“There are no words to describe what you have done,” he said, trembling inwardly. “I will absolve you only if you vow, here, this minute, and before God, to tell the police what you have told me.”
“But, Padre, I have great remorse for what I have done. You must absolve me.”
“No, I don’t have to. Swear it. Swear you will, and remember that God knows if you mean it.”
“But, Padre…” He faltered. “I am the police.”
Riordan’s instincts had been right. He very nearly laughed.
“There are federal policemen all around here. You can surrender yourself to them.”
“Very well, I swear it.”
The man’s attempt to sound sincere failed, but Riordan had backed himself into a corner. He had no alternative now but to pronounce the old words: “I absolve you from your sins…” He assigned a penance that wasn’t even a slap on the wrist: kneel and pray a rosary every day for the remaining thirty days of Lent, beginning immediately.
After dismissing the penitent, Riordan stepped out of the confessional and told the people in line he would be back in a moment. He needed to confirm that his suspicion was correct. And as he went up the aisle toward the sacristy, he saw that it was. Rigoberto Ochoa, the municipal police sergeant, was kneeling on the stone floor beneath the Virgin of Guadalupe, a rosary in his hands. A cop who moonlighted as an assassin and dissolved his victims’ corpses in acid, on his knees before Our Lady. This image had the opposite effect from the one of the repentant Miranda. It was obscene, unnatural, grotesque, like a poster he had seen in front of a Tijuana bar when he was a kid hitchhiking through Mexico; it showed a naked woman fornicating with a man costumed as a gorilla.
Three days days later, Bonham’s federales raided police headquarters and dragged Ochoa out in handcuffs and leg irons. Betraying him did not greatly trouble Riordan’s conscience; he had helped rid San Patricio of a monster.
* * *
YouTube COMMUNIQUÉ #3
VIDEO: Full screen of the cover of a self-published book with no graphics, only the title, in bold green letters: MY REFLECTIONS.
Pull back to the same masked man who appeared in the previous videos, seated at a table, with the photo of Emiliano Zapata, the pencil sketch of Che Guevara, and the portrait of La Santa Muerte on the wall behind him.
AUDIO: Here we are once again, brothers and sisters, speaking to you from the comandancia of La Fraternidad.
The Butterfly flies to you today with exciting news: the Brotherhood will soon be moving into a new phase of its operations, and we hope all citizens of Sonora and, eventually, all of Mexico will join us in our crusade. I cannot present you with the details at this time, not until we are fully prepared to make the announcement.
But first, I wish to read some precepts from my book, My Reflections.
VIDEO: Tight on the Butterfly opening his book.
AUDIO: Precept One: The Brotherhood dedicates itself to the goals of love, fidelity, equality, and justice for all the people of Sonora.
Precept Two: The Brotherhood dedicates itself to bring strength where there is weakness, to give voice to the mute, and to the poor, generosity.
VIDEO: The Butterfly turns several pages.
AUDIO: Precept Sixteen: It is wrong to kill for pleasure. When the Brotherhood takes a life, it is only in the cause of divine justice.
Precept Twenty-one: We ask God for strength that He will present us with challenges to make us strong. We ask for wisdom that He will give us problems to solve. We ask for adversity that He will give us a brain and muscles to work.
Precept Thirty: Intelligence without love makes you perverse. Wealth without love makes you greedy. Power without love makes you a tyrant.
VIDEO: The camera pulls back as the Butterfly lays down the book and looks directly at the viewer.
AUDIO: These precepts, brother and sisters, are the inspiration for our new phase, our new endeavor, our new crusade. Think about the last one: Power without love makes you a tyrant. Is that not our situation today in Mexico? Has it not been our situation throughout our history? Our enemies call us criminals, but who is our enemy? It is your enemy. If we are criminals, then is not our government, which has power but lacks love, guilty of greater crimes because it permits extreme wealth to fall into the hands of the few while it allows the many to live in extreme poverty?
These are the questions I would like you to reflect upon as you await our next communiqué.
* * *
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
A week after he’d finished interrogating Miranda Galindo-Flores and Rigoberto Ochoa, the Professor, along with Silvio Pérez, the commandant for the Northwest Regional District, rode in the back of an armor-plated Lincoln Navigator as they studied copies of a dossier that had been sent from the Intelligence Division in Mexico City. Pérez’s driver piloted the Lincoln slowly through Hermosillo’s empty, late-night streets, now and then exchanging a word with the Federal Police sergeant beside him.
There were few female assassins in narcoland. As for tall, blond assassins, the Professor had known of only one: Elvira Friesen, a Mennonite farm girl gone seriously rogue. He’d seen Elvira’s photograph several months ago, when he was reviewing the files on the Brotherhood. Looking at it again now, under the glow of the reading light, he disagreed with Padre Tim’s description: she was attractive but not as attractive as Barbara Stanwyck, her cheekbones too broad, too square; and the mole on her neck was larger than he’d remembered. The way it sprouted hairs, it resembled a brownish-red spider.
The dossier contained a few facts: Age: 34; height: 177 centimeters; weight: 58 kilograms. Hair, eyes, identifying marks, etc. Joined the army 1995; discharged 1998. Arrested on minor drug charges, 2001. Arrested for possession of an illegal firearm, an AK-47, in 2009. Served six months of a five-year sentence in the Tepepan women’s penitentiary. It also contained much raw information gleaned from sources of varying reliability.
Elvira’s ancestors had been among the Mennonite immigrants who had fled Russia for Mexico more than a hundred years ago. She’d grown up amid the tidy groves and orchards outside Nuevo Casas Grande in Chihuahua. The Professor guessed that she’d volunteered for the army at seventeen because some mutinous streak in her nature made her gag on the tidiness, on having to wear those nineteenth-century dresses and go to church every Sunday in a horse-drawn buggy. The army had been her ejection seat. She’d learned how to handle firearms and to use language never heard in the trim apple orchards, and she must have grown the emotional carapace that would later allow her to kill people without remorse.
How and when she’d been recruited by the Brotherhood wasn’t known. The Professor had first heard of her when the war between La Fraternidad and the Sonora Cartel was at its height. She had played a kind of Mata Hari who slept her way into the higher echelons of Carrasco’s organization. She’d vowed undying love to an Agua Prieta city cop who peddled mota for Joaquín, then turned him over to a Brotherhood sicario. She’d endured weeks of rough sex with a Carrasco underboss before luring him into a Brotherhood safe house, where he was decapitated with a chain saw.
She advanced to sicaria when a snitch was caught in a Nogales slum and dragged into a truck occupied by Rubén Levya, El Tigre Negro (then a death squad captain and now the Brotherhood’s chief enforcer), two other hit men, and Elvira. In the tale told by an informant, Levya made her an offer: if she killed the snitch, she would no longer have to play Mata Hari. “No problem,” she replied. The choice of weapons was hers: a nine-millimeter or a hammer. Elvira picked the hammer, with which she cracked the snitch’s skull open like a coconut. Quite the young lady, Elvira was.
According to a parenthetical note in her file, the Professor told his colleague, she’d done only six months of her five-year sentence because the warden, in exchange for sexual favors, allowed her to escape. She was smuggled out of Tepepan in a laundry cart—
“Fucked her way back into fresh air?” asked Pérez, incredulous. He was a
ponderous man who bore a resemblance to a turtle: goggle eyes, a receding chin, a nose that turned down into his mouth so sharply that the two features appeared as one.
That was shoddy information, the Professor replied. Another note was on the mark: she got out because her conviction had been overturned by a judge, a recipient of monetary favors granted by Rubén Levya, Elvira’s boss. He was also her lover, a snippet the Professor had extracted from Ochoa, the San Patricio cop, and had confirmed by the epileptic, hysterical Miranda Galindo-Flores. That discovery excited him, in the way rumors of a gold strike excite a prospector. If they were able to flip Elvira, she might take them into the heart of the Brotherhood’s ruling triumvirate, leading them to Levya, he to the number two, Enrique Mora, and then the prize of prizes, Ernesto Salazar, formerly Julián Menéndez. That was the reason the Professor had gone right to the top, to Pérez. This task was too important to be left to the second string.
“You’re telling me you got all this from a priest?” the comandante said. He spoke with a wet, rough voice, sounding as if he were gargling.
“No. He put us on the right track with Ochoa and Galindo-Flores. I’m as surprised as you are. I never believed he’d come through with anything worth more than spit.”
“A gringo priest, shit,” Pérez said with a shake of his head. He leaned forward and told the driver, “We’re through. Head for the address.”
Circling the Plaza Zaragoza, they cruised down a broad avenue toward La Jolla, the upscale neighborhood overlooking Hermosillo and the Cerro de la Compana, picketed with TV and cell-phone towers, their aircraft warning lights flashing. It was good to be in a city again, away from the Sierra Madre and that hillbilly town and the base and Capitán Alberto Valencia, who was getting on the Professor’s nerves with his monomaniacal pursuit of his troopers’ killers. A couple of days ago, acting on some hazy rumor, Valencia had sent thirty men to a squalid little foothill village and interrogated and terrorized everyone in it. If there was such a disorder as a Captain Ahab complex, this man suffered from it.
Elvira lived well in a new, two-story bungalow in a gated community whose security guard, a tubby pensioner, didn’t look capable of deterring a gang of determined six-year-olds. A show of Federal Police badges got them through the gate without delay. Elvira did not answer the loud knock, accompanied by the announcement “Federal Police! Open up!” The sergeant, door-sized himself, kicked hers in. The Professor came close to laughing when they nabbed her in the bedroom. The scene was straight out of a 1950s pulp magazine: four cops confronting a leggy blond femme fatale clad in a satin nightgown, La Santa Muerte tattoos decorating her arms, a gun in her hand. She’d probably pulled it from a drawer when the door came down. The driver and the sergeant, pointing MP5 submachine guns at her, restrained her from committing suicide by police. She laid the pistol on her nightstand. The Professor doubted it was the murder weapon, but he gloved his hand with a handkerchief and dropped the Beretta nine into an evidence bag. Pérez, in his liquid rumble, informed her that she was under arrest for the murder of two federal officers on December 24 of last year. Her face was immobile. The Professor gave her credit. She didn’t utter any of the usual denials, the lame, shopworn things cornered suspects usually trotted out. All she said was “Well, are you going to let me get dressed?”
“No. Come along, and no funny stuff,” Pérez answered.
“I’m not going to jail in this,” she protested, pressing her hands to the nightgown’s straps.
“You’re not going to jail unless you want to,” the Professor said.
“What … what do you mean?”
“Let’s go, Elvira.”
They led her to the Lincoln, sandwiching her between Pérez and the Professor, and drove off. For ten minutes, they rode around the neighborhood, then out to the bypass highway. They didn’t speak to her, their silence, like the aimless driving, deliberate.
“Where are we going?” she asked, her stony indifference cracking.
“We’re not going anywhere,” Pérez answered.
“All right, all right, what the fuck do you want?”
“Ernesto Salazar, but we’ll start with Rubén Levya.”
“Who? I don’t know who you’re talking about.”
Now the Professor was disappointed, and told her so. “Let’s not waste time with children’s games,” he said. “You kill people for him. You’ve been screwing him for years. I imagine he visits you pretty often in that nice house of yours. Or maybe you shack up somewhere pleasant, a beachfront condo. We want you to keep us, oh, call it current, on what he’s up to…”
She turned toward him, their faces half an arm’s length apart. “Snitch? You want me to snitch?”
Her neck muscles strained and twitched as she spoke. He could see the spider-mole twitching with them, up and down her carotid artery. “A little more than that,” he said. “We want you to do what you did during your apprenticeship. You screw him, you promise him eternal love, and then you deliver him—in this case, to us.”
“You want this Levya delivered, call a delivery service.”
“But we have one, right here in this automobile.”
“Someone must have shit in your mother’s womb for her to give birth to a turd like you.”
The malice in the vulgarism was not in its expression; it sounded like a line she’d memorized and rehearsed. Pérez let out a sigh, a loud sigh, a fatigued, I’ve-heard-it-all-I-can-hear-nothing-new sort of sigh. “We know what a badass you are, Elvira,” he said wearily. “You don’t need to prove it with trash talk.” He tapped the driver on the shoulder. “The station. It is very late, and we need to call it a night.”
The driver turned off the bypass and headed toward the Centro, passing the bus depot, the children’s park, the plaza. On the Avenida Jesús García Morales, he pulled into the parking lot behind the regional headquarters for the Federal Police, bright as noon under the sodium lights. The Professor reached under his jacket for his handcuffs and manacled Elvira’s wrists in front of her, not without a little struggle, a little writhing and twisting that, under different circumstances, might have been a turn-on.
“What the fuck is this?” she squalled.
“You did not hear me?” Pérez said, in the same bored, tired tone as before. “The murder of two police officers, federal officers—”
“That makes them special? Federal?”
“Claro que lo hace.”
“Nobody’s special. Know what a life is worth? The money you spend for the bullets that end it, and I can get them for ten pesos apiece.”
She was trying to buy time with cheap philosophizing; they indulged her, because once they brought her inside, the machinery would get rolling—the booking, the fingerprinting, the mug shots—and she would be lost to them.
“So you’re confessing?” Pérez asked. “You shot them?’
“I’m not confessing nothing. I think I know who you were talking to—a little bitch who froths at the mouth.” Elvira swung her wrists side to side, whacking Pérez in the shoulder. “Take these fucking things off!”
“I forgot to tell you that we are also charging you as an accessory to a third murder,” Pérez added, ignoring her remark as well as the thump. “Of a baker. A simple baker, for Christ’s sake. A man guilty of nothing.”
“If he’s dead, he’s guilty. Better tears in his house than in mine, that’s what I say.”
“Do you?” asked the Professor, finally growing impatient. “Then listen to what I say. It is one forty-five in the morning. Today is the first day of the rest of your life! It’s up to you where you spend it. Did you enjoy your stay in Tepepan? Maybe you’ll go back there, but I think a maximum security place like Santa Marta Acatitla. It’s overcrowded. You’ll have to sleep on the floor, and you’ll be sixty-five, maybe seventy when you get out.”
“I don’t think she will be in that long,” Pérez said. “I don’t think the rest of her life will be that long. There are some other girls in there like her, ch
icas Kalashnikovs employed by enemies of the Brotherhood. Besides, the word is bound to get out that she spent this time with us, that she snitched…”
He drew in a breath, exhaled another gargantuan sigh, this one sounding regret. Elvira said nothing. The Professor opened the door and clasped her by the arm, but not too firmly.
“Let’s get started then,” he said.
She wrenched free and raised her cuffed wrists. “Take these fucking things off!”
“Why?”
“Because I have something to tell you, and I’m not going to with them on.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
“If it’s too good to be true, it probably isn’t” was an axiom the Professor had found useful in dealing with informants. To determine if it applied to Elvira’s intelligence a face-to-face interview with Rubén Levya would be necessary. Convincing him that it would be in his interest to sit down with a Federal Police inspector proved, unsurprisingly, complicated and difficult, requiring days of indirect, long-distance negotiations. But he eventually agreed. It might have helped that his girlfriend was under house arrest, guarded by police twenty-four/seven and electronically manacled to an ankle monitor should she effect an escape.
To allay Levya’s concerns that he was being decoyed into a trap, he was allowed to choose the venue for the meeting, and to set conditions. He chose his ranch, where he raised competition cutting horses when he wasn’t planning and ordering hits. The ranch was some thirty kilometers down an unpaved road west of Magdalena. The Professor was to come there alone and unarmed; and to make sure that Levya’s bodyguards and ranch hands didn’t know that their boss was talking to a cop, he was to pose as an American horse buyer. That suited the Professor, who had always enjoyed undercover work. He was good, very good, at pretending to be someone he was not. If the roulette wheel of his life had spun differently, he might well have become an actor, like his mother—only a better one than she.
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