by Rodolfo Peña
John Wayne called a friend on the Judicial Police and asked for a kilo of cocaine from the stash that had been confiscated on the last raid to a safe house. Then he went to his friend’s garage, where they were changing the color of the Durango from bright red to black with fast-drying car paint. He put the kilo of cocaine in the wheel well of the Durango. He told the garage man to deliver the Durango to the Miravalle hotel the next day at seven in the morning, park it near the entrance, and to leave the key in the ignition. He was to tell the valet parking attendant that the car was a rental for the people staying in suite 123.
Major García went to the commanding general’s office as soon as he got the call. The general ordered him to set up a roadblock just north of Jalpa. Military intelligence reported that a drug shipment was expected through there the next day. He was told to take two squads, heavily armed, and an armored vehicle. “Yes, sir, General,” said Major García and snapped a salute.
The following day, as the three men in the black Durango got to Jalpa, one of them suggested they stop for breakfast there but the crew leader said, “No, who knows what you can catch in these greasy spoon restaurants. We’ll have lunch at the airport; it looks like we’ll be early for our two o’clock flight anyway.”
About 10 kilometers outside of Jalpa they came upon some soldiers waving them toward the side of the road.
“What the hell is this,” said the black man alarmed by the roadblock.
“Just take it easy,” said the crew leader. “Roadblocks are common here in Mexico. They’ll ask us a few questions and then let us through. Get your passports ready.”
Chapter 40: Tying Up Loose Ends
The day that he got back from Guadalajara, Lombardo started writing a report on his investigation of Victor Delgado’s murder that detailed all of the facts, and listed all of the evidence that he had gathered. He wanted to be ready in case John Wayne reneged on the deal and Lombardo found out that the three men he wanted arrested had been spirited out of the country and into the United States.
He also made a copy of the resignation letter he kept in his desk but did not date it; he knew that if he handed in this version of the report, he would have to hand in his resignation at the same time. His only salvation now was for “justice to be served” one way or another.
He made other copies of the report and his resignation, which he stuffed into the envelopes that were addressed to local and national media, as well as The New York Times and the CNN correspondents in Mexico City and put them into FedEx envelopes ready to be sent out.
Lombardo’s boss had been in Mexico City all week so he was able to work in peace, without having to explain to him the result of his meeting in Guadalajara, although he was sure that his boss had gotten an update directly from John Wayne or maybe even the U.S. Consul in Guadalajara himself.
At ten o’clock in the morning of the second day after his return, Lombardo arrived at the Investigations Department’s building and went directly to his desk. He had decided that he would give John Wayne until three in the afternoon to call or send some sort of communication; otherwise, he would post his copies to the media before the 4 p.m. deadline for sending things via FedEx for next-day delivery.
As he sat down at his desk he noticed a white unaddressed envelope inside a plastic bag that had a sticker on it: “Delivered by Special Courier.”
He opened the envelope and found a single sheet of paper on which a single sentence had been printed: “Justice has been served.”
Lombardo picked up his cell phone and called the American Consulate in Guadalajara; he asked for “John Wayne” but was told that there was no one by that name in the Consulate. He then asked for the office of the DEA there and was informed that they had no office in the Consulate—perhaps, they suggested, if he called the embassy in Mexico City they could give him more information.
His desk phone buzzed. It was the Director’s secretary. He wanted to see Lombardo.
As soon as Lombardo walked into the office, the Director shoved a newspaper across the desk and said, “Have you seen this?”
The incident was tucked away discreetly in the third page where the “National News” of lesser interest was reported. But it did have one picture. It was a black SUV with a body hanging halfway out of one of its opened doors.
The text said that the SUV had failed to halt as requested at a military roadblock. It had attempted to run over the soldiers, who had signaled it to stop. The passengers of the SUV had shot at the soldiers, which had prompted the commanding officer to order his soldiers to return fire. The passengers, three males, two Americans and one Canadian, had died in the shootout. Upon inspection of the vehicle, several kilograms of cocaine were found hidden in the wheel well of the spare tire. Identification found on the three men proved to be false but fingerprint and other forms of identification revealed that all three had criminal records in their respective countries and had been identified by both international and national law enforcement agencies as known drug dealers and smugglers.
“I guess that’s the end of it,” said the Director.
“As far as the murder of Victor Delgado is concerned,” said Lombardo.
The Director leaned back on his chair and said, “I understand that the interim Governor has named a new Dean at the University.”
“So?” said Lombardo shrugging his shoulders.
“So, soon the only copies of the information, which has caused so much trouble, will be the ones you have. I am sure the new Dean will order the Computer Center to do a lot of housecleaning.”
“Are you asking me to destroy those copies, sir?”
“I’m not asking you anything, Captain Lombardo. You said that the information you have is evidence. Well, I suggest you keep it in a safe place. It might be very useful if the case is taken up by the Public Ministry.”
“It’s even more useful as insurance for me,” said Lombardo.
“I really don’t think you need it anymore,” said the Director dryly. “By the way, there was a reported burglary at the Planetarium. Some valuable equipment was stolen. I’m assigning you to the case.”
“How exciting. Thank you, sir. I was worried you might assign me to investigate your predecessor’s murder.”
“No, that’s been assigned to a ‘crack team’ of combined forces from the Judicial Police and the Public Ministry. Good day, Captain.”
As he left the Director’s office, Lombardo wondered how long it would take the “crack team” to bury the case under the slush pile of unsolved murders.
He went back to his desk and sat down. The note that John Wayne had sent seemed to mock him: “Justice has been served.”
“The hell it has,” said Lombardo and he hurried out of the building and down to the garage. He went to the head mechanic and yelled, “Where the hell is my damned car. I’m tired of paying for taxis.”
Lombardo rushed through the midday traffic to his downtown destination. When he got there, he left his car in a no parking zone in front of the Kalos building, but remembered to put the “Police on Official Business” card on the dashboard.
He went to Lupe Salgado’s office and walked right in, in spite of the secretary’s protestations.
“It’s all right, Miss Flores,” said Lupe Salgado when she said that the Captain had barged in without announcing himself.
“Lupe, I need you to do something for me,” said Lombardo.
“How can I help you, Captain?”
“I want you to find out where Dean Herrera is.”
“You confuse me with one of your colleagues, Captain; I’m not a detective,” said Lupe laughing.
“No, but here’s my idea,” said Lombardo. “Remember that the Dean has a ‘friend’ to whom he is very emotionally attached, to put it nicely?”
“They’re lovers,” said Lupe.
“Yeah, they’re lovers.” Lombardo said that he was sure the Dean was communicating with him. “Not, by cell phone—the Dean knows they are too easy to trace—
but the old-fashioned way, by email.”
“What makes you think that?” asked Lupe.
“Because among the many things Victor Delgado squirreled away into that encrypted archive were the Dean’s personal email files. And after having read some of them, it wouldn’t surprise me if that is how this whole encryption thing started; that is, the Dean wanted his email files encrypted and when it became dangerous to have the emails of their jolly little group in files their enemies could steal, they decided to encrypt those, too.”
“So, the intruders that Victor was chasing the night he was killed were probably snooping around trying to find the emails and other documents.”
“Yeah, they wanted to find out the names of all of the conspirators that were pushing the drug legalizing thing. They were especially interested in knowing who was getting money from the Cartels. Can you imagine what they could do with that information?”
“OK, but why do you want to find the Dean?”
“The men who killed Victor are dead. They were killed because I wanted to arrest them and their buddies thought that would be too embarrassing and would lead to too much exposure for a couple of governments and the DEA, FBI, and who knows what other foreign agencies that are running around loose in this country. The people who tried to stop me from investigating Victor’s murder thought that by killing them, the case would grind to a halt. The bad guys are dead, there’s nothing more to investigate.”
“That seems reasonable,” said Lupe.
“Not to me. The people that had Victor’s murderers killed are guilty of much more than just those killings and Victor’s murder. And the Mexicans who opposed them are just as guilty of who knows how many crimes. Their damned little wars are turning this country into a killing field. They have to be stopped.”
“It seems to me, Captain, that although it is a noble proposition, it is a very dangerous one. If these people won’t stop at killing some of their own, what do you think they’ll do to us if they find out you’re still pursuing the case?”
“But, you see, I am not going to pursue the case. I am going to let the case pursue itself.”
He explained to Lupe that once he had found the Dean, he would tell him that as long as he was running around the world, his life was in danger. If these guys caught up with him, he would be dead and at the bottom of some river in no time. The Governor had fled into the witness protection system because he was probably ratting on all of his former colleagues in the pro-legalizing drugs lobby. He was valuable to them for that, but the Dean was a danger, and of no use, so he was a prime target for elimination. But if the Dean came back, with a copy of the documents in his hand, he would probably find that the politicians, whom the Governor had antagonized with his ratting, would help him and protect him in a safe jail.
“That’s in theory,” said Lupe, “who knows how it will play out in real life.”
“All I can do is try,” responded Lombardo. “So, can the emails, if they exist, be traced?”
“It can be done. Once we find the recipient, all we have to do is hack his account to get one of his emails. Unless the Dean is very careful and uses an anonymous mailer, we can use the header to trace it. But, let’s see what we can do.” As he started to type away on his computer’s keyboard, he added, “By the way, I am charging my usual hourly fee for this, OK?”
The first thing that had to be done, according to Lupe, was find the Dean’s friend’s ISP—Internet Service Provider—for that he needed the Dean’s friend’s name. Lombardo provided that easily. He made a couple of phone calls, including one to a gay theater director who was very active in gay rights movements. The name that came back, Gilberto Jaramillo, was that of a professor in the Visual Arts Department of the University.
When Lupe queried a search engine with the name, a dozen references came up, several of which mentioned his email addresses. He had the usual Hotmail address, which it was Lupe’s guess was probably used only for chat purposes; he had a Gmail address, as did a gazillion other people in the world; he had an address at the University, and he had an address with a local ISP.
“My guess is,” said Lupe, “that the local ISP is the one he is using to communicate with the Dean. If he is using the Hotmail or Gmail accounts, the only way to get to his emails would be to hack his personal computer, and that might be a desktop or a laptop, which I would have to get to when he is online. That, my friend, would take time and luck.
If he is using the University account, which I doubt, you can squeeze David to give you access to whatever he has stored there. My guess is there will probably be just University business in that account.
No, I think we should start with the local ISP and see if he had left copies of his emails there. Lots of people don’t check the option to delete copies of their emails once they are safely loaded to their own machine, so the ISP stores its copies for a long time.”
“So, what can we do then?”
“I suggest,” said Lupe, “that you go lean on David to give you access to this guys emails that will be stored in the University’s email server. As I said, I doubt he’ll have anything that’s useful to us there, but let’s do it for completeness sake. Meanwhile, I’ll see if I can hack into this local ISP. If it is too difficult, I can ‘human engineer’ them and use your scary name to get them to let me see his emails—assuming he has left copies on the email server.”
“OK, that’s a good start. You get busy on that and I’ll call David on my way to the University.”
As Lombardo walked to his car, he mused about the amount of information that is just floating around on the Internet. “It’s a con man’s dream,” he muttered to himself, “but it could be useful to cops as well. I’ve got to ask Lupe to show me some of his tricks.”
His car was not where he had left it. According to the sticker pasted on the curb, it had been towed away.
Chapter 41: The Awful Truth
Lombardo didn’t ask permission from the new Director to leave the country; it is customary for police officers and other law enforcement officials to ask their superiors for permission to do so if they are going abroad on official business. But Lombardo wanted to talk to the Dean before he confronted the powers that be again and he certainly didn’t want the Director to know where the Dean was hiding.
He looked at the printouts that Lupe had given him and the handwritten notes on them. The signatory of the latest emails that the Dean’s friend had received was a “Juán Pérez,” the Spanish equivalent for “John Doe.” Lupe had traced those incoming emails to an ISP in Houston, Texas and had printed the results.
Although no names were used, other than the phony signature, it was clear from the way the two correspondents addressed each other—discreet endearments and understated wishes to be reunited again—that “Juán Pérez” was most likely the Dean.
Police work and investigations always depend on a bit of luck to get results; in this case, Lombardo was lucky that Lupe had read a series of emails in which “Juán Pérez” and the Dean’s friend agreed to meet in San Antonio’s Ingram Park Mall the following Monday. The Dean had told Jaramillo that he didn’t want to meet where he was staying because in case of “trouble,” he would spare his hostess any legal, moral, and emotional hardship. From that email, Lombardo guessed that Dean Herrera was probably staying with a friend or relative in Houston.
“Juán Pérez” gave precise instructions that detailed the place, within the Mall’s gigantic parking lots, where his car would be parked. Jaramillo was to meet him there; they would then drive away together to a more discreet place—a nearby motel. “Cherchez la fame” advised the old French cliché; it seemed to work just as well for love between any combination of genders.
The meeting was set up for the afternoon to give Jaramillo time to fly to San Antonio and then drive to the Mall. Lombardo took a late afternoon flight on Sunday, rented a car, and drove to the Holiday Inn Express that is just half a kilometer from Ingram Park Mall. He wanted to be at the rendezvo
us point before the Dean arrived.
He spent Sunday night watching banal television programs and thinking about how he was going to persuade the Dean to go back to Mexico. He would have to convince him that his life was in danger. He decided that his argument would be that if the ex-Governor had gone into the FBI’s witness protection program, in exchange for giving away all the information he had on all of the co-conspirators he knew on the pro-legalizing drugs group, the Dean’s name would be on the list. He would also argue that Victor Delgado’s death proved that the anti-legalization forces knew the Dean was involved and maybe even had access to the poisoned emails and documents. The anti-legalization forces would conclude that the Dean would have to be “neutralized” in one way or another. If he stayed out in the cold, the Dean might suffer the same fate as Victor.