by Lee Goldberg
And while he recuperated, he watched Fox News and Dwight Edney, and couldn’t believe what they were saying about him. Edney was on the TV now, accusing Arturo, “the escaped drug lord and de facto leader of Mexico,” of sending “legions of drug mules armed by the ATF” across the border wearing vests filled with cocaine underclothes.
Coraline lifted her head from his crotch. “You’re a legend.”
She was naked, bleary eyed from her own liberal snacking on his Vicodin, and tired from working on his flaccid cock with hands, mouth, and cleavage for the last twenty minutes, doing her part in his pain-killing regimen. He wasn’t sure whether she was praising him as part of her therapeutic efforts or because she was genuinely impressed to be in the company of greatness. Either way, she would be executed and dumped in a ravine as soon as the bandages on his face came off.
While he was pleased to be acknowledged as such a powerful, fearsome, and influential figure in Mexico by the American media, he was also deeply insulted to have his name associated with the drug mule story. It made him seem like an idiot, especially among the Mexican public and his rival cartel leaders, all of whom he controlled through fear and respect. That was dangerous, because if they thought he’d lost his mind, he could face an uprising or an attack.
“Nobody is more powerful than you,” Coraline said, wrapping her hand around his limp dick and giving it a few more tugs of encouragement.
Was she making fun of him?
Arturo was considering whether or not to strangle her when there was a knock at his door. He pushed her off him and pulled the sheets up over his crotch.
“Come in,” he said.
Mateo, his second-in-command, strode into the room, stroking his black goatee, something the thirty-year-old killer did when he was anxious or perplexed about something. His gold-capped teeth, and the gold-plated knife he used to slice the throats of Arturo’s enemies, made him the monster in the horror stories that Mexican parents used to frighten their children into doing what they were told.
Do your chores or the Golden Devil will slice your throat!
“Go away,” Arturo said to Coraline and used his remote to mute the TV. She scampered naked past Mateo, who ignored her. “What have you learned, Mateo?”
“Two days ago, Caesar Orona and his men were executed in a barn in Guardados de Abajo.”
“Why should I care about the murder of a greedy coyote?”
“They were all killed by a black-haired woman with a scar across her throat,” Mateo said. “She saved Orona for last. She tortured and killed him in the middle of his sales pitch to some peasants.”
Impressive, Arturo thought. This was a woman his dick would wake up for. This might even be a woman he could marry, though he already had two wives, one in Mexico and another about to give birth to his child in Portland, Oregon, so he could be an American citizen.
“Who is she?”
“I don’t know,” Mateo said. “But she offered the peasants five hundred dollars up front to carry her cocaine across the border and another five hundred dollars when they arrived. She even gave them guns, apparently from the crate that was stolen from us a few months ago.”
Arturo raised his eyebrows, or at least he imagined that he did. He wasn’t feeling much on his face besides pain and his head was wrapped up like a mummy, so it was hard to actually tell.
“That makes no fucking sense,” he said.
“It gets even stranger,” Mateo said. “Our sources in Texas tell me the product that was confiscated was mostly flour and baking soda.”
“This is too stupid to be a real smuggling operation,” Arturo said. “I can’t believe even the DEA would think I was responsible.”
But they do, he thought. Or at least they want others to believe it. But why? What do they gain from embarrassing him and their own ATF?
“The operation may be stupid, but this woman isn’t,” Mateo said. “Anyone who can kill like that is a professional. There’s something else going on here.”
“We need to know what it is,” Arturo said. “Find her and bring her to me.”
“Alive or dead?”
Arturo gave him a withering stare, but the impact was ruined by his bandages. “What fun can I have with a corpse?”
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
Porto, Portugal. November 13. 6:30 a.m. Western European Time.
The Miradouro da Vitória was a vacant dirt lot wedged between Our Lady of Vitória church and an old abandoned building covered with layers of graffiti. But the unobstructed southeast view from the weedy, trash-strewn promontory was truly spectacular, sweeping out over the steepled red rooftops to the Se Cathedral and the Dom Luís bridge to the east, all the way down to the Cais da Ribeira, the Douro River, and across to the wine lodges of Vila Nova de Gaia to the south.
In any other city, Ian thought, a view like this would be monetized and commercialized, with rich landscaping, a snack bar, a souvenir shop, bleacher seating facing the city, and coin-operated telescopes along the edge of the plaza with illustrated plaques mounted on the protective railings that described all of the landmarks within view.
But there wasn’t even a bench to sit on. Just a single, forlorn tree and a couple of tree stumps in the dry, hard dirt and a graffiti-covered, two-foot-high stone pony wall that ran along the far edge of the lot. There wasn’t a railing or fence on the pony wall, so it offered an irresistible spot to sit or stand for a selfie, despite the sheer thirty-foot drop on one side to the winding, cobbled road below. He doubted that Rolfe and Clemens were the first people to fall, though perhaps they were among the few who’d died.
Ian was alone in the empty, roughly triangular lot, which felt strangely secluded, even though it was out in the open. There were no cameras around and it was unlikely that anybody was watching him now unless there were squatters peeking through holes in the boarded windows of the crumbling, derelict building, or clergy peeking between the slats of shuttered windows of the church, or a tourist looking through binoculars at the Se Cathedral.
Margo came running up to him. “I didn’t see anything suspicious on my jog. How about you on your leisurely walk?”
“Nope, but this would definitely be a great place to set a killing in a novel. I can see the couple here, trying to get just the right angle for a selfie, when a friendly stranger comes up and offers to take the perfect picture for them. He suggests they stand on the wall with that fabulous view of Porto in the background. So they get up on the wall, and the moment they do, he pushes them off, then tosses the phone after them.”
She peered over the edge and frowned. “You could fall from here and survive. He might have had to go down there with a rock to finish them off.”
“We can imagine lots of ways they might have been killed here, but we don’t have any evidence that’s what happened. We don’t even have a reason why anybody would want them dead.”
“We just haven’t found it yet.”
“I don’t see how we can stretch this trip out another day,” Ian said. “At least not if we want to maintain the charade that we’re doing an investigation.”
“I do,” she said. “I got a text from Langley while I was jogging. The photos you asked for came in, the ones from tourists who were at the same spots at the same time the couple were. Maybe there’s something there.”
Ian sighed. “Going through them all will be tedious, but I suppose it will buy us another day.”
“There are worse places to be,” Margo said. “Like in your office, staring at a blank screen.”
“Actually, I think I may have my Straker story.”
“Any chance it could become a mission for us?”
“Not unless the CIA is interested in taking down a notorious Mexican drug lord.”
She glowered at him. “We’re in Portugal, not Mexico. How did our trip here send your imagination there?”
“Creativity doesn’t follow a straight line,” Ian said. “But don’t worry, I’ll keep taking this exercise seriously, at leas
t for another day. I’m enjoying the city. Let’s look at those photos.”
They returned to the hotel, where Margo showered and changed while Ian went to his room and opened up his laptop, downloaded the files from a link that Margo had forwarded to him, and unpacked the pictures on his hard drive.
There were hundreds of shots, perhaps as many as a thousand, in directories separated by date and location. But the CIA had helpfully narrowed things down for him by using facial recognition technology to isolate the shots that included any angles on Rolfe and Clemens. Those photos were in a separate subdirectory. He opened up another window so he could compare the tourist shots with the ones that the couple had taken.
That was when Margo knocked on his door, her hair still wet and her laptop tucked under her arm. “Let’s get out of here. We’re in Porto. I don’t want to stay in a hotel all day.”
“We have a lot of pictures to look at. Where do you suggest we go?”
“Up to the university square,” she said. “We’re more likely to find a café there that caters to students and that will let us hang out and use their Wi-Fi as long as we keep ordering pastries and coffee.”
And that was exactly what they did, settling down at a café that faced the severely baroque Carmo Church, which was known for the blue-and-white-tiled mural on one outside wall and was topped in front with statues of four saints, who stood on the roof’s edge as if they were contemplating suicide.
Ian and Margo sipped coffees and gobbled down pastéis de nata, addictive little egg tarts, and Pão de Deus, deliciously sweet, streusel-topped rolls while they browsed through the photos, looking for something without having the slightest idea what it might be.
In each photo, a person, couple, or family were usually in the foreground, or sometimes it was a shot of a Porto landmark like a church, a statue, or a bridge, with Rolfe and Clemens somewhere in the background, walking by or taking a picture themselves, usually a selfie.
After an hour or so, Ian began to feel a strange variation of déjà vu while he looked at the photos. At first, he thought it was the cumulative effect of seeing the same couple, over and over, from different angles in places that he’d visited before. But this sensation was something else, persistent and nagging, on top of creepy and disorienting.
So he started over, but this time looking at everything in the photos except Rolfe and Clemens. The feeling was getting stronger, but whatever it meant felt just beyond his grasp, like a name he couldn’t remember.
Margo yawned and stretched in her seat. “This is like Where’s Waldo? without knowing what Waldo looks like or even if it’s Waldo that you’re looking for.”
That was it.
Her words were like a trigger. The instant the words were out of her mouth, he knew what he was looking for, what he saw but didn’t see.
“You’re right,” he said.
“Right about what?”
He pulled up four pictures at once, taken in four different locations the couple had visited by four different tourists, and began zooming in on the other faces in the crowds besides Rolfe and Clemens.
And then he saw it.
Or rather, him.
Ian felt a jolt of excitement, like getting a blackjack at a casino, and turned the laptop so Margo could see his screen. “Meet Waldo.”
The man’s face was pockmarked, as if he shaved with a cheese grater, and his teeth were so white Ian suspected they’d either been capped or replaced. Waldo wore a short-sleeved, tan panama shirt, white linen slacks and loafers, and a gold watch studded with diamonds.
“Waldo is in all four of these photos,” Ian said, “trailing behind Rolfe and Clemens.”
“Maybe he’s just a tourist on the same walking tour out of the same guidebook.”
“They weren’t on a walking tour,” he said.
“We don’t know that,” she said. “In a few of these photos, they are looking at a map. Maybe the map had a suggested route on it.”
Ian shook his head. He knew that wasn’t it. “Waldo was following them. He’s always looking at them, not at the sights.”
“Because Rolfe and Clemens were standing right in front of what everybody wants to see,” she said. “These are only four pictures. You may be reading more into it than there is.”
“Let’s go back to the beginning and see if Waldo is there,” Ian said, turned the laptop back to him, and began scanning through photos. “The first place the couple took pictures after breakfast at Café Majestic was outside the Santo Ildefonso Church.”
Ian pulled up the photos that Rolfe and Clemens took outside the elaborately tiled church and those taken by other tourists who were there at the same time.
Waldo was there, too.
He turned the laptop toward Margo again so she could see for herself.
“Okay,” Margo said. “Now it’s getting creepy.”
“Maybe this wasn’t the beginning,” he said, taking the laptop back.
He closed the photos from the other tourists and pulled up Briana Clemens’ first selfie, the picture she took of the couple’s reflection in the mirror at the Café Majestic.
Boom.
Waldo was in the reflection, too. He was seated at another table, his back to the couple, staring into the mirror.
Staring right at them.
And staring at Ian, too, or so it seemed. Waldo’s gaze was intense, utterly focused, a hunter targeting his prey.
“Waldo was already watching them at breakfast,” Ian said, turning the laptop to face Margo again.
“Why do you think he was so interested in them?”
“I don’t know, but look at the expression on his face. It certainly wasn’t to surprise them with a check from Publishers Clearing House.”
“What is Publishers Clearing House?”
“Never mind,” Ian said, suddenly feeling a hundred years older than Margo. He copied the Café Majestic photo, cropped the duplicate into a close-up of Waldo’s face, and sent the new picture to his phone. “The point is I don’t believe that his intentions were friendly.”
Margo scooted her chair over beside him. “Let’s check the pictures they took at the restaurant the first night they were here.”
Ian pulled up the pictures. There were shots of their food, and a few of the couple, but there were no other faces visible in the background.
“If Waldo is there,” Ian said. “We can’t see him.”
“Or he didn’t start following them until he saw them at breakfast,” Margo said.
“What if the surveillance is related to something that happened before they got to Porto?”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know,” Ian said. “Let’s look at the photos that they took on their way here.”
He brought them up on his laptop, but there were only three shots—one a selfie Rolfe had taken of the two of them at the departure gate at LAX, one that Clemens had taken of Rolfe sleeping on the plane, and another she’d taken of a decadent Ladurée chocolate pastry that they’d shared at Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris during their layover before their Porto flight.
“These are all tight shots,” Margo said. “You can’t see anyone or anything happening in the background.”
He swiped backward again, intending to reexamine the three shots, but went too far back, calling up a photo taken the day before their trip in San Diego. It was a selfie of Briana Clemens eating a taco at a food truck in a cul-de-sac in what appeared to be an industrial area. The picture sent a chill down Ian’s spine that made him shiver.
“Holy shit,” Ian said, looking up at Margo. “They were murdered.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
Margo studied the photo on Ian’s laptop. “I don’t understand. Someone killed them over a taco?”
“It’s what’s happening behind her that got them killed.” He zoomed in on a black Escalade in the cul-de-sac and a man standing outside the driver’s-side window, talking to the man behind the wheel. “This is San Diego and the driver of
that Escalade is Waldo.”
She narrowed her eyes, as if that would bring the faces into even sharper focus. “Holy shit, you’re right.”
“We have to find something else to say besides ‘holy shit’ when we have a holy shit moment.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s repetitive. I just said it before you said it.”
“If it’s a holy shit moment, that’s what you say, not ‘exalted vomit.’”
“Nobody says ‘exalted vomit,’” Ian said.
“Exactly, because you say ‘holy shit’ in a holy shit moment.”
“We could say ‘my God,’ or ‘hot damn,’ or ‘holy smoke.’”
“Only a cartoon character would say ‘holy smoke.’ Why are we even having this conversation?” Margo said. “You aren’t writing this. We’re living it.”
“That’s not how it feels to me.”
“Focus,” Margo pointed to Waldo. “Why would he follow them all the way to Porto?”
“Because the man Waldo is talking to is Gustavo Reynoso.”
Margo gave him a blank look. “Who is that and why do you know his name?”
“Don’t you ever watch the news?”
“Not if I can avoid it,” she said. “It makes me too angry.”
“Gustavo Reynoso is an illegal immigrant and convicted rapist who killed two women in San Diego with a gun from the Guns & Roses sting.” Ian tapped the screen with his finger. “And that’s the Deathscalade with the bodies in the back.”
“The Deathscalade?”
“That’s what Dwight Edney is calling the stolen SUV that Reynoso was in when he was spotted by the police,” Ian said. “Reynoso fled, ran across a street, and was killed by a hit-and-run driver. It happened the day before Rolfe and Clemens came here. The story is that Reynoso acted alone in the killings. But this photo changes everything.”
“It means the story is bullshit,” Margo said.
