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I was listening to the radio on my way to work at the FBI headquarters in Miramar, Florida, when I heard the report that would shift the direction of my life for the next month.
“The U.S. Coast Guard has stopped at sea over 3,000 Florida-bound Cuban migrants fleeing deteriorating economic, safety and political conditions in the Caribbean nation since October — more than the last five fiscal years combined,” the correspondent announced. “Prominent Republican donor Alvaro Vela Romero has presented the governor with a list or Cuban rafters he wants released from the Krome Detention Center immediately. Included are political activists, former government employees, and three women jailed for selling cafecitos in Havana’s Plaza de la Revolución without permits.”
Because this is South Florida, the correspondent, a woman of Cuban extraction herself, pronounced cafecito and Revolución flawlessly. I was studying Spanish myself with an online app, and as I pulled into the parking garage I repeated those words several times until I thought I had the pronunciation correct.
By the time I reached my office, down a warren of narrow hallways, my cell phone was ringing. With a sinking heart I saw the display read “Jesse Venable.”
“I just got into the office, Jesse,” I said, in lieu of greeting. “I can’t talk now.”
“Just hear me out, Angus,” he said. “It’s about this gay kid at Krome. You gotta help me get him out of there.”
When the universe sends me two messages within minutes about the same topic, I listen. I dropped my shoulder bag on my desk and sat down. “Talk.”
“His name is Yulirus Diaz, and until a couple of weeks ago he worked at the Museum of Decorative Arts in Havana.”
A bell rang in my head. “Would he have been a government employee?”
“Christ, I don’t know. I got a friend from the time I spent in prison who was close with one of the guards, if you know what I mean.”
I knew. Like me, Jesse was gay, though that shared kinship hadn’t stopped me from arresting him for receiving stolen goods two and a half years before. And his friend, and the guard, were probably gay, too, even if only situationally.
“What’s this have to do with me?” I asked.
“My friend’s friend is now a guard at Krome, and he got to know this kid Yulirus. He’s a good guy, a sweetheart, and he left Cuba on a raft because somebody was trying to kill him there. He’s afraid they’re going to send him back, where he’s as good as dead. And I’m scared that nobody’s going to care about one gay kid when the governor is putting pressure on releasing these people who have political pull.”
“I don’t have anything to do with immigration, Jesse. Right now I’m up to my ears in spreadsheets for a series of barbershop robberies.”
I joined the FBI first as an analyst, based on my master’s degree in accounting. Then after taking the training course at Quantico, I’d been made a special agent and shipped to the Miami office to get some experience under my belt.
It had been a tumultuous time. Jesse Venable was small potatoes compared to some of the other crooks I’d faced down. But I felt sorry for him because he was a very persuasive guy, in his sixties, alone, and a survivor of prostate cancer.
“But you’re the FBI,” Jesse said. “You guys can stick your fingers wherever you please.”
“You know that’s not true. Especially for me. I work for a senior agent and he’s the one who tells me what to do. And he’s going to be pissed if I don’t finish these spreadsheets.”
“Please, Angus. Just keep your eyes open. See if you can do anything to help this kid.”
I sighed. “I’ll do what I can, but I can’t promise anything.”
I hung up and knuckled down to work. By lunchtime I’d finished entering all the data we had collected about a series of barber shop robberies that spanned several counties in South Florida and I was staring at the rows of information looking desperately for patterns. I gave up temporarily and navigated the maze of hallways to the cafeteria, hoping some protein would stoke my brain.
My boyfriend Lester is always on me to improve my diet. Just the other day he’d said, “Proteins help neurons within the brain communicate with each other through neurotransmitters that are made from amino acids.”
“What does that mean in English?” I had asked. Lester had a degree in physical education and had been a personal trainer for a couple of years before landing his current job.
“It means you need to eat meat and drink milk to be the best G-man you can be.”
That was one of his refrains. He pushed me to exercise, practice yoga, and manage my nutrition so I could outrun and outthink the bad guys. Maybe he was right, or maybe going along with him was part of learning to be in a relationship.
I chose a plate of chicken salad that balanced out protein, leafy greens and heirloom tomatoes, and a can of my favorite pineapple-flavored soda, called Jupina.
Little by little I was becoming a Floridian. We never had pineapple soda when I was growing up in Scranton.
I saw Miriam Washington sitting by herself at a table and asked if I could join her. “Of course. Have a seat.”
She was a decade older than my twenty-eight, and held a PhD in art history. In addition to her regular responsibilities, she was a member of the Art Theft Task Force, and I had worked with her on a couple of cases, though in all but one I’d compiled data for her rather than being out in the field.
She was a statuesque African-American woman who favored business suits in bright colors—that day’s was a deep maroon, the color of blood. She always made me look ordinary, in my dark blue suits. But my hair was red, and I had a tendency to freckles, so to keep people from thinking I was a teenaged Archie pretending to be a special agent, I stuck to boring.
“What are you up to these days?” she asked.
“Robberies at fifteen different barbershops in inner-city neighborhoods from Overtown in Miami up to Riviera Beach in Palm Beach County,” I said. “Same MO in each case. Man comes in just before closing with a little boy, insists that the kid needs a haircut for an awards presentation the next day. Gives the last barber left a big sob story, and the barber agrees. By the time the hair cut is finished the shop is empty, and the man pulls a gun and cleans out the register.”
“Lots of those inner-city operations are heavy cash businesses,” Miriam said. “I can see they’d be worthwhile heists. You have any leads?”
I shook my head. “I’m just compiling the data, looking for any patterns we haven’t found yet. The report is due tomorrow afternoon, which means I’ll be working all day tomorrow to wrap up the last details.”
I took a couple of bites of my chicken salad. “What are you working on?” I asked.
“I met with the SAC this morning,” she said, and frowned. “You know that saying about how shit rolls downhill? A pile of it landed on me.”
The SAC was the Special Agent in Charge, otherwise known as our boss.
She took a sip of her coffee. “A rich donor has been bugging the governor about releasing more of the Cubans held at Krome. He was born in Havana himself, though he came to the US as a child with his family.”
“I heard about that on the radio this morning,” I said. “It sounded like there were a lot of them. Are they all your responsibility?”
“No, I’ve just got one at the moment. He says he knows about a Spanish Old Master painting stolen from a church in the Cuban countryside.”
“His intel sounds good?”
“I have to talk to him first. But I doubt it. The refugees at Krome are desperate people. They’ve already risked their lives to get here, and for most of them there’s no going back. Either they’ve sold everything they own to pay for passage, or they’ll be arrested when they get off the plane.”
She sat back in her chair. “I feel terrible for them. But you know how our hands are tied unless the governor decides to grant a blanket amnesty. Which is not going to happen while he’s running for reelection.”
“Or for president,” I said.
“So I’ll drive down there and interview Mr. Diaz, and then most likely my name goes on a letter back to the governor telling him there’s no reason to grant the man amnesty.”
I remembered my conversation with Jesse Venable. “Do you mean Yulirus Diaz?”
“I didn’t realize they’d released the names of the rafters we’re investigating.”
“I got a call about him this morning.” I told Miriam what I’d heard from Venable.
“The fact that he’s gay won’t matter in asylum decisions, because Cuba just passed that law allowing same-sex marriage.”
“Jesse says he’s scared that he’ll be killed if he goes back,” I said. “Ordinarily, Jesse shouldn’t even want to talk to me, since I was part of the team that put him in prison. So for him to contact me means he’s very sure of his information.”
I leaned forward. “Can I come to Krome with you? Talk to this guy, help you look into the information he has?”
Miriam didn’t say anything.
“Please, Miriam? So far every case I’ve worked on has already been evaluated by someone else. I’d love to see the way a case gets started and how we make judgments about the quality of information.”
I was fascinated by art theft and Miriam was a great mentor, and I wanted very much to continue my association with her. “I can help you verify the information from Jesse. Maybe this guy is in danger because he knows something about the stolen painting.”
She blew out a breath. “All right, if Vito says he can spare you.”
I couldn’t stop smiling. “That’s awesome. I’ll ask him as soon as we’ve wrapped up these barber shop robberies. When are you going down there?”
“Tomorrow at two o’clock. Which means I need to leave by one.”
It felt like my head sunk down to my shoulders. “No way I can finish by then. Can you wait an extra day?”
She shook her head. “Not with the SAC and the governor on my back. Don’t worry, there will be other cases. There always are.”
She left, and I finished my lunch and walked back to my office. Crap. When I signed up with the Bureau I understood that my work would mainly be behind-the-scenes information gathering and analysis.
I looked at the clock. It was two in the afternoon, and I’d planned to work until at least seven. Lester’s current gig was as a sales rep for a line of high-end whiskies, and he was running a product demo that night at a bar in Fort Lauderdale. I had thought about stopping by on my way home, hanging out with him for a couple of hours, but I hadn’t said anything to him.
If I stayed at work, maybe I could bang out my analysis in time to go to Krome with Miriam the next day. I knew little about the place, other than that it was where illegal immigrants were housed and processed before being sent back where they came from. Yulirus Diaz was on the governor’s list because of the interest of a wealthy Cuban donor. That position might be a negotiating chip toward a green card for a young gay man in trouble. I was intrigued.
Damn, I wanted to join Miriam. But daydreaming about it wasn’t going to get my work done. I went back to my statistics, and as is often the case, I got caught up in the zone, where all my attention was focused on my project, and I hardly noticed time passing. I didn’t realize it was quitting time until my boss, special agent Vito Mastroianni, stopped by my office. “Don’t work too hard, rookie,” he said.
I looked up. He was a big guy, his shirt buttons always threatening to burst through their buttonholes. “Say, Vito. If I get this data crunched by one o’clock tomorrow, do you think I could go to Krome Detention Center with Miriam Washington?”
“That’s a hellhole of a place,” Vito said. “Why do you want to go there?”
“Miriam’s investigating the case of a guy on the governor’s list. I could learn about how an investigation kicks off.”
“I need whatever magic you can work on that data,” Vito said. “We have no leads at all. That has to take precedence.” He paused. “But if you find something by tomorrow you’re okay by me to go with Miriam.”
I thanked him and went back to work. Something gnawed at me as I went back and forth from sheet to sheet on my spreadsheet. In every case, the boy who accompanied the man got a haircut. Yeah, that was part of the MO. But it couldn’t be the same boy, could it? A kid’s hair didn’t grow fast enough to need a haircut every two weeks. After a couple of cuts the poor boy would be nearly bald.
Yet the boys were always described as about the same age. I went back to the statements field agents and local police had taken from the barbers. The boys were always between four and six, and they were all Black, as was the man with them. But I began to dig a few details out of the statements.
One boy could have “passed the paper bag test,” I read. I had a couple of Black friends at Penn State, and I had heard the term there. If you held a paper grocery bag up to the boy’s skin, it would have been lighter than the paper.
Another boy, however, was described by the barber as having very dark skin, like an African. No one else had commented on skin color, but it was clear that there had to be at least two different boys involved.
The barber in Lauderhill remembered the boy whose hair he had cut wore a bright blue T-shirt with a logo of clasped hands. A barber in North Miami recalled the boy wearing a bright purple basketball jersey that was way too big on him. Other than that, the kids had been dressed like kids.
What else could I tease out of that information? I went online and searched for clasped hand logos and found almost nine million results. I narrowed my search to Florida, to kids, to images, and got nothing. And yet an idea kept teasing around the edge of my brain that made me feel like I knew that logo. I closed my eyes and tried to visualize it, and it suddenly came to me.
The Kids’ Club of Scranton. My dad died when I was ten, and my mother sent my brother Danny and me to events there so we could hang out with other boys and their dads and role models. I opened my eyes and jumped onto the computer and started typing.
What popped up was a blue and white logo of clasped hands, which I learned had been adopted by the group after a national competition in 1978, years before I was born. The logo was still in use.
On a hunch, I Googled purple basketball jerseys, and found that a Kids’ Club in Miami used those for its pre-teen ball club.
What if the robber recruited boys from the Kids’ Club? He could be a father to one of the boys, or a volunteer there. Especially with so many single moms looking for role models for their sons, I could see it would be easy for him to take a boy on an outing—including a robbery – and bribe him to keep his mouth shut.
The local police had come up with a composite sketch of the robber, but because he operated in such a wide geographic area they hadn’t had many opportunities to show it around.
I went back over my data again, looking for additional clues, but found nothing. By then it was nearly ten o’clock and I was exhausted. I typed up my report, and a recommendation that the police canvass the Kids’ Clubs in the areas where the robberies had occurred. Then I placed my report in an online folder for Vito to review, and called it a night.
The next morning Vito called me in. “Where’d you get this idea about the Kids’ Club?” he asked. “My nephew in Jersey City used to go there.”
I explained about the haircuts and the T-shirts. “The robber needs to recruit boys for haircuts,” I said. “Since two kids are connected with the club, maybe he’s a volunteer there or goes there to look for kids he can use.”
“Interesting idea. I’ll pass it on to the local cops to do a canvass of the two clubs you cited.” He leaned back in his chair. “Guess this means you want to go to Krome with Miriam, and then work on whatever case she’s got.”
“I do, if you can spare me.”
“If the cops come up with any data on possible suspects I may need you to do more crunching. But it’s Friday afternoon and there’s nothing new on the horizon, so for now you can head to the ass end of nowhere with Miriam. But don’t blame me if you get caught up in something you don’t want to be a part of.”