ONCE PENNINGTON AND THE WACO TREASURY TASKFORCE JOINED UP WITH the investigation, everything fell into place. They had a federal prosecutor signed on, and Lawson, Hodge, and Perez had even gotten a visit from Armando Fernandez, the special agent in charge from the San Antonio headquarters, which oversaw their smaller regional office. This meant the Treviño case was finally becoming something bigger in the eyes of their bosses in San Antonio and Washington, and they were now starting to pay close attention. It was a lot of pressure for the two younger agents, who were determined not to disappoint them.
In April 2011, Doug Gardner called a meeting at his office in Austin. The federal prosecutor wanted to go over their next steps and probe for any weaknesses in the investigation.
Lawson and Perez had been scrambling to get more proactive evidence, setting up surveillances and collecting information from sources. Lawson told Gardner and the rest of the agents seated around the conference table the good news about the consensual wiretap on Graham’s phone. The recordings were already providing valuable information about Nayen’s and Garcia’s activities. They still didn’t hear as much as they’d like from José, however, who mostly left the day-to-day operations with Graham up to his two younger associates. José had been especially tough to monitor. He rarely spent more than one night in the same hotel and switched out his cell phone every couple of weeks. Perez explained their difficulties in setting up the Title 3. Without the wiretap it would be difficult to gather the evidence they needed to link the drug proceeds to the purchase of the horses.
Pennington, sitting next to Brian Schutt at the conference table, listened to the two younger agents run through what they had for Gardner, and understood the difficulties before them. They would need to prove to a jury that the businessmen involved knew beyond a reasonable doubt that they were laundering Miguel’s drug money. Most federal prosecutors practically wanted to see the kilos of coke piled up on the courtroom table to feel they could overcome that hurdle.
He suspected José was smart enough not to mix his racing business with his brothers’ drug trafficking—at least not directly. On the surface José’s business appeared legitimate. He’d even hired an accountant and made sure to pay his taxes on time. They weren’t going to find kilos of cocaine stuffed inside the horse trailers at Tremor Enterprises.
Pennington had a solution. “Why don’t we do a historical money laundering case?” This wasn’t official terminology, just a term Pennington had come up with on his own to describe his more unusual approach.
Lawson had no idea what the older agent was talking about. But Gardner looked intrigued. “That might be a possibility,” he said, mulling it over.
“What’s a possibility?” Lawson asked. He was waiting for someone to fill him in.
If the idea had come from anyone other than Pennington, Gardner probably would have passed. But the prosecutor was well aware of Pennington’s reputation as a seasoned investigator with knowledge of drug busts and dealers that went back nearly three decades.
Over the years, Pennington, Schutt, and Junker had arrested a lot of money couriers and smugglers who had worked for the Treviños. “We have all of these past cases,” Pennington explained. “What’s done is done. It’s a fact.” Why not take the evidence from some of those other cases and use it to bolster their own evidence showing the link between the cocaine proceeds and the horses? The documents would help illustrate how the brothers had been invested in smuggling drugs, money, and guns up and down the cocaine corridor for years. It would be tedious and time-consuming to dig up all the former cases and the salient evidence, Pennington said, but that was their specialty.
“Let’s do it,” Gardner said. The way he saw it, they had the best of both worlds. Perez and Lawson would work the proactive evidence—the surveillance, the informants, and the consensual wiretap—while Pennington and his task force would weave in the history of the Treviño brothers’ drug running and money laundering with the current facts of the case.
It wouldn’t be easy. And the team knew they needed to move quickly. One informant, Ramiro Villarreal, was already dead. Miguel and Omar wouldn’t hesitate to kill another, even in Texas. If Tyler Graham were found out, he’d be next on their list. Most cartel leaders avoided doing hits in the United States because the fallout was too heavy. But Miguel didn’t have a problem sending his sicarios across the river. He’d done it before, and there was no reason why he wouldn’t do it again.
AFTER THE MEETING in Austin, Lawson was feeling energized. The investigation was picking up momentum now, and he was further encouraged when Perez told him there had been a development in the Garcia kidnapping case.
“Good news,” she said, ducking into his cubicle. “Our source called from Zapata. She says our target is coming across tomorrow.”
Lawson put down his pen. “It’s about time,” he said. He wanted nothing more than to see the Garcia brothers’ killer be put away. In the past months, he’d watched his neighbor’s world unravel. Her husband had been the breadwinner, and now she was struggling to hold on to their home. About a week after he’d panicked, thinking she was following him, she’d realized they lived two doors down from one another. One day she knocked on his door in tears, asking if she could borrow a gallon of water. The city had just shut off their service. After he’d filled up her pitcher, he’d offered to show her fifteen-year-old son some moves on the basketball court to take his mind off his missing dad, but he’d never gotten around to following through with it. The truth was, every time he saw the family it tore him up.
He’d noticed that some of the other agents working kidnapping cases would make a few calls to their sources in Mexico, and then tell the families there was nothing more they could do for them. They’d mark the cases down as “pending inactive unless other leads develop” and file them away, never to be reopened. Lawson didn’t know if it was because they’d been beaten down too many times already by defeat, or if they just didn’t care anymore. Maybe he was naïve, but he couldn’t let the Garcia case go that easily. He wanted justice for the family. So did Perez, which was another reason why he was glad they’d become partners. They often had long philosophical talks about it while at lunch or on surveillance. Whenever they were called in on the weekends because of a kidnapping, there were always agents who made excuses not to show. It made him remember his dad’s warning.
Lawson got the warrant and the tech team set up the trace on the Garcia brothers’ cell phone in a matter of hours. The next afternoon he started to get a series of emails every fifteen minutes with a latitude and longitude coordinate. Their target was on the move.
They got into Lawson’s Chevy and Perez punched the coordinates into their GPS tracker. They assumed the coordinates would lead them to neighboring Zapata County, where their source lived. But they were pointed south instead. Lawson kept driving until they were two blocks from the Rio Grande. It was getting dark and Perez wondered whether they should call for more backup. She got the next email with another set of coordinates—the gunman was less than three hundred yards away now, tantalizingly close. They pulled into an H-E-B grocery store parking lot on the bluff overlooking the river.
Lawson scanned the parked cars for their target—they’d been given a rough description of what he looked like—as Perez punched in the next set of coordinates.
“He’s not here,” Perez said.
Lawson felt a sinking in his gut. “What do you mean?”
“He’s there.” Perez pointed toward the distant bluff in Mexico. Beyond the chain-link fence of the parking lot they could see the lights flickering on in the humble stucco and concrete homes as nighttime fell. Lawson got out of the car and walked to the fence, staring at the tall fronds of the Carrizo cane that lined the slow-moving river down below. The waning twilight, the distant sound of Spanish pop music from one of the houses on the bluff, and the dark swallows skimming over the river made him feel like he was in a dream suddenly gone sour. Perez came up from behind and stood next to him. “Chingao,” she said, hitting the fence. They’d given the information about the gunman to the police in Nuevo Laredo, but they’d done nothing. As long as the killer stayed south of the river, he’d go free. What would they tell the Garcias? He imagined the killer in one of those houses on the bluff watching them, his mouth curling into a smile. It was like standing next to a black hole. And there was nothing they could do about it.
THE NEXT MORNING Lawson woke up with a hangover. He reminded himself he’d wanted to work the violent crimes squad because there was a personal satisfaction in solving a homicide or a kidnapping. You caught your suspect, closed the case, and moved on to the next one. And another bad guy was off the streets. But now with the Garcia kidnapping, and his other cases along the border, he was beginning to realize it wasn’t that simple. In the righteous evangelical faith his mother had brought him up in, bad people were always punished and good people rewarded. But in real life it didn’t always turn out that way. His dad, he supposed, in one way or another, had been trying to teach him this all his life.
Lawson poured himself a cup of black coffee in the break room. His cell phone wouldn’t power up, so he left it with a tech person at the office and went down to the federal courthouse to see about another case. When he got back two hours later the phone was sitting on his desk. He sat down and turned it on; there were thirteen messages from his older half brother Chad. A feeling of dread coursed through him as he listened to the first one. His brother sounded despondent. “It’s Dad. They’re doing CPR on him right now.”
Then the next message: “He’s on a Life Flight to Jackson. We’ll be at the ER.”
Time seemed to slow as Lawson listened to message after message from his brother, each more desperate than the last. “Where the hell are you?” his brother pleaded in his final call.
He phoned his brother but it went immediately to voice mail. He left a message that he was on his way, and then threw the cell phone down on his desk. A sudden torrent of emotion overtook him. He put his head down on his desk and wept. He didn’t know how much time had passed before he felt Perez’s hands on his shoulders.
“Are you okay?” she asked, sounding worried.
“I’ve got to go,” he said. “It’s my dad.”
“I’ll drive you to the airport,” she said. After Lawson told Villarreal what had happened, he quickly gathered his things and headed for the door. Perdomo and the other agents peered around their desks, looking concerned, as they watched him leave with Perez. At his house, Lawson quickly threw a few things into a duffel bag, then Perez drove him to the airport. On the way, he beat himself up over missing his brother’s calls earlier in the day. “What if my dad’s gone by the time I get there?” he asked Perez.
When Lawson got to the hospital in Jackson it was nearly midnight. He was relieved to find that his father was still alive. His brother filled him in on everything that had happened. His dad had been with his business partner—they’d recently opened a bail bond business—when he’d suddenly doubled over from a massive heart attack. Now he was in a coma in the ICU. He was only fifty-eight, but he’d lived a hard life. The prognosis for his recovery was not good. Now that Lawson was there at his father’s side, he wasn’t going to let him out of his sight. He remembered their emotional parting in San Antonio only a few months ago, and wondered now if his dad had known then that it would be their last.
PEREZ WOULD HAVE TO work the case without Lawson. She had no idea when he might be back, but she was determined to give him as much time as he needed. “We’ve got this,” she’d assured him over the phone when he’d called her after his first night at the hospital. “The important thing is you spend time with your dad.”
She knew what he was going through. She’d lost her father her first year in the FBI, when she was struggling as a rookie in Miami. Unlike Lawson, her dad had never wanted her to join the bureau. He had hoped she’d become a nurse or a teacher—something less dangerous and closer to home. She’d never felt so alone as when she’d gotten the call in Miami that her father had died. She’d been far from home and never had the chance to say goodbye. Now she was going to do everything she could to reassure Lawson that the investigation wouldn’t lose momentum while he was in Tennessee so he could be with his father.
Fortunately, her new source, Parlay, was turning out to be as invaluable as she had hoped. Now she could corroborate information from Graham about José’s plans and better track the day-to-day activities of Nayen, Garcia, and the others. But he was growing increasingly unpredictable. They talked nearly every day, and it would sometimes take hours on the phone to calm his fears. His moods cycled between total despair that he would be killed and braggadocio about his work with the U.S. government. She was worried about his deteriorating state of mind.