A False Dawn

SIXTY-THREE

On the drive to SunState Farms migrant camp, I called Special Agent Lauren Miles. It had been ten days since I had last spoken to her. After the shootout at the processing house, I’d asked Dan to fill her in on the details. Between the soreness in my mouth and my cracked ribs, I had been in no mood to deliver a dossier for the FBI.

She had news for me. “We have a little more on Santana, but it’s not much. Nothing from DMV. Can’t find photos. There is no record of his birth in America. He’s said to speak three languages. Owns or has partial ownership in an upscale strip joint called Xanadu. He’s also said to have ties to some of the new hotel casino combos and some coming up in Florida. His Xanadu website mixes pictures, video and pay-per-view porno. We found a connection to an Internet escort site, Exotic Escorts.”

“I bet the guy has a few degrees of separation between himself and his businesses. He’s smart, ruthless, well-connected, and manages to buy people or trap them like a spider, and that’s when he uses them.”

“As in Jude Walberg, the good doctor?”

“The same. One of Santana’s former strippers is missing, probably dead. Name’s Robin Eastman. Ring a bell?”

“No, it doesn’t. You think Santana did it?”

“Or he had it done. May have been a cop who did the killing, a Detective Mitchell Slater, Volusia County. See what you can find on Slater. For some reason he’s connected. The guy who owned Club Platinum in Daytona, Tony Martin, was killed after he left the club. Martin had just got into his car and was talking on his cell with his girlfriend, Robin Eastman, when he was killed. Eastman told her mother that Martin had said, ‘You’re supposed to be a cop,’ right before she heard gunshots.”

Lauren was quiet a moment. “If it was a rogue cop playing hit man, Santana’s either paying him many times his pension, or he has something on him?”

“Slater has political aspirations. He was at the Brennens for a fund-raising, and pissed off that I would question them. He knew Leslie was about to implicate him. I’m convinced he killed her. I think he’s a guy paid to look the other way, and when the stuff really hits the fan, then he’s a triggerman behind a badge. Your people are good at surveillance, see if you can follow Santana.”

She was silent for a few seconds. “We have followed him, but we can’t seem to get close enough to catch him in anything.”

“What do you mean?”

“That’s where your skills have helped greatly. You’re closer, at least you’re coming closer than anyone else. You’re beginning to directly link him to things. Our profilers say Santana’s one of the worst-of-the worst, if these creeps can get any worse. So, although we’ve managed to profile him, we haven’t caught him.”

“Your profilers? You’ve known about Santana all along! You recruited me to hunt him down for you.”

“It’s not that simple. Our information corroborates everything you’ve said, but, you actually have more than we do.”

“Were you planning on sharing what you knew, or was I always the only one to sift through clues and hand it to the feds?” I felt my anger boiling up.

“Sean it’s not like that.”

“Bullshit! Keep me in the dark and let me hunt for a jaguar that knows I’m walking under his tree. Thanks, Lauren.”

“We’re not using you, we need you.” Her voice dropped. “We need your help. I’m sorry.”

I said nothing.

“Santana is an easy guy to despise, but he’s a hard person to catch because he has everyone else doing his dirty work. No one’s talking because he seems to have some frightening power, absolute control over those who work for him. We believe he’s tied at the hip with one of the most ruthless human trafficking rings in the world.”

“One of the most ruthless? What do you call harvesting human organs? Does it get any more ruthless than that?”

Lauren sighed. “I haven’t held information back from you that would help solve this or find Santana. He’s a terrorist of a different breed. Intelligent. Fearless. And he enjoys killing…personally. We’re running out of time.”

“That’s insightful. He’s probably two moves ahead of anything we can do right now. We need to get a DNA sample from him. Gomez is dead. Davis isn’t talking. He says he doesn’t know where to find Hector Ortega.”

“What about this doctor, Jude Walberg, can he identify Santana?”

“He says he never saw Santana. Only took orders on the phone. He insists the vics were dead before he got there. He says Gomez and Ortega were the ones who packaged and delivered the organs. Walberg said he didn’t know how the distribution worked. Said as soon as he was done they told him to leave. So what we have is Gomez is dead, Silas Davis in custody, Hector Ortega is MIA, and Santana remains a phantom.”

Lauren was silent.

I said, “Detective Dan Grant questioned the girls in the van that night, the same van transporting the vic I found by the river. Dan said the girls didn’t want to talk. One finally did say that when the vic ran from the van, Ortega chased her for a few minutes, but came back to the van and he said, ‘She deserved what she was going to get.’”

“How many victims?” Lauren asked.

“Walberg says at least six. At first it was one a month. Then business picked up and the slaughters become more frequent. Because the doctor only identified Ortega and Gomez, they must have picked up the bodies and took them to the shack after they got a call from Santana. I was convinced that Richard Brennen fit the profile, but the hair on the duct tape didn’t match his DNA. It did match the killer known as Bagman. I bet Bagman and Santana are one and the same.”

“We’ve got to bring Santana down immediately.”

I looked at my watch. “We need a positive DNA match. Follow him.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I’m going to try and find the bodies. Maybe I’ll run into Ortega along the way.”

“Do you need back-up?”

“I need to find Ortega. Then I think I’ll find a real body count.”

“If Ortega’s fled to Mexico, what’s left?”

“I hope the FBI has some good bloodhounds.”

“To track him to Mexico?”

“No, to find the bodies here.”