Taken ec-13

by Robert Crais

  “That isn’t what I meant to suggest, Mr. Locano. If I sounded that way, I apologize.”

  He didn’t look mollified.

  “Nita told me you’re the go-to attorney when undocumented aliens are arrested, so I’m guessing you’re familiar with how your clients enter this country, and who brings them across.”

  “This is not something I’m going to discuss with you.”

  I pointed at the note.

  “Ask the coyote, Sanchez. Nita Morales saw the crash site when she was seven years old, and being smuggled into this country. She says it used to be a regular transfer spot where people brought north were handed off. Krista visited that same site this past Friday night, and it was the last time anyone has seen her. Today, six days later, I found this note and her driver’s license ten yards from the wreckage.”

  He glanced at the note again, and frowned. This time when he offered it back, I took it.

  “You believe she had contact with this person, Sanchez?”

  “Maybe, but I don’t know. Either way, she wrote this note for a reason, so I want to ask him about it. I need a first name to find him.”

  Locano nodded, but more to himself than me.

  “I would like to help you, Mr. Cole, but this business you speak of is not what it was.”

  “Are you telling me no one comes north anymore?”

  “Of course people come, but the guides I knew are gone. The old guides were a cousin who had come to work the seasonal crops, or an in-law who came to visit relatives. If you gave them a few dollars they would help you, as much out of friendship as for the money, but the cartels and their hoodlums have changed this. They patrol the roads like an army to control the movement of guns and drugs, and now nothing comes north without their permission.”

  “Including the coyotes?”

  “Transporting people is big business now. Groups from Asia, Europe, and the Middle East find passage to Central America, and are taken north through Mexico in large groups. The new coyotes don’t even call them people. They are pollos. Chickens. Not even human.”

  “Coyotes eat chickens.”

  “Not only chickens, but each other, and each other’s chickens. Do you know what a bajadore is?”

  “A bandit?”

  “A bandit who steals from other bandits. These are usually members of different cartels, a Baja stealing from a Zeta, a member of the Tijuana cartel stealing from a Sinaloa or La Familia. They steal each other’s drugs, guns, and pollos — whatever can be sold. They even steal each other.”

  “Sold. As in slavery?”

  “Sold as in ransom. These poor people have already paid their money to the coyote, then they are kidnapped by the bajadores. They have nothing, so the bajadores demand ransom from their families. I do not know people like this. When they are arrested, I do not represent them.”

  I felt my mouth dry as I took in what he told me.

  “Nita received two calls from Krista and a male individual, the man demanding a fee for Krista’s return. Nita transferred the money, but Krista is still missing.”

  Locano’s eyes grew darker.

  “Nita said nothing of an abduction.”

  “Nita believes it’s a joke or a scam. They only asked for five hundred dollars.”

  Locano looked even more disturbed.

  “This is small to you and a woman with a successful business, but it is a fortune to a family counting pennies. We are talking about poor people. A few hundred, a thousand, another five hundred. The bajadores know with whom they are dealing.”

  “It still seems so little.”

  “Multiply it times a thousand. Two thousand. The number of people abducted would astound you, but such abductions are rare on U.S. soil. Let’s hope Nita is right.”

  Neither of us spoke for a moment, neither of us moved as I listened to the voices in his outer office, his wife speaking with one of the younger attorneys.

  “Mr. Locano, you may not know this man, but you might know someone who does, or who can find out. Ask around. Please.”

  He stared at me, and I could tell he was thinking. He tapped the arm of his chair, then called to his wife.

  “Liz. Would you show Mr. Cole to the restroom, please?”

  He stood, and I stood with him as his wife appeared in the door.

  “Take your time. Wash thoroughly. It is important to be clean, don’t you agree?”

  “It’s important to be clean.”

  “Take your time.”

  Elizabeth Locano graciously showed me to the restroom, where I took my time. It was a nice restroom, with large framed photographs of the pre-Hispanic city of Teotihuacan in southern Mexico, what the Aztecs called the City of the Gods. It was and remains one of the most beautiful cities ever built, and one I have always wanted to see. I wondered if Mr. Locano or his wife had taken them.

  I washed thoroughly, then washed a second time because cleanliness was a very good thing, and it was right to be good. Mr. Locano was on the other side of the door talking over my request with his wife, and maybe making the calls I had asked him to make. I hoped so.

  I was staring at the Pyramid of the Sun when my phone buzzed.

  Mary Sue Osborne said, “This is your future wife speaking.”

  You see how they won’t quit?

  “What’s up?”

  “Okay, I went through her research. I didn’t see anything about anyone named Sanchez, coyote or otherwise. Sorry, dude.”

  This meant I was down to Mr. Locano. If he couldn’t or wouldn’t come through, Q coy Sanchez would go nowhere.

  I was thanking her when my phone buzzed with an incoming call, and this time I saw it was Pike.

  “Gotta go, Mary Sue. Thanks.”

  “No chitchat? No flirty repartee?”

  I switched calls to Pike.

  “Elvis Cole Detective Agency, the cleanest dick in the business.”

  “It’s worse than you thought.”

  I stared at the Avenue of the Dead while Pike told me.

  Joe Pike: six days after they were taken

  11

  Joe Pike watched his friend Elvis Cole leave the Burger King parking lot, then entered the longitude and latitude into his GPS. Pike was not using a civilian GPS. He used a military handheld known as a Defense Advanced GPS Receiver, which was also known as a dagger. The DAGR was missile-guidance precise, could not be jammed, and contained the cryptography to use the Army and Air Force GPS satellite system. The DAGR was illegal for civilians to own, but Pike had used it in remote locations throughout Africa, the Middle East, and parts of Central and South America. These were military contract jobs for multinational corporations, mostly, but also the United States government. The government gave the DAGR to him even though it was a crime for him to own it. Governments do that.

  Thirty-two minutes later, Pike slid from his Jeep onto a dirt road a hundred yards from the broken airplane and the overgrown landing strip behind it. Pike considered the airplane, then the surrounding land. The landing strip was obvious. The smugglers had smoothed a forty-foot-wide piece of desert for twenty-five hundred feet, pushing their rubble into a low berm along the runway’s length. Now, all these years later, though the creosote bushes and bunchgrass returned, the landing strip created an unnaturally flat table of land with an unnaturally straight edge.

  Pike took a deep breath, and waited for the desert’s silence. The Jeep ticked and pinged, but the desert swallowed these sounds as deserts will do, muting them with its emptiness. Deserts held an emptiness that could not be filled, and as the metal cooled, the pops and knocks slowed like a clock running down until the desert was silent.

  Pike took another breath, expanding his lungs ever farther, and slowed his heart. Forty-four beats per minute. Forty-two. Forty. Pike wanted to be as still and silent as the desert. The best hunters were one with the land.

  Pike made his way through the cholla and creosote, and quickly located the remains of the fire Cole described and the tire print marked with an
E. This would be Trehorn’s track, with his friend’s track next to it. Pike thought of these tracks as “friendlies,” and would ignore them if he saw them elsewhere in the area.

  Once the two friendly tracks were identified, Pike searched for the oversized quad tracks Cole described. These signs were not easy to find, the way you could see tracks on a sandy beach. The desert hardpack was made of shale plates scattered with sand, rocks, and sun-baked dirt. Though an occasional puddle of sandy soil held a clear track, the signs Pike found were mostly a few inches of thin line on a rock or a shadow pressed into the sand.

  Pike worked carefully, and did not hurry. He eased into a push-up position, lowered his head, then changed position and lowered himself again. During his contract years, he was often hired to protect African villages and farm collectives from raiders and poachers. These missions involved tracking dangerous men through vast tracts of mopane scrub or arid savannah. Pike hired Masai warriors to track them. These were lean, mystical men who would study the tilt of a reed for an hour or touch a tree as if they could feel the heat left by a passing Bantu. They claimed the trees and grass spoke to them, and tried to teach Pike what they saw- be one with these things, and you will see without looking. Pike never heard voices or saw what they saw, but he learned what to look for, and that a man needed patience to find it. Joe Pike was patient.

  He found three nine-millimeter casings almost at once, glittering like small copper mirrors. He found clear prints left by two pickup-sized vehicles, fragments of three different shoe prints, and then found the quad. Cole was right-two big tires mounted side by side, each maybe ten inches wide. A large truck had been here in a place where large trucks did not belong. Pike studied the dual tracks, and noted they lined up with the centerline of the landing strip. He followed them, noting more fragments of smaller treads, some crushed by the quad tracks, others cutting across them. The smaller tracks didn’t follow a straight course, but swerved and curved into the brush. Some of these tracks showed a sideways skid as if the vehicles had been moving fast. Pike wondered why they had turned hard into the brush, but kept following the quad.

  Twenty yards past the dead airplane, the quad tracks curved toward the road where his Jeep now waited. Pike thought this was probably how the truck left, so he reversed course, and followed the tracks in the opposite direction back past the airplane.

  He was thirty yards beyond the crash when the clearing was suddenly crowded with shoe prints; mostly fragments-the crest of a heel, the edge of a shoe-but enough to see differences in their sizes and soles. The shoe prints overlapped as if many people had stood in a group. Pike lowered himself to study them more closely, and realized the shoe prints completely covered the quad prints. This meant the people were here after the truck.

  Something about this bothered him, so Pike backtracked a few feet the way he had come, and discovered the tracks leading to the road were clear. A few feet farther away from the road, and overlapping shoe prints covered the tracks. The line between shoes and no shoes on the quad tracks was clear.

  Pike realized he now knew the truck had come from the south, rolled up the centerline to this spot near the crashed airplane, and stopped. A group of people had gotten off or gotten on at the rear of the truck, after which the truck departed toward the road where his Jeep was now parked.

  Pike said, “Mm.”

  Pike searched for a depression where the truck’s weight would have pressed into the soil when it sat parked. He located the first depression, then two of the remaining three. He paced off the distance between the rear tires and the fronts, which gave him the wheel base. The truck was about twenty feet long with a fourteen-foot box. This was about the size used for local meat deliveries or rented to do-it-yourself movers.

  Pike was considering the size of the truck when he noticed a long arcing skid where one of the smaller vehicles crushed a cluster of furry cholla cactus as it raced into the brush. Pike left the quad for a closer look, and saw a path of broken ocotillos and creosote. The creosotes were large, heavy plants, and would have damaged the vehicle, but the driver hadn’t cared. Five more nine-millimeter casings were scattered along the hardpack.

  The smaller track was easy to follow. Broken shrubs and deep ruts where the tires dug for traction led in a curving arc through the brush. Forty yards from the landing strip, Pike found four deep sideways skids where the vehicle made a hard, sliding stop. A few feet away, Pike spotted seven nine-millimeter casings and three yellow shotgun shells. Someone had driven hard to this place, stood on the brakes, then fired off rounds. Two guns, so Pike guessed two men. Chased something. Caught it. Killed it.

  Pike circled the area, but did not have to go far. Twenty feet away, he found an irregular brown amoeba-shaped stain almost two feet across on the dusty shale. The brown had faded, and was almost the color of dust, but Pike had seen similar stains in similar deserts all over the world, and knew it had once been red.

  Something bad had happened here.

  Someone had died here.

  And the shooters had taken the body.

  Pike had been on the scene for one hour and twelve minutes. It was almost three o’clock. He marked the spot, then jogged back to his Jeep to call Elvis Cole.

  Elvis Cole: four days before he is taken

  12

  The bathroom felt cold when Pike told me what he had found.

  “Big group. Can’t tell how many, but more than ten. Two or three smaller vehicles came hard for the quad. Looks like three, but I can’t confirm.”

  “The quad was there first? The others came after?”

  “The quad wasn’t running. He was probably stopped when they hit.”

  “They followed him?”

  “Or knew he would come and waited nearby. He parked, people got out, the bad guys hit.”

  “So everyone ran, but got rounded up and put back aboard?”

  “Way it looks. At least one man went down. From the amount of blood, KIA.”

  “Jesus.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Anything else on the kids?”

  “No, but I can stay longer.”

  I was thinking about it when a man in his thirties with neatly trimmed blond hair opened the door and told me Mr. Locano was ready. He had a faint Russian accent and wore a UCLA class ring. One of Locano’s associates. I told Pike I would call back, and followed the man to Mr. Locano’s office. As before, he was behind his desk when I arrived and came around to speak with me, but this time we did not sit.

  He said, “There is a man.”

  “Isn’t there always?”

  “Rudy Sanchez. Rudolfo. Mr. Sanchez is well established, and is known to deal with groups.”

  “Thanks, Mr. Locano. This won’t get back to you.”

  “Wait. You’ll want his address.”

  He gave me a white index card on which he had written Sanchez amp; Sons Towing, along with a Coachella address. Both the address and the business surprised me.

  “He lives in Coachella?”

  “They tell me he’s an American, and the business is real.”

  I put the card away. Maybe a man in the towing business would be confident driving a large truck over rough ground, but maybe the overlap of business and large trucks was only a coincidence. Maybe Krista’s Sanchez and Rudy Sanchez weren’t the same coyote, and maybe Mary Sue was wrong about Q COY SANCHEZ, and the Sanchez in the note wasn’t a coyote, but a shy flirt who was after Krista’s boyfriend. Rudy Sanchez might never have heard of Krista Morales, and she might never have heard of or contacted him.

  I said, “I spoke with my associate while I was waiting. There appears to be evidence of some kind of abduction at the crash site.”

  “Evidence the girl was taken?”

  “Nothing specific to Krista Morales, no, sir, but what he’s found isn’t good.”

  “Then let’s hope for the best.”

  He pursed his lips as if wrestling with how much he wanted to say, then finally told me.

  “
Have you seen news accounts of the mass graves found south of the border?”

  I nodded. Mass graves containing scores of murder victims were sometimes found, and were so horrific they made national news in the

  U.S

  He said, “These were immigrants abducted for ransom, Mr. Cole. Bajadores leave no witnesses. Let us hold a good thought until we know more.”

  I thanked Mr. Locano for his help, and went out to my car. I wanted to talk with Pike about what he had found, but Starkey called as I got into my car.

  “I got your DMV on that Mustang. Can you talk?”

  “Sure.”

  “No one owns it.”

  “What do you mean, no one owns it?”

  “The owner of record isn’t a person. DMV shows it’s owned by the Arrowhead Trust. That means whoever owns it didn’t buy the car as an individual, but bought it through the trust or transferred title to the trust. Rich people do that for tax reasons.”

  “I know, Starkey. Thanks.”

  “I know you know. Just sayin’. You want the address?”

  “Yeah.”

  She didn’t give me the address Mary Sue found in Krista’s computer. She gave me a Wilshire Boulevard address not far from UCLA, on a stretch of Wilshire lined with corporate high-rises.

  “One-oh-eight-eight-six Wilshire Boulevard, tenth floor, Westwood, nine-oh-oh-two-four.”

  She repeated it without my having to ask. Though trusts can and did hold title to anything, Mustangs weren’t typically the type of vehicle held in trust. Trusts were used to shelter high-ticket items like yachts, Ferraris, and multimillion-dollar homes from inheritance taxes.

  I said, “Starkey, you at the office?”

  “Yeah. I’m done for the day. You want to swing by and pick me up?”

  “No. I want you to check a name for me. Rudolfo or Rudy Sanchez. Has a business in Coachella called Sanchez and Sons Tow.”

  I gave her the address, and explained his occupation. If Sanchez had ever been arrested in California, his history would show on the California Department of Justice system. I could hear Starkey curse as she typed, and I didn’t blame her. Officers couldn’t tap into the system any time they wanted for any reason at all. She would have to enter a case number and her badge number, which meant her supervisor would be notified of her request, and she would have to justify the search. Fabricating a reason for checking out Rudolfo Sanchez was no big deal, but the paperwork was annoying.