Fear No Evil

Chapter 63

John Sampson followed Ned Mahoney and Captain Eduardo Rodriguez, their Mexican liaison, down the old green-tiled halls of the central morgue in Mexico City. The place reeked of disinfectant and they saw several autopsies under way in the small operatories they passed.

Captain Rodriguez stopped at a set of double doors. “I must warn you, cell phones don’t work in here. Something about the X-ray machine and natural magnetic lines beneath this building. I always turn my phone off because it goes crazy trying to find a signal and the battery gets shot.”

Sampson and Mahoney thumbed off their phones and put them in their pockets before following Rodriguez into a huge cold-storage locker where bodies awaiting autopsy were kept in individual chilled drawers.

Rodriguez went directly to the three drawers on the bottom, opened the first one, slid the corpse out, and drew back the sheet to reveal the face of a handsome guy who looked to have been in his late thirties when he was shot with a small-caliber bullet that entered between his eyes.

“Enrique Alejandro,” Rodriguez said. “Tortured before they did him the favor.”

He drew the sheet all the way down. He’d been burned repeatedly across his torso and his groin. “The coroner says they used a soldering gun on him with different size tips.”

Rodriguez covered Marco Alejandro’s cousin, slid his body back inside the cold drawer, and opened the one next to it. The corpse was Latino, fit, early fifties, by Sampson’s guess. He too had been burned repeatedly with a soldering gun.

“General Guerra,” Rodriguez said. “His involvement is especially tragic and hypocritical. He had a son who died of a drug overdose and he always said his son’s death was what drove him to fight the narco-traffickers.”

Mahoney said, “His confession says otherwise?”

“You will read it for yourself when we are done here.”

“Give us the highlights,” Sampson said.

Rodriguez hesitated but then said, “The general was under the influence of the cartel long before his son overdosed. The tragedy of his son’s death gave Guerra cover to act as if he were fighting the Alejandros while working on the cartel’s behalf at the highest levels of the Mexican government.”

“And door number three?” Mahoney said after Rodriguez pushed the general’s body back in its locker.

He opened the third locker, pulled out the corpse, and drew back the sheet on a buff man in his mid-forties, blond hair slicked back, shot between the eyes.

“We have an ID on him?” Mahoney asked.

“I have not yet read his confession,” Rodriguez said. “So I personally do not know who he is.”

“I think I do,” Sampson said, coming closer. “Yeah, that’s him. He showed up on the scene when Catherine Hingham was found, said he was her boss and tried to claim her body as part of a CIA investigation.”

“Name?”

Sampson thought about that, remembered how condescending the man had been, how it had annoyed him. “Weaver. Dean Weaver. I’m sure this is him.”

“One way to find out,” Mahoney said. “Let’s go read those confessions.”

Captain Rodriguez got a slightly pained expression on his face as he pushed the CIA officer’s body back into its drawer. “This will be in a few hours, señors.”

“A few hours?” Mahoney said. “No, that is not happening.”

“Special Agent Mahoney,” Rodriguez said firmly. “The confessions are still being processed in our forensics lab. You will be able to examine them once that process is completed, which will be only a few hours.”

They left the cold storage area and walked back down the hallway. Sampson felt his phone buzz with a text, saw it was from Alex asking him to call.

Mahoney said, “Can you at least get us pictures of the confessions in the meantime? So we know what we are dealing with?”

“I’ll see what I can do,” Rodriguez said and pulled out his phone.

Sampson called Alex. It went straight to voice mail, which was not part of the plan. At the prompt, he said, “Calling you back, Alex. We were in some kind of cellular black hole. Tag, you’re it.”

He hung up. Mahoney said, “He said he’d answer immediately if we called.”

“He did say that,” Sampson said, feeling the first drip of worry as he looked at his phone. “C’mon, Alex. Where are you when you’re supposed to be sitting in that café waiting for us to reach out?”