They lived in a two-bedroom turn-of-the-century bungalow in a trendy neighborhood, south of downtown. The house had been gutted and retrofitted with central heating and air, despite the fact that the massive Siberian elms and ponderosa pines kept the house shaded year-round. They’d left the original plaster walls alone, at Angie’s insistence. The only real concession Mason had sought was a satellite dish. No man should have to live like a savage in this day and age.
The main floor consisted of a tiny living room with a massive bay window and a well-appointed and functional kitchen. It kind of had to be, considering how tiny it was. There was a dining room and a mudroom and a skinny staircase with a maple banister that led to the second floor and both bedrooms. The master was large enough for a king-size bed, but little else, and the bathroom still smelled faintly of the old people who’d lived there before them. Mason had commandeered the spare bedroom and converted it into a home office. He’d covered the walls with maps of Southern California, Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, and western Texas and riddled them with color-coded thumbtacks connected by lengths of yarn. Any even tangential reference to trafficking along the Mexican border was marked. By the time he added pictures and newspaper clippings and various notes, Angie had started calling it his “den.”
He told her it was for his current assignment with the Metro Trafficking Task Force. And while that might have been true from a certain perspective, she understood that it was only peripherally related. That this room was where he kept the demons he’d brought back with him from the desert.
There were eight different colors, each of which corresponded to one of the major Mexican drug-trafficking organizations: the Sinaloa Federation, the Cártel del Golfo, the Knights Templar, La Familia Michoacana, the Cártel Jalisco Nueva Generación, Los Mazatlecos, the Beltrán-Leyva Organization, and the various splinter groups of Los Zetas. The cartels functioned just like any other multibillion-dollar corporations. They branded themselves in a way that their rivals wouldn’t be able to miss. They each tended toward a main trafficking focus and a signature way of dealing with their competition. The Sinaloans controlled the lion’s share of the cocaine trafficking and had a penchant for beheading their rivals, mutilating their remains, and displaying them in public. The Zetas counted among their ranks a large number of former elite commandos from the Mexican Army whose skills allowed the organization to expand from drugs into extortion, kidnapping, and the protection racket. The New Generation Cartel of Jalisco favored indiscriminate slaughter and overt demonstrations of brutality. And on and on. It was depressing to see all the violence plotted out like this, visualizing the systematic conquest of the American Southwest by merciless merchants of death whose familia made the Sicilians look like Shriners.
Rainbow colors radiated upward from the southern border, through towns like Tijuana and Monterrey, but the vast majority formed lightning bolts that shot into the interior of Arizona from Sonoyta, Sasabe, Agua Prieta, Naco, and Nogales, open sections of the desert where there were no fences, no deterrents, and an entire Native American reservation that served as a big red carpet. Apparently, the border strategy was to funnel all the trafficking into one narrow shipping lane, one that could potentially diminish the number of invaders by heat attrition, but otherwise was left largely untended, while U.S. Customs and Border Patrol stations filmed TV shows and showcased their taxpayer-funded armadas for the media. It was as though the policy makers had simply decided to leave the back door open for a lover to sneak in during the night while publicly decrying infidelity at the tops of their lungs.
As though there were some things that the powers that be wanted to pass through the net.
By weeding out the events he could conclusively attribute to known cartels, he was able to hone in on the reports that fell in the gray areas. The majority were merely crimes of opportunity, individuals or unaffiliated groups attempting to get a leg up, most of which culminated in arrests, deportation, or bloodshed. And then there were others that seemingly went unnoticed, events that he believed would lead him to those he was certain had eluded them at the quarry, the men responsible for smuggling the deadly virus into the country, not to mention the death of his partner.
And a staggeringly high number of them involved fire.
Mason discovered the first instance by accident. In a file related to the seizure of a large quantity of methamphetamines in the town of Eagar, northeast of Tucson, one of the responding officers noted that he’d been summoned to the scene while on his way to investigate a fire in a remote barn with suspected casualties. On a whim, Mason tracked down the report of the actual fire investigation, which consisted of about three formal sentences and a succinct summary involving presumed immigrants being trapped inside by a fire of their own accidental creation. He called the investigator—Sgt. Judd Morton with the Eagar PD—who informed him that such incidents weren’t as uncommon as he might think. These illegals exhausted themselves in the desert, broke into some rancher’s barn or shed, and crashed in the hay with a cigarette hanging from their mouths.
And so it had been on his own dime that he traveled back to Arizona forty-eight hours later and stood before the charred rubble. He took pictures from every conceivable angle. Nothing remained. Not a single wall stood. The majority of the debris had been cleared and loaded onto a fleet of trucks that belonged to the deep treads positively littering the site, which was at the bottom of an arroyo, invisible from just about every vantage point. There were already fresh stacks of lumber and building materials waiting to give rise to a new structure. Were it not for the faint yellowish discoloration of the soot on the branches of the surrounding trees, he probably would have been able to let it go, but he’d learned a little about chemical accelerants after nearly being incinerated on his last visit and knew that benzene was a volatile and explosive aromatic hydrocarbon that burned with an almost dirty yellow chemical flame. A subsequent call to the Pima County Medical Examiner’s Office confirmed that the victims’ bodies had been converted to little more than ashes and hopelessly unidentifiable chunks of bone.
The pictures he took that day were the first he tacked up on his wall. Others followed, the majority of which he copied from the investigative files or clipped from small-town newspapers. Some incidents lacked photos, so he simply pinned up the paragraph-long mentions he found hidden toward the back of the local sections.
A surprising number of the fire-related immigrant deaths were accidental, as Sergeant Morton had said, but there were still a good number that had been ruled as such that Mason simply didn’t buy. In most cases, the victims were discovered to have various degrees of burns over their bodies. Some weren’t even burned at all; they had merely succumbed to the smoke. It was the incidents in which no physical remains had been salvageable that he discreetly looked into in his spare time. He plotted them on his maps with red thumbtacks and connected them with red yarn. Six incidents in all. Hardly enough to form a readily identifiable pattern by anyone’s standards, but the nature of the coincidental elements they shared was impossible to ignore. That, and the fact that the line connecting all six incidents shot straight upward like an arrow from the quarry where his team had been ambushed on the Tohono O’odham Reservation into Saguache, Colorado, southeast of Pueblo.
He had discovered an unidentified ninth organization operating under the radar on an interstate route that led directly into the heart of Colorado.