Cross the Line

by James Patterson

  “They’ve swept their way out again,” Mahoney said when we were ten yards from the Dodge.

  I looked at the glistening dirt road between the Viper and us. I saw faint grooves in the moist dirt and said, “Or raked.”

  The door to the muscle car was ajar. The window was down. The driver had taken a slug through the back of the skull, left occipital. Blood spattered the windshield and almost covered two bullet holes, one exiting, and one entering. The passenger in the Viper had been rocked back, his left eye a bloody socket and a spray of carnage behind him.

  “Two shots, two kills,” Sampson said. “Driver was shot from behind.”

  “And at a slight angle,” I said. “The passenger was shot from one of those roofs, probably the left one.”

  We walked on, seeing the trucks parked grille to bumper and the signs that said they belonged to the Littlefield Produce Company of Freehold Township, New Jersey. Two dead men in every cab. Each of them shot once.

  “They were suckered in here and then executed from above,” I said, wondering if Nicholas Condon and his buddies could have dreamed up this ambush. Yes, I decided, probably relatively easily.

  “Shot from one shed roof or another,” Mahoney agreed. “The roofs are slanted toward us and yet we haven’t seen a single spent casing on the ground.”

  “If each sniper shoots once, there’s no reloading, so no brass,” I said.

  We walked past the forward semi and looked to the Mustang and the two dead men lying in the field with tape up around them and a crew of FBI criminalists documenting the scene. Figuring we’d better not disturb them, we walked back to the rear semi, the only one without a truck grille up against its rear bumper.

  Deputy Max Wolford, who’d discovered the massacre, was waiting with the bolt cutters.

  Sampson said, “How much do you want to bet we don’t find radishes and baby greens in here?”

  “I vote for drugs and money,” Mahoney said, and he nodded to Wolford, who centered the lock shackle between the cutter’s blades and snipped it off. Sampson worked the lever and threw up the door.

  A cloud of cold humid air billowed from the refrigerated unit, and sunlight poured inside. It wasn’t what we’d expected. Not at all.

  “Jesus Christ,” Sampson said. “I didn’t see that coming.”

  I swallowed my reaction, drew my gun, held up my badge, and climbed in.

  Chapter

  48

  Four blue corpses in underwear were laid out on tarps on top of stacks of wooden produce crates marked CUCUMBERS, TOMATOES, and LETTUCE. Three of the dead were young women, late teens and early twenties. The fourth was a young boy, maybe a year older than Ali, no more.

  Beyond the bodies and the crates, far back in the container, I could see the shoulders, heads, and fearful eyes of at least thirty people of various races and colors, mostly young women and a few young boys dressed in ragged winter clothes, all pressed tight together, teeth chattering, trying not to freeze to death.

  “Move the trucks so we can get the other containers open,” I told Mahoney. “We’ve got to get emergency medical crews in here.”

  “And a lot more support,” Mahoney said, pulling out his cell phone.

  I pulled off one of the tarps, gave it to Sampson, said, “Cover the Viper. They don’t need to see that.”

  He took it, and I started clearing a path through the produce boxes.

  “I’m with the police,” I said. “We’re getting you all help.”

  They stared at me either shyly or blankly.

  “Any of you speak English?” I asked.

  A few of them shifted their eyes, but not one replied.

  When I reached them, some were crying, and some shrank from me, would not look at me, as if they were both afraid and ashamed somehow. I tried to smile reassuringly and gestured toward Sampson. At first, no one moved.

  Then a pretty young woman with black hair wearing a gray snorkel parka broke from the group and hurried past me. A stream of them followed. Only a few glanced at the corpses on the way out.

  Sampson helped them off the truck, and they lay down in the grass in the baking sun beyond the shrouded Viper, weeping, hugging, and consoling one another in at least five languages.

  State troopers brought jugs of water and boxes of PowerBars, which they tore into ravenously. After the cabs of the other trucks had been photographed, we had the miserable task of removing the dead and placing them on the plank floors of the drying sheds.

  In the other two containers we found a total of five corpses and sixty-seven survivors.

  “We have no idea how long they’ve been in there,” Sampson said, frustrated as the scope of the situation sank in. “We have no idea where they came from or who all these dead guys are. There’s not a stitch of identification on any of them.”

  We were standing to the side, watching as EMTs and disaster-relief workers began to arrive. I noticed the girl who’d left the container car first, the one with the dark hair who’d scurried past us in the gray snorkel parka. She’d stripped off her heavy coat and pants, revealing shorts and a long-sleeved pink T-shirt with silver sequins spelling out GODDESS. She was within earshot and as we spoke, she kept glancing our way.

  I smiled and crooked a finger at her. Goddess acted like she didn’t understand. I went over and crouched next to her.

  “You can stop pretending that you don’t know any English,” I said.

  She looked at her lap.

  “We’re here to help,” I said. “But we need your help in return.”

  There was no change in her affect, just a casual glance up, as if she were looking through me toward something far away.

  “Suit yourself,” I said. “But U.S. Immigration will be getting involved soon enough. If you want a chance at staying in this country, you need to start talking.”

  Her pupils dilated and her breath quickened. I saw both tells, shrugged at her as if I were done, stood up, and took a few steps toward Sampson.

  She called after me in a thick accent, “You get me a pack of Marlboros and I try to help you.”

  Chapter

  49

  “You believe her?” Bree asked when I finally got home around eleven that night after one of the more upsetting days of my life.

  “I’ve got no reason not to believe her,” I said, eating leftover lamb kebabs with a sweet, fiery peanut sauce Nana Mama had come up with. “Several of the other young ladies who spoke English told a similar story. The young boys too.”

  “It’s inhuman,” she said.

  “No argument there,” I said, my thoughts traveling back to Mina Codrescu sitting on her snorkel coat and taking a long drag on that first Marlboro before she spoke.

  Mina was nineteen and from the city of Balti in northern Moldova, a small, impoverished country between Hungary and Ukraine. Her mother was dead, she’d told us; her father was a drunk. She had no assets other than an ability to speak English and a dream of someday going to America, so when a Russian man she met in a bar told her there was a way she could go to the States, she’d been interested. He took her to Chişinău, the capital of Moldova, where she met a second Russian man.

  “He said he would bring me to America in return for five years of work,” Mina had told me, blowing out smoke from her cigarette and looking away.

  “What kind of work?” Sampson had asked.

  “Sex work,” she’d said defiantly.

  “You agreed to it?”

  “I’m here, aren’t I?” she said and took another drag.

  I said nothing.

  Mina waved her cigarette at the scenery and in the same defiant tone said, “This was worth it. For this, I would do it again. Look, I am here, in America. I can smell my dream here. If I didn’t say yes, none of this happens.”

  “We’re not judging you, Mina,” I said. “Just listening. Tell me how it worked after you agreed to the deal.”

  Mina said she had had sex with the second Russian for three days, and then he’d
handed her a ticket for Miami. A woman she knew only as Lori met her in Florida.

  Lori took her passport and cell phone. She told Mina she’d get the passport back in five years and the cell phone once she was assigned to a particular locale. Lori brought Mina to a truck depot in the middle of the night. Delivery vans pulled up, and other women and boys began to pour out.

  Piles of old winter clothes were dumped out on the ground and they were told to put them on. Lori had set aside the snorkel parka, pants, and boots for Mina, and she’d helped her into the refrigerated truck with assurances that her life would be much better at the other end of the drive. Luxurious, even.

  “It wasn’t bad for me because it gets cold where I come from,” Mina had said. “But others, they barely had any clothes. We tried to keep them warm, but some of them were sick and too weak already from traveling, and they just died.”

  “How long were you in the truck?”

  “I don’t know. I didn’t have a watch or phone. Two days? Maybe more?”

  “Any other young Moldovan ladies here?”

  “Two,” she had said. “There are more from Hungary and Slovakia.”

  Several had been recruited as Mina had, she’d told me. Others had worked in brothels in Germany before being “transferred” to the United States, and—

  “It’s sad,” Bree said, breaking me from my thoughts, “that there are parts of the world now where there’s so little hope that young women and boys desperate for something better will sell themselves into sexual slavery.”

  “It sounded more like indentured servitude,” I said.

  Bree arched an eyebrow. “You honestly think those Russians were going to turn Mina loose after five years? No way. They were going to use her up, spit her out. Someone would have found her in a ditch.”

  “Maybe, but she’s got a chance now,” I said. “When the INS special agent in charge from Virginia Beach showed up, I had Mahoney single her out as critical to the investigation and in need of political asylum.”

  “That’ll help her.”

  I nodded, trying to feel good about that rather than tired and emotional, but my exhaustion must have shown because Bree said, “You okay, Alex?”

  “Not really,” I said. “The whole ride back on the helicopter I was thinking about Jannie and Ali, and us. We all won the lottery at birth and got to grow up here in America, not someplace where we’d have to prostitute our way out of misery. I mean, I’m sorry, but something’s wrong or out of balance when that exists. Or am I overthinking things?”

  “You’re just indignant,” she said. “Maybe outraged.”

  “That bad?”

  “No. It shows passion and a noble sense of fairness that I adore in you.”

  I smiled. “Why, thank you.”

  “Anytime,” she said, and she smiled and yawned. “I have to sleep.”

  “Wait—how was your day, COD?”

  Bree got to her feet, waved me off, and said, “I’m doing my best to forget it and start life over tomorrow morning, bright and early.”

  “I like that idea,” I said.

  “I’m full of good ideas,” she said, and kissed me on the cheek.

  Chapter

  50

  Late in the afternoon the Friday before Labor Day weekend, fifty members of law enforcement were crammed into the roll-call room at DC Metro for Special Agent Ned Mahoney’s briefing on the massacres.

  I was pleased to see the same faces from ATF, Justice, and the DEA there. It helped if the same people showed up, kept the communication lines open and clear.

  If I didn’t know Mahoney so well, I probably wouldn’t have noticed the slight stoop to his shoulders and the tight lines around his eyes. The case was weighing on him. He was being squeezed, probably harder than Bree.

  “There have been no new attacks,” Mahoney said, “and we have made some progress, but we’ve been hampered by media leaks and the frenzy surrounding this killing spree.”

  That was true. The media coverage had turned red-hot and constant after the fourth massacre. Stories had been published or broadcast stating that “unnamed sources close to the investigation” said that the FBI believed ex-military, likely mercenaries, were executing the attacks and were either working on behalf of a cartel or acting as vigilantes.

  Also leaked was the fact that, in addition to the human cargo, the trucks had contained a million dollars in cash and ninety kilos of cocaine, all hidden in the produce crates. DC Metro and the FBI had been hoping to keep all that inside this room.

  “The leaks must stop,” Mahoney said. “They’re hamstringing us.”

  I scanned the room, seeing no one displaying obvious guilt or avoidance postures. But that didn’t matter. The leaks had already made the cops distrust this group as a whole. We had decided to hold back some of the new evidence we’d found, at least for the time being.

  “Moving on,” Mahoney said. “There is no Littlefield Produce Company of Freehold Township, New Jersey. And six of the dead traffickers have been identified through fingerprints and IAFIS.”

  Six mug shots went up on a screen behind the FBI agent.

  “The two on the left are Russians with ties to organized-crime syndicates out of St. Petersburg and Brighton Beach,” Mahoney said. “There are agents in New York and Russia working those angles. These other four are more familiar to law enforcement. Correct, George?”

  George Potter, the DEA’s special agent in charge, nodded. “All four have long rap sheets in south Florida or Texas. The two there on the right, Chavez and Burton, they have loose connections to the Sinaloa cartel.”

  “Do any of them have a history of involvement in human trafficking?” Bree asked.

  “Not that we know of,” Potter said. “But they could be branching out.”

  “Or this could be just one branch of something bigger,” I said. “These connections to both Russian mobsters and Mexican drug cartels suggests a possible alliance that is frightening when you think about it.”

  Potter nodded. “Like a supercartel.”

  Sampson said, “Or maybe they’re just a crew of freight agents that transport three different kinds of criminal commodities at once: drugs, cash, and people.”

  “Slaves, you mean,” Bree said.

  Bob Taylor, a smart, African American agent over at Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, asked, “Are you a slave if you sign up of your own free will?”

  “They were bought and paid for,” Bree said. “Even if the sellers were the girls themselves. Let’s call this what it is: sexual slavery.”

  Taylor threw up his hands in surrender, said, “Just trying to clarify, Chief. You ask me, whoever these shooters are, they’re doing the world a favor getting defects out of the gene pool.”

  There were a number of nods and murmurs of agreement in the room.

  I couldn’t argue with the sentiment in one sense. I’d had the chance to go over the dead men’s rap sheets, and there was viciousness, cruelty, and depravity laced through their lives.

  I don’t care if you believe in Jesus, God, Allah, karma, the spirit of the universe, or a Higher Power—the crew of thugs who’d died in Ladysmith, Virginia, had been begging for a violent death like that: shot down, no mercy. I believed that was true, even if I also believed that whoever killed those thugs deserved trial and punishment.

  In my book and in the blind eyes of justice, the fact that a man had it coming to him doesn’t make killing him right. Especially if he’s killed in an ambush. That’s premeditation any way you look at it.

  Mahoney went on with the briefing, giving some of the preliminary lab reports. The victims were all shot with .223 rounds, probably from AR-style rifles.

  “Military?” ATF Special Agent Taylor asked. “Full-jacket?”

  “No,” Mahoney said. “The bulk crap you can buy at Walmart.”

  Sampson leaned over to me. “I gotta go. Anniversary dinner with Billie.”

  “Congratulations to you and Billie. How many years?”

>   “The big six, and thanks.” He slipped out.

  The big six. Somehow that was funny.

  A few moments later, Bree leaned over and said, “I’ve got a pile of work on my desk I need to dig through.”

  “I’ll stay here and tell you if there’s anything new,” I said.

  There wasn’t anything new, at least not from my perspective. Mahoney wrapped up the rest of the briefing in twenty minutes, and the place emptied out.

  “You look like you could use a three-day weekend,” I told Ned.

  “Wouldn’t that be something?” Mahoney said.

  “Go to your place on the shore; it’ll give you fresh eyes on Tuesday.”

  “I don’t think the gods of the Bureau would appreciate me kicking back with a cold one if there’s another attack on the underworld over the weekend.”

  “You can always keep your phone on,” I said. “No one says you have to be in your office waiting for a call. There has to be some benefit to these phones beyond Facebook and texting, right?”

  Mahoney half bobbed his head, getting a distracted look. “Traffic will be a bitch tonight. Maybe I can sneak away early tomorrow?”

  “Now you’re thinking.”

  “What about you? And Bree? Why don’t you and the kids come? Supposed to be a beautiful weekend.”

  “Nothing would make me happier, but Jannie’s got an invitational thing over at Johns Hopkins, and we were going to see Damon too.”

  “There are three days to the holiday. You could always come on Sunday morning, or even on Saturday night.”

  “Tempting. Let me run that by the new chief of detectives.”

  Chapter

  51

  Ordinarily, the track season ends in mid-August, but the U.S.A. Track and Field organization had launched a program to nurture young talent, inviting high school athletes from across the country to a meet on the Johns Hopkins campus in an effort to help coaches identify those with potential.