Martinez had been born in the same kind of village that had given birth to Uno, Dos, and Tres. She had no more hope than they had, no more possibilities, but something primal, something in her soul, kept her going to school when most everybody else had given up. She learned very early, though, that while she was smarter than most men, men were stronger.
That was a very simple equation where she came from: you could be a young Einstein, but that wouldn’t keep you from getting beaten bloody, or worse, if you said something unwise to the wrong narco. She learned to keep her head down.
When her father went to the U.S. to work, her mother moved them to a slum in Ciudad Juarez. Drugs were everywhere, and gangs. She got back into school, drawn by one belief: that if you could graduate, you would “have it made.” She worked, kept her head down, a pretty young woman who was raped one Friday night by a low-ranking narco named Bueno Suerte, and then, for a while, was passed around the gang, beaten regularly, raped even more often.
Still, she was good at math, at numbers, at bookkeeping, and a year before she graduated, went to work as an accountant of sorts, for a mid-level marijuana exporter, a fat man named Chanos. While Chanos raped her occasionally, he protected her from anyone of lower rank. Sometime after she started with Chanos, she confessed to Bueno Suerte that she desperately missed his attentions. She would like to slip back in his bed, but if Chanos or anybody else found out…
Bueno Suerte was transfixed by the possibility of putting the horns on Chanos, and they conspired to meet one night when Chanos was traveling. She went to Bueno Suerte’s bed, and when he was done with her, and asleep, she took a hammer out of her purse and smashed his head with it. She was told later that someone had hit the boy twenty or thirty times with a pipe, or something, and that his head had looked like a pizza. She didn’t remember hitting him that often, but she did remember how purely wonderful it felt, as she did it.
She stayed with Chanos, and did well enough that the narco had a word with the school principal, and when graduation day came, she walked across the stage with the few of her schoolmates who’d gotten that far, and got the precious paper.
Later that year, Chanos committed suicide by cutting off his own head and putting it on his chest, and she was inherited by the new boss. Seven years later, when she was twenty-five, a narco named Cabeza de Madera, a member of the Criminales, suggested that she might have another potential. She listened to his suggestion and applied for a job as a clerk with the Federales. The skids had been greased, and she got the job, a short, quiet, pretty, head-down young woman.
Two years after that, at the suggestion of the Big Voice-Cabeza de Madera had had an unfortunate encounter with
She’d become a person of some value to the narcos, a chunky, humble, almost unnoticeable spy at the center of a Federale headquarters. And she continued taking classes, increasing her value to the Federales. She moved into a decent apartment, went to better restaurants, even signed up at a health club, where she did the stair- climber, became an exerciser-dancer, and went to yoga classes.
All of this taught her one great lesson: money was everything.
With the payments from the Criminales, she could even have afforded a car, although she wasn’t allowed to buy one-her Federale pay wouldn’t support it, and the purchase of a car might be looked upon with suspicion. Still, she took driving lessons and was eventually approved to drive government cars.
And one day, the Big Voice said to her, “There is an inspector, named Rivera. You know him. He is an unhappy man, we hear, with a loveless marriage….”
She allowed herself to be seduced. The sex meant nothing to her-she’d become numb to it as a teenager. Rivera, as it turned out, was an intelligent man, but harsh, and sometimes foolish. He deluded himself into believing that she loved him, or at least regarded him with great fondness. In fact, she disliked him, and that feeling grew over the years.
She had no trouble concealing that from Rivera. He believed, with great certainty, that women admired him without reservation. By the time she killed him, she was very, very tired of Rivera’s whole act.
In her room, Martinez sat up and let her eyes and mind readjust to the world. Five minutes later, she was reporting to the Big Voice. He said, “I will talk with the others. We did not see this possibility, though the death of Rivera had been expected for some time. But not by our hand.”
“A decision was required,” Martinez said. “I felt for some time that I was coming to the end with David. He had much guilt about me, and about his wife.”
“If it was going to end, then, better to have saved the children,” Big Voice said. “So: we will consult, and I will call back.”
When she hung up, she worried: Big Voice had not been approving. Had, in fact, seemed a bit chilly. Had she miscalculated? She had felt that she was coming to an end with Rivera. Was she coming to an end with the Criminales, as well?
Ivan Turicek drove to St. Paul, turned north on I-35E, then exited to an office that he’d rented in St. Paul under a phony name. He’d been willing to do that because he never expected to see the landlord a second time, and he planned to sterilize the place when he left it. It was a package drop, pure and simple. A dozen deliveries were coming that morning, another dozen in the afternoon.
There’d been no questions at the bank, nobody snooping around, but the cops were moving. Kristina had friends at Polaris, and on Friday afternoon had arranged to bump into them at their regular lunch spot, sat with them, and all the talk was of accountants looking at the computer system.
So the cops had gotten that far. Taking the step to Hennepin would be difficult, but not impossible. In the meantime, the gold harvest was under way.
The instructions on the FedEx boxes simply said to leave the boxes outside the door if there was no answer. There’d be no answer, but Turicek would be waiting behind the door for the FedEx man to leave. Four of the boxes were coming in First Overnight, eight more Priority Overnight.
Twelve more should arrive in the afternoon on Standard Overnight, Saturday delivery. Albitis was shipping them with a variety of priorities, hoping that they’d be delivered by different FedEx men, in separate vans, to confuse the issue of how many boxes were suddenly arriving at a place that had never before gotten any. None of them would require a signature.
Turicek was moving early in the day because he didn’t know where he’d fall on the FedEx delivery list. At the office complex, he parked in the lot, down a bit from the office, and spent a few minutes watching. The only activity was at a carpet place, where a couple of people came and went. Turicek sighed, got out of the car with his briefcase, and walked over to the office and let himself in. Waiting for the handcuffs, but they never came.
The office smelled like carpet cleaner and contained a cheap wooden desk, three inexpensive chairs, an old computer with a keyboard that Turicek got at a rehab store, and a TV set that sat on a built-in bookcase shelf. Whiteboards hung on two walls, with phony scrawled appointments they changed every time somebody was able to stop by. That was usually at night to avoid contact with other tenants.
There was no telephone.
Turicek locked the door, pulled on a pair of cotton gloves, and took a seat at the computer. The computer contained no files, but it was hooked into the Internet, paid through the same dead-end account that paid the condo rent. Turicek signed on and began looking for news on the murders in Wayzata: there was a lot of it, but everything he found he’d already seen. The cops were still focusing on Sunnie Software.
Killing time…
The first spate of the FedEx packages arrived an hour later. Turicek had been pacing back and forth between the front window blinds and the computer, saw the truck pull in. The driver knocked, perfunctorily, and started dropping the packages outside the door. He made two trips, and when he put his truck in gear after the last one,
