by Brad Parks
“Again, that’s going to be very difficult, because the question the court will ask is, ‘Well, wait a second, if this guy had such a solid alibi, why wasn’t this presented during the first go-around? And why did he plead guilty?’ It just raises too many questions we can’t answer. So, really, I think we have to go with our second option.”
“What’s that?” Amanda asked.
“We get him resentenced based on his extraordinary cooperation with law enforcement. That’s a somewhat easier route, and it happens more often. The question there is, on what issue is he cooperating? It has to be something real, something that will get the FBI excited when I take it to them.”
Barb presented it like it should have been obvious to all: “He can testify against Danny Ruiz and Rick Gilmartin for impersonating federal law enforcement officers.”
Drayer was already shaking his head before Barb could finish. “I’m sorry, but I doubt that’s going to move the needle. When judges weigh cooperation, one of the things they’re asking is how important the cooperation actually is. How much public good was done here? Impersonating a federal law enforcement officer would be seen as a less serious crime than robbing a bank. So a judge might shave a year off Tommy’s sentence, which would be nice. But I’m guessing that’s not what you have in mind here.”
There was silence in the room. Frustrated, stymied silence.
“This is madness,” Barb said. “He didn’t actually rob a bank! How can he be in jail for something he didn’t do?”
“I’m sorry, ma’am, but you’ve got to put that thought out of your mind,” Drayer said gently. “As far as the courts are concerned, he’s had his bite at the apple. They bend over backwards to make sure that first bite is as fair as it can be. That’s what the presumption of innocence is all about. But once he’s had that, it’s very, very difficult to get him a second bite. Plus, if we tried to reopen the case, he’d have to admit that he lied to the court the first time by pleading guilty. That’s called perjury. And he’d have to acknowledge he took money from the cartel in exchange for breaking the law. That’s called criminal conspiracy. Both carry their own penalties. That’s why I think cooperation is the way to go. But it has to be big. Does he have something on the cartel itself?”
“No,” Amanda said immediately. “But the man he went to prison to get close to sure does.”
Amanda talked Drayer through what Tommy had told her, about Dupree and the smoking-gun evidence he was harboring.
“Would that be enough?” she asked when she was done.
“Sure would,” Drayer said. “If your fiancé can play a role in bringing down the most notorious drug lord in the Western Hemisphere? I think any judge would go for that.”
“Okay, so what do we do next?” Amanda asked.
“We talk to the FBI,” Drayer said. “The real FBI.”
CHAPTER 47
Herrera had waited until El Vio departed Rosario No. 2.
Then he called back the contractors and demanded to know everything—everything—about this actor they had hired. How had they found him? Had they needed to convince him to do this job, or had he been eager? Was there any chance this “actor” wasn’t really an actor and was in fact working for someone else?
After all, the actor was now a subcontractor for New Colima—acting, even if he wasn’t aware of it, on the cartel’s behalf. Which meant the director of security needed to give him a thorough vetting.
Ruiz assured Herrera all was as it seemed. Still, Herrera knew he could never be too careful. Law enforcement was more cunning than ever. Especially when it came to high-level targets like New Colima.
This actor could actually be some kind of sleeper agent. Herrera had heard devastating stories about such people. These were law enforcement officials who spent years establishing their credentials as criminals and worked their way deep into the organizations they would someday destroy, even committing illegal acts in order to improve their cover.
They would then wait until the most critical moment—like, say, when the criminal syndicate in question was about to recover some vital documents—to reveal themselves.
Another scary scenario: that the actor was working not for law enforcement but rather for a rival cartel. One of their enemies could use those documents to extort New Colima out of hard-won territory and supply lines.
Anything was possible. There was something about this whole setup that smelled wrong to Herrera. He didn’t like that the contractor had lied about who his asset had been. Herrera was also nervous about the personal history between Ruiz and the actor.
Who was this actor, really?
This was what led, two days later, to Herrera making another journey through the tunnel, past the border checkpoint—to which several new insults had been added—and into America. As Hector Jacinto, he caught a flight to Newark, then rented a car.
He made a quick stop at a New Colima safe house in Newark’s North Ward, arming himself courtesy of two associates who were thrilled to be able to help such a high-ranking member of the cartel. Then he continued farther north.
The actor grew up with Ruiz in a town called Hackensack. According to the contractor, the actor had a mother and a fiancée. This delighted Herrera. They were potential leverage.
Before long, Herrera found himself once again in the knotty tangle of suburban America. Shortly after ten P.M.—earlier than was probably wise, but Herrera was tired—he turned onto the actor’s street and drove past his house. Just once. It was small, like all the others on the street. There were no lights on. Its short driveway was empty, and it had no garage. So no cars. Which suggested no one was home. That was the extent of what Herrera could distinguish at twenty-five miles an hour.
He parked around the corner and was soon on foot. Just a guy going for a walk. It wasn’t a new moon, which he would have preferred. And there were streetlights. Still, he felt less conspicuous than he had in Atlanta. There were more Mexicans here.
After one walk-by, he allowed himself another, looking for signs of habitation. During that second pass, the exterior lights on the house next door turned on. A tall, dark-skinned man in a turban emerged from the front door and stood on the porch.
His intent was unmistakable. I see you. I know my neighbors. You don’t belong here.
Herrera hurried along, retreating back into his car, scolding himself for being sloppy, impatient. He drove to a Marriott two towns away and checked in under the name Hector Jacinto. Then he waited.
At two A.M., he returned to the neighborhood. Surely, the man in the turban was asleep by now. Just in case, Herrera approached the actor’s house from the opposite direction. He was no longer some amiable ambler, out for a stroll. He was moving with purpose.
When he was two doors away, he pulled on his ski mask. His gloves were already on. He turned quickly into the actor’s driveway and then skirted around the right side of the house. There was a narrow gap between two fences—one belonging to the actor’s house, one belonging to the neighbor’s. Herrera scaled the one to his left and was soon in the actor’s backyard.
There wasn’t much to it. Just a small patch of grass, now dormant in winter. It was dark back there, shaded from the streetlights by the house. Finally, Herrera felt like he could take his time and look around without worrying about being spotted.
The house was simple. Just a plain white box, not like the gracious homes Herrera had grown up around in Jalisco. There was a deck with a cheap patio set, its umbrella tightly wrapped. The only other structure was a shed in the far corner.
No lights were on inside the house. Not even a nightlight in a hallway. Herrera climbed the three steps up to the deck and peered into one of the windows. He tried it, just to see if he could get lucky. But no. Locked.
The only door was sliding glass. He checked to see if it was reinforced by a bar. It wasn’t. He had found his way in.
He descended the steps back into the yard, then opened the shed. He wasn’t expecting a full lockpick set, but with what he was able to rummage—screwdrivers, some twelve-gauge wire, a gardening fork, and whatnot—he was confident he had everything he needed. It wasn’t like he had to worry about the noise he was making.
Fifteen minutes later, he was inside the house. Whoever had been there last had left in a hurry. There were dishes in the sink. A plate full of waffles, now partially desiccated, had been abandoned out on the table.
Herrera treated himself to a full tour of the house, learning everything he could. There were pictures of a small woman, likely the actor’s mother, and a small boy who resembled her. That had to be the actor. He had been scrawny as a teenager and as a young adult. Only in his later pictures had he added some muscle.
There was one picture of the actor with his arm wrapped around the waist of a beautiful young blond woman. The fiancée, obviously. She was wearing a sweater that hugged her upper half, a skirt that showed off her legs. He allowed his eyes to linger on her. His thing for blondes again.
With his phone camera, Herrera snapped a picture of the picture, then continued on. Nothing in the house triggered Herrera’s alarm. No pictures of the young man graduating from a police academy or a diploma from a criminal justice college. No indications any of them had traveled to Mexico. No conspicuous signs of new wealth that may have come courtesy of a rival cartel.
The last room Herrera entered was the second bedroom. It was ringed with glass-covered framed snapshots from Broadway musicals. The actor was featured in all of them. When he wasn’t onstage, he was posed with other people who must have also been actors. They had that glossy glow about them.
Herrera brought his face close to the glass. The pictures were authentic, not photoshopped. And, really, even the FBI or Sinaloa wouldn’t have gone through the trouble of making that many fakes. The actor had, in fact, been an actor.
He continued into the bathroom, which was connected to the bedroom. As he had done in the other bathrooms, he opened every door and drawer. He only slowed down when he got to the medicine cabinet. On the second shelf up, next to some tweezers, there was a jar of vitamins.
But not just any vitamins. Prenatal vitamins.
The fiancée was pregnant.
Interesting.
CHAPTER 48
For three days, I lived in a kind of suspended animation.
My body kept operating, because it had to. My mind was working through the very real possibility I would have to spend the next eight years serving time for an invented crime; and while I could rail against Danny Ruiz or the New Colima cartel, I ultimately had nothing to blame but my own gullibility.
The dread of that came at me in waves. At times, I almost convinced myself I could handle it. I had made a colossal mistake for which I would pay dearly, but others in this world had made worse mistakes or had worse things happen to them. They had survived. So would I.
Eight years wasn’t a life sentence. It just felt that way.
At other times, the awfulness of it all hit me so hard I could barely breathe. Eight years of soul-deadening monotony, of time thrown away, of pain for people I loved.
Eight years was the remainder of my late twenties and the entirety of my early thirties, prime years of my life. It also encompassed the first seven years and three months of existence for my son or daughter, who would have scant to no relationship with Daddy, not to mention being saddled with the confusion and shame of Daddy’s incarceration. Some huge portion of the child’s personality—basically all of it, right?—would be formed, with barely any help or input from me.
All the while, Amanda would be struggling along as a single parent. I didn’t want to think about what kind of resentment she would have built for me or what our relationship would look like by the time I got out.
It was thoughts like this that made me wish there was someplace I could just hide. But the federal prison system doesn’t allow inmates vacation days.
So I kept going through the motions, there but not there. I trudged off to the laundry each morning, played in the poker game each night—why not?—and maintained the guise that nothing had really changed for Pete Goodrich, that there was no before/after schism in his life that had started the moment he learned he had been duped.
Despite my efforts at projecting normalcy, I swear Mitch was acting differently toward me. The first few times, I thought maybe I was just imagining it. But after several days of it, there was no question: Mitch’s behavior had changed. He was guarded. There were no stories about hunting. There was no more talk about his days at USB.
Not that it really mattered. My mission had changed. It was no longer about Mitch.
It was about getting the hell out of there.
Not being able to talk to Amanda only made it harder. Was she making progress? Had Drayer shut her down? Had she given up and gone back to New Jersey? Was she leaving me to rot? I could only guess.
Perhaps the strangest thing about those three days was that, in some ways, nothing else had really changed. To me, the earth shifted on Sunday morning. To FCI Morgantown, it was right where it had been all along.
It wasn’t until Wednesday morning, when I was coming out of laundry duty, that Karen Lembo flagged me down.
She gently grabbed my arm and steered me to a place where no one would be able to hear us. And then, softly, she said, “The warden sent me to get you. Two FBI agents are here. They’re waiting for you in a conference room up in the administration building. Will you come with me, please?”
My first reaction was that Ruiz and Gilmartin had a lot of nerve, fake-badging their way into FCI Morgantown. Shouldn’t they have treated a federal prison like the one patch of turf they didn’t dare tread on?
My second reaction was fear. This was a bold move on their part, bordering on reckless. And they wouldn’t have made it for no reason. Amanda’s maneuvering must have triggered some chain reaction. Drayer ran straight to them and now they were coming here, to tell me they were onto me being onto them. They would deliver that news alongside some kind of threat against me. Or, worse, against Amanda.
My third reaction—and this one began forming as I walked up to the administration building with Mrs. Lembo—was that maybe I could turn this around on Ruiz and Gilmartin. Could I, without alerting my fake FBI friends, signal to Mrs. Lembo or someone else high up at FCI Morgantown that these so-called FBI agents were really cartel henchmen? Had they, in fact, made a massive mistake that I could turn into my advantage?
These were among the many thoughts making waves in my brain as I walked up the hill toward the administration building.
Mrs. Lembo led me inside, then took me to a part of the building I had never been in, down a carpeted corridor. Without a word of explanation, she opened a door to a conference room, where two people were waiting.
Not Ruiz and Gilmartin.
It was man and a woman, both in suits. The woman had a no-nonsense air about her and shoulder-length brown hair that was starting to get streaks of gray. The man was blond and square-jawed. I had never seen either before.
They invited me to sit down, which I did. I was still trying to process what was happening when the door opened again.
And in walked Mitch Dupree.
* * *
• • •
He didn’t look at me or at the two strangers in suits. He seemed mostly interested in the table.
“My name is Special Agent Lia Hines,” the woman said to me. She had a warm, earthy voice that would have sounded at home on an elementary school teacher. She gestured toward the guy. “This is Special Agent Chris Hall.”
He made brief eye contact with me but otherwise sat stone-faced. There weren’t going to be any five-paragraph essays coming from him.
“We work in white-collar crime for the Federal Bureau of Investigation,” Agent Hi
nes continued. “Mr. Dupree is already quite familiar with us. It’s nice to see you again, Mr. Dupree.”
She glanced serenely toward Mitch, who was still furiously studying the table. She slid business cards toward both of us, which triggered in me a strong sense of déjà vu. Danny Ruiz had done the same thing. Except this time it was real, right? Dupree knew them.
I looked at her card:
LIA HINES
SPECIAL AGENT
FEDERAL BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION
ATLANTA FIELD OFFICE
3000 FLOWERS ROAD S.
ATLANTA, GA 30341
It looked legit. But then again so had the one Danny gave me.
Once bitten, twice shy, I asked Mrs. Lembo to go to the FBI’s website, look up the number for the Atlanta Field Office, and verify Lia Hines’ employment. It took Mrs. Lembo a few minutes to accomplish this, but she was soon giving me a thumbs-up and saying, “Thank you,” to whomever she had talked to.
Hines sat patiently through this exercise, then began.
“Mr. Goodrich, you obviously don’t trust me, and that’s fine. I understand. Mr. Dupree can tell you I’m a pretty straight shooter. I believe you lay things on the table and then see where that leaves you. You’re either going to love it or hate it, but I won’t be apologizing either way. How does that sound to you?”
“Fine, I guess,” I said, still mystified as to what was going on.
“What brings us here today is a little unusual,” she said. “We were contacted by an AUSA from the Northern District of West Virginia named David Drayer. He said you had a conversation with your fiancée, who then relayed the conversation to Mr. Drayer in the hopes of getting a sentence reduction in exchange for cooperation with us. Now, before we get into the details, I want you to understand that the FBI is not the federal judiciary. We do not have the power to shorten or commute your sentence. At most we can make a recommendation to a judge, and then it’s out of our hands. Is that clear to you?”
