Dark Target (17 page)

He tossed a Ziploc bag on the table, and in it, a single rose petal, dried out to a deep maroon.

“That’s full-sized, probably long-stemmed, maybe two or three weeks old. I found it inside the vacuum cleaner bag, but it
was the only one. It wasn’t crumpled or broken, and it was one of those Mighty Mite canister vacuums with a lot of power,
so it was probably sucked up before it was completely dried out, or it would have crumbled.”

“So three or four weeks ago, allowing for the time it was in water, Theresa got one or more long-stemmed red roses, put them
in a vase, they dried up, she threw them out but missed a petal and that ended up in the vacuum. Was it her birthday?”

“I don’t think they were for her,” Sykes said. “That’s what’s odd—she was allergic to flowers. Truitt didn’t give her any.
She had admirers at the bar…”

“She was just a bartender, right? Did she ever dance?” DeLuca asked. Sykes shook his head.

“Maybe it was a secret admirer, but nobody who knew her would have sent her flowers. So maybe they weren’t for her. Maybe
they were for Cheryl Escavedo. She got some at work, right? Maybe it was the same bouquet. She would have kept them in her
room. So I looked under her bed and behind the end table and guess what I found?”

He produced a second glassine bag with a matching rose petal.

“We’d need a lab test to prove they come from the same plant, but they certainly look like they do,” Sykes said. “None of
the local florists have any record of making any deliveries to that address in the time frame given.”

“I know. I already checked,” DeLuca said. “So somebody sent Sergeant Escavedo roses.”

“Unless she bought them for herself,” Sykes said. “Maybe to cheer herself up.”

“But do you buy roses to cheer yourself up?” DeLuca asked. “You buy tulips, or daisies, or carnations. Roses are too loaded
with meaning. Maybe.”

“Maybe,” Sykes said. “I’m talking with the boyfriend later today to ask about it to see what he remembers.”

“Good work,” DeLuca said.

“We might go back to the strip club to see what we can scare up,” Sykes said. “I figured I’d bring the boyfriend in and troll
him around to see what happens, but I gotta get a cash advance on the credit card for garter-belt money first.”

“Our tax dollars at work,” DeLuca said.

Mack and Vasquez were disappointed when Colonel Martine Guzman, of the Chihuahua State Anti-Drug Joint Task Force, asked to
reschedule their meeting so that he could fly to Mexico City to meet with the leader of the national antidrug task force and
members of the armed forces. Wes Vogel, DeLuca’s friend at the ICE, had given them the name of a club across the border that
Leon Lev owned but warned them against traveling in Juarez alone, and to stay on Avenida de Juarez if they went and avoid
the side streets where
los pandillas
controlled the neighborhoods. They’d posed as newlyweds, but apparently no one believed that young newlyweds would come to
Juarez on a honeymoon—that wasn’t the kind of tourism the town once called Paso del Norte was known for.

They paid the twenty-five-cent toll and walked across the Rio Grande Bridge on foot. Immediately cab drivers asked them if
they wanted to see the
zona roja,
a trip to “Boys Town,” perhaps—were they interested in women, or maybe a “donkey show”? The cabbies said they knew of safe
bars where the whores specialized in couples and threesomes.
“Te quiero, bonito chocho,”
men hissed to MacKenzie in the one bar where they stopped, a place called The Persian Slipper.
“Eres casi demasiado bonito—cuanto cuestas? Te parece bien por la boca? Hace sexo al estilo Griego?”
She was waiting alone while Vasquez talked to a Nana, the old woman who inspected the men for venereal diseases before they
accompanied the girls upstairs to one of the various rooms. Mack pretended she didn’t speak Spanish, but when a pair of American
sailors approached her in English, she switched to Russian.

“You’d better make an arrangement with the bartender if you want to keep your tits,”
a girl next to her said in Russian.
“The rest of us tip him five dollars a customer.”

“I told her I was told to talk to Leon, and she said he didn’t come in that often but the bartender could help me,” Mack reported
to DeLuca upon her return to Albuquerque. “I said my friend Theresa Davidova recommended this place and did she know her?
She said she didn’t. She said Leon didn’t like to put too many white girls in one place. It might be our way in. Hoolie could
be my pimp.”

“Colleen…”

“I just got a 5-5 rating at DLI—my Russian is almost native,” she said. “And don’t tell me it’s dangerous. I just spent eleven
months in Iraq. I think we know how to take care of ourselves.”

“I paid the Nana a hundred dollars and she gave me the whole story,” Vasquez said. “I told her I was writing a book on sex
tourism. Lev owns two upscale restaurants and a resort in the fancy Condesa District—he lives at the resort, which is more
like a private club and spa, but he made his nut running whorehouses, and he still owns something like twenty of them—I wrote
down the names. Tia Maria’s on Begonias Street. Club Hombre on Martinez. Zoom Zoom on Otumba. Diablo’s on Mariscal. Casa Bambinas
on Degollado. The Nana didn’t know how many girls total, but what she did say was that for the last ten years, he’s made more
money pushing porn on the Internet than he does in the clubs, and five years ago he got into the film business, and I don’t
mean adapting Chekhov classics for
Masterpiece Theatre
. Really hard-core stuff, much harder than what used to come out of Mexico. The guy’s becoming one of the biggest porn suppliers
to Latin America.”

“By himself or with somebody?”

“Lev is backed by the Cabrera family, which took over the Mexican cartel after the untimely demise of Amado Carillo Fuentes
in Sinaloa-Chihuahua and Jaime Nevares in Durango and the Arellano Felixes in Tijuana. Cipriano Cabrera has God only knows
how many politicians in his pocket, and part of what he does for them, in addition to cash, is supply them with girls, which
he gets from Lev. Lev was basically a white slave trader for years, right after the Soviet Union fell apart—he’d bring poor
Russian and Romanian and Bulgarian girls over, telling them he’d find them work as domestics or temps, and peddle them on
the streets.”

“The Nana said she made a living looking at dicks but she’d never seen a bigger prick,” Mack added. “We figured we’d put out
the word that there’s a girl from his hometown working the
zona roja
—if that doesn’t get his attention, we’ll think of something else. The other thing we heard is that Cipriano Cabrera’s bodyguards
have flooded town and started listening to police scanners and spreading extra threats and bribes around, which is what Cabrera
does before he visits in person—he lives in Hermosillo. So something is going down.”

“It’s some kind of summit meeting, according to what I could pick up,” Vasquez said. “Vogel said he’d heard one had been planned.
He’s got some SIGINT, but they’re pretty cagey about what they say on their cell phones. The chatter’s been about a wedding,
a big party, but nobody knows anybody who’s getting married.”

“Connect that to Theresa Davidova,” DeLuca said.

“I’m not sure it connects,” MacKenzie said. “I’m thinking, what if he’s put her back to work to pay off the money she owes
him? Lev gets the girls for the parties—maybe Theresa is going to be there. I was thinking of saying I used to dance at the
bar where she worked in El Paso.”

“Just be careful,” DeLuca said. “Talk to Dan if you want to know anything about Theresa. And brief me before you do anything,
and make sure you get backup from Vogel. He’ll know the ropes down there—don’t forget what happened to Kiki Camarena,” he
said, referring to the DEA agent who was tortured and killed by Mexican cartel members in 1985.

He couldn’t reach Walter Ford for an update, and there was nothing in his e-mail. Ben Yutahay called to say they’d found a
receipt suggesting the trash they’d found near where Cheryl Escavedo had vanished was purchased at a CostCo supermarket in
Albuquerque. Brother Antonionus called to say the name of the space ship hovering over Arizona that night was the
Zak-4.
He hoped that was helpful. DeLuca showered and changed before the lecture. He asked Peggy Romano if she wanted to go with
him, but she only laughed.

“Sorry, but there’s a game between UConn and Duke tonight,” she said. “I hate Duke. They’re the New York Yankees of college
basketball.”

He arrived early and found a seat at the back of the auditorium in room 103, Regener Hall, north campus, University of New
Mexico, and watched the room fill with college kids, boys in goatees and girls in shirts that exposed their bellies even though
it was below freezing outside. Already seated, down front, was a contingent from the Brethren of the Light in full crimson
regalia, and seated among them he saw Sami, next to Rainbow, who was talking animatedly, her hands moving in the air above
her. DeLuca was pleased when a familiar face appeared in the seat next to him.

“Do you mind,” Penelope Burgess said. “I might need to hold your hand if I get too scared.” A part of him wouldn’t have minded
her touch. It wasn’t hard to figure out which part of him.

“I didn’t think you’d be up for this kind of thing,” DeLuca said.

“Unfortunately, it fits loosely under the rubric of what I teach—alien life forms. I don’t want my students accusing me of
being closed-minded tomorrow.”

When the lights came down, the dean of students introduced the speaker, listing his accomplishments. Hilton Jaynes was professor
emeritus and holder of the Adler chair in the psychology department at Harvard. He’d won the Pulitzer Prize in 1988 for a
book he’d written on early cognition, and numerous other prizes, grants, and awards. He’d turned his attention to UFOs in
the mid-nineties, when he began to interview and study over a hundred subjects who’d reported having one or more abduction
experiences. He’d written up his results in a book entitled
Chosen by the Gods,
which became a commercial bestseller and the cause of great controversy in the academic community. The methodology of his
work had been gone over with a fine-toothed comb, both by academics at large who disagreed with his conclusions and by his
own faculty review board at Harvard, where there was some concern that the old professor had gone off his rocker. After careful
review, their conclusion was that he had not, that his methodology and his research were sound, and that his conclusions were
drawn from solid scholarship and scientific practice. They were, however, conclusions the psych department found difficult
to embrace: that UFOs were real, they’d been visiting earth for a long time, and they would be with us in the future.

“I give you Dr. Hilton Jaynes,” the dean concluded.

Jaynes was in his sixties but young-looking and vigorous, dressed in a black turtleneck sweater, gray pants, and black shoes,
his white hair combed back and falling over his collar. He seemed like the kind of guy who would be equally comfortable at
an academic seminar or at a party at the Playboy mansion. He spoke from memory, with a gentlemanly southern accent.

“At 4:00
A.M.
on January the fifth, 2001,” he began, “in the town of Millstadt, Illinois, four police officers and a bartender on his way
home from a one-night stand with a cocktail waitress all found an arrowhead. The arrowhead was black, triangular, two stories
tall and about the size of a football field, and it was floating in the air above the cornfields, moving slowly on a southwesterly
course at perhaps fifteen or twenty miles an hour, maybe a thousand feet above the ground. There were three bright lights
on it, one at each corner. One of the police officers was a man named Curtis Marshall, and he had a camera on him and tried
to take a picture, but it didn’t come out very well. The vessel hung in the air for about twenty minutes, then rose and flew
off in a northerly direction. Twenty minutes. Five reliable witnesses, four of them officers of the law trained to observe
and give testimony. So they filed their reports, the police officers did, sworn to tell the truth, saying just what they saw
with their own eyes and experienced with their senses, and I should say two officers were together but the other two were
in separated locations. The bartender had stopped by a tree to take a leak. Independent of each other, they all saw the same
thing. Described it the same way. Later, one of the officers said it must have been a blimp. Man-made. Recanted his story,
but the other four gentlemen stuck to what they’d said originally. Today, the only officer who kept his job is the one who
recanted. Two of the police officers were fired and the third was so harassed that he quit. The bartender left town after
a series of events, including kids making crop circles in his lawn with an herbicide.”

Jaynes took a drink of water. He was a mesmerizing speaker, DeLuca had to admit, with a deep plangent tone to his voice, full
of emphasis and dramatic pauses. DeLuca glanced at Penelope Burgess, who seemed bemused.

“What is it in our natures that makes us resist the inexplicable? Where did we lose our capacity for ambiguity? How did this
black and white either/or mentality arise, where we make room for that which is literal and visible but have no room in our
hearts and, more to the point, in our minds for the unseen and the spiritual? There was a time, early in human evolution,
when the gods spoke to us all the time. You study cognitive evolution and you find that way back when, the two halves of the
human brain were less integrated, physically less connected, the cerebral cortex much smaller, without half the ganglions
we have today, when the right brain, the controlling superego brain, tried to speak to the left brain, the emotional brain,
it sounded to us like God talking, a big voice of unimpeachable authority saying, do this, do that, that’s right, that’s wrong.
Nobody knew it wasn’t God. And sometimes, the lizard brain back here, the cerebellum, just got scared and started stomping
around like Godzilla, crushing every new thought upon arrival—that’s what the Godzilla brain is good for, but it’s not good
for much else. For the most part, we accepted spiritual experiences beyond our ken. Took ’em at face value. A burning bush
was God pointing the way. Ezekiel lifted bodily into heaven was just that, a rare occurrence and awe inspiring, no doubt,
but we didn’t ostracize the folks who were there to witness. Nobody lost their job. Nobody got their lawn trashed. Things
from the unseen realm could show up all of a sudden in our physical literal world and it was all right. It was okay.