I scanned the room, seeing no one displaying obvious guilt or avoidance postures. But that didn’t matter. The leaks had already made the cops distrust this group as a whole. We had decided to hold back some of the new evidence we’d found, at least for the time being.
“Moving on,” Mahoney said. “There is no Littlefield Produce Company of Freehold Township, New Jersey. And six of the dead traffickers have been identified through fingerprints and IAFIS.”
Six mug shots went up on a screen behind the FBI agent.
“The two on the left are Russians with ties to organized-crime syndicates out of St. Petersburg and Brighton Beach,” Mahoney said. “There are agents in New York and Russia working those angles. These other four are more familiar to law enforcement. Correct, George?”
George Potter, the DEA’s special agent in charge, nodded. “All four have long rap sheets in south Florida or Texas. The two there on the right, Chavez and Burton, they have loose connections to the Sinaloa cartel.”
“Do any of them have a history of involvement in human trafficking?” Bree asked.
“Not that we know of,” Potter said. “But they could be branching out.”
“Or this could be just one branch of something bigger,” I said. “These connections to both Russian mobsters and Mexican drug cartels suggests a possible alliance that is frightening when you think about it.”
Potter nodded. “Like a supercartel.”
Sampson said, “Or maybe they’re just a crew of freight agents that transport three different kinds of criminal commodities at once: drugs, cash, and people.”
“Slaves, you mean,” Bree said.
Bob Taylor, a smart, African American agent over at Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, asked, “Are you a slave if you sign up of your own free will?”
“They were bought and paid for,” Bree said. “Even if the sellers were the girls themselves. Let’s call this what it is: sexual slavery.”
Taylor threw up his hands in surrender, said, “Just trying to clarify, Chief. You ask me, whoever these shooters are, they’re doing the world a favor getting defects out of the gene pool.”
There were a number of nods and murmurs of agreement in the room.
I couldn’t argue with the sentiment in one sense. I’d had the chance to go over the dead men’s rap sheets, and there was viciousness, cruelty, and depravity laced through their lives.
I don’t care if you believe in Jesus, God, Allah, karma, the spirit of the universe, or a Higher Power-the crew of thugs who’d died in Ladysmith, Virginia, had been begging for a violent death like that: shot down, no mercy. I believed that was true, even if I also believed that whoever killed those thugs deserved trial and punishment.
In my book and in the blind eyes of justice, the fact that a man had it coming to him doesn’t make killing him right. Especially if he’s killed in an ambush. That’s premeditation any way you look at it.
Mahoney went on with the briefing, giving some of the preliminary lab reports. The victims were all shot with.223 rounds, probably from AR-style rifles.
“Military?” ATF Special Agent Taylor asked. “Full-jacket?”
“No,” Mahoney said. “The bulk crap you can buy at Wal-mart.”
Sampson leaned over to me. “I gotta go. Anniversary dinner with Billie.”
“Congratulations to you and Billie. How many years?”
“The big six, and thanks.” He slipped out.
The big six. Somehow that was funny.
A few moments later, Bree leaned over and said, “I’ve got a pile of work on my desk I need to dig through.”
“I’ll stay here and tell you if there’s anything new,” I said.
There wasn’t anything new, at least not from my perspective. Mahoney wrapped up the rest of the briefing in twenty minutes, and the place emptied out.
“You look like you could use a three-day weekend,” I told Ned.
“Wouldn’t that be something?” Mahoney said.
“Go to your place on the shore; it’ll give you fresh eyes on Tuesday.”
“I don’t think the gods of the Bureau would appreciate me kicking back with a cold one if there’s another attack on the underworld over the weekend.”
“You can always keep your phone on,” I said. “No one says you have to be in your office waiting for a call. There has to be some benefit to these phones beyond Facebook and texting, right?”
Mahoney half bobbed his head, getting a distracted look. “Traffic will be a bitch tonight. Maybe I can sneak away early tomorrow?”
“Now you’re thinking.”
“What about you? And Bree? Why don’t you and the kids come? Supposed to be a beautiful weekend.”
“Nothing would make me happier, but Jannie’s got an invitational thing over at Johns Hopkins, and we were going to see Damon too.”
“There are three days to the holiday. You could always come on Sunday morning, or even on Saturday night.”
“Tempting. Let me run that by the new chief of detectives.”
51
ORDINARILY, THE TRACK season ends in mid-August, but the U.S.A. Track and Field organization had launched a program to nurture young talent, inviting high school athletes from across the country to a meet on the Johns Hopkins campus in an effort to help coaches identify those with potential.
The fact that Jannie had been invited at the age of fifteen years and eight months was a shock to us. Initially, she hadn’t been among the athletes offered spots at the meet. But Ted McDonald, a well-regarded track coach who works with my daughter, showed videos of her to the right people, and she got in on discretion.
We were on the shady side of the stands an hour before she was set to run. Down on the field, the kids were warming up. Except not many of them looked like kids.
“What are they feeding them?” Bree asked.
“Human growth hormone cereal with steroid milk,” Nana Mama said, and she cackled.
“I hope not, for their sake,” Bree said. “Jannie said everyone had to submit urine and blood samples.”
“Those can be doctored,” Nana Mama said.
We knew that all too well. Earlier in the summer, a vindictive and jealous girl in North Carolina had tried to frame Jannie for drug use. Since then, we’d always demanded samples from any drug test she had to take.
A group of athletes glided by at an easy ten miles an hour. I watched them, trying to keep memories of the prior evening at bay. This was a holiday, and I’d read that it was important to take them and enjoy them or you risked burnout.
“Can I have a Coke?” Ali asked, pulling off his headphones, which were attached to the iPad we’d bought used on eBay.
“Water would be better,” Nana Mama said.
“I thought this was a holiday,” Ali grumbled. “Holidays are supposed to be fun. You’ve heard about fun, right?”
My grandmother twisted on the bleacher and fixed him with her evil-eye stare. “Are you sassing your great-grandmother?”
“No, Nana Mama,” Ali said.
“I won’t take sass,” she said. “You’ve heard about that, right?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Bree and I watched in amusement at the mastery with which Nana Mama handled Ali.
“What are you listening to?” Nana Mama asked, her voice softening.
Ali brightened. “A podcast about dolphins and how they have echolocation just like bats, only in the water.”
“What’s the single most surprising thing you’ve heard so far?”
Without hesitation, he said, “Dolphins have the best hearing in the world.”
“Is that true?” Bree asked.
“Humans can hear up to, like, twenty kilo-hearses. Dogs to like forty-five kilo-hearses.”
“Hertz,” Nana Mama said. “Forty-five kilohertz.”
“Hertz,” Ali said. “Big cats, like lions, hear up to sixty-five, I think. But a dolphin can hear sounds up to a hundred and twenty kilohertz. And they have, like, an electrical field around them. They say you can feel it if you swim with them. I want to do that, Dad, swim with dolphins.”