Hood looked down at the drawings. Jordan’s skill was a gift, he thought. When Hood looked at the boy, his teeth had quit chattering but his lips were pale.
“Will you please tell me everything again? Every single thing you remember. I’m going to ask you all those questions again. Maybe something new will come out. Something you overlooked.”
Hood thought that Jordan Jones, or whatever his last name was, overlooked very little.
“I gotta stand in the sun.”
“Ernest,” said Hood. “Can we go up to the snack bar for a drink?”
“Up to you, Jordan.”
Jordan kept the towel around him and led the way. “That guy caught like eight fish. He put them back. Did he kill Harold and Gerald?”
“I believe he did. Did your mom keep the originals of your drawings?”
“Yeah. She saves a lot of my stuff. We have a whole wall of it at home.”
“Is Ernest your father?”
“My father was Joe Iverson. He died when I was two. There’s me and Bradley and baby Kenny and we all have different dads. Bradley’s cool. Kenny cries a lot.”
“Bradley’s dad come around much?”
“Not a lot. He’s afraid of Mom.”
By the time they went to the snack bar and back Jordan had told Hood his mysterious fisherman story three more times. He remembered nothing new and did not change a single detail from his original version, right down to the number of different lures he used to try to catch a bass that day: thirteen. Hood found it significant that Jordan told Lupercio that the family was going to the movies that day. Apparently, Lupercio had waited down by the stream for them to go, and was interrupted in the barn by Harold and Gerald.
Ernest held his right hand out to Hood, who thought it was to shake, then saw the business card in it. The card was for Ernest Kaleana Electric and featured a graphic red lightning bolt. On the back was a handwritten phone number.
“Try that,” said Ernest.
On the way to his car Hood dialed the number and got a computerized voice telling him to leave a message, which he did.
14
Captain Wyte handed the drawings back across the desk to Hood.
“A ten-year-old did those?”
“Yes.”
“We should hire him.”
“Do you recognize the man?” asked Hood.
“Lupercio Maygar,” said Wyte. “One of the original MacArthur Park MS-13 gangsters. Our most recent photograph of him is ten years old. He broke ranks with Mara Salvatrucha and vanished. They say-well, they say a lot of things. Have you heard any of them?”
“No, sir.”
“People need heroes and enemies. So they make them. Look at Allison Murrieta.”
Wyte went to one of the three black file cabinets along one wall. Hood saw that he moved slowly and unevenly. He pulled open the top drawer of the left-hand cabinet, reached in and removed two thick files.
He set the files on his desk and sat. “Here’s the last known photograph of your man.”
Hood looked at the picture. Lupercio Maygar was thirty-eight years old at the time of the picture, about to be discharged from San Quentin State Prison in September of 1998. Lupercio looked like many of the Salvadoran gangsters: compact, fearless, ageless. Even at thirty-eight he looked like he could have been eighteen, or forty-eight, or anything in between. Hood set Jordan’s drawings on either side of the photograph. The flat-top was new. But if you put that haircut on the ten-year-old photo of Lupercio Maygar, you had the same guy.
“When he got out, his own people turned on him,” said Wyte. “When they couldn’t catch up with him, they killed his wife and his family, sent their heads to him UPS. He vanished, then MS gangsters started dying even faster than usual-seventeen of them in 1999 alone. These weren’t youngsters. They were high-ranking OGs, captains and pistoleros. Lupercio looked good for twelve of them, possibly more, but we never got to warrant because everyone was afraid to talk. They’re still open, all twelve of those murders.”
“Twelve,” said Hood. He studied the photograph some more. He’d lost faith in numbers in Anbar-the numbers of people killed by soldiers, IEDs and suicide bombers. The numbers of Shiites murdered by Sunnis, and vice versa. There was never agreement. There were U.S. Command numbers, Coalition numbers, UN numbers, Iraqi army and police numbers, American media numbers, BBC numbers, Al Jazeera numbers and of course the numbers muttered in the mosques and marketplaces and alley-ways.
“Mostly with a machete,” said Wyte. “That’s the village method from Salvador-because a machete is personal and quiet and makes a dramatic statement. There was a truce in late 2000 between Lupercio and Mara Salvatrucha. There was some fond hope he’d gone to Salvador for good. Maybe run into a death squad and tasted a little of his own medicine.”
“Do we have anything working on him at all?”
“Just this ancient history. After prison came the murders and the truce, then-he disappeared. Next thing we know, he’s down in Valley Center murdering Native Americans.”
“It’s tied to Miracle Auto Body,” said Hood. “But I don’t know how. Lupercio was both places-the body shop, then Valley Center.”
“Lupercio at Miracle? Can you put him there for sure?”
“Close to for sure. We’ve got a good witness.”
“The woman from Valley Center,” said Wyte. “This kid’s mother.”
Lupercio in two bad places, thought Hood. And Suzanne in two bad places, too.
Wyte leaned back and frowned. “Why would she be at an auto body shop a hundred miles from home?”
“She was driving by. Heading home after seeing a relative who lives up there. She saw Lupercio pulled over, in his black Lincoln, talking on a cell phone.”
“The Lincoln,” said Wyte. “I remember it well-always polished and perfect. He drove something else for a few years because he knew we were onto the Lincoln. Now it’s apparently back in action.”
Hood told Wyte about pulling her over for speeding and hearing her description of Lupercio. He silently cursed himself for failing to get the name and number of Suzanne’s alleged relative that night, then failing to get them again the very next day. Wyte listened, tapping his keyboard. Hood noticed that Wyte’s computer wasn’t a department-issue plastic one like everybody else’s but a brushed aluminum laptop that looked like it could withstand an IED. He remembered hearing that Wyte built his own computers, had built one for the sheriff himself.
“Then Lupercio must have seen the woman, just like she saw him,” said Wyte. He shook his head slowly, as if only grand stupidity on Suzanne Jones’s part could have allowed this. “And he’s after her because she’s a witness, or he thinks she is. Where is she now?”
“Her boyfriend isn’t telling.”
“Forty-eight hours in a holding cell would help.”
“I don’t think he knows.”
“Where’s the boyfriend?”
“Oceanside.”
Hood wondered again if Suzanne had seen Lupercio doing more than just sitting in his car in the vicinity of Miracle Auto Body. For instance, seen him making off with four hundred and fifty thousand dollars’ worth of diamonds that several people knew were about to change hands. That was another pretty good motive for Lupercio to track her down, he thought. But if she’d seen something suspicious that night, why didn’t she tell him? Because she didn’t know what she was looking at? Maybe. Or maybe she knew something about the deal. Or maybe she, too, had been after the diamonds. Hood hadn’t even considered these possibilities until he’d seen Patmore’s video of Allison robbing the Taco Bell in Van Nuys. If Suzanne Jones was Allison Murrieta, things got possible. Strange things. And if she wasn’t Allison, well, then she was just a schoolteacher on her way home from seeing a relative.