unless she poured it out and handed it to him. 'I feel fine,' he'd grumble, all the while looking pale and sweaty. He wouldn't hear of her mowing the lawn instead of him, and only by sending him to church with the kids Sunday and staying home was she able to sneak the job in. Even then, she lied and told him one of the neighbor's kids did it to earn a few bucks. In some ways, living with Granddad was as exhausting as living with her ex had been, although with Granddad she didn't have to worry about drugs or STDs.
On Monday, assembling for the morning briefing, her head was still half at home, worrying about what the kids would be doing and how Granddad was holding up. If Flynn hadn't nudged her, she would have forgotten her notebook.
'Here's the bad news,' the chief said, hiking himself onto the table. 'This is today's
Paul Urquhart snorted. 'I say we can do with a few less straphangers. They just grab all the parking spaces and make it so it takes ten minutes to drive up Main Street.'
'Because they're shopping at our stores and pumping money into our economy.' The chief folded the paper in half and laid it on the table. 'There were a lot fewer people around on the Fourth this year. The local businesses have a right to be concerned.'
'Does this mean the board of aldermen's gonna be on your tail, Chief?' Noble Entwhistle asked.
'You let me worry about them. The rest of you need to be prepared to field even more questions about the investigation. Here's the company line: it's proceeding well, leads are developing, and there's no reason to be afraid.'
'That'd be more convincing if we knew whether Amado Esfuentes was snatched or not,' Eric McCrea pointed out.
'Which brings me to the good news. We've got ballistics on the gun found in Esfuentes' backpack.'
'You're kidding,' Lyle MacAuley said, from his position propping up the whiteboard. 'Less'n two weeks? How much extra did you grease 'em?'
The chief grinned. 'As Noble guessed, the mayor and the board of aldermen were screaming at me. I suggested they'd be of more use screaming to our assemblyman and representative. I understand several phone calls were made.'
'Hah! Finally. Our tax dollars at work.'
The chief pulled a stack of papers from a folder and handed them to Flynn, who took two, for himself and Hadley, then passed them back. 'Here are your copies. The gun was a Taurus three-fifty-seven Magnum, not used in any of our unsub killings. We already knew that, because it wasn't a twenty-two. However, the CAF lab says there's a good chance it was a three-fifty-seven Magnum that fired on Sister Lucia's van back in April.' He nodded toward Hadley and Flynn. 'First District Anti-Gang Task Force says Taurus three-fifty-sevens are a hot item with various gangs in New York.'
'Mexicans?' MacAuley asked.
'Yeah,' the chief said. He flipped to the second page. 'Fingerprints matched those taken from Reverend Fergusson's house and identified as Amado Esfuentes's. There are several good prints from a second-unknown-handler, and a third set on the cartridges. Those prints are nowhere else on the gun, and the second set don't appear on the cartridges.'
MacAuley jotted down the info on the whiteboard. 'Guy number one was the last to load, he hands it to guy number two, who gives it to our missing boy.'
'That's my thought,' the chief said.
Hadley looked around. No one was sitting poised at the edge of his chair, waiting to ask the question percolating in her mind. She sighed. 'Chief, why wasn't the gun wiped down? If it's connected to the money, and we think the money comes from the drug trade, we're talking about professionals, right? Why wouldn't they take a basic precaution like getting rid of their fingerprints?'
'They're stupid. Or cocky,' Eric McCrea said.
'Or,' MacAuley said, 'they're amateurs.' He set the marker down and reoriented himself to face the chief. 'You've never liked the serial killer angle.'
'Damn right, I haven't.'
'What if what we're seeing here is the fallout from a turf war? What if we've got a group of guys up from Mexico on work passes who've figured out that selling pot is a lot more profitable than milking cows? Maybe they've got connections back home, relatives already in the trade in Central America or something?'
'Or raising it here,' Flynn said. 'There're always farmers growing plants between rows of corn or guys up in the mountains with microplots.'
The chief shook his head. 'Homegrown is a little cash on the side up here. The weather's too harsh for any kind of major cultivation, unless you've got a greenhouse, and that's a hell of a job to conceal.' He twisted to face the deputy chief. 'What about distribution? If somebody's going head to head with the big boys, they've got to have distributors up here. Those guys sell wholesale, not retail. CADEA thinks the various gangs that control the trade have been building up their networks for years. You're not going to replace that overnight, no matter how many relatives you've got growing the stuff down in Guadalajara.'
MacAuley flipped his hand open, as if throwing a card into play. 'The guys on the street will go with whoever has the product. You replace the wholesaler, the rest of the organization falls into line.'
'If you know who and where the dealers are. This isn't Brooklyn or Manhattan. This is the North Country.' He pointed, and they all stared at the big map, three counties and a state park the size of Massachusetts splashed out in pastels against the stucco wall. 'How the hell do you find the dealers in a territory this size? Not even counting the difficulties of being a Spanish-speaking alien in one of the least ethnically diverse parts of America.'
There was a long pause as they all stared at the map. Hadley thought about how she, moving into a town she had only known as a visitor, found a hair-dresser, a second-hand clothing store, the day-old bakery outlet. She had to ask around. It didn't seem a likely technique for would-be drug lords.
'Maybe someone's switched sides?' The chief and MacAuley turned their attention to Flynn, who looked surprised that he had spoken out loud. 'I mean, say you have the established distributor,' he went on. 'It works a lot like any other company, right? A couple CEOs at the top make a lot of money, a few middle managers make decent money, and the rest of them are living from hand to mouth. Then some competition shows up. Maybe one of the little guys decides there's a lot more potential for advancement if he takes what he knows and starts working for his bosses' rivals.'
MacAuley shook his head. 'The little guys know whoever shows up and gets the stuff out of the back of the truck. They don't have the big picture.'
'Kevin's got the right idea, though.' The chief reached for the coffee mug on the table beside him. 'A turncoat makes the scenario more feasible.' He took a long pull, then sat cradling the mug in his hands. 'The part that doesn't fit is the timing of the murders. One in March, one roughly a year ago, and one older than that. If it's intergang rivalry, it's the slowest conflict in history.'
MacAuley rubbed his lips with two fingers and nodded.
'Okay, send everything we've got to the First District Anti-Gang Task Force. See if something rings a bell with them.'
'You got it,' MacAuley said.
'Eric, you're continuing with background checks. See if you can get anything out of the CADEA.'
'Yep.'
'Everybody else is on patrol. I've called in Duane and Tim to handle the radar guns, so I want the rest of you very visible in town and in Cossayuharie. I want the community to know we're on the job, looking out for them.'
'What about the migrant workers?' Urquhart asked.
