In Desperation

by Rick Mofina

  “I want to take the test now. Anything to find Tilly.”

  “All right. I will alert the FBI and we’ll call a cab.”

  Few words were spoken during the ride to the FBI’s office. Cora sniffed and twisted a tissue in her hands. Gannon’s phone rang with two more calls from the WPA in New York and one from the bureau in Phoenix. He didn’t answer any of them.

  The cab stopped in front of the FBI’s Phoenix headquarters on Indianola Avenue. As Baker-Brown, Cora and Gannon walked the few steps to enter the brick-and-glass building, Gannon heard his name called.

  It was Henrietta Chong and a WPA news photographer, who fired off several rapid shots of Gannon, Cora and her defense attorney entering the FBI building.

  Chong and the photographer were approaching them.

  “Any comment on speculation the FBI now has Cora under suspicion?”

  No one responded.

  “Jack? Any comment on this turn in the case?”

  Gannon knew this was his fault, unless Hackett had tipped them.

  He shook his head, his stomach tightening.

  49

  Las Vegas, Nevada

  Tilly Martin’s face beamed at Vic Lomax from the big flat-screen TV.

  It was followed by the scowling mugs of Ruiz Limon-Rocha and Alfredo Hector Tecaza of the Norte Cartel. Then Carlos Manolo Sanchez, the young one. Then Lyle Galviera stared at him. Then the replay of Salazar and Johnson, the dirty cops murdered in the desert south of Juarez.

  And here again was the footage of Cora pleading alongside the FBI.

  That stupid fucking bitch.

  Lomax had canceled his meeting on wagering trends and revenue-per-room percentages, locking himself away in his glass-wall office overlooking The Strip to replay the latest network news reports on the Phoenix kidnapping.

  This new information disturbed him. He watched, tapping one of his business cards on his chin.

  Lomax knew the drug trade well and figured the young one, Sanchez, was likely a Norte hit man. This was not good. The heat was increasing, all of it brought on by that fool, Galviera, and his stupid bitch.

  Cora.

  Never in a million years did Lomax expect to see that skank again.

  Then, after all these years, comes this shit with her kid, and her reporter brother comes right to his house.

  Right to my goddamn home! I should’ve killed the fucker.

  Now the shit keeps piling up and the Norte Cartel has gone into full vengeance mode on Galviera.

  And now it’s getting too close to me.

  Lomax had his own operations with his own business partners.

  But his connection to Cora would cost him. Those Mexican motherfuckers were going to drink Galviera’s blood and cut off the head of anyone remotely linked to him. There are truths in the universe that must never be challenged, and one of them is that you do not rip off the Norte Cartel and expect to live.

  No matter what he did, his connection to Cora was a liability. He had to do something to remove the risk.

  The best defense is a good offense.

  He turned the business card over.

  A phone number was penned on the back, a very important phone number that Lomax had paid fifty thousand dollars to obtain.

  He had a cell phone on his desk, one he’d taken from his casino’s lost and found. He’d use it to call the number, then have a staff member toss it in the fountains at the Bellagio.

  Calling the number was dangerous, but it was Lomax’s only way to get his message to the very highest levels of the Norte Cartel-to its very heart.

  Because the information he had exceeded any rip-off.

  Lomax knew about Cora, Donnie Cargo and the mystery surrounding the murder of Eduardo Zartosa-little brother of Samson Zartosa, the head of the Norte Cartel.

  Whether Lomax’s information was true or not didn’t matter to him.

  As long as it’s true enough to save me.

  He held the phone steady, checked the card and started pressing numbers on the keypad.

  50

  Chihuahua, Mexico

  The mansion stood on a craggy palm-shrouded hill with a sweeping view of the mountains, fifty miles west of Ciudad Juarez.

  The only way to access the property by ground was a winding road whose entrance was gated and guarded by private security officers, ex-soldiers armed with AK-47s.

  Other security officers patrolled the grounds on all-terrain vehicles and by horseback. The entire property was fenced with razor wire and necklaced with motion sensors, laser-activated trip wires and several dozen security cameras.

  Ownership of the land was not listed on any government records. On paper, the estate of Samson Zartosa, leader of the Norte Cartel, did not exist.

  His security was formidable.

  His fortress had never been penetrated, although two idealistic federal drug agents on a rogue operation drove near it one night, determined to arrest Zartosa for the cartel’s murders of their fellow officers.

  Soon after, their car was found parked at a federal police station-their corpses in the trunk.

  Zartosa’s compound was a small village of buildings for his cars, his security team, their quarters and vehicles, their equipment, the servants and other compound staff. Zartosa’s house was a three-story, ten-bedroom colonial hacienda overlooking a man-made pond, gardens, two swimming pools, a private zoo and a small amusement park.

  The house had several offices. The largest was Zar tosa’s. Next to it was the office for his second-in-command, his Comandante, Garcia Deltrano.

  Deltrano was on the phone, managing a shipment with a troublesome contact controlling Norte routes into New York City. A problem had arisen from a greedy distributor, an ex-Wall Street player whose voice dripped with arrogance toward Mexicans.

  “Give me bigger numbers or nothing moves,” he said. “That’s the deal.”

  The cartel had taken steps in advance and Deltrano would resolve matters with a few sentences and a few mouse clicks.

  “Is this not your nine-year-old daughter entering her private school?” Deltrano sent a photo, then another. “And is this not your wife, only thirty minutes ago, shopping for your daughter’s birthday?” Deltrano sent one last photo. “And here are the overweight, overpaid security men you hired to protect them.” Two white men, naked and bound, guns held to their heads stared in fearful humiliation at the camera. “Do you wish to accept our new number?”

  Deltrano quoted a figure that halved that of the original shipment.

  Stunned, the American said nothing.

  Deltrano whispered a command into a second phone and the head of one of the naked men exploded from a gunshot. The man beside him, drenched with warm visceral matter, screamed for his life.

  “This is the last time I ask. Do you accept our new figure?”

  “I accept. Yes, God, yes.”

  Deltrano ended the call, went to the kitchen and got a cold Canadian beer, a gift from a distributor in Toronto. Upon his return, one of his secure lines was ringing. He didn’t recognize the number. Deltrano checked his state-of-the-art call tracking system. The call was coming from Las Vegas, Nevada. Deltrano answered.

  “Sí?”

  “My Spanish is not so good, so I’ll say this in English, okay?”

  The voice was coming through a voice changer, making it sound digitized, robotic. Deltrano listened.

  “This is for Samson Zartosa and concerns the unsolved murder of his brother Eduardo twenty years ago in San Francisco. Fate, it seems, has delivered an answer. The mother in the Phoenix kidnapping, Cora, is responsible for Eduardo’s murder. She was there.

  “Tell Zartosa that no matter what he hears or sees, all of his attention should be focused on Cora. To prove the validity of my information, tell Zartosa that I know Eduardo died with God in his hand.”

  The line went dead.

  Who was this caller? How did he get this number? Was this a police tactic? Deltrano’s mind raced. He used the most current
phone tracking program, obtained from a military intelligence source; he had linked it to credit card and financial databases obtained through several international banks controlled by the cartel.

  The number came up for a cell phone owned by Harry Burgelmeyer, of Muncie, Indiana. A deeper check showed he owned a tow truck company in Muncie. Recent credit card use showed he was a guest at Caesars. Deltrano called the cell phone number. It rang through to the message: “You’ve got Harry. You know what to do and I’ll get back to you. If you need service, call the shop’s twenty-four-hour line.”

  Deltrano went with his instinct: Harry’s phone was stolen for the call.

  By who? Why? And was the information true?

  After ruling out Harry Burgelmeyer, Deltrano continued using all of the cartel’s resources to try to track down the person behind the call. He worked at it in vain for some forty-five minutes until he heard distant thunder, rising until it grew deafening.

  Paintings rattled on the walls as the helicopter ferrying Samson Zartosa from his private airstrip landed on the compound’s helipad. He was returning from a business meeting in Buenos Aires.

  Deltrano’s hair lifted in the prop wash as he greeted Zartosa, taking his bags as he walked with him into the house.

  “I need to piss, then a little swim and eat, Garcia. Then we’ll talk.”

  Twenty minutes later, servants brought them club sandwiches at the poolside. The two men sat alone, working, while armed guards patrolled the grounds.

  Deltrano had two laptops showing Zartosa the latest shipments, updating him on issues and outstanding security matters.

  “You’ve taken care of the asshole in New York, Garcia?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good. I am growing tied of our situation in Arizona. On the plane I saw the latest news, all those pictures, all this attention on us. I don’t like it, of course. We need to end it.”

  “Just before you landed, I got a call, a strange call. I’m sorry to speak of this, but I think you should be aware. It was about Eduardo’s murder.”

  “Eduardo?”

  As Deltrano recounted the call, he watched a dark curtain fall over Zartosa. It was Samson who had flown alone to California to bring the body of his little brother home.

  “The caller said to tell you that he knew that Eduardo had died with God in his hand. What does that mean, Sam?”

  Zartosa’s gaze bored into Deltrano, who then watched pain seep into Zartosa’s eyes.

  “It means the information is true. Only those who witnessed Eduardo die would know what was in his hand. Do we know who called?”

  “We’re working on finding out.”

  “And the caller said the mother in the Phoenix kidnapping case is behind Eduardo’s murder?”

  “Yes. What do you want me to do?”

  “I need to be alone, to think.”

  Samson Zartosa looked to the mountains and back on his life, back to when he was a boy growing up with his brothers in the barrio in Juarez. For a few joyous years, they were so happy, never realizing how poor they were because everybody was poor.

  Samson, Hector and Eduardo did everything together-played together, ate together, bathed together, slept in the same bed and dreamed together. Eduardo was always in the middle, safe between his two older brothers.

  “I want to be a pilot and fly jets when I grow up,” he said.

  “I want to be a bullfighter,” Hector said.

  “I want to lead an army like Zapata,” Samson said.

  Then came the night of their father’s murder, the night the Zartosa family’s destiny was written in blood.

  They were all gone now, his mother, father, Hector and Eduardo.

  While Zartosa could do nothing about his mother’s death, he had avenged his father’s murder and his brother Hector’s murder. He thought back to that long flight from California with Eduardo’s coffin in the belly of the plane-I want to be a pilot-thought back to the cemetery where Eduardo was buried.

  Who would have thought that in all the galaxies of chance that this arrogance by the Americans-Salazar, Johnson, this Lyle Galviera-to plot a betrayal of the cartel, would actually lead him to Eduardo’s killer?

  Anger began to bubble in the pit of Zartosa’s stomach.

  At first Zartosa only wanted to use Galviera’s girlfriend’s daughter to draw him out, to retrieve their stolen millions and teach them all a lesson about the Norte Cartel.

  He had even contemplated returning the girl-if they’d cooperated.

  But now this happens.

  Zartosa thought of Cora, thought of the piece of information the caller had given: Eduardo died with God in his hand.

  This changes everything.

  Zartosa picked up his house phone and pressed a button.

  “Garcia?”

  “Yes.”

  Garcia was like a brother to Zartosa. Garcia had grown up with him, with Hector, with Eduardo and was the first to join their little gang after they’d avenged their father’s murder.

  “Garcia-” Zartosa cleared his throat “-is everything still in play for Arizona?”

  “Everything is in play.”

  “You know Eduardo was the best of us all.”

  “He was, Sam.”

  “You know when we lowered him into the ground I made him a promise.”

  “I was there beside you when you made it.”

  “It is time to honor my promise.”

  51

  Phoenix, Arizona

  As Cora, her lawyer and her brother were led through the FBI offices, she remembered that distant night when she’d given birth to Tilly.

  She recalled the antiseptic smells, the blinding lights, everyone masked, leaving her afraid and alone, until the moment she held her baby in her arms.

  Now her fear that she would never hold Tilly again grew with each step she took. It carried her along a blue hazy stream of sounds and images that flowed to the truth buried in her past.

  They’d arrived at a large meeting room.

  Here again were Hackett; Larson; their boss, Bruller; and the two San Francisco inspectors, Paul Pruitt and Russ Moseley.

  “We’ll be observing,” Pruitt said after the usual greetings. “We helped Agent Hackett with some questions. Then we’ll talk to you afterward about your time in San Francisco.”

  Cora nodded before turning to Oren Krendler, the FBI’s polygraph examiner. On the polished table beside him was a collection of files next to a hard-shell case.

  “I will need some time alone to chat with you.” Krendler offered Cora an officious smile.

  After the others left, he acknowledged her anxiety. “I’ve been doing this a long time and I know you’re nervous-that’s expected.” He unscrewed a fountain pen and for the next twenty minutes, asked her about her medical history, about medication, if she felt rested, able and willing to help with the investigation by undergoing the examination.

  Satisfied that Cora was a capable subject, Krendler then snapped open the latches of his case and showed her his polygraph machine. He tried to make her comfortable with it, telling her that it was an older standard five-pen analog that he swore by.

  “These models are very efficient.”

  The machine worked by using instruments he would connect near Cora’s heart and on her fingertips to electronically measure her breathing, perspiration, respiratory activity, galvanic skin reflex, blood and pulse rate, recording her responses on a moving chart as she answered questions.

  Krendler said the questions would concern her original statements to the FBI about the kidnapping, her relation to it and her time in San Francisco. He would look at how her answers fit with the facts and known evidence, analyze her chart and determine one of three possible outcomes: She was truthful, untruthful, or the results were inconclusive.

  Cora understood and was ready.

  When the others returned, Hackett came to her and said, “Before we get started, I want to advise you of your rights.”

  She glan
ced at Baker-Brown, who nodded, and Hackett proceeded.

  “You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you…” How did her life come to this? “Do you understand each of these rights I have explained to you?” No, I do not understand any of this. “Having these rights in mind, do you wish to proceed?”

  “Yes.”

  Hackett and the others took seats at one end of the room, behind Cora, who sat in a chair facing Krendler. As he connected her to the machine, she tried to remain calm.

  This was her moment of reckoning.

  Krendler began with establishing questions, reminding Cora to answer “yes” or “no.”

  “Is your name Cora Martin?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you change your name from Cora Gannon?”

  “Yes.”

  “Were you born in Buffalo, New York?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are your parents deceased?”

  The needles scratched the graph paper. “Yes.”

  “Do you have any sisters?”

  “No.”

  “Do you have any brothers?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is Jack Gannon your brother?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you have a daughter?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you married?”

  “No.”

  “Do you have a boyfriend?”

  Cora hesitated.

  “Do you have a boyfriend?”

  “I did.”

  “Answer yes or no, please.”

  “No.”

  “Are you employed at Quick Draw Courier?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you know Lyle Galviera?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you have a romantic relationship with Lyle Galviera?”

  “Yes.”

  “Was your daughter kidnapped from your house?”