IT WASN’T UNUSUAL for a vehicle to spend a night in the parking lot of the big-box store. There were several restaurants and bars in the neighborhood and their customers often used the lot when space was tight, but the store’s policy was clearly posted. No overnight parking. Whether it was a few too many drinks, a spontaneous romance, or often a combination of the two, the store’s security guard tried to give people a break, letting the cars sit as long as he could. But his boss would get to work in an hour, and if the old pickup truck was still sitting out front, it was the guard who was going to have a bad day and not the pickup’s owner.
The tow truck driver reported the pickup’s license plate number to the San Antonio police before he hooked up the tow bar. It was standard procedure so that when the owner returned to find his vehicle missing, the police wouldn’t waste resources searching for a stolen car that wasn’t, and they’d be able to give the owner the modestly better news that his vehicle had only been towed.
But the entry of the pickup’s plate number triggered a law enforcement flag. That in itself wasn’t a big deal. Maybe 10 percent of his tows had expired registrations, lapsed insurance, or some other issue, but this was a federal hit. He’d never tripped one of those before, and he had no idea that it had been placed by the Customs and Border Protection officer in Los Indios who had searched the truck the day before.
The CBP officer’s white and green Chevy Tahoe averaged ninety miles per hour on its way to San Antonio. He thought through all sorts of possibilities as he drove, from a simple breakdown to something much more nefarious. He called ahead to the big-box store and had them pull the parking lot surveillance tapes from the prior day. By the time he arrived, the security guard had located the two men arriving in the pickup at 11:57 a.m., but he had been unable to find them leaving. It was only when the CBP officer reviewed the tape that he realized that the two men had ditched their cowboy hats and left in a light-colored compact SUV at 12:14 p.m. Unfortunately, the low-resolution black-and-white video was unable to capture the SUV’s color or plate number.
The officer did some quick math in his head. The men in the pickup could have driven from the border to San Antonio in four hours, then easily made it to Dallas in time for rush hour. It was a long shot, he told himself, laughing mirthlessly at the unintentional pun, but his gut told him that he might have just identified the men responsible for yesterday’s highway shooting in Dallas.
The initial conclusion from the first responders at the scene had been that they were looking at a high-speed pileup. Multivehicle crashes were common enough on the big expressways, where people tended to drive too fast and follow too close. It was only when a veteran crash scene investigator had examined the shattered glass and smashed sheet metal that the first bullet hole was located. She then scrutinized the entire debris field until the other windshields yielded the same telltale marks of a skilled rifleman. Postmortem analysis of the victims showed conclusively that trauma incurred during the wrecks were not the causes of death.
The CBP officer pulled the names and photos of the men in the pickup from their entry records and called the Dallas Police Department.