Desert Jade

by C. J. Shane

  “That is great news! Do you need me to give you some spending money?”

  “Nah, Letty. You do enough for me already. I have some money saved. I’ll use it for snacks and maybe get a souvenir. No problem! I’m so excited.”

  Elena asked about her brothers. Letty decided to avoid the topic of Will’s shoulder dislocation. Instead she said, “Eduardo is fine. I talked to him yesterday. And little brother Will has a girlfriend.”

  “Really!” Elena squealed. “Awesome! What she like?”

  “She’s smart and pretty and her name is Clarice. She’s in his bicycling club. You should see the way they look at each other. She kissed him on the cheek, and he turned beet red…well, as red as a full-blood O’odham can get. He’s been in the sun a lot lately, and he’s even darker than usual. He told me that he really likes her, and he emphasized the word ‘like.’ You can meet her when you come home.”

  Elena giggled. “I can’t wait. I know I’m going to like her, too.”

  They chatted a few more minutes, then said their goodbyes.

  Marv was next. Letty told him what had happened with Will and all the information that came from her Uncle Miguel, although she didn’t mention that Miguel was the source. She had to wait for Marv to get paper and pen. He took extensive notes on Letty’s description of the isolated desert location where the smugglers had been seen.

  “I’m going to contact a friend in ICE,” Marv said. “This is serious. You can’t do this by yourself. Since it’s on the reservation and way in the back country, maybe they’ll want to call on the Shadow Wolves.”

  “That’s what I was thinking, too, Marv. Let me know when you have a name and number I can call. I really appreciate your help.”

  “No problem.” They said their goodbyes.

  By that time, Millie indicated that she was hungry, so Letty stopped long enough to feed her and give her bowl of fresh water. As usual, Millie ate like she would never have the opportunity to eat again for the rest of her life. The food was gone in about sixty seconds.

  “Don’t eat so fast! You’re going to choke, you goof ball,” Letty said. Millie wagged her tail amicably.

  Adelita was next. She and Letty had an off-the-record relationship that no one official knew about. They had helped each other by sharing key information for nearly the entire time that Letty had worked as a private investigator and during the time Adelita worked her way up to the job of detective in the Tucson Police Department. Letty considered her relationship with Adelita to be professionally invaluable. And they were friends and had been for many years. A true friendship was valuable beyond all measure. Letty knew that for certain.

  Letty filled Adelita in on almost everything. She told Adelita about being hired by Sylvia Baird.

  “What can you tell me about the arrest of José Gomez?” Letty asked.

  “There was a report about a fight between two groups of boys, one led by Gomez and the other by the dead woman’s son, Travis Lyle. Instead of going home like the police officer told him, Gomez went to the Lyle home. He and Travis Lyle were seen arguing loudly in the Lyles’ front yard. Gomez was seen later getting in his car and driving away. We don’t have an exact time on that because the neighbor wasn’t sure. Around the same time, a 911 call came in from the husband of the dead woman. We do have the exact time that the call came in. An ambulance was sent, but she was already dead when they arrived.”

  “We set up a crime scene. One of our officers found a gun in the hedge outside the wall around the Lyles’ back yard. There’s a wrought-iron gate in the wall that leads to the back yard. You can’t see the gate from the street because of an oleander hedge that is nearly fifteen feet high. We found the gun between the wall and the oleander bushes about ten feet from the gate. Looks like someone shot through the gate then tossed the gun into the hedge. The gun is being tested now for fingerprints and ballistics. The dead woman is at the morgue. They’ll do an autopsy on her this week. Retrieving the bullet from her brain is a priority. We want to see if it matches the gun. We interviewed both the husband and the son. They said pretty much the same thing. A shot came from the street and killed the woman. Not much to add although the son, Travis, did say he thought it was Gomez who shot her. Travis didn’t see Gomez fire the shot, though. Gomez did not have gunshot residue on his hands.”

  “Adelita, it looks like there’s a connection to the Chinese triads I told you about.”

  “What! That’s crazy! Tell me more!”

  Letty explained what she’d learned from her interview with José’s girlfriend Emily Castro. “I’m looking into this now,” Letty said. “It’s a real possibility that there’s way more to this than some teenager getting pissed off and trying to kill another teenager over a girl. Also, I have a source that tells me the Chinese are smuggling, but not going north. They are taking contraband south into Mexico.”

  “Wow! Maybe weapons smuggling? This is getting nasty. Let me know as soon as you learn more. We’ll figure this out together. Meanwhile, you be careful, Letty. Watch your back.”

  “I am watching. I’ll check with you tomorrow.”

  Letty decided to wait on contacting Zhou. She wanted to gather as much information as possible before she saw him again. That meant meeting with Jessica Cameron first and seeing if she could interview the Lyles, both father and son. She decided that she preferred to go to Jade’s house and talk to Zhou in person. Letty took a quick shower, dressed, and headed for Jessica Cameron’s office.

  ***

  Jessica Cameron’s office was in a large law firm on the tenth story of a high-rise building in downtown Tucson. Letty didn’t much like having to go downtown. Parking was always a problem, and a parking place always cost her money. She found the cheapest option – the lower level of the multistory main library. First hour free. Two dollars for every hour after that.

  Letty walked the short distance to the office building and took the elevator to the Clark law firm. She introduced herself and gave her card to the receptionist who disappeared for a few minutes. Jessica Cameron appeared soon after with a faint smile on her face.

  “Welcome, Ms. Valdez. Please come into my office.”

  Letty noticed that Jessica Cameron didn’t look that old – maybe mid-thirties – but she had a spacious office with a great view of the Tucson Mountains to the west. Cameron is either well-connected, or she’s doing a very good job for the firm, Letty thought to herself. Maybe she knows how to bring in wealthy clients, or maybe she’s just good at winning cases.

  Cameron gestured to a chair and said, “I’ll get to the point so we don’t waste each other’s time. I want us to keep each other informed and work together as a team. Are you on board with that?”

  Letty nodded yes.

  “You are familiar with the outlines of the case. Two groups of teenage boys got into a conflict that was broken up by police. Our client, José Gomez, follows Travis Lyle to his home in the Sam Hughes neighborhood, Gomez and Lyle get into a shouting match, then Gomez is seen driving away from the Lyle home about the same time that Barbara Lyle is shot. A gun was found nearby, but so far, we have no link between the gun and our client. We’re waiting on forensics. At this point there is no direct proof that our client shot Mrs. Lyle. But the fact that he followed Travis Lyle home, they got into it again, and then Mrs. Lyle was killed while standing next to her son makes it look really bad for José Gomez. He had motive and opportunity. If the gun turns out to have his fingerprints on it, then he had means. There was no gunshot residue on his hands, but the prosecution can just argue that he had gloves on. Circumstantial evidence against him is strong. There appears to be no other suspect.”

  Cameron paused. “Do you need water or coffee or anything?”

  “No, thank you.”

  “Okay. So what do you have so far?” she asked Letty.

  “Ms. Cameron, I want to make clear that, if we are on the same team, the information I give you is to be kept between us until the right time to make it public. Lives m
ay depend on your discretion.”

  Cameron’s eyebrows went up in surprise. “Well….I didn’t expect this. Yes, of course. You can count on me.”

  “This case appears to be much more complicated that what is in the police report. I interviewed Gomez, and I’m fairly certain that he’s hiding something. He simply made no attempt to defend himself. He may be trying to protect someone.”

  Cameron nodded. “I see. Go on.”

  “I also interviewed his mother and his girlfriend Emily Castro. Emily told me that the fight – the one the boys got into that the cops broke up – may have been about her. She said José was furious that Travis Lyle had been hitting on her. Then she said something very interesting.”

  Letty paused. “Emily said she heard Gomez say to Travis, ‘Why are you hitting on my girlfriend when you have all those Chinese girls?’”

  Cameron shook her head. “I don’t understand. What Chinese girls? Why is that important to this case?”

  Letty launched into the tale of Interpol, Chinese triad gangsters, human and drug trafficking, Homeland Security, her friend Jade Lopez, and a Beijing cop named Zhou Liang Wei.

  “Wow!” Jessica Cameron said. “So you think Travis Lyle is mixed up in the trafficking, and José knew about it somehow?”

  “That’s correct. No proof yet, but the comment about Chinese girls says a lot to me. Emily Castro said it wasn’t about any Chinese-American girls at school. She didn’t know what Gomez was talking about. He won’t say.”

  Jessica Cameron leaned back in her chair. “That’s quite a story.”

  “There’s more. I learned from two other sources that this Chinese criminal gang had been smuggling Chinese girls into the U.S. from Mexico. About a year ago, they changed their business, cut back on the girls, and started smuggling something from the U.S. into Mexico. First south to north. Now north to south. My sources say that that they had – or still have – a drop-off location in Tucson, then they take the contraband out to a rather isolated area on the reservation to move it across the border. The Sinaloa Cartel may be involved, too, although I have no confirmation of that. In Tucson, there is a Mexican-American man, a coyote, whom we think was moving the girls north, and is now helping move the contraband to the south. An Anglo man was seen at least once at the coyote’s drop-off in Tucson.”

  “That could be Travis?”

  “Yes, or more likely his dad. Or some other player that we haven’t come across yet. There’s a possibility that Mrs. Lyle was involved, or maybe she just got caught in the crossfire.”

  “What do you think they are smuggling?”

  “The Beijing cop shared with me a long list of contraband that the triad gangs are known to smuggle in various locations in the world. But I think guns are the most likely. They started off smuggling girls and probably drugs, too, into the U.S., but then moved into weapons smuggling. There’s a lot of money in guns. They are easy to get in the U.S. Guns are a lot less trouble to deal with than a bunch of terrified Chinese teenage peasant girls who thought they were going to get a job and instead found themselves brutalized by gangsters and turned into unpaid prostitutes.”

  “So circumstantial evidence makes the case for my client look really bad unless we can prove that Mrs. Lyle got caught up in something far more complicated and nefarious than any of us thought,” Jessica Cameron concluded.

  “Exactly. I’m following up on my leads. I’m hoping to figure out what is being smuggled, and by whom, and what that has to do with the Lyle family. Finding the answers to these questions will shift suspicion from José Gomez to the real culprits.”

  Letty paused. “There’s more, too. The coyote here in Tucson may have turned over to the Chinese a Mexican girl who had just come across the border illegally. He probably sold her to the Chinese. And the Beijing cop is also looking for the daughter of a Hong Kong official who was kidnapped. We think the gangsters have her, too. My view of this is based on an incident which occurred a couple of nights ago in Himmel Park. A Chinese girl was seen attempting to run away from a bunch of Chinese men. They caught her and hauled her off in a van. And for some reason, these Chinese gangsters are very interested in Jade Lopez. She’s an elementary school teacher here in Tucson. Perhaps you remember her husband, Carlos Lopez, who disappeared about a year ago. The gangsters have searched her house twice for something. We don’t know what they are looking for. So these three women are in danger. It’s possible that Emily Castro might be in danger of kidnapping and human trafficking, too, although I’m not sure about that. That’s why we have to proceed carefully.”

  “What do you need from me?” Cameron asked intensely.

  “I’m going to attempt to interview father and son Lyle, but I’m going to try to talk to them separately. I don’t expect that they will be very cooperative. Also I’m going to be doing some serious research on both Barbara and Fred Lyle. The comment that José made to Travis about the Chinese girls suggests to me that Travis found out about the smuggling of Chinese girls, and he probably bragged about it to the other boys. It’s very likely that Travis took advantage of them sexually. That’s a nice way of saying that he may have been raping those girls. But it’s unlikely that a teenage boy would be able to form a cooperative business relationship with Chinese gangsters. My guess is that one or both parents were involved. We need to know as much as possible about the Lyles. I suggest you start with doing some research on them, and I will, too.”

  Jessica Cameron was grinning now. “This is the most interesting case I’ve been handed for ages! Thank you so much.”

  Letty snorted. “Interesting, yes, but not so much fun if a Hong Kong gangster is after you with a hatchet. You should watch your back. Be more careful about security. We don’t know how much they know about you and about me. They will become aware of you at some point.”

  “Okay. I’ll take your advice,” Cameron said seriously. “But I must tell you. This has a lot of potential for making some money and also enhancing the reputation of the firm. I just want to say that I am very, very pleased to have you on our team, Letty Valdez. I am very impressed with what you’ve learned so far.”

  Letty stood. “Time for me to get back to work. Let’s stay in touch.”

  The two women shook hands. Letty made it back to the library parking garage within the sixty minutes allowed. She did not have to pay for parking.

  ***

  The neighborhood where the Lyles lived was named after Welsh immigrant Sam Hughes, who came to Tucson in 1858. The neighborhood was graced with many beautiful older homes in various architectural styles, yet almost always with a Spanish influence. Large trees in elegantly-landscaped yards provided more shade than many Tucson neighborhoods. Bicycles and walkers abounded. Many University of Arizona professors owned homes and lived in Sam Hughes. Jade also lived in this neighborhood in a much smaller and more modest home than many of the residents.

  Letty parked a block away and watched the Lyle residence. The best thing would be to interview them separately. Travis Lyle at age 18 was old enough to be interviewed without a parent present.

  She waited, and after a while, she saw a wide metal gate at the rear of the Lyle property slide open onto the alley. Travis drove out into the street. The gate closed behind him automatically. It was around lunchtime by now so she figured he’d come home from school for lunch, or maybe he’d never gone to school at all that morning. She followed him from a discreet distance. He showed no indication that he knew he was being followed.

  Letty noticed that Travis was tall and well-built, with very blonde hair cut stylishly. He was wearing well-tailored clothing and expensive running shoes.

  Lyle drove to a Chinese restaurant on Speedway Boulevard, parked and went in. She could see him ordering at the counter. He was sitting at a booth waiting for his lunch when Letty slipped into the booth opposite him.

  “Hi, Travis. My name is Letty Valdez, and I’m a private investigator. I’m looking into the death of your mother. I’m very sorry to hear that
she died and in such an awful way.” Letty tried her best to look sympathetic.

  “Yeah,” Travis said. “It was bad. But they already caught the guy who killed her. His name is José Gomez.”

  “Right. That’s what I’m doing. Trying to build a case.” She didn’t say that she was trying to build a case for the defense.

  “I’d like to ask you a few questions. I promise I won’t take much time.”

  “I’m not sure my dad would think this is okay,” he said. He looked around furtively as if he were guilty of something. His eyes were very blue.

  “Your dad is committed to seeing your mother’s killer go to jail, and if you can help us, that would be great.”

  “Okay. What do you want to know?”

  “Please describe what happened that afternoon.”

  “We were sitting on the back patio – my dad and my mom and me – and they were drinking margaritas. I had a beer.”

  Underage and his parents let him drink, Letty noted.

  “What were you talking about?”

  Travis immediately began to look uncomfortable. He turned his head away from Letty and said, “Nothing. I don’t remember.”

  “Then what happened?”

  “Gomez shot my mother.”

  “Where was she sitting?”

  “Next to me.”

  “Where was your dad sitting?”

  “He wasn’t there. He’d gone into the house to get something, some snacks, I think.”

  “Okay. So you and your mom were sitting there and then what happened?”

  “This bullet came from the direction of the street and hit my mom in her forehead. She fell over backward onto the patio.”

  “You live on a corner. When you say the direction of the street, do you mean the south or the east?”

  “South.”

  “There’s a gate there.”

  “Yeah, I think Gomez was standing there at the gate, and he shot through the iron railings. There are spaces between them that you can see through.”

  “Why do you think Gomez shot your mom?”

  “I think he was trying to shoot me!”