The Cornwalls Are Gone Page 18

  The climate is wonderful, the pay is superb, but he’s under no illusions about the men he works for, and has worked for, in the years since his uncle’s trucking firm went bankrupt. He maintains a strict focus, keeps his mouth shut, and never gossips or talks about his work.

  This morning he is in a small cement-lined room in the basement of a new hotel that is under construction, and is accompanied by one of the young, hard men who also work here. Inside the room is an Anglo male who has a bandaged arm and a sweet-looking blond girl Benito assumes is his daughter. He has been told to fix a toilet in this room, and with a tool belt around his ample waist and a toolbox in his callused right hand, he goes to work.

  He won’t look at the two Anglos. That will gain him nothing, though he will say a prayer for their souls when he leaves here and goes to the little room that he has been gifted to live in while working here. He has nothing against Americans, although he doesn’t like their arrogance and how they blame his country for the drug trade, though without their own appetites, the drug traffic would collapse in a month.

  Benito also remembers a phrase his local priest had said over and over again, Poor Mexico. So far from God, so close to the United States.

  The priest was a good man, teaching classes at night about economics and politics, and he took particular interest in Benito, telling him that he shared the same name as Benito Juárez, a past president of Mexico and one of its greatest leaders, as well as a child of Zapotec peasants. He taught Benito and others to have pride in their poor nation, to have hopes for its future, and their neighborhood dearly missed the priest after the army came in one night and took him away forever.

  He lays out his tools, gets to work, uses some rags to mop up some of the leaking water. It looks like a simple repair job, and Benito should be out of here in a few minutes. He accidentally looks toward the two beds. The Anglo male is sitting on a bed, his back against the wall, his face puffy and red, looking like a defeated man.

  The blond girl is cute, and Benito feels a sharp pang, remembering his own little girl, Gabriela. Oh, such a black-haired beauty, and he has to pause for a moment, remembering the year after she graduated from high school, how she went to work for a cousin in Ciudad Juárez, across the river from El Paso, Texas. She worked as a restaurant manager, was young, beautiful, with her whole life ahead of her…

  He wipes at his eyes. One night she went out with some friends, driving a car across the border as a “favor” for someone. The car was part of a mule effort, smuggling cocaine across to the United States, and the car passed through the border checkpoints without any problem. The real problem came when the car was to be delivered to some sort of dealer in El Paso but ended up being seized by his rivals. The drugs were taken, the car was driven into the desert, and young, sweet Gabriela and her three friends were shot in the car and burnt.

  “Hey!” comes a little girl’s voice. “Hey, mister!”

  He ignores the girl’s voice. The toilet seems to have shifted on its base, which has led to leaking and a backup, and with a soft shove from his shoulder, the toilet returns to the proper place.

  “Mister, please! Look at me! C’mon, look at me!”

  Benito doesn’t want to look, but the pleading tone of the girl’s voice makes him turn his head. The cute Anglo blonde is standing straight up on her tiptoes, arms stretched out, and then she does a perfect cartwheel on the cement floor.

  She stands, smiling, arms back straight up.

  “Did you see? Did you?”

  Benito nods and turns away, eyes filling with tears. He doesn’t want to think of what will happen to this sweetie at some point. Her father, sitting on the edge of the bed now, a dead look on his face…well, Benito thinks he is here because of something he has done. He is the guilty one. The little girl?

  She is an innocent.

  “Look! Please! Look again!”

  And damn it, he does look again, and even the hard man standing guard looks, glancing up from his cell phone where he’s been playing some game, and the girl spins out again in a cartwheel, and her foot slips and she falls in a tumble.

  She screeches and her father comes down and checks her, and she cries out for a moment, and says, “It’s okay, Daddy, it’s okay. I’m fine.”

  He picks her up and gives her a hard, squeezing hug, and Benito’s hands shake as he gathers up his tools and nods to the other man.

  “I’m finished,” he says.

  The hard man goes to the door, unlocks it, and Benito follows behind him and keeps on walking, for he never wants to see that man and his daughter ever again.

  The air in the room is still stuffy and smells lousy, but Tom doesn’t care. His little girl is safe, she’s with him, and that’s all that counts.

  He says, “You okay?”

  She nods and pulls away. “I am. You can put me down now.”

  He gently puts her on the bed. Her face is dirty where she’s cried, and her pretty nose has dripped snot, but she’s smiling.

  “Did you do it, Daddy, did you?”

  From under his shirt he pulls out what he had seen earlier, what he had grabbed from the Hispanic man’s toolbox: a wooden-handled cutting tool used for linoleum, with a curved, razor-sharp blade.

  With one arm he hugs his little girl. “Thanks to you, I did.”

  “What now?” she asks, wiping her nose with her hand.

  “You know how you wanted Mommy to kill them?”

  “Yes.”

  Tom examines the blade again. “I’m not going to wait.”

  CHAPTER 69

  FOLLOWING ANOTHER bit of thievery this morning—taking Texas license plates from a dented white Subaru wagon and putting them on my Wrangler— my new best friend and I stop for a quick drive-through meal from McDonald’s.

  He still hasn’t said a word. I tell him what I’m going to have for breakfast—coffee, OJ, and Egg McMuffin—and he just shrugs, so I double the order that is our morning meal. Following directions from a helpful senior citizen out for his morning walk, we’re on North Main Street, pulling up to the Victoria Public Library. The area around the squat, bare concrete building has small homes and one-story businesses, with lots of trees. I park my Wrangler in a nearby parking lot, hiding it from the main street, and after shutting off the engine, I give the old man a good, long look.

  I say, “So we have a situation, you and I. I need to spend some time in the library, doing research. But I can’t leave you here alone. So you’re coming in with me.”

  He doesn’t say anything, but his eyes look intelligent, so I’m sure he’s understanding what I’m saying.

  I say, “I’ll be as quick as I can, but you’ve got to be at my side. I can’t have you running away while I’m in the library. You see…”

  My voice catches for a moment.

  But just a moment.

  “Somebody has taken my husband and my daughter, and to get them free, I need you as a trade. And we’re going to do that in Florida. But don’t try to run away. Back at Three Rivers, I killed two men to get you. Trust me when I say I’m not going to let you run away.”

  He just looks at me.

  I reach for the door. “If you try to run away, I won’t kill you. But I’ll break your arm. And you’ll be hurting all the way to Florida.”

  Getting to a computer terminal at the nice library takes some work on my part, since they require a library card and PIN to get access to a computer, but some sweet-talking and showing my Armed Forces identification card persuades the cheerful young lady librarian with a strong Texas accent and black hair to let me in. She’s a bit overweight but wears it proudly, with tight black slacks and a bright-red blouse.

  God love the South. I grew up in chilly Maine, and I long ago gave up the soft bigotry most northerners have for those living below the Mason-Dixon line, for I’ve found most of them unerringly charming, polite, and, in the army, stone-cold killers.

  I sit down at one of the terminals and make sure my companion is sitting behind
me. “You know,” I tell him, “I can’t keep on saying ‘Hey you’ when I’m talking to you.”

  Of course he says nothing.

  “You don’t look like him, but you have the charm of an older Cary Grant,” I say. “So I shall call you Archie. Archie, stay put while I get to work.”

  I dig in and decide to start where my destination is going to be, Beachside, Florida. I’ve never heard of the town, and as I start Googling my way hither and yon, I learn a lot. It’s a very new town, a “planned community” for retirees, for budget travelers, and for corporate retreats. I get a map of the streets and arrange to have it printed out at a nearby printer. The population is about three thousand or so, and…

  It has no police department.

  Interesting.

  It has a top-of-the-line full-time fire department, but any law enforcement requirements are fulfilled by the Walton County Sheriff’s Department.

  So how and why did this little town spring up on the Gulf Coast of Florida?

  There’s not much about its history or construction, but I do find a throwaway line in an old story that makes me sit back and swallow hard.

  The place was mostly financed by a bank.

  A bank in Mexico.

  First Republic Global Bank, NA, based in Guadalajara.

  The same bank that owns the Learjet that took away Tom and Denise.

  I let my fingers float across the keyboard, look to my rear, and Archie is sitting there, quiet and calm.

  “Time for a gamble,” I say, and I go to Gmail and sign into my personal email account to see what information might be waiting for me, and to also do something else dangerous, but necessary.

  Good God, look at all those unread messages that have piled up in the past few days…with a good chunk from Major Bruno Wenner, pleading and then demanding to know where I am and what’s going on. If Wenner is using my personal email account in addition to my standard Army account, he and Colonel Denton must be really going berserk.

  Then there’s the regular email mishmash of spam, a couple of messages from old friends of mine in the service, and some reminders from Amazon and Staples.

  But no messages from Tom.

  Or Denise.

  I check out Archie again. “A gamble. You never know how and where it’s going to pay off.”

  Archie doesn’t look away, and I shake my head and say, “Just so you know, I’m one to keep my promises, to keep my oath. No matter the pressure, no matter the temptations. When I was in college, my roommate, Marcia, cheated on her boyfriend. She asked me to keep that secret. Save for you now, I’ve never told anyone, even my husband, even my best friends in the service.”

  My throat thickens. “I’m about to violate a promise I made to my husband, a long, long time ago. I’ve been tempted here and there to break that promise, but now…well, it’s an emergency. I have to do it. You understand? I have to do it.”

  I turn back to the keyboard, stop wasting time with Archie. I minimize the open screen that has my Gmail account, get back to work. Within a few minutes, I locate Tom’s Cloud account in Google. I feel sick at what I’m doing. For a long time I’ve known his log-in data to get access to his Cloud storage—as an intelligence officer, how could I not?—but I’ve never, ever gone into it. When we were first dating, Tom said to me, “Hon, I know how talented you are…in lots of ways, but especially in the Army. But Amy, please. My work has a lot of sources and confidential information in it. Please don’t ever try to find out what I’m doing, all right?”

  And of course I promised to do that, and now, I am breaking that promise. At some point, I hope he will forgive me.

  Tom’s office at home is a mess of papers, folders, books, and piles of old newspapers and clippings, but I’m pleased to see he’s not a slob on the Internet. I start going through his files, looking at his notes, and using a function that allows me to see the most recent information. I’m stunned at how quickly I find what I’m looking for, and what it means.

  “Oh, Tom,” I whisper. “You damn, damn, damn fool.”

  I can’t believe what I’m seeing there, in plain text on a plain screen, but it’s apparent. And thorough. And deadly stupid.

  Now I know why he was picked up. And my Denise as well. And although I don’t know the identity of the man behind me, I know his background as well.

  Oh, Tom.

  I shake my head in disgust and turn around to leave.

  Behind me is an empty chair.

  Archie is gone.

  CHAPTER 70

  AT THE George Bush Intercontinental Airport in Houston, Warrant Officer Rosaria Vasquez is quickly walking to the service kiosk for Hertz when a familiar man in civilian clothes steps out from a news shop and says, “A minute, Vasquez.”

  She halts in her tracks, stunned. Her boss, Senior Warrant Officer Fred McCarthy, who should be back at Quantico in Virginia, is here, deep in the heart of Texas.

  “Sir?”

  “This way,” he says, walking to a food court, where he takes a chair and gestures her to sit down.

  She takes the chair and says, “Is this where you’re going to tell me why I’m in Houston?”

  “You want coffee or something?” he asks. His usually tanned and fit face looks pale and anxious, and as always, he’s wearing a dark-gray suit that doesn’t fit him well. Senior Warrant Officer McCarthy is tall and loose-limbed, and Rosaria doubts that even the best tailor from Hong Kong or London could ever make a suit fit him.

  She says, “No, I don’t want coffee. I want to know what the hell is going on.”

  “You first, Vasquez,” he says. “What’s the latest on the Three Rivers shootings?”

  Rosaria really doesn’t need her notebook but pulls it out for appearance’s sake. “Shooting broke out at a rental residence on Linden Street. Two Mexican nationals killed. A person—male or female, not sure—was seen fleeing the residence, dragging an older gentleman along. That person’s identity is also unknown. A black Jeep Wrangler was seen leaving the area shortly thereafter. No confirmation of how many people were inside. And the license plate wasn’t noted, either.”

  “Forensics?”

  “Too soon,” she says. “It’s a small but professional department, but even a big-town department would have a challenge handling three shootings in one afternoon.”

  “Three? Who was the third one?”

  She turns over a page. “Approximately thirty minutes after the first shootings, Texas State Police responding to the scene found a tricked-out black Ford pickup truck with extended cab that had earlier been seen at the Linden Street residence. The truck was seen at a nearby McDonald’s restaurant. The driver of the truck, armed with a revolver, was spotted nearby. He refused to drop his weapon. He was killed in a shootout.”

  “Another Mexican national?” he asks.

  Rosaria says, “That’s right.”

  McCarthy rubs at his large chin. “Hoo boy, the nearest Mexican consulate is going to have their hands full. Besides the fact that Captain Cornwall drives a Jeep Wrangler, and was seen earlier in the next town, is there any specific, credible evidence linking her to these two shootings?”

  Rosaria has thought this through, again and again, thinking of what she learned from the third gunman. That the older man kept there was to be turned over to American journalist Tom Cornwall when he arrived.

  And instead of journalist Cornwall arriving, apparently his wife did, taking the man and killing two in the process. Rosaria is convinced that’s what happened. As to why…no idea.

  But her boss has asked her for specific, credible evidence linking the missing captain to the shootings. And Rosaria can always say later that she didn’t believe a bulked-up gangbanger armed with one big-ass revolver to be credible, which was why she never mentioned meeting him.

  Thin ice indeed, but she’s been there before.

  “Nothing that I’ve heard from the police,” she says.

  “You got a good contact with the Three Rivers police?”

/>   Sergeant Morales’s business card is safely secured in her travel bag. “I do.”

  “Good.” He rubs at his massive chin and says, “We have good intelligence that she’s heading east. Alone or with someone, we don’t know. But she’s definitely heading east, most likely on Highway 59, coming from either Three Rivers or Kenedy. That’s why you were ordered to Houston.”

  “Where did you get this information from, boss?”

  “From a good source.”

  She doesn’t like the sound of that.

  “Sir…”

  “A good source,” he repeats. “That’s all you’re getting. So you’re going to get into a rental car, and start heading west on Fifty-Nine. Once we get better information on where she is, or where she’s going, you’ll be in a position to intercept.”

  The din and movement of people around her in this busy terminal gradually fades away until all she can see and hear is the senior warrant officer sitting in front of her. On the table, there’s a crumpled napkin at his elbow and two half-circle rings from where earlier travelers deposited their drinks.

  “By myself?” she asks. “With no backup?”

  He says, “You can hook up with any local law enforcement if needed. In this state, they’ll trip over themselves trying to help the Army.”

  She literally cannot believe what she’s hearing. “Sir…she assaulted a state trooper in Tennessee. She’s a good suspect for a kidnapping and a double homicide. She’s a deserter. And you want me to go after her…by myself?”

  He nods. Doesn’t say anything.

  “It doesn’t make sense!” she says, her voice rising.

  McCarthy’s tired eyes flicker. “It might not make sense to you, Vasquez, but to certain higher-ups and the Army, it makes perfect sense. So do your job.”

  Something else comes to her quickly, and she’s nauseated at the realization. “Boss…you could have told me all of this over the phone. By text. Or email. Why did you waste your time coming to Texas?”