After almost a minute or so, she turned and walked east, as though nothing had happened.
“Any more?” asked Garza.
“That is our only outdoor camera.”
“It cannot pan up?” She wanted to see Virgilio get into his car, apparently.
“No, it is fixed.”
Fisk said, “She was marking him.”
Garza straightened. “Yes.”
“Marking him?” said Nwokcha.
“Signaling someone,” said Fisk. “Someone who is not on camera.”
“Pointing him out,” said Garza, doubly anxious now.
Nwokcha had isolated her face from the bar and was running it through their system. “The system has her flagged as a hooker.”
“It does?” said Fisk.
“There’s an algorithm for that. Young women in short dresses who come and go frequently and aren’t tagged to a specific room . . . the system flags them as prostitutes.”
“So you can blackball them?”
“Hardly. A hotel without working girls? We’d be out of business in no time. No, we just want to know who is coming and going.” He tapped a few more keys. “Her first visit to the hotel, apparently. No additional information.”
“She’s Mexican,” said Garza.
Fisk said, “You’re sure?”
“Of course I am.”
Fisk asked Nwokcha, “Is that the best image?”
“The computer automatically displays the clearest facial image, the one most suitable for further analysis.”
Fisk said, “Could we get a printout?”
“Not from here. But I can e-mail you the image.”
Fisk gave him his Intel address and waited for the e-mail to arrive at his phone. Garza had stepped away to call in an update.
Fisk asked Nwokcha, “Does the system do anything for people who don’t show their faces?”
“It isolates them. Here’s the trick if you don’t want to be photographed. Use this.” He pointed to Fisk’s phone. “You pretend to talk on a cell phone, you see, with your eyes down. Wear a baseball cap or something similarly common that will obscure your face from a high angle. Then you add in sunglasses, of course, hunch up your shoulders a little. Put your finger in your other ear as though you are having trouble getting reception or hearing well in a crowded area. People do it all the time who aren’t hiding from cameras. Looks perfectly natural.”
Fisk’s phone hummed with the arriving e-mail. He opened the attachment and looked at the photo image of the woman. On his phone, she looked even younger, maybe nineteen or twenty. He forwarded the image to Intel.
CHAPTER 31
Back in his car, before pulling out, Fisk turned to face Garza. “We need to issue an alert about Virgilio.”
“He’s already dead,” said Garza.
Fisk studied her. Her jaw trembled a bit, but her eyes remained fierce, focused. “You’re saying he wouldn’t have allowed himself to have been taken alive?”
“Only if incapacitated. I realize there is always a chance . . . but if the aim is to extract information, about President Vargas’s movements and security, he won’t cooperate. He will be killed when he refuses.”
“Then there is no reason not to issue an alert. It might give us a lead.”
Garza looked through the windshield at busy Fifty-seventh Street. She had already resigned herself to Virgilio’s fate.
Fisk continued, “If you are reluctant because of showing your organization’s vulnerability, or disclosing his true identity . . .”
Garza turned to Fisk. “He was a good man. I cannot accept that he is gone . . . and yet I have to.”
Fisk was checking his mirrors.
“What is it?” she asked.
Fisk said, “I’m making sure nobody picked us up at the hotel to follow us.”
Garza’s eyes narrowed, and she looked at the hotel doors as Fisk pulled out into traffic.
“All right, Comandante,” he said. “I think it is time for you to tell me who this guy is you’re looking for.”
She looked off into the distance as though she was trying to decide whether or not she could trust him.
“You need help here,” said Fisk, more pointedly this time. “And if I’m going to marshal resources, I need a damn good reason. Who is he?”
“Two months ago, Detective Fisk, a row of headless corpses was left on the plaza of the town of Nuevo Laredo, just across the border from Laredo, Texas. The man I am chasing was responsible for those killings and numerous others. We finally tracked him back to a compound in the mountains that was his home. His refuge. He was gone. But before leaving, he killed every one of his servants and even his own men. He was making a statement. He left this behind, just a few feet away from a dead boy we believe to be his nephew.”
She thumbed her phone screen, waiting for Fisk to be able to take his eyes off the road and look over. He saw the image of a newspaper photograph of President Vargas, over which was a peculiar reddish brown design.
“That’s blood,” she said. “And if you were able to look at it closely, you would see that it is not just a random stain. It is a drawing. It is the mark of an assassin known as Chuparosa. It means Hummingbird.”
Fisk glanced at the image again. He could see it now, the wings, the needle-shaped nose.
“Why a hummingbird?”
Garza looked at the image herself before darkening the screen of her phone. “It is a symbol of vigor and potency. But specifically? I don’t know. He was notoriously aligned with the Zeta Cartel as something of an inspirational figure, cherishing violence over all else.”
“And you’ve never seen him?”
“No confirmed photographs exist. I have been tracking this man for two years now, Detective. He existed like a legend for years. In a country of dangerous men, this man is the most dangerous, by far. So brutal that his exploits were denied by many, out of sheer disbelief. Last July was the closest I have ever come to catching him.”
“Why did the Zetas need to rely on one man?”
“He aligned with them early. To give you an example . . . in searching his compound after we secured it, we discovered six metal barrels below a trapdoor in a storage shed about a half kilometer from the main house. Outside the shed was a fire pit covered by a grill. You see, disposing of bodies is problematic, especially in the heat of the desert. Scavengers will dig up anything that is buried. And cadaver dogs can track the scent of the long dead. For every beheaded victim of the drug war, there are another dozen victims who simply disappear. In one particularly horrifying case, a man who reported the abduction of his family was himself kidnapped the next day.”
She paused a moment, and Fisk knew she was thinking of Virgilio.
“What we believe is that Chuparosa would fill a barrel with water and two large bags of lye. He would set the barrel on the grill and light the fire, bringing the liquid inside to a boil before submerging the dead body. Over the next twenty-four hours, the body would liquefy. We found remnants of a pinkish gunk that resembled posole. Do you know what that is?”
“No.”
“It is a stew. Later he would dump the liquefied remains into a nearby stream. We learned this by digging up soil samples and testing them for traces of human remains. But our forensic teams could not identify even one victim. He is as diabolical as he is thorough. Hundreds of families have no answers, and will never know the true fate of their loved ones. He has no regard for human life, Detective.”
She turned to him.
“Let me see the bodies dumped in Rockaway yesterday. There may be something of value there.”
Fisk had some more questions to ask before answering her. “Why does he now want to kill the president?”
“I don’t know. It must have something to do with the trafficking treaty.”
“That seems somewhat extreme, doesn’t it? Why take this on by himself? It seems like he would be motivated more by a personal grudge.”