Morris’s partner showed up, and leaned against the banister with Lucas, and they walked through it all over again. When they were finished, Morris and Lucas walked off a bit and Morris said, “You know what the British say, this ‘fuck-all’ thing that they say? ‘You don’t know fuck-all about whatever’?”
“Sure,” Lucas said.
Morris looked back at Martinez sitting on the porch, still talking with his partner. “That’s what we got from her,” he said. “We got fuck-all.”
“I’m gonna go find this Latino guy he talked to last night,” Lucas said. “You want to come?”
“Let me talk to Larry, I’ll be right with you,” Morris said. Larry was his partner. While Morris was doing that, Lucas went back up the porch steps and looked at Rivera’s body. Martinez said he’d done this before, but Lucas thought that it didn’t look like he’d done it before. Why he thought that, he couldn’t say: but he thought it.
He walked back out to Martinez and said, “We have to notify the Mexican police. Can you do that informally, and then we could follow up? We need to know the official contact. Preferably somebody who speaks English.”
She nodded: “I will arrange that.”
And he asked, “Did David bring that pistol with him? On the plane?”
She shook her head. “No, he got it last night. If he hadn’t gotten it, he would be alive now.”
She’d driven to the meeting the night before, and the address was still on the car’s GPS. Lucas took it down and then said, “I’m sorry. I’m really, really sorry.”
Red-eyed, she started snuffling into another Kleenex, and he went to get Morris.
Morris drove a city sedan so bland that Lucas could barely see it, even when he was sitting inside it.
“Better than the death trap you’re driving around in,” Morris said.
Tomas Garza lived south of downtown St. Paul, just off one of the main commercial streets, amid a clutter of food, shoe, and auto franchises, mom-and-pop restaurants, carpet stores, remodeling contractors, and a couple of big box stores and supermarkets.
He wasn’t home, but his wife was, and worried when they showed her their IDs. “He is gone. I don’t know when he’ll be back,” she said.
“We don’t have anything to do with immigration,” Lucas said. “We need to talk to him about David Rivera. We need to talk to him right away.”
Morris played the bad guy: “If we don’t find him right away, we’ll have to ask the immigration people to get involved. They’ve got more sources than we do.”
Her face went blank, and Lucas added hastily, “We don’t want to do that. Rivera was hurt. We need to find out what was said at the meeting last night. Miz Martinez is cooperating with us, she’s back … uh…”
“How bad hurt?” she asked.
“Ah, he’s dead, Miz Garza. He was shot to death an hour or so ago, when he found these bandits who murdered the family over in Wayzata.”
She put a hand to her face: “He is dead? He was just here.”
“We know, Miz Martinez told us,” Lucas said. “That’s why we need to talk to Tomas. Somebody last night told him the kind of car and maybe the license plate numbers of the bandits…. We desperately need that information.”
She said, “Nobody knew the license plate numbers. But it was a silver Chevrolet Tahoe with Texas license plates, and they thought it was a rental car. This came from somebody else-not Tomas. I don’t know who.”
“I’m going to call that in,” Morris said.
“Let me do it,” Lucas said. “My researcher’s looking for that Nunez guy. She can switch over to this. She’ll have it for us in twenty minutes.”
Morris nodded and went back to Garza: “We still need to talk to your husband.”
“He works very hard for his family,” she said.
“We really don’t care about his status,” Morris said. “We really don’t.”
“He works at Europa Car,” she said.
LUCAS GOT on the phone and called his office, got switched to Sandy, and told her what he needed. “How long?”
“Not too,” she said. “Fifteen minutes. Half an hour.”
“Fifteen minutes,” he said. “The shooters may still be in the car. Push Nunez.”
“I can’t push both of them,” she said.
“Sure you can.”
Europa Car was a repair shop a half-mile down the street, a bunch of older BMWs, Mercedeses, and an ancient Porsche, covered with gray primer paint, in its parking lot, which was surrounded by a chain-link fence with concertina wire on top.
Garza was sitting in the outer office, nervously smoking a cigarette, when they arrived: his wife had called, and he’d decided to talk.
“We know the Tahoe and the Texas plates. What else?”
Garza took them through the meeting, didn’t mention the gun until Lucas asked. He looked away, then back and said, “David said you treated him like a child. This is a man who’d been fighting the gangs in a way you Americans just don’t know. You have nothing like this, except, maybe Afghanistan.”
Lucas and Morris looked at him, but he turned away again, and Lucas decided, what the hell, and said, “Okay. He needed the weapon. I’ll buy that.”
“If anybody pushes it, it could be a problem, later on,” Morris said. “I’m not saying it will be, but it could be.”
“Whatever,” Garza said, in what was almost a valley accent.
They talked for a few more minutes, then Sandy called back and said, “There’s a silver Tahoe out on the road from El Paso, been gone a week, to a man named Simon Perez, who showed a Texas driver’s license and credit card. It looked good, so I called this Perez in El Paso, and he answered and he says he doesn’t know anything about a car rental. Says he’s never rented a Hertz in his whole life.”
“That’s it,” Lucas said. “Put that out to every agency in the state, the description and the plate, and get the highway patrol looking down the interstates. They might be running for home. Tell everybody for God’s sakes be careful: they’ve now killed six people that we know about, and another two or three won’t make any difference to them. Put an alert out on that credit card. I want to know where and when they use it.”
“I’ll do that. About that International ReCap-I’m not sure, but I think it’s a tire place. They buy used tires here in the U.S., recap them, and ship them south, across the border.”
“Where’s their headquarters?”
“Brownsville, Texas.”
“Call them up and find out about Nunez-where he might be.”
“I did that, but I got a woman who says she’s an answering service,” Sandy said. “She can take messages, but that’s all she does. She won’t give me Nunez’s phone number.”
“So call the Brownsville cops, have them drop in and ask her. Those places don’t like cop trouble.”
“I’ll try,” Sandy said.
Lucas went back to Morris and told him about the car: “All right. Now we’re getting some traction,” Morris said. “They’re either riding in a car we know, or they’re walking around with a bunch of suitcases.”
“No traction on Nunez,” Lucas said.
He explained, and then they said good-bye to Garza-told him to stay away from street guns-and headed back to the crime scene. On the way, Lucas took a call from the BCA duty officer who said he had a Mexican cop on the line. “He says he’s Rivera’s boss. You want the call?”
“Yeah, give him the number,” Lucas said.
The phone rang again a minute later. A Comisario General Jorge Espinoza, a secretary said, and Espinoza came on a minute later. “David is gone, I’m told.”
