. “That guy was too low-level and too stupid to be trusted with two million dollars worth of anything. And look how he died. You don’t swallow a two-gram balloon when you’re driving down the highway with two kilos in the trunk. I’m not surprised someone wanted the guy dead. I’m just surprised that it looks like it was someone on our side of the law. He was arrested before noon. He died after midnight. If he had swallowed that balloon himself, it would have gone through him by then.”
“You think someone put it there after he was in holding? Like, put it in his…” I don’t like that image.
“You have a better explanation?” Dixon says. “I’ll tell you another thing. I sometimes patrol near the Louisiana border. The Louisiana cops ask me why we’re not catching guys running drugs into their state. I hear the same thing from patrolmen working the borders of Arkansas, Oklahoma, and New Mexico. We don’t catch guys running drugs out of Texas, but we do catch the money coming back in on its way to Mexico. Those two big busts I told you about probably aren’t the only ones. I have a feeling there have been more, and they never made the news.”
“That’s a lot to think about for one day,” I say.
“Well, think about it.”
I nod and start to pull out my wallet to pay. “I need to head out.”
Dixon stands and extends his hand. “It was good talking to you,” he says. “Real good. I’m going to give your buddy Alfonso Jiménez a call. And hey—your FBI friend—can he get the ear of someone in the Bureau?”
“I think so.”
“Good. ’Cause the fucker Martínez talked to was worthless.”
“What fucker?”
“Rollins, or something like that. An old do-nothing burnout of a cop.”
I’m getting close to the point where I can walk back into Travis Seldin’s house, lay out the case, and show enough evidence to convince Anna to come out of hiding so she can
get the help she needs. I keep thinking of her disappearing down that hatch in the closet floor, like she’s climbing into her own grave. I know a lot of people died in that crash, but right now all I care about is making sure the one who didn’t die comes out of this OK. It’s been too long since I’ve heard from her, and I’m getting nervous.
I need to see her—tonight, if possible—but I’ll never convince her to leave while Errol Lomax is still at large. Even if I had an airtight case and all the evidence in the world—and that could take months—he has a hold on her through fear that no amount of reason can outweigh. I looked for him in the alley the other night, after the cops took Julia to the marshal’s house. He was gone.
Looking back on it now, I wish I had killed the guy.
Anna Brook has one thing right in that religion of hers. Someone is going to have to die to set her free.
35
Fifteen minutes after I leave the diner, I get a call from Alfonso Jiménez in Dallas. I tell him I just met someone he should talk to. I give him a rundown of our conversation and Chester Dixon’s contact info.
When I finish, he says, “I got your credit card statement.”
“Yeah?”
“I’ll email it to you.”
When traffic on Interstate 45 backs up a few minutes later, I get a chance to look at the statement. There are only two charges on the card, each of them two days before the crash. One was for Anna Brook’s ticket. The other was from an army surplus store in San Francisco.
I call Ed to see if he can check on that one. He actually sounds happy about it.
“I’ve been in this office for days,” he says. “Talking to investigators, talking to lawyers, eating stale sandwiches.”
“Well here’s an excuse to get some fresh air,” I say. “Take a little walk outside.”
“Hey, while you’re on the phone,” he says, “were you following Errol Lomax?”
“I followed him once or twice back in DC. And once or twice we just kind of wound up in the same place.”
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