Faith asked, “Why did they take Michelle Spivey?”
Van said, “Carter took Michelle Spivey. We don’t know that Dash ordered it.”
Faith wasn’t going to swim in that bullshit again. She nodded to the stack of folders in front of Miranda. She’d only opened one so far. “What else does Pandora have in her box.”
Van nodded.
Miranda opened one of the folders. “This is the only photo we have of Dash.”
Faith walked across the room. Her stomach had turned queasy. She didn’t know why the thought of looking at Dash made her nervous. She was expecting a mugshot, but what she saw was a glossy snapshot of a college-age kid standing on the beach in shorts and a T-shirt.
Miranda said, “This was taken on the western coast of Mexico in the summer of 1999.”
Faith wasn’t buying it. “Mexico doesn’t seem like the right vacation spot for a future white supremacist.”
Van supplied, “Hate the sinner, love the sin.”
Faith studied the kid’s face—angular and goofy with a patchy goatee and mustache. He could’ve been one of her son’s annoying fraternity brothers.
Or he could’ve been one of the innocuous-looking young men in Charlottesville.
Miranda showed Faith another image, this one with the patchwork quality of an Identikit. “Here’s what the FBI came up with when we asked for an age progression of what Dash would look like today.”
Faith was not impressed. “How old is Dash now?”
Miranda shrugged. “Mid-forties? But we’ve done a hell of a lot with very little. Our Naval analysts believe, based on the landmarks in the distance, that the beach Dash is standing on is on Isla Mujeres. There’s technical stuff about erosion and the angle of the sun that I won’t bore you with, but they’re damn good at their jobs.”
Faith returned to the beach photo. “This isn’t a surveillance shot. It looks like it’s from a vacation album.”
Van pulled out her chair. He waited for Faith to sit down.
He said, “In June of 1999, a guy named Norge Garcia was staying at the Mujeres La Familia Resort with his wife and kids. He noticed a preponderance of single, young, white, male Americans hanging around the beach. As the name implies, this is a family resort. Real kid-friendly. The frat boys are usually at the adults-only places because that’s where the girls are. So, Garcia starts asking around—Where are these guys staying? What are they up to? Why are they here?” Van paused to ask Faith, “Are you following me?”
“Not really,” she said. “Why was this Garcia poking around? And how do you know so much about him?”
Van gave her an appreciative nod. “I know about him because I flew down to Mexico to interview him. And he was poking around the resort because, in 1999, Garcia was an inspector with the Federales. That’s Mexico’s version of the FBI with a dose of the Army.”
Faith knew about the Federales from a heavy addiction to Netflix narco-porn. “How does Dash fit into this?”
Instead of answering, Van nodded toward Miranda.
She slid another beach snapshot across the table. The lens had focused on a bunch of kids building a sandcastle. About ten yards behind them, the blurred image of a man was circled in red Magic Marker. Dark hair. Sunglasses. Stocky build. He was waving to someone behind the camera. Both arms in the air. More like a semaphore. His face was shadowed by a baseball hat, but it was crystal-clear that two fingers on his left hand were missing.
Faith leaned back in her chair.
Martin Elias Novak was missing two fingers on his left hand. He had blown them off while he was serving as an explosives expert in the United States Army. In 1999, he would’ve been forty-one years old.
She looked up at Van, searching his face for confirmation.
He shrugged. “Who’s to say?”
Faith motioned for him to continue.
Van said, “This mysterious, older white guy with the missing fingers—Inspector Garcia gets a bad vibe off of him. What’s he up to? He’s always got this revolving group of frat boys around him. He’s not a guest at the resort, but he’s on the beach right in front of it every day. He rents a chair and watches the kids playing in the water. Single guy. No wife. No kids. Garcia’s Spidey senses tell him something ain’t right. He starts asking questions, and the locals working at the resort tell him ‘Oh, don’t mind him. That’s just Pedo’.”
“Pedro?” Faith clarified.
“No, Pedo, like pedófilo.”
Faith’s stomach dropped. She could see the beach. The laughing children. The creepy middle-aged man intently watching the kids jumping over the waves outside of a family resort.
She felt herself starting to shake her head. Nothing in the Martin Novak briefing had even hinted at pedophilia. The man had a daughter he’d raised on his own. He’d served in the military. Yes, he was a bank robber and a murderer, but that made him a criminal. This new information, if it was true, made him a monster.
Van said, “They called him Pedo because of the way he looked at the children. Sometimes he gave them candy—no kidding. Sometimes he would offer to watch the kids while the parents went for a walk.”
Faith nearly gasped. “They let him?”
“It was the late nineties. Nobody knew that clean-cut, all-American men could be pedophiles. Priests were still saints. Hell, we still thought Columbine was a one-off.”
Miranda had another snapshot. “This is the only other image we have of Pedo.”
The man who had to be Martin Novak was turned away from the camera, but Faith recognized the same T-shirt and build from the earlier image. His three-fingered left hand was at his side. He was talking to a kid whose face was angular and goofy with a patchy goatee and mustache.
Dash.
Van said, “Pedo was renting a villa about three hundred yards from the resort. He paid cash, signed the rental agreement with the name Willie Nelson.”
He gave her a second to let that sink in. At the car accident, Carter and the rest of the men had given Will fake names taken from country music singers.
You didn’t get more country than Willie Nelson.
Van continued, “Inspector Garcia was told that Mr. Nelson was holding retreats for like-minded individuals. Every week, six Yankee frat boys would show up with their suitcases. At the end of the week, they’d go back across the border, then six new frat boys would show up in their place. It went on like that all through the summer.”
Faith had questions, but she quickly answered them herself. Before the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Americans only had to show their driver’s license to go through the border crossing into Tijuana, and no one was keeping records. There was no facial-identification software. No license-plate readers. No digitized passports.
“This is the villa that Pedo was renting.” Miranda showed another photo, this one of a two-story ramshackle house with a large porch. Red Swastika flags were draped over the railings like drying beach towels.
Van said, “Garcia couldn’t go undercover for obvious reasons, but he called in reinforcements. They started tailing the frat boys from the villa. What they saw was, most of them were hanging out with Pedo on the beach. One guy was sitting in the bar outside the bathrooms. A girl, nine years old, went into the toilet. The guy at the bar waved to his buddies on the beach. They waved back. Then the guy at the bar got up and went into the toilet.”
Faith’s hand went to her throat. “Did he hurt her?”
“The Federales stopped him before anything physical could happen. He had his hand over her mouth, but that was it.” Van said, “They dragged him down to the station. They put him in an interview room and he started talking.”
“Wait—” Faith had to know. “Was it Dash?”
“Bingo,” Van said. “Garcia put him in a room to sweat it out. When they got to him, Dash was ready to talk. He said his name was Charley Pride.”
Another country music singer. Also an African American, which had to be a racist, inside joke.
Van contin
ued, “Dash apologized profusely for being in the wrong toilet. Said he’d had too much tequila, didn’t speak Spanish, it was an honest mistake, he put his hand over her mouth because she was going to start screaming and he panicked. He was a real polite kid—yes, sir and no, sir and I’m sorry, sir. He told Garcia that he was a senior at UC-San Diego. Got a late start because he was in the Army. He came down to Mexico with a friend who wanted to attend the retreat. He claimed he didn’t know his friend was a Nazi until he got down there.”
“Garcia believed him?” Faith asked.
“Not at all, but even Federales need evidence, especially when they’re jamming up an American. The murder of Kiki Camarena casts a long shadow. So, Garcia had to kick Dash loose and close the investigation, but—”
Van held up his hand, telling her to wait.
“Two weeks later, Garcia starts to get annoyed about the situation. On his own, he goes to the resort. He dresses like a tourist. He sits at the bar and watches. This is what happens. Same set-up as before: Pedo on the beach with the frat boys. One guy at the bar. A girl goes into the toilet—eight years old. Bar guy exchanges a signal, but this time, another girl, maybe eleven or twelve, goes into the toilet. She comes out with the first kid. She takes her down to a shed where surfboards are stored, and she leaves the kid inside. The frat guys from the beach show up a minute later. One goes inside. The others stay outside and wait their turn.”
Faith pressed her lips together so she wouldn’t beg him to stop.
“Garcia was on his own. The guys outside the shed ran off the second he showed up. He grabbed up the frat boy inside before he could do anything.” Van stopped. “I mean, other than psychologically damage this poor little girl for the rest of her life.”
Faith asked, “What name did the frat boy give? Tim McGraw?”
“Garth Brooks,” Van said. “Which was pretty stupid. He was the biggest act on the planet at the time. It took about five seconds of pushback from Garcia before the guy says his real name is Gerald Smith, aged twenty-one, resident of San Diego. He tries the same story Dash gave him—‘Sorry, sir, I was a little drunk, sir, I didn’t know the girl was in there, sir, I thought it was a men’s toilet, so that’s why my jalapeño was hanging out, sir.’” Van shook his head. “Garcia brings in his bosses. He sends Gerald to holding. Next thing he knows, Gerald is gone.”
“Did the inmates kill him?”
“Unfortunately, no. Garcia thinks he was allowed to slip back into the US. Pedo disappeared at the same time. The frat boys ghosted. Garcia was vague on the details, but I got the feeling his superiors saw Gerald and Pedo as American problems, and figured America could deal with them.”
Miranda said, “As a coda, there’s not a significant overlap between the white supremacist movement and pedophilia or child molestation. At least not one larger than the population as a whole.”
“What a relief.” Faith wanted to go home and take a scalding hot shower to wash the stink of these men off of her. She hoped like hell that Dash wasn’t around any children right now.
Something occurred to her.
She asked Van, “How did you connect the Dash from the IPA to the 1999 Dash from Mexico?”
Van said, “I got Carter shitfaced. He was always tight-lipped about Dash, but something was different about him. This was around the same time Carter started pulling at his leash. We were halfway into a second bottle of Johnny Walker Red and he started telling me about Dash’s war service in these real hushed, reverent tones—how Dash was a Navy SEAL who did Black Ops until he knew too much and the government sent an assassin out to kill him and—” Van made a jerking off motion with his hand. “Anyway, I pried it out of him that Dash had a really old tattoo on his calf. It’s in script, yellow ink with a blue outline: Freedom Is Not Free.”
“That’s a military tattoo,” Faith said.
Miranda provided, “It’s predominantly Army. SEALs go for the frogman, bone frog, Seal Tridents, anchors, toughest of the tough. Back in ’99, regulations forbade a sailor from having a tattoo on his lower leg. And no Navy man would highlight the color of cowardice.”
Van took over again. “I ran the tattoo through the FBI’s biometric database, and nada. Then I ran it through INTERPOL. Usually, when you get a hit, you click on a link and you can read the arrest warrant or sometimes the case file. All I got was a name and phone number. Norge Garcia, Inspector Jefe with the Policía Federal.” He shrugged. “So I jumped on a plane and went down for a conversation.”
“He remembered quite a lot of detail,” Faith said.
“He still had the files, photographs, notes, statements. It stuck with him. That’s why he put the tattoo on INTERPOL. They didn’t have computers in ’99. As soon as he figured out what a computer was, he told one of his guys to enter in the information. Garcia felt like he’d missed something with Dash. Spidey senses. Even twenty years later, he still had a bad feeling.”
Faith sat back in her chair. Her brain was so full that she could barely hold it all in.
She told Van, “Novak has a daughter. She would’ve been ten or eleven years old around the time he was being Pedo on the beach.” She waited, but Van said nothing. “The girl who took the kid into the surfboard shed was around that age. Novak had his own daughter trick out little kids for him and his buddies, right? That’s what you’re saying.”
Miranda had one more photo. “This is the most recent picture we have of Gwendolyn Novak. Taken when she was nineteen.”
Faith looked at a photocopy of an ID card from Georgia Baptist Hospital. Gwen Novak was plain-looking, with mousy hair and sad eyes. Faith wanted to read something into the sadness. Gwen had been her father’s pimp. She had lived in a house full of pedophiles. There was no way she hadn’t been abused. But then she had become an instrument in the abuse of other children.
Miranda said, “Gwen was an orderly with dreams of going to nursing school, but at this point, she didn’t even have her GED. She already had two children, a ten-month-old boy and a five-year-old girl.”
“At nineteen?” Faith felt ashamed of her judgmental tone. She had been fifteen when Jeremy was born. And she hadn’t been raised by a racist pedophile. “What about the father of her children?”
Miranda shook her head. “Both birth certificates leave that area blank. The girl was eventually enrolled in an elementary school on the westside, but she was pulled out after a few months. The department of family and children’s services was sniffing around the baby. One of the neighbors suspected abuse. But Gwen followed in her father’s footsteps and dropped off the grid. No credit cards, bank accounts—not even school records on the girl. Joy, the daughter, would be fifteen now.”
“Joy,” Faith wanted to hold on to the name, to believe that Gwen had protected her daughter from her rapist father and his friends. “What about the baby?”
“We’ve got a death certificate. The cause is listed as SIDS.” She handed Faith the form. “Poor thing suffocated in his sleep.”
Faith didn’t take the form. It felt like bad luck to even look at it. She wanted to feel sorry for Gwen because of what she had gone through as a child, but the woman was grown now. She was no longer a victim. If she had given a pedophile access to her child, she was an abuser. Worse than an abuser, because Gwen knew intimately what it felt like to be a helpless kid who lived under the constant threat of rape.
Van said, “Thank you, Miranda. I know you’ve got another meeting.”
Faith told the woman, “Thanks. I mean, this is all awful, but thank you.”
“I hope I’ve been helpful.”
“You have.” Faith went to collect her bag, but Van stopped her.
“Could you hang back for a minute?”
Faith sat down again. She looked at the clock.
3:52 p.m.
Beau Ragnersen and Will were probably at the park. Dash’s flunky was supposed to meet them at four. Faith wanted to hit pause and tell Will everything she had learned. The military stuff was important. The
fact that Dash was a pedophile. He could use both to angle his way into the group.
Or Will could finally snap and just beat the shit out of the flunky until he agreed to take him to Sara.
The door buzzed as Miranda left. Van waited for the click, the red light to roll indicating that the room was secure again.
He said, “All right, Mitchell. Give me your best shot.”
She was already locked and loaded. “You had Naval Intelligence analyze Garcia’s beach photos to verify the place and date on his story. You’re telling me you can’t find experts to look at the stumps on Pedo’s left hand where his fingers used to be and match him to Martin Novak?”
“All of our stump experts are trying to break up the Dam Mafia.”
Faith stared at him. “We’re a quarter of a mile from a graveyard where a parking deck used to be.”
He could not be chastened. “Carter and Vale are dead. Hurley is in custody.”
“Thanks to my partner,” Faith reminded him. “I get the leaderless resistance and the lone-wolf stuff, okay? But Martin Novak’s bank robberies netted half a million bucks. Miranda said that 9/11 took coordination, discipline and money. From where I’m sitting, the IPA has all of that, which means they’re not lone wolves, they’re a full-on domestic terrorist operation. And I’m just going to say it: it’s fucking negligent that your boss is so busy covering her ass that she won’t let the FBI do its job.”
“Oh, hey, did you see this?” He held up the ID card on his lanyard. “I actually work for the FBI. This whole thing today, all the cloak and dagger, that’s the FBI helping local law enforcement. Because I work for the FBI. And I ran an FBI informant who gave me intel on Dash. And I flew to Mexico looking for Dash. And I’m talking to you right now because I, me, the FBI agent, want to find Dash.”
Faith probably owed him an apology.
The Last Widow: The latest new 2019 crime thriller from the No. 1 Sunday Times bestselling author Page 27