THE INVESTIGATION HAD FINALLY FALLEN INTO PLACE. VILLARREAL WAS giving them the freedom to focus all of their energy and resources on José Treviño and Tremor Enterprises. Lawson was feeling upbeat as he entered the federal courthouse in downtown Laredo. It was Valentine’s Day 2012, and his love life was also on the upswing. Spending time with Elena and her family, he’d begun to embrace life on the border—the good food and the close-knit Mexican American families. He was actually starting to like Laredo, much to Perez’s amusement.
Leaving the courthouse, he ran into Ed O’Dwyer, an agent with Immigration and Customs Enforcement who was also an out-of-state transplant. They had gone out for beers several times, and Lawson had considered him a friend. But a few months earlier they’d had a disagreement when Lawson discovered that O’Dwyer had been investigating Victor Lopez and had had to tell him to back off.
O’Dwyer, who worked the international bridges, had questioned three Mexican women, each carrying $9,900 hidden in plastic shopping bags, who had tipped him off to Victor Lopez. Afterward, he started occasionally pulling Lopez in for questioning on the bridge and building a case for bulk cash smuggling. Lopez was José’s main money courier, and the FBI had already been watching him for several months. O’Dwyer sniffing around could jeopardize everything. So Lawson had gone to his office to explain that they were working something big with the IRS, which involved Lopez, and had asked him to let it go. He tried to convince O’Dwyer to join them in their investigation, but O’Dwyer’s supervisor was against it. Lawson assumed O’Dwyer had dropped his pursuit of Lopez after their meeting. So when he saw him leaving the courthouse he was sympathetic. He knew how it felt to be muscled out of an investigation. “What’s new?” he asked good-naturedly.
O’Dwyer’s face turned pale. “We need to talk,” he said hesitantly. “Why don’t we get something to eat?”
They walked over to a hole-in-the-wall Mexican restaurant not far from the courthouse. Lawson felt a cold sweat coming on, even though it was a balmy morning. He didn’t feel like eating. He had a bad feeling. O’Dwyer tried to make small talk as they sat down and ordered their food.
Finally, he got to the point. “We’re having Victor Lopez stopped today in Oklahoma City.”
“Oh shit,” Lawson said. “You’re serious?”
O’Dwyer nodded. “Yeah.”
Lawson felt like punching him in the face. If they pulled over Victor Lopez in Oklahoma, José would immediately find out. The worst of it was that O’Dwyer didn’t even know about José Treviño or who he was. Lawson had only told the ICE agent that he was working an OCDETF case, it had taken years, and Lopez was an important part of it.
Lawson didn’t know what to say. O’Dwyer explained that he’d never given up on Lopez after their talk. Instead, he’d established a system to notify him whenever Lopez boarded a flight. Lawson had to give him credit for his persistence. At this moment, O’Dwyer said, Lopez was on a plane to Oklahoma City and would be returning to Laredo that same day. When he touched down at the Oklahoma City airport, O’Dwyer was going to have him followed by the local police and find out what he was up to. And on the way back, during his layover in the Dallas airport, he’d have Lopez pulled aside for questioning. He was turning up the heat.
“I just didn’t want to give up the target,” O’Dwyer said apologetically. As the waiter put down the plate of chicken tacos in front of him, Lawson pushed back his chair. He’d completely lost his appetite. He put some money on the table. It was out of his hands. There was nothing he could do about O’Dwyer and the traffic stop.
“Could you update me after you do the stop?” he asked.
“Yeah, no problem,” O’Dwyer said. “I’ll call you.”
Valentine’s Day was getting off to a bad start. Now he’d have to share the news with Perez and Pennington that their investigation could be blown by evening. He hoped the rest of the team could see a brighter side to what was about to unfold, because he couldn’t.
Lawson had an anxious night. And when O’Dwyer got back to him the next morning, it was worse than he had imagined. Lopez had briefly met José in the airport parking lot, then gone back to the terminal for his flight. Afterward, an Oklahoma City traffic cop pulled over José’s truck eight miles from the airport. The cops had no idea who he was—their target was Lopez and they were just collecting evidence for O’Dwyer, trying to find out whom Lopez was delivering the cash to. The Oklahoma cops, as well as undercover HSI agents, held José in the back of a squad car while they searched his truck with a drug-sniffing dog. José was traveling with a Mexican horse trainer, and he told the agents they’d just come from the nearby Remington Park racetrack. He was helping the trainer get a license to race in the States, he said.
José was carrying $5,000, which was a lot of cash but not a crime. The cops photographed him, dressed in an ordinary plaid shirt and stocking cap and wearing his glasses, in the backseat of the squad car holding the money. José was obliging but said little. If anything, he was too calm, the police said, not questioning why there were eight officers, some of them from HSI, milling around his truck after he’d been pulled over for a failure to signal when changing lanes, as the Oklahoma City cop had explained. He even consented to a search of his truck. After about forty-five minutes, they let him and the horse trainer drive away.
As O’Dwyer gave him the rundown on the traffic stop, Lawson tried to imagine José’s next move. He may have been calm on the side of the road, but he knew José would know now that the police were watching him. The traffic stop would have repercussions. Now they could only wait and see how it all played out.