Prolonged Exposure

Chapter 36

The night wore on, and on, and on. There had been a few times in my life when the sun simply refused to make any progress around the other side. This was one of them.

Tiny bits and pieces of information dragged in. We were using my office, spacious and removed from the traffic flow in and out of the Public Safety Building.

When Niel Costace of the FBI arrived shortly after ten from Las Cruces, Sheriff Martin Holman and I were alone in my office, trying to establish telephone contact with Capt. Tomas Naranjo of the Mexican federales. We hadn’t had much success, since Naranjo wasn’t in his office in Juarez and wasn’t at home-and his wife didn’t know where he was. If he had a cellular phone, he was ignoring it.

Costace stood in the doorway of my office, his posture suggesting that he was carrying a sack of cement in each hand.

“What the hell mess have you got going here this time?” he said by way of greeting, and Holman strode across the room to pump his hand like the good politician he was.

“And no word on either the vehicle or the boys yet,” Costace said when Holman finished his recap of the case.

“Not a thing.”

He turned one of my straight chairs around and sat on it, cowboy-style, resting his chin on his hands.

“We’ve met this Roberto Madrid a time or two,” Costace said. “He’s a wheeler-dealer, kind of a free agent. Works most of the time out of Monterrey, as far as we’ve been able to tell. I can tell you one thing. If he’s involved with the missing boys, don’t bother sitting around waiting for a telephone call.”

“I was afraid that was the case,” I said.

Holman looked uneasy. “Why not? What’s Madrid’s game?”

“No game, Sheriff,” Costace said. “Madrid doesn’t do drugs, as far as we can determine. Nothing to connect him, anyway. His name came up a couple of years ago in connection with that nasty deal in Matamoros. Remember some of those missing teenagers? Kind of a cult thing? He was connected with that, but we could never nail it down-and neither could the federales. The only thing we know for sure is that not all of those kids went down there of their own free will.”

“Abducted, you mean?”

Costace nodded. “That’s what we think. The next time his name came down the pike was in connection with a deal over in Tampico. That one involved a sixty-five-foot sloop that was stolen out of Hatteras, North Carolina.” He rocked the chair forward. “Now, you think it’s hard to hide a thirty-foot travel bus? How about a boat twice that big? He pulled it off, and the new owners had been using it for nearly six months before Mexican officials got around to making the connections.” He shrugged. “Hatteras to Mexican waters is a hell of a long run.”

“Madrid just sailed it down there?”

“He didn’t. He had some hired hands. No, old Roberto just does the deals. From the description the boat owners gave, we know it was Madrid. He said he was an insurance agent and he got himself on board the boat for an inspection. That’s how he knew the layout.”

“I don’t care about boats,” Holman said. “Why would he be interested in two three-year-olds?”

“Well, I said he was a wheeler-dealer. If there’s a market, then he’s in there pitchin’.”

“You mean sell them? Sell the kids?”

Costace shrugged in that cold-blooded way that suggested that he’d seen it all. “How’d it happen, exactly?”

Holman told him about Cody Cole’s disappearance.

“And that happened several days before the Guzman boy was taken?”

I nodded. “Well, see,” Costace said, “the Cole youngster’s abduction fits. There’s no way of tellin’ just yet how the Coles made contact with Madrid in the first place, but if they set up a deal, Madrid’s style would fit just what happened. They hold the kid-maybe using that big old RV for just that purpose.”

“That would mean that the boy’s natural father was in on it, too.”

“Would seem so. Madrid hits town, and if he thinks the coast is clear, all he has to do is hand over the pesos to the parents and then hit the road.”

“Why wait four days to do it?” I asked. “Cody went missing on Saturday night. Why would they run the risk of keeping him around for four days? That doesn’t make a bit of sense.”

“Madrid might have been planning to hit town last Saturday. Who knows?” Costace said. “Anything could have delayed him-traffic accident, other troubles.” He rested his chin on his hands and stared at the floor. “He’s late, and whoever is holding the boy is forced to mark time. One day, two days…”

“What about the second boy?”

“That’s a problem,” Costace said. “We’ve been getting rumblings now and then that there’s a market for children-sometimes a family of ricos gets it in their heads that they’d like a little blond-haired, blue-eyes status symbol. They’re willing to pay good money for an instant adoption, and that would attract the Roberto Madrids of the world. You want it, he finds it. But the Guzman boy puzzles me.” Costace smiled without much humor. “Lord knows, Mexico has its share of cute little black-haired, black-eyed urchins who speak Spanish. I don’t see much need to go north of the border to fetch another one, especially a high-visibility target like this little Francis. That sounds like panic to me.”

“Panic?”

Costace shrugged. “If the deal was goin’ down without any hitch, Madrid would have taken the Cole boy and hit the road. He would have been in and out of here so slick, no one would have been the wiser. Little Cody would have been a Mexican citizen by bedtime Saturday night.” He shrugged again. “Nobody would have been the wiser. After a few days, the search is called off; everybody’s sad, but eventually everyone forgets. Ma and Pa Cole pocket a trunkful of cash. But it didn’t happen that way. From what you say, there was a hell of an argument.”

“Someone changed her mind,” I said as a lightbulb flashed in my head.

“Who?” Holman frowned at me.

“We went through Tiffany Cole’s house tonight,” I said. “That woman has a screw loose somewhere. That child’s been living with them for all three years of his life, and except for a half-eaten dish of hash and a plastic child’s cup of milk, there wasn’t any way to tell he’d ever been in that house.”

I got up and walked to the window. “She makes a deal to part with the youngster. We don’t know how she did; we don’t know the circumstances. We know that her ex-husband, Paul Cole, came to Posadas under false pretenses, so only an idiot would ignore his involvement. It couldn’t happen under Andy Browers’s nose without him knowing, so he’s in on it, too.”

“A real crop of woodchucks you got here,” Costace said.

“They make a deal with Madrid. The time comes to deliver the boy, and someone backs out. Mama, maybe.”

“Touching,” Costace said.

“Maybe they took some money in advance to secure the deal. They know they have Madrid at the motel, waiting. They figure, Hey, what the hell. Give him some other kid.”

Costace rubbed his face. “Do you have some reason to believe they’d know about the Guzman child? Why would they choose him?”

“Sure,” I said. “His mother’s high profile in this town, as is his father. And his picture was just in the local paper, in a big play they gave the search efforts.” I rummaged on my desk and found a copy of the Register. “Here it is.”

Costace frowned and examined the newspaper at some length. “Handsome boy,” he said finally. “But I can just see the look on Madrid’s face when they come trooping into his motel room with Francis Guzman, Jr., in tow.”

“And so the argument,” Holman said. “In all your dealings with Madrid, is he usually armed?”

Costace held up his hands. “Don’t get me wrong. I haven’t dealt with the man myself. And he’s a slick one. He’s no strong-arm, if what I hear is right. Sure, he might carry a knife, but the fastest way to get yourself nailed at the border is to be carrying a concealed weapon. No, guys like Madrid come and go slick as an oil spill, because they know what attracts attention.”

“Why would he fight, then?”

“Well,” Costace said, “if they already had a down payment and didn’t want to return it, then he might get just a little testy. Depends on who he was facing, and what they were trying to pull on him. It’s all just speculation.”

“That’s all we’ve got,” I said. “There was blood all over the motel room, and considerable blood in the truck and Browers’s house.”

“He got in a couple good licks, then,” Costace said. “They shot him twice?”

“That’s right,” Holman said. “The coroner told me tonight that the preliminary shows two twenty-two-caliber wounds. One in the side, one in the back. He lived for about twenty minutes.”

“End of his argument,” Costace said. “And now your good folks have discovered how easy it is to go from foolproof plan to royal fuckup.” He stood up and pushed the chair back against the desk. “Did you find any money in the motel room, Sheriff?”

Holman shook his head. “Nothing. Not even Madrid’s wallet. There were a couple of car-rental papers. That’s all.”

“Then your folks are running around with a bundle of money that doesn’t belong to them, and they haven’t delivered the goods, either. Someone down south isn’t going to be too happy, but there isn’t a hell of a lot they can do, either.” He glanced at his watch, as if we’d used up his allotment of time. “If what we’ve been thinking is true, then you can figure it out as well as I can. If I were them, I’d get rid of three things.” He held up three fingers, then bent the index. “First is the bleeder. He’s hurt bad, maybe dead. There’s a lot of empty desert out there, so that’s no problem.” He bent down the second finger. “The second is the Guzman child. Without that little kid, they’re just a nice family. And finally, they’ve got to dump that RV. They bring top dollar in Mexico, so if they can slip across the border, they’ve got a chance.” He shoved his hands in his pockets. “You been in touch with Naranjo, I imagine?”

“Trying,” I said.

He nodded. “There’s some good news in all this,” he said.

“I’d like to hear it,” I replied.

“Well, if Madrid had the boys, I’d bet even money that you’d never see them again. He knows how to slip in and out of Mexico clean as the wind. He’s got contacts, and he knows who to pay. But Madrid’s dead. You’re dealing with a bunch of wild-eyed amateurs. Who knows what they’re thinking, or what their logic is? You wait long enough and they’ll drive themselves right into a dead end. They can’t come back. They can’t cross at Regal. The Border Patrol’s looking for ’em every foot of the border, and they don’t have Madrid’s savvy or contacts.”

“Maybe that’s good news, and maybe it isn’t,” I said, and eyed Costace. “At least one of those two little boys is excess baggage at this point. And as you say, it’s a big desert out there.”