JT [02] Horns of the Devil

by Marc Rainer

  “OK. When and where?”

  “My shop in fifteen. Shall we go?”

  The Washington field office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation was located at 601 4th Street NW, just across the street from the Triple-nickel. Doroz led the way into the gang squad. Eight low-walled cubicles—carpet over gray metal and each with a computer station—occupied the center of the bullpen. They passed the cubicles and entered the squad conference room, bright and well illuminated by several rows of energy-saving fluorescents. Trask made a mental note to alert Hollywood that their portrayals of the Bureau in the X-Files, Fringe, and other shows were a bit off. The FBI had lightbulbs, and actually used them.

  Trask and Doroz shook hands with Willie Sivella and Dixon Carter. Trask held out his hand to Lynn, who pushed the hand away and kissed him full on the mouth, prompting cleared throats from six other FBI special agents standing around the conference table.

  “I knew this would never work,” Doroz quipped.

  “It’ll work just fine,” Lynn replied. “We have the best cops, the best agents, and now the best prosecutor working the case.”

  “And as soon as she gets up to speed, the best investigative analyst?” Doroz asked.

  “Of course,” she said.

  “Good.”

  Doroz looked toward the door as a very young-looking man in a light-gray suit entered the room.

  “Everyone here remember Puddin’?” Doroz asked, using the squad moniker for Special Agent Michael Crawford. An aging secretary had seen the new agent as he arrived for his first day of work and had loudly proclaimed that he looked like a fresh bowl of the dessert. The nickname had stuck.

  “I never forget a face,” Sivella said. “Especially one that looks twelve.”

  “Thanks, Cap,” Crawford said. “You can help me buy some beer after I give this spiel. I’d just get carded again. It’s such a hassle.”

  “Just look at it this way, Mike,” Lynn offered, “when you’re forty, you can still date cheerleaders.”

  “Thanks, but they’re pretty high-maintenance,” Crawford said, blushing.

  “As if you knew,” Doroz laughed. “Get on it with it, Puddin’.”

  Crawford walked to the front of the conference table as the rest of the group took their seats. A button-push on a remote caused the lights to dim and a screen to drop from the ceiling. A projector in the rear switched on, displaying the silhouette of a small country.

  “The Republic of El Salvador,” Crawford began. “A small nation on the Pacific side of Central America, about the size of Massachusetts. The capital is the city of San Salvador, one-point-six million people, about one-fourth the population of the entire country. Until recently, the government was controlled by the Alianza Republicana Nacionalista, the National Republican Alliance, or ARENA party. Hard-line conservatives and very friendly to the US. The last national election, however, was won by the Farabundo Marti para la Liberacion Nacional, the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front, or FMLN.”

  “Liberation front?” asked Trask. “That doesn’t sound too friendly.” You’ve done your research, Puddin.’ Don’t leave out the politics. It could matter here.

  “Probably not,” Crawford said, “unless you’re Castro or Hugo Chavez. It’s a fairly new administration, and we have to see how far to the left the country will swing. Anyway, that’s how this all started. In the eighties, there was a helluva civil war going on down there—left versus right—and about one hundred thousand people died, mostly in the rural areas. The country’s agricultural industries got caught in the middle, and with nothing to sell or eat, about two million Salvadorans decided to come to the US. Thousands of them settled in California, and as their kids became teenagers, they faced the same problems any other teenagers face in LA and Oakland.”

  “Gangs?” Carter asked.

  “Precisely. The black and Mexican street gangs were already established, and originally the Salvadorans banded together in self-defense. They created Mara Salvatrucha 13. Mara is short for marabunta, a word for gang or for army ants; salvatrucha can be translated as ‘shrewd.’ The thirteen comes from the 13th Street area in LA, where a lot of the original members lived. In fact, their chief rival gang is usually just called the 18th Street Gang, Barrio 18, or M-18, another Salvadoran crew originally from LA. The Maras originally only admitted Salvadorans, but later they were taking in anyone from Central America. Of course, in the proud history of LA street gangs, self-defense soon took a backseat to every kind of criminal enterprise you can think of.”

  “What kind of colors and tats are we looking for?” asked Carter.

  “For MS-13, colors are light blue and white. Tattoos include ‘MS,’ ‘Salvatrucha,’ the number thirteen or any numbers adding up to thirteen—”

  “Like a Philly 76ers jersey,” Sivella noted.

  “Yes. And also tattoos of their signature hand sign.” Crawford held his left hand up in a sideways rendition of what any Texan would have recognized as a tribute to the University in Austin. “Think hook ’em horns, but held down or sideways. They call this the Horns of the Devil. The 18ers use similar numerical tats and tags: 666, XVIII, or just eighteen. They wear black mostly, sometimes black and blue.”

  “We need to start concentrating on potential charges,” Trask said. “Tell everyone what the gangs are into.”

  “Drugs, prostitution, extortion, and most of all, violence.” Crawford hit the button on the remote. “Some examples.”

  The screen changed to a photograph of the bodies of two young men and two young women who had been shot in the head, execution style. The women had also been slashed in the face with a machete.

  “Newark, New Jersey, 2007. One of the girls actually survived. There’s a MySpace entry we took off the web from a sixteen-year-old MS-13 gangbanger bragging about his role in this.

  “They’ve got absolutely no respect for authority,” Crawford continued. “In 1997, the son of Ricardo Maduro was kidnapped and beheaded after the government of Honduras started a crackdown on the gang. Ricardo Maduro is a former president of Honduras.”

  “Sound familiar?” Doroz looked at Carter, who nodded. It was evident now why the Bureau had the case. Assassinations, even if drug-related, were federal business, not local.

  The screen changed again, revealing an incredible scene of carnage. A mass of bodies, including several women and small children, lay strewn about a shattered bus.

  “Honduras again, 2002. Some MS-13 members stopped this bus on the outskirts of Tegucigalpa and sprayed it with AK-47s. Killed twenty-eight, including seven little kids, then left graffiti tags on the hood of the bus bragging about it.”

  “Assholes.” Lynn Trask had no tolerance for those who abused the helpless.

  “That they are,” Sivella agreed. “How many of these assholes are we dealing with?”

  “Not that they faithfully return their census forms, but we estimate at least twenty thousand nationally, with as many as ten thousand in the metro DC area.”

  “Shit!” exclaimed Sivella. “Have you guys had any luck penetrating this bunch, Bear?”

  “Only occasionally,” Doroz said. “They have the same code as the mafia. MS por vida. Once you’re in, you’re in for life. The Mara kills cooperators, so they’re hard to recruit. We had a seventeen-year-old female give us some info back in 2003. Four of her high-school classmates stabbed her to death and left her body on the banks of the Shenandoah River. They even whack their own just for trying to leave the gang.”

  On cue, Crawford clicked the remote again. A photograph of a single blood-soaked corpse filled the screen.

  “This is the body of Ernesto Miranda. They called him Smoky. He was actually one of the Mara founders. They murdered him at his home in El Salvador after he refused to attend a gang party. He’d decided to go straight, was attending law school, and was trying to keep kids from joining the gang.”

  “Thanks, Puddin’.” Doroz stood and switched the lights back on. “I just wanted everyone
to go into this with their eyes wide open. This is not going to be a normal investigation. We aren’t going to find every street dealer tied to this organization wanting to sing to us in order to avoid a five-spot at Lorton or in some federal pen. They’ll probably want to go down swinging.”

  “That being the case,” Trask said, “let’s look for the hangouts, businesses, wherever they do their dirty work. Without informants, we’ve got to think T3’s.” Title III was the short name given to that section of the federal code covering electronic surveillance: wiretaps and hidden microphones.

  “I agree,” Doroz said. “Willie, I’d like to deputize any of your people working with us on this, so we can cross state lines without having to make a phone call every five minutes. They’ll be our TFOs.” Doroz used the common acronym for federal task force officers. “Any problem with that?”

  “Nope,” Sivella answered. “I’ll assign Dix here and get him a new partner.”

  “What?!” Carter objected. “Dammit, Cap, we’ve talked about this, and—”

  “And I’ve changed my mind, Dixon. I don’t want anybody—even you—riding alone on this thing. Too risky. Discussion closed.”

  Carter shook his head and stormed out of the room. Most of the others headed back to their desks.

  “Dix still has Juan Ramirez hanging over his head, doesn’t he?” Doroz asked.

  “Yeah, but it wasn’t his fault, and he’s going to have to get over it,” Sivella said. “I shouldn’t have let him fly solo this long.”

  “Who’ve you got in mind?” Trask asked. “Anyone we know?”

  “You’ll recognize him. Lots of experience, and a good young cop. Just passed the detective’s exam.”

  Chapter Four

  August 11, 2:37 a.m.

  Esteban Ortega pulled his car up to the back door of the deli and pulled the gasoline can out of the trunk. The convenience store where his soldiers had been killed the night before was not that far away, and the shootings had him worried. Not afraid, just worried. If the cowards from the 18th Street Mara were trying to move into his territory, the deli was not the kind of place from which one could properly manage a war. It was too close to the street and virtually indefensible against drive-by assaults like the one that had killed his troops. There was also too much glass in the front. Glass exposed those inside to the view from the street, and ordinary plate glass didn’t stop bullets.

  The deli had served its purpose—to provide a legitimate cover for the laundering of the funds generated by the sales of cocaine—but his people needed a new home. He had found one with concrete walls, a spacious attic, and set well back from the street. He just needed to get the final drop of financial funds out of the deli in order to crank up the new business. He unlocked the padlock on the back door and poured the gasoline around the base of the walls in the storage room, then dropped the container where he was sure the investigators would find it. Returning to the car trunk, he pulled a tire iron out. After relocking the padlock, he smashed the frame around the lock and ripped the hasp out of the door, leaving it dangling. He struck a match and threw it into the pool of gasoline.

  At 3:12 a.m., the man with the eye patch low-crawled along the wall of the vacant house. When he reached the rusted air-conditioning unit on the concrete platform at the side, he balanced the rifle barrel on top of the unit.

  He was close enough to the backyard of the house in the 3100 block of Georgia Avenue NW that he didn’t really need the scope, but he preferred to use it anyway. It lessened the slim odds of a miss, but more than that, it allowed him to see the faces of his targets.

  There were three of them sitting around a patio table on the elevated deck in the back of the house. There was a lantern in the center of the table, providing enough illumination for the man with the eye patch to read the Cerveza Caguama labels on the beer bottles. The one in the middle seemed to be very proud of the tattoo across the top of his back, since he kept pulling his shirt up to display it to the others.

  The man with the eye patch focused the scope on the face of the center target. Looking through the scope gave him a small sense of contentment. The view was the same as before his loss; his left eye was closed, not needed, as it had always been while he shot. The difference would come when he took his right eye off the scope. His left eye was no longer there for him to open. They had taken it from him, along with so much more.

  He took in every detail of his target’s face. The round shape, the flat nose, a bruise here or there, the bloodshot eyes and drunken smile. His first shot arrived at the center of the forehead. The dead man tumbled backward. The two other targets stood reflexively, first looking down at their friend, and then whirling back toward the rear of the yard, toward him. His second shot hit the man on the right, the bullet striking the center of his chest. That target had been closest to the door of the house, and he fell, blocking it and slowing down target number three as he tried to pull the door open. The third round struck this target in the back, squarely between the shoulder blades.

  The man with the eye patch paused to pick up the brass casings on the ground before turning toward the car waiting for him on the curb.

  “Home, Hugo.” He pulled the drawer open beneath the seat and dropped the rifle into it.

  Trask got out of the Jeep and started walking up the hill past the perfectly lined rows of white grave markers. It was half-past ten in the morning, and Lynn had said that Dixon Carter hadn’t checked in yet.

  Arlington was an awe-inspiring place. Trask stopped and looked out at the silent ranks, wondering how many were buried there, what their stories were. One of his three academic majors had been history, after all. He knew that some lying here really had been heroes, while others had just been unfortunate. He had been to military bases named after those whose only accomplishment had been to get themselves killed on their first mission. Other bases had been named after combat or service legends. All had assumed the risk by putting on the uniform. Many here had paid the ultimate price for their service. All rested quietly now.

  Not all the heroes chose to come here. Major Richard Bong, our Ace of Aces. Forty kills in the Pacific during World War II. Crashed and died on a test flight in San Francisco. The Japs couldn’t kill him; forgetting to switch on a fuel tank in a new plane did. They took him home to Wisconsin for burial.

  Trask couldn’t help but feel a little inadequate among these honored dead. He’d never seen combat. His knees had been almost destroyed by the time he’d graduated from the Air Force Academy. Too many innings playing catcher in baseball, too many football games. It would have been a waste of the taxpayers’ money for him to try to make it through pilot training. The flight surgeon who did his graduation physical told him that once he started pulling a few g’s in a fighter trainer, they’d have to pull his kneecaps. There just wasn’t enough cartilage to hold them in place anymore. So he’d stayed on the ground, gone to law school. His only fighting had been in the courtroom. He was still fighting those battles while his pilot classmates were all retired or flying desks of their own.

  He remembered the burial site from the ceremony. The route through the headstones and trees was still vivid in his mind.

  The grave’s just beyond the crest of the little ridge, toward the right.

  As he reached the top of the hill, Trask saw him sitting on the grass in front of the grave. Carter turned as he approached.

  “Hi, Jeff.”

  “Dix.”

  Trask looked past him to the marker bearing the name of Sgt. Juan Ramirez, United States Army. For a moment, the images returned. The pallbearers in their dress uniforms, the mournful notes of the bugle, the rifle shots fired in salute. The folded flag presented to Juan’s partner who was sitting here now, still blaming himself.

  “Are you here to give me the lecture?”

  “No. In fact, I was at the LEO Memorial today and got one myself.”

  “You? Why?”

  “I’ve always thought that Bob Lassiter took a bullet t
hat was meant for me. Barry Doroz agreed that it probably was, but said there was nothing I could do about it now but move on.”

  “Sometimes that’s easier said than done.”

  “I know.”

  Trask waited for several long minutes for the big man to say something. He didn’t. Trask turned to leave.

  “Thanks for coming out,” Carter said.

  Trask turned back.

  “Nobody else thinks it was your fault, Dix.”

  “What anybody else thinks doesn’t matter.”

  Trask walked back over and sat down. Not too close. He looked at the gravestone, not at Carter.

  “Saint Thomas Aquinas wrote that the greatest sin of all wasn’t even written in the Ten Commandments. He said that you had to be a man to accept responsibility for your actions, but that you had to be a bigger man to forgive yourself when you didn’t measure up. Otherwise, you were committing heresy by throwing the Maker’s forgiveness back in his face and substituting your own judgment for his.”

  “I didn’t know you were Catholic.”

  “I’m not. They just made me read a lot in school.”

  Carter nodded. “Saint Thomas sounds like a good man who never got his partner killed.”

  “Even if that happened, and I don’t believe it did, there’s another partner waiting for you who’s willing to bet that you’d never let it happen again.”

  Carter scowled at him. “Who is it?’

  Trask stood up and started back over the rise. “You’ll have to see for yourself when you’re ready. I thought it was a good pick.”

  He walked back toward the Jeep.

  Hell if I know who Willie picked to survive your self-loathing, to try to measure up to Juan, but you’re a detective, for Christ’s sake. You’ve got a curiosity chip in your head that’s just as big as mine, and I’m betting that right now you’re really pissed that Sivella told anybody before he told you. You’re also trying to figure out who he picked and who I thought was a good choice. I’ll bet you’re in the Cap’s office in an hour.