by Dick Wolf
“Good evening,” said Garza.
Fisk grabbed his laptop off his desk and carried it into one of the briefing rooms, closing the door. He opened it up before them.
The high-angle videos showed split-screen versions of the same scene, one in regular exposure and one shot with night vision. The automobile, a Ford Explorer, had tinted windows, but the night vision picked up some images through the glass.
One video showed a bulky man driving, only from the chin down. In the backseat, on the left side, a man wearing a Yankees cap glanced out the window as the Explorer passed the camera.
Two videos offered different perspectives on the same car, but the first one offered the only true glimpse at the man in the backseat.
Two other traffic videos, each of much lower quality and taken from a higher angle, showed the sedan they had found being driven toward the first cemetery. In the front passenger seat, the bulky man was again visible, only from the shoulders down, due to the extreme angle. But the knife in his hand was plain to see.
That one was taken at 11:43 P.M. The other video was captured four hours later, at 3:51 A.M.
As ever, there was an eeriness inherent in viewing the confusing final moments of a doomed human being. The driver, Virgilio’s cousin or friend—it mattered little to Fisk now—looked as though he were in conversation with someone in the backseat. Someone unseen.
Perhaps the man in the Yankees cap.
Fisk said, “We have the license plate of the Explorer. Stolen four days ago from a parking lot in Ozone Park.”
Garza was transfixed by the image. “He has changed vehicles by now.”
Fisk watched her watch the screen. “You think that’s him? The Yankees fan?”
She nodded curtly. “I think it might be.”
“Okay,” said Fisk. “Now take a look at this.”
He pulled up stills from an e-mail from Canadian Intelligence. The first showed a series of color images of a man with tattooed arms walking through an airport.
“First U.S. No Fly Zeta goon,” said Fisk. “Back when he still had a head.”
He clicked to open up the second attachment.
Another man, this one wearing a tight gray sweatshirt and sunglasses, walking through the same airport corridor.
“U.S. No Fly Zeta goon number two,” said Fisk. “We think they crossed into the country through the border into New York State, either through the woods, which is better attempted in winter, or by vehicle, traveling with false papers. But we have no border-crossing photos, at least not yet.”
Fisk opened up the third attachment.
“Voilà,” he said.
A man of medium height, wearing a thin navy suit jacket and trousers, moved through a different corridor in the same airport, a travel bag slung over one shoulder. He held a cell phone to one ear, covering the other with his finger as though trying to hear someone over a bad connection. He wore sunglasses and a ball cap that further obscured his face.
The cap was black with a white Yankees logo on it.
“Chuparosa.”
Garza stared. The series of images cycled through on slideshow, the man walking down the corridor among other disembarking passengers. His face was mostly covered, but he certainly resembled the darker figure in the backseat of the Explorer near St. Michael’s Cemetery.
She glanced once Fisk’s way, in disbelief, then back to the screen. Memorizing his gait. The shape of his body. Burning it into her memory.
“It’s all circumstantial,” said Fisk. “But I’d lay odds it’s him. The question is, why did he off his own guys?”
“He’s killing anything that links to him,” said Garza. “He wants to succeed at any cost.” She turned to Fisk. “Based on what I saw back at his compound, I believe he understands this to be a suicide mission. It is the only way he can succeed. And, for whatever reason, he has accepted that fate.”
Fisk nodded. “All we need to know now is where he is.”
CHAPTER 47
Octavia Clement?”
The door to apartment 231 was barely open more than a crack. Garza was a block from Brookville Park in Rosedale, standing with Fisk in front of the door to a walk-up apartment situated over a store called Tats ’n More.
Garza could not see much through the crack: a single eye peering back, the door still on its chain.
“Who are you?” It was a woman’s voice.
“Octavia Clement? My name is Colonel Cecilia Garza.” Garza knew that the American equivalent of her rank sounded more impressive to the English-speaking ear, and less confusing than comandante. “I am here with Detective Fisk of the New York Police. I am with the Mexican Federal Police. May we come in and speak with you?”
The eye looked at her with unconcealed suspicion. “Mexican?”
Garza nodded. “We very much need to speak with you. It is very important.”
The eye blinked. After a moment the door closed, the chain came off, and then the door opened wide.
Standing in the doorway was a slightly plump woman wearing a thin T-shirt with a black bra showing through underneath. Her bare arms were covered with tattoos.
Her face was the face from the dead tattoo artist’s upper arm. A little older, a little more weathered, her hair dyed red now.
But the resemblance was plain. The facial recognition search had worked. This was the same woman.
“You are Octavia, correct?”
“Are you here about Gary?” Her mouth hung open a bit. She seemed to know what was coming.
Garza and Fisk stepped inside. The apartment reeked of cannabis smoke.
“Where is he?” the woman said. Garza noticed her tongue stud, the twin silver rings through her left eyebrow, the multiple loops in both ears. She looked petrified with fear and suspicion, her skin ashen, her hands trembling.
“May we sit down somewhere?”
The woman shook her head. She might have been indicating no to the truth she knew was about to come, but they did not sit. “Is Gary okay?” she asked.
Cecilia Garza pulled her cell phone from her purse. She had the photo of the tattoo ready. She thumbed the display button and turned it around so that Octavia Clement could see the picture of herself taken from the arm of the dead man on Rockaway Beach.
Octavia Clement stared at the picture. It was just the arm, not the entire dead body . . . but Garza could see that she knew. You didn’t show a candid picture of a tattoo on a person’s arm and then tell the person looking at it that the person in the phone was just fine.
Garza hated this part of her job. It was one hundred times easier looking at decapitated bodies than it was talking to the families of victims. “This is Gary?” asked Garza.
The tattooed woman let out an awful howl and sagged against the doorframe, clutching onto it as though she were holding onto the edge of a cliff. Fisk caught her before she could collapse completely and strike her head on the floor. He helped her into the front room of the apartment, setting her on a futon covered with homemade blankets.
It was a good minute or two before the woman could get enough breath to speak. “I knew he was gone,” she said, wiping her tears on her tattooed wrist.
“His full name?” asked Fisk.
“His name is Gary Lee Clement,” she said. “He’s my husband. Did those men kill him?”
“Those men who?” said Garza. “Please tell me what men you’re talking about?”
Garza sat so close to the woman on the couch, she felt the woman’s leg against her own. The apartment was lit by lamps with colored shades—red, amber, yellow. Large bright photographs of flowers hung on the walls, and there was a tripod and other camera equipment in the corner of the room. The furniture was old and mismatched, but the place appeared to be in perfect order, every surface clean. Amazingly clean. The scent of cleaning solution, bleach and ammonia, came through behind the lingering marijuana smoke. Bohemian, but without the squalor. A TV played a news channel on the other side of the room, turned so low it was barely
audible.
The young woman waved a hand around the apartment. “I’ve been cleaning for twenty-four hours straight. Just trying to keep my mind focused on something . . . something else.” Her lips were pressed tightly together. “You still haven’t told me what happened to him. He’s dead, isn’t he?”
Garza nodded. “I am very sorry to be the one to inform you.”
“And it was those men?”
Garza was patient with Octavia Clement. The bereaved required forbearance. Sometimes they were quite helpful; sometimes they were no help at all. “Tell me about the men.”
Octavia Clement closed her eyes for a moment. “Me and Gary, we grew up in McCool Junction, Nebraska. Population three hundred and seventy-two. Can you imagine that? We were the only people in our town who were like this.” She ran her hands down her body, showing off the tattoos, the hipster clothes, the eyebrow rings. “And it was subtle then, compared to now. Gary, he had such a gift. He was such a beautiful soul . . .”
She collapsed into tears again. Fisk went off in search of tissues and thankfully returned with some. Octavia blew her nose and balled the tissue in her hand.
“He was an artist. From the very first time I saw him, he could draw these amazing pictures.” She pressed her fingers against her wet eyelids, as though pressing and activating these happy memories. “I fell in love with him the very moment I saw him draw for the first time. Ninth grade! He was everything I wanted out of life. Everything.” She smiled gently, still with her fingers on her eyes. “It took him maybe a little longer to see me. But eventually he came around. I got him. We got married on my nineteenth birthday, March the twenty-third. On March the twenty-fourth, we loaded up his pickup truck and drove out here. Knew nobody and nothing. And we made it our home.”
Her voice trembled momentarily, but she held it together. Garza wanted to pounce on her, to drag the information out of her, but had to sit and listen.
“We were so happy together. The tattoo business has taken off so big, the past ten, twelve years. People could see it, you know? His talent? His gift? It just . . . it shined out of everything he ever did.” She paused. “But he was sweet, too. You could see that in the work, too. The sweetness.”
Garza saw an opening. “And the men?” she asked. “Please tell me about the men.”
“Too sweet maybe,” said Octavia, going on without hearing Garza. “He would never have gone with those men if he hadn’t been too naive, too trusting for this world. I didn’t like them. I told him that. There was something about them. Something dark. Something evil. I could just see it.”
A siren screamed outside suddenly, a passing ambulance. Octavia went silent until the sound faded away.
“There were three of them,” she said finally. “Last week we got a call from a man who said he had a special order. Said he’d pay four thousand dollars cash for a good afternoon’s work. Gary had to come to him, though. That was the only catch. But for the price, it was good for him. Four thousand.” She looked from Garza to Fisk, stressing the impact of that much cash. “Gary asked where he should go, and they said, ‘Don’t worry about that, we’ll pick you up.’ ”
She sat forward suddenly, as though she was about to get up. But she was just stretching out so that she could swallow more easily, craning her neck as though for extra air.
“Gary was so excited, but I didn’t like it. I truly . . . I’m not just saying that now. I did not like it at all. I don’t like different things. ‘Whatever it is,’ I said to Gary, ‘it’s not worth it. Don’t do it.’ But he was like, ‘It’ll be fine, Tavy. It’s a gig. Nothing’s going to happen.’ ” She smiled a sad, fond smile. “No one else ever called me Tavy. And now no one ever will.” Her smile turned pinched, and tears sprang from her eyes. “Gary’s folks farmed wheat. That was the difference between him and me. You stand out in a field of wheat, looking out at all that bounty, and you think the world is bounteous and gentle and generous. But me? My old man ran a meatpacking plant. You spend your young years near a slaughterhouse, you realize on a deep level that things won’t always be fine. Just the opposite. You understand that beneath all our good intentions and bad pretensions, we’re just meat on the hoof.” She stared at Garza. “All that killing. It does something to you. Makes you cold.”
Garza looked at her own hands for a moment. Fisk was standing to the side, giving them space.
Octavia said, “Maybe that’s why I needed Gary. I needed his light.”
Garza hesitated before saying, “Please, Octavia . . . so when did the men come?”
“Three days ago. Not to the house, they came to the store downstairs. I was up here working when they came. I sure never talked to them or anything. I do Photoshop work, mostly advertising, but some glamour, some fashion. Taking the ugly off people—that’s what Gary calls it.” She smiled faintly. “Anyway, Gary called me from the store downstairs to say he was leaving. Said he’d be back that night. So I went over and looked out the window. Set back a bit, so they couldn’t see me.”
She was quiet for a moment, her eyes looking into the past, not seeing what was around her.
“There was something about them,” she said quietly. “I instantly wanted to run down and tell him not to go. Three men. There wasn’t anything necessarily remarkable about them. It just . . . it wasn’t right.”
“Can you describe them in any way? Did anything happen?”
“Not really,” she said. “It was up here, looking down. Gary, he’s one of those guys who never met a stranger, you know? He was talking away. All the way into the back of the truck.” This time her smile was angry, angry at her husband for trusting the men who’d killed him. “It was an SUV they got into. Brown.” Her hands balled into fists and she pounded her thighs. “Why didn’t I stop him? Why?”
“You couldn’t have known,” Garza said. “May I ask a leading question?”
“Whatever that is,” said Octavia.
“Did any of the men wear a hat?”
Octavia thought hard. “Yes. A sports team hat. Baseball. I don’t give a shit to follow any of that stuff. Does that help you? Can you catch them?”
Garza took the woman’s hand. “Two of them are already dead themselves. One remains.”
“You find him,” said Octavia, then buried her head in her hands. “My Gary . . .”
“I will find him,” Garza said. “I will.”
CHAPTER 48
Where are you staying now?”
“The Sheraton,” Garza said. She was checking her messages on her phone. “Tomorrow is the big day.”
“I don’t like this feeling,” he said. “The feeling of running out of hours in a day.”
“I’m so exhausted. And keyed up at the same time. I can’t believe I lost a man today. Two.”
Fisk nodded. There was nothing to say to that.
IT WAS NEARLY TEN by the time Fisk and Garza reached the Sheraton. He pulled up outside under the overhang, watching theatergoers trickle in from Times Square. A homeless man stood praying and singing to a streetlight.
She opened her door and extended one leg out, her foot reaching the curb before a valet could arrive. “Did you eat?” she said, without looking back.
“I’ve been dining out of a vending machine pretty exclusively.”
She nodded. “Cop cuisine.”
“Are you offering to buy me dinner?”
“No,” she said, rising from Fisk’s car. “But you can join me if you like.”
THEY FOUND SEATS TOGETHER at a table near the lounge. But when the time came to order, neither one wanted food.
Garza said, “What do you think of a Chilean Malbec?”
“Love it.”
“You didn’t seem like a shot and a beer kind of man.”
“Oh, but I am. Just not tonight.”
The server came and Fisk ordered two glasses. The San Felipe Garza had wanted only came by the bottle. She tried to make him change the wine, but he refused, and the server went away to get a bottle.
“Tell me about Vargas, your president.”
Garza’s eyebrows lifted and she fiddled with the cocktail napkin the server had left in front of her. “President Vargas is a good man. A courageous man. And I believe the presidency will break him.”
“How?”
“He is still a man of principle.”
“You say ‘still’?”
“I knew him when he was a law professor.”
“Oh,” said Fisk, not sure if he wanted to know more.
“I believe the accord is built on a good foundation. In the past, cooperation between Mexico and the States has focused on equipment, police funding, communications protocols, all sorts of law enforcement tools. Gifts, I call them. As from a parent to a child. Your country saying, ‘Here, play with these, and keep quiet and out of our way.’ I like more guns, more breaching explosives, more trucks, more helicopters, more body armor, better radios. But it is just money. There is no working relationship. No sense of responsibility.”
“As your number one importer of illegal substances.”
“ ‘The giant nose to the north,’ we say. It is just confronting violence with violence. In an illegal market, the natural tendency is toward monopoly, and beyond the rule of law, all that is left is violence. On the other hand, this is also a big fat check for corrupt Mexican military and police to stuff in their pockets. Most federales make less than a worker at McDonald’s. Drug cartels pay no taxes, but more than the equivalent in bribes to mayors, prosecutors, governors, state and federal police. I’m forgetting the army and navy.”
Fisk said, “This accord will cut the purse strings.”
“You have to go after the money. The product is plentiful and cheap. Very cheap until it gets across the border, when the cost of doing business rises and rises. It is the money coming back—often in the same shipping containers the drugs go north in—that needs to be intercepted. The blood flowing back to the heart—that is where the knife blade must go.”