WORKING HIS FIRST KIDNAPPING CASE, LAWSON WAS BEGINNING TO UNDERSTAND just how small Los Dos Laredos could be. One evening, he stopped at a gas station to fill up his truck, and from across the station he recognized one of the Garcia brothers’ wives. He and Perez had met with her a few days ago, but she didn’t acknowledge him now. He felt a rush of embarrassment. The woman was desperate to find her husband and here he was sweaty and in his shorts, having just come from a nearby park. He’d been working on the case all day, but she’d caught him when he’d gone to play softball after work with some of the local cops. Of course, it was nearly dark outside. Maybe she hadn’t seen him? He got back into his truck and headed for home.
He had finally bought a home in the same gated community as Hodge and his family. His house was close to the Rio Grande, where there was nothing between him and Nuevo Laredo but mesquite brush and white-tailed deer, which he found ironic. The gate around their subdivision was more for show than anything else. He’d always lived out of duffel bags and in cheap apartments, and his new middle-class home made him feel like he’d made the right choice becoming a federal agent, even though it still held nothing more than a bed and a few plastic chairs in the kitchen.
As he turned onto Mines Road and headed north toward home past the freight shipping companies and fast-food restaurants, he glanced in his rearview mirror and noticed that the woman was right behind him now. Maybe it was just a coincidence, he thought. And maybe some of Hodge’s paranoia was starting to rub off on him. He expected her to turn at any moment. But as he made a right and rolled up to the front gate of his subdivision she was still there. He kept driving. As he turned into the cul-de-sac where he lived, she was still behind him. Maybe he should pull over, ask her what she wanted? He pulled into his driveway. He expected her to stop, but to his surprise she kept driving, then parked in a driveway two doors down and got out, oblivious to his presence. He smiled at his own paranoia. They were neighbors. He wondered how many more of his neighbors had been touched by the evil on the other side of that placid green river.
LAWSON WAS LOSING ALL HOPE that Graham would call, when he finally phoned on the third week. Tempting Dash had just arrived at the Southwest Stallion Station after months of Graham’s lobbying. He and his grandfather had already spent hours with José going over everything from the finer points of horse shoeing to the best mix of feed before a race. José asked a lot of questions, and wasn’t afraid to admit he knew little about racing, even less about breeding. He appeared eager to learn, said Graham. And he seemed intent on entering the racing industry in a big way.
Lawson took notes at his desk as Graham talked. He still wasn’t sure he could fully trust Graham. The first few weeks he knew would be a test, to see whether they could work together, and whether Graham was feeding him useful information.
There was something else that Lawson needed to know, Graham said. Tomorrow a horse trailer would leave Graham’s farm for Mexico. José was sending the two weanlings from the January auction.
Lawson imagined that Miguel wanted to see up close what he’d paid for in Oklahoma. Just like Tempting Dash, the horses would be trained and tested on the racetracks in Mexico. If they won, or seemed like they had promise, then they’d be sent north to compete in the big-money races.
If the horse trailer was headed to Nuevo Laredo it would have to pass through Laredo first. Lawson could set up surveillance and start documenting the other players in José Treviño’s horse-buying operation, as well as corroborate whether the information Graham was giving him was solid. Since Hodge was lead agent on the case, Lawson would need to run it past him first. He turned around in his office chair. Hodge was poring over some spreadsheet on his computer and messing with his shoe as usual.
“I finally heard from Graham,” Lawson said.
“Hey, that’s excellent,” Hodge said, turning around in his chair to face Lawson. “So what’d he say?
“José’s sending two horses this way in a trailer tomorrow.”
“We need to set up surveillance,” Hodge said.
“That’s what I was thinking too,” Lawson said, feeling slightly annoyed that he hadn’t gotten the opportunity to show he was already on it.
“When’s the trailer coming through?”
“Tomorrow afternoon,” Lawson said. “Maybe we could put a tracker on the trailer?”
“Nah,” Hodge said, “there wouldn’t be enough time to get all the paperwork approved.”
“We can sit up on him and see where he goes, who he talks to,” Lawson said.
Hodge nodded. “I’ll tell the guys.”
The next day, Lawson and Hodge parked at a small rest area on Interstate 35 north of town. It was a barren spot with nothing but a single live oak for shade and a barrel trash can. But it was also on a rise above Interstate 35 and they’d be nearly invisible to anyone who was heading south. Lawson trained his binoculars on the interstate’s southbound lanes.
Hodge had recruited a couple of the other agents and the Laredo task force officers to help out on the surveillance. Lawson noticed that Perez wasn’t there. He wondered whether she’d been busy with another case, or whether Hodge had never thought to ask. He would ask her about it later. The task force officers fanned out around the international bridge in their unmarked cars and trucks to get a spot on the trailer before it crossed into Mexico. Hodge and Lawson would follow the trailer south once it entered the city limits.
After they had waited nearly two hours, the trailer came around a bend on the interstate and Hodge radioed to the task force officers that they were on the move. Lawson wrote the license plate number down so they could run it through their databases and figure out whom the trailer belonged to. They hoped that whoever the driver was, he’d stop along the way so they’d have more leads to follow up on. The more new faces the better. But the horse trailer never stopped as it moved slowly through traffic south toward Mexico. As they got close to the international bridge, Hodge and Lawson pulled over and radioed the task force officers that the target was all theirs now as the trailer merged into the lanes heading south across the bridge into Nuevo Laredo.
“You think he’s heading straight toward Miguel?” Lawson asked Hodge, who was in the passenger seat.
“He’s probably right there, waiting for it,” Hodge said, his leg working up and down nervously as he stared again through the binoculars at the trailer, which was now nothing more than a glint of silver in the harsh sunlight as it disappeared into the heavy traffic on the bridge.
“It’s gone,” one of the task force officers’ voices crackled over the radio a few minutes later.
Hodge put down the binoculars and picked up the radio. He seemed relieved it was over. “All right, let’s call it a day. Thanks, boys.”
As they drove back to the Laredo RA office, Lawson felt the crush of disappointment after the surge of adrenaline from tailing the trailer. One of the things that had convinced him to join the FBI was that he could cross any state line in pursuit of a criminal. He wasn’t boxed in by jurisdiction like he’d been as a deputy in Tennessee. But he’d never taken into account being sent to the border, where he’d have an entire country next door that was off-limits.
BACK AT THE OFFICE, Hodge went back to brooding over his drug gang case, while Lawson ran the license plate number from the trailer. If their driver was a “friendly”—someone tied in with the Zetas—they could try to flip him so he’d give them information. He ran a criminal check on the name that popped up from the plate search. The results were mixed. Their driver lived in Laredo, which was good. The bad news was that he was related to the Treviños, which meant it was too risky to approach him. Lawson walked over to Perez’s cubicle on the other side of the squad room, which the Laredo RA called its “bullpen”—no one seemed to know why; it was just tradition. Lawson wanted to run his findings past Perez first, before he took them to Hodge.
As he approached her cubicle in the corner of the office, he could see that she was busy typing something on her computer. There were photos of her son in his soccer uniform and her daughter wearing a purple bow tacked up above her desk and neat stacks of paper. It was the picture of organization compared to his workspace, littered with the bags of sunflower seeds that he was using to try to replace the craving for the can of tobacco he usually kept in his back pocket.
“Missed you on the surveillance the other day,” Lawson said, standing near her desk.
“I guess I didn’t get the email,” she said, looking up from her computer with a half-smile to show it hadn’t really fazed her. “I’m slammed with another AFO case anyway, and there’s the Garcia kidnapping.”
Their office got a lot of AFO cases, which meant “assault on a federal officer.” These were mostly charges filed by Border Patrol agents against immigrants who had resisted arrest and fought back. Or, sometimes, rocks were thrown at the agents from the Mexican side of the river so they’d be distracted while the smugglers brought across their drug loads. Most of these cases were more of a paperwork exercise than anything else, since the rock throwers were in Mexico and usually long gone by the time the case would arrive on their desks.
With five years already on an investigative squad, Perez should have been working on something more ambitious. During their frequent lunches together, Lawson had told her about his meetings with Graham, and could tell she was intrigued by the case. Her squad in Miami had specialized in four- to five-month surveillances and big-scale coke busts. But they’d rarely followed the money.
“Can I run something by you?” he said.
“Sure,” she said, turning toward him in her chair, giving him her full attention now.
Lawson went through what he’d found: the suspect’s background and the fact that he was a relative of the Treviños and lived not far from Lawson’s neighborhood. It was Hodge’s nightmare come true.
“I’m not surprised,” she said. “Laredo’s a small town and they’re a big family.”
“It’d be too risky to approach him,” Lawson said.
“Yeah.” Perez nodded in agreement. “In Miami we’d stake out the place for a couple of days, see if anybody else comes around.”
Lawson had been thinking the same thing. He wasn’t ready to cut the driver loose just yet. And it felt good to hear Perez come to a similar conclusion.
“Have you talked to the source in Zapata yet?” Lawson asked, changing gears now to the Garcia case. He’d done a phone analysis on the Garcia brothers’ cell phones and found that several calls had been made in Mexico from one of the phones to a number in Zapata County, a rural border county to the south of them. Since every cell phone left a digital trail through its constant connection to the cell towers, they could track the Garcias’ kidnapper if he ever crossed the river.
Lawson had already driven out to Zapata and located the woman who was receiving the calls. It turned out she was a relative of their suspect. But she’d readily agreed to cooperate—she knew he was no good, she said—and was willing to help as long as she could do it in Spanish. So Perez had been speaking with her and gathering information.
“She says he can’t cross legally because he’s got a warrant on him,” Perez said. “But he still comes across anyway. Next time she’ll let us know.”
LAWSON SAT UP most of the night watching the trailer driver’s apartment, which was in a run-down complex a few blocks from the interstate. He pushed the driver’s side seat back and dipped into his can of tobacco. He’d given up on the sunflower seeds already. His thoughts strayed to his dad, as they often did during a long surveillance. His dad loved being a cop but the job had taken its toll. He was a chain-smoker and a drinker who’d been married five times. Lawson knew his dad was proud of him, even if he’d never said as much. He knew because his older half brother had told him that their dad often bragged about his son in the FBI to his friends back home. But his dad still seemed wary of Lawson’s choice to follow him into law enforcement. He’d told him a story over the phone one night, not long after Lawson had arrived in Laredo, and he still wasn’t sure what to make of it.
His dad said that he’d been on the force for only a few years like Lawson, and was working the night shift at the sheriff’s department, when he was called to the scene of an accident. It was late at night, and snowing, and the car had flipped over on the highway. When he looked inside, he saw a young boy and his parents. The parents were dead, but the boy was still alive. He pulled him from the car. He remembered as the paramedics loaded the boy into an ambulance that all he could think about was clocking out and going home. He felt nothing, really. It was late and he was exhausted.
The family’s clothes were spread out all across the highway, and he and another deputy kicked their belongings into a ditch so other cars could get through. Then he got in his patrol car and headed to the office. But when he pulled into the parking lot it suddenly hit him hard—what a coldhearted bastard he’d become. That six-year-old boy had lost everything, and it hadn’t even registered. He’d just kicked everything he had left into a ditch. So he turned around and went back. It was nearly dawn and still snowing, but he collected all of the clothes, everything from the ditch, and drove to the hospital.
“The job will harden you,” his dad warned. “Don’t let it. Don’t ever lose your heart.”
In his short career, Lawson had already seen how some of the older deputies back in Tennessee had stopped caring about the victims in their cases and were just counting down the days to retirement. He thought about the Garcia family and made a promise to himself that if he ever started phoning it in on the job, he’d find a new line of work.
AFTER A COUPLE OF DAYS of watching the apartment with no new leads, Hodge called off their surveillance. It wasn’t the bold start Lawson had hoped for. Not wanting to lose any more time, he called Graham to see if he had anything else that could be useful. He was still wary of Graham’s motivations, and whether he was sharing everything he knew or giving him half-truths. He needed to know whether he could trust him. He asked whether he’d seen anyone else associating with José, and whether he knew of other horses besides the ones from the January auction that might have been bought by Miguel.
He was encouraged by Graham’s response. José had just sent ten more horses to his farm, he said. And along with the horses had come a new player: Carlos Nayen, or “Carlitos,” as José called him. Nayen, who didn’t look much older than Graham, explained that he would be in charge of making sure boarding and breeding expenses were paid. Through a smattering of English and Spanish that passed between them, Graham understood that Nayen would be coming to the farm regularly.
Not long after their meeting, Graham said, Nayen introduced him to Fernando Garcia, also in his twenties. In his faded Levi’s and work boots, Garcia looked more like a regular horseman than Nayen, who always wore a flashy gold Rolex and designer shirts to the stables. Garcia also spoke English, which made doing business with him easier, since Nayen struggled with the language. It seemed like Nayen was replacing Ramiro Villarreal, the former owner of Tempting Dash. Graham had also noticed that Villarreal wasn’t spending large sums of money at the auctions like he used to. Lawson wanted to know more about the two men who’d replaced Villarreal. He asked Graham to keep him updated with anything he heard.
To build a prosecutable case, Lawson was working off what he knew from his days as a narcotics investigator. But his knowledge had its limits, especially when it came to money laundering. Financial documents and accounting was Hodge’s wheelhouse, so after conferring with him, Lawson knew he’d have to push Graham for more on José’s purchases. With his access to his grandfather’s auction house, Heritage Place, he could pull documents without anyone knowing the FBI was involved. Lawson had already gathered that the world of quarter horse racing was a small and insular one, with Heritage Place at its center. The last thing he wanted was news of their investigation leaking, which could tip off José and his brothers. But he thought he’d seen enough of Graham’s character already to know that he had the nerve to pull it off.
Lawson made his pitch to Graham and, much to his relief, Graham agreed. He would do some digging for the purchase records, saying he needed the information on behalf of José since he was boarding many of his horses at his farm.
A few days later, Graham called to say he had the documents. Since he was a board member of Heritage Place and the grandson of the owner, his inquiries had hardly been questioned, which put Lawson at ease. The results of his search had yielded useful evidence. In the documents from the January auction, Lawson could see that ownership of the expensive broodmare Dashin Follies was listed not under José’s name but under another man named Luis Aguirre. To make it even more complicated, Heritage Place had received wire transfers from an Alejandro Barradas who owned a customs agency in Veracruz, Mexico, called Grupo Aduanero Integral, to pay for Dashin Follies and the other three horses. Only these payments had fallen short. There was still a $100,000 balance owed at Heritage Place.
Graham said he’d already reminded José and Nayen about the money several times. Behind the venerable auction house, whose motto was “where champions are sold,” was his family’s reputation, and the former owners of the horses were still waiting to be paid.
Not long after Lawson got the documents from Graham, he called with a new development. Graham said that that morning, Nayen and Garcia had pulled up to his farm and Nayen had handed him a heavy, bulging backpack. When he unzipped the top, he could see it was filled with bundles of hundreds and twenties. Nayen told him it was the $100,000 they owed to Heritage Place. When Nayen opened the car door, Graham had noticed five or six more backpacks like the one Nayen had just handed him. After some small talk about the horses and the weather, the two men drove away. Their car probably held a half million or more inside it.