by C. J. Shane
“Those guys are definitely looking for something, and they think Jade has it.”
“Correct,” Zhou frowned. “They will not stop looking until they find it.”
Letty crossed her arms over her chest. “We have to watch her 24-7. What they do next may lead us to where they are headquartered and what they are up to.”
“Yes, but they have a history of killing a person if they cannot find what they want.”
Zhou hesitated. “Letty, do you believe that Jade’s husband, Carlos, is alive?”
“No. I did a very thorough search for him, and in the months since, I’ve checked in again and again. He took the money from the bank. We know because he showed up on surveillance video. Then nothing. He could have created a separate identify or stolen someone’s identity, but if that happens, there’s usually some evidence that surfaces eventually. In his case, he disappeared off the face of the earth. I’m almost certain Carlos is dead, and his body was dumped in the desert somewhere.”
Zhou frowned. “It would be good to find the bones. This would help Jade have…what do you call it?”
“Closure.”
“Yes. Maybe a final memorial service also.”
“Yes. Any other news?”
“No. And you? What have you found?”
“First, I was hired to investigate a murder. The client’s nephew, his name is José, is accused of killing a woman who lives here in Tucson not too far from Jade’s house. His lawyer arranged for me to interview him. I spoke to him, but he told me nothing. I think he’s trying to protect someone. Then I talked to his girlfriend. She told me that José got into a fight with the son of the murdered woman over her, the girlfriend. She told me that José said to the boy Travis, ‘You’ve got all those Chinese girls. Why do you want my girlfriend, too?’”
“Ah. Very interesting,” Zhou mused. “Now we see maybe connection to this local family and triad gang.”
“Yes, an Anglo and very affluent family.”
“By Anglo, you mean white people?
“Yes.”
“You have more?”
“Yes. I have two younger brothers and a younger sister. One of my brothers, Eduardo, lives on the reservation. He rescued a migrant lost in the desert last week. She is from southern Mexico, and her name is Esperanza. She insisted that Eduardo bring her to Tucson to meet her coyote who promised her a job. She told him that her brothers and sisters don’t have enough to eat so she’s eager to work.”
“Coyote?”
“This is a wild animal that lives here. The coyote is very much like a wild dog. The native peoples call them ‘song dogs’ because they howl to each other at dusk. You’ll see one sooner or later. They are quite common. The men who smuggle migrant workers across the border also are often called ‘coyotes.’ They smuggle drugs, too, or they force the migrants to smuggle drugs.”
Zhou shook his head. This was an America that he knew little about. In fact, he guessed most Americans who lived away from the U.S.-Mexico border knew little about this as well.
“Eduardo and Esperanza developed an attachment to each other. He became very worried when she did not contact him, so he went to the house where the coyote lives. He was turned away rather roughly. The coyote claimed that he didn’t know any Esperanza. So Eduardo started asking the neighbors, but got no answers because everyone was too scared to talk. Then he got to the home of Denise, who is our cousin.”
“Why afraid?”
“Many are undocumented workers with families who have been here for years. They are afraid that if they report crimes to the police, they will be found out and deported.”
Another aspect of the America most people do not know, Zhou thought to himself.
“Denise provides information?”
“Yes, she said the neighbors had seen vans full of girls brought there. Asian men, Denise said, brought them to the coyote’s house. Then about a year ago, that stopped. Now she sees the Asian men and the coyote, who is Mexican, and once, she saw a white man. Now they are moving boxes in and out of the house.”
“This also is the time when Carlos disappeared,” Zhou said.
“Yes, and it looks like they have cut back on the girl smuggling and now they’ve moved into smuggling something else.”
“Letty, I must tell you that I have a second assignment that I did not mention earlier.”
Letty frowned. “Don’t hold back on me, Zhou.”
“I will not. I also am sent to find a kidnapped young woman named Victoria. She is the daughter of a high official in the Hong Kong government. The official refused to pay bribes to gangsters so they took his daughter to sell into sex slavery.”
“Wow, these guys are real scumbags. I have another story to tell you – something that just happened last night.” She went on to relate how her brother Will had encountered a group of Asian men – Will was sure they were Chinese – who were in the process of taking a young Asian woman dressed in that traditional Chinese dress.”
“Cheongsam’ in Cantonese, ‘qipao’ in Mandarin. You think this may be the young woman Victoria?”
“Could be. My brother called out to stop them, and one of them came forward and dislocated Will’s shoulder. Then they got into the van with the girl and drove off.”
“Your brother is okay?”
“Yes. His friend Clarice took him to the hospital last night. She’s with him now.”
“Your brother described the man who harmed him?”
“Chinese, fairly young, longish hair, white suit.”
“Bao. His name is Bao. We can conclude then that perhaps they continue to smuggle girls but on a smaller scale. Now they are smuggling something different. What could it be? Triads have a history of smuggling counterfeit money, weapons, and drugs, of course. In recent days, we find they smuggle fentanyl and other opioids into the U.S. Also they smuggle chemicals from China to the U.S. to produce meth and to Europe to make the drug known as ecstasy. I worked on a case for Interpol that involved smuggling the chemicals into several European countries.”
“We need to find out where they are headquartered…in Tucson or across the border or somewhere out in the desert,” Letty was feeling the urgency. “And we need to figure out what they are smuggling and where’s it going. And we need to find those two girls – Victoria and Esperanza. And soon.”
“I agree.”
Letty reached into her pocket. “Will found this on the ground after the girl was picked up in the park and shoved into the van.” She showed Zhou the necklace. It was a green stone with a red string tied into a circle.
“This is a Buddhist jade amulet, Guan Yin. Goddess of compassion. She is said to protect women and children.” Zhou knotted the broken red string together again.
Again another memory thrust itself into Letty’s consciousness without warning. Chava with a St. Christopher medal on a chain around his neck.
Zhou tried to return it to Letty.
“You keep it. You can give it to her when we find her,” she said.
“What will you do now?” Zhou asked.
“This afternoon I’m going to go see my uncle who lives on the other side of the border in Nogales, Sonora. His name is Miguel Valdez. He’s been mixed up in things,” Letty hesitated. She didn’t want to go into Miguel’s occasional illegal activities. “He knows a lot. I hope he’s heard something about the triad gang.”
“You have good guanxi, Letty.”
The word sounded like “gwan-she” to Letty’s ears.
Her puzzled look led Zhou to continue. “’Guanxi’ is what you call connections or networking. You know many people, and you are in a large family.”
Letty smiled. “I hadn’t thought of it that way. That’s good. What are you doing this afternoon?”
“Jade and I go to visit the family of Carlos. I want to see if any of his family members maybe remember something helpful. I will ask about the Chinese connection. This is something no one here knew about until Bao and I met in Jade’s back yard.
”
“Good idea. Let’s talk tonight.”
“Letty, I don’t hold back now. I have a problem.”
“What’s that, Zhou?”
“I am like your brother Eduardo who has attachment with the migrant girl. I feel this attachment for Miss Jade. I do not know if she feels this also, but I think maybe yes.”
Letty laughed. “Oh, she does. Definitely. She looks at you like a big bowl of ice cream that she wants to gobble up and then lick the spoon.”
This made Zhou smile.
“And that’s how you feel about her? Like a big bowl of ice cream?”
“No,” Zhou said seriously. “Jade is a fine French wine best to savor slowly.”
Letty’s eyebrows went up. Who knew this ass-kicking Chinese cop was such a romantic? Sweet.
Zhou frowned. “This is an unfortunate development. I make a strong effort to not be distracted. I must be very careful. I must be awake and watching at all moments. I cannot let this fine wine distract me.”
“You’ll do great, Zhou. You are a good cop.” Even as the words came out of her mouth, Letty was taken aback. She didn’t know why, but she had a good feeling about Zhou.
Letty smiled broadly. “And when this is all over, you can give your ice cream to Jade, and you can drink her wine.”
Zhou couldn’t help himself. He laughed, delighted at the thought.
Chapter 12
Letty headed south on I-19, the major four-lane highway that leads straight to the border between Arizona and the Mexican state of Sonora. Normally she enjoyed making this drive. Right now, she was tense, and she hoped the drive would help her calm down and focus. At a distance of nearly seventy miles, it was far enough to allow her to center into her thoughts. She wanted to get away and have an opportunity to think about recent events.
The day was one of those clear, warm, sunny winter days in the Sonoran Desert. A deep ultramarine blue sky stretched to the horizon. Behind Letty were the Santa Catalina Mountains on the northern edge of Tucson and ahead were the Santa Rita Mountains to the south, just two of the Sonoran Desert mountain ranges known as “sky islands.” She deftly passed through the traffic congestion at the southern edge of the Tucson metro area. Finally traffic began to give way to open desert with sand, mesquite trees and saguaro cacti.
Soon after leaving Tucson, Letty could see on her right to the west the White Dove of the Desert, that beautiful eighteenth-century church of Mission San Xavier del Bac. The Mission church was considered the best example of baroque architecture in the United States – thus the White Dove designation – and Letty couldn’t help but be proud that the Mission was built by the native people, Tohono O’odham, the maternal side of her family.
She liked to imagine what it was like for the people living in the O’odham farming village of Wa:k to see a stranger on horseback appear without warning in the late 1600s. He was Father Kino, an Italian Jesuit priest sent to New Spain, the Spanish colony in the New World. His task was to establish a string of Catholic missions that stretched up into what would become known as California. San Xavier del Bac was one of twenty-four outposts that he established for crown and church in his lifetime. Father Kino was an explorer, cartographer, astronomer and agronomist. What did Letty’s people think of this strange man from a faraway world with his wide-brimmed hat and dark robes? How could they have known that he was just the first of so many Europeans who would follow and who would change everything forever?
Letty was not a practicing Catholic, but she loved going into the sanctuary of the Mission church. She liked sitting in the quiet silence where generations of O’odham had prayed. Seeing the Mission to her right as she drove toward the border helped to settle Letty into a quieter state of mind. Her thoughts turned to the problem she was facing now – the presence of a group of Chinese gangsters who were quite willing to use violence against her brother and her friend, for what purpose she did not know.
She considered the possibility that the Chinese triad gang members had developed a relationship with Mexican gangsters, probably from the Sinaloa Cartel. After all, the cartel controlled this part of northern Mexico, and not much escaped them. Were the Chinese gangsters paying off the cartel? Or were they working together? Sinaloa had competitors, of course. The Tijuana Cartel, the Juarez Cartel, and Los Zetas Cartel were in play, and any one of them could be trying to get an edge against the Sinaloa Cartel.
The possibility of some kind of connection between any of the cartels and the triad gang terrified Letty. She had made a point of avoiding any investigation that might push her into the sphere of the Sinaloa Cartel. Like the triads, they were known for a long list of crimes, chief among them drug smuggling, and like the triads, they were no strangers to violence and murder. Or it might be possible that cartel members hadn’t noticed the triad gang yet, in which case there would be hell to pay when they did. A turf war would surely follow, one that would lead to multiple deaths.
While working with Marv Iverson before he retired, Letty found that she was really good at finding missing persons. Most often, those cases involved individuals who had engaged in some illegal financial dealings, especially fraud or embezzlement. These were the skips. She had become more and more efficient at finding them, typically because they couldn’t stand waiting another minute to spend those misbegotten funds. She followed the money, and because of that, it was often easy to track them down. She was not typically responsible for bringing these criminal skips to justice. That was left to others. There was a distance between her and these white-collar criminals, and she liked it that way. It wasn’t just her own revulsion to violence. She had her siblings to consider now. She did not want them dragged into her work.
Occasionally Letty would take another missing-person case that had nothing to do with financial misbehavior. Tracking down a missing child who most often had been abducted by a noncustodial parent was on her list of completed assignments. She had once found a demented missing father who had wondered away from home and had been taken in by a neighbor. The neighbor viewed her new house guest, who was not allowed to leave her house, as an opportunity to raid the helpless father’s financial resources. Letty’s client in that case was the elder son of the man suffering from dementia. Once found, the father was sent to a more secure nursing home and the neighbor to jail.
Infrequently, and only because she needed money to pay bills, Letty would engage in a stakeout. Usually this involved being hired by a person who believed his or her spouse was being unfaithful. Proof was needed in the form of photos that would help her client in divorce court. Those stakeouts often meant long hours in her pickup truck watching outside a motel or apartment where she could get photographic proof of marital misbehavior.
Letty’s biggest failure as an investigator was her inability to find Jade’s husband, Carlos Lopez. There was a point at which she had to accept what seemed obvious. He was dead. She had no proof at all that he was alive. She had no proof that he was dead, either. But based on her experience finding missing persons, everything about his disappearance pointed to his death and possibly his murder.
So now there was this thread connecting Jade and Carlos and a missing girl from the highlands of southern Mexico and her brothers Eduardo and Will that led to some Chinese gangsters and possibly some Mexican gangsters, too. Letty sighed in frustration.
Hearing from the girlfriend of José Maria Gomez that there might be a tie between the triad gangsters and a local white family living in an affluent neighborhood of Tucson was disturbing as well. If she closed her eyes and hoped for the best, this might mean very little. It could be something very simple. Perhaps “those Chinese girls” that José had spit out in the argument with Travis Lyle simply referred to some girls at school who happened to be of Chinese ethnicity.
But Letty had this feeling in her gut that it had to be more than just a jealous fight between two teenage boys. If it were more than just a reference to some local girls at school, wasn’t it just logical to connect “thos
e Chinese girls” to the triad gangsters’ crime of sex trafficking? And if that was the case, then what the hell was the teenage son of an affluent white family doing? How could he possibly know about this? He couldn’t, unless, of course, the triads were running a house of prostitution patronized by local boys. That was possible but unlikely, because the Chinese girls were probably not being kept in Tucson. Zhou seemed to think that these girls, typically from peasant families in rural counties, were taken to Las Vegas or some other location where it was more difficult to distinguish the unwilling prostitute from the willing.
Letty had to find out more about Travis Lyle and about his mother. Why had Barbara Lyle been murdered, and by whom? Was she involved in some criminal activity herself, or did she just know about it and someone was trying to shut her up? How had her son become involved in this? Most parents wouldn’t want their kids involved in such dangerous illegal activity. And what about the father, Fred Lyle? Did he know what was going on? Did he play a role in any illegal activity?
On Monday, Letty would go to the Lyles’ home and try to speak to both father and son, This would be after she spoke to the lawyer Jessica Cameron, who needed to be informed immediately about the complexity of this case. It was not a simple matter of Cameron’s client being accused of murder. Letty’s gut feeling was that José had not shot and killed Barbara Lyle. But he wasn’t helping Letty at all. If José was trying to protect someone by not talking, who? And why? And who did kill Barbara Lyle and why?
And then there was Zhou. He was from another world. He seemed entirely legitimate, and there was no doubt that he was deeply concerned about Jade’s welfare. But Letty had no way of verifying anything he said or recognizing any mistakes he might be making or anticipating any shortcomings he might have that would affect what was becoming a joint investigation. She was entirely dependent upon his knowledge of the triads. Yes, she had a good feeling about him, but feelings can be very misleading. What did she really know about Zhou?
The biggest mystery of all – and the one fact that made Letty most uncomfortable – was that she had never yet encountered a single one of these Chinese gangsters. She just had no idea how she would react when meeting one of them or especially more than one at once. Letty had her military training, and she had taken advanced martial arts classes while in the Army and after her honorable discharge, too. She had done quite well at defending herself when attacked. But she didn’t have confidence that she could compete in a one-on-one with a Chinese gong fu expert bent on killing her, Jade, or her brothers. Letty was not eager to find out.