In a large vase on the long, spare kitchen table stood a single orchid blossom.
Leaning against it was a small, folded card on heavy stock. On the face was written “Comandante Garza.”
“Shit,” she said.
The inside of the card was blank.
MacClesh made certain his men went first, in the event Chuparosa had any surprises in store for her. Garza followed the PF officers up the stairs and down a long hallway lined with what must have been family photographs. She felt something unusual from them: protectiveness. It went beyond their jobs. They construed the card as a threat, and for the first time she felt a true concern for her well-being from her men.
“In here,” the officer said, pointing to a set of double doors leading into the master bedroom.
She walked inside. The bedroom was large, without seeming silly or pretentious. A giant canvas covered the far wall, and while Garza did not recognize the artist, she indeed recognized its quality.
“Here,” the officer said.
On the floor near the bed lay a boy of maybe fourteen or fifteen. Barely even old enough to shave, curled into the fetal position.
He had been shot execution style in the back of the head. His blood had splashed across the neatly folded covers of the bed before he fell.
MacClesh went around to look at the boy’s face. “We passed a photo of this young man, hanging on the wall. He must be related to Chuparosa.” The major cleared his throat. He had a grandson near this age. “Who do you think did this?” he asked Garza. “Who could be this angry at Chuparosa?”
Garza shook her head, surprised by MacClesh’s shortsightedness. “Major, this is him. He did this. Chuparosa.”
MacClesh looked at the boy once again. Now he understood. “Because of the survivor. This boy failed him.”
“The man murdered his own blood. Probably right as they were getting ready to leave.”
MacClesh was shaking his head. Not in disagreement. In disgust.
Garza said, “He was sanitizing his trail, Major. Erasing his past. What for? That is the question.”
MacClesh shook his head again—though this time, he was angry. “What kind of madman . . . ?”
“An artist,” Garza said.
MacClesh’s eyes narrowed, blazing with anger at her. “You cannot be serious.”
“Sometimes an artist has to wipe the slate clean before he can move on to a new period, a new style, a new . . .” She ran out of words for a moment, thinking back to her own artistic crisis when she’d been in college. She had wrestled for several years over whether to be an artist—and not a very good one—or to pursue law, something she found dry and uninteresting. From the vantage point of her present existence, it seemed like a foolish little adolescent crisis now. But at the time, she had been racked with turmoil.
Only the abduction of her sister and her mother had brought clarity—had indeed chosen her path for her.
“Once you exhaust the seam,” she told MacClesh, “you have to move on.”
Major MacClesh stared at her without comprehension, his eyes still ablaze with rage. Not at her: at Chuparosa. “You speak of him with respect,” he said. “I cannot. These were his own people, Comandante! Not his enemies. His people! His blood.” MacClesh got hold of himself then, moving to the door. “When we find him, Comandante, he will not stand trial. I promise you that.”
Garza had never seen MacClesh so embittered. She said nothing, allowing his threat to hover in the air like the flies. He turned and walked out of the room, his shoulders tight.
“Comandante, over here.”
Garza walked over to a drawing desk by an open window. The sketches, if there were any, had been taken. All that remained among the charcoal pencils was a single piece of paper.
It took Garza a moment to figure out what she was looking at. Once she did, she carried it out of the bedroom and through the house, looking for MacClesh.
She found him outside, standing near a pear tree that stood at the edge of the lush greenery of Chuparosa’s garden. The sun was an orange ball now, just starting to hide behind the dry black teeth of the mountains.
The pear tree was alive with rapidly darting shapes, glinting in the last orange light of the desert sun. Hummingbirds.
She showed him what they had found. It was a printout of an article from Reforma, the big newspaper in Mexico City. A story about President-Elect Umberto Vargas.
Drawn in red over the accompanying photograph was a small design: a picture of a hummingbird, scrawled across the president-elect’s face.
By Chuparosa’s own fingertip, no doubt. Using the blood of his own nephew.
“He’s going after Vargas,” said Garza.
CHAPTER 12
Late August
Foley Square, New York City
The highest-security wing of the Metropolitan Correctional Center of New York is on the tenth floor of the Foley Square building, just across from the federal courthouse.
Ten South, as it is known, has been home to many notorious criminals with New York ties. Mafia bosses such as John Gotti have called it home. Infamous Ponzi-schemer Bernard Madoff traded in his seven-million-dollar East Side penthouse for a tenth-floor bunk there. Bloodthirsty terrorists such as Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman and 1993 World Trade Center bomber Ramzi Yousef resided in Ten South while awaiting their trials.
Ten South’s windows are blacked out, but the lights shine inside twenty-four hours each day. There is no interaction between guards and prisoners, and meals—the law mandates that prisoners be fed twenty-five hundred calories each day, for which the state budget allocates $2.45 per prisoner—are served through a narrow slit in a stainless steel door.
Fisk entered the building through an underground tunnel from the courthouse. He moved slowly from secure area to secure area, and in the midst of his rise to the tenth floor he realized why: security cameras had to be turned off at every stop along the way. He had left his mobile phone at home, where he had been picked up by Dave Link. There would be no electronic record of his visit with Magnus Jenssen.
“You bring anything for me?” asked Link, as they waited to enter Ten South. He was referring to the small cardboard box in Fisk’s hand, folded similarly to a carton of takeout Chinese food.
Fisk did not answer. He wore his best suit, a dark, three-button Canali; he had given his appearance perhaps too much thought. He wanted to make a lasting impression on Jenssen. Because of the physical restrictions imposed upon him, he wanted to maximize this visit’s psychological impact.
“I can trust you, right?” said Link. “I mean, something like an open-hand slap isn’t going to matter, but no marks, no bruises, no nothing. In other words, there won’t be any telephone books in the interrogation room.”
Fisk nodded.
“We’ll be watching and listening. Don’t make us come in there.”
Fisk nodded again. This felt like a prefight talk between a trainer and a boxer.
Link continued, “This is not a regular interrogation room. There is no window or mirror. In case you’re curious, we’re in the crown molding running around the top of the walls. It’s molded to the wallboard so that prisoners can’t pry it off and stab you to death with it. It’s all prefab with access holes for installing sensors, microphones, cameras, the usual. All that is going to be erased after you’re through. No, you don’t get a copy.”
Link was smiling. Fisk was not.
Link said again, “Fisk, you’re worrying me here. I’m not making a mistake doing this, am I?”
“It’s fine,” said Fisk, his voice distant even to himself. “No worries. Let’s get this over with.”