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EL PASO, TEXAS (Monday, Dec. 10, 2012, 10 p.m.) — Mac sat by the window in the hotel room, reading through the documents that had caused so much grief. A small lamp was angled just at the table in front of him, protecting Kristy from the light.
Mac put the pages down, rubbed his eyes. For the life of me, I cannot see what is worth all this trouble, he thought.
He no longer believed Parker had panicked, over-reacted. It didn’t ring true with this resume, these missions, these skills. Parker was a stone-cold, calculating son of a bitch. He did not panic. Not over this collection of public documents.
Mac sighed. He got another Mountain Dew from the sack of groceries he’d brought in earlier. Empty boxes of Church’s Fried Chicken were piled in the garbage. He glanced at the bed where Kristy was curled up sleeping. He’d found everything they needed at Target, toothbrushes, toothpaste and the like, underwear, a couple of packages of T-shirts and jogging shorts, jeans for the both of them. Nothing fancy, but Kristy’s eyes had lit up when she saw the clothes. She’d riffled through things, headed for the shower. He smiled briefly.
He sat back down, took another gulp of Mountain Dew. The clues had to be here. Could Parker think Troy knew more than he did? Always possible. For damn sure, Troy didn’t have much.
He kept asking himself what was he missing? What was so important to warrant killing someone to get it back, to stop the information from getting out? He picked up the pages, started reading through them again then put them down in disgust. He damn near had them memorized.
Approach it from a different angle, he told himself. What is there in here you didn’t already know? He went through the pages again.
And this time he found it. An early DEA report of the bust, not the court records, but the original DEA report before Parker had appeared on the scene. Paid to be in the Senator’s office to get that report, Mac thought. In it was a list of names, non-Hispanic names.
He scrambled through the pages, looking for the court report. His copy was in Shreveport, but Troy had a copy. Names of the convicted.
Bingo.
Mac sat back in his chair and sighed with satisfaction. Got you, he thought. The names were different.
Mac jumped when hands, Kristy’s hands, he identified quickly, massaged his shoulders. “Aren’t you tired,” she asked softly.
“Yeah,” he said, stretching out a bit under her hands. “But this thing had me stumped.”
“Figured it out?”
Mac shrugged. “I don’t know yet, but I’ve got a string to pull on now.” He looked around at her, smiled. “How are you doing?”
She sighed, pulled up a chair next to him. He massaged the back of her neck, gently. She was wearing the jogging shorts and an oversized T-shirt. She looked good in them, Mac thought. She sighed again, with pleasure this time, rolling her shoulders and neck slightly under his fingers.
“Have you ever been afraid?” she asked, not looking at him.
“Yes.”
“Not afraid because someone is shooting at you, or you’re in danger. But afraid, and you don’t know why or who, you’re just afraid.”
“Like in a nightmare.”
She nodded. “But it doesn’t stop when I wake up. It’s there all the time. Two men — government agents — broke into my house and took me! Just like that. They kidnapped me. Wouldn’t let me go.” She shook her head. “They treated me fine, but I was afraid. All the time. I still am.”
He put his arm around her and pulled her against his chest. She relaxed there. “It will get better with time,” he said quietly. “But don’t let anyone tell you that you shouldn’t be afraid, or laugh at it. Your fear is real, and it is likely to keep you safe.”
“Safe?”
He hesitated, looking for the words. “A man without fear takes risks he shouldn’t take,” he said slowly. “The one man you don’t want in your squad is someone whose wife just dumped him back home, or whatever, so he thinks he’s got nothing left to lose. He takes risks. Likely to get himself killed and everyone around him. A man who is scared, he stays low, doesn’t draw attention to himself.”
He paused, thinking it through, then continued, “You’ll remember to lock doors, and check through the peephole before opening it. You’ll be more aware of who is around you and what they are doing. You’ll be more cautious. And that’s good. Fear is your body’s way of saying pay attention, you’re in danger.”
She sighed. He stroked her hair softly.
“I feel safe with you,” she said. “The fear got worse when you left. I was so scared I was hyperventilating. What if you didn’t come back? What would happen then?”
Mac nodded. “You’ll get better at being alone again,” he promised. “Until then, I’ll be here.”
He thought about that, then said ruefully, “If I don’t fuck up. I did today.”
“When?” Kristy raised her head enough to look at him.
“I thought I had it all figured out. Pull those agents off the Saturn, send them to Lake Charles. Put one over on the dumb cops.” He shrugged. “I underestimated them. Underestimated their resources. They didn’t have to go to Lake Charles, they just called ahead to the P.D. there and vice cops show up at the airport. Could have been a disaster.”
“Because you weren’t afraid enough?” she asked.
He thought about it. “Hadn’t thought about it like that,” he admitted. “But I’ll be more wary in the future.”
She tapped the pile of documents. “Tell me what you’re looking for,” she said, determinedly more positive.
“I don’t know. You know the one thing worse than looking for a needle in a haystack?”
She shook her head, smiling.
“Trying to prove there is a needle in the haystack.”
She laughed. “Have you found if there is a needle?”
He nodded. “I think I have. Don’t know what it means, yet. But I will.” He stretched. “What does 2007 mean to you?”
“2007?” She shrugged, not moving from her place against his shoulder. “Five years ago. I was 21.”
“Young aren’t you? My last year in the Marines.”
“Did you go to college right after?”
Mac nodded.
“Five years ago,” she mused. “President Obama was getting elected, first black president in the White House — I was so excited to be able to vote for him. I don’t know. It wasn’t that long ago, but it’s hard to remember precisely what happened that year and not the year before or the next year. Why?”
Mac relaxed in his chair. “Obama's election. A Democratic administration,” he repeated. “Kristy, you’re a genius.”
She smiled at him sleepily, stifling a yawn. “Does that mean we can turn off the light and go to bed now?”
Mac started, looked at her quickly. She didn’t mean it as an invitation, he told himself. “Sure sleepy head,” he said lightly. “Go back to bed.”
The hotel had a small gym to Mac’s relief. In the morning, he and Kristy both worked out for an hour. Kristy knew what she was doing, he noticed. They had breakfast.
Over breakfast, Mac told Kristy Parker’s nomination had been announced.
She was silent. “So it’s over?”
Mac shook his head. “We got maybe a week. Hearings will probably go pretty fast; Congress will want to go home for Christmas. And some Cabinet positions you just don’t want to leave vacant.”
“A week,” Kristy repeated.
At 9 a.m. Mac called Shorty from a pay phone down the street.
“It is 7 a.m.,” Shorty complained.
“Stuff it. If I called any later you’d be on your way to school.”
“So true. Troy called. He’s in Atlanta. He says the Saturn is sweet, no sign of agents, and he expects to be in D.C. some time tomorrow.”
“OK, and the file?”
Shorty yawned. “The file is a proprietary relational database file.”
“Say what?”
“Probably a computerized address book. Someone downloaded Parker’s Rolodex and gave it Troy.”
Mac was puzzled for a moment, and then grinned. “Hot damn,” he said softly.
“I don’t get it.”
“What’s the one thing we keep running into with Parker?” Mac asked.
“He’s damn well connected.” Shorty paused, made the leap and laughed. “You think this will reveal all his connections.”
“Past, present and future,” Mac said. “Can you open it?”
“Yes and no. I can open it using a database program, but because it’s some kind of simplified commercial software, without the program itself the fields may not mean much. So, you might have a name with two addresses, but you might not know which one is the current address and which one is an old one. Things like that.” Shorty pondered for a moment. “Or I could run past the computer store, see if any of the most well-known appointment calendar programs will open it. But what do you want me to do then? It’s apparently got more than a thousand records.”
“Records meaning entries?”
“Yeah,” Shorty said. “I can print it out, but then what?”
“Can you translate it to an Excel spreadsheet?”
“Be one large file, Mac, but if I can find the original software, yeah, I can probably do that.”
Mac thought it through. “Okay, then. Print it out, send it to Troy Maxim at Senator Abigail Murray’s office. You can find the address — she's the Senator from Illinois. Email me the Excel file as an attachment. Then make copies of it all and take it to Janet for safekeeping.”
“Got it. Check your email this evening.”
Mac hung up the phone. And just who do you know that I know? he thought. Parker’s Rolodex. Holy shit.
But he didn’t have to wait for that list, he had his own list of names to work on. The disappearing coke makers, and the poor saps who took the fall for it. This time at the public library, Mac and Kristy both got a computer terminal.
“One hour,” the librarian cautioned. “We usually having a waiting list all day.”
The two of them split the names. It became routine. Check the telephone directory, do a local search, do a Web search. The last was almost worthless. No matter how unique the name there always seemed to be more than one person with the same name.
Nothing definitive — he could sort through the Web search, but it didn’t seem worth it. The librarian came by. Mac stopped her.
“Is the El Paso newspaper online? Searchable?” he asked hopefully.
“Searchable for the last five years,” she said. “A fee if you pull an article. Before that it’s all on microfiche.”
Mac groaned, and the librarian smiled. “No stranger to research, I take it,” she said.
The search through the last five years was quick. Nothing. Mac sighed. “How about we get some lunch,” he suggested to Kristy.
He planned to tackle the microfiche after lunch — look through 2005 to 2007. But the magnitude of it alarmed him. The El Paso paper wasn’t a huge paper, but reading nearly three years of a daily newspaper wasn’t high on his list of fun ways to spend the afternoon. Over the best Mexican food he’d had in a long time, Mac decided on a slightly different strategy.
“Let’s hit the courthouse first,” he suggested, licking the grease off his fingers. “Birth records, police records, marriage licenses, car registrations. They had to exist some time.” He shrugged. “Of course, I’m not sure they were even from Texas, could have been from New Mexico. That part of the country is wild. Could have been from anywhere.”
“Death certificates, too,” Kristy said, swallowing a big bite.
“Yeah.” He grinned. “Let’s go talk to Darlene.”
Darlene was exactly as Mac had pictured her, 50, bleached blonde, and nobody’s fool. “Your newspaper can fly you to El Paso to check out an itty-bitty drug bust?” she said, hands on her hips, when Mac introduced himself. “You got some ID?”
Mac gave her a business card. “I told my boss there’s this woman in Texas, I gotta go see,” he teased.
Darlene rolled her eyes. “I just bet you did,” she drawled, but she was smiling. “OK, let’s see this list of names.”
Mac handed it to her. “How networked are you to other county/state databases?” he asked.
She shook her head. “Honey, this is Texas, and El Paso to boot. Share information? We ain’t going to be doing none of that, now, you hear? Communists would just love to be able to get all that information about our God-fearing patriotic citizens.”
“You have much problem with Communist infiltration here?” Mac asked, laughing.
Darlene looked over the top of her glasses. “We get Yankees and Mexicans. If any of them are Communist, they haven’t been announcing it.”
Kristy smirked. “Damn Yankees, you mean,” she murmured.
Darlene laughed. “Got that right. I was old enough to vote before I found out that wasn’t one word.” She looked at Kristy curiously. “You sound Southern, yourself.”
“Louisiana,” she said. “I’m just helping out.”
Darlene’s fingers tapped over the keyboard as she talked. Every now and then she’d hit print and move on. Mac watched her, fascinated by the combination of patter and efficiency.
“OK, most of your people show hits, 'course some of them I gave you in that drug bust of yours. Not much since 2007 on any of them,” she said, her words more crisp now that she was being official. “Two names show up as arresting officers, rather than as criminals. That make any sense? I did a global search, not just for the case cite.”
Darlene pulled the stack from the printer. “Here’s what we got. Want me to call down to the auditor’s office and clear the way for you to do records search down there?”
“Thanks Darlene, I’d appreciate it,” Mac said gratefully.
Darlene nodded. She made the call and then turned back to them. “I don’t usually stick my neck out,” she said quietly. “I like my job. Been here a long while, and I plan to retire from here. But I can tell you that you’ve got a couple of names on there that are going to ring people’s bells a bit. You watch your back, you hear?”
She turned around, picked up a pile of files and left for the back room. Mac called his thanks after her, but she didn’t even look back.
The auditor’s office had a public terminal and they were glad to let them look up their own records. “If Darlene says you’re all right,” a young clerk said cheerfully, “Then you’re all right in this building.”
Mac nodded his thanks, sat at the machine and punched in the names. Kristy fetched printouts from the printer. Birth, marriage, death. Car registrations were in a separate database but could be accessed from the same machine. Property ownership was down the hall, but Mac figured it would take too long to sort through that for people who seemed to have disappeared by 2007.
“I didn’t know you could get this much information on people,” Kristy whispered, watching with fascination as the computer coughed stuff up.
“You ought to watch Shorty work,” Mac said. “This is simple stuff. People do it all the time as a hobby — genealogy, you know? Same thing. Shorty gets incredible stuff if you ask him to. But he pays for some services.”
On a hunch, Mac asked the clerk if they by any chance archived old courthouse telephone directories. She laughed. “Yeah, we’ve got ‘em on a shelf in back, God knows why. What years you looking for?”
“2004, 2005, 06, 07,” Mac answered.
Bingo. One name appeared in them all: Joey Hightower. He copied the information down. Sheriff deputy. He asked for the 08 book. No Hightower.
“Now what?” Kristy asked as they left the courthouse.
“How do you feel about microfiche?” he asked smiling at her.
“That the inventor of it ought to be shot,” she sighed. “Back to the library?”
“Unless you want to go back to the hotel room, take a nap while I go back.”
She shook her head. “Library is fine.”
“Good,” he said. “Because if you read the microfiche, I can work through this pile of stuff.”
Kristy smiled. “OK,” she said. “You sure know how to show a girl a good time.”
Kristy was good at research, too, Mac discovered. While he read through all the records he had, developing chronologies for the people on his list, she read microfiche, narrowing down the material to the news and society sections. Mac might not have included the society section, but it made sense when she explained. That was where the small stuff of about normal people was published. Good news, not just the tragic.
The sheriff’s deputy was the key, Mac discovered as he worked his way through the chronology. Joey Hightower was a local man, born and raised in El Paso. He’d been 22 in 2007, about the same age Mac was at the time. Local boy made good, in a small fashion, he supposed.
He died in 2007. Kristy handed him the story about Hightower’s death, just as Mac was finishing his chronologies. Burglars had been interrupted by Hightower’s return home one night. They’d killed him, injuring his wife and baby boy. There appeared to be no leads. He was listed as being with the DEA at the time of his death.
“He died protecting her and his son,” Kristy said, her face white. She’d read all the coverage, which had gone on for weeks.
“I’d like to find her,” Mac said, tapping his fingers on the table. He looked in the phone directory, no Linda Hightower. “I suppose she’s remarried.”
Kristy nodded. “Let me see if I can find out.”
“You’re volunteering to read more of that stuff?” Mac teased. Microfiche made his head hurt and his eyes ache.
“I want to know what happened to her and her son,” she said. “Do you think....”
Mac shook his head, interrupting her. “Don’t talk about it,” he warned. “Not here.”
She nodded her understanding and returned to the microfiche reader.
Mac looked at his chronologies. Some names, he had discarded. Those who were turned over to Immigration didn’t leave much of a trail. Two names didn’t register anywhere locally. Be hard to find them unless he came across a string somewhere later. He wished he could access the DEA employee database for 2005. Be interesting to see what names would show up there. Or the CIA?
That left five names. Joey Hightower, Robert Hilliard, James Jackson, Rob Springer and Allen Clayton.
Hilliard, born in a town just outside El Paso in 1952, no record after that.
Jackson didn’t show up in the birth records, but he had gotten married in 1996 in El Paso. He’d been 25 at the time. Nothing else.
And Allen Clayton, who had been the arresting officer on a drug bust in 2005 and showed up on the DEA list for the warehouse bust, had died in 2006. He’d been 60.
Kristy found his obit too. He’d died south of the border on a vacation. Bandits. Right.
Then there was Rob Springer. For some reason, Darlene had put a red star by this name. Mac hadn’t even seen her do it. Springer showed up in traffic violations: speeding, parking in no parking zones, running red lights. The tickets tapered off, but there was one in 2010 for doing 35 in a school zone. Mac frowned. Springer was still around two years ago, but didn’t show up in the phone book.
Unlisted number? Mac mulled that over, went out to the pay phone, called the auditor’s office. Got the young helpful clerk, identified himself. “Could you look up a name for me in the current directory? I forgot.” He gave her Springer’s name.
She laughed. “I don’t have to look him up, he works up in the district attorney’s office. He’s one of their investigators. Want his number?”
“Sure,” Mac said, jotting it down. He hung up. So, one of the six who had really been at the warehouse was still alive. Working at the courthouse no less. Mac smiled.