by Todd Borg
“With the help of Street blocking the road. I also was lucky to find a handy battering ram nearby. Used it to momentarily subdue the kidnappers.”
“You think the men who took this boy are the ones who perpetrated this grave you’re talking about?”
“Yeah.”
“I heard from Diamond that these guys are bruisers,” he said.
“Paco says they look like superheroes.”
Paco flashed me a look of anger.
“And I thought superheroes were good guys,” Mallory said. “What’s your guess on why they took the kid?” He talked like Paco wasn’t standing right next to him.
I tried to think of how best to phrase it considering that Paco was listening. “He was a witness to a shooting.”
Mallory nodded. “Got it. So you’re sitting on the kid?”
Paco looked up at him.
I shrugged, using Paco’s affirmative version.
“I guess you’re pretty good protection,” Mallory said, “in spite of the kidnapping.”
“You want to volunteer?” I said. “We could take turns.”
“Well, I’m not...” Mallory glanced down toward Paco, then looked back to me. “My schedule’s real busy,” Mallory said. He held my eyes for emphasis.
“Right,” I said.
“Show me what you got?”
We started walking.
“Your dog found the grave?” Mallory said.
“Probable grave, yeah.”
“How’d he do that? He’s just in the habit of looking for graves?”
“He sniffed the shoe. Paco saw it from the air. He believes it belongs to Cassie Moreno, his foster mom. The shoe’s in the Jeep. You can take it when you leave.”
“You did an air search?”
“Nice day for a plane ride, so we went up looking for signs of the woman’s van or the cliffs that Paco described. Paco saw this shoe. We drove over here and found it. I scented Spot on the shoe, and he walked over to the grave.”
“Just like that, huh?” Mallory glanced at Spot, then muttered under his breath, “I’m glad I don’t have a nose like that. I’d hate to go around being able to smell dead people in graves.” Mallory gave Spot a longer stare. “Why’s he acting so depressed?”
“He doesn’t like smelling dead people, either. Makes him sad.”
“Likes to find them alive, huh?”
“Yeah. That makes him happy.” I knew that I could set up a live find to turn Spot’s funk around, but it would have to wait until I was done.
Sergeant Tibbs and the other cop carried shovels. We walked through the trees. The sky got darker, the rain harder. When we got to the dense trees, I pointed toward the gentle mound of dirt.
Mallory pulled up on the creases of his pants, squatted down and looked at the sandy mound. “How you figure it went down?” he asked.
“I didn’t see any tire tracks around here, but I did back at the rocky cliffs. I think that the shooting that Paco witnessed happened over there. After that, Paco hid in the back of the pickup and said it didn’t move for a time. So my guess is that the killers picked up the body, carried it here, and buried it.”
Mallory nodded. “I don’t see any marks,” he said. “Someone shoots somebody over there by those cliffs, then carries the body all the way over here, there would be marks.”
I saw a branch on the ground. It had recently broken off from a tree, so it still had green needles. I walked over and picked it up. Then I walked backward, using the branch like a broom to rub the grus cover and erase my footprints as I backed up.
“You learn that working Homicide at SFPD?” Mallory said.
“Westerns,” I said. “John Wayne. Or maybe it was Eastwood.”
Mallory turned to the other cops.
“Go ahead and dig this mound up. But go gentle. I don’t want you contaminating a corpse with your shovels.”
“Like we want to stick a shovel blade into a corpse,” one of the cops said.
I winced at the words, stole a glance at Paco.
“Let’s go over to those trees,” I said. “Get out of the rain.”
Mallory walked with us. He said, “You think your hound could find shell casings like he finds bodies?”
“If you find one to scent him on, he might be able to find others. But Agent Ramos said these superhero guys match the description of some dirtballs known as the Collectors. They go by Salt and Pepper. Their M.O. is to Taser their victims, then suffocate them with heavy plastic wrap.”
Mallory looked at me. “The stuff that holds boxes on pallets?”
“Yeah.”
Mallory nodded, thinking. He looked over at Paco who was sitting on a rock under a big Red fir.
“When this kid first called you, how did he happen to have your number?” Mallory asked.
“My name was in his foster mom’s cell phone.”
“Why you think he didn’t just call nine, one, one? That would be faster.”
“Paco knows that nine, one, one goes to the cops. He said that his foster mom had told him never to call the cops. I’ve since learned that the boy is an illegal immigrant.”
“Didn’t he think you were a cop?”
“He said her cell phone listed me as ‘Private Cop.’ Apparently, she’d told him the difference.”
“Christ, these Mex workers think we got nothing better to do than send them back over the border. They work hard, we leave them alone. Without them we’d be screwed, anyway. No one else will pick crops in the hot sun.”
“People still get deported.”
“True, but most of the time it’s just the crooks.”
“So the authorities say. Not what I heard from a Central Valley school principal.”
Mallory frowned at me harder than before. He turned his attention to his boys digging. They inserted their shovels into the ground as carefully as if they were digging up an unexploded landmine.
“You got a take on this whole gig?” he asked me.
“No. Unusual for a woman to leave the Central Valley in the middle of the night and drive up to Tahoe to meet someone who then assaults her. What kind of threat could she possibly represent to someone that they set her up to kill her for it? If, in fact she is dead.”
“We’ll know more in a few minutes.” Mallory sipped his Coke. It was empty. He turned the can upside down and shook out the remaining drops. “How could they get her to drive up from Stockton in the middle of the night without her suspecting something?”
“She had switched from selling at farmers’ markets to doing a custom delivery service. They come up here almost every day. Maybe she was planning to meet a client. But it could have been something else. Turns out a guy named John Mitchell called her on the phone and arranged to pay her cash for information about the travel plans of her business clients. She knew it was a funky thing to do even if it is technically legal. So she wrote me a note about it and told Paco to contact me if anything bad happened.”
Mallory made one of those big, ah-ha nods. “So she did suspect that something bad was going to happen. I still think that her warning lights would go off when someone wanted her to meet her at such an hour. Most people would either refuse such a meeting or take along someone else for safety.”
“I agree,” I said. “But Paco says they always leave really early to make their deliveries. Once Cassie agreed to meet someone, it was probably her who chose the time.”
I turned to look for Paco. He was still sitting on the rock.
I called out to him. “Paco, you said you were sleeping in the van, then you woke up. Did Cassie say anything to you before she got out of the van, before she was shot?”
“She told me to stay down. Not to let them see me.”
“Did she sound like it was just a normal meeting? Or did she sound like she was frightened?”
“Like she was scared,” Paco said.
I turned to Mallory. “So she went to a meeting that she thought would probably be safe. Then she saw something that made
her concerned.”
“But she didn’t drive away,” Mallory said.
“No. She wasn’t that worried. Just concerned enough that she wanted Paco to stay down.”
Mallory nodded.
“Got something,” one of the cops said.
Mallory looked at Paco. “The kid going to be okay with this?”
I said, “Hey, Paco. Looks like there is something in this grave. You want to take a walk someplace? You want to go do something with Spot?”
He shook his head.
“You gonna be okay about this?” It was too big a judgment to expect a ten-year-old kid to make, but he’d been dealing with big stuff for the last three days.
He nodded, but he didn’t get up. If he wondered about the grave, he wasn’t curious enough to walk over and look up close.
The men were down on their knees, scooping loose dirt with their hands. It didn’t take them long to get the corpse uncovered.
The victim was female, lying face down in the grave, wearing jeans and a flannel shirt and one Nike shoe with a red swoosh. The plastic around the body’s arms and head was several layers thick. Although the body smelled bad, the decomposition was not as advanced as it might have been in a warmer climate. Tahoe’s cool ground and cold nights had slowed the natural processes. I’d also learned from Street that when a body is buried, blowflies can’t get to it to lay their eggs. So there was no maggot mass trying to make fast work of her flesh.
The men carefully cut the plastic sheeting from the victim’s head.
When her face was revealed, it was dark with pooled blood, but it wasn’t yet bloated with decay.
Mallory walked away, faced the woods, took several deep breaths. After a minute, he came back. He didn’t look at the corpse and instead spoke softly. “You think this kid can ID her without falling apart?”
“Yeah.” I went over to Paco and sat next to him.
“Paco, there is a body in the grave. It could be Cassie, or it could be someone else. A dead body looks pretty bad. You could maybe identify the body for us. But it might make you sick or very angry. You don’t have to do it if you don’t want to.”
“I’ve seen bodies on TV,” he said.
“Bodies on TV are fake. This is real. It’s quite a bit worse than seeing one on TV. If you want, we can take a picture and show that to you.”
“I’ll do it,” he said. He stood up, walked over, and took a look.
“It’s her,” he said.
“You’re sure the body is Cassie?” I said just to be certain.
“Yeah.” Paco walked back and sat back down on the rock.
His face didn’t seem to change, but I thought I could see a hint of weary old man in Paco’s young face. The boy looked toward the forest, his face impassive. He stared at the trees, but he was no doubt seeing something much different, something that young kids should never have to see.
“This might be a good time to get a statement from the boy,” Mallory said. “You think he would be up to it?”
“Yeah. Probably be good for him, too,” I said. “It’ll focus him on the idea that you cops can help find the guys who put that woman in the grave.”
Mallory nodded. He went back to his car to get his tape recorder.
I went over and squatted down in front of Paco. “Commander Mallory wants to ask you about what happened, what you saw. You don’t need to worry about this. Nothing you tell him will cause any problem for you. It will just help him catch the killers. He will ask you to tell him what you saw. He’ll ask you to describe as best you can what these guys looked like, what they did, what they said. What Cassie said, too.”
Paco glanced at me, then looked away.
“You okay with this?”
He nodded.
“Good,” I said. I reached out and held his shoulders. “You’re a tough kid,” I said. “I like that about you.”
Paco didn’t respond.
Mallory came over, and I left them alone.
Later, I told Mallory to call if he had questions, and Paco, Spot, and I left.
As we walked back to the Jeep, I tried to imagine Cassie coming up from Stockton to Tahoe, planning to meet someone. It obviously seemed innocent enough that she felt fine bringing Paco. But she’d told him to stay down. It was as if she pulled up and then realized that the men at the pickup were not the men she was planning to meet.
Yet something kept her from driving away. Maybe she thought they’d chase her. Or maybe she thought that the person she was planning to meet was there in the dark, and she just couldn’t see him.
A third possibility was that the man who paid for executive travel plans arranged to meet Cassie, maybe to finally pay her in person. Although she didn’t know what he looked like, when she saw Salt or Pepper, she might not believe that either of them could possibly be the man who called himself John Mitchell.
In Cassie’s note to me, she’d written that she was a cautious woman. So whomever enticed her to the meeting must have seemed benign because she willingly went. And it got her killed.
We got in the Jeep, and I turned the heat on high to dry us out.
Paco stared out the side window. The clouds had gotten thicker, the rain harder, the sky darker.
I put my hand on his knee. “Sorry you had to see all that back there,” I said.
He kept facing out the window. He said, “Rafael and his sister got to put up a string of Christmas lights in their bedroom. They have lights in their life. All year long.”
TWENTY-FIVE
As we drove away, my insides were twisting into knots. In all of the difficult moments of a difficult career, I’d never been in this situation. I didn’t know what to do, what to say, how to behave. I had a kid in my car who could well be on the verge of coming apart. Instead of making his life better, it seemed that everything I did pulled the string that was slowly unraveling Paco’s life.
Desperate for a change of scene, I called FBI Agent Ramos and explained that I was with Paco. I suggested that Ramos might want to get an update from Mallory, hoping that Ramos would understand my reluctance to talk about what we’d found. Then I asked if we could stop by the FBI’s Tahoe office.
“It would just be a short visit,” I said, hoping he would realize that I wanted Paco to see that lots of law enforcement personnel were working on the case.
“I understand,” he said. “Come on by.”
We parked outside the nice-but-plain building, and left Spot in the Jeep. I took Paco with me to the security door, pressed the button. Someone spoke through a speaker while a camera stared at us from behind glass.
“Owen McKenna here to talk to Agent Ramos,” I said.
The door buzzed. We walked through a metal detector into a glass-walled entrance room where we could be seen and appraised. Another door buzzed and we walked into the office.
Ramos was on the phone.
The other agent who shared the office pointed at his watch, then held up three fingers.
We waited. Paco stared at the FBI insignia on the wall. I watched the clock. Ramos got off three minutes and three seconds later.
Ramos stood up from his desk and came over. He looked ready to attend the opera. His suit was freshly-pressed, his hair perfectly combed, and his pencil mustache was trimmed with such precision that he must have used a drafting ruler.
Paco looked at Ramos’s shiny shoes.
I introduced Ramos and Paco. Ramos nodded at the boy. Paco stood silent and rigid and looked at the floor. Ramos gave no indication that he recognized the skin-color-match in the room. The other agent and I shared the pale skin of Irish brothers, while Ramos and Paco both had the rich brown coloring of Central American Indian-Spanish mix. They could have been uncle and nephew.
“So this is the boy who hid in the pickup bed,” Ramos said. “Brave kid.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Why I came by. I wanted you to meet the bravest kid in Tahoe.”
No reaction from Paco.
“Mallory is fast,” Ramos sa
id. “He’s got some kind of new transcription software. He ran the recording of Paco’s statement into his computer and just emailed it to me. I also heard from Diamond about the kidnapping of this boy last night.”
Ramos tapped Paco on his shoulder.
Paco looked up at him, his frown mixed with concern. The sunglasses in his hair reflected a vivid gold in the fluorescent office light.
“It took real courage to hold it together during that,” Ramos said to Paco. “I’m impressed.”
Paco didn’t respond other than to pinch his lips together. He looked back down at the floor.
Ramos looked at me. “You think the murder of the woman and the boy’s kidnapping are connected.” It wasn’t a question.
“Paco said it was the same guys in both cases,” I said. “The kidnap attempt shows that they’re persistent.”
“More dangerous than a lot of their colleagues, too,” Ramos said. “Not because they’re smart – they’re not. But because they don’t know their limitations, and they have no governor. They think they’re some kind of underworld superheroes. They like to do unnecessary, grandstanding stuff just to get press and puff up their rep.”
I looked at Paco, wondered if he noticed that an FBI man saw the same superhero motif as he did.
Ramos continued, squinting at me. “Like Tasing you and dropping the fishnet on your hound. Diamond told me about it. What a ridiculous move. The only reason to do that is to get press. The media has already picked up the fishnet story. It’s not just another kidnapping, it’s The Fishnet Kidnapping by The Collectors. There are kids out there who will idolize these guys. Like famous gangsters. Like superheroes. Salt and Pepper might be stupid, but they have an instinct for press, and they’re building a legend.”
“Paco also said they looked like superheroes,” I said. I rubbed Paco’s shoulders. “How do you think these guys have evaded the law?” I asked Ramos.
“Mostly luck, a lot of bluster, and a vehicle disguise.”
I raised my eyebrows.
“There’s a man in – let’s say Detroit – who makes a clever device that shuffles up to six license plates. Works just like a fifties jukebox pulling records up and out of the stack. The whole contraption is only two inches deep, so it can be installed in most vehicles without any outward sign. We leaned on this guy, and he told us that the Collector boys purchased front and back units from him some months back and had him install them in their pickup.
