Deadly Assets (16 page)

O'Hara, stepping carefully around the bloody prints, stopped at the door.

He looked back at Payne.

“This is how I found it.”

There was a glass pane in the upper third of the door. A beige lace curtain, knocked from its mount, hung at a crooked angle. As Payne stepped closer, he got a larger view of the interior beyond the lace.

“Jesus,” Payne said softly.

He felt his stomach knot, and understood how O'Hara had succumbed to the nausea.

“Yeah. Jesus.”

Payne looked at O'Hara.

“You went in, Mick?”

O'Hara nodded.

“I know it's a crime scene,” he said. “But, yeah, the second I saw Emily there I had to. The door was unlocked. When I got closer to her, it was clear she had been long . . . gone . . . and then I turned and saw Tim's body. They both already had livor mortis—that is, from whatever blood they had left.”

Payne knew, courtesy of Doc Mitchell's impromptu lectures during postmortem examinations, that when blood stopped circulating in the human body, gravity took over. The blood settled, and the skin color changed. Even through the window, he could see the distinct pooling pattern on her body, the lower flesh much darker than the light purple of the upper skin. He further knew that rigor mortis, the stiffening of the muscles, occurred about three hours after death, and took place before the heavy pooling.

Payne pulled out his cellular phone.

O'Hara put up his hand, palm out. Payne raised his eyebrows at the gesture for him to stop, and said, “What?”

“Before you call in the medical examiner, I want to ask a favor, Matty.”

Payne met his eyes.

“Sure, Mick. Name it.”

“You work this case personally. Own it.”

Payne slowly nodded. “Okay. Sure. Want to tell me why? I know he worked for you, but . . .”

O'Hara narrowed his eyes, said, “Because you get it,” then motioned with his head for Matt to follow.

—

They stood in a small utility room off the kitchen at the back of the house. It had a dented stackable clothes washer and dryer in one corner. The rest of the space had been fashioned into a home office. Wooden boards for shelving had been mounted to the wall above an old wooden door that served as the desk. The shelving sagged under the weight of books and papers and a computer printer. A folding metal chair lay collapsed under the desk.

Payne stared at the notebook computer on the desk—and the severed head thereon.

Tim O'Brien's dull, lifeless eyes gazed back in his general direction.

The scene did not surprise Payne.

After passing the badly bludgeoned body of Emily O'Brien, and Payne taking photographs with his cell phone camera, they had approached Tim's body, the legs and feet of which stuck outside the kicked-in door of the hallway half-bath while the upper torso lay inside. There was an enormous pool of blood. Overhead, the exhaust fan rattled. The bulb in the half-bath was still on, too, casting a harsh light over the body that not only had been crudely eviscerated but also decapitated.

O'Hara and Payne had followed the blood trail to the kitchen, then into the utility room turned home office.

“Remind you of El Gato, Mickey?”

O'Hara nodded.

Months earlier, Sergeant James O. Byrth of the Texas Rangers had come to Philadelphia hunting a twenty-one-year-old thug from Dallas who was trafficking drugs and teenaged Latinas from Central America to Texas and finally on to Philly. Juan Delgado—called El Gato for his jungle cat–like fierceness—befriended the young, vulnerable girls, then preyed on them, forcing them into prostitution, feeding them drugs and forcing them to have sex with a dozen johns in as many hours as the means to pay for their being smuggled into the United States.

When one fourteen-year-old ran away in Philly, Delgado became enraged. He beat her young female companion to death, cut off her head, and dumped the body in the Schuylkill River. He then went to the laundromat in North Philly where the fourteen-year-old girl had found work with other illegal immigrants, and slid the severed head across the floor.

The Mexican national who quietly ran the laundry business, and had witnessed Delgado's act, became a confidential informant. He helped Byrth and Payne track down Delgado to a dilapidated row house in Frankford, and then, with Byrth as witness to what he declared was an act of self-defense, ended Delgado's reign of terror with shots from a .45.

Payne, who'd been in the next room when the two rounds were fired, quietly wondered if the confidential informant's motive had been revenge. But while Payne could not prove it was not self-defense, there was ample evidence of Delgado's brutal crimes—including El Gato and his crew having kidnapped Amanda Law, throwing her inside a minivan in front of Temple University Hospital and holding her hostage at the Frankford row house.

No one had any doubt whatsoever that El Gato finally had used up at least nine lives and that the bastard deserved to die.

And now Payne understood what Mickey meant when he had said, “Because you get it”—Matt had personally experienced the evil.

When he saw O'Brien's butchered torso and then the severed head, he had flashbacks to when he'd been at the medical examiner's office for the autopsy of the young girl's body pulled from the Schuylkill and again when the confidential informant had showed him her head that he'd hidden in a bag in his basement deep freeze after it had been thrown in the laundromat.

“Like El Gato,” Mickey O'Hara said, “only worse. Delgado was a deluded wannabe thinking he could operate his small crew in the shadows, outside of the cartels. These bastards are the real deal. And they have no problem killing anyone in their way—not just little girls. In Mexico alone, a hundred journalists have been killed over the last decade, another twenty gone missing—and not a single one solved. If their bodies are found, they show clear evidence of torture. Mexico is the fourth most dangerous nation in the world for journalists, after Syria, Somalia, and Pakistan.”

He turned and met Payne's eyes.

“And now it's here. This is beyond intimidation. This is retaliation, Matty.”

[ THREE ]

The tall bartender approached Payne and O'Hara. He carried an almost empty bottle of Irish whisky, and held it up to them.

“Looks like you've killed one, gents.”

Mickey looked at the bartender, then at Matt—and suddenly burst into laughter.

Payne chuckled, and shook his head.

The bartender made a quizzical look.

“What?” he said.

“Bad reaction for a bad day,” Payne said. “Good people were murdered this morning just blocks from here.”

The bartender shook his head, his expression now one of disgust.

“What's wrong with this world today, huh?” he said.

“Give him one, too,” O'Hara said, waving his index finger between both their shot glasses. “After what I'm about to show him, he's going to need it.”

The bartender raised his eyebrows, then filled the two glasses, drained the bottle into a third, said, “They're on me. My condolences,” and turned away.

O'Hara pulled out his cell phone and brought up a photograph on it.

He held it up for Payne to see.

The image was of the severed head of a bearded brown-skinned male on the keyboard of a notebook computer. The difference between that head and Tim O'Brien's was that it had a handwritten note stuck to the dried blood:
Editors of Obrien: This source no longer wishes to talk for your stories. Tomas was warned to stop. Now you are. No more articles. Period. CDNA.

Payne shook his head and turned to O'Hara.

“CDNA?”

“Cartel del Nuevo Acuña.”

“The New Acuña Cartel? Have you talked with Byrth about it?”

O'Hara nodded.

“I did. O'Brien did. Tomas certainly did. Jim put him in touch with the Texas Rangers there. CDNA is a relatively small organization that's based just across the border from Del Rio, Texas. Its plaza, which is what they call their smuggling routes, skirts the big plaza at Nuevo Laredo, which is twenty miles downstream and controlled by the Gulf Cartel.”

O'Hara picked up his shot glass and held it up before him.

“To Tomas.”

Payne did the same, then they banged the glasses on the wooden bar, then downed the Irish whisky.

“Tomas? Who was he?” Payne then said, feeling the warmth of the alcohol again reach from his throat to his belly.

“A stringer we hired to work with Tim O'Brien,” O'Hara explained. “Tomas Rodriguez, thirty-five, married, one child, a boy, and one on the way.

“Tomas needed work. About six months ago, he was having lunch, sitting at a sidewalk
mercado
in Acuña, when an elderly man, uninvited, took the seat across from him. The man put a copy of that day's
Acuña Noticias
on the table and drummed his fingers on the cover story. It was about four male bodies that had been found in a
narco fosa
, their hands and feet bound and a single bullet hole in their heads. The story bore Tomas's byline.”

“A
narco fosa
?”

“It's what they call a cartel shallow grave. Just like mob ones in the good ol' guinea gangster days—whack 'em, maybe cut 'em up, maybe not, then bury them in a basement, an unmarked hole in a field, somewhere.

“The man said he'd been ordered to relay a simple message:
‘No mas.'
He said that meant no more coverage of the shallow graves, no more coverage of drugs and humans moving through the plaza near Acuña and across the Rio Grande, no more mention of CDNA.
No mas
.

“Then the elderly man stood and left.”

“And Tomas didn't stop,” Payne said, unnecessarily.

O'Hara shook his head.

“Tomas, despite knowing full damn well that journalists are being targeted all over Mexico, did not think much of the old man's message. He was a newsman, he said, and he reported news. But the next day, after he published a piece on a stash house near where the dead from the shallow grave had last been seen alive, Tomas had been in his newspaper office—it's a two-room masonry building on the southern edge of town—when the roar of a motorcycle rattled his window. That was immediately followed by the sound of gunfire. He ducked under his desk. When the shooting seemed to be over, he peered out the window and saw that his Volkswagen had been shot up, its windows shattered, the two left tires flat.”

“Jesus,” Payne said.

O'Hara nodded, then went on: “That night he put his wife and their young son on a bus and sent them to stay with relatives in Texas, outside San Antonio.

“He remained in Mexico but backed off on the cartel articles. Then, probably for pure intimidation purposes, they firebombed his newspaper office one night. Now he could not publish the newspaper. No matter. He wasn't intimidated. He went underground and started publishing about the drug war on the Internet, in a daily blog in addition to social media, writing under
La Verdad
—‘The Truth.' When the cartel found out, they offered a bounty to anyone who gave them the name of who was behind
La Verdad
—or anyone in that person's family.”

O'Hara pulled up another image on his cell phone. It showed a bloodied, shirtless male body hanging from a rope tied to a bridge overpass. A dirty white bedsheet with hand-painted lettering was draped over the bridge. It was in Spanish. Payne saw that it was signed “CDNA.”

“Someone gave up one of Tomas's photographers,” O'Hara said, “and, judging by the wounds, the cartel tortured him, most likely trying to get information on Tomas. Then they killed him. Hung him over an Acuña highway as an example. The
narco mantra
reads ‘This will happen to all who write lies about us on the Internet. You will pay. Signed CDNA.' Tomas took off for San Antonio.”

“And they killed him there,” Payne said. “Just like O'Brien.”

“Just like O'Brien,” O'Hara repeated, “
and
his wife. Emily just learned she was pregnant.”

“My God!” Payne blurted. His mind then immediately went to Amanda, who they recently had learned was with child.

“And the bastards knew she was pregnant,” O'Hara went on. “They put on the Internet a photograph of Tomas's head on the computer with another note that read ‘The sins of the father shall be visited upon the son.'”

“That's some damn message.”

“If they weren't sending a message, Matty, he'd just wind up in a
narco fosa
. Hell, they hacked up Tim.”

They were lost in their thoughts for a long moment.

O'Hara then said: “While reporting news is not a perfect craft—never will be—I would suggest that it is getting worse as fewer people are willing to pay for publications that produce long-form journalism—the hard-hitting, in-depth pieces. That's a damn necessary craft needed to protect this thing we call a free society. Corruption is a cancer wherever it feeds. And there no longer are real checks and balances in government.”

“No argument,” Payne said, nodding. “Seems that no matter which political party's in charge, the politicians essentially take turns enriching themselves and their supporters. Not that that's anything new. Remember what Mencken said about that a hundred years ago?”

O'Hara made a wistful smile.

“You mean good ol' HL, the Sage of Baltimore? My hero scribe? Every one of his social commentaries, alongside those of Samuel Clemens, should be etched in stone. I will take a wild guess that the one to which you refer is: ‘Every election is a sort of advance auction sale of stolen goods.'”

“And yet,” Payne said, “it's just accepted. To this day. Meanwhile, too much of what passes for today's so-called investigative journalism is some perky TV reporter, her ponytail poking out of an Action News ball cap, waving a failed health department inspection at a restaurant manager and demanding to know if he's cleared out all the cockroaches. No one puts the time into life-changing stories like your Follow the Money series. Tim seemed to be trying, which I suspect is in large measure your influence, including that solid piece he did on the Commish's grandson.”