Jihad

CHAPTER 126

Dean got the same shrugs in Veracruz that he’d gotten in Mexico City. The police in the port city on Mexico’s eastern coast were considerably more concerned with sailors from the local navy school than possible al-Qaeda terrorists. A few thousand tourists stopped in the city’s hotels every week, but the vast majority of them were middle American gringos and their families—“People like you,” the police chief told him, “looking for bargains.”

Dean figured it was supposed to be a compliment and nodded.

The chief gave Dean a few recommendations for dinner.

“Mention my name,” he explained, “they take care of you, no charge. You see.”

“Thanks,” said Dean, making it a point not to remember the restaurants’ names.

Dean took a walk through the city, trying to imagine what he would do if he were Kenan. But that was a lost cause; it had been a long time since he was in his early twenties. He fell back on the obvious, stopping into hotels too small and cheap to have computer reservation systems; no one recognized the photos he showed.

He worked his way down toward the sea. Ships lined up in the distance, heading toward the port; it reminded him of Istanbul’s procession of tankers up the Bosporus.

“You think there’s any possibility that Kenan Conkel hooked up with a ship out of here?” Dean asked Sandy Chafetz when he checked in with her a half hour later.

“I can’t rule it out,” she told him. “But we can’t rule it in, either. Boats and ships leave there all the time.”

“I can spread some photos around by the docks,” said Dean. “It’ll be a long shot.”

“Before you do that, I have something for you to check out. It’s a long shot, too, but it’s much more interesting,” Chafetz said. “A boat and its captain have been missing from a town north of Catemaco called Negro Olmec since the day before yesterday. The police there say that the captain was seen with a young white male and someone who was possibly Arab.”

“How do I get there?”

It took two and a half hours to drive to Negro Olmec from Veracruz. The sun had set a half hour before Dean started out, depriving him of what would have been a gorgeous view of the ocean for much of the drive. But he didn’t mind; he found a station that played American country-western, alternating between the likes of Dwight Yoakam and the Judds, with the occasional Hank Williams tune thrown in.

“Hey, Hey, Good Lookin’ ” came on, a gringo request according to the deejay. Dean sang along. Hank Williams was one of the few things he and his father agreed on, even to this day.

Negro Olmec had only three full-time police officers, and none were on duty when Dean arrived a little past nine P.M. But the man at the station was the cousin of the chief, and when Dean explained in Spanish that he was an American investigator who might have some information about the missing boat captain, he picked up his phone and told the chief that the case was solved.

The police chief walked through the door before Dean could finish telling his cousin that he had only a possible lead, not a solution. The cousin waved the picture of Kenan at the chief, telling him the murderer of boat captain Oscar Nunez had been discovered.

“You’re sure this is the man?” the chief asked Dean.

“No. I want to know if it is. I’ve been looking for him. He came to Veracruz about two months back. I’m wondering if he came back in the past few days.”

The chief picked up the phone, dialed a number, and began shouting into it, speaking so quickly that Dean couldn’t decipher his Spanish.

“Come,” demanded the chief. He put down the phone and marched out the front door, down the short flight of creaking wooden steps and across the street to a small stucco house where a battered Volkswagen with bubblegum lights sat in the driveway. By the time Dean got into the car, the chief was drumming his fingers impatiently on the steering wheel. Dean had barely closed the door when the policeman threw the car into reverse, skidding onto the road with a screech of tires that would have impressed Tommy Karr. Fifty yards down the road he jammed on the brakes, sending Dean against the dashboard.

An elderly woman was waiting at the door of the house. Before Dean could take the photo out of his pocket, she was proclaiming that Kenan had murdered her son, the most dedicated son in all of Mexico.

“How do you know he’s dead?” Dean asked. “I thought he was only missing.”

The chief nudged him aside. “We find the body today,” he said in English. “And the boat. Fifty miles offshore.”

“Fifty miles?”

“Maybe it drift, maybe not. The ocean is like a wandering woman. The captain — shot through the head.”

“I’d like to see the body,” Dean told him.

Negro Olmec’s morgue was not only a funeral home but a restaurant and travel agency. The police chief assured Dean that this was the village’s best restaurant and most likely the best on the coast.

“Julio will show you when we are done,” he said, as the funeral home director and restaurateur led them down the hall to the funeral parlor. “Yes, Julio?”

“Anything you want,” said Julio. He took out his keys and unlocked the door. “I have to go back now. The customers come on nights when we have shark. We’ve been so busy. You stop by; you’ll see.”

The smell of fish stew flowed into the large viewing room with Dean and the chief, staying with them right up to the door to the back room. There a new odor took over, the scent of decay and the chemicals meant to arrest it.

The body had been brought in just before dinnertime at the restaurant and had not been worked on yet. Sea birds had picked at the dead man, and there were gouges on his face, chest, and hands. Dean took out his PDA and placed the camera attachment on it to beam images back to the Art Room.

“A good hunk of the jaw is gone,” Dean said, ostensibly talking to the police chief but really passing the information along to Chafetz and a pathologist.

“A big wound, yes,” said the chief.

“See if there are any shots to the chest,” Chafetz told him. “Examine the clothes carefully.”

Dean glanced at the side table, looking for gloves. He didn’t see any. Gingerly, he picked at the dead man’s shirt, moving the handheld computer across it slowly.

“I don’t see any bullet wounds, do you?” he asked the police chief.

The chief didn’t answer. He was standing across the room, face toward the door.

The pathologist directed Dean to scan the skull slowly, then had him turn his attention to the jaw.

“Shot him in the face?” Dean asked.

“No, that’s probably an exit wound,” said the pathologist. “There is a smaller hole toward the top that would line up almost exactly. I can’t be sure, but it looks to me like he was shot from above at an angle. Definitely from above.”

Dean couldn’t find any other wounds and bruises, aside from the damage done by the birds. When he was done, neither he nor the police chief were in any mood to eat. They went back to the police station and looked at the bullet that had been recovered from the boat; Dean could tell from a glance that it had come from a rifle.

“One other went through the side of the boat, making a hole,” said the chief. “But it was high enough that only a little water came in.”

“Can we take a look at it?”

“Yes, come.”

Dean braced himself for another car, but the dock turned out to be across the beach directly behind the police station. The chief showed the way with a large flashlight whose light conked out every ten steps or so; he would tap it and the light would flash back on.

“What sort of customers did Senor Nunez get?” Dean asked as they walked out onto the pier.

“Some scuba, sport fishermen.”

“He ever take drug dealers or smugglers anywhere?”

“I’ve never heard that he did,” said the police chief. “And now that he is dead, who would speak ill of him?”

Even in the dark, Dean could tell the boat wouldn’t be a smuggler’s first choice. Twenty-nine feet long, it was thirty years old at least, with a stubby, low-slung cabin and a single Mercury at the rear — the sort of boat you might call dependable, but never fast. It would be cheap to rent and inconspicuous — the sort of thing a terrorist might prefer when rendezvousing with someone else.

If the blood was any indication, the boat’s captain had been standing near the wheel when he’d been shot. Dean climbed up onto the cabin deck and had the police chief stand at the wheel. His head came to Dean’s waist.

“How tall are you?” Dean asked him.

“Five foot nine, señor.”

“How tall was the captain?”

The chief shook his head.

“Six-three,” said Chafetz.

Dean adjusted his arms, figuring where he would have to hold a rifle to shoot someone at the wheel to hit him in the middle of the head. It was possible, but far from likely.

“You’d have to hold the gun way up here,” said Dean, acting it out for the police chief. “Be a very unnatural shot. Easier to shoot him like this, in the face.”

“Assuming the bullets came from a rifle,” said the chief.

“True,” said Dean. “Where’s the hole?”

The police chief pointed it out on the starboard side of the vessel.

“I’d say he had to have been shot from another boat,” said Dean. “Something higher to get that angle.”

“Or a ship,” said Chafetz. “Much more likely. We’re sending a pathology team down there to check out the dead man and the boat. Good work, Charlie.”