by Diana Renn
“I know we didn’t see Darwin or his group come up in any of these emails,” I said. “But we know they’re connected. And we can’t let Darwin get away with his crimes, either. We have to believe Juan Carlos had a strong reason for wanting to turn over the bike with this hidden money and the flash drive at the same time. Mari!” I sat up straighter. “Remember what Rosio said about her mom seeing Preston taking stuff out of his bike in that hotel room?”
“Yeah.”
“What if it’s not drug money? What if it’s gambling profits?”
Mari’s eyes lit up. “That’s possible. According to ice, you can’t bring more than ten thousand dollars into Ecuador. Maybe Darwin’s helping him carry cash into the country, cash earned not from drug deals, like we first thought, but from the Sports Xplor business!”
“Wait—ice?”
“Immigrations and Customs Enforcement. I.C.E.”
Something Preston had said once came back to me now. The fragment of a phone conversation I’d overhead at the Compass Bikes container load. The ice crackdown. My breath came fast. “Mari, is there some kind of crackdown by that organization about looking for cash smugglers?”
“Yes. Haven’t you been following the news here?”
I shook my head. I was a news junkie at home, but here I’d been so focused on solving the mystery of Juan Carlos’s death, and following the PAC tour, I hadn’t tuned in to the major headlines.
“Cash smuggling into Ecuador has gotten worse lately, along with the drug mule problem,” Mari explained.
I told her about the phrase Preston had used back at Compass Bikes. “He said something about moving in a different direction because of the I.C.E. crackdown,” I concluded. “So maybe, before this crackdown, he used to move cash himself. Maybe he suddenly needed to go the extra mile to avoid customs, so he hired Darwin’s group. He might have seen the container load as a golden opportunity to conceal this bike full of cash.” I bit my lip. “I just don’t get why the cash would be in Juan Carlos’s bike. Who put it in there? Preston? Darwin? Or Juan Carlos?”
“I don’t know. But this is huge, Tessa,” said Mari. “We can’t just sit on this information. Let’s email Bianca Slade right now! She’ll know what to do next.”
I started typing Bianca’s name in my email, then snatched my hands back from the keyboard.
“What is it?” asked Mari.
I shook my head. “I don’t know if I can point the finger at Preston.”
“Have you lost your mind?” Mari exploded. “How can you just keep quiet about this? This is a way bigger deal than bike theft or even drug dealing. We’re talking racketeering. Cash smuggling. Money laundering. A major CEO bribing and blackmailing a young athlete. Possibly committing or hiring out a murder.” She paused to let all this sink in. “This is your big chance to complete Juan Carlos’s mission—the mission he wanted you to get involved with. If you don’t share this information, you’re basically betraying him.”
I got up and started pacing the small room, feeling like a caged animal. There was no good option. “But if I do share it, I’m betraying my friend Kylie,” I said. “She just got awarded the Lane Scholarship at our school, to finance her senior year. And she deserves every penny. Her mom has cancer. She’s taking an expensive experimental drug. If Preston Lane is hauled off to jail, Kylie won’t get her money, and she’ll have to go to public school senior year.”
Mari rolled her eyes. “Oh, so sad!” She smirked. “Give me a break. I went to public school. Believe me, there are worse fates than graduating from Cambridge Rindge and Latin. Gee, I’m sorry she’ll miss her cotillion or her debutante ball and the caviar in the cafeteria—”
“My school’s nothing like that,” I insisted. “It’s not ritzy. It’s always short on money, even with Preston Lane’s regular infusions. Anyway, it doesn’t matter if it’s a rich school. That’s where Kylie’s gone to school since kindergarten, and it’s where she wants to finish . . .”
My voice faltered. Mari was right. What was I saying? I couldn’t possibly justify hanging on to Kylie’s private school education if it meant covering up a racketeering operation . . . and a murder. Still, the thought of letting Kylie down, again, made me feel sick to my stomach.
If I didn’t finish the work Juan Carlos had begun, Preston, Darwin, and this whole Sports Xplor organization would continue its shadowy business. My life would just go on. Kylie’s scholarship wouldn’t be at risk. What difference did it make?
A lot. I pictured the faces of kids I had interviewed over the years. Including Jake and Juan Carlos’s teammates on the development team. Keeping quiet would let Preston go on corrupting sports and athletes, and letting a murderer go unpunished.
I’d just have to find a way to explain it to Kylie and hope that she’d understand.
I wrote Bianca a quick note explaining what we’d found, and tried to attach the first file from the flash drive, but an error message popped up:
FILE TRANSFER DENIED.
USB COPY PROTECTED.
“Oh, no,” said Mari. “It looks like this flash drive is locked or encrypted. To prevent leaks.”
“Why would Juan Carlos do that?” I asked, trying now to copy the files to my hard drive. “He wanted to share the information, not lock it up, right?”
The error message showed up again, with a loud beep.
“If this is Preston’s own backup drive,” Mari reminded me, “I bet Preston had it protected—lots of executives do that to prevent data theft—and Juan Carlos took it.”
“Why would Preston save emails on this flash drive, though?” I wondered out loud. “Some of this stuff looks like regular business, but a lot of it’s really incriminating.”
“To get it all off his hard drive and his email server,” Mari guessed. “The cloud’s not safe from hackers, either. A protected flash drive was probably a safer way to keep all his side business dealings separate from EcuaBar.”
“And now I understand why Juan Carlos asked me at Chain Reaction if I had a laptop. He couldn’t just copy the files to his own computer or flash drive and share them. Preston Lane had locked his backup drive.”
“Right. So Juan Carlos had to give someone the actual, physical flash drive to share this information. Otherwise there was no way to leak it.”
“But wait! Why wouldn’t a screen shot of these emails work?”
“Good idea! Let’s try.” Mari leaned over me to press the commands on the keyboard. “We can email our screen shots to Bianca Slade, and to the Cabot Police, and they can take this information and run with it.”
The screen shot Mari took of Preston’s email to Coach Mancuso seemed successful—no error box showed up. But when we opened the screen shot file to check our result, all that showed up was a pixelated mess of garbled information. A message from Mars.
Mari tried again, and groaned. “That is one sophisticated USB lock,” she said. “You can’t even take a picture. Preston definitely didn’t want this stuff getting into the wrong hands.”
“Neither did Juan Carlos,” I said, studying the pieces of the crucifix necklace and flash drive case. The two pieces fit together so snugly you could barely detect a seam. He must have spent some money on this. Not because it was gold—the gold was fake—but because it looked secure. I caressed the necklace. “I’m sure he wanted to keep this on him at all times until he found the right person to hand it over to.”
“Right. You,” Mari reminded me. “And now you have it. Just like he wanted. So what are you going to do?”
We exchanged a long look.
“Hand it over,” I said. “First thing in the morning, we’re going to the embassy office with this flash drive. The PAC Tour comes to Quito tomorrow. Didn’t you tell me the ambassador was planning on attending? He must be back in town.”
“And the bike?” Mari asked.
“We’ll tel
l him it’s coming Friday. And if he really enjoys a good cultural exchange program, he should come and check out our container unload.”
“What about Bianca?” Mari looked at the screen, where our note to Bianca Slade awaited, along with a red X showing that our attachment was unsuccessful.
“We’ll hold off,” I decided. “There’s no point in telling her about this without proof. There’s nothing she can do from there. We’ll get faster results delivering the flash drive to the ambassador here. Especially since Preston is coming this way.”
/////
BACK IN bed, I reassembled the necklace, with the flash drive nested inside, and laid it carefully on the nightstand. Then I picked it up and looked at it in the moonlight, letting the chain run through my fingers. It didn’t seem as shiny as it had before, like Juan Carlos’s spirit had flown out of it the moment it came apart. It was no longer a sentimental object, loaded with potential personal meaning or romantic implications. It was a storage case, containing a piece of electronic equipment.
I slipped it under my pillow.
Finally, I felt like a huge weight was lifting off my chest.
54
THE NEXT morning, Lucia greeted us with warm smiles, huge plates of breakfast, frothy glasses of fresh-squeezed jugo de tomatillo, and an exuberant exclamation: “It is venticuatro de julio!”
I stared at her as she plunked Ecuadorian flags on toothpicks into our breakfast rolls.
“Um, yay?” I said. “What’s July twenty-fourth?”
Lucia frowned. “You do not know? There was no talk of this at Vuelta? It is el natalicio del Libertador!”
“The Liberator?” I echoed. That nickname sounded like another cyclist.
“Simón Bolivar. He helped to liberate Latin America from the Spanish Empire,” Lucia explained. He is a very important figure. On this day we have a public holiday, parades in the street, celebrations.”
Mari shot me a panicked look. “I’m sorry, Tessa,” she whispered. “My cousin told me about this this holiday, and I totally forgot about it. This could really throw off our plan.”
“If it’s a public holiday, does that mean offices are closed?” I asked Lucia.
“Government offices, yes, and most businesses. Hugo will not be at work, so he will take you to the container unload this morning,” Lucia explained as she stirred two short mugs of Nescafé.
I shook my head, struggling to keep up. “Today’s Thursday. The container unload is tomorrow.”
“No. It’s today! Wilson called early this morning to say that it is arriving today, a day ahead of schedule, despite the protests,” Lucia said, beaming. She handed Mari and me our coffee. “You must be at the Vuelta warehouse for the unload in one hour. Hugo will drive you right after breakfast. This means missing the circuit race for the PAC Tour, but I think this is more important, yes?”
Mari and I exchanged a look. “Santiago invited the ambassador to come to the container unload to see the bike tomorrow. Not today,” I whispered to Mari when Lucia disappeared into the kitchen again. “He won’t be at the container unload today. Or at the office—it’ll be closed!”
“But he will be at the PAC circuit race,” said Mari. “I guarantee. It’s the first PAC Tour cycling event in Ecuador, and it’s el Ratón’s debut event with Equipo Diablo. The ambassador, as a cycling fan, wouldn’t miss this for the world. And law enforcement will be a huge presence at the race. The ambassador should know which officers are trustworthy.”
“Are you saying we’re supposed to find the ambassador somewhere on the course?”
“It’s a high-speed, two-mile course making a square through the business district,” Mari explained. “The start and finish line are at the same place, since it’s a circuit. That’s where the grandstands are. El Parque Metropolitano. He’ll be there, in VIP seating. We’ll go there and give him the flash drive this morning.”
“But how, if we have the container unload? We can’t skip that.”
“So we’ll get the bike from the container and have Santiago drive us to the race as soon as we’re done,” said Mari. “We’ll find the ambassador and give him both things at once.”
“What about Preston?” I pointed out. “He said he’d be at the container unload.”
“That was back when the container load wasn’t scheduled for the same day as a race,” Mari countered. “I’m sure Preston will be at the circuit race too, with the team. Tied up in team business. We can get the bike past him and to the ambassador. I’m telling you, this early arrival of the shipping container is the best thing that could have happened.
“But what if people see us loading a bike into Santiago’s car? They might think we’re stealing a donation!”
“Can you be just a little bit positive about this?” said Mari. “God, what’s happened to you? We can get the bike into the car. If anyone asks, we’ll just say we found a mechanical problem that wasn’t caught back in Cambridge, and we’re taking it back to Vuelta. No big deal. Hey.” She lightly punched my arm. “Remember when you asked me to trust you? To go on your ride, when we went undercover at Dylan Holcomb’s place?”
“Yeah.”
“So now go on my ride. My plan will work. I’m sure of it.”
Lucia returned with a basket of fruit. “Eat up, girls! You’ll need your energy. Unloading those bikes will be a lot of work!”
I wanted to believe Mari. But I looked at the fruit, thinking of the Sports Xplor site, and suddenly felt sick.
/////
AFTER BREAKFAST, while I waited for Mari to finish her shower, I checked my email, hoping something had come in from Amber.
It had. I called Mari over to read her note.
Hi Tessa,
Yes, I do remember you. How could I forget the girl who came to our bike school to spy on my husband? And who got that Watchdog reporter to come sniffing around, which led to the police sniffing around, which led to my husband being accused of a heinous crime? I remember you all right. And I have to say, you’re not exactly my favorite person right now. He’s been through so much, finally getting his life back on track, and this false accusation is not what he needs.
But I appreciate that now you’re trying to clear his name. I’m desperate to clear his name too. So desperate, I guess, that I decided to take your email seriously. I went through all the pre-race photos I took and found a few that looked odd. I have a bunch of Team EcuaBar riders goofing off by the trailer, like at any race, but something in the background made me look twice. I enlarged it and zoomed in on the suspicious area in the lower right corner. See the attached JPEGs.
I opened the picture file and made it full screen. Preston was removing a Cadence racing bike with white handlebars from the trunk of his Lexus SUV. The car was clearly his—the vanity plate said ECUABAR on it.
In the background of a second picture, taken moments later, Preston could be seen propping the bike against the side of his car, while talking to Coach Mancuso, who was also looking at the bike. In a third picture, the two men were doing something to the seat tube, it looked like. In the fourth photo, the men had moved to the back of the car, where they were looking in Preston’s trunk. The fifth image showed Juan Carlos mounting that bike while Preston and Coach Mancuso talked. In the sixth photo, almost out of the picture frame, Juan Carlos was seen riding away. And in the seventh image, the coach and Preston were back on the side of the car, Preston’s mouth wide open, aghast, and the coach making one of his wild, flailing hand gestures. If I could speed the pictures up like a movie, the sequence would show Juan Carlos taking off with a bike, surprising the team owner and coach who seemed to have other plans for it.
My heart pounded. The bike that I’d thought was Juan Carlos’s spare when I saw it in the woods might not have been his at all! That would explain why Mari had seen Juan Carlos’s spare bike on the wall at Dylan’s place. Juan Carlos’s spare bike
had never been stolen. The bike was Preston Lane’s. And the money stashed inside it had to connect Preston to the death of Juan Carlos.
I went back to Amber’s email and read the end of her note.
When I zeroed in on this sequence of background images, a narrative began to emerge. Maybe you can see it too. That bike didn’t really belong to Juan Carlos. Yet. Dylan told me Preston had a new spare bike for Juan Carlos that he would give to Dylan to box up with the bikes going to the PAC Tour. That must have been the bike in the trunk. Dylan said he would want to check the fittings before he packed it, and run an inspection. Preston told him not to bother, just to pack it up the same day he got it. We both thought that sounded weird, but then Dylan said he never got the new spare bike from Preston, so he put it out of his mind. Now I’m going to show these pictures to the Cabot Police and see what they think. Clearly they should be questioning Preston and Tony. Not our boyfriends.
Our boyfriends.
I’d stared at the word, not recognizing it for a moment. Maybe I’d been talking in Spanish so much, it seemed unfamiliar. But also the idea of Jake as my boyfriend now seemed so foreign to me. As did the idea that he was still a potential suspect. In my mind, I’d cleared him of suspicion. But until the truth about Preston and Darwin’s group came out, Jake wasn’t out of the woods. I wasn’t, either.
/////
LESS THAN an hour later, we were in Hugo’s car, and he was driving us to a parking lot by a warehouse in a rundown area. “Why is this container delivery happening so far away?” he asked, frowning as we passed a busy long-distance bus terminal. He glanced at Amparo and Andreas. They had worn out their parents by pleading to come, and now sat in the back beside Mari.
“Because we’ve got nearly five hundred bikes coming, and we need a warehouse,” Mari explained. “There isn’t enough space to store them and organize them for distribution at the Vuelta headquarters. I’m sure it’s safe. Equipo Diablo stores their equipment there.”
