Rosarito Beach

by M. A. Lawson

  Mora left the concrete operations center and walked the half-mile path to the stables. He found Caesar inside dressed in an expensive suit and tie, but wearing rubber boots on his feet. He was talking to a groom who was holding the reins of a golden palomino with a white mane and tail, and the groom was nodding his head like one of those little bobble-head figures. Very few people had the courage to do anything more than nod in agreement when Caesar Olivera was speaking.

  Mora waited until the groom led the mare back to its stall before he approached Caesar. “I wanted to talk to you about the second person needed for the operation,” he said. “The most logical choice would be a man named Kevin Walker, who is head of the Marshals Service in San Diego. The marshals guarding Tito at the Camp Pendleton brig would never question an order from him. The problem with Walker, according to our psychiatrists, is that he’s guilt-ridden. He considers himself personally responsible for the deaths of the marshals in San Diego. He doesn’t care if he dies, and in fact, our doctors say it’s very likely he’s suicidal.

  “We could kidnap a member of Walker’s family. He’s divorced and has no children, but he does have a mother and a brother he’s close to. But I’m afraid, in his depressed state, he might simply kill himself so that he can’t be coerced and so his family will have no value as hostages. Finally, I’m worried about Walker because he’s started to drink heavily and alcoholics are unreliable and unpredictable.”

  “So if you don’t want to use Walker, who do you want to use? Someone who works for him?”

  Mora could sense Caesar’s impatience, but he didn’t allow himself to be rushed. Raphael Mora wasn’t a groom.

  “No. I could use someone in Walker’s chain of command, but I’m concerned that many of these people are the type who would call their superiors or the FBI. They are rule followers. I want a rule breaker. I want to use a DEA agent named Katherine Hamilton. She’s the woman who directed Tito’s arrest, and because of this, she would logically have some access to Tito. What I like about her is that she’s a . . . a lone wolf. She’s secretive even with her own people, she acts independently, and she’s bent the rules in the past.”

  “How do you know all this?”

  “I hired a woman to seduce a man who works for Hamilton, and when the man drinks, he complains about her. She’s very unpopular with her subordinates. Until she arrested Tito, her most famous case was the fatal shooting of Marco Álvarez in Miami. Do you remember that? It happened four years ago.”

  “Vaguely, but refresh my memory.”

  Mora did.

  “She slept with Álvarez for almost a year to get evidence against him?” Caesar said.

  “Yes, and then she killed him and three of his men.”

  “How would you control her?”

  “Approximately four months ago, Hamilton became the legal guardian of a fifteen-year-old girl. I’m still collecting information from a social organization in Cleveland, but it appears that Hamilton is the girl’s birth mother and until recently the girl lived with her adoptive parents in Ohio. She now lives with Hamilton. I need a bit more time to analyze the situation, but I believe Hamilton can be controlled through her daughter.”

  “You’ve been analyzing for months. How long before Tito’s trial?”

  “Five months. As you know, Tito’s lawyer tried to delay the trial until December but he wasn’t successful. But there’s plenty of time left for what I need to do.”

  “How’s my brother holding up?”

  “About as well as can be expected. He’s frustrated, but he hasn’t done anything to jeopardize his health—no hunger strikes, no suicidal behavior, nothing foolish like that. On the other hand, there’s really nothing we can do to make his situation more comfortable.”

  “I don’t want to make his situation more comfortable. I want him to experience what it’s like when you make a serious mistake.”

  “The good news is that the longer he’s in the brig, the more relaxed his jailers become. The general at Pendleton has stopped conducting weekly drills in case we attack the brig, and Tito’s lawyer has told me the marines at the checkpoints aren’t as cautious as they were in the beginning. The marshals, although they are more disciplined than the marines, have also become less vigilant. That’s inevitable after guarding Tito for almost five months. I must warn you, however, that if an attempt is made to free him, I believe the marshals will do as Walker told Tito’s lawyer: They will kill him immediately as payback for their dead friends, and then they will lie and say that he was killed during the escape attempt.”

  “Do you have the Russian chemical yet?”

  “It will be here this week.”

  “Do you know if it will work?”

  “No. I know what the Russians have told me and I don’t think they’re lying, but I won’t know for sure until I can test it myself.”

  “Okay,” Caesar said. Then he looked at his watch and Mora knew one of his special guests was coming for dinner, which explained not only his impatience but also the suit. Caesar’s . . . Mora didn’t know what to call it. An appetite? A compulsion? Whatever the correct term, it was the only weakness his employer appeared to have and Mora considered it a significant character flaw—and a significant security risk.

  “What about the woman, the informant?” Caesar asked.

  “Now, there I have some good news for you.”

  25

  When Raphael Mora heard that a coke dealer had seen María Delgato in a casino, he called the private detective agency in Seattle he’d hired months before to find the woman.

  The private detectives concocted a story that María had jumped bail and convinced casino personnel to allow them to look at security tapes. They found out that Miguel Delgato had been with his sister in the casino, and discovered two overweight white men in their fifties who looked like cops sitting with María and Miguel. Mora figured these were María’s handlers, either DEA or federal marshals, but he couldn’t imagine marshals showing such a lack of discipline as to bring María into a casino. He was betting the fat white men were DEA.

  When shown María’s picture, a casino cocktail waitress also remembered María and her little red dress; she’d even asked María where she bought the dress. María told her she bought it at a boutique in Port Angeles, and there were only a couple of boutiques in Port Angeles. The owner of the boutique remembered María, too, and thinking she was talking to cops and not private detectives, she showed the detectives the credit-card record of María’s purchases. The credit card was a VISA belonging to one Michael A. Figgins.

  Then the trail ran cold. Mora’s private detectives checked with real estate agents to see if Figgins had rented a house in the Port Angeles area. They visited other stores where María might shop if she was staying in Port Angeles. They did find the salon where she had her hair done the day she went to the casino, but the woman who did her hair couldn’t tell them anything about where María might be. She said María had told her she was visiting from L.A.

  A routine background check on Michael A. Figgins showed that he owned a home in Miami, so Mora sent men to Miami. They found out that Figgins had rented his house to a guy from the Dade County Sheriff’s Office and had not been there in more than a year. His renter said he never talked to Figgins and dealt only with the property-management firm Figgins used.

  One of Mora’s people, an Anglo, cozied up to a retired DEA agent in a Miami bar. The retired agent had worked with Figgins in Miami. Mora’s man claimed he was an NYPD detective on vacation and eventually steered the conversation around to Figgins, who he said he’d met when Figgins was working a case in New York. Three beers later, Mora’s man learned one significant thing: Mike Figgins liked to fish.

  —

  Buzz Thomas was one of the Seattle-based private detectives sent to Port Angeles. He was also a fisherman—and he had an inspiration.

  The area near Port An
geles is salmon-fishing paradise, particularly places like La Push, Sekiu, and Neah Bay. So Buzz started talking to fish checkers. Fish checkers are people employed by the Washington Department of Fish & Wildlife. They hang out at marinas, and when the fishermen come in for the day, the fish checkers make sure that what they’ve caught is legal. Using the same story they used for María, Buzz said Figgins was a bail jumper and he’d heard he was in the area. One fish checker, the one who worked the Neah Bay marina, recognized Figgins. He’d talked to him several times when Figgins and his two buddies—an older guy Figgins’s age and a young Hispanic guy—brought in their fish. The fish checker was shocked to learn that a nice guy like Figgins was a criminal but said he hadn’t seen him in several months. The last time the fish checker saw him, in fact, was about the time María Delgato disappeared from San Diego.

  Buzz’s boss told Raphael Mora that Figgins might be someplace near Neah Bay, which was all Indian reservation and little houses spaced miles apart up and down the coast. Mora looked at a map and Google Earth and he figured Neah Bay was the perfect place to stash María; it was as far from civilization as you could get.

  Raphael Mora knew he was close, so close he could almost smell his prey.

  —

  Buzz figured that if the Delgatos were someplace near Neah Bay, they had to go out occasionally for supplies. There were no major stores in Neah Bay—no big Walmart or a Costco or anything like that. The detective figured they probably did their big shopping in Port Ángeles, going once a month to buy in bulk the stuff they needed, but they wouldn’t drive eighty miles to Port Angeles if they ran out of coffee or cigarettes. There were only two or three grocery stores near Neah Bay, and the best one was a place called the Sunsets West Co-op in Clallam Bay.

  Buzz brought an RV over from Seattle—there aren’t many motels near Neah Bay, either—and he and three other guys staked out all the small stores in the area, praying that Figgins would need something from one of them. Buzz staked out the store in Clallam Bay himself. It was a long shot, but he couldn’t think of anything else to do and the Mexican who’d hired his firm didn’t appear to give a damn about how much money he was spending.

  A week later, Figgins drove into the parking lot near the store. He was wearing a baseball cap and sunglasses, but Buzz recognized him. He knew Figgins wouldn’t be inside the place for long and he knew he couldn’t follow Figgins, either. There wasn’t much traffic on the roads near Neah Bay, and a DEA agent, trying not to be found, would spot a tail in no time. But Buzz was prepared for this.

  As soon as Figgins walked into the store, Buzz took an object from his glove compartment, walked past Figgins’s car, dropped his keys on the ground—and attached a GPS device to Mike Figgins’s car.

  As Raphael Mora had said, he had some very good news for Caesar Olivera.

  26

  Mike Figgins’s cell phone rang, and he knew it was Kay Hamilton calling. Hamilton and her boss, Jim Davis, were the only people who had his number and Hamilton was the only one who ever called. She called every couple of weeks from a pay phone just to see how things were going—or maybe just to let Figgins and Patterson know that she hadn’t forgotten about them.

  A month earlier, two days after he took María to the casino, Hamilton called and Figgins’s heart, which wasn’t in the best of shape anyway, had started hammering in his chest. He knew—he just knew—that Hamilton had discovered the bone-headed thing that he and Patterson had done. He’d been ready to explain to Hamilton how that fuckin’ girl had been driving everyone crazy and how they had to do something to settle her down. He’d also been ready for Hamilton to tell him that his fat ass was fired and she was sending someone with half a brain to replace him. But all Hamilton did on that phone call was ask how things were going, and she’d actually sounded—for Hamilton—fairly mellow.

  This call was more of the same, Hamilton just asking if they needed anything, how things were going with the Delgatos, and giving him an update on preparations for the trial. She concluded the call as she always did, asking if he’d heard of anyone sniffing around, looking for María.

  “No,” Figgins said. “Everything’s fine up here.”

  It looked as if he and Patterson had gotten away with the stupid stunt they’d pulled.

  Thank you, Jesus.

  —

  Figgins sounded funny, Kay thought. And he’d sounded funny the last time she talked to him, too. He sounded nervous—and Mike Figgins was the least nervous guy she knew. He was usually so laid-back she just wanted to smack him. But it seemed like everything was going okay up there, other than María being a pain in the ass, which was normal. Kay tried to make soothing noises, telling Figgins that he and his partner just needed to hang on a little bit longer. She ended the call as she always did, asking if he had noticed anyone strange hanging around Neah Bay. She knew it was a dumb question. If Figgins had even an inkling that somebody was in the area looking for María, he would have called Kay immediately. Mike Figgins was lazy—and sneaky—but he wasn’t stupid. She hoped.

  Kay was bored. She’d been spending way too much time in the office getting ready for the upcoming trials of the guys busted as a result of the Tito Olivera case, talking to Assistant U.S. Attorney Carol Maddox, and discussing security arrangements for getting María and Maddox together before the trial. Which made her think of poor Kevin Walker. He still hadn’t recovered from the deaths of his men, and the last time Kay saw him she thought he might be hitting the sauce.

  There were half a dozen other operations going on, but Kay’s people were doing most of the fieldwork and Kay was playing supervisor. They’d picked up a rumor about another drug tunnel going from Mexico to an area near Calexico, California, but all they had so far was rumor. There was a mutt near Juanita who had a pot farm out in the woods they hadn’t been able to find, and a couple of meth labs in Lemon Grove they had found but that Kay didn’t want to bust until they identified whoever was supplying the chemicals. Then there was the Navy thing.

  An informant in Turkey had given the DEA office in Ankara a tip that eventually led to some sailors on the USS Ronald Reagan. The Navy guys, as many as ten of them, including a couple of officers, were bringing duffel bags full of heroin back to the States, getting the dope when the carrier was deployed to the Middle East. The whole thing was a bureaucratic nightmare involving NCIS, JAG lawyers, and Pentagon PR weenies who didn’t want to give the Navy a black eye when they finally arrested the yahoos. In other words, just the usual shit.

  One thing making her job harder and less interesting was that she was spending a lot more time adjusting her people’s work hours to accommodate their personal lives. She did this not because she really wanted to but because she was forced to now that she had a kid. The guys working for her appreciated this, but they also knew why she was doing it and made snide cracks. You just couldn’t win with some people. She also made the effort to minimize weekend work as much as possible and delegated a lot of the backshift/nighttime duties to subordinates, which she really hated to do. She liked being in charge and she liked being out there prowling around at night, but she forced herself to back off because she didn’t like leaving Jessica home alone too many nights.

  She also realized that living with Jessica was changing her. She wasn’t used to trying to act like a role model and she wasn’t used to trying to accommodate another person, much less sacrifice for one. Hell, she’d never even made much of an effort to accommodate her husband when she’d been married. But she now felt a sense of obligation to another human being, which she’d never felt before, and it was like there was this . . . this weight on her. The weight of motherhood, she guessed. Whatever it was, it was there and she couldn’t seem to get out from under it, and it was changing not just her personal behavior but her professional behavior as well—and she didn’t like that.

  Things with Jessica were going okay, though. She really didn’t have anything to bitch a
bout. The kid still kept pretty much to herself and she was still irritatingly self-sufficient, but she and Kay were talking more. They didn’t exactly have mother-daughter chats—the kid never asked for advice—but she would occasionally gripe a bit about something happening at school or brag, just a little, about something that had gone well.

  The other day, for example, when she got home from work, she could tell Jessica was excited about something, and when she asked how school went that day, instead of blowing her off with Fine, Jessica said, “You’re not gonna believe it, but they fired Mr. Hancock.”

  “Who’s Hancock?”

  “My English teacher. You met him. Anyway, there’s this rumor going around that he was hitting on one of the senior girls, and they fired him.”

  Kay started to say Did this asshole ever hit on you? In which case, she’d shoot the son of a bitch. She didn’t say that, though. Instead, trying to act like the responsible adult, she said, “You gotta be careful with rumors.”

  “Yeah, well, it may be a rumor, but I’ve seen the way he touches some of the girls.”

  At which point Kay couldn’t stop herself: “Did this asshole ever do anything to you?”

  Which reminded her: They still hadn’t had the discussion that Maddox told her to have with Jessica, about her getting pregnant when she was fifteen. Kay just wasn’t ready for that.

  Another good thing was that Jessica was still taking surfing lessons, and Kay went surfing with her whenever she could. That was the one activity they did together, and Kay actually enjoyed the time even if they didn’t talk a whole lot. She also figured that in a few months Jessica was going to be a better surfer than her. Kay asked her why she didn’t go out for a sport at school—softball, soccer, something like that. She was certainly athletic enough. Her daughter told her she really didn’t like team sports but something like surfing, something she could do on her own without a whole lot of structure, appealed to her.