Scott stared at Benny for a long time. Then he said, "You're right."
She looked up at him. Although she was no longer cry-ing, her eyes were still bloodshot. "About what?"
"I have no idea know what it's like to be a cop here."
"But you still don't think you would take their money, do you?"
"I'd find another way," Scott said.
"Alejandro Dominguez tried to find another way."
"Who's he?"
"A honest man who accepted the job as chief of police in Nuevo Laredo when no one else would. When the cartel offered him money, he refused to take it. His career lasted less than one day. Six hours after he was sworn in as the new police chief, Los Zetas shot him dead."
"Why did you tell Larios about the video?" Scott said. "You said you loved Mike Cassidy."
"I did love him," Benny said, her voice cracking but full of conviction.
Scott believed her. "Then why?"
"Because if Larios found out I knew about it and didn't tell him, he would have killed me and my daughter...or worse."
Scott didn't need her to explain the meaning of or worse. He already knew. Los Zetas operated a string of brothels along the border, where they kept women, and girls as young as twelve, shot full of heroin and turning tricks six-teen hours a day.
"Larios wants the video to come out," Benny said. "He wants to see it on American television. He wants the Ameri-can people to know their government made a deal with the devil."
"So maybe you're wrong," Scott said. "And it wasn't the Sinaloa who killed Mike. Maybe it was Los Zetas who did it because Larios wanted to release the video himself."
"No," Benny said. "There was no need to do that. Lar-ios knew the video would eventually come out, and from the best possible source."
"The DEA," Scott said, realizing just how much sense it made. A video released by a rival cartel could be dismissed as a fake, but a video used as evidence by the DEA in the criminal trial of corrupt U.S. officials...What was it that credit card company advertisement said? Priceless.
Benny nodded.
"Tell me how Mike Cassidy got that video," Scott said.
Benny wiped her nose on the sleeve of her black Polo shirt again. "Do you know what the PFM is, the Policia Federal Ministerial?"
"I know what they are," Scott said. "The Mexican FBI." But he knew more than that. The PFM, known in English as the Federal Ministry of Police, was indeed modeled after the American FBI and created to replace the thoroughly discred-ited, and now disbanded, AFI, the Agencia de Federal Investigacion, or Federal Investigations Agency, which had probably been the most corrupt agency in the entire Mexican government, and that was saying quite a lot because that bar had been set pretty high.
A classified report Scott had read during his tour at DEA Headquarters said that nearly half of AFI's 7,000 agents were under investigation for criminal activity, and that many of those agents were suspected of moonlighting as enforcers for the Sinaloa cartel. The general consensus at DEA was that AFI's successor, the PFM, wasn't any better than the agency it had replaced.
"When Oscar Ramirez was assassinated in Mexico City," Benny said, "because he was the deputy attorney gen-eral, the PFM was put in charge of the investigation. I knew one of the agents, Raul Fuentes. He was an instructor at a training school I went to a couple of years ago. We became friends, and we stayed in touch." She looked hard at Scott. "And before you say anything, he was an honest man and a good policeman."
Scott raised his hands. "Okay."
"Raul was one of the agents who searched Ramirez's apartment. He found the flash drive and after he watched what was on it, he knew he couldn't document it as evi-dence."
"Why not?"
"Because it would disappear."
"So what did he do?" Scott asked.
"He called me."
"Why you?"
"Because he knew about me and Michael."
"He wanted you to give the video to Mike?"
"Yes," Benny said. "To expose the corruption on both sides."
"You told me when we watched it that you hadn't seen it before."
"I hadn't seen it," Benny said. "All I did was arrange a meeting so Raul could give the video to Michael."
"Why didn't Mike show it to you?"
"He said he was trying to protect me."
"But you told Larios about it?"
Fresh tears formed in her eyes. "I had to."
"What exactly did you tell him?"
Benny rubbed her eyes. "Only what I knew, that Mi-chael had a video of a meeting and that if it got out, it was going to be bad for El Gordo and the Sinaloa."
"Nothing else?"
"I didn't know anything else."
"But did he ask?" Scott insisted. "Did Larios ask you what was on the video?"
Benny hesitated as her eyes shifted to her left, to Scott's right. He knew from his training and from years of experi-ence conducting hundreds of interrogations that when asked a question, a person trying to recall something, as opposed to trying to create something, looked to his or her left. Whatever she was going to say, it was going to be the truth. "No," Benny said. "He didn't ask."
"The reason he didn't ask was because he already knew about the meeting," Scott said.
"What do you mean?"
"Los Zetas killed Ramirez."
"How do you know?"
"Because nothing else makes sense," Scott said. "Gutierrez had no reason to kill him. He had just made a se-cret deal with Ramirez and needed him alive. But Larios, if he knew about the deal, would have a very good reason to kill the man who had just agreed to use the power of the federal government to take the Nuevo Laredo plaza away from him and give it to his archenemy."
"How would Larios know about the meeting?"
"I don't know," Scott said. "But there were three people at that meeting, and as Benjamin Franklin said, Three may keep a secret, if two of them are dead."
"I don't understand," Benny said. "What does that mean?"
"It means one of them talked. And it means you weren't telling Larios anything he didn't already know. He had Ramirez killed before either you or Mike knew that video existed."
Benny was looking at him, her eyes red from crying, her nose crusted. "Do you really believe that?"
He nodded. "It wasn't your fault."
Benny laid her forehead on the hood of the Oldsmobile and sobbed so hard her whole body shook.