No way out

Chapter Fifty-eight

I called Ammara Iverson when we got back into Kate’s Chevy, using the clean cell phone Simon had given me.

“Sorry,” she said, “I haven’t had time to get back to you. Believe it or not, there are other crimes that require my attention.”

“None as much trouble as mine.”

“Amen.”

“Then give me what I need and I won’t darken your door again.”

“Until the next time,” she said.

“With any luck. What do you have on Cesar Mendez?”

“He has strong ties to Nuestra Familia in Mexico.”

“How strong?”

“Blood strong. His family is the Familia. They sent him here to run things. They trust him to sell their drugs and send them their money. Word is he’s also been sending them guns, all he can get.”

“How does he get the guns to Mexico?”

“Each shipment is passed from one collection point to the next until it gets to the border. The farther south the shipment gets, the more guns there are. It’s like a dirty snowball rolling downhill. It keeps getting bigger. Once the guns reach the border, they’re taken across in smaller lots.”

“Where does Kansas City fit into the distribution network?” I asked.

“Not surprisingly, it’s the halfway point on the north-to-south route.”

“Which means Mendez is stockpiling guns. Probably has them spread out so if we find one cache, he doesn’t take too big of a hit.”

“And that’s what happens from time to time. Nothing big, maybe a dozen pieces recovered in a raid on a drug house. Things like that.”

“What’s the organizational chart look like? Nuestra must have somebody in the States to make sure the trains run on time.”

“We assume they do, but nobody knows who that is. Immigration keeps close tabs on all the known gang members in Mexico who are high enough up in the food chain to handle something like that, and they stay pretty close to home,” she explained.

“Would they contract it out to someone not in the Familia?”

“Would you?”

“Depends on how much they trusted him. What else?”

“As gang leaders go, Mendez is not a nice man. When he came to Kansas City, the first thing he did was ice-pick his predecessor to death in front of his girlfriend before he raped and strangled her. One of his lieutenants got busted on an undercover drug buy and told us the story. Before we could put him in witness protection he backed out and refused to testify.”

“What happened?”

“Mendez sent him a message. He snatched the guy’s mother, cut off her ring finger, sent it to him, and promised to send the rest of her one piece at a time.”

“End of story?”

“Beginning. The guy lasted twelve hours when he got back on the street. We found his body and his mother’s tied one on top of another, both of them naked.”

“Where can I find him?” I asked.

“You have to be kidding.”

“I don’t shake and kid at the same time. Where does he hang out?”

“You’re crazy. I’m not going to tell you.”

“I’ll find out one way or the other.”

“Well, it won’t be from me. I won’t have that on my conscience.”

Kate drove two blocks after I finished talking to Ammara, biting her lower lip, glancing at me, giving up.

“You can’t go after Mendez.”

“Look, I’m not delusional, and I’m not suicidal. I’m not going to take him on one-on-one or walk into his house and shoot everyone in sight, pat myself on the back, declare victory, and go home.”

“Then what are you going to do?”

“The more I know, the more options I have. Knowing where he lives, where he goes, and who goes with him is all part of that.”

“Then why didn’t you tell that to Ammara? She might have told you what you wanted to know.”

I looked at Kate, smiling. “She wouldn’t have believed me.”

Kate studied me, taking snapshots. “I don’t blame her.”

I called Simon to avoid telling Kate another lie. “I want you to find Cesar Mendez.”

“Of course you do. How about I send him a friend request on Facebook?”

“And if that doesn’t work, do something creative, like check property and utility records. The guy has to live somewhere.”

“Gang leaders aren’t like the rest of us taxpayers. They don’t own, rent, buy, sell, or trade. They have people who do that for them.”

“Then find one of them and follow the trail but find him.”

“Which is more important, finding Mendez or doing something brilliant? Because I’m getting close on the brilliant thing. I can drop it if you want me to. Your call.”

Simon didn’t like being left behind at the office, even though he knew that was where he did his best work. When pressed, he admitted that Lucy and I had the edge in the field, but that didn’t satisfy his desire to be on the front lines until I reminded him that his best weapon was sarcasm and sarcasm never stopped a bullet or a bad guy.

“Give me a taste of brilliant, and I’ll let you know.”

“We wanted the police files on the missing-kid cases so we could look for similarities and evaluate whether those crimes were part of a serial killer’s pattern. We didn’t find a pattern, but that doesn’t mean we were wrong to look for it. The brain appreciates patterns. It’s how we organize, process, and understand our experiences.”

Simon’s other favorite weapon was the long explanation. “I remember. Get to the point.”

“So just because there wasn’t a pattern of child kidnappings didn’t mean there wasn’t some other pattern at work here.”

“And you found one.”

He couldn’t disguise his pleasure. “Indeed I did, robberies of gun dealers. I searched for other reports of gun dealers being held up especially after leaving gun shows. That’s when they’re the most vulnerable. They’ve got their inventories in the trunk of their cars or the back of their trucks. They’re usually alone and tired after a couple of days at a show, especially these victims, who were all seventy years old or older, guys that can’t wait to get home, put their feet up, have a beer, and recite the Second Amendment until they fall asleep.”

“Simon, I’m getting old.”

“Okay, okay. Here it is. Five gun dealers have been robbed in the last three months after coming home from gun shows. Eldon Fowler was one of them.”

“Wasn’t he the guy who lived at Lake Perry and died when he hit a deer?”

“Right. He was the fourth one. Numbers one, two, and three occurred in Lincoln Nebraska; Ames, Iowa; and Edwardsville, Illinois. The last victim, a guy named Joe Rosenthal, lives in Kansas City. The thieves followed the victims from the gun shows all the way into their garages and grabbed their guns. Fowler didn’t make it that far.”

“Any of the other victims hurt?”

“The guy in Iowa went for his gun. One of the thieves shot him in the leg, but he’s okay. They tied Rosenthal up and left him in the garage. His wife didn’t find him until she took the trash out the next day.”

“Every one of those towns is within half a day’s drive of Kansas City.”

“If KC was the hub, the others would be spokes in the wheel,” Simon added.

“Any arrests?”

“All open investigations. Each robbery made the local press, and the papers quote the same ATF agent who says all the usual bullshit that they’re making progress.”

“Braylon Jennings?”

“His Eminence.”

“How many guns total?” I asked.

“More than five hundred split roughly sixty/forty between semiautomatic handguns and assault rifles. Ballpark retail value is close to seven hundred fifty thousand dollars.”

“Eldon Fowler’s wife told you that he called her from the gun show, said someone stole his Ruger Redhawk. Has that gun surfaced?”

“Not yet. The only gun that’s been traced to the thefts is the one Frank Crenshaw used to kill his wife.”

“Anything else on the driver that passed Eldon Fowler on the highway, the one who called the Highway Patrol and said a crazy man was aiming a shotgun at them? Did you find out what he was driving?”

“I did. It was a Dodge Ram pickup truck. That’s not all. Fowler was driving a Ford F-150. CSI found paint scraped against a tree at the accident scene, but it wasn’t from the Ford. It was from a Dodge Ram.”

“That’s why Fowler had his shotgun in the window. He must have seen the thieves earlier that night, and they must have been driving a Dodge Ram. Find out if any of the people we’re looking at own one.”

“Make up your mind. You want me to do that or look for Cesar Mendez?”

“I want you to do both.”