“We joined the Florida Audubon Society. A hundred-dollar contribution, the woman wouldn’t shut up. There’s a list of local nature clubs on the back. With the logos. I marked the one that the boys spotted on that VW van.”
Hurtado flipped the brochure over. “Forest Planet Alliance? What is this, environmentalists?”
“That’s what it looks like, but who knows what they really are? There’s something else. Look at this.” He handed Hurtado a color photograph of a young woman with blond-streaked hair leaving the doorway of Felipe Ibanez’s mansion and said, “We’ve been taking pictures of everyone who goes in and out of both houses. This is Ibanez’s granddaughter, a woman named Evangelista Vargos. You see her shirt?”
“That’s interesting. Another connection, the girl belongs to the same group. And…?”
“Ibanez wants to knock off his partners. He knows this organization from his granddaughter-maybe he even set it up. The bitch is some kind of spy, say. He figures we’ll look into these killings, we’ll think maybe someone is trying to get a piece of the Puxto deal, someone from home, but this way he can lay it off on these Americans. The environmentalists are all of a sudden killing people who piss them off.”
Hurtado shook his head. “That doesn’t explain the Indian, though. And these American kids, I can’t see them doing these kinds of things to Fuentes and Calderon, not to mention getting past our boys and taking out Rafael. And Ibanez or whoever would know we’d never go for the idea that this came out of some nature lover club. No, what I think is that Ibanez brought a bunch of tough Indios up from somewhere as muscle and he’s just parking them with these American pendejos. Americans love the fucking Indios, and why should they make a connection? So he gets cover and a team of killers at the same time. That has to be it.”
“He must think we’re stupid,” said the other. “So…we take them out? I mean Ibanez and the girl.”
“No, there’s plenty of time for that. And we need Ibanez to run the timber and transport operations. For the time being. What we need to do is find those Indios. Take some people and check out this”-he consulted the card-“Forest Planet Alliance. See what they have, who’s associated, and so on. Low-key, Ramon. I don’t want blood on the ceiling yet, understand? Speaking of that, did you get that garage we talked about?”
“Yeah. No problem. It’s south of here, off the highway, very quiet.”
“Good man. And the machinery is there? If we need it.”
El Silencio nodded, rose from his chair and started to leave. “And Ramon?” Hurtado added, “Send the girl back.”
“Here’s the file,” said Morales, dropping two heavy cardboard folders with a thump on his desk in the homicide squad bay. “Knock yourself out.”
“You’re pissed at me, right?” said Paz, catching the other man’s tone.
“At the prima donna act, yeah. I come to you like a pal, I ask for help, and I get shit, and now you set up this…situation, where I got my boss’s boss with his nose up my ass, and I got no fucking idea where you’re going with this thing. And it would’ve been nice if I’d fucking known about you and Calderon beforehand, instead of looking like a complete and total asshole in there. I mean, I was your fucking partner…. ”
“Right, and I’m sorry. I apologize. And the reason I changed my mind is because when Calderon got it, it became a family thing. You don’t think I was blindsided, too? You’re a Cuban, you know how it works.”
“Right, and if my father got whacked, I would be the absolutely last person allowed on the case. But exceptions get made for Jimmy Paz.”
“That’s right, Tito. They do. Meanwhile, I am a fucking supernumerary mugwump on this case and when it clears, you and you alone will pick up the glory.”
“Assuming it clears,” said Morales, trying to keep a grin from forming. “A supernumerary mugwump, huh? You’re a piece of work, Paz.”
“I love you, too,” said Paz. “Let me read this shit, okay? It doesn’t look like it’ll take that long.”
Nor did it. Paz already knew the broad outlines on the Fuentes killing, but it was useful to study the forensic reports and the actual photographs taken at the scene. And there were details Morales had not shared when he’d discussed the case in Paz’s restaurant the previous month. They had found claw marks on the wooden railing of the balcony from which Fuentes had been hurled. They had calculated the weight of whatever had made the paw marks in Fuentes’s garden-a little over 453 pounds, and this was a puzzle. There was a report from the Metro zoo, from a Dr. Morita, attesting that although the cast of the paw print shown to him was undoubtedly that of Panthera onca, it was nearly 50 percent too large, nor had a jaguar of such a size ever been recorded by science: the largest males rarely topped 300 pounds. Dr. M. expressed keen interest in studying the beast should they ever secure it. I bet, thought Paz as he read this and turned to the interviews with the staff at the Consuela Company offices-Fuentes’s secretary, Elvira Tuero, and the three building security men. The police had constructed Identi-Kit likenesses of both men. One was a young kid, good-looking in a wispy way, with a scraggily beard and a nest of blond dreadlocks. The other was the famous Indian.
Paz studied this one rather more closely. Identi-Kit photographs all have a certain sameness about them and serve mainly to ensure that the cops don’t pick up someone of a different sex or race from that of the suspect, but this one caused a little chill in Paz’s belly. Like many detectives, Paz was extremely good on faces. He could summon up a fair picture of nearly everyone he had ever met, and while at the police academy had spent a good deal of time with the Identi-Kit reproducing faces from brief looks at photos of people on the faculty. He could do movie stars, too, to the amazement of staff and students both. The kit had recorded a man of uncertain age, but no longer young, with the broad mouth, high cheekbones, dark eyes, and bowl hairdo of a Central or South American Indian.
What caused the chill was Paz’s certain knowledge that he had seen this particular Central or South American Indian before. It annoyed him exceedingly that he could not immediately determine where, but this he put down to rustiness. One item he had expected was missing. Although the witnesses had all stated that the young white male had been wearing a T-shirt with a logo on it, no one had tried to reconstruct it or find out what it represented.
Morales returned, carrying a couple of paper cups of Cuban coffee, and said, “Oliphant said it’s okay to see Finnegan.”
“Great. What about this logo on the white kid’s shirt?”
“What about it? Kids wear all kinds of shit on their T-shirts-rock bands, concert tours, college teams….”
“True, but according to the secretary, this office invasion they pulled was a political action about the environment. The guy’s in an organization, it stands to reason he’s going to wear his organization’s logo, right? This Tuero woman, the secretary, said he was yelling about something called”-Paz leafed through a report-“the Puxto, whatever that is.”
“It’s like a game preserve in Colombia. The kid thought Consuela was going to cut it down.”
“Are they?”
“Not according to Felipe Ibanez and Cayo Garza. And your father. They got nothing going on down there. They said.”
“That’s not in the file. Or did I miss something?”
“It’s a lead that didn’t pan.” Morales caught Paz’s dark look and said, “I should have put it in the file, I know, I know, but it just didn’t figure that some tree hugger would chop a man up for some, I don’t know, failure of conservation. It didn’t fit.”
“You thought it was a coincidence that Fuentes had a screaming fight in his office the day before he got killed?”
“Since Calderon got it, I do,” said Morales, somewhat more aggressively. Paz realized that the man did not like being cross-examined by a civilian at his own desk, never mind that the civilian had once been a cop who’d got him into the detectives in the first place. Unfortunately, there was no help for this; if Morales had screwed up, and he had, he would just have to take his lumps.
Paz drank some of his coffee. “This is the Colombian gangster theory?”
“Where did you hear about it?”
“My sister. Finnegan told her, and somebody over in the county must have leaked it because Doris Taylor knew about it, too. What’s the basis?”
“Well, it’s obvious. Two identical killings of people associated with business in Colombia. When we just had Fuentes, it could have been anything, a cult, a random maniac. Weird and uncanny. With two, there’s a connection, plus the vandalization and jaguar shit incidents at all four of the Consuela principals’ houses. Someone is saying,
