Dead Heat (18 page)

“No,” Donnelly said before anyone else could. “Meet us there. I need a minute with my team.”

He waited until she left, then sat down, his head in his hands. “This is fucked. I wish—”

“Brad,” Lucy said, “wishing isn’t productive.”

“Do you know that Mendez is clean?” Ryan asked. “Maybe she’s on Sanchez’s payroll.”

Lucy didn’t buy it. “It would be very stupid of her to leak information about her own CPS wards.”

“Or very smart. Because it looks stupid.”

“I didn’t get that vibe from her,” Lucy said.

“Her name has never come up in any of my investigations,” Donnelly said, “but I’ll put Nicole on it. I’m not going to wait for Mendez to talk to her boss. We’ll light a fire under CPS and get them to look for security breaches on their end, send over one of our cybercrimes experts if we have to.”

“You should also run a background on Mendez,” Ryan said. He looked at the clock. “We’ve got to go.”

“Just—give me a minute. I’ll meet you there.”

Donnelly walked out.

“I need to talk to Brad,” Lucy said. “I’ll get a ride with him over to headquarters.”

“What’s going on?” Ryan asked. “Donnelly’s rep is solid, but he’s losing it. I don’t think he’s slept since the sweep, and he’s taking a time-out when the SSA of Violent Crimes is expecting him at a debriefing?”

“He knows Jaime Sanchez better than anyone on the team. He’ll be there.”

“Watch yourself with him,” Ryan said. “I know cops. He’s going to snap.”

“He knows he’s on edge. Cut him a little slack on this, Ryan.”

Ryan didn’t comment. Her partner was suspicious, and the most important thing on a task force like theirs was trust.

“Don’t be late,” he said to her and left.

Lucy asked one of the agents outside the conference room where Donnelly had gone, and he said he thought the locker room. She hesitated, then stepped inside.

“Brad,” she said quietly.

“This is the boys’ room,” he said without looking at her. He was facing the wall, head down, hands above his head.

“Casilla wants us in for a debriefing. We need you there.”

“I should have known Jaime would try something like this. There’s been something off about this whole thing from the beginning, but I have no idea what it is. It’s making me crazy trying to figure it out.”

“Finding out he’d imprisoned kids—”

He cut her off. “It’s not just the boy in the basement.”

“I have a lead on Michael.” She didn’t tell him it was old—fourteen months old. It was more than they’d had two hours ago. “If we find Michael, he can lead us to Sanchez. I’m almost certain of it. I have to convince Casilla that I’m right. You can help with that, and then we both get what we want. We save Michael, find Bella, and put Sanchez in prison.”

“I should have put them in protective custody. I should have protected them myself! Is this your way of saying
I told you so
?”

“I don’t do that.”

He grunted and leaned against the lockers, head down, his hands still fisted above his head.

“They’re family,” she said. “I don’t think he plans to harm her.”

“Jaime Sanchez is violent. You read his file. He fucking beat us. It doesn’t matter that those girls are his nieces. He’s not his brother George.”

“You’re right. But hurting them is his last option. Right now he thinks he’s winning. He has Bella.”

“Why? Why her? Why not CeCe who was helping him?”

“I don’t know. Leverage? She’s easier to control?”

“It makes no fucking sense to take a kid when every cop in southern Texas is looking for him.”

“Brad, he won this battle. So we go at him from another direction. Shake every tree. You said from the beginning that something big was going on and Sanchez was at the center—you focus on that.”

“No one is talking. They’re too scared, and not of us.”

“We talk to Mirabelle, find a way to convince her to help.”

“Maybe she’s in on this,”

“I don’t think so. Maybe—”

Brad cut her off. “The logical reason for Jaime to take Bella is to keep his sister in line. He has her daughter, not us. We have no more leverage. He does. She talks, her daughter dies. Every time I think
Why Bella
, that’s what I come back to.”

Lucy’s stomach burned. Brad’s scenario made sense.

“We have to find a way.”

“You’re pulling at straws, Kincaid.”

“I never thought you would be defeated.”

He didn’t say anything.

“I’m going to take a run at her. I don’t need your permission, Brad, but I want your blessing. If you’re right and she’s scared of what Jaime might do to Bella, we’ll know. She could let something slip. Or maybe I can convince her that she needs to help us to save her daughter.”

Again, he remained silent.

“It’s one more angle,” she continued. “You have every law enforcement agency looking for him. The border patrol has been alerted. You took down his supply house. If you were him, what would you do?”

Brad thought for a moment. He’d calmed down after his outburst, and Lucy was relieved. He was a good cop, but far more emotionally involved in this case than he should be.

“I’d lay low. Regroup. Send my most trusted allies out to do my work for me.”

“And you know who those are, right?”

He nodded, for the first time excited about a possibility. “Stick to them. Talk to them. Haul them in if there’s a warrant.”

“Exactly. Disrupt his process. Force him to show himself. Force him to make a mistake.”

“We have some leads on the next shipment—which is supposed to be the big one. But nothing solid. We don’t know where it’s going to cross, or how. Truck, car, plane, foot.”

“Foot? From the border?”

“Best way to do it. Small quantities brought in through couriers.”

“The boys,” Lucy said before she realized she’d said it. “Like Michael.”

Brad’s eyes widened. “That’s it. It’s why he’s been so successful. He has young boys hauling his heroin across the border. They’re under the radar. They’re American. They’re not going to be treated the same as if they’re teenagers or adults.”

He paced in front of the lockers. “They can blend in, practically carry the drugs in the open because they’ve found a way to not be inspected, something. Bribes. Holes in the system. They could move hundreds of pounds of drugs, especially if they rotate—” He stopped.

“What?”

“Until we find Michael we don’t have anything on them. I can’t prove this. No one is talking, Jaime Sanchez is in the wind, and now we have a missing seven-year-old.”

Two uniformed cops came into the locker room and glanced at Lucy. “We’re done,” she said with a slight smile. She turned to Brad. “We’re going to get him. It starts with Michael.”

“I hope you’re right. Because I’m telling you, Kincaid, I’ve met my fair share of thirteen-year-olds who would shoot me in the back without remorse.”

*   *   *

The FBI conference room was half full when Lucy arrived with Donnelly. It was clear that nearly everyone knew him and greeted him warmly. She spotted Jennifer sitting at the far end of the table, away from everyone else, looking out of place, her chin up. Every cell in the woman’s body was screaming
Stay away
and Lucy wondered what her story was.

Donnelly immediately approached Casilla. “I’m sorry we’re late, Juan, but can I have a minute alone?”

“Of course. Ryan, start the debriefing. Nate, Kenzie, and a team from the cyber unit who specialize in child abductions need to be brought up to speed. They’re on the task force now, use them.”

Lucy didn’t know what Brad wanted with Juan, but she followed Ryan’s lead and sat near the head of the long conference table.

Ryan ran through the status of Jaime Sanchez and Bella Borez quickly. “The cybercrimes unit already has the burner phone that CeCe Borez used, and they’re tracing it. The girl is distraught and refuses to talk. A child psychologist is working with her, but we’re not holding out hope. It’s clear that she’s been in contact with either her uncle or an intermediary.”

He also gave them a brief rundown of the sting, the raid, and what they’d found in the basement of the hardware store that fronted Sanchez’s drug and weapons storage facility.

“DEA Agent Brad Donnelly called the shots, and he was right on. We dealt Sanchez a major blow.” Ryan motioned to Lucy. “Agent Kincaid will fill you in on her parallel investigation.”

She frowned. “What?”

“You said you had information about Michael Rodriguez.”

She cleared her throat. This was the first time she’d had to formally speak in front of her colleagues. As she spoke, Casilla and Donnelly walked into the back of the room and remained standing.

“The girl Bella Borez confirmed that the boy kept chained in the basement for the past four weeks is Michael Rodriguez. Michael was a suspected runaway fourteen months ago, leaving his foster family in what I believe was his attempt to protect them from a threat.

“Based on interviews with Bella, Michael’s foster mother, and Michael’s priest, it seems that about a week before his disappearance, Michael started behaving strangely. He went to his old neighborhood and was seen with a younger boy known as Richard Diaz.”

“A classmate?” Kenzie asked.

“No, Father Flannigan didn’t know much about the boy, but suspected he was from Michael’s past. I don’t have all the details yet, I literally just learned about this right before I heard about Bella Borez’s kidnapping. However, there are several indirect connections between Jaime Sanchez and Michael Rodriguez, primarily through his father Vince and common associates.

“Sometime after Michael first disappeared, he was scarred or tattooed with a symbol that appears to be gang-related. No one has identified it yet.” She pointed to the copy on the master board. “He was missing and unseen by anyone who knows him until Saturday, when he left a note for his foster mother”—she pointed to the copy—“and then was at his church, St. Catherine’s.”

“His priest saw him?” Ryan asked.

“He took his confession, and I couldn’t get any details out of him about that, as you might expect. Father Flannigan told me what he told the police when Michael first disappeared, and I think some of the leads might still yield information.

“I also believe,” she added, “that if we find Michael, he can lead us to Jaime Sanchez.”

Kenzie said, “I don’t understand. I thought this kid was locked up by Sanchez. Why?”

“It may be that Michael was aiding Sanchez under duress, but at some point Sanchez felt he was a flight risk and kept him under lock and key. Bella implied that she let him go because she feared for his life.”

“Why didn’t he talk to someone about this?” Tony, the head of the cybercrimes team, asked.

“He doesn’t trust the police. Neither do the Popes, because they don’t think the police took Michael’s disappearance seriously. Treated him like just another runaway foster kid.”

“But he wasn’t,” Ryan reiterated.

“No. There’s a lot more here and if we’re going to find Bella, I think Michael is our best bet.”

Juan cleared his throat. “We’re going to tackle this investigation from three angles. With Agent Donnelly’s agreement, the FBI is taking point. Agents Kenzie Malone and Nate Dunning will join Agents Kincaid and Quiroz specifically on the child abduction. Jennifer Mendez from CPS will be our contact person with that agency.”

Everyone turned to look at her, and Jennifer got the deer-in-the-headlights look, though it disappeared almost immediately. She nodded but didn’t say anything.

Juan continued. “Agent Donnelly is running the op. We have the full cooperation of the DEA when and if we need it.” He nodded to Brad, who took over the conversation.

He said, “I’ve been tracking Jaime Sanchez for years. He’s good at getting others to take the fall for him. He’s violent and will not hesitate to kill anyone who gets in his way.

“But because of the Michael Rodriguez situation, we now believe that he’s not using the traditional gang-related drug distribution structure. We believe he’s using minors to move product across the border. If we can find this kid, we can learn how the operation works.

“We all know that Sanchez is not the one calling the shots. He’s a high-ranking operative, but we have no intel on who he answers to. We’re hoping the ledger Agent Kincaid found at the Thirty-Ninth Street gang headquarters will lead us in the right direction, but so far we’ve had no success in decoding the information.”

He looked around the room. “It very well could be that this boy has the information we need, not only on Jaime Sanchez, but also on who he answers to. The gang didn’t seem overly worried that we seized the weapons in the hardware store facility, and it could be because they have more coming in. It’s also clear that at one point there were drugs in the facility, but they were removed prior to our sting. We have known for some time that something big is going down and Sanchez is involved, which is why he and his brother were added to the sweep this weekend.” He glanced at Lucy. She wondered if he would have revealed that information if she hadn’t already called him on it.

He continued. “I have a full squad of DEA agents currently shaking down every known associate of Jaime Sanchez. We’re making it hard for him to hide. We have border patrol on high alert, and now that we have the kidnapping, they’re fully engaged. We don’t know why he took Bella and not his older niece—who helped him get Bella out of the house—but we suspect it’s to keep his sister from talking. He doesn’t do anything without a reason.”

“And you don’t know how he found out where CPS had stashed the kids?” Tony asked.

“We’re working on it,” Donnelly said.

Juan turned to Tony, “If you and your team can get together with Ms. Mendez and the CPS technology department and see if you can find a breach, that may answer our question.”

Lucy glanced at Donnelly. Good call; the FBI cybercrimes unit was bigger with more resources than the DEA unit. Even though Donnelly was borderline obsessed with Sanchez, he was willing to delegate.

“Sanchez could be in Mexico by now,” Nate said.

“We alerted border patrol within an hour of the kidnapping,” Donnelly said. “He couldn’t have reached the border that fast. And ICE is cooperating.” He glanced at his watch. “It’s thirteen hundred hours. Fuel up and let’s find this bastard.”