by Leslie Wolfe
Fletcher looked over his shoulder every few minutes, fearing that Captain Morales and the fed would return to grill him some more. He’d managed to disclose only some of the things he knew, but he was getting anxious, afraid he’d forget what he’d said to whom and when. He was good at keeping secrets, if no one threatened him. He was not secret agent material, not that he’d ever claimed he were or wished he’d be. No 007 in his future; he was destined to remain a nerd forever, albeit one with a cum laude degree from MIT and a solid influx of job offers hitting his inbox every week.
When Fletcher’s desk phone rang, he smiled widely and rushed to pick it up.
“Yeah, this is Fletcher,” he said, although he knew who the caller was and couldn’t hide the smile in his voice. Not many callers would hit his office line at three in the morning. Karyn was probably the first.
“Hey,” Karyn said, her voice chipper, filled with excitement. “I finished running the cell towers.”
“All carriers?”
“All of them,” she replied calmly.
“Wow,” Fletcher whispered. The feds must’ve had some real processing power to pull that off in only a few hours. Connections with the carriers too, to open access so damn quickly.
“I went back for the last two weeks,” Karyn announced. “I pulled tower ping history and looked for commonalities, for patterns in usage. The good news is, not many phones became stationary in the Mojave, at the far edge of a tower’s reach. Only one of them did, actually.”
“And the bad news?” Fletcher asked, knowing how the symmetry of good and bad news usually worked in a technical investigation.
“It’s a different one each day. All burners, no GPS enabled.”
“Argh… That means all locations are approximate.”
“Yeah, because all we have to work with is triangulation, not satellite positioning. For the latest two crime scenes, we don’t even have three towers to work off of; only the two along the state route, one east and one west of the crime scenes.”
“Resulting in a swath of terrain where he could’ve actually been, not an actual point. The intersection of two circles, not three,” Fletcher completed her thought. “Do those swaths include the crime scene locations?”
“Yes, they do. But, again, it’s a different phone each day.”
“Smart son of a bitch,” Fletcher muttered, thinking. Maybe the perp’s daily habit to get a new burner phone had a benefit after all, something the perp might’ve not considered. “What if we mapped where these phones have been, the days they were active? Can you see if they all, or at least some, visited a residential address in Henderson?”
“I got you,” Karyn said, typing quickly. “Your coroner’s estimations of the killer’s timeline in the desert were a great help narrowing down the cellular traffic in the area. Otherwise, we’d still be crunching.”
She typed some more, grumbled something unintelligible to herself, while Fletcher muted the line to slurp loudly from his freshly opened can of pop. He was intrigued by the FBI analyst; it was rare to find someone who was an intellectual match to his data and analysis abilities. Then he wondered how old she could be; was she more like his age? Or pushing fifty, overweight, and wearing bottle-bottom glasses?
Nah… her voice sounded youthful.
“Okay, so, let’s see. Between his visits to the crime scene, he went back and forth to a Henderson address about eighty percent of the time.”
“Not sure I follow,” Fletcher said, wanting to kick himself for becoming distracted trying to picture Karyn in his mind.
“I’ll explain. I looked at the days when there was any stationary cell phone traffic in the desert, pinging off of one of those towers. By stationary, I defined the parameter as someone not moving out of that tower’s range for at least thirty minutes. That eliminated all the highway traffic passing by, even folks who might’ve stopped to take a leak at the side of the road. With me so far?”
“Uh-huh,” Fletcher replied.
“That returned a number of eight days out of the past fourteen, and eight different burner phones. During each day, the perp’s phone of the day pinged at that tower at least once, twice, sometimes three times. And in about eighty percent of the visits, he went back to a Henderson residential area afterwards or came from a Henderson location. Always the same area.”
“Bingo,” Fletcher reacted, excited at first, but immediately deflated. “You don’t have an address, because it was triangulation, not GPS, I get it.”
“Tell me about this address you’re looking for,” Karyn said. “You have no idea what I can do.”
“I’m starting to imagine,” Fletcher replied. “I don’t have much; only that it has a large garage, and that it should be relatively isolated. An informant mentioned Klug shooting people there without concern for neighbors’ nine-one-one calls.”
“Keep it coming,” Karyn said, typing quickly.
“I don’t have anything else. Oh, just one thing: Holt said to exclude the homeowners who are family people with kids and gainfully employed. Can you do that in a query? If not, I’ll weed them out by hand.”
“We don’t do anything by hand here, except make coffee,” Karyn laughed. “Sending you the list of possible addresses now.”
“How many?”
“Seven.”
Fletcher jumped off his chair with excitement. Seven! He could work with seven. He could look at them via satellite, have detectives do drive-bys and get a feel for those places, and look at prior history of activity or any red flags on any of them.
“Karyn, you’re awesome!”
“Not really, but thanks. I still owe you the mapping of GPS trackers coming from the same batch as your victims.”
“Any issues with that?”
“They’re mapped, here you go,” she said, pushing a screenshot of her system to Fletcher via the messenger interface. “But you can’t spot a pattern; I think I know why. It’s three AM. The girls are still working, scattered all over the city.”
He studied the map for a moment. Tiny blue dots marked the location of each girl, and Fletcher counted fifteen. Each dot was in a different location, sometimes two in the same place or close vicinity. Most of the dots lined the Strip, and one was a little south of the city, on a highway, probably in transit when the screenshot was taken.
Another one was in Henderson.
“Does this dot in Henderson coincide with one of the seven addresses?” he asked, holding his breath.
“Damn,” Karyn muttered, “why didn’t I think of that?” She fell quiet for a second, then shouted, “Yes. You have your address, Fletch. Can I go to bed now?”
“Nah,” he laughed. “What’s the fun in that?” He was delaying the moment he’d have to say thanks and hang up. “Um, maybe we can have a cup of coffee together? You and me?” he asked, his voice tentative.
There was a long moment of silence, and he almost withdrew his invitation.
“That could be a terrible idea,” Karyn said, the smile in her voice clear as day. “Yeah, sure, why not?”
She ended the call, leaving Fletcher smiling until he realized he could’ve googled her, instead of obsessing over how Karyn looked like.
“I’ve turned into a complete idiot,” he admonished himself quietly, running a search with her name. Then, happy with the results of the image he found, he sent a high-priority, flagged message to Captain Morales.
“Have a highly likely address for Meredith Holt’s location. Requesting warrant now.”
31
Territories
Forty-four hours missing
I’d been sitting in my car in the same place, my eyes scanning the loading dock’s door every few seconds, waiting. Nothing had happened in almost two endless hours. Not another sound or image from the camera attached to Holt’s pants. No one came, and no one left the plumbing store during the time I’d been watching it.
I put all that time to good use. Fletcher had sent me everything he could get his hands on from our
colleagues in Narcotics, and I started studying Snowman’s business. I had very little time to learn every aspect, every player, every influence in the Vegas underground trade.
I kept Fletcher on an open line while reading the materials he’d put together for me, and I asked the occasional question. I remembered what Holt had shared a couple of weeks ago about his undercover mission in Klug’s organization. He’d been deployed to identify how the drugs made it across the border from Mexico straight to the Strip without detection. He’d done his job; he found out they were shipping the powder in meat carcasses, the pouches slid under the ribs of the frozen animals. The dogs didn’t sense them, and even if they did, the presence of the meat discredited the dogs in the eyes of their handlers. X-ray didn’t reveal anything either, because the structure of the carcasses, flesh and bones, rendered blurry, intricate-pattern images on the screens, against which the packets were difficult to distinguish. Brilliant.
But that transport method had dried out after Holt plugged that hole in the system. The hundreds of meat trucks crossing the border every day from Mexico were now inspected with a different, more powerful type of X-ray machine and software that recognized geometrical shapes against all backgrounds.
And yet, white death poured in from the south, unabated.
I moved on to the next report, skimmed it, then read it again. It went in detail over the distribution of power in the Las Vegas drug trade.
Snowman reigned over the richest territory in the city that never sleeps and had direct access to its four million annual tourists because he owned the Strip. His kingdom encompassed the entire east side of the city to I-15, the Interstate dividing the city in half, north to south. The two halves weren’t equal in surface; the west side was broader, but tourists rarely visited that part of town. That area belonged to another slime bag, a Latino with an impressive rap sheet by the name of Carlos “Dry Bones” Juarez. Dry Bones had earned his street name once his pushers learned that he liked to take snitches and thieves into the desert, shoot them, and let the sun dry their bones.
There it was, the desert again. I didn’t retain that as an unusual coincidence though; with its proximity to the city and its extreme, deadly climate, anyone who was in the killing business used the desert as a dump site.
I remembered most of what I read from the days I used to troll the streets hunting for my husband’s killer. I knew Dry Bones really well, personally, because I’d interviewed him a couple of times in prison, where he was about to finish serving his nickel. Then he was back conducting business as if nothing had changed, beating the streets in his black Cadillac SUV with chrome wheels and ridiculously raised suspension. I also knew Bones’s right hand and best bud, Pedro “El Maricon” Reyes, doing time alongside his boss for a while, because I’d put him there after sending him to the emergency room for a little visit.
I flipped back through the digital pages, making sure I understood everything clearly. Every square inch of territory east of the Interstate belonged to Snowman, the affluent customers, the junkies who lurked around the casinos, the crazed-up tourists, the irresponsible youngsters who really believed that what happened in our city had a real chance of staying there. Snowman’s product was first class, cut with clean, decent fillers and priced accordingly. The product was so good, rumor had it that his network had many business clients who snorted a little coke to keep up with the demands of a high-intensity workload without fear of nasty side effects during quarterly meetings.
But the moment one crossed the Interstate to the west side where less coin hit the streets, the coke was cheaper, the clients poorer, and the boulevards not so glamorous. The price of a well-dressed hooker dropped by 50 percent, and a hit of cocaine dropped by at least 25. The sleazy, east-side clients were in Dry Bones’s territory, where heroin was nasty, meth was downright lethal, and coke was cut with low-grade fillers, likely to land first-time users in the hospital.
I frowned, looking and not finding a way into Snowman’s game. I didn’t see anything I could use, any name I recognized, any piece of information that could open the door into Klug’s organization.
I checked the plumbing store door one more time; everything was shrouded in darkness and silence. I closed my eyes for a fraction of a second, thinking. Where was all this coke coming from, and how?
Most important, what did drug dealers fear the most? The loss of a customer? Not that much; a new sucker was born every minute, and dope dealers were skilled at pushing free product in schools and clubs to get people hooked. But the thought of losing one’s supply, that was scary. After Holt had strangled the incoming flow of cocaine from Mexico, the entire organization Klug controlled had fallen into disarray for months. Dealers killed one another, ratted on one another, each desperate to be the first to get their hands on some product and keep the cash coming in. It took Klug a while to patch things up.
Who held supply in their hands, held power over the organization?
That was my way in.
“Hey, Fletch?” I asked, waiting for him to acknowledge. He’d been on mute for a long time.
“Yeah, go ahead,” he replied. I heard him munching on something crunchy and realized how hungry I was.
“Do you have any intel on the supplier? Who’s sending the stuff?”
“It’s the Sinaloa Cartel,” he replied quickly. “Same as before.”
“For Snowman, I get it. How about Dry Bones? Where’s he getting the poison?”
“Sinaloa,” he repeated, taking another bite of whatever that was.
“What? Both of them have the same source?” I asked, feeling refreshed at the possibilities unfolding before my mind’s eye. “How positive are you?”
“One hundred percent,” he replied. “The DEA gave us the name of their contact: Anado ‘The Don’ Cardenas. He’s pretty high up in the Sinaloa, this Don. A few years ago, the DEA had him confirmed as lugarteniente, a lieutenant, the second highest rank in the cartel. He could be a drug lord by now, or close enough.”
“How come he’s still drawing breath and pushing product into Vegas if we know who he is?”
“Eh, you know how it goes,” Fletcher replied. “DEA suspects, but can’t prove anything. Just like us, they need someone undercover to help them intercept a major shipment or put two or more of the top players in the same room talking business. Without that, we have nothing, and the perps continue pushing the dope across.”
“Get me anything you can about this Don, Fletch. I need to know how to get to him: phone number, location, everything you can get from your friends in the DEA. How would Snowman interact with him? How would our pal, Dry Bones?”
“I don’t have any friends in the DEA, Baxter,” he said, sounding deflated.
“Well, then, make some.”
32
Internal
Forty-five hours missing
Special Agent Glover stood in the dark, looking at the quiet street from behind the living room window sheers. Mrs. Sauceda was in the bedroom, and his colleague, Special Agent Rosales, kept her company. At times, wails and whimpers came through the closed door. As the hours rushed by, Meredith’s mother grew increasingly desperate, afraid she’d never see her daughter again, losing every shred of hope she had left.
Per procedure, they set up a base in the home of the victim, making it easy to intercept any incoming ransom call. After almost two days had passed without a call coming through, he’d given up all hope that the kidnapper was after ransom, or that a call was going to come in at all. He suspected Holt of keeping many critical details to himself, including that call.
He’d invited Internal Affairs Bureau Lieutenant Steenstra for a chat, because her notes were present in both case files he’d shortlisted as most likely to be related to Meredith’s abduction. He called her shortly after four in the morning, and the lieutenant promised she’d be there in thirty minutes. In anticipation of her arrival, Glover had disabled the doorbell, not wanting Steenstra’s arrival to disturb Mrs. Sauceda.
<
br /> The street lit up as Steenstra’s headlights appeared. The lieutenant parked alongside the curb and walked briskly to the door but didn’t get a chance to knock.
Glover held the door open for her, inviting her in. They shook hands, as Glover observed how perfectly professional Steenstra appeared, although it was still dark outside and less than an hour ago, he supposed she had been sleeping in her bed. She wore a metallic blue pantsuit tightly adjusted to accentuate her thin waist, and a white shirt with a raised collar that underlined her long neck and proud stance.
She took a seat where Glover indicated, at the dining room table, where two thick files were stacked and, on a coaster, an almost empty coffee cup.
“Some coffee, Lieutenant?” he asked, keeping the pot in one hand, and reaching for a clean cup with the other.
“Sure, why not?” Steenstra replied, eyeing the two files.
She took the cup from his hand with both of hers and nodded in lieu of thanks. “Why am I here, Agent Glover?”
He pushed the two files her way. “These two have your notes. We believe the detective’s daughter’s kidnapping is related to one of them.”
She opened the first file, looked at the name, then closed it and opened the second one, reading from it just as briefly. “I see. What do you want to know?”
“What’s your history with the detective? What’s your impression of him?”
“Detective Jack Holt is extremely independent and holds little respect for the procedure manual,” she said, weighing her words carefully. Glover could tell she was holding back. “He has a strong sense of right and wrong, thankfully, because he’ll stop at nothing to get his man. He’s not in the slightest way a political player or elbowing for advancement. He’s driven by the need to rid the city of people who break the law.”
“You’re describing the perfect cop, aren’t you, Lieutenant?”