Fields of Wrath (Luis Chavez Book 1) (10 page)

When he didn’t move away, she turned back.

“Did you know him well?”

“I never met him. I’ve heard he was a good man.”

Maria indicated the papers, one pink and one white, in his hand.

“Are those for me?”

He nodded and handed them over. She read them and looked back up in confusion.

“I don’t understand. Are you”—she eyed the white sheet—“Luis Dedios?”

“Chavez,” he corrected. “I’m a priest from Los Angeles.”

“You’re working here?”

“I came looking for information. The woman whose name is on the other sheet came to our parish the morning Santiago disappeared.”

“He didn’t disappear. Somebody came here and took him away.”

“No,” Luis said. “He was going to Los Angeles to meet with a deputy district attorney and be taken into protective custody. Only somebody got to him first. Maybe corrupt members of law enforcement. A woman named Odilia Garanzuay was to speak to the deputy DA as well, likely as part of the same case. The woman who was bringing them in was murdered the same night. Odilia escaped, only to be kidnapped a day later. I’m hoping to find her.”

Maria’s jaw dropped. How a priest—if he really was a priest—came across such information she couldn’t guess.

“I don’t understand. What
case
?”

“That’s what no one can figure out. The murdered woman, Annie Whittaker, was a legal rights advocate. I think she’d stumbled across something pretty major. Odilia and Santiago were her witnesses.”

“But you don’t know what it was?”

“No. And neither did the deputy DA. Did your brother say anything to you?”

“He told me something was going on but that he’d get back to me on Monday,” Maria said, angering. “Why are you telling me all of this now?”

“Because I’m hoping Odilia might still be alive. If whoever is behind this thinks they’ve shut down the investigation by killing Annie and your brother, maybe they won’t do the same to her.”

In her wallet, Maria had business cards for two FBI agents, two LAPD detectives, an official from the State Department, an officer from the Mexican Consulate, and half a dozen lawyers. There were any number of sources she could check Luis’s story with the moment he left the shack.

“Sorry to be blunt, but what do you want from me? I knew nothing about this. If my brother really was some kind of crook—”

“I don’t think he was,” Luis interrupted. “Everybody here goes on about how he kept things on the up and up. All I’m asking is whether you have any kind of record of Odilia Garanzuay working here.”

It took twenty minutes for Maria to come back with a definitive no. She’d been reluctant to get involved, unsure of where it could lead, but her own curiosity got in the way. And if there was a Los Angeles deputy DA on the other side of the priest, she wanted to have a word with him.

“There’s nothing. The records go back to when he first started here. The number of workers goes up a little each year, but you see a lot of the same names. No Odilia Garanzuay.”

“But that is his signature on the page, isn’t it?”

“It is,” Maria admitted. “Any other questions?”

“No,” Luis said quietly. “I appreciate your assistance.”

He turned to leave. Maria sighed.

“I’m sorry I can’t be more help,” she said. “I don’t know you. You might be who you say you are, but you might not be. And I have my son to think about. He just lost one of the only positive influences in his life. If for some reason he lost me, he’d be on his own.”

“I understand,” Luis said. “I won’t trouble you again.”

He moved to exit, but then glanced back one more time.

“Did your brother ever mention something called the Blocks?”

“No, not that I recall.”

Luis nodded.

“Thanks for your time.”

She’d heard the trucks a good twenty minutes before they arrived. Though she was in darkness, the desert around her was so quiet it could never hold a secret. There was the roar of the engine, the chassis bouncing on its shocks, and the tires losing traction on the dusty dirt track leading to her hill. She’d heard spitting gravel next, once they’d reached the actual road leading to the summit. Then finally the squeal of brakes, the opening and slamming of doors, and the footsteps of those who’d left her here.

She was no longer afraid. Her body had proved so much stronger than she thought it would be. The deprivations meant to drive her mad had done their job when she’d had hope. Once that had vanished and her routine was one only of survival, she retreated inward.

She didn’t know where she was exactly. They’d called it La Calavera, “the skull” in Spanish. She’d only seen the outside when they carried her from the truck to the metal shed, but she understood the name right away. It was a small flat-topped hill whose crest had been wind-polished and sandblasted into a smooth surface. There were no trees, but there was an old fire tower near the shed.

One of the men was up there now. She only heard him when he opened the door to piss off the balcony. Then the door would bang shut, and she’d almost forget she wasn’t the only human for miles.

The narrow road to the hill’s summit was treacherous. As she heard the first truck rev its engine to begin the climb, she silently prayed that it would take a turn too fast or hit a bad patch of gravel and tumble over the side. It would be a temporary reprieve, but the men would be dead.

She waited for God to answer her prayer. Waited for a sudden crash, the sound of crumpling metal, the screams of the wounded—or, better yet, dying—but they didn’t come. All there was were the dual sounds of the two truck engines drawing near.

The door to the fire tower swung open and closed with a bang, and she heard the ping of the man’s shoes on the metal ladder as he descended to meet the trucks. They arrived as he reached the bottom. Judging by the time between truck doors opening and closing, she estimated there were three men in each vehicle. She imagined
he
was with them, the only one whose name she knew, El Matachín.

She assumed he had a real name, but it was what all his men called him.

She heard Matachín now ask the tower man for the key. A second later she heard his footsteps reach the metal door of the shed, where he inserted the key in the padlock that hung between the chains connecting the handles. After popping the shackle, he stripped the lock and chain away before swinging open the door. Odilia closed her eyes at the last minute, the sheer amount of light coming in enough to blind her after so many hours in the dark.

But the air that came in with the light was cool and felt good against her blistering skin. She shivered a little, rattling the chains that kept her bound to the corner of the shed.

“How are we doing today?” Matachín asked.

Her captor was a tall man, a good three or four inches past six foot. His hair was dark and he kept it short. He was all muscle. But what she’d noticed first about him were his copper eyes. In a different situation she might have found them attractive. Here, she thought it gave him a reptilian appearance. It fit.

“How are we doing today?” Matachín asked again.

Odilia didn’t reply. Her tongue was swollen, so she didn’t know if she’d be able to formulate a sentence, even a sound, regardless. The man in the tower had brought her water every hour. But in this heat, which turned the metal into an oven, an ocean wouldn’t have been enough.

“I’ve got good news,” Matachín announced. “It’s over. You’re done here. You’re getting out.”

Odilia looked up sharply but instantly regretted it. If he’d been teasing her, she’d just made his day.

“I’m not kidding!” Matachín insisted. “You’ve done your time.”

He reached for her chains, but she pulled away.

“Easy,” he soothed. “It’s not a trick.”

She let him unchain her, then help her to her feet. She could barely stand. He practically took her whole weight as he led her out onto the sun-bleached summit of La Calavera. Her legs were like jelly, and the sun burned at her raw skin. She started walking to the trucks, but Matachín grabbed her arm.

“No, something I want you to see first,” he said. “Come here.”

He turned her body toward a flat-topped boulder beyond the fire tower. Unlike every other surface, this one hadn’t been bleached white by the sun. It was stained with deep reds and dark browns, as if bathed in wine. Odilia knew what had painted it and why Matachín wanted her to see it.

Neither sun nor wind nor water can get blood from a stone.

Matachín kicked at the back of her knees, causing them to buckle. She slumped onto the stone, head bowed as if in front of an altar. She’d spent the week thinking death would come for her in the shed. She’d dehydrate. Her organs would fail. She’d slowly starve. Now this. A very small part of her was glad that instead of dying alone in the dark, the last thing she would ever see was this amazing vista of the endless desert.

“I hope it was worth it,” Matachín said quietly, leveling a pistol at the back of her head.

So beautiful . . .

PART III

XIII

“I’m sorry it’s not better news. We thought we had a real chance with this latest protocol.”

Pastor Whillans buttoned up his shirt as the doctor, David Yapp, went over his chart.

“Me too,” Whillans replied dryly. “But we knew from the beginning these were long shots.”

“Not true,” Yapp chided. “You can never tell how a patient will react to treatment.”

“And we’re beyond surgical options?”

“There’s a primary site and a secondary site. If we’d caught either one of them earlier, perhaps there would’ve been a chance.”

Whillans sighed. “What I’ve been most curious about was why it didn’t show up during my annual physical six months ago.”

“Some cancers don’t show up on routine tests. Not right away anyway.”

“But I had it then?”

“You did,” Yapp admitted. “I’m sorry.”

Whillans couldn’t tell from the doctor’s tone if he meant it or not. He seemed the type that wished his patients would accept Stage Four cancer for what it was, a death sentence, and prepare for that rather than treatment. Maybe this was why he worked in a strip mall urgent-care facility and not Cedars-Sinai.

“How much time do I have?”

“We don’t like giving patients life-expectancy estimates. It can vary. All I can say is that you need to get your affairs in order.”

“You think I can’t go on the Internet?” Whillans said, buttoning his Roman collar back in place. “I’ll just type in everything you put on my chart.”

Dr. Yapp sighed and acquiesced.

“All I feel comfortable saying is that I’ve had two patients with diagnoses similar to yours. One lived three months, the other two weeks.”

When Whillans left a couple of minutes later, he checked his phone on the way out. Three voice mails from the archdiocese, all from Bishop Duenas’s office. An hour before, Whillans would’ve obediently rung back to receive more verbal lashes over how he handled the Odilia situation. Now he had no problem deleting all three unheard and shoving the phone back in his pocket.

How quickly things can change,
he mused.

“Mom?”

When Miguel’s cell phone rang, he’d already been nervous. After seeing that it was his mother, he paled.

“Hey, Mom. Where are you?”

“Not ‘How are you doing?’ or ‘How’d it go today?’” she said.

“Sorry,” Miguel replied quickly. “How’d it go today?”

“Not bad, all things considered. How was Mrs. Leñero’s house?”

“Boring.”

“Good,” she replied. “Any calls?”

“Another one from a bank. I took the number. Guy said he’d work with you on the various loans, but if you were looking to wash your hands of the farm, they’d already had inquiries.”

“Did you tell him that wasn’t the kind of information he should be giving to a fourteen-year-old?”

“He probably thought I was your husband. Wait, are you in the car?”

“I am. I had a strange encounter with one of the workers. I packed up most of the files and started heading home. I’m just passing Woodland Hills.”

Woodland Hills,
Miguel thought.
I’ve got two hours.

“Where are you, by the way?” Maria asked.

“Enrique’s giving me a ride home from school. We’re almost there.”

“All right. See you in a little while.”

She hung up. Miguel turned to Enrique in a panic.

“She’s coming home. I’m so busted.”

Enrique rolled his eyes.

“Are you serious with this?” he asked as he turned off the highway.

“We should turn around,” Miguel insisted. “If we go back now, I’ll be home in time, or maybe a block or two away. I can say I needed printer paper or something.”

Enrique stopped the car at a red light and stared at Miguel.

“Dude. It’s too late to back out on these guys. These aren’t a bunch of high school assholes.”

Miguel scowled. He hated getting boxed in.

“We’ll be in and out,” Enrique assured him. “I promise.”

“Fine. But how’d they find out about us anyway? Nobody was supposed to know.”

“When you’ve got skills, word travels.”

Miguel didn’t like this response.

It had started the previous fall. Miguel bombed a test.
Bad.
He’d simply forgotten to study. It wasn’t the first time, but he’d skated by previously and managed passing grades. Not this go-round. It was the kind of disaster that put his entire semester in jeopardy. But then he’d done the math and realized that a couple of points added to one test, a few more to his homework assignments, and a minute bump on a couple of quizzes earlier in the year and he’d pass.

Whereas most boys Miguel’s age were playing sports, chasing girls, or tinkering with cars, Miguel was into computers. This had been the case since he was six and had taken apart his mother’s cell phone to see what made it tick. His mother had initially been furious but then watched in amazement as he’d put it back together and even repaired a couple of bugs. She soon convinced a coworker to let her have a phone he’d planned to discard and gave it to Miguel. He repaired it within a week and soon began creating his own rudimentary games and apps for the thing. By the time he was a teenager, he knew more about coding than either of his school’s computer science teachers.

All this to say, when it came time to hack into the computer program his school used to log grades, getting through the one-step authentication security software would be a snap. The real question was whether he should spread the discrepancies over several projects or give himself one A-plus.

He decided on the former, calling it “grade arbitrage,” before learning that wasn’t what arbitrage was at all. He passed and wasn’t caught. Like any criminal who encounters early success, he began to wonder where else he might apply this matrix. Though the possibilities were endless, so were the risks. He settled on low-level bank fraud utilizing online checking accounts, a twenty-first-century version of check kiting, and enlisted his best friend, Enrique, to help out.

Things had run smoothly for the past three months. They’d seen enough gangster movies to know that the key to failure in an illegal enterprise was getting greedy, so they kept things small.

Two months in they’d made ten thousand dollars. Rather than expand, Miguel stopped things cold for a month. Enrique understood it wasn’t his place to question this. When no one came after them, Miguel turned the works back on and they cleared another ten thousand dollars over the next ten weeks.

Enrique took a job bussing tables and padded his tips a few bucks every shift to ease his cut into circulation. Miguel wasn’t old enough to work a job, so he didn’t spend a dime.

Then last week Enrique got a phone call. The caller said he needed to meet with Enrique and Miguel to talk about their activities. Realizing it wasn’t law enforcement, Enrique denied all knowledge. He was informed this wasn’t a request and was given directions and a time. If they didn’t show up, a meeting would be held at Miguel’s mother’s workplace.

Miguel hadn’t been sure how to take the news. He initially believed the call must have come from a bank, possibly a security official. As the meeting drew near, he began to have doubts. What if it was a trap? What if he’d pissed off some other hacker out there?

When Santiago was killed, the meeting was the first thing he’d thought about. It gnawed at him for days. He ran every scenario. How could it
not
be related?

But then the instructions for the meeting arrived, indicating the boys were to be in Glendale one week later at a specific time. The route they were to take was laid out, as well as what they could and could not bring to the meeting. There was no mention of Santiago.

“That’s it,” Enrique said, pointing to an Armenian restaurant at the end of a block of shops. “We’re supposed to park in back.”

As they turned into the parking lot behind the strip, they saw two large men. One indicated which spot, and Enrique pulled in.

“Here we go,” he whispered.

The two men led them into the restaurant, ushering them through a small kitchen to a dining room with no more than a dozen tables out front. The room was empty save for an older man alone at a table nearest the kitchen. A “Closed” sign hung in the front door.

The old man indicated for them to sit at his table. He was short with thinning gray-black hair and wore a rumpled light-gray suit. His face was lined and leathered. He didn’t look particularly strong, but there was intensity behind his coal-black eyes.

As the boys sat, he produced an old-fashioned, ivory-handled ice pick and set it on the table.

“You get one chance at this,” the man said. “You stole from me. Yes?”

“What?” Enrique said, scrunching his brow. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, man . . .”

The ice pick flashed and was driven into Enrique’s left hand with such force, the point chipped the Formica below. Enrique opened his mouth to scream, but one of the men who’d brought them in stepped forward and slapped a length of duct tape over it, silencing him. The old man leaned forward, gripped the pick with both hands, and yanked it straight up and out.

Then he turned to Miguel.

“Yes, we stole from you,” Miguel admitted quickly.

Though in agony, Enrique turned to Miguel in surprise. The old man nodded to his men, who lifted Enrique off his chair and dragged him into the kitchen. When they were gone, the man turned back to Miguel.

“That makes you the smart one.”

Miguel knew better than to confirm or deny this.

“Do you know who I am?” the man continued.

“No.”

“Good,” he said. “That’s the only thing that could explain such an error in judgment on your part.”

“I’m sorry,” Miguel added. “I’ll return whatever I took.”

The old man belched out a cackle that revealed a set of weathered and rotting teeth.

“Thank you, Mr. Higuera. Without your return of my forty dollars, I’m not sure my business could remain afloat another day.”

Miguel thought fast. That it was forty dollars told him little. This was the amount he skimmed off most extremely low-volume corporate accounts. He selected accounts that were underutilized but maintained a high balance to avoid fees. These were the deep-sleep, single officer types that existed for individuals doing business as corporations to reap federal benefits. A small onetime extraction could go unnoticed or unaddressed for weeks, if not months.

“When I discovered the discrepancy and called the bank, do you know what they said?” the old man continued. “We’ll replace the money immediately. They were so apologetic. I asked if they would go after the culprit, and they hesitated, saying they would if I filed a police report and gave them a copy. It was obvious that if I didn’t the matter would drop. Forty dollars wasn’t enough to make them care.”

Miguel said nothing.

“I’m paying you a compliment,” the old man scowled.

“Thank you, sir.”

“Tell me. How did you come to this forty-dollar amount?”

“It wasn’t scientific,” Miguel admitted. “And I’m sure the actual number their fraud division lets slide is higher. But I figured the absolute minimum would be around fifty dollars, so forty felt safe.”

“How did you identify my account as vulnerable? You could never have gotten away with this on the checking account of a little old lady on a fixed income. Was there some kind of activity that suggested I might not be one to go to the police?”

“It was the way the account was set up,” Miguel explained. “It was one of several created by the same person.”

“How could you tell that?”

“Not from anything you did. It’s how the bank handles its batch processing. The temp PIN codes were sequential, and the PO boxes were copied and pasted. It creates a pattern.”

The old man seemed satisfied by this. Until he peered back at Miguel.

“Don’t spare my feelings.”

“There was one thing you did. The amounts of money coming in and out felt randomized, not random, as if selected to prove they were irregular. Another reason I thought it was automated and therefore vulnerable.”

The old man’s gaze left Miguel’s face. He picked a corner of the ceiling and eyed it thoughtfully for a moment before turning back.

“I have an old-fashioned approach to business,” he said. “If I spend one dollar, I want to make three. That is easy for me to understand, and it keeps things manageable. But what you showed me is a way I can lose money from a direction I didn’t know to look in. My thinking, perhaps, is outmoded. What I need is new thinking.”

“What you need is me,” Miguel offered.

“Is that what I said?” the old man barked, coming alive with a vengeance. “That I need you?”

Miguel waited for the ice pick to flash. When it didn’t, he let out a sigh of relief.

“What I
want
,” the old man began, “is to see if we might do some business together. If you can steal from me, so can others. More importantly, if you can find patterns in what are meant to be secret accounts, so can others. It will require time away from your current profession, but you will be compensated.”

Current profession.
Miguel found this funny but then considered the offer on the table. It meant an exponential increase in risk but might allow him to explore other weaknesses in electronic banking to exploit.

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