Cotton

by Paul Heald

  She asked him to spell the bank name and turned down his offer to formally extend the rental period. A Google search for Banco de Sabines revealed a regional bank with several offices all close to the Mexican town of Sabines, about a three-hour drive from Laredo, Texas. It wasn’t much, but it was something to share with James and Stanley when they finished their homework.

  Melanie spent the rest of the day catching up on a stack of motions and interviewing several young law graduates for a position in her expanding immigration unit. Late in the afternoon, Vonda knocked on her door and dumped the results of the morning’s warrant motions on her desk. All had been granted by the magistrate, with the exception of a request to conduct an unannounced search of a Walmart warehouse in a trademark-counterfeiting case.

  She pulled out the motion that included the cell numbers she wanted and asked Vonda to fax a copy of the order to the cell phone’s service provider. She waited thirty minutes and then called the corporate attorney charged with responding to court-ordered records requests. His name was Jerry, and she had dealt with him on several prior occasions, because not all of his company’s five million cellular customers were innocent citizens planning the next backyard barbeque. After some friendly small talk, he confirmed receipt of the faxed order and agreed to expedite the request on both numbers. He would get back to her the following morning.

  * * *

  Stanley and James sat in the main reading room of the University of Georgia library, alternately tapping away at their computers and searching for hard copies of books and journals in a large reference room serviced by a small but knowledgeable group of research librarians. Stanley dove into the entire Arkansas congressional delegation, surfing the senators’ and representatives’ websites and reading articles attacking and praising each member’s work on Capitol Hill. He had little trouble finding lobbying disclosures and other tax-related documents coughed up like hair balls in the course of the most recent campaign. Every congressman had an enemy, and a clear picture of the Arkansas congressional delegation slowly began to emerge.

  For his part, James charted the location and ownership of the major clothing maquiladoras, all of which were fairly close to the US-Mexico border. Accessing several business databases, he created a spreadsheet identifying the firms that purchased the most cotton directly from the US and noted any interlocking corporate relationships. His Spanish was good enough to peruse foreign-language websites, and he found several key databases created by labor groups documenting the abuse of workers and by human-rights groups documenting who benefited from the multi-billion-dollar subsidies that enriched not only Arkansas cotton growers but also the buyers of their cheap commodity in Mexico.

  The two compared notes over a quick lunch in leafy downtown Athens and then worked through the afternoon and into the early evening, each feeding off of the other’s energy until empty stomachs and the shared need for a beer put an end to the day’s operations. As the sun began to set, the two researchers sat outdoors in front of a faux-English pub with a wide variety of American microbrews and European ales on tap and a decent selection of food on order at the burnished-oak bar. Rather than drive back to Clarkeston, Stanley had arranged for both of them to spend the night with his former colleague, Kirk, who was happy to hear that he was back in town so soon.

  “I’ve got a couple dozen documents in a file folder on my computer,” the journalist explained, “everything that I could find on the textile maquiladoras, including data that I got from the SEC’s EDGAR database and Hoover’s, which is Dun & Bradstreet’s business-data arm.” He explained how corporate annual reports and other disclosures mandated by the Securities and Exchange Commission were available through the newspaper’s subscription service. “And I asked the library to scan a couple hard-copy sources, which should be ready by tomorrow morning. I’ve also downloaded a bunch of news articles off of LexisNexis.”

  “Excellent,” Stanley replied, “I still need to see which Arkansas farmers I can pair with which politicians.”

  “If you can do that by lunch, then you can give me Arkansas names to run through my data folder. I can just do a simple word search in the folder and see who crops up where in the stories and business records. We’ll see if we can trace factory owners to cotton sellers to sleazy politicians.”

  Stanley took a long and satisfying draught of his Terrapin Rye Pale Ale. “Let’s keep our fingers crossed. It’d be nice to impress The Boss.”

  James and Stanley had settled on The Boss as a descriptor for Melanie. Having successfully defended the life of the beautiful prosecutor, they only needed a couple of pints to share their admiration for her fierce intelligence, no-nonsense attitude, and shapely legs. The premature end of both of their marriages provided even more common ground for discussion as they sipped the tasty local brew and watched the college students traipse by. Stanley did not take long to figure out that James’s interest in The Boss was becoming more than just professional.

  The next morning went as planned and by early afternoon they had identified three major pipelines of Congress’s billions. Three of the largest corporate farmers in Arkansas consistently sold their crops to three major Mexican textile firms. Those planters in turn made large donations to all members of the Arkansas delegation, but no one received even close to the feudal dues collected by senior senator Elbert Randolph. They also identified several smaller players in the subsidies game by comparing the data in the journalist’s digital source folder and the professor’s spreadsheets. If Melanie had any luck tracking down either number in the Mexican hit man’s cell phone, they could fire into nerd hyperdrive, flip open their laptops, and burrow into action.

  * * *

  Melanie arrived at the office two hours early the following morning and caught up on her work before any of the staff arrived. By the time she heard from the phone company about the owners of the two phone numbers that had been called by her deceased assailant, she was back up to speed on the most important cases her subordinates were arguing that day and was ready to make a personal appearance in a bond hearing on a meth dealer whom she considered a serious flight risk.

  “What do you have for me, Jerry?” she asked the phone company corporate counsel when he finally called.

  “Not much, I’m afraid,” he said in a genuinely apologetic voice. Unlike some private attorneys, Swanson always seemed eager to rat out his criminal customers to the feds. “Both of the numbers are associated with pay-as-you-go phones, bought and topped up with cash, so we don’t have the same information we’d collect if they were on a two-year plan or something.”

  Her heart sank. She had been hoping for landline connections. “Do you have names, at least?”

  “Yeah,” he replied, “but it’s what you’d expect. One was bought by a John Smith and the other by a Juan Cruz, which is pretty much John Smith in Spanish, as far as I can tell.”

  She sighed. Cell phone records were helpful in charting patterns of communication between bad guys, but criminals were seldom stupid enough to buy a phone or purchase air time in their own names. Any sophisticated perpetrator—and even the unsophisticated ones—used aliases in establishing their networks.

  “Can you tell me where the phones were bought?”

  “It’s the SIM cards that matter,” he corrected her and then read aloud two addresses, one in Little Rock, Arkansas, and one in Sabines, Mexico. He apologized that he had so little information to share and promised to send her his company’s records related to the other phone numbers in the drug case she was investigating.

  As soon as he hung up, she sat down at her computer and googled the Little Rock address, which turned out to be a Magic Market on South Arch Street, a couple of blocks away from the federal building in downtown Little Rock. The address in Sabines was also a convenience store.

  So that was it. More inferences, more suspicions of connections, but no smoking-gun trail leading directly to a corrupt politician or a murderous businessman. She closed her browser with an angr
y click that sent the mouse scurrying across her desk. She was not going to let go of the investigation until there was some obvious suspect to prosecute, and right now the only person who had clearly committed a crime was lying dead in the North Carolina woods.

  She retrieved her mouse and reopened her browser to check whether the body by the falls had been discovered. Given the remoteness of the site and the rain that had begun to fall soon after they made their escape to Clarkeston, she was not surprised to learn that no news of an accident or foul play in the area had been reported.

  A few minutes later, Melanie took the elevator down to the third floor of the building and vented her frustration on opposing counsel in the bail hearing, asking for, and getting, bond set at a level so high that the scrawny meth cooker would rot in jail until his trial. Maybe the forced meditation time would do him some good, although his crazed Charley Manson stare did not suggest an introspective spirit. When she got back to her office, the phone rang almost immediately. James wanted an update on the phone numbers.

  “I didn’t get much,” she admitted, “but you can tell Stanley that the Arkansas connection is still strong. One of the numbers our dead friend was calling was purchased from a convenience store in downtown Little Rock. The other number comes from a Mexican town called Sabines. It’s about three hours from Laredo. There’s no wiki page on it, so I don’t know anything about the place.”

  “Hang on a minute,” the journalist replied and then passed on the name of the town to his partner. She heard the faint clicking of a computer keyboard and the sound of the two men conferring excitedly. She was about to ask what was going on when James’s voice returned to the phone.

  “We need to meet,” he said. “When are you free?”

  “I’ve got a couple of hearings tomorrow,” she said, with a glance at her calendar, “but I could get away by the late afternoon.”

  “Perfect.” James muttered something inaudible to Stanley. “We’ll need a little time to prepare.”

  “When and where do you want to meet?” She felt safer after an undisturbed day in the office but was still worried that this might change when the body was discovered. “Where are you, anyway?”

  She heard something oddly gleeful in the journalist’s response. “Are we still paranoid?”

  “Maybe a little,” she conceded. “I think we should keep playing it safe for a while.”

  “Okay. Then let’s meet in the lair of the Norse hammer god at six tomorrow. We’ll bring pizza.”

  “The which god?” Then her memory kicked in. “Yeah, yeah. I get it. Cool. I’ll see you there at six tomorrow.” She paused. “I’ll bring beer.”

  XXX.

  PLANS

  Father Thor sat at his kitchen table and excitedly grabbed a third slice of pepperoni pizza. His parents had told him tales of attending clandestine meetings in homes and church basements when they had worked in the mid-1980s’ sanctuary movement, helping to shelter refugees from Guatemala, El Salvador, and Nicaragua from right-wing death squads. Their stories had helped fuel his desire to become a priest, and he was thrilled that his loft was now serving as a safe haven for his new friends as they schemed against the perpetrators of an insidious new kind of human-rights abuse—subsidies worth killing for. Brenda Harvey, Diana Cavendish, and Jacob Granville had all died so that no one would question the morality or wisdom of paying large corporate farmers to grow artificially cheap cotton to sell to sweatshop owners. And the price of corruption went beyond the lives of the three martyrs; thousands more in Africa starved as their cotton crop was sold for depressed prices.

  After a brief summary of the research trip to Athens, Stanley flipped open his laptop and spun it around so that Melanie, Thor, and James could all see. He smiled and shrugged, “I’m a professor. I can’t really explain anything without a PowerPoint presentation.”

  James motioned to his colleague to begin. The reporter and the sociologist had spent the afternoon comparing and distilling data, drinking beer, and pasting photos into a slide-show presentation that they hoped would impress the woman they called The Boss. Thor knew much of what was coming, but he stared with fascination nonetheless at the fruits of their labor.

  “All right, let’s start with senator Elbert Randolph, head of the Senate Agriculture Committee.” Up popped a picture of the senator smiling into the camera during a campaign speech. “He’s not a bad guy, apparently.” A picture of the senator sitting in earnest conversation with a class of African-American elementary school students. “He’s authored several pieces of key education legislation and is considered to be the foremost proponent of school reading programs in the Senate.

  “But,” the professor continued, “he is also a Son of the Land.” Black-and-white photo of an unsmiling man. “His father was a cotton farmer.” Sepia-toned picture of slaves picking cotton in the antebellum South and an amused rumble from James. “And his closest buddies from school and church and politics are some of the wealthiest landowners in the state.” Several photos of the senator attending functions held by an Arkansas cotton-growers association. “Here is one of his longtime friends, Cameron M. Swinton, chairman of the board of CotCo, Inc., which farms tens of thousands of acres of land and sells seed to those farming hundreds of thousands more.”

  James interrupted, “Since CotCo is publicly traded, we’ve pulled a shitload of data on the company and its officers from the EDGAR system and Hoover’s. This guy is one rich son of a bitch.”

  “What’s most interesting is Swinton’s connection to a particular Mexican maquiladora. CotCo sells most of its cotton to a textile company located in”—both Stanley and James gave the kitchen table a brief drumroll with their hands—“Sabines, Mexico.” They waited for Melanie to respond.

  She nodded her head in appreciation and added, “Where someone bought a phone to talk to our Mexican stalker and where a bank issued a credit card to pay for his car rental.”

  “Exactly,” Stanley nodded, “and Swinton’s connection with the Sabines textile mill is not just business.” A picture of two smiling men at a Randolph fund-raiser. “Swinton’s got a personal connection to Moro Zingales, the owner of the mill. Unfortunately, the maquiladora is not a corporation, so we don’t have access to many records, but Zingales himself is well known.” The cover of a report flashed on the screen. “Several human-rights groups have filed complaints about the working conditions in his plants, and he’s testified before Congress on the mutually beneficial relationship between Arkansas growers and Mexican mills.

  “He’s got a cute wife,” Stanley continued, with a click on a new photo, “three kids, and a big Newfoundland dog named Chupacabra.” Kids and adorable dog playing on a beach. “But in 1985, when he was in college in Monterrey, he was accused of beating a classmate nearly to death.” Headline from a Mexican newspaper. “The charges were dropped when the main witness recanted his testimony.”

  James continued the presentation. “We think this guy Zingales or someone close to him sent our Mexican friend to keep an eye on me and Melanie.”

  “But why?” Thor interjected. “How could he know that you were a threat?”

  This time Melanie answered. “Some Arkansas politician, perhaps Randolph, must have told Swinton or Zingales that James was poking around in the Cavendish case. When I called that number in the Little Rock federal building, I put someone on red alert. That call got his house broken into and his computer stolen, and then my queries to the FBI put me on the radar screen. And, of course, my darling ex told someone that I had refused to drop the case. Somehow that got back to the wrong ears.”

  “You did get some valuable information, though,” James consoled the prosecutor. “The Sabines connection makes the money trail and the surveillance trail clearer, and the Little Rock cell number confirms that someone there was also communicating with the Mexican dude, and I’ll be surprised if it’s not someone from Randolph’s office, maybe even the senator himself.”

  “That’s the problem, though,”
Melanie added thoughtfully, “we have no proof who in Little Rock is calling the shots.”

  The group fell silent for a moment and Thor felt the vibrating of his cell phone in his pocket. It was a text from Miriam containing a link to an article on the Clarkeston Chronicle website. He tapped on his phone and a story appeared a moment later, a short piece on the death of an unidentified hiker near a Highlands, North Carolina, waterfall.

  “Someone found the body in the mountains, guys.” He waved his smart phone and slid it across the table. “Late-breaking news from Miriam.”

  James and Melanie leaned together and read the story off the phone’s screen while Stanley did a quick search on the computer. “They haven’t identified him yet,” the professor declared, “but it won’t take too long to track down the car.”

  Melanie nodded. “It’s just a matter of time before Zingales, or whoever, figures out his man is dead and we’re still alive.”

  “Well,” Stanley added quietly, “they know you and James are alive. They don’t know about me and Father Thor.”

  The priest’s phone buzzed again, and he saw that Miriam had sent a link to another story about the body in a regional newspaper.

  “What the hell should we do?” James asked the question, but he clearly didn’t expect a quick and easy answer. He tossed an empty beer can in the garbage and cracked open a fresh one from the refrigerator.

  Stanley spoke first. “We could confront Randolph. Tell him what we know and ask him to call off the dogs.”

  “He’ll never admit to knowing anything about this,” Melanie replied with a shake of her head. “We’d be better off just telling the whole story to the FBI and coming clean. I’m sure they’d be willing to protect us, even if they charge us with messing up a crime scene.”

  “Screw that!” James exclaimed. “That threatens your career and my career and leaves Diana and Jacob rotting in their graves for nothing. I say we go for the throat. I say we bring these cocksuckers down!”