contact the Buckeye Police Department. Somehow Al doubted it, but that wasn’t his problem. If Rose Ventana’s family didn’t care whether she was alive or dead, why should he? What Al Gutierrez needed to do was go back to work on Tuesday and forget all about it.
But he couldn’t. He had saved her life, and as he’d said, nobody else seemed to give a damn. Not her family. Not Kevin Dobbs. No one.
When Al reached the intersection of Grant and the freeway, he had a decision to make. Keep going east and go home, or turn off and go to the hospital. He turned off.
26
3:00 P.M., Sunday, April 11
Tubac, Arizona
It was while he was eating his lonely Sunday-night dinner when Manuel Renteria missed Midge the most- Midge and her tamales. Theirs had been a mixed marriage. They were still newlyweds when Manuel’s mother had taken her Anglo daughter-in-law in hand and taught her how to make tortillas and tamales. When Midge was alive, that was what they usually had on Sunday nights-Midge’s homemade tamales.
Now Sheriff Renteria pushed aside the leavings of his Hungry-Man microwave dinner and sat at his kitchen table, surveying a stack of documents he never should have had in his possession.
Santa Cruz County was too small and too poor to have a crime lab of its own. As a consequence, any forensic work the county needed done was sent to the state crime lab in Tucson on a contract basis. Sheriff Renteria had been in the law enforcement business in Santa Cruz County for a very long time. He knew most of the people who worked in the crime lab, not just the scientists in the labs but their bosses and their bosses’ bosses. He also knew their wives and their kids-who played soccer; who was going to ASU; who had signed up for the marines.
In other words, Sheriff Renteria was connected. And when he called in his markers, the people at the crime lab delivered. In this instance, he had run up the flag on the Reyes shooting, even though it was not his case to investigate. Duane Lattimore’s evidence was not Manuel Renteria’s evidence, but he had it anyway.
Naturally, the reports from the crime lab went first to the DPS investigator, but after that and on an “unofficial basis,” most of that same information turned up on Manuel Renteria’s private fax machine at his home in Tubac. With any luck, Lattimore would never be the wiser.
Manuel Renteria knew, for instance about the results from the search of Jose and Teresa Reyes’s mobile home in Patagonia. Several plastic containers of grass, each in the neighborhood of three kilos and conveniently packaged for flat-rate USPS shipping, had been found on the floor at the back of the entryway closet. These were amounts that would automatically trigger charges that included the words “intent to distribute.” The sheriff studied that notation for a long time, trying to come to terms with the very idea that either Jose Reyes or his wife, Teresa, could be involved in the drug trade.
Manuel had known both these people for years. He had seen the couple out in public with Teresa’s two girls in tow on more than one occasion. They struck him as good parents-caring parents-and the idea that they would leave that much grass in a place that was so easily accessible to the girls didn’t fit.
Then there was the money. According to the crime lab report, a stash of over five thousand dollars in hundred-dollar bills had been found in a plastic container in Teresa’s underwear drawer. Only one set of fingerprints had been found on the outside of the container. Due to the location, it was safe to assume the prints would turn out to be Teresa’s, although no copies of her prints were currently available. A notation from Lattimore indicated that her comparison prints were in process, but Sherif Renteria wasn’t sure what that meant.
The crime lab was proceeding with an examination of the cash, lifting fingerprints whenever and wherever possible. The bills from the dresser drawer, along with the ones that had been found lying loose at the crime scene after Jose’s shooting, all had traces of cocaine and methamphetamines. As far as Sheriff Renteria was concerned, that didn’t mean much. He suspected that most of the hundred-dollar bills currently in circulation in southern Arizona had been used in drug trafficking somewhere along the way and most likely held the same kinds of trace evidence.
The presence of flat-rate USPS shipping boxes in the search warrant inventory rang an unwelcome bell. He remembered seeing one of those on the ground near Jose Reyes’s vehicle. Was that how crooks were transporting drugs these days? In a way that seemed smart-a lot like hiding something in plain sight-but if that were the case, how did they get the shipments past the various Border Patrol checkpoints where drug-sniffing dogs checked every vehicle?
Unidentified prints had been found on shipping boxes but not on the packaged bags inside the shipping boxes. The prints had been run through the Automated Fingerprint Identification System, but so far there had been no hits. That was odd. If Deputy Reyes had handled the boxes, his prints would have been there, unless he had used latex gloves. Since he was a police officer, a record of his prints would be in the AFIS database.
So whose were the unidentified prints? Teresa’s, maybe? If that turned out to be the case, three little kids were about to be left alone, not orphaned but worse. The very thought turned Sheriff Renteria’s stomach. He went into the living room, retrieved a bottle of Jose Cuervo from the liquor cabinet, and poured himself a generous shot.
Back at the table, he looked through the blurry facsimile copies of the crime scene photos, trying to sort out how the shooting had occurred. There was a gravel road, a narrow single-lane track where it left the pavement, which widened into a turnaround at the spot where the shooting had taken place. Situated at the top of a small hill, it was unofficially dubbed Necker’s Knob, because it was a known hangout for teenagers bent on drinking and/or screwing. After the shooting, the other vehicle had been able to drive away without leaving any identifiable tracks.
A battered lug wrench had been found on the front seat of Jose’s patrol car. It was easy to assume that had been used to blast the dash-mounted camera off its perch. Pieces of the broken mounting system had been found at the scene, but none of the camera. The footage in the camera most likely would have allowed the identification of the vehicle and maybe even the shooter. But how many crooks bothered with that kind of detail? Scared of being caught in the act, they were usually far more preoccupied with getting the job done and then getting the hell out of Dodge.
There was a copy of search warrant requests that had been submitted on all of the Reyes family telephones, landline and cell phone alike. Phone records, both incoming and outgoing, made otherwise invisible connections obvious. The fact that Teresa’s phone was included in the request suggested that Lattimore suspected her of involvement, at least in the drug movement system and maybe even in the attempted hit on her husband.
Initially, that had been Sheriff Renteria’s inclination, too-to assume that both Jose and Teresa were involved in whatever was going on. The evidence found in the search of their home should have reinforced that idea. Instead, the sheriff found himself moving in the opposite direction. This was all too easy; too pat. If it was a setup, Teresa had been targeted right along with her husband.
So who was behind it and why? Who was easier to answer than why. The people who called the drug-dealing shots in and around Nogales were members of the feared Nogo Cartel, based in Nogales, Sonora.
For as long as he had been sheriff, Renteria had maintained a separate peace with the cartel, due in large measure to the fact that his cousin’s son, Pasquale, a boy Manuel had once dandled on his knee, had risen to the top of the organization. Once Manuel was elected to the office of sheriff, he and Pasquale had hammered out a live-and-let-live agreement. The sheriff would keep his department’s efforts focused on the needs of the people who had elected him while leaving the drug war to others-to the feds, the DEA, and the Border Patrol. In exchange, Pasquale had agreed not to target Santa Cruz County officers.
Sheriff Renteria wasn’t someone who went looking for a fight, but if the fight came to him, he wouldn’t shy away from it. If the Nogos turned out to be in any way involved in what was going on here, then all bets were off. Sheriff Renteria would do everything in his power to take them down, starting with Pasquale. Renteria would turn whatever he knew about his nephew and his cohorts over to Duane Lattimore.
Having made up his mind, Sheriff Renteria stacked his papers and locked them in his briefcase. Then, after pouring and downing one last shot of tequila, he went to the bedroom and fell into a dreamless sleep on what he
