The Traffickers (Badge of Honor 9)

They all had risked much, and they all had come far in their lives, and while-God forbid-some mistake they might make could send them back to that which they left far behind, they were being careful and invisible and integrating well in their adopted country. He’d even begun mailing small payments-no return address on the envelope, but his account number on the Western Union money order-to Saint John’s Hospital in Tucson.

One of the workers came up to El Nariz and told him that she had heard a k

nock on the pair of steel doors at the back of the building.

Esteban looked at his cellular phone’s clock, nodded appreciatively, and thanked her. The six-thirty delivery apparently was early, which meant his crew would have that much longer-nearly an hour-to process it before quitting at eight.

El Nariz went to the back door and looked out the peephole. All he saw was a darkened loading dock. So he went over to the electrical breaker box and opened its door. When he found the breaker, to throw that would power the mercury floodlamps that bathed the loading dock in a gray-white light, he saw that there was no red line on the breaker, indicating that the breaker had tripped. Still, he rationalized that with the recent renovation, anything was possible, so El Nariz threw the switch to the OFF position, then back to ON, then closed the door of the box.

At the steel doors, as he started to look out the peephole again, there came a steady and hard-bordering on impatient-banging. The mercury bulb was still out. El Nariz knew it took them a little time to come fully on, but thought that he could make out the silhouette of the laundry’s minivan and the driver gesturing for him to open the door.

Paco Esteban sighed. He did not want to lose the advantage that the early delivery afforded him. There was a wooden brace, a heavy square timber that rested in U-brackets bolted to the wall on either side of the set of double doors, that secured them shut. With some effort, he removed the brace, then unlocked the lower deadbolt, then the upper one.

The door suddenly flew open, its leading edge striking Paco Esteban in the forehead and causing a great deal of blood to start flowing down his face. He staggered back as in strode a tall muscular Hispanic male in black boots, pants, shirt, and hooded sweatshirt, the hood pulled up on his head.

Hanging from a thin black sling on his right shoulder he had what El Nariz thought looked oddly like a long pistol or a short rifle. Whatever it was, it was futuristic-looking, unlike any weapon he’d ever seen.

In the man’s left hand, El Nariz saw what looked like a wet brown ball hanging from a black rope-although, with Esteban’s vision blurred, he could not tell if the blood he saw belonged to the object or to him.

“Rosario! Where is Rosario?” the man called out in almost happy singsong Spanish as he trained the muzzle of the weapon on El Nariz, then walked purposely past and on to the front of the building. Then his tone changed. “Rosario! Where the fuck are you?”

When the man reached the big room of washers and dryers, the workers moved to the side, out of the man’s way, in effect creating a path for him. The man looked to the end of this path, to the folding station along the far wall, and grunted at what he saw.

He held up the grotesque ball by its black rope.

“Let this be a lesson to all of you,” he bellowed as he swung it around.

Then he slung it, in a fashion oddly like that of a bowling ball, down the polished concrete floor toward Rosario, then turned to walk out the way he had come.

As he passed El Nariz, who was trying to get up from being down on his hurt left knee, his right hand holding his bloody forehead, the man again waved the muzzle of his futuristic-looking gun at him-but this time let off a burst of fire. The fifteen rounds loudly made a neat arch of pockmarks in the newly painted white brick above El Nariz’s head, pelting him with chips of masonry.

The man went out the door, and moments later the minivan roared off in a squeal of tires.

The bloody object had slid the length of the room and left a long, sloppy trail. As the crew of workers had recognized what exactly it was, they started wailing and shrieking-and running past El Nariz to the back door.

The object had stopped just short of Rosario’s feet, and when she looked down and saw that the rope was a ponytail and the ball was the bludgeoned decapitated head of Ana Maria Del Carmen Lopez, its lifeless gaze staring up at her, Rosario Flores fainted to the floor.

III

ONE

Room 52 The Philly Inn Wednesday, September 9, 6:05 A.M.

“Detective, it’s murder, is what it is,” Javier Iglesia said. “No question in my mind.”

Homicide Detective Anthony Harris, standing outside the motel room and looking in through the hole that once held a plate-glass window, was watching the technicians from the Medical Examiner’s Office work the scene.

The masonry walls and ceiling of the interior-and practically everything therein-had been burned at such a high temperature that there were no distinct colors and almost no shades-just the grayish-white hue of ash everywhere. Harris saw that the mattresses had been scorched to such a degree that only their metal frames and coils remained, and these were melted almost to a point of being unrecognizable.

Two shiny black vinyl body-transport bags-open on the floor in the middle of the room, each containing a charred body-were a stark contrast to their surroundings, as were the technicians methodically documenting the scene.

One representative of the Medical Examiner’s Office was a photographer, an attractive black female in her midtwenties wearing slacks and a dark blouse. She had slender features, and stood right at five feet, maybe a hundred pounds. She moved with her camera-a bulky professional-grade Nikon digital model, its strobe firing off flashes that washed the room in a pulsing light that bordered on the surreal-in such a graceful fluid manner that it looked to be a natural extension of her.

Harris had worked crime scenes with Javier Iglesia, the lead technician, and was aware of his well-earned reputation for being somewhat loquacious. He was a beefy but fit thirty-year-old of Puerto Rican ancestry. He wore black jeans, a white knit polo, and a frayed and stained white thigh-length lab coat with two big patch pockets on the front. Both he and the photographer had transparent blue plastic booties over their black athletic shoes and tan-colored synthetic polymer gloves on their hands.

“It’s Shakespearean, is what it is,” Iglesia then announced.

Harris shook his head, not understanding. “It’s what, Javier?”