He called her, and she said, “I got a call from Washington, a young boy from the Department of Justice said
“Did you thank them for consulting with us?” Lucas asked.
“You got a problem with it?”
Lucas told her about the DEA agent’s suggestion that they send any Brooks murder suspect to Mexico for questioning-and why, including the story about the agent who was flayed alive.
“You think that’s a true story?” Rose Marie asked.
“Who knows? You hear all kinds of shit coming out of the border. Wouldn’t surprise me, one way or the other,” Lucas said.
“Well, we’re not turning anybody over to Mexico,” Rose Marie said. “But be nice with these people. They’ve got problems.”
“You said they wanted to send an observer, but then you kept saying ‘they.’ How many are there?”
“One cop and his assistant,” Rose Marie said. “Cop’s name is David Rivera. I don’t know the assistant’s name.”
“Okay. When do they get here?”
“If their plane’s on time … they’re coming Delta from LA … about forty-five minutes,” she said. “It’d be really, really nice if some senior BCA agent was there to meet them.”
Lucas called Shaffer, who’d heard about the Mexicans coming in but had no details. “I’m going over to pick them up and run them out there,” Lucas said. “Have the bodies been moved?”
“Pretty soon now. Alex is talking to the ME’s guys now.”
“Hold off. If everything works, I’ll be out there in a couple of hours,” Lucas said.
“Why don’t you just have … you know … somebody else pick them up?”
“’Cause I want to talk to them about this whole Criminales business,” Lucas said. “Hope they speak English.”
Besides, he liked driving around town, looking out the window. You could never tell what you might learn. In this case, though, it wasn’t much-a few leaves turning yellow on maple trees. At the airport, Lucas locked his pistol in the truck’s gun safe, went inside, identified himself to the airport police, and got a piece of typing paper from them. He wrote “David Rivera” on it with a Magic Marker, and the airport cops walked him through security and out to the arrivals gate. The cop said, “With that sign, you’re gonna look like a limo driver.”
“But a very high-rent limo driver,” Lucas said.
“Well, yeah.”
They talked to the gate agent about the arrival, then Lucas found a seat while the airport cop wandered away. When the plane was parked, the agent came over and said, “They’re here,” and Lucas got up with his sign.
Rivera was one of the first passengers off the plane. He was a man of middle height, but more than middle breadth, with dark hair and a short, carefully trimmed mustache. He was wearing what looked like an expensive but ill-cared-for blue suit and a dress shirt open at the throat.
He looked at Lucas’s sign and said, in good English, “You don’t look like a limousine driver.”
Lucas introduced himself, and Rivera thanked him for coming and said they had to wait for his assistant, who had been riding in coach. His assistant was female, a pretty woman with dark hair and dark eyes, carrying an oversized briefcase and pulling a rolling carry-on suitcase. Lucas took the briefcase from her, and Rivera said, “She can take it,” and Lucas said, “That’s okay,” and led them down to Baggage Claim, carrying the briefcase.
There was a big bag for Rivera, and a second small bag for the woman, and since Rivera had made no effort to introduce them, Lucas said to the woman, “I’m Lucas Davenport. I’m an agent with the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension.” She bobbed her head and gave him a quick smile and said her name was Ana Martinez. Lucas left them at the curb outside Baggage Claim, retrieved the Lexus, pulled around and loaded them up.
“I need to know about the Criminales,” Lucas said as they left the terminal. “Who they are, what they want. What their reach is.”
As he was talking, Martinez pulled an iPad out of her bag and began typing into it.
Rivera said, “They are not quite the worst of the worst, but they are close. They began with a family, or a clan, in Sonora. At first, they were cross-border smugglers, mostly people, not drugs. What drugs they did smuggle, they took the other way, from the U.S. back to Mexico. Prescription medicine that was hard to get out in the countryside. Then, they began with the cocaine, going into the U.S. There were wars with other gangs, and their leadership got wiped out a few times, and they kept getting lower, and lower, and now they are like mad dogs. They will bite anything that moves. They have several hundred members, two-thirds on this side of the border, in distribution, one-third on our side, for acquisition, smuggling, and enforcement. There are still some members of the original family, but most of those are dead. It is not hard to find new management.”
Lucas mentioned the agent who was allegedly skinned alive and asked, “Did they really do that? Or is that mostly an urban legend?”
“The skin was sent to my superior-I saw it,” Rivera said. “Along with a movie. They did it, really.”
“Jesus.”
“He was not involved,” Rivera said. “I can tell you something else. You never want to smell a skin that has been three days in the mail.”
“So then what?” Lucas asked. “You went to war with the Criminales?”
“We were already at war-if we don’t kill them soon, the whole snake, they will be coming for me.” He looked out the window at the lush August landscape of the Minnesota River Valley. “I come here to the States as often as I can, to stretch out my life.”
Martinez passed the iPad over the seat and said, “E-mail from Luis.”
Rivera looked at it, then said, “I’ll call him later.”
She took the iPad back and typed something else into it.
Rivera had more background on the LCN, but it was all fairly standard gang stuff. “They are not innovative,” Rivera said. “They are just crazy, and what can you say about that? They don’t seem to care whether they live or die.”
His real information was not sociological or anthropological, but factual: he had names, fingerprints, DNA profiles in a few cases. “I can tell you who is who, what rank they hold, where they usually are, and what their job is, when we know that. I don’t have any secrets. I want everybody to know them.”
“I’ve got people from St. Paul shaking out Latino gang members. Let’s see if we can figure out who belongs to who,” Lucas said. “If we find a Criminales clique, that’d be a step in the right direction.”
“If these killers were doing what we think they were doing, they won’t be local, and the local clique won’t know them,” Rivera said. “They will be from Mexico, and they’ll go back to Mexico when they are finished here.”
“You don’t think they’re finished?”
“I hope not,” Rivera said. “If they’re not, you might catch some of them. If you do, we will ask for extradition through our embassy. Or, if there is no proof, we will ask that you deport them. Illegal aliens.”
Lucas said, “Huh.”
Rivera smiled at him. “We don’t get rough with them.”
“Good to hear it,” Lucas said. There was a little doubt in his voice.
“We pull down their trousers, then we bring in the garbage disposal,” Rivera said. “They always talk. Mexican men are very adverse … adverse, correct? … adverse to having their personal parts placed in a garbage disposal. So, as we work to get it plugged in and operating … we always have to work at it, we invent problems, to invent time for them to watch the machine … drop some walnuts in, to test it … They start talking. We never have to get rough.”
Lucas said, “Hmm.” Then, “We had three Mexican guys check into a hotel here a couple days ago, and then they took off.”
Rivera was interested.
