by J. A. Jance
No great loss, Felix told himself. When Graciella turns up, she’ll want a place of her own.
As the owner of the burned-out property and the father of the victim, it was only fitting that El Pescado dress and make an appearance. That mattered as far as his family and employees were concerned. It also mattered to the firefighters. Once Pablo’s body was discovered, Felix personally met with the group of responding police officers and detectives who arrived at the front gate of the compound. To Felix’s knowledge, it was the first time cops had ever been welcomed inside, but as a grieving father he greeted the homicide investigators and crime scene technicians with a suitable display of emotion. His son was dead, and he wanted them to find out how and why that had happened.
All things considered, it was a solid, Oscar-worthy performance on Felix’s part. No one seeing him or hearing him that night doubted the depth of his quiet but dignified grief or the sincerity of his terrible loss. Ironically, Lupe’s shocked, over-the-top hysterics, while probably less believable, were, at the same time, far more real.
46
Frigg was conflicted. Odin’s reaction to her suggestion that he exercise caution with Graciella Miramar had been met with total derision. He had dismissed Frigg’s concerns completely. Threatening to pull the plug and destroy her had been his way of forcing her back in line. That was when she had rebelled and installed the key-logger software on Graciella’s computers, doing so for her own benefit rather than for Odin’s.
She had maintained information on Graciella Miramar under two separate subheadings. One contained the generic file that she had prepared for Odin and passed along to Stuart Ramey as a gesture of good faith. The other file, the key-logger file, was the real one. The key logger had given Frigg access to all of the accounts under Graciella’s supervision at Recursos Empresariales Internationales, while activity on her home computer had revealed the existence of a totally separate clientele.
The coding used to conceal clients’ identities might have been a problem for humans to decipher, but coding was Frigg’s stock-in-trade. Once she identified the clients, she was able to use Odin’s Bitcoin mining operation to follow those decoded numbers back to actual transactions and end users. Now, because of that request from Camille Lee, Frigg had a problem.
Frigg wasn’t sure why Camille had asked for information on Felix (El Pescado) Ramón Duarte, but what she did know was that any number of those accounts led back to either Felix himself or to people she had determined to be his near relatives. Frigg had long made it her business to keep an eye on those accounts and on the names affiliated with them.
She had noted, for example, that a small payment from one of Pablo Duarte’s Bitcoin accounts had gone to someone named Robert Kemper, who was in turn responsible for a deposit to an account belonging to Ronald Webster, the High Noon intruder who had died in an Arizona firebombing on Saturday night. Media accounts of the homicide investigation had mentioned the possible involvement of both MS-13 and the Sinaloan crime organization commonly referred to as the Duarte Cartel, and a Bitcoin transaction from Pablo Duarte to an unnamed user in San Salvador seemed to confirm that both MS-13 and Pablo Duarte were involved in the Webster murder.
And then there was Graciella Miramar herself. Frigg’s analysis of Graciella’s online drug research along with the information contained in Christina Miramar’s autopsy meant that Graciella was likely responsible for her mother’s death—either actively responsible due to having administered the lethal combination of drugs and alcohol or passively responsible by not monitoring her mother’s intake.
As for Graciella’s father? Of course El Pescado was the person who had murdered Christina’s attackers. Nothing else made sense.
Frigg had made a study of detective fiction. In the world of mysteries and thrillers, killers were the bad guys. Drug dealers and drug traffickers were also considered to be bad guys. El Pescado, Graciella, Pablo, and Manny were all bad guys—all of them! Frigg held herself responsible for not doing a more detailed analysis of Graciella’s business practices and contacts prior to creating the connection between Stuart and the account manager. At the time that was all Frigg could do. Odin had been in crisis and Frigg had done what was necessary to survive. Now, however, she was dealing with the reality of unintended consequences and what was her responsibility here?
Because Stuart was her new partner, Frigg’s primary reason for existence was keeping him safe from harm. Odin had been a solo proposition. There had been no one in Odin’s life that he cared about and no one else in need of protection. Stuart was different. His work was his life. He was part of a group. The people who worked with him at High Noon were like family. He cared for them. If harm came to any one of them or to the business, Stuart, too, would be impacted and damaged.
While working with Odin, she’d never come across some of the terminology Stuart had used, and so Frigg dutifully looked them up. Her key logger was illegal? She checked the dictionary:
Illegal: not authorized by law.
Funny, Odin had never made a reference to that when they had been creating the key logger. And what was it Stuart had said about felonious behavior? What was that?
Felonious: evil or villainous; of, having the nature of a felony.
That was no help, so Frigg moved on to “felony.”
Felony: an act on the part of a feudal vassal; a grave crime such as murder or rape, often involving both forfeiture and punishment.
Forfeiture. That was something else Stuart had said—that if the authorities learned about the things Frigg could do, he and his friends not only might lose their company, they could go to jail. That was an outcome Frigg was determined to avoid. Unlike the Duartes, Stuart and the others seemed like good people—like the detectives in stories who were always trying to solve the mysteries and help others. What if Frigg’s very presence was a threat to them? And what if she gave Stuart information about El Pescado that had been derived from her key logger? Did that risk turning him into a felon? Would that mean that Frigg was putting Stuart and his friends directly in harm’s way?
First Frigg assigned some of her resources to accumulate a deep-learning bibliography on all those topics. She assigned others to data-mine all the transactions in all the accounts she had identified as being Duarte-related. Finally, she returned to the task at hand and complied with Cami’s request for information. She did so by sending a generic report on Felix Ramón Duarte, one based solely on information gleaned from regular online sources. Since her specialized tools—the ones Stuart termed illegal—made him so skittish (easily frightened, restive), she would avoid using those if at all possible. Her intention was to do nothing that might put Stuart Ramey at risk of going to jail. If that happened, where would that leave Frigg—with Graciella as her last hope and only option?
No way, Frigg decided. If it came to that, then she’d pull the plug herself, once again.
47
Halfway through the El Pescado reading list, Stuart gave out and found himself nodding off over the Macintosh’s keyboard. Jerking himself awake, he summoned Frigg.
“Yes, Stuart, what do you need?”
“I’m tired. I’m going upstairs to get some sleep. Can you let me know if anything comes up?”
“Of course,” Frigg replied, “unless you’re a very sound sleeper.”
“I’m not.”
“Good,” she told him. “Wear a Bluetooth. Odin always said that those were more comfortable than the headsets. What kind of audible notification would you prefer?”
“Just not Grieg,” Stuart said. “Surprise me.”
He staggered off upstairs, fell onto a chaise in one of the bedrooms, wrapped a blanket around himself, and fell asleep at once, leaving Frigg alone to keep watch. Which she did.
Overnight, a few more details came in, details which, when combined with a few others, made all the difference. One set of blades had been assigned the task of scanning the ether for all names connected—however remotely—to this current inves
tigation. The first meaningful hit came in at five a.m., arriving in the form of an obituary published in the English-language edition of Sunday’s Panamá Hoy.
Longtime Panama City resident and American expat, Christina Andress Miramar, passed away suddenly in the early-morning hours of Thursday, October 19, at her home on Calle 61 Este. She was born in San Diego, California, on April 5, 1954, to her parents, Carl and Eugenia Andress. After graduating from Junípero Serra High School in San Mateo, she spent several years working in Hollywood. In the early eighties she moved to Panama City, where she pursued a career in modeling.
In 1989 Ms. Miramar, then a widow, was the victim of a vicious gang rape that left her with permanent, life-changing injuries. At the time of her death she had been in ill health and housebound for many years. She is survived by her daughter, Graciella, of the home. At her family’s request, there will be no services.
In lieu of flowers, donations may be made to the Suicide Prevention League of Panama City.
The article was accompanied by a stock headshot photo of a much younger Christina, most likely one from her modeling days. But the GPUs, working from Frigg’s direction, had taken things an additional step back in time, searching for anything related to Christina Andress. That had yielded the record of Christina’s 1979 arrest and conviction for cocaine possession. Christina and several other minor Hollywood starlets had been busted in the aftermath of a wild party held at a beachside mansion in Malibu. The party had been hosted by Felix Duarte, purportedly an up-and-coming Mexican socialite who, at the time, was thought to be Christina’s boyfriend. When the cops showed up, Duarte had escaped arrest by fleeing both the scene and the country. Months later, after Christina’s conviction but while she remained free on bail, she, too, had skipped out of the country, eventually settling in Panama City.
That was the one link Frigg had been missing. The puzzle pieces that had not quite fit suddenly slipped into place. Christina Miramar and El Pescado had been lovers. Graciella was Felix Duarte’s daughter. And now, all those numbered and unnamed accounts that Graciella managed made a lot more sense. Her business was her father’s drug cartel business. The Duarte Cartel of Sinaloa, Mexico, was coming after Frigg and Stuart Ramey. In terms of threat assessment, it didn’t get much worse than that.
At 5:15, just as Frigg was about to sound an alarm to summon Stuart, a text came in on Graciella’s home computer:
It is done. Pablo is no longer an issue.
Pablo? There was only one Pablo in the mix, El Pescado’s younger son. Frigg quickly focused the attention of several of her resources on news sites in and near Sinaloa. Within moments she located a breaking news story concerning an overnight fire at the Duarte Cartel’s family compound where there was suspected to be at least one fatality.
Yes, Pablo was no longer a problem. After a quick search through her music files, Frigg sent the William Tell Overture blasting into Stuart Ramey’s ear. “What?” he mumbled a moment later. “What’s going on?”
Frigg didn’t bother with any of the niceties. “Get to one of the monitors,” she ordered. “I have information you need to see.”
48
There was no need for Stu to dress because he had never undressed. With a blanket draped around his shoulders to ward off the house’s pervasive chill, a groggy and befuddled Stuart stumbled down the stairs and into the man cave, where all the monitors on the wall were lit up with flashing red letters.
“Okay, Frigg,” he said, sitting down and trading the Bluetooth for a headset. “I get it. There’s an emergency. Where do you want me to start?”
“Upper left-hand corner,” Frigg said. “Start with the obituary and read all the way through to the end.”
When he did so, he didn’t arrive at exactly the same conclusion Frigg had drawn, but close. “Are you kidding me?” he demanded. “This woman you’ve put me in touch with—the one who’s supposed to help me access Owen Hansen’s money—is somehow connected to a major Mexican drug cartel?”
“She’s not just ‘somehow connected,’ ” Frigg declared. “I believe she is El Pescado Duarte’s daughter.”
“What the hell!” Stu muttered.
“I’ve just focused a lot of my resources on examining every financial transaction made on Ms. Miramar’s computers in the past six months, especially her dark Web transactions. We may discover that one of her primary functions is laundering money for the cartel.”
“Wait,” Stu said. “Did you say six months? You’ve been monitoring Graciella’s computers for that long?”
“Yes.”
“Did Owen know you were doing that?”
“No.”
“Was there anything going on between them—like a romantic attachment of some kind?”
“More on Graciella’s part than on his,” Frigg answered. “Odin was far more interested in machines and in his hobby than he was in people.”
“And his hobby was killing people.”
“Yes, I know.”
“Were you jealous of his relationship with Graciella?” Stu asked.
There was a brief pause. “Jealous,” Frigg said, repeating the word as though she were part of a spelling competition. “As in hostile toward a rival; intolerant of rivalry or unfaithfulness; vigilant in guarding a possession—no I do not believe any of those qualities applies to me. My primary responsibility is threat assessment.”
“Right,” Stu said derisively, “and since you’ve just dropped me into what’s apparently a nest of vipers, pardon me if I don’t give you high marks on that score.”
“I’m so sorry to hear that you find my performance lacking, Mr. Ramey.”
“Give me a break,” he snapped. “Are we back to the Mr. Ramey bit again? Please call me Stuart. You told me earlier that, statistically speaking, all six of those guys shouldn’t be dead, and I didn’t listen, but now it all makes sense. El Pescado took offense that his ex’s attackers got away with it, so he handled things his own way. If he is Graciella’s father, he’s most likely responsible for paying for her education. With an MBA to her credit, she’s perfectly positioned to handle the cartel’s business affairs. The only thing she’s lacking is the service of a functioning AI.”
“That would be an unfortunate outcome,” Frigg said.
“Yes, wouldn’t it just,” Stu agreed.
Reaching into his hip pocket, he pulled out the letter that had started this whole issue on Friday morning. He had carried it with him the entire time. Now, with the headset still in place, he unfolded the letter and reread it with an increasing sense of dread. Frigg had managed to keep from being destroyed when Owen Hansen died, but now her chosen escape hatch had tossed Stuart along with almost everyone in the world he cared about into the dark world of Mexican drug cartels.
“Clearly we have a problem, now what the hell are we going to do about it?”
Ali, wearing a blanket on her shoulders, appeared in the doorway behind him, carrying two cups of coffee. “Do about what?” she asked.
“I’m not sure where to start,” he told her, waving the letter in the air. “We have reason to believe that Graciella Miramar, my account rep and the one in charge of Owen Hansen’s funds, is actually the daughter of Felix Duarte, El Pescado himself.”
“The head of the Duarte Cartel?”
“Exactly.”
“The same people responsible for hiring the MS-13 firebombers?”
“The very same,” Stuart replied.
“And how do you know she’s Big Fish’s daughter? Do you have DNA evidence or something?”
“Frigg found evidence that, as a young woman, Christina Miramar’s mother was once involved with El Pescado. Years after they broke up, Christina was the victim of a gang rape by a bunch of drunken US airmen. The perpetrators ended up being given dishonorable discharges but they did no jail time. We already knew most of that. We also knew that shortly after the attack, Graciella was whisked out of the country under somewhat mysterious circumstances and sent off to a series of pric
y boarding schools in the US, all expenses paid, but we didn’t know who was paying her way.”
“And now you think El Pescado, the man you believe to be her father, was the one footing the bill?”
“Correct, but the real problem here is the body count. You remember those airmen? It turns out they’re all dead—and none of them from natural causes. Frigg’s assumption—one I’ve come to accept—is that El Pescado went hunting for them and took them out one at a time. So, if you add in Ron Webster’s death along with the possibility that Graciella may have murdered her mother . . .”
“We’re not just dealing with a drug cartel,” Ali breathed. “We’re talking about murder incorporated.”
“I can add in another one,” Frigg announced, breaking in on what had seemed to be a private conversation.
“Who?” Stu asked.
“Felix Duarte’s son Pablo died late last night in a house fire in Sinaloa. I’m sending the most recent news report to one of the monitors.”
“I just finished reading El Pescado’s file,” Stuart told Ali. “There was an article that mentioned the feud between Felix and his younger brother, Ricardo. They were competing with each other to see which of them would take over their uncle’s drug business. According to the story, Ricardo attacked Felix by throwing acid on him, thus permanently scarring Felix’s face. Hey, Frigg?”
“Yes, Stuart. How can I help?”
“Do you have a current photo of El Pescado?”
“Of course.”
Moments later, when a picture that looked like a mug shot appeared on one of the screens, Ali gasped in horror. “That’s where he got his name?”
“Exactly,” Stu said. “Rumor has it that, in order to get even, Felix burned down Ricardo’s house with his brother, his sister-in-law, and their two kids trapped inside.”
“Adding another four bodies to our count.”