“That’s it for me. I need to get moving.” Moss lifted a plastic water bottle from the table.
“There’s smoke in the air,” Aragon said. “I don’t know about running.”
He smiled and pulled a blue face mask from his shorts. His soles squeaked on the tile floor as he jogged the hallway toward the stairs.
Aragon said, “I’d like to hear about the scene.”
Rivera turned to the forensic people, Salas and Barone. “Who wants to go first?”
“I’ll go,” Salas said. “Phil’s still catching up. There’s a million latents on the dumpster. We isolated Gray’s, the college student who found her, and the first officers on the scene. But there’s untold others we can’t identify. We’re sorting the garbage, for what it’s worth. If you want to help, come to the warehouse. We’ll suit you up for the fun. I can tell you right now—unless they’re inside something, we don’t have Cassandra Baca’s phone or the gun.”
“We’ve been pinging the phone,” Tucker said. “It’s off or destroyed.”
Rivera walked to a dry-erase board and picked up a marker. “We have several lines of inquiry.” He headed one column Daniel Breskin and flowers.
“I like that one,” Tucker said. “I’ll tell you why when it’s my turn.”
“This connection with Benny Silva and his brother.” Rivera used Silva to start another column.
“Silva gets us back to our original investigation into Judge Diaz,” Aragon said. “He has a case in front of her. Joe Mascarenas says her behavior appears odd, the way she’s sitting on a motion for new trial. What if Silva knew about the parties at Diaz’s house? His brother knows Dolores Baca, her hustling background. Andrea ending up in one of his dumpsters—what if it was a message to Diaz?”
“What kind of message?” Tucker asked.
“We don’t know. If Diaz denies the motion for new trial, no reason to be suspicious. But if she hands down a ruling that’s squirrely, we look closer.”
“I agree we take a look,” Rivera said. “What’s Silva’s case about?”
“About nine million dollars. Rick, you read the trial transcript.”
Lewis took it from Aragon. “He had an old building by the Rail Yard. Next door, this Hollywood mogul named Jeremiah Kohn was building an editing facility so movies filmed in Santa Fe needn’t be shipped back to LA. Vandals broke into the site, got hold of welding torches. Propane exploded, flames spread to Silva’s building, burned it to the ground. The allegation was no reasonable person would have left welding supplies and propane tanks unsecured.”
“How did the jury get to nine mil?”
“One of his daughters was inside the building. There was almost no defense case. A long witness list, but few called. The jury returned a million in property damage, two million for the daughter’s life. Not much for a wrongful death in Santa Fe. That was about the only defense the jury heard, how the Silva woman was a junkie, already close to dead, washed out of every rehab in northern New Mexico. The rest came in punitives. Lawyers for the insurance company say there was jury tampering, witnesses were run off. A key witness maybe murdered, but no body to back that claim. Their investigators claim they have new evidence the fire was intentionally set. Defendants want a retrial.”
“It was Thornton corrupting Diaz,” Tucker said. “Now it’s some garbage man. I think the roses guy is a better lead.”
“Run with it,” Rivera said. “You looked into Daniel Breskin.”
“He’s a big deal in virtual reality. You wear goggles and ear plugs that thrust you into another world. His breakthrough was using the technology to help surgeons, let them virtually walk through the body, step around a tumor, see it from all sides. His company is selling shovels and picks to the virtual reality gold rush. Every headset has his technology inside. His latest venture is a New Mexico company called the Real Deal. I’d like voucher approval to Las Vegas to investigate his company’s product line thoroughly.”
“What’s in Las Vegas?”
“The Adult Entertainment International Expo, where he is right now. Real Deal is incorporating real girls into the imagery, photographing them from every angle, every sex position you can think of. And those maybe you can’t. They’ve been advertising on Craigslist and Backpage for models instead of using established talent. They want a warehouse of unknown faces so every experience is new to the user.”
“That could explain the twenty thousand under the cars outside Cassandra Baca’s house,” Aragon said. “An even twenty grand, in large bills. Not what you’d expect from turning tricks.”
“Why did Breskin come to New Mexico?” Lewis asked. “Like our state needs this.”
“Real Deal is bragging how its profitability will exceed California porn houses because New Mexico taxpayers are going to kick back expenses for filming here, as well as waiving gross receipts taxes. Direct investments by the state are governed by a kind of morality code. Not so for other film subsidies and the tax waiver.”
“But the dumpster,” Aragon said. “It’s miles from his house, outside the circles that transplants travel in Santa Fe. And why kill her? Something get out of hand?”
“It’s on the way to the Santa Fe airport, where his jet was waiting to take him to Vegas. The FAA has him leaving the morning Cassandra Baca was found dead.”
Daniel Breskin. They looked at photos on Tucker’s laptop. Breskin in a sanitary bunny suit in a factory making headsets. Breskin at the New York Stock Exchange, his company going public. Breskin on the web page for the adult entertainment expo, his chubby cheeks framed between two women, naked shoulders, a suggestion there was nothing off-screen covering the rest of them. The seminar was entitled, And You Thought The Internet Was Big.
“Now you can explain the porn on your computer,” Aragon said.
“Case-related research,” Tucker said. “We can catch him if we hop the next Southwest to Vegas. I’d be glad to search for him in the private party suites.”
He clicked the site’s tab for parties and brought up a display of still shots for events labeled no clothes, BDSM demo, and fan appreciation, each advertised by at least one woman in very little or no clothing.
“You volunteer to go,” Aragon said.
“Selfless service to the Bureau.”
“Not going to happen, Agent Tucker,” Rivera said. “Find out where Breskin hangared his plane. We’ll meet him at the airport, where we won’t be distracted.”
Tucker disappeared into his computer. Aragon was glad for the break in the flood of energy pushing them at Daniel Breskin.
“This started,” she said, “as an investigation of judicial corruption. We have to nail Cassandra Baca’s killer. That jumps to the top of the list. But we’re losing focus on what got us here.”
“Fager hasn’t lost focus,” Lewis said. “He called again from prison. I guess we’re becoming buddies.”
“No one else will take his collect calls,” Aragon said.
“Worth the loose change. The latest: we’re interested in Benny Silva, and according to Fager, so is Marcy Thornton.”
“Crap. So close.” Tucker closed his laptop. “Breskin left Vegas. He’s headed to Seattle. Someone else can go. I hate rain.”
“Rain,” Lewis said. “What’s that?”
Thirteen
“You did a good job for my boy,” Frank Pacheco told Marcy Thornton. “He paid for his dope in my car, but not the gun I forgot in the glove box. That would have killed me, him doing time because I got sloppy. Sure I’ll tell you about Benny Silva. Meet me at the Railyard for the tour.”
“Why can’t you just tell me?”
“Seeing is believing.”
None of her guys in jail would give her anything on Benny Silva. The conversation ended when they realized she hadn’t reached out to talk about their own case. Frank Pacheco’s kid had come to mind, a case she had t
aken for no cash up front. Instead Pacheco had brought a van full of guns to her office, with a gun dealer waiting to give her a price. She didn’t know old shotguns and rifles could be worth that kind of money.
His son, Chucky, had been pulled over DUI. Snort in his pocket, Dad’s nine in the glove box. He was looking at ten years with the weapons enhancement. Marcy had another client who once owed her money. She tore up the bill outside the courthouse when he finished testifying he’d been riding with Frankie, stuck his Glock in the glove box when he went into the post office, it being a federal crime to carry in there. Sorry, man, he said, looking at Chucky at the defense table, putting this on you.
She had Chucky ready, a friend accepting the apology, grateful tears welling up from deep inside, though the two had never met before that day in court.
She sat in her Aston in a parking lot at the Railyard, worried about leaving her car there, when Frank Pacheco arrived in a Dodge Charger. The passenger stepped out, a short, wide guy with a shaved head. He walked with his feet wide apart, telegraphing each step with his hip. He opened the trunk, Frank popping it from inside, and came over with a folding lawn chair.
“I’ll be watching your car.” He set up and pulled a paperback from his back pocket. He was sitting in full sun, his scalp baking. He looked perfectly comfortable.
The passenger seat was still warm. Pacheco, not taking his hands from the wheel, said, “You always had the sweetest rides. I didn’t want you worrying.”
On the back of one hand she read WSL, each letter on a different finger, not including his pointer. That was gone. The letters on the other three stood for West Side Locos, Pacheco’s gang coming up. When he turned the wheel as he steered out of the parking lot she saw what was on the four fingers of his other hand: Loko. The graffiti moniker West Side Locos used to save spray paint. Or bullets, when they announced themselves that way.
He was saying he’d always remember what she did for his son. Chucky got out early on good time, married, and left Santa Fe to find work in North Dakota.
“Oil fields. A gun charge would have closed doors. So many guys have dope on their sheet, it don’t matter long as they’re pissing pure now, they can’t find enough men for the jobs. He’s got a kid on the way, a good wife, a gringa. She’s been driving heavy trucks, pulling down one sixty a year. Between them they’re making like a quarter mil, and living in a single wide that smells. Formaldehyde, one of the tin cans FEMA used in Katrina. The Bakken, what they call that oil country up there, so crazy that’s the only rental they could find. Costs as much as a condo in Santa Fe. Here’s the first stop on your Benny Silva tour.”
“It’s a church.”
“With a graveyard. None of Benny Silva’s enemies in there.”
“Why show me this?”
“They’re not in any graveyards. None of those funerals with everybody wearing tees with dearly departed’s face, birthday, and death date. No business for undertakers, no viewings, nobody buying flowers, balloons. People bringing balloons to funerals? Sure they say something. We love you, Daddy. Miss you, Mijo. But balloons, shit.”
“I’m not getting this.”
“His enemies don’t get buried. They disappear. No bodies turning up when the bulldozers push new houses into the mesa. No bears digging up bones in the mountains. No skull washing out of an arroyo after a good rain. I hear Benny Silva makes people disappear for a fee, but you have to approach him just right. People who make the wrong first impression … ”
He was back in traffic, now heavy, heading south away from the center of town.
“How come I haven’t heard of him before?”
“He hasn’t required the services of members of your profession. He’s never been busted. Not him, not his twin brother. Here, look at that.”
They’d turned off one of the six-lane roads carrying traffic through Santa Fe into a narrow street, chain-link fences between sidewalks and yards, statues of the Virgin by front doors of single-story stucco houses.
“Look at what?”
“I’ll come back around.” He drove to the end of the block, pulled into a concrete driveway, reversed. Coming back up the street he said, “The house with the Oldsmobile in front of the garage. Look close.”
“I don’t see anything. It’s a house, like the other dumps.”
“Exactly. That’s the Benny Silva residence. All his life he’s lived there. Nothing special, not showing off with remodeling, putting in grass, a fancy car out front. He’s got a different approach to transportation needs than you with your Rolls Royce.”
Aston Martin. She let it go. Pacheco said, “Go up to ring the bell, I bet you’ll find ‘I listen to Catholic radio’ stickers on the door. ‘Mi casa es su casa,’ one of those clay things you hang on the wall. But no fake ADT stickers like everyone else. You don’t hit the Silva residence.”
“He’s not showing it, or he doesn’t have it?”
They returned to heavier traffic, still moving south. He took another small street past a corner store called “La Tiendita.”
“Benny’s?” Thornton asked and Pacheco nodded.
After a couple miles on a busy street he said, “That lot on your left, where people leave their cars for sale with a number to call.”
“Looks like a bad investment.”
“Where’s the next MacDonald’s, the Starbucks going? Until then that lot’s zoned agricultural, hardly no taxes. You see any farming happening?”
After another block he said, “That liquor store, on the right.” A run-down white building, portable sign by the street, Bud on special. “In his wife’s name. Safest liquor store in northern New Mexico. Never been robbed. We’re getting close.”
Again they were off the busy streets, two blocks back, warehouses, metal buildings, houses squeezed in here and there.
“You’re seeing it now. All of this. E. Benny Silva Enterprises, he calls his business. He bought when the previous owners disappeared, a couple Jewish guys from Long Island, thought they’d buy up south Santa Fe, wait for the city to come to them. Actually, I got that wrong. He bought it right before they disappeared. Heard he got a hell of a deal. There’s the corporate headquarters.”
Razor wire around a scrap yard. Pickups loaded with metal and cardboard backed up to industrial scales. A cinder-block building, only the front painted, surrounded by storage bins holding tin, aluminum, iron pipe and copper wire. Through a section of fence she saw portable toilets like soldiers at attention, uniforms of blue and white, in formation, going back into the yard toward a metal building.
Another Olds in front, to the side of the front door, the one she’d seen outside her office, same tennis ball on the bumper hitch.
“He likes Oldsmobiles,” Thornton said. “The other one his wife’s?”
Pacheco grunted something and drove down the side of the lot to the next intersection, the razor wire out his window.
“What do you do with a dead horse, a cow killed on the road, all those deer busting windshields? Those dogs half-crushed you see on highways, somebody does go around picking them up. E. Benny Enterprises has the contract to run it through a thing called a tissue digester, mix in some nasty chemicals, suck it out of the tank, and take it in his honey dippers to the sewage treatment plant. Taxpayers built the thing, seeing the pressing need for something like this. Benny was close to some legislators at the time, like that one just got back from the federal jail in Florence, Colorado.”
Thornton rolled down her window. A strong chemical smell in the air that wouldn’t be tolerated in any other Santa Fe neighborhood.
Pacheco said, “A truck loaded with pigs flipped over. State police and game wardens had to shoot those that weren’t killed. Like a couple tons of bacon, ribs, and hocks. A mountain of menudo. Benny’s machine ate it all. Someone started calling the thing El Puerco.”
“The pig.”
“Thing never worked when the state was putting millions into it. Benny bought it for scrap. Somehow he made it work. Maybe he plugged it in, something they didn’t think of.”
“Do you know this building he had that burned? He had a big lawsuit, nine million dollars coming his way if the verdict holds up?”
“The one where he recycled his junkie daughter? You want to see that next?”
Fourteen
Camino High’s McRae called in the morning and said they should watch the new reports on Cassandra Baca’s murder again. He’d been watching for Star Salazar. She’d been truant for a week. But she was in the broadcasts, in the background, behind other students talking about Cassandra, what a special girl she was, how they’re handling someone they know, their own age, getting killed.
SFPD’s Public Information Officer regularly Tivo’d news broadcasts. They called McRae and told him to come over. Watching the television in the PIO’s office, he said, “That’s her,” and Lewis froze the screen.
“That is one rough-looking teenager.”
“I’m wondering if that’s the friend Lily described, the one sitting at Pizza Hut who wanted in on the party,” Aragon said.
“What party?” McRae asked.
“Something we’re looking into.”
“I’ve been forgetting,” McRae said. “Here’s those lists. This is Cassandra’s circle of friends. Not very big. It was Star Salazar she hung with. And here’s Star Salazar’s home address and friends that I know of. Right there”—he got up from his chair and touched the television screen—“is one of them. Abel Silva, Jr. Goes by Junior.”
Aragon looked closely at the boy. “Who’s his father?”
“Uh, Abel Silva.”
“I know, stupid question. Where did we see that name?” Aragon looked hard at Lewis until he jutted his jaw and nodded. “You remember seeing it, too,” she said.
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