The Verdict on Each Man Dead

by David Whellams

  The forensics labs offered few fresh leads. The bodies had given up most of their blood on the killing floors, and despite testing of samples throughout the two houses, no new DNA strings were identified.

  Hollis Street itself remained in sad limbo. Henry tried to avoid the strip, since it depressed him. When he had to drop by, to follow up on a point with Jerry Proffet or take additional pictures, he encountered a creepy resistance. No one offered him lemonade or gossip, and expressions of pity for the Watsons were perfunctory. The denizens were waiting for the two suburban properties to be cleared of yellow tape and window blacking, so that the homeowners could sink back into complacency. Until then, Number 3 and Number 5 would haunt them, almost as much as they plagued Henry and Phil.

  Midway into the third week, a crew came in to fumigate and scrub the blood- and drug-permeated homes. A crowd of rubberneckers gathered, resulting in West Valley Police blocking off the street entrance at the stone portals for the afternoon and checkpointing residents in and out through trestle barriers. Phil and Jackson came in to help. When Jerry Proffet and the Wazinskis bitched, Phil commented, “Well, you always wanted a gated community.”

  The Homicide detectives began to get along better with DeKlerk and his people, in part because there was so much legwork to be done. Drug-related inquiries broadened to nearby states, while national databases were scanned, including records of drug-financed domestic terrorism incidents. All the while, Boog and Phil put on a unified front against suggestions by the feds that the DEA should take over the case.

  The lack of results only increased everyone’s yearning for a breakthrough. Phil summed up their frustrations over lunch one day at the Rose. Sitting in the regular booth, he referred to a page of notes he had made. “Tom Watson either sold the bulk of his product to a single dealer somewhere in the state, or he spent his nights wholesaling small batches to scads of petty street vendors in Salt Lake City and Provo. It’s unlikely that he ventured as far as Nevada in one direction or Colorado in the other, journeys that would have burned up his profit in gas expenses. Odds are he handed off the whole monthly output to a single middleman. Not likely he retailed the marijuana on street corners himself.”

  Boog DeKlerk was in attendance at the Rose that day but merely nodded noncommittally, causing Henry to wonder if Boog was concealing something about Tom Watson’s business.

  The following week, DeKlerk turned up a dope dealer in Sandy City, only a few miles from Hollis Street, who had been a seller of Tom Watson’s product, and he was held in an interrogation room in the West Valley precinct for a full day. The promising lead soon hit a wall; the man knew nothing about Watson’s broader links to drug networks.

  The Utah Department of Public Safety welcomed calls (anonymous or not) from the public on its confidential drug tip line. Nothing useful came in from the citizens of Utah.

  One night, a cool evening in the third week, a day after the cleanup crew had signed off, Henry drove to Hollis Street and parked by the curb between 3 and 5. He had reached a low point, no longer believing that the case was a career-maker. The residents had outlasted the cops. But he would plug away for a while longer, cobbling together help from Theresa, Phil, and anyone else who offered. He sat there in complete silence, not even crickets to be heard. The sweet odor of cannabis lingered in the dry Utah air.

  The breakthrough came in the fourth week, from a source that no one, but no one, in the world of Utah justice could have predicted, and led to one of the most reverberant ploys in the annals of the police community.

  It began one afternoon at the Rose, where Boog DeKlerk was holding court in the usual booth. Although Chief Grady still refused to transfer the Watson case to Narcotics, he had appointed Boog to be West Valley’s delegate to a multi-department anti-drug committee that included every imaginable federal agency. Boog had just arrived from an all-morning session of the group.

  “No one on this committee is naive about the drug trade,” he affirmed, and from beneath his placemat slipped out a twelve-by-twelve-inch plastic-sealed map of the western states. He stabbed a fat finger wildly at the grid. “Six states we gotta consider.” To Henry, it seemed that Boog was launching one more attempt to browbeat Homicide. Henry rolled his eyes. “Bear with me, Pastern. You can’t understand the drug trade in West Valley without knowing the ins and outs of the drug flow across Utah. The big organized operations are all run by the Mexicans.”

  Henry examined the map. Two large states, Arizona and New Mexico, squatted between Utah and the Mexican line; add California if you wanted an additional buffer. Most of Utah’s population lived in the northern third of the state, creating more insulation. This plastic map didn’t change the fact that West Valley lay a great distance from the international border.

  Boog moved his index finger to and fro. “Don’t be deceived, my Homicide friends. All that land between us and the border is hardly a hindrance to smugglers and dealers when Interstate 15 provides a straight shot from Tijuana to Salt Lake and back. The Mexican gangs are masterful at running the trade in cocaine, heroin, and methamphetamines. Marijuana is a messier business, with regional/local variations in price and quality, and lots of small entrepreneurs, but it’s profitable. The gangs assert control over the distribution networks, less so over the grow ops themselves.”

  Henry wondered where this lecture could possibly be headed. This wasn’t news and, had the DEA been at the table, they would have recoiled and told Boog to get to the point.

  “The Mexicans don’t like publicity,” Phil prompted, picking at a zucchini stick. Henry had the sudden feeling that his partner had been forewarned by Boog.

  Something is coming.

  Boog DeKlerk glowered at Henry. “We share a problem with the Watson murders. We all want West Valley to hold on to this investigation — and I’ve got a strategy. College boy, have you ever heard of Avelino González?”

  Henry frowned. The name rang a distant bell but he couldn’t place it.

  “Tell us,” Phil said.

  DeKlerk’s preamble and Phil’s encouragement sounded rehearsed. Phil knows the punch line. Boog proceeded. “He’s a drug lord with tentacles reaching across those six states. For the last three weeks, every U.S. police force with an interdiction mandate has been pressuring his distribution networks in all these localities, scooping up grow ops, cashing in informants to take down meth labs, big and small, and hassling small-timers at the interface point with street users, dime bag by dime bag. My squad has been as active as any of the federal agencies.”

  So that’s all? Boog wants us to know he’s on the job?

  The big man paused and Phil nodded for him to continue. “This morning it all paid off. González controls half the marijuana trade and all cocaine sales in Utah. He’s hurting. A few hours ago, he called me.”

  “Did he sound worried?” Phil queried, a note of sarcasm there. Henry remembered now: the Mexican was a particularly vicious cartel figure. González, who was rumoured to cut off his rivals’ heads, wouldn’t be fazed by any Hollis Street blowback.

  Henry noted uncertainty in DeKlerk’s voice, and it wasn’t caused by the Guinness. If he had a plan involving González, it was by no means a lock.

  “Tell us the deal,” Phil said.

  “González wants to meet. One time only. The deal is, he’ll tell us everything he knows about Tom Watson, and keep us informed about anything new that comes up.”

  Henry rushed in. If Phil wasn’t going to plant a flag for Homicide, he would. “You — we — can’t promise to lay off his network.”

  “You think I don’t know that? Sure, he hopes we’ll back off a bit if he helps us, but no concessions.”

  Henry didn’t understand the transaction. What kind of a deal was this for either side? The drug lord couldn’t expect police agencies to back off on enforcement or give a pass to his distribution networks while targeting his competition. González was pro
bably warranted under the RICO statute for half the offences in the drug code. He was a murderer. DeKlerk was pitching a meet with an unequivocal bad guy.

  And there was another fundamental question to be addressed.

  “Is it possible that González’s people took out Tom Watson?” Henry said.

  Boog scowled at him. “No, it wasn’t him.”

  Henry glared back. He inferred that González knew who committed the killings on Hollis Street, but what did the drug lord want in return? What kind of a side deal had DeKlerk engineered? It all sounded like high-risk freelancing on DeKlerk’s part.

  “Will Grady go along with this?”

  “I talked to him an hour ago. He’s copacetic, as long as we convene a meeting with the agencies and get everyone’s okay. I’ll set it up for the day after tomorrow.”

  “It will be hard to keep this a one-off,” Phil said. “The feds will want to use the meeting to pressure González on interstate drug trafficking, all kinds of issues.”

  “Hell, they’ll try and Taser him right there!” Boog said. “González is ready to talk but not to the feds. He insists on only two police reps in the room. One state, one local. We can manipulate that to our benefit. You and Pastern can come with me this week and we’ll hang tough with the feds and the Staties. This is an exceptional operation, and it’s gonna be ours.”

  Henry grasped why González preferred to have only one state and one local delegate at the meeting. “He hopes to sidestep the bigger trafficking issues,” Henry said.

  “More important, college boy, he wants to get goddamn Hollis Street off the table.” DeKlerk took a deep swallow of Guinness.

  “If we get our way, that means a Valley Police rep and someone from the State Bureau of Investigation,” Phil said.

  “Where does González want the meeting held?” Henry asked.

  “Wendover,” answered DeKlerk.

  Henry laughed out loud.

  “What’d I say?” Phil sputtered.

  Wendover was a tiny place smack on the rim of Nevada. A border town. To get there, you drove straight west on Interstate 80, threading the sprawling Utah Test and Training Range, up to the Bonneville Salt Flats and the Utah–Nevada state line. Henry laughed again. If Avelino González chose to escape, he could simply hop the border into the casino hamlet of West Wendover, Nevada. Utah police would be reluctant to follow.

  CHAPTER 12

  The planning session was set for two days later, at the shared police facilities on Amelia Earhart Drive, where the State Bureau of Investigation and the regional wings of the FBI and the DEA were lodged. The West Valley detectives expected a full house, with reps from the ATF, the Homeland Security–linked Joint Terrorism Task Force for the area, and the Utah State Major Crimes Task Force. Everyone would be defending turf. Phil Mohlman warned Henry to watch out for the DEA man, named Rogers, and the JTTF delegate, Walter Frommer, both known to despise municipal police.

  “Neither has any good claim to take over the Hollis case, but it’s in the nature of the federal agencies to pre-empt us local yokels …” said Phil, then realized that Henry used to be an FBI special agent and fell silent.

  Henry wanted the Wendover plan to work. He and Phil had stalled, and it was time for a radical move. More important, though he discussed it with no one, Henry considered whether, as a former FBI man, he might serve a conciliatory role at the table and impress his colleagues with his fastidious prep work. Over the two days, Henry toiled on a detailed study of the drug lord, Avelino González, that he might provide to Phil and Boog for the session. Most of the core information, such as González’s NCIS rap sheet, was available online on secure servers, but Henry also tapped the detailed files kept by the DEA.

  Henry decided not to share the full report with Theresa — she would be alarmed by the Mexican’s history — but he did ask her impression of the mug shot of González taken by Mexican police.

  She stared at it for a full minute. The drug lord stared back. He appeared exceedingly relaxed in the photo, given the occasion of his arrest, Henry mused. His face was lean and disciplined. If, like many a cartel leader’s, his eyes were cold, Henry concluded that this was a posture of contempt he had adopted at the time of the photo; indeed, candid photographs of Señor González were rare. “He’s handsome, for a mass killer,” Theresa said. “Sexy … or is it politically incorrect to say so?”

  Even armed with this profile, Henry wasn’t sure that he had a complete portrait. On the surface, González was a typical drug kingpin. He was born in the northern state of Sinaloa and rose from abject poverty by joining the Mexican Army Special Forces. The arc of Avelino González’s adult life could be traced by flashpoints of greed and death. The Army employed him in the U.S. border zones, where he provided security for the maquiladoras, factories run by rich entrepreneurs in favour with Mexico City politicians. As a soldier he learned skills that proved essential later, in the drug trade. He fought on the government side in Chiapas, where as an enforcer he burned settlements and executed Zapatista captives in jungle clearings. This labour demanded total loyalty to the national government, but the moment young Avelino began to listen to the weeping of women in the Chiapas villages, he was done.

  Next, the Gulf Cartel recruited him to shepherd overland shipments of cocaine from the jungles of southern Mexico to the Pacific coast, and as he established his reliability he moved into management. It was a smooth transition, and if he had to kill competitors along the way, that was better than killing peasants under the oppressive rationalizations of the PRI government. For five years, he oversaw all the cocaine routes for the Gulf Cartel.

  So far, Henry viewed this as the standard life story of an avaricious drug lord, but he remained alert to any special factors in the biography that would explain why González might take the risk of parlaying with the police. He ticked off the unusual watershed points in Avelino’s peripatetic career. Twenty years ago, entrenched in the unforgiving world of Mexican drug smuggling, he achieved a leap upward in the guise of a sideways move. Tiring of his routine and the squalid jungles of Central America, he made a deferential and unprecedented approach to his masters: he asked for a transfer. The Gulf Cartel often partnered with the Sinaloa Cartel in the north, and the two operations — unlike the Zeta organization, which hated everyone — seldom clashed. González made the transfer to his home state. The rest was blood-spattered history.

  Drug bosses don’t mellow, and they rarely die in bed. There was nothing in the police records to show that Avelino González, passing sixty now, ever felt remorse. Over the years, he had ordered the deaths of dozens, if not hundreds, of men. He had never been arrested inside the U.S., although the DEA monitored him each time he ventured north to organize his distribution network. Henry finished the file review without feeling that he had gained much insight into the passions of Señor González. And none of the American law enforcement agencies had him down for the Watsons.

  Henry called a pair of friendly sources at the Bureau in D.C. He knew that federal agencies, including the DEA, commissioned detailed psychological portraits and character studies of cartel leaders. He was soon in possession of a ten-page bio of González.

  The fact that the report remained sketchy intrigued Henry in itself. Despite the best efforts of the federal agencies, the Mexican remained as unfathomable as a businessman in a Sinclair Lewis novel by way of Mario Puzo. Henry combed the study for trenchant details. González was his birth name, but he had switched Christian names six or seven times, from Juan to Pedro to Chico, and so on. Drug dealers like to invent new reps for themselves, but his were not nicknames, for the most part; no one called him “the Fox” or “the Wolf” or “the Killer of Chiapas,” although the file sometimes referenced him as “the Man”; perhaps a bland moniker contrarily won him respect and fear. González reportedly had three, perhaps four brothers, but, oddly, investigators could not verify where they lived or if some o
f them might be dead.

  He had flirted with revolutionary movements in Mexico over the decades, said the report, but his drug dealing and three early years devoted to suppressing the Zapatistas in Chiapas made him seem a less than committed revolutionary.

  Henry drove to the planning meeting with Phil, while Boog DeKlerk arrived on his own. Neither Homicide detective knew how Boog planned to finesse the federal and state agencies. There were too many officials around the conference table for Henry’s comfort and he saw right away that it would be hard to achieve a consensus. None of the agencies would welcome a one-off interaction with a murderous drug lord. Henry recognized only half the reps. Ugly drapes on bangled curtain rings decorated the two walls of windows, and when someone slid them noisily along their rails, shutting out the sun, Henry felt that a bad movie was about to start.

  Boog repeated the strictures set by González himself, adding, “González refuses to have any feds in the room.”

  The federal officials all recoiled at Boog’s promise. Bad ploy on Boog’s part, Henry thought; instantly, the feds in their unrumpled suits were unified by indignation. The JTTF delegate, Frommer, was first to mutter his disapproval, but DeKlerk tried to ignore him. Henry noticed that Rogers, the DEA man, maintained a sanguine neutrality at the far end of the table from the West Valley contingent.

  “He’s restricting the negotiations because he thinks he won’t have to address trafficking issues,” Frommer said in a pinched voice.

  Boog took a blunt, hard line. “He won’t anyway. That was never our deal.”

  “Why did you make the deal without our go-ahead?”

  “Don’t give me that rhetoric, Walt,” Boog said. “I’m here today to get your approval on a strategy, not to renegotiate the ground rules.”