by Mark Wheaton
“When I discovered the discrepancy and called the bank, do you know what they said?” the old man continued. “We’ll replace the money immediately. They were so apologetic. I asked if they would go after the culprit, and they hesitated, saying they would if I filed a police report and gave them a copy. It was obvious that if I didn’t the matter would drop. Forty dollars wasn’t enough to make them care.”
Miguel said nothing.
“I’m paying you a compliment,” the old man scowled.
“Thank you, sir.”
“Tell me. How did you come to this forty-dollar amount?”
“It wasn’t scientific,” Miguel admitted. “And I’m sure the actual number their fraud division lets slide is higher. But I figured the absolute minimum would be around fifty dollars, so forty felt safe.”
“How did you identify my account as vulnerable? You could never have gotten away with this on the checking account of a little old lady on a fixed income. Was there some kind of activity that suggested I might not be one to go to the police?”
“It was the way the account was set up,” Miguel explained. “It was one of several created by the same person.”
“How could you tell that?”
“Not from anything you did. It’s how the bank handles its batch processing. The temp PIN codes were sequential, and the PO boxes were copied and pasted. It creates a pattern.”
The old man seemed satisfied by this. Until he peered back at Miguel.
“Don’t spare my feelings.”
“There was one thing you did. The amounts of money coming in and out felt randomized, not random, as if selected to prove they were irregular. Another reason I thought it was automated and therefore vulnerable.”
The old man’s gaze left Miguel’s face. He picked a corner of the ceiling and eyed it thoughtfully for a moment before turning back.
“I have an old-fashioned approach to business,” he said. “If I spend one dollar, I want to make three. That is easy for me to understand, and it keeps things manageable. But what you showed me is a way I can lose money from a direction I didn’t know to look in. My thinking, perhaps, is outmoded. What I need is new thinking.”
“What you need is me,” Miguel offered.
“Is that what I said?” the old man barked, coming alive with a vengeance. “That I need you?”
Miguel waited for the ice pick to flash. When it didn’t, he let out a sigh of relief.
“What I want,” the old man began, “is to see if we might do some business together. If you can steal from me, so can others. More importantly, if you can find patterns in what are meant to be secret accounts, so can others. It will require time away from your current profession, but you will be compensated.”
Current profession. Miguel found this funny but then considered the offer on the table. It meant an exponential increase in risk but might allow him to explore other weaknesses in electronic banking to exploit.
“You’re taking a long time to make a decision, Mr. Higuera,” the old man said.
“What are the terms of our agreement? I’d never agree to anything without all our cards on the table.”
The old gangster’s eyes widened. Miguel feared he’d crossed the line from useful to troublesome. But then the old man’s hyena-like cackle returned, followed by a hand thrust across the table. Sans ice pick.
“Everything’s gone the way you might have hoped thus far,” the old man intoned. “Let’s not ruin it by having you dictate my terms. A trial period, okay?”
Miguel shook the hand, hoping his own palm wasn’t as sweat soaked as the rest of him.
“Sounds good to me, boss.”
“Basmadjian,” the old man said. “That is my name, and that is what you’ll call me. Got it?”
Miguel did. Now he just had to get home before his mother did.
XIV
Luis finished his fifth day in the fields before slipping away at nightfall. It was Friday night, and a number of workers were trekking to the nearest gas station for a weekend liquor run. Luis joined this party, but not a one looked at him. Word of his ostracization had been fully disseminated.
He waved a good-bye to the others at the station before heading to the highway. No one waved back.
It took him the better part of an hour to reach the 101 freeway and another two to get to his destination eight miles away. He’d considered ringing Oscar for a ride even though they’d agreed they were square. It occurred to him that other than Pastor Whillans, Oscar might be the closest thing he had to a friend these days. That was a strange feeling indeed. He pushed this from his mind, however, needing to focus his thoughts on the task at hand.
Throughout the day he picked apart Odilia’s story. She hadn’t been at Santiago’s fields, so why did she have a paper signed by Santiago saying she did work there? What exactly was her connection to Annie Whittaker? Had she even been present at the shooting as she claimed?
Could she have lied about more than that? Maybe even about how the shooting at Annie’s house had gone down. Was there more to it than she wanted to let on?
The instincts he’d developed from his years on the streets led him to believe she was telling the truth. But he was a priest now, not a detective. What made him think he could get to the bottom of it all?
That said, he’d been able to work out Annie Whittaker’s home address from cross-referencing a number of articles online. The neighborhood was mentioned in one report, and photos of Annie’s house in another obscured her house number, painted on the curb, but not the one next to it. A few minutes on Google Earth and he had his destination.
When he reached her neighborhood, a walled-in but not gated community called Tierra Rejada, Luis fully realized the extent of the risk he was taking by being there. For him to step into this upper-class suburban enclave not even a week after the murder of one of its residents by, as the papers suggested, someone that probably looked a lot like him, was stupid bordering on dangerous.
He might as well have arrived on a parade float.
Rather than go in, Luis passed the front entrance and followed the brick wall that ringed the neighborhood until it reached the foothills. He circled Tierra Rejada twice, cutting in close only to glimpse street signs. He settled on the house he believed to be Annie’s and approached from the rear. As Odilia had reported, there was a gate on the back wall that led into the arroyo behind the neighborhood. Judging from the pickets around where Luis stood, a second neighborhood was planned to abut Tierra Rejada. The gate would eventually open onto a new road or alley that would run between the two.
The exterior of Annie’s beige-brick, two-story prefab house was as unremarkable as the others in the community. Luis stood back from the fence and ran Odilia’s story against this backdrop. He imagined her inside as Annie went out the front door and onto the driveway. Then the first shots. It seemed immediately that if Odilia’s tale was accurate, there would have had to be two shooters. There was no way someone could’ve shot Annie in the driveway and then made it over the fence, through the backyard, and over the back wall to get a shot at Odilia as she exited the gate.
She could’ve been wrong. The bullets she thought were coming from in front of her could have been fired from behind. Having just seen her friend killed and being targeted herself, was she a reliable witness?
What bothered him was the neighborhood itself. There were plenty of streetlights. He’d seen the silhouettes of security cameras hanging off every other house as he walked. Even if the police were involved in some kind of cover-up, it would be impossible to loop in the other residents. He speculated that every homeowner on the block had gone over their camera footage with a fine-tooth comb the next morning.
He felt sure Annie’s murder was premeditated. But who would look at this well-lit and walled-in neighborhood and decide that of all the places Annie might go on any given day, this was
the best place to stage an armed robbery turned murder?
He moved to the wall behind Annie’s house. He didn’t know if the police were watching it, but he knew it wouldn’t be wise to stick around for long. Beginning at the gate, he ran his fingers up and down the frame and along the wall. Odilia had said that the first shot came once she was out of the gate. If she was right and it came from in front of her, there was a chance it had struck the wall.
After five minutes of finding nothing out of the ordinary, Luis did a cursory glance over the gate to see if a window was broken or something obviously chipped in the backyard.
Nothing again.
If the shot had come from behind her, it was a lost cause. The sand and scrub would’ve easily concealed a bullet. He’d need a metal detector. Even then he’d be there all night.
So he stuck with Odilia’s story and moved down the wall in the direction she described. As he moved down the row of houses, he found the same exact thing. Stuccoed, cinder-block walls with degrees of slight water damage and solid redwood gates.
He was unsure why he kept going to the end of the row, but something egged him on. It was at this last house that he found a slight fringe of wood Mohawking up from the top of the gate. Six thin splinters extruded away from a groove. Luis ran his finger over them. They arrowed downward, as if pointing to something.
Luis kneeled alongside the gate’s frame, lining up the cut with where a bullet would’ve completed its trajectory. He was rewarded with a crack in the stucco and a shallow dent in the concrete beneath. A pencil eraser couldn’t have sunk much deeper in the hole. His fingers searched for a piece of sharp or twisted metal but found nothing. Instead, there were a number of cuts and grooves.
They collected their rounds, Luis realized. Definitely premeditated.
Something disturbed him about the angle. For the bullet to have nicked the top of the gate and then embedded itself in the frame, it would’ve had to come from somewhere up high. Could someone have been running along the top of the wall?
He kneeled back down, staring into the direction from which the bullet had to have come. There was nothing there but night sky.
Except . . .
Except when he looked harder, he saw a hill about 150 yards away. The articles had been unambiguous. The bullets found in Annie Whittaker were pistol rounds, suggesting the shooter was close. The police could lie all they wanted, but how easily could the medical examiner’s office be roped in? If there was even a hint of a discrepancy, all the family would’ve had to do was request an independent autopsy. The discovery of a single rifle bullet, implying the shooter was far away and no kind of armed robber at all, would’ve unraveled the official story, and these guys seemed too good to make a mistake like that.
Luis started toward the top of the hill. Traversing the uneven ground was not easy in the moonlight, but his eyes had adjusted by the time he reached the hill and scrambled up the rocky face with ease.
And there it was.
Though it took him a minute to figure out which one of the houses back in Tierra Rejada was Annie Whittaker’s, he saw that from this vantage point there was a perfect sightline to Annie’s driveway, as well as to the back of her house. With night-vision capabilities, a good scope, and—Luis thought—military training, a sniper could shoot Annie and, without switching position, take a shot at Odilia as well.
The genius move was in using a pistol. With the pistol rounds recovered during the autopsy, they wouldn’t need the whole police force in on it, just a single forensic tech, who could fudge the speed at which the bullet entered Annie’s body. He’d heard of hunters dropping deer with a pistol at five hundred yards. How much would the tech even have to fudge?
He was wondering what Michael Story might be able to do with this when the hairs on the back of his neck stood up. He was being watched.
The first shot echoed across the hill as Luis dropped to the ground. He felt the gentle push of hot air as the bullet whistled past. He didn’t wait for a second one. He pitched himself over the edge of the cliff, taking his chances with the rocks rather than the sniper. As he rolled, a bullet ricocheted off a rock inches from his face, sending sparks up around his eyes. He closed them tight as inertia carried him all the way down the hill.
He heard an engine roar to life, but he couldn’t tell from which direction it came. More bullets whizzed past, though they missed by a wider margin. He reached the bottom of the hill, got to his feet, and ran.
O Lord, please guide me . . .
It had been a week since his last confession. At any second he might die and wouldn’t be in a state of grace, absolved of his earthly sins. Maybe a priest would reach the hospital in time to deliver the last rites, but given that, the person firing at him might’ve been the same who’d killed a woman at five times the distance.
O Lord, please . . .
Maria awoke realizing she’d been dreaming about Miguel’s father, the one man Santiago swore to kill if he ever saw him again. This was a surprise, but the bigger one was that she wasn’t repulsed or annoyed with herself. The man was a lowlife, after all, who preyed on impressionable young girls who believed him when he used words like amor or corazón or siempre.
But this had been a nice dream, one that disregarded that his name was forbidden in her household and that he’d established a pattern for her of entering into abusive relationships. She allowed men who said the right things about family and were nice to Miguel to get her hopes up, until she’d withstand anything to keep the affair afloat.
Even if that meant looking the other way after catching her boyfriend with his tongue down the throat of a seventeen-year-old high school junior.
Come on, baby, that was for laughs. She just wanted to see what a real man was like.
So, why not a trip down memory lane with the kind of asshole she could see coming from a mile away these days? She’d been beautiful then. Everything about her body had been smooth, tight, new, and unused. No wonder Santiago had worried about her.
The dream was fading, but Maria wanted to luxuriate a little longer. She selected a memory to relive, a night when they’d gone to a small house party together. There was a lot of alcohol and a band set up in the backyard. The driveway and back patio were filled with dancing. She missed dancing.
They’d both been tired from the day and were doing big, silly Danzón-type moves in imitation of their elders, drawing disapproving looks from all sides. When the music suddenly changed to a merengue, he pressed into her. She answered by snaking her hips into his and pressing herself against his chest. He drew her in for a long kiss, and she remembered glimpsing an uncle or cousin she knew would report all this back to her mother, chapter and verse.
Christ, I was naïve.
Emerging from her reverie, she entered the kitchen a few minutes later. Miguel was looking out the front window, eating a bowl of cereal.
“What?”
“There’s a truck out front,” he said, pointing through the glass. “Guy behind the wheel hasn’t taken his eyes off our house. You want me to go talk to him, or you want me to call the cops?”
Maria remembered Luis’s words about corrupt law enforcement and shook her head.
“No, calling the police is the last thing I want you to do. Lock the doors and don’t go back to the window. If they think parking a truck in front of our house is going to intimidate us, they’ve picked the wrong family to tussle with.”
XV
Michael had been looking forward to an easy Saturday. Sure, he’d have to spend most of it working, but even though Helen had an open house to prep for, the kids all had playdates and activities.
But that’s when he got the call from DA Rebenold to be in her office by nine sharp.
At least there’d be no traffic.
“Jesus, Story,” she said when he stepped into her office. “You think I needed this today?”
&
nbsp; He saw the open file folder on her desk. There was a single letter inside with the seal of the Federal Bureau of Investigation at the top.
“I ran into Judson Nichols this morning.”
Shit.
“He said he felt it important to bring this to my attention directly before the bureau does so officially on Monday.”
“What is it?” Michael asked.
She pushed the folder over to him but didn’t wait for him to read it before launching in.
“Can you explain to me how it is that you contacted the Mexican federal police without first running it by me?” she asked. “More importantly, why you did so with regard to a murder investigation that, to my knowledge, has nothing to do with this office?”
Oh fuck, Michael thought. He’d debated telling her but knew it’d open a can of worms. When he’d called the Policía Federal about Santiago moments after it hit the papers, he hadn’t even given his name, saying it was a routine call from the LA district attorney’s office to see if they needed any assistance. He pumped them for information, they gave him even less than they gave the press, and that was it.
And here it was, biting him in the ass.
“Hello?” she asked. “This is a letter from the FBI chastising this department for circumventing them and potentially obstructing their own investigation into the murder of an American citizen named . . .”
She looked at him expectantly.
“Santiago Higuera.”
“Bingo. Who is that? And if you choose to lie, make it a good one.”
As it’ll be your last, Michael filled in. He hesitated a moment, shifting his weight as if to bolster himself before revealing a confidence. “I was approached by a member of the Los Angeles archdiocese and asked to look into it. I said that I would. They asked for discretion. I’m sorry I didn’t run it by you, but it seemed like such a small thing.”