“It’s got to be someone who was close to Navarro,” Munro speculated. “Someone who knew what he was working on and is now trying to get his hands on it, one of his lieutenants who climbed up the ranks after he was killed.”
That’s how it works down there. Every time some kingpin is arrested or killed, you get a bunch of his underlings going to war with each other over who’s going to take his place, all while trying to fend off takeover attempts from other cartels. The violence spirals and is often far worse than it was before the takedown. It’s like we can’t win either way.
We weren’t going to get anything out of his shooters. The one Jules had knifed was DOA before he reached the hospital. The other two had melted away into the crowd and disappeared.
Villaverde asked, “What is this drug anyway? What was so special about it?”
“We don’t know,” Munro told him. “All we know is that it’s a very powerful hallucinogen that McKinnon found through some godforsaken tribe in the middle of nowhere.”
I remembered the recording I’d heard of McKinnon’s distress call. It had come in unexpectedly, via a cell phone that had been smuggled in to him.
His message was brief, chaotic, and intense.
He gave his name and said he’d been kidnapped several months earlier by armed bandits while bioprospecting in the rainforests down in the south, near Chiapas. The banditos had thought to ransom him to whatever big pharmaceutical company he was working for—a common occupational hazard for researchers working in the hinterlands in that part of the world. When it turned out McKinnon wasn’t working for anyone but himself, they debated killing him before coming up with another way to monetize their catch. They offered him to Navarro, figuring El Brujo would be interested in the kidnapped chemist’s talents.
They had no idea.
In a desperate attempt to stay alive by proving his usefulness, McKinnon made the mistake of telling Navarro about something he’d discovered, something he’d been searching for for years, something the shaman of a small, isolated tribe living deep in the rainforest had shared with him: a radical hallucinogen that was, according to him, unlike anything else out there. Navarro tried it, loved it, and became obsessed with it.
“McKinnon was very cagey about giving us any specifics,” Munro told Villaverde. “It was like pulling teeth. He said it was an alkaloid that would be irresistibly popular, and described it as ‘ayahuasca on steroids.’ But Navarro had a problem. With most of these tribal hallucinogens, like ayahuasca—taking them is like drinking mud. Literally. Thick horrible sludge that tastes like shit and makes you puke your guts out for days. No one would want to try that. Navarro needed McKinnon to turn his discovery into an easy-to-pop pill that didn’t have the horrible side effects—and once it was a pill, Navarro could easily add chemicals into the mix to make it highly addictive. He threatened McKinnon with a slow, drawn-out death—we know how convincing he can be on that front. So McKinnon got to work. And he did it. He told us he figured out how to synthesize it into pill form, but he hadn’t told Navarro—not yet. He wasn’t sure how long he could hold out. We looked into McKinnon and he checked out. He had the profile and all the know-how he needed to come up with something like that. So we had to do something. We couldn’t afford to let that drug hit the streets. That’s why we had to get him out.”
Or kill him, I thought.
“But you don’t know what its effects are?” Villaverde pressed.
“McKinnon wouldn’t say. I guess he thought it was too damn dangerous to say more. That’s why he called in his SOS. And that’s why he didn’t leave any record of it behind. At least, nothing we’ve found.”
Villaverde nodded, soaking it in. “So now we’ve got another player after it, whoever hired the bikers.” He turned to me. “Why you? What do they think you can give them?”
I said, “I have no idea. But they must know I was there”—I turned to Munro—“we were there, and maybe they think I found McKinnon’s notes and still have them.” I looked at Munro, curious about something. “You were there, too. Why is this about me and not you?”
He gave me a nonchalant shrug. “No fucking clue.”
Bottom line was, we needed to know who we were dealing with if Tess and Alex—and maybe I—weren’t going to spend the rest of our days boxed up in some kind of witness protection wonderland. And something was bothering me about that very question.
I turned back to Munro.
“What do you know about Navarro’s death?”
From the knowing half-grin on his face, it was clear he knew exactly where I was going with this.
“I can’t tell you for a fact that the bastard’s dead, if that’s what you’re asking.”
I felt a little charge go off inside me. “It is.”
Again with the shrug. “We went after him, as you know. DEA doesn’t take an attack on any of its agents lightly, least of all some coked-up maricón coming after someone like Hank Corliss.”
Any narco, Navarro included, had to be well aware of that. It was gospel, ever since Enrique Camarena was yanked out of his car and tortured to death in Mexico in the mid-eighties. The DEA had pulled no punches in bringing his killers to justice, even going so far as to kidnap suspects that were proving hard to extradite and smuggling them into the United States to face trial. And yet, Navarro had come after Corliss himself, brazenly and in plain sight.
A bad move.
A mad move, even.
“The narcos beat us to it,” Munro continued. “Navarro had brought down so much heat on them all that they decided it was in their best interest to end the witch hunt themselves. But they weren’t about to hand him over to us alive, not with everything he knew. So they invited him in for a chitchat. He wasn’t buying.”
“So they took him out with a car bomb,” I threw in. I remembered going over an interdepartmental report on that. “How solid was the coroner’s paperwork?”
“Come on. You know what we’re dealing with here. Mexico.” He pronounced it may-hee-koh, the sarcasm loud and clear. “But we did what we could. We had our own guys run DNA tests and ask the right questions. And their take was, it was him.”
“But you were basing that on, what?”
“Whatever we could get our hands on. Stuff we found at his house—his toothbrush, hair, spunk on his sheets. General height, weight.”
“Fingerprints?”
“Yes, on two fronts. They matched ones we found at his house. And they matched a file the federales had on him, one that had prints from an arrest early in his career.”
None of that was foolproof. If he had enough money and the right connections on whom to spend it—which someone in his position had to have—Navarro could have staged the whole thing.
Which is where my suspicions was converging.
There was no way of knowing for sure. Not yet, anyway.
Either way, it didn’t really matter. Whether it was Navarro or one of his ex-lieutenants, what mattered was that one of them was after something they thought I had. Because of a mistake, an error of judgment I made—a crime I committed, let’s not mince words here—five years ago. What goes around comes around, right? I’d heard that piece of twaddle all my life. I never gave it much thought—until now. But if that was the case, if my take on this was correct, it meant the bad guys’ game plan was to get hold of me. It meant I was their golden goose.