by P. J. Tracy
“Good afternoon, Sheriff. This is Gino Rolseth out of Minneapolis Homicide.”
His heart stammered a little, thinking of Marla. Jesus. He wasn’t ready. “Detective. What can I do for you?”
“I’m calling about an attempted homicide case you had in Cottonwood County back in ’95. Were you on the job then?”
Jacob let out a sigh of relief. “Just barely. My father was sheriff back then, though.”
“Would he be available to talk?”
“He passed a few months ago.”
There was a slight lag in the conversation. “Oh. I’m sorry to hear that.”
“Thanks. Listen, most of our files from back then are still on paper. What case are you asking about?”
“The perpetrator’s name was Ernesto Cruz. He knifed a man half to death over some kind of scuffle and did some time. Does that name ring a bell?”
“Name doesn’t ring a bell, but the case sure does. Back then you could count violent crimes in Cottonwood County on one hand. If memory serves, it happened at a seasonal camp where the orchard workers used to stay during fall harvest. I can dig up the old files for you. My father kept copies of all his handwritten notes, too, if that will help.”
“I really appreciate that, Sheriff Emmet. What’s the name of the orchard?”
“It was called Country Sun Apples, but it’s long gone. Closed going on a couple decades.” Jacob left the bedroom and went into Pop’s old office, where wooden file cabinets lined the walls, each drawer meticulously marked by year. “Anything specific you’re looking for?”
“Actually, we’re trying to find out who Ernesto Cruz’s son is, but there are no records of him anywhere. He’s a person of interest in some pending priority cases up here.”
Jacob pulled open the 1995 file drawer and started ruffling through yellowed folders. “The women in the parks?”
“Yeah.”
“Hang on, Detective, I’m looking at the file right now.”
Ten minutes later, Gino hung up with a flourish. “Okay, buddy, here’s the story. Ernesto Cruz was a seasonal laborer, here on a work permit from Mexico back in ’95. And check this out—he got lit up one night during a poker game and took some deep swipes at his friend with a bowie knife, whacked up his torso pretty good and almost killed him. Sound familiar?”
Magozzi’s mouth tightened. “I see where you’re going. What happened to him?”
“After he did his time here, he got deported back to Mexico. It’s a blank slate after that.”
“Any mention of Cruz’s family in the sheriff’s records?”
“Nothing. No wife or kids on record or at his trial.”
“That doesn’t mean much. Maybe they hightailed it back home when Cruz got into trouble with the law. Maybe they weren’t even here at the time.”
Gino propped his elbows on the desk and folded his hands together to make a resting place for his chin. “Cruz might not even know he has a kid, although the knifing over the poker game and our serial’s MO makes me wonder. Bottom line is, we have to find Ernesto Cruz and question him, and that’s going to be damn near impossible if he’s in Mexico. You know what it’s like trying to get fast answers out of the Federales. Their homicide rate is double ours at least, half of them are in bed with the cartels, and it looks like that’s the beehive we’re about to poke.”
Magozzi looked over at McLaren, who was busy at his desk, dragging his hands through his mess of red hair and making it stand up like a miniature fire spreading over his scalp. “Hey, McLaren, is Spanish one of the forty-seven languages you speak?”
“That’s a supreme insult. I was fluent in Spanish when I was five.”
“Are you tight with anybody in the Federales?”
“Everyone’s tight with the Federales until they decide to ignore you. Or shoot you.”
“We need to locate Ernesto Cruz . . .”
“That’s the father of our serial killer, right?”
“We’re assuming, and we just found out he was deported back to Mexico after his sentence here.”
“I’m already on it.”
McLaren spent the next forty-five minutes on the phone, then retrieved a sheet of paper from his printer and slid it across the rugged, paper-littered terrain of Magozzi’s desk. “Ernesto Cruz is dead. He and a few of his friends got killed in Ciudad Juárez five years ago, execution style. And if you don’t already know, Ciudad Juárez is the drug cartel version of Dante’s seventh circle of Hell.”
Gino grunted. “So Ernesto Cruz decided seasonal work wasn’t his gig after all. How about family?”
“No wife or kids associated with him on any paperwork south of the border, either. And that’s all I could get before the guy I was talking to decided he was too busy for me.”
“Touched a nerve?” Magozzi asked.
“That was my impression. When you talk to the law down there, it’s even odds you’re talking to somebody who’s getting squeezed or paid off by a cartel one way or another. My best guess is the family business didn’t end when Ernesto Cruz got killed.”
Gino tossed a pen across his desk. “We’ve got cartels popping like flashbangs at a riot, but no solid connection to our serial except for Daddy’s DNA, which wouldn’t make it to a courtroom in a thousand years. Hell, we don’t really know that the blood at the scenes belonged to our serial, or how many kids Ernesto Cruz had in the first place. The blood only proves that one of his kids enjoys the Minneapolis park system.”
“Let’s send the DNA profile to Interpol,” McLaren suggested. “Maybe Cruz Junior was operating somewhere internationally and we can track him that way.”
“Already done,” Magozzi said. “Nothing popped on Interpol. They have about a hundred and fifteen thousand DNA profiles, and our serial’s not one of them.”
THIRTY-FOUR
Lon Cather had just made his third loop of the major Saint Paul parks that had jogging or walking paths and a lot of tree coverage, hoping to see something he hadn’t seen before.
He had no delusions of grandeur, imagining himself as the one who would collar the guy in the act, especially with the stepped-up heat from extra street patrols and park police. The pressure had more than likely chased their perp away, at least temporarily, which is probably what had happened in Minneapolis and sent their man east across the Mississippi River to Phalen Park. Tomorrow or the next day, he might be in Wisconsin or Iowa or Ohio, at some other park. This trip had an entirely different purpose, which was to look through a new prism to try to get inside a hunter’s mind.
Think about your quarry, Lon, that’s first. You have to know where to find it, then you have to figure out what their special spot might be, based on what you know about the animal. Once you stake out their position of highest vulnerability, you need patience, silence, and good cover. That’s your only advantage, because prey can pretty much do anything better than a human except think and plan.
Words of wisdom from good old Uncle Rudy when he’d taken him up north for his first and last deer hunt. Rudy had gotten a big old buck that had looked a hell of a lot better browsing peacefully in the woods than it did plastered above Rudy’s mantel that Christmas Eve, and Lon had never seen life or death the same way after that. But Rudy’s perspective was universal—it was the way a serial killer thought, and it was the way a good cop hunting a serial killer should think.
As he wound his car back to his starting point at Phalen Park, his cell rang—Junior Liman calling from Eagle Lake. “Junior, tell me you have something for me.”
“You sound desperate, my friend. Is all the media getting to you?”
“I could give a shit about the media. What I do give a shit about is four dead women and a freak still on the loose.”
“I hear you. Listen, I did what I could, plowed through all our casino footage from the past two weeks and compared it to the film you bro
ught down. I found something interesting.”
Lon veered over to the curb and parked in front of a busy Dairy Queen where a Little League team was clamoring out of a couple of minivans, trampling each other to get to the walk-up window first. Maybe he’d get an Oreo Blizzard for dessert when he was finished with his call. “Give it to me, Junior.”
“Okay, by your calculations and mine, the blurry figure of the creep sneaking into Phalen Park was a shrimp—five-six at best. Right now I’m looking at a split screen of that footage compared with casino surveillance video taken eleven days ago. And I’m seeing another shrimpy creep about the same height, same stocky build, sitting at the highest stakes poker table we have. He’s wearing a Nike baseball cap and drinking a Budweiser. The guy never looks up, never shows his face, even when he gets up and walks away.
“My first thought was, big deal, you could walk into any casino in the country and find fifty guys who match that description. But I showed the footage to the dealer, and he remembered him, said he’d been in a couple times before. He also said he was spooky—kept his head down, never made eye contact with anyone, never said a word, always bought in with cash—a lot of it.”
“No paper trail, then.”
“No. But here’s the real story—the guy had a tatt on his neck. The dealer recognized it and so did I. Three dots above two bars.”
“What the hell does that mean?”
“Mayan numerology for the number thirteen. It probably means this guy is Sureño—Mexican Mafia, aka cartel thug. I’ve got security on high alert in case he shows again.”
Lon leaned back in his seat and stared at a Little Leaguer shoving a chocolate-covered ice cream cone into his mouth. “Jesus Christ, are you kidding me?”
“The cartels are in every major city in the U.S. and probably most of the minor ones, you know that. And talk about an incubator for sociopaths—these guys come up as kids and they’re stone killers. After decapitating a couple dozen people and hanging them from a bridge, a few women in some parks are probably like dessert.”
Lon looked away from the Dairy Queen then, abandoning all hope of an Oreo Blizzard for dessert. “Yeah, I know that, it’s just that this is setting off all kinds of alarms.”
“I’m happy to hear that. I’ll send you my casino footage to put in your book. Go get him and bring him down hard.”
“Thanks, Junior. Be in touch.”
“You, too.” Lon hung up and started dialing Detective Magozzi.
THIRTY-FIVE
Roadrunner was in the war room of the Chariot, which was a back bedroom he and Harley had retrofitted into a mobile computer lab that was fully linked to all the office hardware via satellite, including the Beast. There wasn’t any task they couldn’t perform from the road, and as he looked out at the shiny waving green leaves of young corn and the pastures dotted with cows, he began to wonder why they didn’t chew up the asphalt more often, just for a change of venue.
As he flicked his sleeping touch screen to refresh it, the satellite phone rang and went to safety screening mode. No matter how many times he changed the protocol, it still occasionally got electronic intrusions, sometimes from foreign hackers trying to mine their software, sometimes from one government agency or another, trying to do exactly the same thing. The first and best line of defense was voice recognition, and right now, his screen was telling him that this was a legit call from one of the few outside friendlies the software recognized, specifically Magozzi.
He waited for the caller to enter the requisite password for connection, then picked up when the caller was verified as authentic. “Magozzi?”
“Hey, Roadrunner. Is everything okay on your end?”
“Grace is fine. We’re all fine. Actually, it’s pretty cool out here in the sticks. I’m sitting in the war room, watching cows and cornstalks waving in the breeze. Sounds wildly exciting, right?”
“You don’t have to convince me, Roadunner, I’m the guy who bought a lake house in the sticks and I get excited watching herons and wood ducks. Listen, we need to talk. Are we secure?”
“Totally secure.”
Magozzi hesitated. “You’re positive?”
Roadrunner smiled a little. Most people couldn’t wrap their minds around an ironclad security system, let alone understand how it worked. “I’m positive, Magozzi. The Chariot scrambles and destroys everything coming or going. I wrote the program specifically to fly under Big Brother’s radar.”
“That’s exactly what we need to do. Okay, here’s the deal—Grace told you about our new case and that the Feds are involved now, right?”
“Yeah, of course. Global Foods. What are the Feds saying?”
“Not much, but we’re suddenly up to our eyeballs in cartel connections, which includes your blood on the road at Marla Gustafson’s scene. We’d be grateful if you could take a look, throw it into the hopper.”
“That’s a given, Grace is already merging our cases, so send whatever else you’ve got. Anything specific you want us to focus on, or is this just a general data dump?”
“A name—Ernesto Cruz, deceased. Mexican national who did jail time in Cottonwood County back in the mid-nineties and got deported after time served. He was killed in a presumed cartel hit in Ciudad Juárez a couple years ago, and we’ve got his DNA profile matching blood at two of our scenes that says he’s the father of our serial killer. We need to find his kid or kids, but as far as we can tell they don’t exist anywhere.”
Roadrunner pressed his fingers hard against his temples as he sorted through the information Magozzi was throwing at him. “Wow, okay, we’ve got something to work with. Did you talk to the Federales?”
“McLaren had a conversation with them, but when he started pressing about Cruz’s family, they shut up.”
“Hmm. I think I have an idea . . . wait a minute. Did you say Cottonwood County?”
“Yeah, why?”
“Because Cottonwood County is exactly where we are right now.”
Gino eyed his partner worriedly as he hung up with Roadrunner. “You went all tense there at the end, Leo. Is Grace okay?”
“They’re all fine. You know where they are?”
“Buttonwillow.”
“Buttonwillow’s in Cottonwood County.”
“Whoa. Things are starting to pile up. . . .” Gino looked at his watch and cursed. “Leo, I’m really sorry, but I’ve got to take an hour, I promised Angela I’d go to the Accident’s kindergarten roundup.”
“Go, go, go, it only happens once in a kid’s life. I’ll handle this. Meet me at my house when you’re finished so we can get the hell out of the office while we try to tie this together.”
“Sounds good . . .”
Magozzi’s phone interrupted. “Hang on, Gino, it’s Lon Cather. Talk fast, Detective, Gino’s on his way out the door.”
THIRTY-SIX
An hour later, Gino was camped out in Magozzi’s living room, eating a slice of pizza and drinking a beer while he scribbled on a big whiteboard he’d set up on an easel. Magozzi had casually wondered why Gino had a whiteboard and an easel in the trunk of his car when he’d pulled them out in the first place, but was afraid to ask for fear it had something to do with the Accident’s kindergarten roundup today.
He poured himself a glass of scotch and brought out a bowl of tortilla chips from the kitchen. “How’s it going?”
Gino gave him a look of exasperation. “Don’t pull that crap. You want to know why I had this stuff in my trunk, you know you do.”
“Not really.”
“Sure you do. It’s driving you crazy, so I’m going to tell you. This piece-of-shit whiteboard is exactly one-half inch too long for a regulation kindergarten whiteboard—one frigging half inch. Are you kidding me? We’re not talking pro sports here, we’re talking kindergarten, for God’s sake. Are they afraid that extra half inch is going to send the
m over the edge, or what?”
Magozzi was a little shocked by how ludicrous it seemed, but he didn’t respond; even a grunt would have been interpreted as encouragement.
“Nope, this just won’t do, and don’t even think about mentioning chalkboards to those fascists, because you have to use chalk on chalkboards, and God forbid some kid gets dust up his nose and sneezes. And you wanna tell me what does a kindergartner need with three-ring binders? They can’t even pick them up in their little hands yet.”
“You’re supposed to buy three-ring binders?”
“Yeah, that and about forty other things. The schools don’t pay for shit anymore. Next year, they’ll probably ask him to bring his own desk and chair and charge him rent. I’d like to know where the hell my tax dollars are going, because last time I checked, they’ve gone up every year for a decade, and there’s still a pothole in my alley the size of a moon crater that I’ve been complaining about for two years. I’m telling you, the world is falling apart one whiteboard at a time.”
Magozzi selected a slice of pizza from the greasy box that was sitting on his floor. “Other than that, how’s it going?”
Gino brightened. “A helluva lot better than if we’d stayed at the office. I’ve got pizza, I’ve got beer and tortilla chips, and no distractions. And the best part is, every single scrap of evidence that comes in just puts another bow on my ‘serial killer with a day job as a hit man’ theory.”
“I didn’t know that was an actual theory, more of an offhand remark.”
Gino threw him an annoyed look. “You know what people do when they’re resistant to fresh new ideas? They start revising history. I put out that brilliant theory when we found out Cassie Miller was undercover and most likely a hit. It explains the anomalies in the MO and it explains the playing card. Even you thought it was brilliant at the time . . .”
“Actually, I didn’t.”
“. . . and now you’re pretending you thought it was just an offhand remark. Come on, Leo, you used to have an imagination. Work with me.” He grabbed a marker and wrote CARTELS in huge block letters. “This is the thread I’m going to use to sew this up.”
