The Investigator, page 21
“Oh my God! Max is dead?”
“I don’t have names or too many details, but somebody’s dead. The guy who killed Winks is apparently dead. I’ll try to get more, but I thought you should hear about this right now.”
“Thanks, R.J. We owe you,” she said. “What do you know about the DHS guy?”
“Only that he’s a big guy, and that’s about it.”
* * *
Hawkes didn’t have to think about the problem. She called Victor Crain in Monahans. Crain, groggy with sleep, said, “Yeah, Duran’s here, he’s bagged out in the back. He was drinking late, but he oughta be sober enough now.”
“You gotta get out to the shack and the truck,” Hawkes said. “You gotta burn them. Take some gas out there and set them on fire. There’ll be DNA and fingerprints all over the place, and the only thing that’ll wipe them out is fire. If you can’t get it done, the cops will be holding Winks and everything else over our heads forever.”
“If they were at Winks’s, they probably know about the truck,” Crain said.
Hawkes thought about the night she’d been out at the shack, and thought she’d seen a figure going out the back. She hadn’t been certain there’d really been anybody there, but now it seemed more likely. “Is Terry’s stuff still out there?”
“Most of it. We moved a box of clothes up here.”
“Listen: you get some gas and cruise the place. If there was a shooting, the cops’ll all be doing bureaucratic stuff for a while, making reports and all that. We got a chance. You cruise the place and if you can get in, burn it. Burn the truck, too. We’ve got no more use for it now. Can you get gas without buying it?”
“Yeah, I got an aftermarket tank in my truck bed, I can pull some out of that,” Crain said. “We’ll go check it out. I got a gas can. Where’s Rand?”
“He’s here at his apartment, but that’s too far away to get to the shack. You gotta do it.”
“We’re on the way,” Crain said.
He shook Duran out of bed, and the two men drove out of Monahans in the dark. They scouted the shack and the truck from the road to the north, saw nothing moving, then made a pass on the road in front of the shack.
“Still nothing moving,” Duran said.
“Could be somebody inside,” Crain said. He drove on by and continued to the first intersection, a half-mile away.
“You spooked?” Duran asked.
“Man, they killed Max.”
“Yeah. But if we don’t burn that place, we’re cooked. You and me. We gotta get back there,” Duran said.
Crain turned around, drove back to the shack, and they found it empty. They carried Duran’s boxes out to the truck, along with the AR-15, dumped all the paper garbage in the middle of the floor, piled some cotton blankets on top of it, ready to be burned.
That done, they ran down to the truck, hosed the interior with a pail of gasoline, and touched off the fire. They’d always handled the truck’s hoses with gloved hands, so that shouldn’t be a problem. At the shack, they broke the wooden kitchen bar off the wall, and stacked it on top of the blanket, along with the wooden chair.
The sun wasn’t quite up, but the sky in the east was getting bright when they moved the pickup, trailed a pail of gas out to the road, and set it off.
The interior of the shack exploded with flame, burning hot and nearly smokeless.
“Let’s get the fuck out of here,” said Duran, and they jogged to the truck and were gone.
Two miles down the road, Duran looked back. There was a wisp of smoke hanging over the shack, but he couldn’t actually see any flame.
“I think we’re good,” he said.
“Call Jane. Let her know.”
* * *
The day after the shootings was paperwork hell for Letty and Kaiser. A couple of reporters heard about the shoot-out, apparently from Santa Anna sheriff’s deputies, and called around, asking questions. Rhodes, the sheriff, held a brief press conference in which he said that federal agents had arrived at the scene just as Roscoe Winks was being murdered, and in an ensuing shoot-out, the gunman, whose identity had not yet been confirmed, was shot and killed.
In essence, a nothing-burger for the bigger city news outlets, and the small towns no longer had newspapers or reporters.
Letty and Kaiser made statements at the FBI offices in Midland, and to the Santa Anna Sheriff’s Department and led two Midland FBI agents and an ATF explosives agent to the tanker truck and the building next to it, only to find them gutted by fire. Nobody had reported the fires, probably because they were far out in the countryside.
The ATF agent, whose name was Burrell, sniffed at the building and truck and said, “Doused them down with gasoline and touched it off. Won’t be anything to work with, I’m afraid.”
The metal building was still warm from the fire, which Burrell thought must have happened before dawn. “But, hell, I’m no expert on residual temperatures. Seems likely that it wasn’t much of a fire and not long ago. If they burned it before daylight, the fire wouldn’t have been too visible, and you wouldn’t see the smoke at all.”
“There’s an outhouse in the back,” Letty said. “Couldn’t you get some biologics out of that?”
“Somebody could,” Burrell said, wrinkling his nose. “Not me. I don’t do poop. Ask the FBI.”
The FBI agents agreed that somewhere in the FBI’s ecology there probably was a guy who did poop and they’d look for him, if that became necessary. They took the VIN off the tanker truck, and before they left the site, it had been traced to Roscoe Winks.
“No help there,” Kaiser said.
Kaiser and Letty kicked through some of the rubble in the shed. The remnants of the mattress on the steel bunk smelled like burned chicken feathers. The cardboard boxes that Letty had searched had been removed, along with the rifle.
“What do you think?” Kaiser asked.
“Somebody tipped them off to the shooting at Winks’s, and they hustled up here and burned everything they couldn’t move. Didn’t need the truck anymore with Winks dead. We got them worried.”
“Where would they have gotten the tip?”
“A cop,” Letty said. “Cops would have been the people who would have known about this in the middle of the night, early enough that these guys could feel confident about coming out here and setting the fires…”
“Yeah. That doesn’t make me feel any better,” Kaiser said.
“Now we call Rhodes and see if he’ll let us in Winks’s office,” Letty said. She looked around the site. “There’s nothing more for us here.”
* * *
Letty and Kaiser, trailed by an FBI agent in a separate car, drove out to Winks’s early in the afternoon and found two sheriff’s deputies sitting in the shade of an oil tank, reading their phones. Both bodies had been removed, the deputies said, and the crime scene crew had finished their work.
Winks had used a Windows laptop, which was sitting on his desk, lid closed. His cell phone was sitting beside it. The FBI agent opened the computer, brought it up. The computer asked for a password.
“What do you do here?” Letty asked.
The agent was digging in his briefcase, and took out a thumb drive. “I’ve got an offline NT password and registry editor here… I can edit the registry and reset the password.”
Kaiser: “It’s that easy?”
“Yeah, it is,” the agent said. “Of course, if he’s encrypted his files, we’re out of luck…”
They stood around, watching as he worked: five minutes later, he said, “We’re in, and the files are not encrypted. Dummy. What are we looking for?”
“Let me in there,” Letty said. “Emails first.”
* * *
They found dozens of receipts for oil pickups by a half-dozen different oil service companies, but nothing that suggested a connection to the suppliers of the oil, the thieves. Winks had saved a number of websites, but all but one were commercial and routine. The FBI agent pointed to a link in the browser and said, “Click on this.”
They did, and found it led to an empty website.
“I’m thinking what they did was, they talked here,” he said. “Whoever is on the other end wiped it out after every conversation. Or Winks did.”
“Why do you think that?” Kaiser asked.
Letty: “Because of the website ID.”
“Exactly,” the agent said. “Fifteen random numbers and letters dot com. Not something anyone would find by accident. The only way you could find it would be if you came to this machine, or the other one, and found it like we did. But with nothing there… we’re shut out.”
“What about his cell phone?”
“That will take a while, unless you find something written down somewhere. We’ll have to go fight Apple about it.”
“Damn it,” Letty said. “You know what we’re talking about here. These people may be getting ready to blow something up. Why don’t you tell Apple that?”
“We will. Today. Is there anything else I can help you with?”
“How about recovering deleted files? Deleted emails.”
“I can try to go to his ISP for that… He’s not in any cloud that I can see, so it’s not up there. The ISP, you know, we’re dealing with sticky bureaucracies here. Sometimes they don’t even answer the phone.”
“Not even for the FBI?”
“We can get to them eventually, but it can take time. I’ll push it as hard as I can.”
* * *
Winks’s office gave up nothing useful. Letty called the sheriff and asked him to contact the state patrol to see if anyone whose name they had—Sawyer, Duran, Crain, Low—had any traffic tickets of any kind, from anywhere.
Rhodes called back and said that Sawyer had gotten a speeding ticket in the past twelve months in El Paso. “You going down there?”
“Actually, I think we’ve seen something about El Paso,” Letty said. “I’ve got to read through my notes.”
“If you go, take it easy down there, girl. Things can get rough on the border.”
“But not in Santa Anna County?”
“We’re peace-loving folks here, by and large,” Rhodes said. “With a few outliers.”
* * *
“Are we going to El Paso?” Kaiser asked.
“Those guys spent a lot of time down there,” Letty said. “It’s probably the headquarters of this Jeep militia. I mean, the militia patrols the border and the border isn’t here. This was the moneymaker.”
“So we go down there and talk to who?” Kaiser asked. Then, “Should have a big FBI office, maybe they’ve got something on the El Paso area militias? Wouldn’t be surprised if there’s a half-dozen of them.”
“Maybe the Border Patrol would have something. Can’t be many militias that have a woman as a leader.”
“You know who’d have something?” Kaiser asked.
“Who?”
“Google. Or Bing.”
* * *
Google and Bing did have a lot of information on border militias, but none mentioned a woman as a leader, though there seemed to be a lot of women in the militias in general. “We’re gonna have to go down there,” Letty said.
They were sitting in the hotel lounge with Kaiser’s iPad on the bar. Letty got carded every time she ordered alcohol in Washington or Virginia, but the Texas bartender hadn’t even looked like he was going to ask. He slid a margarita across the bar with Kaiser’s beer, and Kaiser asked, “You’re only gonna have one, right?”
“Right. I don’t like alcohol, but this day made me thirsty. For more than water.”
“Good. Have one and quit,” Kaiser said. “I’d hate to see what you’d do if you were liquored up. Probably start fights in the parking lot.”
“My mother—my natural mother—was an alcoholic. She didn’t wait to get into the parking lot. She’d fight you right in the bar,” Letty said. “I’ve done some reading and some authorities think alcoholism might run in families. Not because of culture, but because of DNA. Something in the genes. So I’m careful.”
“I was an alcoholic for a while, but it was cultural,” Kaiser mused. “Right after I re-upped for the first time, with the Army. I was twenty-four, just made sergeant, thought about quitting, but the thing was, I was good at it and I liked it. I re-upped for six years and I started drinking. Like everybody else. This was up in North Carolina. Then some guys and I went to this crappy resort on the Outer Banks when we were on leave, I was with this chick who didn’t drink… We had this little cabin to ourselves and there was a garbage can out back. We weren’t cooking, we were eating every meal in a diner or restaurant, so I wasn’t putting anything in the garbage can. This girl would clean up my beer cans and throw them away every morning. Toward the end of the week, I picked them up myself one morning and took them out back and the damn trash can was half-full of beer cans. Just beer cans. I thought, Holy shit, I’m an alcoholic.”
“And you quit?”
“Not right away, but yeah. Then I got made a staff sergeant and I was already Ranger-qualified, and decided to try out for Delta. And I made it. Culture changed. Figured I could drink two beers a day and I’ve stuck to that.”
“No women in Delta,” Letty said.
“No, but there are in the CIA’s Special Operations Group. Some Delta guys wind up there, if they’re smart enough. Tough bunch.”
“You never were?”
“No. SOG is usually small missions, a team taking out one particular target, or maybe exfiltrating somebody from hostile territory,” Kaiser said. “If you think about them as assassins, you wouldn’t be far wrong. Or, sometimes, Boy Scouts, doing a good deed. I was more interested in bigger actions. Taking and holding something until the Rangers get there. Cleaning out a town. That kind of thing.”
“You ever get shot?”
“No, not shot. Wounded, twice, shrapnel. Walked back with the team once. The other time, they medevacked me, gave me a painkiller lollipop while they flew me in to a hospital. Assholes got me in the back of the left leg and across my butt and up my back, almost to my shoulder. Bleeding like crazy; medic stuffed bandages into the cuts. It was an IED, an improvised explosive device, made out of an artillery shell and a cell phone. I walked right past it and probably thirty or forty yards down the road before it was set off. Killed two of the team outright, wounded four of us.”
“My God. That sounds…”
“What?”
“Interesting.”
Kaiser laughed. “You better stay away from SOG. They’d get you killed for sure. When Sawyer was shooting at you, you stood there shooting back like bullets was flies, like you were going to live forever.”
“Hey. I had one eye exposed, and my hand. He never saw me,” Letty said. “And I’m sorry about bumping you off-line. That won’t happen again.”
“Yeah, well.” He laughed again. “You sorta scare me, man.”
“Don’t mean to,” Letty said.
“I know, but you do,” Kaiser said. “I don’t want to be there if you get killed.”
“Huh. So—El Paso?”
“You’re running this boat. If you say so, it’s El Paso.”
* * *
They met at the front desk the next morning, agreed they’d slept well, stopped a last time at the IHOP for pancakes and at a convenience store for a cheap Styrofoam cooler, ice, and bottles of water, and aimed the Explorer south down I-20.
El Paso was almost due west of Midland, but they had to drive four hours first southwest and then northwest to get there, interstate all the way, I-20 and I-10. The landscape changed, the plains dwindling in the rearview mirror, sere, dirty brown mountains poking up along the highway, cut by the Rio Grande, which defined the greater El Paso area. El Paso sat on one side of the river, Juárez, Mexico, twice as big, on the other; together, two million people, with a dome of haze visible for a hundred miles.
“The mountains here… They look like big piles of dirt,” Letty said.
“And hardly a ski resort among them,” Kaiser said.
Letty opened her laptop on the way, combing through her notes. After a while, she said, “I knew we’d run into an El Paso address somewhere along the way. The addresses I got out of Max Sawyer’s Jeep. Alice Serrano, on Pear Tree Lane. We could swing by her place on the way into town, see what we can see.”
“What do we know about her?”
“Almost nothing. Convicted of assault in New Mexico years ago, didn’t serve any jail time,” Letty said. “Nothing since then. She’s either innocent or guilty as hell but keeping her head down. What do you want to do?”
“I’m good to go, and it’s still early, so why not?” Kaiser said. “Dig one of those waters out of the cooler, will you? I’m getting dry.”
“It is dry,” Letty said, peering out at the landscape through her sunglasses. “And hot. I’d hate like hell to walk across this country.”
* * *
Pear Tree Lane was buried in a housing development of single-story brick and stucco houses with flat roofs built on gently curving blacktop streets. The houses, mostly earth-colored, had minimal lawns and little foliage around them, cypress trees here and there, some pines, an occasional palm. The backyards were tight boxes pressed against similar tiny backyards from the next street over.
They cruised by Alice Serrano’s house. An old Pontiac slumped in the left half of the short driveway, like it might have been there, unmoving, forever. The back window was covered with dust, and one tire was visibly low.
“Doesn’t look like the house belonging to a leader of the revolution,” Kaiser said. They continued down the block, around the corner. “You want to make another pass?”
“One more,” Letty said.
