“Took you long enough,” Garcia said, pulling off his sunglasses and slipping them onto his boonie hat.
“Let’s see it.”
Dawson followed him under the yellow tape and up the steps to the warehouse loading dock. Inside the high-ceiling space, their footsteps echoing in silence, crates filled with red and green chilies were stacked against the wall. Pungent odors mingled with the sweet wafting smell of apples and peaches in crates piled high along the opposite wall. The interior of the dimly lit concrete-block warehouse was eerily quiet.
They stopped at the remains of a glassed-in office, now only metal frames and jagged glass shards covering the floor. Blood was splattered everywhere. White chalk outlined where five bodies had been found on the bloodstained floor.
Dawson ran his fingers over the side of a panel van smeared with dark, dried blood and riddled with holes the size of his thumb. “What the hell happened?”
“Fonseca’s men were moving a shipment of drugs,” Garcia said. “Someone came in to intercept it and shot up the place.”
“I guess Fonseca’s men were more than building contractors.”
Garcia nodded.
“What about Fonseca?”
Garcia shrugged. “Gone.”
“Has Viviana heard from him?”
Garcia laughed. “Nope. He’ll show up, sooner or later.”
Dawson looked at the side of the semitrailer truck. “Colonia Juárez is the Mormon farming community near Chihuahua, isn’t it?”
Garcia nodded.
Dawson thought for a moment. “That means drugs are being smuggled into the U.S. in fresh food trucks from Colonia Juarez?”
Garcia nodded again. “Among other places.”
“Who shot up the place?”
Garcia stood erect, lifted his boonie hat and scratched his head. “Whoever it was got away with a bunch of marijuana, cocaine, and meth. And weapons. Probably handguns and assault rifles.”
“Guns for drugs?”
Garcia nodded. “Sure looks like it.”
“How did they get it all out of here?”
“Their own vehicles. It was well organized and executed.”
“Not much left but the blood, fruit, and vegetables.”
“The investigators already cleaned the place out. A computer in the office was shot up bad. They’re going through the hard drive now.”
“Fonseca was dealing big-time, then.” Dawson narrowed his eyes as he looked at Garcia. “You told me he was clean. Walked the straight and narrow.”
Garcia grinned sheepishly. “This place was under surveillance. There’s only so much we can do. We can’t be going through every warehouse in the region just to check for drugs. Reasonable search and seizure. Remember?”
“Call them terrorists, and you can do whatever you want.”
“Yeah, maybe.”
“So the DEA knew about this place?”
“This and others.”
“Someone tried to put Fonseca out of business.” Dawson thought for a moment. “Had to have been Carlos Borrego.”
Garcia nodded. “Coulda been. But he’s not the only player around.”
They turned to the sound of footsteps. Trini Serna walked toward them, but stopped when he saw Dawson. Serna caught himself and continued on, smiling broadly as he came up to them, extending his hand to Dawson. They shook hands. “Well, well. Mr. Dawson. You get around.”
“Not as much as you do,” Dawson said. “What’s a senator’s chief of staff doing here at a crime scene?”
Serna glanced at Garcia, then back at Dawson and cleared his throat. “The senator likes to stay on top of things,” he said. “Border violence has only gotten worse, as you well know.”
“Looking out for the interests of his constituents, I imagine?” Dawson said.
“So, why don’t you tell me what you’re doing here,” Serna said.
“I’m a journalist, remember? Washington Herald.”
“This incident here has to be handled carefully. Back off until we can figure out what the hell is going on.”
“Back off?”
“You’ll only make things worse. That’s bad for everybody, including yourself.” Serna put a hand on Dawson’s shoulder.
Dawson looked at the hand on his shoulder, then at Serna.
“Remember when you were kidnapped by the Taliban?” Serna asked. “The senator pressured the Pentagon to get you the hell out of there? It was a favor to your father.”
“Special Forces rescued me. My translator and half-a-dozen Afghans were killed in the process.”
Serna clenched his teeth and exhaled slowly. “We’re in the middle of a presidential campaign. The situation here is delicate.”
“It’s too late for that,” Dawson said. “Bodies keep turning up with holes in them.”
Serna glared. “The next time I may not be so patient or polite.”
“Are you threatening me?”
“You know what happens around here to reporters who ask too many questions.”
“You’ve got cojones, Serna, I’ll give you that.”
Chapter 33
Rancho la Peña, New Mexico
Dawson watched Jacquelyn’s maid, Maria, wipe the sprawling granite kitchen counter tops. She reached for the coffee pot, filling a mug with steaming black coffee and handing it to him. He took it with a smile as she offered to make him huevos rancheros. It sounded delicious. He nodded a silent “thank you” and headed to the sound of the television coming from the living room. Jacquelyn sat on the couch wearing her kimono and cradling a coffee cup in her lap. Her hair was on top of her head as she watched Fox News.
“I just love these guys,” she said. “They tell it like it is.”
“Hmm,” Dawson said, settling onto the couch.
She glanced and frowned. “You just getting in?”
The night with Anita and the scene at the warehouse scene flooded his mind. There was nothing he wanted to tell her. “I had some things to do.”
Jacquelyn looked at him disapprovingly. “Well, you missed a big story.”
Dawson twitched and his stomach knotted. Missed a story? Then he knew. “No I didn’t. I just came from there. I saw it.”
Jacquelyn sipped her coffee. Her face soured. “I must have just missed you. I was there half the night with the DEA and the FBI. I just now had breakfast.”
Dawson thought a moment. “I ran into Trini Serna there.”
Jacquelyn nodded. “Yes. He was there as well. I called him so he could let Micah know.”
Micah? Of course. Jacquelyn calls him by his first name. Dawson sipped his coffee. “A shootout in a warehouse. After all that’s happened? How is Madsen going to spin this one?”
Jacquelyn glanced furtively, then stared at the television.
“What’s going on, Jacquelyn?”
She sipped. “I wish I knew. I feel like…”
“Like what?”
“Like it’s all getting out of control.”
“What does this latest shooting have to do Sam’s murder?”
She jerked around face him, and for the first time in his life, he saw fear in her eyes. “I don’t know. Really. I don’t know what’s going on.” Her hands grasped the cup, but she couldn’t stop them from shaking.
She’s afraid for her life. He held her frightened gaze. She was worried, he realized, that she could be the next one to be dragged out into the desert and executed. What had she and Sam been doing? As he searched for an answer, he sensed a dark cloud hovering in the background. He remembered Anita’s warning that as he dug into his father’s murder, he might not like what he found. She had said nothing was what it seemed. He had dismissed her warning with a quick shake of his head. He was not going to let anything or anyone stop him. Least of all Jacquelyn. As he saw her frailty revealed, he wondered if she was the one who had pushed Sam down a deadly path.
Maria handed him a breakfast plate of scrambled eggs on a flour tortilla and smothered with red chili. Beside
it was a dollop of frijoles—all set on a serving platter with a napkin and silverware. Dawson smiled at her as he grabbed the fork and dug in, holding the tray on his lap. “Thanks.”
Dawson soon wiped the remains of chili sauce from his lips and cleared his throat. “Did Sam go to Mexico very often?”
“Actually, he was gone a lot,” Jacquelyn said, staring at the television and fiddling with the remote control. “Here and there. Sometimes to Santa Fe. Sometimes to El Paso. Sometimes Chihuahua. I wouldn’t find out until after he was back. It was a big problem for me. We argued about it, but it didn’t seem to do much good.”
“Did Sam ever mention Colonia Juárez?”
She quickly turned, fear returning to her face. “Colonia Juárez? The town in northern Mexico?”
Dawson nodded. “The Mormon community. Rather prosperous. Founded in the late 1800s. They grow fruits and vegetables.”
“Yes. We have a contract with the people there. Sam dealt with it.”
***
Later that morning, Dawson sat at the office desk, berating himself for not having rummaged through his father’s papers more deeply before. Earlier, he’d found his father’s bank statements from Sun Park Bank in the dark oak file cabinets on either side of the desk. He pulled the drawers open again and fingered through the hanging files, which were in no particular order. He extracted a fat file labeled Colonia Juárez and flipped through it. Contracts, some dated ten years earlier. Letters addressed to a man named Brigham Madsen. “Jesus,” he muttered. Madsen’s relatives.
Micah Madsen came from a family of Mormons, but he was a “jack Mormon”—non-practicing--until the campaign began. Dawson had pointed that out to Frankel when Madsen was first photographed exiting a Mormon temple looking much like Sam’s temple at Rancho La Peña.
It was a risk, of course, for Madsen to trumpet his Mormonism, even though the American voting public had become more tolerant. Religion was a nominal factor, or so it seemed, except to the religious right. Dawson was convinced that someone had put out the word to the Christian right to zip it about the Mormons being a cult, not a religion. Madsen was the party’s best hope, bar none, and the power brokers in the party did not want any dissension in the ranks that would doom Madsen’s chances.
As he sifted through the letters, Brigham Madsen’s name kept coming up, along with a telephone number and an address. Dawson picked up his phone and made the call.
The phone rang half-a-dozen times until a woman answered. “Hello?”
Dawson didn’t know where to begin and hesitated for a moment before introducing himself as a reporter from the Washington Herald.
“What was your name again?” she asked.
“Dawson. Kyle Dawson. I’m covering the campaign of Micah Madsen. I understand he has family ties to you and other in Colonia Juárez.”
“Why yes, he does. He and my husband are cousins. Their grandfathers were brothers.”
“I’m writing a story about Madsen’s family background for the newspaper. I’d like to talk to you about it.”
“Brigham—he’s my husband—knows about that. Let me call him. Oh, I’m his wife Dorothy, by the way.”
The phone clunked on a table. A door squeaked open and Dorothy shouted for Brigham to come. Moments later, he heard Dorothy’s muffled voice telling Brigham who was on the phone.
“This is Brigham,” he said breathlessly. “Can I help you?”
Dawson explained why he’d made the call. “And you’re the cousin of Micah Madsen, the man who’s running for president?”
“I am.”
“Could we meet? I’d like to talk about the family history.”
“If you want. But you’ll have to come down here.”
“That’s not a problem. How about tomorrow?”
“Fine.”
As an afterthought, Dawson added, “You may have known my father, Sam Dawson.”
“Sam Dawson? Yes. We know him. You’re his son?”
“Yes. He died recently.”
“Yes. I heard. I’m very sorry about that.”
“He was murdered.”
Brigham groaned. “It’s gotten so bad around here with the drug cartels. Now it’s spread across the border. There’s no place that’s safe anymore.”
“My father had business dealings with you. I thought maybe we could talk about that.”
“He was a good man. He helped this community a lot.”
After Brigham hung up, Dawson tilted back in the padded leather chair, smiled as he grabbed the remote, and turned on the noon news.
The anchor came on, saying they were going directly to a crime scene at Rancho la Peña, where five bodies had been found, killed in an apparent drug deal gone bad. Starting with a close-up of the yellow crime scene tape, the camera pulled back to reveal the loading dock, then panned the warehouse where he’d been hours earlier, finally focusing on Anita. A twinge of remorse gripped Dawson’s chest.
“This is the second shooting incident with multiple fatalities in a month,” the anchor said. “What is the latest, Anita?”
“I’m here at the commercial warehousing district at Rancho la Peña, where police and federal agents have been investigating this latest killing in what appears to have been a drug deal gone terribly bad. Officials say that this latest incident may have been one cartel intercepting the drug shipment of another.”
“Do authorities know who’s responsible?” the anchor asked.
“If they do, they’re not saying. At this point, no victims’ names have been released.”
“Why has Rancho la Peña become the focus of these attacks?”
“As we have reported, often drugs are hidden in shipments of legitimate commercial products and smuggled into the United States. Here to explain this is Pauline Gorman of the DEA.”
The camera pulled back slightly to reveal Carter’s spokeswoman dressed in a dark blue windbreaker emblazoned with bright yellow “DEA” in block letters. Anita must have arrived not long after he’d left, Dawson thought. He felt the urge to write a story, to at least keep pace with her, then thought better of it. No, don’t. Let it go. Go after the bigger fish. He wanted to get to the bottom of his father’s stake in this mess. He focused on his drive tomorrow to Mexico.
* * *
Carlos stood at the bar in his warehouse office in Juárez. He poured two fingers’ worth of tequila into the tumbler and lifted the glass in a toast to Anita. He smiled at the thought that he’d soon be with her in the remote Borrego mountain hacienda, where they’d be safe, and far away from the pressures of Juárez.
Her report was exactly what he had wanted. Though his name was not mentioned, the people who mattered would know that he, Carlos Borrego, had arrived. He was now el jefe, the new man atop the Borrego cartel. Don Diego was dead, God rest his soul. Now he, Carlos, would take revenge for his father’s death in ways that no one would soon forget.
The warehouse raid had gone well. They’d taken a half a ton of marijuana, fifty kilos of cocaine, and twenty kilos of heroin. The fools. He had stashed it safely not far from where they’d captured it in another warehouse at Rancho la Peña—right under the noses of Fonseca and his masters. Why bother bringing it back across into Mexico? Tomorrow, it would be on its way to St. Louis, Minneapolis, Chicago, and Detroit.
The weapons that had come with him and his men across the border were another matter. Just outside his office door, he could hear his men unpacking them and checking them. They would test them at his indoor firing range at the opposite end of the warehouse. Some fifty weapons in all, AR-15s, a dozen AK pistols, and ten thousand rounds of ammunition. An arsenal. Carlos smiled.
He had reasons to smile, except for one thing. Fonseca. That bastard had gotten away. But five of Fonseca’s men hadn’t. Sorry. Just business. Nothing personal. Fuck him. He’d get Fonseca later. No doubt about it.
Carlos felt his anger rising as he thought about how badly he wanted to kill Fonseca, but checked himself. Anger was something that h
ad to be controlled. It could grab a person and make him do stupid things that he’d later regret. But, his anger would not recede easily.
Carlos loved the raids. There would be more, each with more men, more trucks, more of everything. He relived this raid, play by play—the madness, the chaos, the guns, the shouting, the death. He had felt exhilarated as he’d clutched the sleek AR-15 and squeezed the trigger, the weapon shaking his hands, spitting a stream of bullets.
The magazine emptied quickly, and the weapon fell silent. He felt cheated. He grabbed another magazine from his thigh pocket and jammed it into place with a click. He turned and squeezed off a short burst this time, conserving his firepower.
He hit his first target, killing a middle-aged man with a thick chest and bulky, tattooed arms. The man saw Carlos and had paused for a split second to release the safety—at the same moment Carlos pointed his weapon and squeezed the trigger. Three bullets slammed into the man’s torso, knocking him backward against the side of a panel truck. The man had looked at Carlos, his eyes open wide, his jaw dropping, as if surprised that he’d been hit. The shock on the man’s face was replaced with darkness—the realization that it was over for him. His face hidden behind a black ski mask, Carlos watched the man clutch a hand to his oozing chest and slowly sink to the concrete floor, leaving a trail of smeared blood down the side of the truck.
Carlos was exhilarated at the kill. Dying was the risk of this line of work. He dismissed the man’s death by telling himself the man’s time had come. Carlos had moved around the warehouse, killing. He felt his power grow with every bullet, with every man that fell. Yes. Carlos Borrego had arrived.
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