Padilla wiped away tears, shoulders high. Méndez sighed sympathetically. Still, he could not rule out the possibility that she was being melodramatic or paranoid.
Quietly, he asked, “Why would they be watching you, Zoraida?”
“To find Abrihet. Listen to this: She called me from Mexico. I think they tapped my phone. They started watching more closely after the call.”
His eyes widened. “When?”
“Late July, early August.”
“How many calls from Mexico?”
“Just one.”
Abrihet had said she was in Tijuana. After talking to her brother, she had changed her mind about trying to join him in Italy. Instead, he would wire her money for Mexican smugglers to sneak her back to the United States. She intended to return to New York.
“She said I was right about telling the police. She had decided to do it, so she asked if I would be a witness for her, back up her story with the authorities if she denounced Mr. Blake.”
“And?”
“I said I would. She said she was glad she had listened to me. She would get revenge. She had information, and she was going to use it against him.”
“Information? From the pen drive?”
“That was what I presumed. She didn’t say.”
“What happened?”
“I don’t know. There’s a lot of Border Patrol at the Line. It’s very difficult. Chances are they caught her. I never heard from her again.”
Méndez and Padilla talked for a while longer. When they were done, he walked her back to her building. She startled him by taking his arm as they crossed the street. She gripped it hard.
“Licenciado,” she murmured. “One of the cars that follows me. At the end of the block, by the bus stop.”
He smiled and nodded as if they were making small talk. He didn’t look until they had reached the sidewalk near the pet store.
“A blue Crown Victoria,” he said. “Two men.”
“One white, one black.” Her voice shook. “I don’t see them together a lot. Maybe they are here for you.”
“I should take their picture, ask them what they are doing. Give them a fright.”
Her fingers dug into his arm.
“Please, Licenciado. I don’t need any more problems.”
“Don’t worry, Zoraida. You have an ally now.”
He followed her into the vestibule, which smelled vaguely like cat litter. She stared up at him, looking small, exhausted, and miserable.
“Thank you, Zoraida,” he said. “You are a good and brave person.”
“You think so?” Her eyes gleamed with shame and anger. “It hasn’t brought me any luck.”
Méndez hesitated. “The important thing is that you tried to help.”
Zoraida shook her head. Avoiding his eyes, she said, “Licenciado Méndez, I really don’t know if they tapped my phone. But Mr. Krystak came to see me again several times. The last time was two days after Abrihet called. He said he could cause many problems for me. Have the government look at my taxes, tell my employer bad things, endanger my green card. He demanded to know if I had heard from Abrihet.”
Méndez waited. He knew what was coming. What a brute, he thought.
“So I told him,” she continued, unable to meet his eyes. “About the phone call, that she was in Tijuana, what she said about the information and revenge. Everything I knew. And he gave me five hundred dollars. And I took it. That’s how good and brave a person I am, Licenciado Méndez. I took the money.”
Méndez tried to console her. He told her not to be hard on herself. He gave her a brief hug when they said goodbye and said to call him immediately if anyone bothered her.
Méndez walked a block south to hail a cab. As he passed the Crown Victoria, he clicked off a burst of photos with his phone aimed at the windshield and the license plate. The men inside wore baseball caps. They stiffened but otherwise didn’t react.
Maybe they are here for you.
Or maybe there was a second team shadowing him. In the taxi, Méndez turned in his seat to see if he could spot a tail.
Until this moment, working north of the border had felt like operating in a bubble of security. The bubble had burst.
Probably better, he thought. If you feel safe, you drop your guard.
He worked during the flight. He transcribed the interview, adding every detail he could remember. He wrote a list of questions, items to double-check and follow up on. He recalled his encounter with Perry Blake, juxtaposing it against the grim tale he had heard in New York. He did not find it hard to imagine Blake as a predator. However, the image of Blake unhinged surprised him.
Remembering something, Méndez searched in the background files that Santiago had prepared for him. He found notes from an off-the-record interview with a businessman who had gone to college with Blake. There was a section about Blake’s fraternity—binges, brawls, injury lawsuits, run-ins with campus police. And a rumor: A fellow student had accused Blake of raping her at a party. The Blake family threw its weight around, the source said, and the rumor went away. Only three sentences, an anecdote from twenty-five years ago, nothing that Méndez had thought he could use. But now it was a possible precedent for a kind of crime that was almost always repeated.
Méndez closed his eyes. The triumph of the day was wearing off, giving way to doubts. He had been building a story about complex, sophisticated, white-collar impunity. The narrative had veered in a way that was dramatic and problematic. He wasn’t sure how to go about proving this tale of cruelty, brutality, and abuse of power. Unless he found the Eritrean. Perhaps she had landed in an immigration detention center in the Southwest. Perhaps Mexican police had picked her up. Or smugglers had kidnapped her. Then there was the supposed theft of the pen drive. Did she really have compromising information?
Méndez remembered another detail. When the Secretary had given him the Mexican intelligence report, he had said there was a rumor that the Blakes were concerned about a problem. Some kind of internal leak or whistle-blower.
After New York, San Diego seemed impossibly calm, clean, and empty, the palm trees backlit by the moon, the breeze a welcoming caress. When Méndez arrived home, Estela was standing at the front door, eyes narrowed.
“So,” she said. “You are back.”
He found himself unable to sleep that night. On Monday morning, the Méndez family functioned with Prussian precision. Estela’s mood was Prussian as well. Her silence was ominous. She had left for the university by the time he got back from dropping off Renata. He decided to deceive his body by acting as if he had arisen from a regular night’s sleep. He showered and shaved. He put on jeans and a Team Mexico soccer jersey with the name of Chicharito, a star forward, on the back, then took a mug of coffee into his garage-newsroom. No one else was there. The sun shone. Birds chirped.
Isabel Puente answered his call on the street, walking and talking fast.
“I’ve had you on my mind, Leo,” she said. “You’ve pretty much dictated my schedule, in fact.”
“My apologies. I hope, at least, there were positive repercussions.”
“We’ll talk. I’m running now.”
“How does it look?”
“Now is not the time.”
“Give me a hint, Isabel.”
“Your story forced high-level people to engage on this issue. You shamed the bad guys, which is nice. But the bottom-line dynamics haven’t changed.”
Méndez rubbed his eyes. What had the Secretary said about journalists? In the end, you are voices shouting outside the palace walls.
Isabel started to hang up. Méndez interrupted to say he needed a favor.
“Information on a name,” he said. He didn’t plan to mention a Blake connection unless or until Isabel did. “An illegal immigrant.”
“Can this wait?”
“I’m afraid not.”
He waited while she found a spot where she could write it down.
“Go ahead,” Isabel said.
“Repeat the name.”
“Abrihet Anbessa.” He spelled it.
“Eritrean? Illegal?”
“Yes.”
A long pause.
“Hello? Isabel?”
“Go ahead.”
The edge in her voice took him aback. He read her the date of birth and last known address Padilla had given him.
“I’d like to know if she is in any databases,” he said. “If she was detained by the Border Patrol. Possibly a recent arrest in California.”
“What makes you say that?” Her whisper was urgent.
“Well, the last information I have puts her in Tijuana with plans to be smuggled across the border.”
“When?”
“Early August. Eh…are you familiar with this name?”
Silence. Finally, she asked, “Do you have a photo?”
“In my laptop. One moment, I will send it to you.”
Zoraida Padilla had taken the picture at an employee picnic. Abrihet sat at an outdoor table, glancing up at the camera. Slim, early thirties, windblown hair, but her face was visible. An engaging smile. Delicate, fine-boned features. As Padilla had said, she had bright, animated, resilient eyes.
After confirming that she had received the photo, Isabel hung up without asking anything else.
He was perplexed. Isabel could have conceivably learned about Abrihet through a source inside the Blake Group, perhaps a wiretap. But if so, why hadn’t they jumped on it, bringing in the New York Police Department to investigate the assault? And Isabel would have mentioned something, at least obliquely, if she had that kind of artillery against Perry Blake. Méndez told himself that he might just be imagining things about Isabel’s reaction. Maybe she had never heard the name; maybe she was just tired and exasperated.
That afternoon, Méndez tucked his daughter in for a nap. Renata regaled him with an account of her adventures at nursery school. Although he was desperately sleepy, he sat enthralled by her big eyes, her round cheeks, her crisp little voice sliding between Spanish and English. He had missed her.
In violation of his wife’s naptime policy, he read to Renata from a picture book about Clifford the Big Red Dog. Curled up at his side, she corrected his pronunciation in English now and then. He wished he had his daughter’s talent for languages, her ear for mimicry. After repeatedly viewing the Disney cartoon film Peter Pan, she had taken to calling him “Father” in a disconcertingly British accent.
It’s like having a little bilingual extraterrestrial scampering around the house, he thought.
“Father,” Renata said drowsily. “Go like this: Hem-hem. Hem-hem.”
After a moment, he figured it out. His voice was hoarse; she wanted him to clear his throat. But she didn’t know the phrase in Spanish or English.
“Like this?” He made a production of clearing his throat.
“Yes. Muy bien.”
He kept reading. He wasn’t sure which of them fell asleep first.
His cell phone woke him. Isabel.
She wanted him to come to Washington right away.
Chapter 9
Leo Méndez had always reminded Pescatore of a streetwise professor.
Although his hair had grayed, Méndez looked better now that he had put distance between himself and all his would-be assassins in Mexico. He had lost the pallor, the stooped and haunted look.
As Méndez told his story, Pescatore took notes. He copied information from the whiteboard that Isabel had set up in the dining room of her town house in Alexandria. Two columns on the board, one devoted to the Tecate killings, the other to the Blake Acquisitions Group, listed names, dates, and events. Each column ended with Abrihet Anbessa, the name that had caused the cases to intersect. Pescatore was still getting his head around the whole thing.
Isabel stood at the whiteboard, running the show. Her black hair was piled up and pulled back with barrettes. She wore makeup and a blazer over a skirt. She had taken the afternoon off to host the meeting at her home. Pescatore and Facundo faced Méndez, who was flanked by Athos and Porthos. The two veteran cops were behaving as if Méndez was still the chief of the Diogenes Group and they were still his loyal deputies.
Méndez had dropped a bomb. While reporting on the Blake Group, he explained, he had stumbled onto an allegation against Perry Blake. An employee had accused him of assaulting her, but the victim, an illegal immigrant from Eritrea, hadn’t gone to the police. She ran to Mexico with information stolen from Blake’s office, planning to use it against him somehow. Then she decided to come back. Méndez had traced her whereabouts as far as Tijuana in early August. Her name was Abrihet Anbessa.
In return, Pescatore told Méndez about his own investigation. Abrihet Anbessa had surfaced as a survivor of the Tecate massacre. She had told a Brazilian witness that she thought powerful people in New York had engineered the multiple murders in order to kill her. The photos and facts matched. Pescatore and Méndez were looking for the same person.
The group had spent the afternoon talking. Where was Abrihet? What was in the pen drive she had taken? Was there a connection between the Blakes and the killings at the border?
“If there isn’t,” Méndez said, “it means coincidence is the most powerful force in the universe.”
“We don’t have proof,” Isabel replied. “Suspicion. Logic. A potential motive. But we don’t have proof that the Blakes, or someone acting on their behalf, were involved.”
“What other explanation is there?”
“Leo, immigrants get killed all the time. Here’s a question: Why kill the others if she was the target?”
“We were talking about that…”
Méndez glanced at Athos. The grizzled cop had taken off his baseball cap; his remaining strands of hair were combed neatly across his brown scalp. He sat with his fingers interlaced in front of him.
“Based on past experience, Licenciada Puente,” Athos said, “it could be the triggermen lost control, or improvised. The young wolves out there today are totally crazy. Another scenario: it could be a mafia tactic to hide the true target of the crime.”
“I suppose. But that’s convoluted. What do you think, Valentine?”
“You’re right—we can’t prove it. But I gotta think Blake’s involved. Maybe they got their pals in Mexico to send shooters after her. I wonder if there’s a link on the U.S. side through the missing border inspector, Covington. Maybe he was helping them look for her. Did he ever turn up?”
“No. The word is he’s dead.”
Isabel turned to Facundo and asked for his opinion.
Facundo sipped a San Pellegrino lemon soda.
“I think this is a real quilombo, that’s what I think,” he growled.
“Translation of folkloric Argentine term,” Pescatore said drily to the others, “‘a big complicated mess.’”
“I would venture to say,” Facundo said, “that it is unusual for American titans of finance to hire Mexican assassins to rub out African migrants.”
“Extremely unusual,” Isabel said.
“It would help to know more about the leader of this gang—El T. And any conceivable connection to the Blake Group.”
Isabel opened a folder. “Well, we have a sketch, for what it’s worth. Based on Chiclet’s description.”
Two days earlier, Athos and Porthos had delivered Chiclet to the front gate of the U.S. embassy in Mexico City. With the Honduran smuggler in the custody of Homeland Security agents based at the embassy, Isabel had reinserted her agency into the official investigation, which the smuggler’s confession would point toward Tayane Pires in Rio de Janeiro.
Isabel distributed copies of the sketch. It was a reasonably detailed likeness of a strong-boned, clean-shaven face. A Latino in his thirties with grim eyes and buzz-cut black hair receding at the temples.
After putting on reading glasses, Athos studied the image.
“He looks familiar. It would help to s
how this to certain people.”
“By all means do that, discreetly,” Isabel said. “We haven’t come up with anything.”
“With all respect, I would bet on the comandante against your databases,” Porthos said. “He remembers everything. And he is older than Moses.”
It occurred to Pescatore that the group at the table were the people he most trusted and admired. The woman he had almost married; a boss who was like a father to him; three staunch friends with whom he had battled bad guys. Heartwarming, but also kind of sad. The breakup with Isabel still cast a shadow over their relationship. He and Facundo were based in different countries now. Despite Pescatore’s bond with the Mexicans, he didn’t really know them that well. It made him realize how alone he was in the world. Especially now that his so-called romance with Fatima Belhaj had sunk into radio silence.
“One thing,” Pescatore said. “El T is former military. Didn’t you say the Blakes have a veteran running security, Leo?”
“Yes,” Méndez said. “A large surly individual named Krystak.”
“Major Louis Krystak,” Isabel said. “Veteran of Afghanistan. Close to the Blakes, especially the father. We can look for a connection. But we don’t even know if El T is American or Mexican.”
She turned to Méndez. “Except for you, Leo, everyone in this room works for me—and therefore the U.S. government. But we are old friends, and you’ve made an extraordinary contribution today. I’m ready to incorporate you into the team if you’d like. Unofficially—as an unpaid consultant, let’s call it—on the condition that you don’t write about this again unless you have my approval.”
“Ideally, I will write something in the future,” Méndez said. “When the timing is right.”
“That might never happen.” Isabel showed her teeth without smiling. “The timing might never be right.”
She had made a calculated choice to have this conversation in front of witnesses, Pescatore thought. She had to protect herself. Even though this journalist had once been a police chief—and had handed her a breakthrough on the case.
“Fine.” Méndez sighed. “The important thing is to get to the bottom of this. And to find that young woman—if it isn’t too late. I surrender my reporter’s badge to you, Isabel.”
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