The Last Witness (Badge of Honor 11)

“Nice shot. You said he was an illegal. Any ID, background?”

“Not a damn thing on

him—just my gut feeling that he’s illegal. We’re running down property records to find who owns this place. Anyway . . . when Bailey comes up on the guy, he gets a whiff that’s overwhelming. Since it’s not Bailey’s first rodeo around a mess of gray matter, and he knows that that’s not what he’s smelling, he can’t figure it out. So he recons the area—and bingo.” He nodded toward the corral. “Hell, come here. I’ll show you.”

—

Jim Byrth smelled it before he saw it. The combination of odors was that of rotten eggs and putrid meat. It was oddly familiar to him, in an unsettling way.

“Behind the stable there,” Pabody said, pointing to what was the edge of an eight-foot-tall open-air shed. “That’s where Bailey found the drums.”

Pabody put his bandanna to his face as they stepped back to it. Byrth fished out a handkerchief from his pants pocket.

The shed was roughly twenty by thirty feet, with a floor of bare earth and, atop what looked like four old telephone poles, a low, flat roof of rusted sheets of corrugated metal. It held eight fifty-five-gallon high-density polyethylene drums more or less in two lines of four. The blue plastic—with SULFURIC ACID CAUTION! HIGHLY CORROSIVE! stenciled in white—was faded and stained.

Six of the drums were covered with blue plastic lids. The lids for the other two were missing, and when Byrth looked in the nearest one, the disfigured face of a teenaged girl stared grotesquely back.

“Jesus!” he said from behind his handkerchief. “You never get used to seeing something like that.”

The flesh on her cheeks and chin and forehead—all the parts above the surface of the murky fluid in the drum—was blue-black. What little hair she had left was ragged stubs of blonde along the top of her forehead.

Under the fluid’s surface, the body was simply bony skeleton. And what was left of the skeleton—there was nothing below the waist—was in various degrees of disintegration.

Byrth felt Pabody’s eyes studying him.

“Pozole,” Byrth said, shaking his head and turning to look at Pabody.

“What?”

“South of the border, that’s what they call this process of getting rid of bodies,” he explained. “Pozole is actually a Mexican stew. Apparently, the Cártel del Golfo has its own gallows humor. I first saw this in Nuevo Laredo, then outside Juárez, a couple years back. Those Zetas are ruthless sonsofbitches. They’re literally liquefying anyone in their way—the cops and soldiers and reporters they can’t buy off—just making anybody they don’t like disappear. Their rivals they behead and stack ’em in town like cordwood to intimidate everyone else.”

Los Zetas was made up of deserters from commando units in the Mexican army—units that were trained and armed by elite U.S. forces in the war against the very drug cartels they joined. Los Zetas had acted as the enforcement arm of the Gulf Cartel before breaking off on their own. Battles over routes for the trafficking of drugs and guns and humans across the United States border—the areas leading to Interstate 35 at Laredo being highly prized—became an endless bloodbath.

“Juárez is the murder capital of the world,” Pabody said. “Six thousand killed in the last two years.”

“That’s just counting official deaths,” Byrth said. “No telling how many more get murdered. The Mexican government acknowledges that almost thirty thousand of its citizens have simply disappeared. Cases get opened when family members report someone’s gone missing. Someone who just never comes home, or was abducted from their home, or even ‘arrested’ by uniformed police or military.”

“There’s a lot of cops on the take.”

Byrth nodded. “Theirs and ours. Then there’s also the fact that Zetas and others not only got trained as cops or soldiers before joining the cartels, they kept the uniforms and weapons. How the hell is the average abuela going to know that the ‘official’ hauling off of her son or grandson in front of her very eyes ain’t legit?”

“And when she goes down to the police station asking questions, there’s no record of arrest.”

Byrth nodded again.

“No body means no murder, no nada,” he said. “That’s very effective intimidation.”

Pabody’s eyes grew. “It’s not just girls here, there’s evidence men were also . . . liquefied. You figure this is some of Zetas’s work?”

“For lack of better words, it damn sure smells like it. But out here? It could be someone copying them. Sinaloas, Knights Templar, any of them. Fucking cartels and their splinter cells can be anywhere.”

Pabody’s eyes went back to the drum. “It looks like he just stood the dead bodies in there.”

Byrth nodded. “And as the acid ate away at them, they slowly sank lower.”

“Until they were completely gone,” Pabody added.

“In Juárez, they did the same with sodium hydroxide, potassium hydroxide—”