them, we’ll know in an hour. We’re looking now. If it was somebody in my department, I don’t know how they would have found out about the account. Maybe just stumbled on it. The important thing is: somebody had to have access.”
Rivera frowned and said, “Wait. Could it not be that this money man, who moves the money, the man who talked to you, this Gutierrez. Could not somebody have spoken to Gutierrez with, say, a blowtorch in his hand, and convinced him to give up the codes?”
Vaughn seemed to go a whiter shade of pale: “Yes. That would be another way. But…”
“What?” asked Shaffer.
“Then, wouldn’t Gutierrez be dead? If somebody forced him to give up the codes? And if he was killed or disappeared a month ago, wouldn’t the narcos have done something to protect their account? Maybe even stop putting money in it?” Vaughn was tentative, uncertain of his ground when talking about criminal behavior. He added, “If Gutierrez himself was stealing it, would he do it this way-actually depositing it in an account, then stealing it back? That seems way too complicated … too risky, when you’d have other ways of doing the same thing. You could just send it out to your regular investment accounts, but then divert a check to an anonymous account somewhere.”
“These are very good points. I congratulate you,” Rivera said. “But it seems that you are arguing that the criminal here is in your department.”
“I’m not arguing for it, I’m
Rivera smiled and said, “Yes, that’s likely. If twenty-two million dollars went away, plus more money that they can’t ask about, I believe they would be very angry, and would continue their investigation until they got to the bottom of it.”
Martinez said, quietly, “I think they would have some reason to come after a specific person. These people are somewhat crazy, but not entirely stupid. If they were stupid, all we’d have to do is watch each of you, and they would come to us. This, I do not think will happen.”
That was the first time that she’d ever said anything that in the slightest way contradicted her boss, as far as Lucas remembered. He looked at her for a few seconds, then turned back to Vaughn. “So let’s rip up the systems department. Mr….?”
“Vaughn.”
Lucas continued, “Let’s get a list of names, addresses, and phone numbers for the systems people, from Mr. Vaughn, and start running them through the mill. If he says that somebody must have known, I’m willing to believe that.”
Shaffer said, “My guys can handle it.”
“Okay,” Lucas said. “You might want to work out some kind of cross-checking strategy, get them to rat on each other.”
“We can handle an interrogation,” Shaffer said.
“Great,” Lucas said. “Let’s get it on the road.”
The whole discussion circled around Richard Pruess, but it would do Pruess no good at all. As they sat and talked, Richard Pruess was already dead. He’d been effectively chopped to pieces by Uno, Dos, and Tres, and now the three killers sat and looked at the remains of the banker’s body and Dos sighed and said, “The cleaning up is always the hardest.”
“True, but we have to do it,” Uno said. “The owner here, he’s a friend of the Big Voice. We cannot just leave it.”
They’d killed Pruess in the basement, on a blue plastic tarp that they’d bought at a Home Depot. That kept the mess somewhat confined. Dos, who was sitting on the basement steps, pushed himself onto his feet and said, “So, let’s get it done. He is making a stink.”
Uno was sitting in a lawn chair, a blood-spattered pruning saw next to his feet. He’d used it to cut deep grooves in Pruess’s shins. “They don’t know, do they?”
Tres said, “They don’t know anything. Nobody could be this brave.”
Pruess had denied knowing anything about the stolen money. Then, after a while, he’d agreed that he’d taken it, but they knew he was lying, to make the pain stop. So they continued the pain and he went back to denial, and all through the pain and the death, they got absolutely nothing useful.
“If he knew nothing, and if the family knew nothing…” Dos began.
“They knew nothing,” Tres said.
“Then what happened to the money? Somebody knows something,” Dos concluded.
“This is not really our problem,” Uno said. “We call Big Voice and report. We do what he tells us. Knowing where to send us, and what we ask, this is the Big Voice’s problem.”
They were all wearing gloves, to avoid the slop of the butchery, rather than to prevent fingerprints. They wrapped Pruess’s body in the tarp and bound the tarp up with duct tape, and when they were done, the body looked like an enormous blue joint. After dark, they would throw the body in one of the garbage dumpsters that seemed to be everywhere. After finishing some minor cleanup with paper towels and Lysol, they carried the body up to the kitchen and washed their hands and started talking about dinner.
“Pizza?” Tres asked.
“If you go get it,” Uno said.
They’d happened across a pizza place a few blocks away, on an avenue called Selby; a pizza place that had two Mexicans working behind the counter. They’d eaten there twice.
“I will go,” Tres said. “Anchovies?”
So Tres went down to Zapp’s Pizza and ordered two extra-large pizzas, one anchovy with mushrooms and olives, and one pepperoni, sausage, and corn. The man behind the counter told him that because of the dinnertime backup, it would be thirty minutes, and would that be okay?
“Is there a church where I can pray?” Tres asked.
The man behind the counter, who wasn’t Mexican, but was extremely white and wide across the shoulders, gave him a smile and said, “Man, you are a five-minute walk from one of the phattest churches in the United States of America.”
“Yes? Fat?”
“Yes. St. Paul’s Cathedral. They’d be happy to have you come and pray.”
That the church should be so close was like a sign, Tres thought, as he walked along the street. In five minutes, like the pizza man said, he came to a large but ugly church, sitting on the edge of a hill, like a frog ready to jump into a pond. There were thousands of churches in Mexico, and he was not intimidated either by the cathedral’s size or by its holiness, although the gray, stark walls were somewhat forbidding. He found the heavy fort-like doors open, and people walking out, trailing the scent of incense. A religious service had just ended, he thought.
He stepped inside, intending to find a pew, to recite an Ave Maria or two, and perhaps a Gloria Patri, and to check the place out. And inside, he found the most glorious vision of his life:
Three rose stained-glass windows glowed like fire, the Jesus and the saints and the martyrs reached down to him. He turned and turned and turned, in the church aisle, looking at first one and then another, then stopped, breathless, transfixed, as the saints began to move, like willow trees in the wind, gracefully, a dance even.
And Jesus called, “Juan…”
Tres got back to the pizza place an hour later, and the man behind the counter still smiled, but he was annoyed. Although the pizza was still warm, he said, “The crust may be a little crispy because you’re so late,” and Tres said, “I went to the church. Like you said. Jesus called my name.”
“Hey, that’s really awesome,” the pizza man said. “That’ll be thirty-eight ninety.”
Tres fumbled a couple of twenties out of his jeans pockets. He was still distracted, dazzled by the procession of Jesus and the saints. The pizza man handed him the boxes, and Tres went toward the door and turned to the pizza man and said, “Jesus said I will die soon.”
The pizza man stepped back, and when Tres went out the door, thought,
