The Traffickers

by Griffin, W. E. B.

  He tugged at the bag and with some professional pride added: “These really are better than the old ones, in every way. The old ones, they had zippers, and those could get really messy.”

  Payne understood what he meant. The zippers allowed for the risk of contamination of the evidence, or for the viewer possibly to be exposed to any biological or chemical hazard that may be part of the remains, or both.

  Not so with the new design. The bag—made of heavy-duty vinyl, oval-shaped and ringed with padded loops that doubled as lifting points and tie-down points—had two unheard-of features that made it unique and, more important, preserved the chain of custody.

  The first was that the top of the bag had a black flap running its length that, when folded back, revealed a clear vinyl viewing panel. One could examine the bag’s contents without having to open the bag, which was important, as there was no zipper on the bag.

  And that pointed to the bag’s second main feature: a chemically sealed main flap. Once the remains went into the bag and the clear panel was closed, a chemical reaction occurred as the seams touched, heat-sealing them securely closed. If someone opened the bag, it could not be resealed. A new bag, with a new, unique serial number, was required. And, as an added bonus, no zippers also meant no zipper teeth for bodily and other fluids to seep out through.

  Harris pulled back the solid black panel, uncovering the clear vinyl viewing one.

  “Actually, Javier,” Harris said, “what I meant was for you to show Matt the critter, not give a sales job on the damn bag.”

  “Oh.”

  The clear vinyl panel, despite being somewhat smudged on the inside by viscous fluids, did its job of allowing a remarkably clear view of the remains.

  So clear that, for a moment, Matt Payne feared that he—and everyone else—was about to see his breakfast again.

  But he gulped his coffee, pushing down the feeling in his gut while trying to maintain a detached inspection of the remains.

  He saw that the Hispanic male victim’s face was disfigured beyond belief. And from head to toe the outer layer of skin was blackened and blistered. There were crude cracks and gouges in his darkened flesh, particularly about the face and arms and hands, which at points were scorched to the bone.

  Scorched and seared, like a steak on a hot grill.

  It would take more than a little imagination to piece this guy all back together for an ID shot.

  Right now he looks like something out of a really bad sci-fi flick.

  “Javier,” Harris went on, “is that the one with—”

  “The circumcision?” Iglesia said, smiling. “Yeah.”

  In Harris’s peripheral vision, he saw Payne looking between him and Iglesia, trying to decode what was being said.

  “Give Detective Payne a peek, would you?”

  Payne thought: I don’t want to see what’s left of his damn—

  Javier Iglesia slipped his hand under the bag, at the point just under the back of the dead man’s neck, and lifted.

  —Oh, Jesus!

  Payne felt the lightness rise in his stomach again. It went away when Iglesia pulled back his hand and the neck wound closed.

  “Go on, Javier,” Harris egged him on, “tell him.”

  Iglesia looked at Payne and, clearly pleased with himself, said, “The dickhead got himself circumcised.”

  Then he unceremoniously flipped the body bag’s top flap back in place and rolled the gurney to the back bumper of the van. He aligned it there, and with a shove collapsed its undercarriage and slid it in beside the other gurney holding the other body bag.

  Watching Iglesia close the van’s back doors, Matt suddenly thought:

  . . . forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us; and lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, For ever and ever. Amen.

  Jesus. Where did that come from?

  Where else? From years of reciting the Lord’s Prayer—sitting in the same sanctuary as Becca.

  Then he thought: How bad can Becca be?

  Matt looked at Harris and said, “Was Becca, the girl in the Mercedes—”

  Tony Harris shook his head.

  “Nothing like that, Matt. Curiously, what hurt her is also what saved her from something worse. When the windshield blew inward and struck her, it appears to have also acted like a shield that deflected the brunt of the blast.”

  They walked back to the window. As they surveyed the scene, Harris put down his coffee and pulled out his notepad, flipping to a fresh page.

  “Matt, how about giving me that information you said you have? You asked about the Mercedes. Do you know the Benjamin girl well?”

  “Yeah, fairly well. We grew up in Wallingford. Went to the same church. And she was two years behind me at Episcopal Academy.”

  Harris started writing on his pad, then said, “Any reason to believe she’s involved with running drugs, specifically meth?”

  “No reason at all. And I sure as hell hope she’s not. Her boyfriend, however, is another case. . . .”

  “What about the boyfriend?”

  “I haven’t seen Skipper Olde since we graduated from Episcopal Academy.”

  “ ‘Skipper’?” he said, and spelled the last name aloud as he wrote.

  “Right. J. Warren Olde,” Matt furnished, “initial J—Juliet, though I have no idea what it stands for. Also known as Skipper. He’s my age, twenty-seven.”

  “Was he into drugs back then?”

  Matt shook his head. “Not that I know of. Mostly beer and whiskey, and a lot of it. He led Becca Benjamin, who’s a couple years younger, down that path. Not that she maybe wouldn’t have gone down it on her own. Just sure as hell not so far and so fast.”

  Harris nodded, then asked, “Is Olde the same as—”

  “Yeah. Olde and Sons, the McMansion custom home builders. Philly, Palm Beach, Dallas. His old man J. Warren Olde, Sr.”

  “Oh boy.”

  Matt heard something in Harris’s tone that suggested more than mere annoyance at the mention of another wealthy family name.

  “What ‘oh boy,’ Tony?”

  Harris didn’t respond directly. He looked inside the motel room, and Payne followed his eyes.

  “What in the hell happened here, Tony?” Payne then said, shaking his head in disbelief.

  “On the assumption that that wasn’t a rhetorical question, I thought I told you—a meth lab. They’re volatile as hell.”

  “But is that all that this is about?”

  Tony Harris shrugged, then said, “I don’t know if it’s ‘all,’ but it’s certainly a large component.”

  Payne nodded. “So were those two crispy critters in the body bags running the lab, and selling to Skipper? Or was it Skipper’s lab? Or had he come to throw them out of his motel? I cannot understand why he’d bring Becca, in Becca’s Mercedes that screams everything that this place is not, here. . . .”

  “Well, as you point out, there’re a number of possible scenarios. My money’s on the one that says your prep school pal—”

  “He’s not my pal,” Payne interrupted. “Becca, however, I do like.”

  “—okay, this Skipper guy, then, was in the illicit drug manufacture and distribution trades, specifically crystal meth. Maybe the girl, too. But we won’t know until we can talk to them. If we can talk to them. He was unconscious after he collapsed. And she was in and out of consciousness when the boys wheeled her out of here in the meat wagon.” Harris heard what he’d just said. “Sorry, Matt. No offense.”

  Matt motioned with his hand in a gesture that said, None taken.

  “Till then,” Harris went on, “any other pieces to the puzzle you can fill in . . .”

  Payne thought, If anyone can figure this out, it’s Tony.

  He then told him everything that Chad Nesbitt had said in the diner.

  Harris finished writing that in his notes and said, “You were right. You’re really close t
o this. Anything else?”

  Matt Payne made eye contact with Tony Harris.

  In for a penny, in for a pound.

  “Yeah, there is, Tony. I want in on this job.”

  “And I’d like to have you. But I thought you were going—”

  “No. That’s not happening. I’m a cop.”

  “No, you’re not,” Harris said.

  What—? Payne thought.

  Harris went on: “Matt, at the risk of inflating what already might be an oversize ego, you were a damn good detective. Now you’re a sergeant—a supervisor. And I sure could use you on this job—if, that is, I get it.”

  Payne nodded once. “Thanks, Tony. That means a lot coming from you.” He paused, then added, “Bari’s going to get this job?”

  Harris shrugged.

  Harris then watched as Payne reached for his cellular phone, scrolled the list of names, then hit CALL.

  “Good morning, Captain Hollaran,” Matt said when the call was answered. “Matt Payne. How are you, sir?”

  Captain Francis X. Hollaran was assistant to First Deputy Commissioner Dennis V. Coughlin, the second in command of all of the Philadelphia Police Department. Commissioner Coughlin had been the one to order the overworked and overstressed Sergeant Matthew M. Payne, who was his godson, “Matty, you’re taking some time off. Thirty days. You’ve earned it, you deserve it—and you need it.”

  Payne said into his cell phone: “Thank you, Captain. I appreciate it. I do feel better. Would it be possible to speak with the commissioner when he gets in?”

  He glanced at his wristwatch, then said: “He’s in already? Then yes, please. Tell him I’m on my way to the Roundhouse, and I need ten minutes of his time.”

  Payne paused to listen, then, making eye contact with Tony Harris, added, “Of course you can give him a heads-up what it’s about. Tell him my thirty-day R and R officially ended with a boom a few hours ago. I’m coming back to work.”

  [THREE]

  Reading Terminal Market Center City, Philadelphia Wednesday, September 9, 7:45 A.M.

  In a crush of rush-hour commuters, twenty-one-year-old Juan Paulo Delgado stepped off the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority’s R1 “Airport Line” railcar at the Market East Station. He followed a half-dozen of the commuters as they one by one passed through the Eleventh Street exit’s revolving door. On the sidewalk, El Gato pulled up the hood of his sweatshirt, covering his head against the rain that was starting. Two women in business attire and sharing an umbrella walked past, and he trailed them to Filbert Street, then into the Reading Terminal Market.

  El Gato had boarded the SEPTA regional railroad at the Thirtieth Street Station, which was about a mile to the west, just across the Schuylkill River. And it had been into that dark river, from the tree-lined eastern shore under the Thirty-fourth Street bridge, that thirty minutes earlier he’d unceremoniously dumped the headless body of Ana Maria Del Carmen Lopez.

  In the back of the rusty white Plymouth minivan, he had put her remains into a fifty-gallon black plastic lawn care bag and tied to the outside, around her ankles, a pair of twenty-five-pound workout dumbbells. Then he had poked a few holes in the bag to vent any trapped air. Once in the water, the bag had floated half-submerged with the river current for less than a minute, air bubbling out the vent holes. Then, when the bag had sufficiently filled with water, it had slipped toward the river bottom, a final series of bubbles popping on the surface.

  El Gato then had rinsed off the blood from his hands with river water and thrown his bloody black clothing into the brush, behind a cardboard box long ago vacated by a homeless person. He’d driven the half-mile to the Thirtieth Street Station, and there carried a backpack into the men’s room. After cleaning up at a sink, he’d gone into a toilet stall. He had removed his gun from the backpack, run its sling over his right shoulder, then pulled on a clean hoodie sweatshirt and, over that, a cheap navy blue vinyl raincoat. Finally, he rolled up a Philadelphia Eagles ball cap and slipped it into his pants waistband at the small of his back.

  The polymer-and-alloy weapon was a Belgian-made Fabrique Nationale submachine gun, Model P90, capable of firing nine hundred 5.7- × 28-mm rounds per minute, though its magazine held only fifty rounds. It was of a bullpup design, the action and magazine behind the trigger allowing for a shorter weapon with a barrel of equal length and accuracy as that of a longer gun. At just under twenty inches long, the P90’s futuristic styling resembled something right out of a science-fiction movie.

  He’d taken the gun off the hands, quite literally, so to speak, of a former business associate in Texas, who had acquired it in Nuevo Laredo from a low-level member of the Zetas, the paramilitary enforcement arm of the narco-trafficking Gulf cartel. Despite the P90 having been a prized possession, the former associate had had no further need of it. El Gato, in a crack house in South Dallas, agreed to the associate’s offer of the weapon as collateral against the unpaid debt he owed El Gato for a kilogram brick of sticky black tar heroin. Then El Gato pulled his pistol and shot the associate dead. Or, more accurately, shot up the associate. First with the nine-millimeter pistol, then with the P90. The burst of forty rounds was meant to send a message to others who might consider shorting El Gato.

  After he followed the businesswomen into the Reading Terminal Market, the heavy metal door slammed shut behind him.

  Juan Paulo Delgado reached inside his raincoat and pulled up on the right side of his sweatshirt. He readied the P90 while keeping it concealed under the raincoat.

  Tricia Hungerford Wynne—an attractive fair-skinned blonde of twenty-two years who stood a slender and athletic five-foot-ten—waited patiently in Reading Terminal Market. Tricia, whose family could trace their lineage back to Dr. Thomas Wynne, William Penn’s personal physician and one of Philadelphia’s settlers, was a Swarthmore College senior about to graduate early with a degree in education.

  As a teacher-in-training at West Catholic High School, she had already begun what she considered a life of influencing future generations. And it was for that noble cause that she stood on line five back at the busy glass display counter of Beiler’s Bakery. Beiler’s sold homemade Amish delicacies only on Wednesdays through Saturdays (no later than five-thirty each day, three o’clock on Saturday), and she’d come to pick up the shoofly pie she’d ordered. Tricia taught a cultural diversity class for West Catholic freshmen, and today’s emphasis was on the peaceful Amish of Lancaster County.

  I should bring some scrapple, too, she thought, grinning mischievously.

  Just to watch the boys turn green as they read aloud all the parts of a pig listed in the ingredients.

  The Reading Terminal Market had opened in 1893 as a farmers’ market. The massive riveted steelwork of the onetime Reading Railroad train shed now housed nearly a hundred merchants. The shops and restaurants were laid out on a grid, boxed in by Twelfth Street to the west, Eleventh to the east, Arch on the north, and Filbert to the south.

  Like every day Tricia could remember, the market was packed. Locals came regularly from their Center City offices; City Hall, with its statue of Willy Penn standing atop, was but blocks way. And tourists poured in from the nearby Marriott and Hilton Hotels and the Philadelphia Convention Center.

  And for very good reason, Tricia thought.

  She glanced around the market and marveled at the worldly mix it offered.

  In addition to the dozen or so merchants representing the Pennsylvania Dutch communities, Reading Terminal Market had many others representing the four corners of the world. Up and down the aisles, hanging shingles advertised Little Thai Market, Kamal’s Middle Eastern Specialties, Hershel’s East Side Deli, Tokyo Sushi Bar. There were Greek souvlaki and gyros, French crepes, Italian hoagies, and the revered hometown favorite not to be forgotten, the Philly cheesesteak.

  Then there was the market’s mascot, Philbert the Pig, a life-size bronze pig that doubled as a giant piggy bank. Tricia smiled at the thought of the money that visitors donat
ed to it being used to teach children healthy eating habits.

  Maybe next time I’ll just arrange for a class field trip here.

  Because of the way that the line had bent in the aisle, Tricia now stood almost exactly in front of the counter for the Mercado—The Reading Market Market, she thought, amused at the translation. She eyed the exotic variety it offered. Everything from homemade Mexican cheeses to burritos to even a chicken mole.

  Who knew a chicken dish could actually have chocolate in it?

  Behind a short wall that was the kitchen food-prep line, she noticed a black male of about twenty. He wore a white T-shirt and apron. He had his black hair in thick ropelike dreadlocks, a hairnet ridiculously overstretched on them, and Tricia then realized that he was Jamaican.

  A Jamaican working in a Mexican café.

  Now, that’s really what you call a melting pot of worldly people.

  He smiled at her, and she returned it as she reached over to a display. She picked up a jar and began to casually inspect it. It was salsa, which she knew to be a spicy sauce of chopped tomatoes, onions, jalapeño peppers, and more. The festive red lettering of the label read HOLA! BRAND HOT & TASTY TEX-MEX SALSA, A TASTE OF OL’ MEXICO VIA SAN ANTONE, TEXAS.

  The line for Beiler’s moved forward, and she returned the jar to the display, once more smiling warmly. The thought of such a product—one having originated in a country so distinct and different—being readily available in the urban belly of a city like Philadelphia was wonderful.

  (Her warm feeling would have been somewhat tempered had she turned the jar and read the tiny print on the back of the label: HOLA! BRAND IS A WHOLLY OWNED SUBSIDIARY OF NESFOODS INTERNATIONAL, INC., PHILA., PENNA.)

  Tricia made brief eye contact with Kathleen Gingerich, who stood behind the counter at Beiler’s. The shy and sweet sixteen-year-old was of slight build and light features, and of course, being Amish, wore absolutely no makeup. She was dressed in the traditional Amish conservative clothing—a simple ankle-length tan cotton dress, white cotton blouse, and a tan cotton head cover, its spaghetti straps tied in a tiny bow beneath her chin.