SIXTY-TWO
It took about five days before Max could look at me without quickly turning her head. I don’t think my swollen face scared her. She seemed to be more uncomfortable than afraid. She still slept at the foot of my bed. The dark is often the great equalizer.
On my sixth day of convalescence, I left the river house with Max and took her to the beach. She played in the small breakers while I floated on my back, tilted my face in the sea, letting the sun and saltwater gods heal my cuts and bruises.
From the beach I decided to head over to Ponce Marina to pay the boat slip rent. My cell rang. It was Dan Grant.
“Sean, the guy you said Davis and Gomez referred to as ‘Doc,’ is a real doctor. His name is Jude Walberg, an oncologist. He says he didn’t kill anyone. He was being blackmailed by someone he never met. Walberg says one day he received an e-mail with a video attachment. Showed him having sex with underage girls. Although he swears he was told they were all over eighteen. He met them through an escort service that specializes in Central American women. Said he was given directions to meet the women at a posh condo. Camera must have been hidden there. The good doc is married with two kids. He cried straight for the entire hour we questioned him.”
“Who’s blackmailing him? What’s the escort service called?”
“He didn’t know the guy’s name. Service is called Exotic Escorts. Because all biz is done online, who the hell knows where they’re located. Probably some pimp’s house. Walberg would get a call about a few hours before he was supposed to drive to the processing shack near the river. Vics would be on ice. He removed a heart or kidneys and left them in Styrofoam cartons with that clear liquid in the tanks.”
“Did he say what the caller sounded like? Any accents, speech patterns?”
“He said the guy talked in a soft monotone. Like he was in total control.”
At that moment, I wanted to hear Santana’s voice. I knew how Richard Brennen spoke. Measured. Complete control. But Richard Brennen had brown eyes, unlike that of a jaguar.
#
I PARKED IN THE MARINA LOT
and walked to the office. The door was locked. I had forgotten that it was Sunday. The office was only open from 8:00 A.M. – noon on Sundays. I checked my watch: 2:45 p.m. I wrote a check and slipped it under the door.
Turning to leave, I almost ran into Dave Collins.
“Sean, what the hell happened to you? Don’t tell me I should see the other guy.”
“He’s dead.”
“What?”
“Yeah, worse shape than me.”
“Did you…”
“I didn’t kill him. I would like to have, though.”
“What happened?”
We sat on the aft deck of the
Gibraltar
.
I told him everything that had happened. I concluded by saying, “Not only is Santana a serial killer, he’s figured out a way to make a huge profit from his spoils. Dave, this perp is the most sadistic and smartest criminal mind I’ve ever come up against. I might have to set a trap to draw him out.”
“What kind of trap?”
“Not sure. It has to be one that he can’t resist. I need to dig as far into his mind as I can. I have to get as close to his way of thinking as I can consciously permit myself to travel. Evil is a dark destination.”
“Maybe if you knew Santana’s past, you could predict his future. If you could open his mind, a psychopath who kills the way he does…the asphyxiation…what would you see? I’ll make drinks, maybe it’ll take away some of the pain in your wounds.”
Dave served Grey Goose martinis with slivers of ice bobbing on the surface. I said, “In the processing shack, the liquid in the vat looked like this martini. I didn’t see any ice in it, but it was cold. Not a subzero cold, but more like a chilled syrupy liquid.”
He listened intently, brow wrinkled, eyes trained on me, and then he glanced to the side like what I said brought back some distant connection. “Santana has a pipeline for quick distribution,” he said. “Maybe some hospital is turning a blind eye and accepting the organs. He might have a network getting them to recipients far away.”
Dave sipped his martini and continued. “I recall a study done on the wood frog. The frog is found far north as Alaska. They survive severe winters by increasing the glucose stored in their cell fluids. This acts as a kind of antifreeze providing the tissue, membranes, and internal organs with a greater freeze threshold. Gives the frog the ability to withstand temperatures minus twenty degrees Fahrenheit. What if Santana had some type of agent, antifreeze if you will, that allowed them to dramatically cool down organs without damaging the cells and tissue, essentially providing greater latitude from the time the organ leaves the victim to the time it enters the receiver’s body? Makes it easier to ship from point A to B.”
I watched Dave scratch Max behind the ears. She was asleep in his lap. I said, “Thanks for the martini. I can’t finish it. A little sore. Can you to watch Max for a few hours tomorrow? I have her food on
Jupiter.”
“I’d love spending some time with the lass. Where’re you going?”
“To point A.”
SIXTY-THREE
On the drive to SunState Farms migrant camp, I called Special Agent Lauren Miles. It had been ten days since I had last spoken to her. After the shootout at the processing house, I’d asked Dan to fill her in on the details. Between the soreness in my mouth and my cracked ribs, I had been in no mood to deliver a dossier for the FBI.
She had news for me. “We have a little more on Santana, but it’s not much. Nothing from DMV. Can’t find photos. There is no record of his birth in America. He’s said to speak three languages. Owns or has partial ownership in an upscale strip joint called Xanadu. He’s also said to have ties to some of the new hotel casino combos and some coming up in Florida. His Xanadu website mixes pictures, video and pay-per-view porno. We found a connection to an Internet escort site, Exotic Escorts.”
“I bet the guy has a few degrees of separation between himself and his businesses. He’s smart, ruthless, well-connected, and manages to buy people or trap them like a spider, and that’s when he uses them.”
“As in Jude Walberg, the good doctor?”
“The same. One of Santana’s former strippers is missing, probably dead. Name’s Robin Eastman. Ring a bell?”
“No, it doesn’t. You think Santana did it?”
“Or he had it done. May have been a cop who did the killing, a Detective Mitchell Slater, Volusia County. See what you can find on Slater. For some reason he’s connected. The guy who owned Club Platinum in Daytona, Tony Martin, was killed after he left the club. Martin had just got into his car and was talking on his cell with his girlfriend, Robin Eastman, when he was killed. Eastman told her mother that Martin had said, ‘You’re supposed to be a cop,’ right before she heard gunshots.”
Lauren was quiet a moment. “If it was a rogue cop playing hit man, Santana’s either paying him many times his pension, or he has something on him?”
“Slater has political aspirations. He was at the Brennens for a fund-raising, and pissed off that I would question them. He knew Leslie was about to implicate him. I’m convinced he killed her. I think he’s a guy paid to look the other way, and when the stuff really hits the fan, then he’s a triggerman behind a badge. Your people are good at surveillance, see if you can follow Santana.”
She was silent for a few seconds. “We have followed him, but we can’t seem to get close enough to catch him in anything.”
“What do you mean?”
“That’s where your skills have helped greatly. You’re closer, at least you’re coming closer than anyone else. You’re beginning to directly link him to things. Our profilers say Santana’s one of the worst-of-the worst, if these creeps can get any worse. So, although we’ve managed to profile him, we haven’t caught him.”
“Your profilers? You’ve known about Santana all along! You recruited me to hunt him down for you.”
“It’s not that simple. Our information corroborates everything you’ve said, but, you actually have more than we do.”
“Were you planning on sharing what you knew, or was I always the only one to sift through clues and hand it to the feds?” I felt my anger boiling up.
“Sean it’s not like that.”
“Bullshit! Keep me in the dark and let me hunt for a jaguar that knows I’m walking under his tree. Thanks, Lauren.”
“We’re not using you, we need you.” Her voice dropped. “We need your help. I’m sorry.”
I said nothing.
“Santana is an easy guy to despise, but he’s a hard person to catch because he has everyone else doing his dirty work. No one’s talking because he seems to have some frightening power, absolute control over those who work for him. We believe he’s tied at the hip with one of the most ruthless human trafficking rings in the world.”
“One of the most ruthless? What do you call harvesting human organs? Does it get any more ruthless than that?”
Lauren sighed. “I haven’t held information back from you that would help solve this or find Santana. He’s a terrorist of a different breed. Intelligent. Fearless. And he enjoys killing…personally. We’re running out of time.”
“That’s insightful. He’s probably two moves ahead of anything we can do right now. We need to get a DNA sample from him. Gomez is dead. Davis isn’t talking. He says he doesn’t know where to find Hector Ortega.”
“What about this doctor, Jude Walberg, can he identify Santana?”
“He says he never saw Santana. Only took orders on the phone. He insists the vics were dead before he got there. He says Gomez and Ortega were the ones who packaged and delivered the organs. Walberg said he didn’t know how the distribution worked. Said as soon as he was done they told him to leave. So what we have is Gomez is dead, Silas Davis in custody, Hector Ortega is MIA, and Santana remains a phantom.”
Lauren was silent.
I said, “Detective Dan Grant questioned the girls in the van that night, the same van transporting the vic I found by the river. Dan said the girls didn’t want to talk. One finally did say that when the vic ran from the van, Ortega chased her for a few minutes, but came back to the van and he said, ‘She deserved what she was going to get.’”
“How many victims?” Lauren asked.
“Walberg says at least six. At first it was one a month. Then business picked up and the slaughters become more frequent. Because the doctor only identified Ortega and Gomez, they must have picked up the bodies and took them to the shack after they got a call from Santana. I was convinced that Richard Brennen fit the profile, but the hair on the duct tape didn’t match his DNA. It did match the killer known as Bagman. I bet Bagman and Santana are one and the same.”
“We’ve got to bring Santana down immediately.”
I looked at my watch. “We need a positive DNA match. Follow him.”
“What are you going to do?”
“I’m going to try and find the bodies. Maybe I’ll run into Ortega along the way.”
“Do you need back-up?”
“I need to find Ortega. Then I think I’ll find a real body count.”
“If Ortega’s fled to Mexico, what’s left?”
“I hope the FBI has some good bloodhounds.”
“To track him to Mexico?”
“No, to find the bodies here.”
SIXTY-FOUR
It was late afternoon when I drove into the migrant camp. Some of the buses had returned with exhausted workers. I parked the Jeep under two Australian pines and tried to blend in with the farm workers as they shuffled to the store or in and out of the trailers.
Out of the corner of my eye, I felt someone staring at me. I turned and recognized the man. He was the young man I had seen earlier, the man who’d been beaten. He looked the other way and started walking. “Wait!” I shouted. He kept going. I ran toward him. He darted between two trailers, limping on his right leg. I caught him easily, put my hand on his shoulder, and turned him around.
“It’s okay! I’m not here to hurt you.
Comprende?
I’m here to help. Please… put the knife away.”
“I understand English, some.”
“Good. What’s your name?”
“Manny Lopez.”
“Manny, listen to me. I know what’s happening here. I don’t care what they say, you’re a free man. They can’t hold you or the others against your will.”
“I try to leave…to run...they find me...hurt me…say they kill me next time. Others try...try to run…they no come back. I think they killed…”
“Who do you think was killed?”
“Some workers…I don’t know all names. They take people from camps…you know…some in Immokalee…Lake Placid…Palatka. Some no come back.”
“Is it men and women, or mostly women?”
He gestured with his palms up. “The womens.” He glanced away for a beat, his eyes looking over the dark tomato fields.
I described the woman I had found to him and he slowly turned his face back to me, his eyes heavy.
“She wear a small gold…how you say?”
“Crucifix.”
“Si.”
“Tell me, what’s her name?
“Angela…Angela Ramirez…”
I could see her face as clear as the morning I found her. Now she had a name. Angela Ramirez. “Is her family in Mexico?”
“No. Honduras.”
“How can I find them?”
“I know the casa…where Angela’s family live. I can show to you on map.”
“Thank you.”
“Angela dead?”
“Yes. I’m sorry.”
“How she die?”
“She was murdered.”
“Gomez…he kill her?”
“I don’t think so. I think it’s a man in Miami who’s connected to Gomez, Ortega, Davis and maybe even the Brennens. Do you know where I can find Ortega?”
“I no see him for six days.”
“Where does Ortega usually work? Where might he be hiding?”
He shrugged his shoulders. “I not sure. He sometimes with Gomez. Sometimes he with the grande black man name Mr. Silo. Sometimes he take the women’s in the...”
“The van.” I said
He nodded.
“Where does he keep the women?”
He pointed to the doublewide trailer at the end of the road.
“The largest one?” I asked.
Manny nodded. “That’s where they take Angela. She no go…they not break her...” He pointed toward his heart.
“Spirit,” I said.
“Si.”
“Manny, I think even more people have been killed. Is there any place on this farm where someone might be burying bodies? An area difficult to find them?”
“Many places. Some fields have no fruits...no tomatoes. Somebody could make graves out there.” He looked down the hard-packed dirt road and pointed to a backhoe near a tall Australian pine. “That macheen…sometime I see them take it out at night.” He paused, licked his dry lips, and asked, “Angela in a cemetery?”
“Yes. I will take you there.”
“Gracias.”
He made the sign of the cross.
I thanked him. Then I headed for the trailer at the end of the dusty road.