“You’re making a fundamental mistake,” she says, cutting off my objection with a flick of the hand. “Listen to me. You’re assuming that if somebody’s undercover, then the story will be flimsy and won’t check out. If it was thrown together at the last moment, then maybe. But exactly how far back did you really go?”
“I talked to the man’s ex-wife. I saw his kids.”
“And she’s known him for how long? A few years?”
“His mother does the baby-sitting.” I take the photo from the garage out of my pocket: Brandon and his two friends, with his mother in the background. “She’s known him since he was born.”
As she studies the image, the corner of her lip curls down. “Oh, I know her. And there’s more to the situation than you realize.”
“Let me lay something out for you, Bea. This started off as a murder investigation, and now a Houston police detective, my partner, is dead. From where I’m standing, I’d say there’s more to this situation than you seem to realize. You’re withholding information, pure and simple. Now either start at the beginning and tell me everything you know, or I’m gonna walk.”
“You’ll walk? You’re the one who called me.”
I shrug. “I’m not gonna stand here and be lied to again.”
She’s mad, that much is obvious, even though she tries to keep it bottled up. Maybe she thinks I’m not showing her enough respect. Whatever illusion she had of controlling the situation is starting to crumble.
“This is off the record,” I say, giving another little push.
“Here’s what I can tell you. I inherited Brandon. I inherited the whole operation. Another agency put it in place, and for some reason had a change of priorities. This thing goes back years. But I was only put in charge of it four months ago.”
“When exactly?”
She does the math in her head. “Early February. Going on five months, I guess.”
In other words, not long after Andrew Nesbitt’s death.
“And the other agency that was responsible for putting the operation in place?”
“I can’t tell you that. Seriously. I have my suspicions, but there’s a certain. . imprecision to the way things like this happen.”
“But we’re talking about the CIA, right?”
“Maybe,” she says. “Or somebody working with them.”
“Earlier, you said you had information that the computer would blow Ford’s cover. Where did that come from?”
“A phone call,” she says. “A tip.”
“From?”
She stares into the water, not wanting to give it up.
“Bea, who tipped you off? You realize whoever it was set you up, right? We wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for that call.”
“You said Brandon’s mother baby-sits his kids. Did you actually talk to her?”
That was on Lorenz’s list, but we never got that far. I shake my head.
“Well, you might have a hard time finding her now. That’s who called me. Hilda. And she was Brandon’s handler, not his mother. What a piece of work.” She shakes her head. “I haven’t been able to reach her since that call.”
“This operation,” I say. “What’s it all about?”
She takes a half step toward me, touching her right arm against my left. She talks so softly I have to bend closer to hear. “This cannot go any further than you and me. I’m telling you this in good faith.”
The story she tells concerns a war between the powerful Gulf Cartel and the renegade enforcers called Los Zetas, now a cartel in their own right. Los Zetas was originally from the Mexican special forces, recruited by the Gulf Cartel’s then-leader, Cárdenas Guillen, to take out the competition. After defying the FBI and DEA, Guillen is now doing time in a U.S. prison without possibility of parole. A Federal judge in Houston sentenced him not long after Bea was handed her undercover operation. “Suddenly I had an inside man in Matamoros, home base of the Gulf Cartel.”
The volume of good intel coming up from Matamoros was staggering. The first report to come across her desk read like a soap opera digest of cartel gossip. Some of this she routed to contacts at the DEA, some she delivered through channels to the Mexican government. Everything came through the woman posing as Brandon Ford’s mother. She gave Bea the initial rundown on the organization and introduced her to Brandon, who would make the 350-mile trip to Matamoros every couple of weeks to collect information.
“Brandon had ideas of his own,” she says. “He wanted a larger role in the operation. He was tired of being the courier.”
So with the help of their cartel insider-Bea won’t share the man’s name, or even his code name-they set up the scenario she’d hinted at in our first interview. Brandon would use his gun-dealer cover to offer arms to the cartel. The plan was to expand his business until he had deals in place with the rival outfits, too.
“It would have been a delicate operation,” she says. “We’d have to set up new deals before the original ones were fulfilled, then arrange the deliveries close enough together to where the initial arrests wouldn’t tip the others off.”
There was another side to the sting, which made it appealing to Bea’s higher-ups. With a bankroll from the FBI, Brandon would purchase guns from U.S. dealers. With luck he’d be able to rope in manufacturers or importers, too.
“How far along had all this gotten?” I ask.
She sighs. “He had the money.”
“And what about the arms?”
“I don’t know,” she says with a shrug. “This first deal had already been worked out. Things were going smoothly. The last time we talked, he was heading to Matamoros for the final arrangements. I guess something went wrong.”
There’s a tremor in her voice.
“Bea, look at me.”
She turns. Her smooth face twists into a knot. She puts a hand over her nose, like she’s trying to stifle a sneeze. But it’s more than that.
“What’s wrong?” I ask.
“Nothing,” she says, shaking her head. She chews her lip and wraps her arms tight around her body, squeezing herself still.
“You and Brandon. .?”
“Whoever did this, I want them as bad as you do.”
“The two of you. .”
“I don’t want to talk about it. But, yes.”
The idea forming in my head puts all my earlier conspiracy theories to shame. Suppose this fellow, Brandon Ford, finds himself running information back and forth across the border. He’s looking for a payday and suddenly finds himself working for Bea, who’s not as tough and streetwise as she’d like to make out. He insinuates himself into her life, and pretty soon she’s going to her superiors for the cash to fund this sting operation.
“How much money did you actually sign out?”
“Not much to begin with,” she says. “Two hundred and fifty grand.”
Is that enough? I guess it depends on the situation. If Brandon Ford was ready to decamp before the opportunity came along, an extra quarter million to jump-start his new life wouldn’t have gone amiss. And if he was ready to leave behind an ex-wife and kids, then saying goodbye to a new love interest-and leaving her in the lurch-would not have presented any problem. How this connects with Andrew Nesbitt’s death and the way the dumped corpse was arranged, I’m not sure. A message to his so-called mother, maybe? Given time, I suspect I can work it all out. But Bea still seems oblivious.
“You’re not going to like the sound of this,” I say, “but I suspect you’ve been played. He wasn’t in this to hand you a sting operation. All he wanted was the money.”
She walks away from me, then turns. “You didn’t know him.”
“Neither did you, Bea. I think he was using you. Once he had the money, it was only a matter of time.”
“You. Didn’t. Know. Him.”
She punctuates each word with a jab of the finger, speaking loud enough for the breakfasting office workers to turn and watch. I close the distance, put a hand on her arm. She shrugs free but stands her ground.<
br />
“You can at least do me the courtesy of not questioning my professional judgment!” Her words come out in a hiss. “I thought I was doing you a favor, putting you in the picture. I could get in serious trouble even for talking with you.”
“Bea,” I say. “Calm down. There’s something you need to know.”
She starts to go. “I’ve heard enough from you-”
“Wait.” I take her by the arm. Her eyes flare with outrage, and for a moment I’m afraid she’ll lash out. “Wait, Bea. You need to hear this.”
She glances at the office workers, who start gathering their things and moving on. She looks at the sky, her whole body trembling with rage. Then she takes a deep breath and bores into me with her eyes. “What is it?”
“There were two men. They got the drop on me in Ford’s office. For some reason, they wanted the evidence-he’d covered a wall full of clippings related to Andrew Nesbitt’s death.” Her face is blank. No reaction to the name. “They took the computer hard drive, too. One of them, the man I killed, was tall and lean. He wore a gold ring shaped like a skull. The other one did all the talking. He had a faint Texas accent, stood about six feet and had a broad, muscular chest. They wore hoods so I couldn’t see their faces. When I shot him, the one with the skull ring had pulled his hood up. The other one got away in the car. He’d taken his mask off, so as he went by I got a good look at him.”
“And?”
I nod at the photo still clutched in her hand.
“What?” she says.
“That’s who I saw.” I point to Brandon Ford. “That face.”
“Then you saw a ghost.”
“We’ll see.” I take the photo back. “I want you to go somewhere with me, Bea. We’ll figure out which one of us is right.”
“Go with you? Where?”
“The morgue,” I say. “You’d know Ford’s body, wouldn’t you? I want to see if we can make a positive identification.”
Bridger waits outside, not looking too pleased by our sudden arrival. He senses something’s wrong between Bea and myself. I close the door gently, then walk to the cantilevered platform where the body waits, draped by a sheet.
“I don’t want to see this,” she says.
She stands a few feet back, her hands gripping the fabric front of her blazer, pulling it tight. The room is cold to begin with, but the open refrigerator forms a chilly draft. She’s breathing hard, loud enough that I can hear it. Her eyes stray to the depression in the sheet where a head should be.
“What other choice is there?”
“Are you sure about what you saw? Absolutely sure?”
“You’re not going to believe me if you don’t see for yourself.”
Maybe it’s cruel, what I’m putting her through. If I could be absolutely sure, then I would stop. But I only glimpsed the man with the shotgun, only got a snapshot impression of his features. This is the only way to be certain.
“I’ll start at the feet,” I say.
She extends one of her hands as if to stop me.
“You have to do this, Bea. You have to face up to it.”
She drops her hand.
I lift the sheet in stages, folding it back on itself, revealing the feet, the shins, the thighs, the genitalia. The mutilated hands appear, and there’s a catch in her breathing. I reveal the torso with its autopsy incisions. At the height of the clavicle, I rest the sheet and step back.
“Is this Brandon?” I ask.
Bea edges forward slowly. She takes her time with the body. When she’s finished, she straightens up. The expression on her face is unreadable.
“Bea?”
She doesn’t look at me. She turns for the exit, her heels clicking across the hard floor.
“It’s not him.”
She disappears behind the swishing door.
CHAPTER 13
Bea is a quiet passenger, uninterested in anything I have to say. Legs crossed, arms folded, face turned toward the window so I can only see her expression in chance reflections. Blank. The muscles slack. Signifying nothing. The extent of her contribution is to point the way to Hilda Ford’s house at the opposite end of Westheimer from Brandon’s office. When we pull up in the driveway, she’s out the door before I can cut the engine, advancing up the driveway with her side arm drawn.
“Bea!”
She keeps advancing, halted only by the locked door. I coax her gun back into the holster and try to calm her down. But she already seems calm, preternaturally so. It’s hard to judge whether I’m getting through to her.
We circle the house, peering in through the windows. I half expect to find the place cleared out. But no, it’s fully furnished, even a little cluttered with knickknacks. Through the kitchen door I can see the white fridge covered in layers of children’s artwork and alphabet magnets. I try the handle, but it’s locked.
As I check the nearby windows, Bea rears back and kicks the kitchen door. She can’t put enough weight behind her foot to force the lock, but the wood gives a satisfying crack. She tries again before I can stop her.
“Have you ever heard of a warrantless entry?” I ask. “Anything we get will be unusable without probable cause.”
She glares at me. “We’re past warrants.”
“No, Bea, we’re not. I’m not. The people responsible for my partner’s death, I plan to put them away. And I can’t do that if you go nuclear on the scene.”
“March,” she says. “March.” She clutches my arms in her hands, shaking me, looking up at me like she’s gone crazy. “Are you listening to yourself? Are you serious? Don’t you get it?”
I grab her wrists and pull her hands away. She tries to twist free, but I hold her.
“Get control of yourself,” I say.
“Let go.”
“Bea, I mean it.”
Her shoulders slump and the mask falls over her features again. “I’m fine. Let me go.”
I release her wrists.
“We’re going in there,” she says.
After a long, silent standoff, that’s what we do. There’s no way to stop her, and I need her cooperation. Without that, I don’t have a next step. If I go along with her this time, the forced entry will hopefully burn up some of her rage and I can reason with her before we move on. She gives the door a final kick while I look on.
We clear the house, which is unoccupied, then work our way back through the various rooms. While all the furniture, appliances, and clothing are still in place, there are no computers or phones. The garage is empty, too. Nothing I see suggests this is anything other than the home of a lone woman in her fifties with a fondness for her grandchildren. There are even toys strewn across the living room floor.
“Look at this,” Bea says, beckoning me over to an upright piano tucked against the wall. On top, a line of framed photographs, mostly of the two kids I recognize from the ex-wife’s apartment. There are two gaps in the row. Missing photos. “There used to be one of Brandon here. And there was one of him and Miranda with the children.”
She finds a pack of plastic bags in the kitchen and starts filling them with random small objects, anything that might yield fingerprints or trace evidence. Then she goes into the master bathroom in search of combs and brushes for stray hair.
“We’re going to find out if Hilda’s in the system,” she says. “Maybe we can get a real name on her.”
Given the fact that her supposed son was in the database, I seriously doubt that. But it’s worth a try. When she’s finished, we go out the way we came in, pulling the busted door shut. She stores her samples in the trunk of my car.
Back on the road, I ask if she wants to talk.
“What I want to do is find him,” she says.
We hit a series of locations, places she thinks he might be: a chain of bars and restaurants and cigar lounges along the Sam Houston Tollway, Hempstead, and Tidwell. She shows his picture around, but gets nothing. She has me drive slowly through the parking lot of several hotels along the Northwest Freeway
without explaining why she’d expect to find him in these particular spots. None of this is likely to bring results, of course, but I’m humoring her in the hope that once she simmers down, she’ll be forthcoming with information.
“He’s going to be anywhere associated with his old life,” I finally tell her.
“You think I don’t realize that?”
“What next, then?”
She thinks it over. “We should have a talk with Miranda.”
“And tell her what? Her husband’s not dead? I think she’s the last person who’s gonna have a line on his whereabouts.”
“I don’t know,” she says. “He loved those kids.”
She turns her face back to the window, elbow on the sill, her balled fist pressed against her lips. Then it all catches up to her and she doubles over. She doesn’t cry, doesn’t sob out loud. She just tenses up like a woman in labor, only instead of giving birth, she’s trying to hold something inside. The gravity of the betrayal, the weight of her own misjudgment-whatever it is, she’s overcome. I put a hand on her back.
“I want to help you fix this,” I say, “but I need you to work with me.”
She sits up, burying her face in her hands. “I can’t do this. Take me back.”
“Bea, I need you.”
“Just drive me back. I can’t think. I can’t even breathe.”
I point the car in the direction of the Water Wall, trying to argue her out of it the whole way. She’s determined, though. Whatever force was driving her to the brink, overcoming all her instincts toward secrecy and self-preservation, now it’s gone. Perhaps she’s even a little scared of herself, afraid of the consequences of what she’s learned and what she’s done.
Just when I think I’ve lost her, pulling up to the curb behind her car, she turns in her seat and touches my arm.
“If I find anything, I will let you know,” she says. “You have to promise me to do the same. And remember: you’ll wreck us both if you’re not careful who you talk to.”
“What’s my next step?” I ask.
But she doesn’t know. “If you could figure out who that John Doe really is, it might help. Or get an ID on the guy you killed.”
Nothing to Hide drm-3 Page 13