by Joel Goldman
“Coroner says Staley was killed during the night, an hour either side of midnight. Eberto was shot later, probably around dawn.”
“You think the shooter spent the night in the store and killed Eberto on his way out this morning?”
“The timing works, but why stick around after killing Staley?”
I thought of his son, imagined him on the run, coming back to the store for more money or to get even with his father for smacking him and for a lifetime of other slights. It was easy to picture them arguing, Nick reverting to form, belittling Brett, his son pulling a gun, Nick laughing, daring him to shoot, both of them astounded when he did. Brett could have been drunk, high, or both and passed out until Eberto woke him.
“Maybe he had no place else to go.”
“What killer wouldn’t have a better place to go than the murder scene?”
“Brett Staley,” I said, telling him that Nick had caught his son trying to rob the store and laying out my scenario.
Carter listened, interrupting with the right questions. “That’s as good a take as any. What were you talking to Nick Staley about in the first place?”
“You know the missing-kids case Adrienne Nardelli is handling, the Martin kids?”
“Yeah. She told me how you broke the case on that other missing kid, Timmy Montgomery. Makes me almost want to take back all the things I’ve said about you. How did you get from there to Staley’s Market?”
“Peggy Martin was cheating on Jimmy. She filed for divorce, got a restraining order against him so he couldn’t see his kids except with court supervision. The kids disappeared, and Jimmy refused to answer any questions about what happened to them. Peggy thinks he took the kids to punish her, but she wouldn’t give us the name of her boyfriend. I was trying to find out who he was.”
“You figured if she was cheating on Jimmy with his best friend, that would make him even angrier.”
“Right. And Jimmy told his lawyer the two of them were buddies. Nick acted like he hardly knew the guy, but I think Jimmy was telling the truth.”
“Only it turns out the wife was banging the neighbor kid, so it was a wasted trip.”
“Not entirely.”
I told him about seeing Eberto on the bus on Monday and outside the grocery yesterday along with Cesar Mendez.
“And you don’t think Mendez stopped by the grocery to pick up a carton of milk?”
“I think he was looking for Brett Staley.”
I explained Brett’s relationship with Frank Crenshaw and Mendez, and my theory that Brett had acted as the middleman on Crenshaw’s purchase of a gun from Mendez and that Mendez had forced Brett to kill Crenshaw so that Crenshaw’s lawyer wouldn’t offer Mendez in a trade for his client’s life.
“I worked gangs for a while. Mendez is smart enough not to get blood on his hands and cold enough to make sure someone else does. But I don’t think he’d take any chances on a white boy like Brett Staley. He’d get someone he trusts to pop him.”
“Someone like Eberto.”
We watched as paramedics rolled Eberto into a body bag, zipped it closed, and carted him away.
“You tell all that to Braylon Jennings?”
“Yeah.”
“What’d he say?”
“He’s real sensitive on the subject of Brett Staley. I think Staley was his CI.”
“Which puts Jennings’s balls on the chopping block if his CI has graduated to murder.”
“Jennings used his ATF clout to get the charges against Roni Chase dropped so he could use her as bait to draw Brett out, make it easy on Mendez.”
“Son of a bitch,” Carter said, biting off the words.
“No fun to get played, huh?”
“You talking about what I did with Roni and her gun? Tell me you would have done it different. You’ve forgotten what it means to be a cop. So has Jennings. Where’s Brett Staley now?”
“In the wind.”
“And Roni Chase, is she riding the breeze with him?”
“I don’t think so. Brett’s been off the grid since you cut him loose at the hospital Monday night. I stopped by her office this morning. She’d been there, but had stepped out, left it wide open with a warm cup of coffee on the table.”
“Maybe Brett called her, said come and get me. Love will make you forget about your cup of coffee.”
“Yeah, but I don’t think she’s in love with him. Besides, her mother had a stroke a while back, and she’s taking care of her. I don’t see her running off with Brett or anyone else.”
“Maybe he didn’t give her a choice.”
“You don’t know Roni. She makes her own choices.”
“And you don’t know Cesar Mendez. If he’s behind all this, I guarantee you he doesn’t give a shit what Roni Chase wants, or Brett Staley for that matter. All he cares about is making sure nothing lands on his doorstep.”
“Where can I find Mendez?”
“You can’t find him anywhere. Go home before he makes you a hood ornament.”
Chapter Fifty-eight
I called Ammara Iverson when we got back into Kate’s Chevy, using the clean cell phone Simon had given me.
“Sorry,” she said, “I haven’t had time to get back to you. Believe it or not, there are other crimes that require my attention.”
“None as much trouble as mine.”
“Amen.”
“Then give me what I need and I won’t darken your door again.”
“Until the next time,” she said.
“With any luck. What do you have on Cesar Mendez?”
“He has strong ties to Nuestra Familia in Mexico.”
“How strong?”
“Blood strong. His family is the Familia. They sent him here to run things. They trust him to sell their drugs and send them their money. Word is he’s also been sending them guns, all he can get.”
“How does he get the guns to Mexico?”
“Each shipment is passed from one collection point to the next until it gets to the border. The farther south the shipment gets, the more guns there are. It’s like a dirty snowball rolling downhill. It keeps getting bigger. Once the guns reach the border, they’re taken across in smaller lots.”
“Where does Kansas City fit into the distribution network?” I asked.
“Not surprisingly, it’s the halfway point on the north-to-south route.”
“Which means Mendez is stockpiling guns. Probably has them spread out so if we find one cache, he doesn’t take too big of a hit.”
“And that’s what happens from time to time. Nothing big, maybe a dozen pieces recovered in a raid on a drug house. Things like that.”
“What’s the organizational chart look like? Nuestra must have somebody in the States to make sure the trains run on time.”
“We assume they do, but nobody knows who that is. Immigration keeps close tabs on all the known gang members in Mexico who are high enough up in the food chain to handle something like that, and they stay pretty close to home,” she explained.
“Would they contract it out to someone not in the Familia?”
“Would you?”
“Depends on how much they trusted him. What else?”
“As gang leaders go, Mendez is not a nice man. When he came to Kansas City, the first thing he did was ice-pick his predecessor to death in front of his girlfriend before he raped and strangled her. One of his lieutenants got busted on an undercover drug buy and told us the story. Before we could put him in witness protection he backed out and refused to testify.”
“What happened?”
“Mendez sent him a message. He snatched the guy’s mother, cut off her ring finger, sent it to him, and promised to send the rest of her one piece at a time.”
“End of story?”
“Beginning. The guy lasted twelve hours when he got back on the street. We found his body and his mother’s tied one on top of another, both of them naked.”
“Where can I find him?” I asked.
“
You have to be kidding.”
“I don’t shake and kid at the same time. Where does he hang out?”
“You’re crazy. I’m not going to tell you.”
“I’ll find out one way or the other.”
“Well, it won’t be from me. I won’t have that on my conscience.”
Kate drove two blocks after I finished talking to Ammara, biting her lower lip, glancing at me, giving up.
“You can’t go after Mendez.”
“Look, I’m not delusional, and I’m not suicidal. I’m not going to take him on one-on-one or walk into his house and shoot everyone in sight, pat myself on the back, declare victory, and go home.”
“Then what are you going to do?”
“The more I know, the more options I have. Knowing where he lives, where he goes, and who goes with him is all part of that.”
“Then why didn’t you tell that to Ammara? She might have told you what you wanted to know.”
I looked at Kate, smiling. “She wouldn’t have believed me.”
Kate studied me, taking snapshots. “I don’t blame her.”
I called Simon to avoid telling Kate another lie. “I want you to find Cesar Mendez.”
“Of course you do. How about I send him a friend request on Facebook?”
“And if that doesn’t work, do something creative, like check property and utility records. The guy has to live somewhere.”
“Gang leaders aren’t like the rest of us taxpayers. They don’t own, rent, buy, sell, or trade. They have people who do that for them.”
“Then find one of them and follow the trail but find him.”
“Which is more important, finding Mendez or doing something brilliant? Because I’m getting close on the brilliant thing. I can drop it if you want me to. Your call.”
Simon didn’t like being left behind at the office, even though he knew that was where he did his best work. When pressed, he admitted that Lucy and I had the edge in the field, but that didn’t satisfy his desire to be on the front lines until I reminded him that his best weapon was sarcasm and sarcasm never stopped a bullet or a bad guy.
“Give me a taste of brilliant, and I’ll let you know.”
“We wanted the police files on the missing-kid cases so we could look for similarities and evaluate whether those crimes were part of a serial killer’s pattern. We didn’t find a pattern, but that doesn’t mean we were wrong to look for it. The brain appreciates patterns. It’s how we organize, process, and understand our experiences.”
Simon’s other favorite weapon was the long explanation. “I remember. Get to the point.”
“So just because there wasn’t a pattern of child kidnappings didn’t mean there wasn’t some other pattern at work here.”
“And you found one.”
He couldn’t disguise his pleasure. “Indeed I did, robberies of gun dealers. I searched for other reports of gun dealers being held up especially after leaving gun shows. That’s when they’re the most vulnerable. They’ve got their inventories in the trunk of their cars or the back of their trucks. They’re usually alone and tired after a couple of days at a show, especially these victims, who were all seventy years old or older, guys that can’t wait to get home, put their feet up, have a beer, and recite the Second Amendment until they fall asleep.”
“Simon, I’m getting old.”
“Okay, okay. Here it is. Five gun dealers have been robbed in the last three months after coming home from gun shows. Eldon Fowler was one of them.”
“Wasn’t he the guy who lived at Lake Perry and died when he hit a deer?”
“Right. He was the fourth one. Numbers one, two, and three occurred in Lincoln Nebraska; Ames, Iowa; and Edwardsville, Illinois. The last victim, a guy named Joe Rosenthal, lives in Kansas City. The thieves followed the victims from the gun shows all the way into their garages and grabbed their guns. Fowler didn’t make it that far.”
“Any of the other victims hurt?”
“The guy in Iowa went for his gun. One of the thieves shot him in the leg, but he’s okay. They tied Rosenthal up and left him in the garage. His wife didn’t find him until she took the trash out the next day.”
“Every one of those towns is within half a day’s drive of Kansas City.”
“If KC was the hub, the others would be spokes in the wheel,” Simon added.
“Any arrests?”
“All open investigations. Each robbery made the local press, and the papers quote the same ATF agent who says all the usual bullshit that they’re making progress.”
“Braylon Jennings?”
“His Eminence.”
“How many guns total?” I asked.
“More than five hundred split roughly sixty/forty between semiautomatic handguns and assault rifles. Ballpark retail value is close to seven hundred fifty thousand dollars.”
“Eldon Fowler’s wife told you that he called her from the gun show, said someone stole his Ruger Redhawk. Has that gun surfaced?”
“Not yet. The only gun that’s been traced to the thefts is the one Frank Crenshaw used to kill his wife.”
“Anything else on the driver that passed Eldon Fowler on the highway, the one who called the Highway Patrol and said a crazy man was aiming a shotgun at them? Did you find out what he was driving?”
“I did. It was a Dodge Ram pickup truck. That’s not all. Fowler was driving a Ford F-150. CSI found paint scraped against a tree at the accident scene, but it wasn’t from the Ford. It was from a Dodge Ram.”
“That’s why Fowler had his shotgun in the window. He must have seen the thieves earlier that night, and they must have been driving a Dodge Ram. Find out if any of the people we’re looking at own one.”
“Make up your mind. You want me to do that or look for Cesar Mendez?”
“I want you to do both.”
Chapter Fifty-nine
I’d been to a lot of gun shows; long lines of tables stretched wall-to-wall, offering everything from replicas of 1842 U.S. black powder percussion muskets to World War II Japanese bayonets, to the latest in easily concealed personal protection handguns and assault rifles, plus ammunition for all occasions. I’d seen Scientologists recruit people who had just snapped up a complete collection of John Wayne western DVDs, an army surplus camouflage wardrobe, and a six-month supply of dried survival meals. And I’d watched fathers instruct sons on the finer points of gun safety, duck blinds, and birdcalls.
The gun dealers were mostly white, mostly older, and mostly scared that the government was going to knock on their doors in the middle of the night and take their guns, none of them worried for a minute that thieves would strip them of their weapons in their garages. But there it was, proof that we’re often so afraid of one thing that is so terrible and unlikely to imagine that we dismiss the real likelihood of everyday evil, certain that it will always be the other guy who gets hit over the head.
Five robberies in three months in five different states was not a casual undertaking. It required planning, personnel, and precision by a team of trained people dedicated to the mission, disciplined, and trustworthy. They had to spend enough time at each gun show to identify their target without attracting attention, probably even following the victim home on a dry run one night, doing it for real the next. Cesar Mendez had the people and the balls to make sure they did their job.
Storage of the guns was another problem. It required either a number of secure locations or one extremely secure location that was above suspicion and beyond detection. A gang that dealt in drugs first and guns second operated on street corners and in crack houses. Mendez needed someplace else to store the guns, a place that he could control but that couldn’t be traced to him. That meant he’d have to rely on someone outside the gang who could front for him.
Brett Staley fit that description. Mendez could have used him as a straw tenant at a storage facility. I sent Simon a text message adding that to his research list.
As much as anything else, Mendez’s operation
required patience because Nuestra Familia was unlikely to pay him before they took delivery of the guns. In the meantime, he had bills to pay and people to feed like any other businessman.
That the Kansas City robbery was the most recent of the five was also significant. Having collected guns from the surrounding states, Mendez may have added the local job to round out his inventory without the risk of going on the road where a burnt-out taillight or an overzealous, bigoted cop suspicious of a car full of Mexicans might get them pulled over.
There were a couple of things that bothered me. The first was why Mendez would have sold one of these guns to Frank Crenshaw. That was like a mob guy skimming the casino take, small change that could get a local gang leader ice-picked, family or no Familia. But arrogance and brutality breed a conviction of invulnerability, and Mendez may have considered it his right to cherry-pick a stash of weapons he could dole out as he pleased. He wouldn’t be the first family member to disappoint.
The second was whether the guns were still in Kansas City or had been shipped south. The way Braylon Jennings was handling this case made me suspect that the guns were still here even though more than a month had passed since the last robbery. That would be one more reason for him to take the chances he’d taken. If the guns had been shipped south, he would have been forced to follow them and worry about a renegade Brett Staley later. Otherwise, his superiors would ask him too many questions he didn’t want to answer.
But why, I wondered, would Mendez hold on to the guns this long, unless he planned more robberies to add inventory to a future shipment. Each day brought an added risk of getting caught. It made more sense to ship the guns out immediately after the Kansas City robbery and let the pending investigations die a natural death before starting over. If the guns were still here, it meant one thing: Something had gone wrong.
Crooks, like honest people, screw up, miscalculate, and outsmart themselves. And, when they are members of a multinational gang, the same thing happens to them as happens to the guy running the regional operation of a big corporation. The home office sends someone to straighten things out. That can make the local guy a lonely man in need of a friend, and I was the friendliest guy I knew.
