Devils in Exile (10 page)

She was studying the fit of his clothes, while he was studying her.

“Yeah,” he said.

A
PROLONGED COLD SNAP HAD ICED THE SURFACE OF THE
Charles River, the body of water separating Cambridge from Boston, since before the first of the year. Beneath the Boston University Bridge, and the lower Grand Junction Railroad bridge that ran below it, a northward bend narrowed the river, and well-worn paths in the snow showed where pedestrians, mostly students, had exploited this seasonal quirk by crossing the frozen moat on foot.

Not until mid-March did a few consecutive afternoons of sunshine start melting the snow. At noontime one day, a life-sciences major crossing the river toward MIT noticed something in the ice beneath her feet. It was a body, curled up and facedown, as though embarrassed by its own mortality. The student plucked out her earbuds and dialed 911, standing there in the middle of the Charles. State police answered the mobile call, and after a few moments working out her exact location—the geographical middle of the river was the borderline between Suffolk and Middle
sex counties—determined that she was closer to the north and so transferred her call to Cambridge PD.

A patrolman met her there, leaving his car and his spinning blues blocking one inbound lane on Memorial Drive as he made his way down to the bank. She couldn’t stay, she had a class to get to, an exam to take, but she left her name and number with the officer and directed him to the body. When the patrolman walked out to look, the ice gave way and he dropped right through.

Other students crossing the bridge whipped out their phones, and multiple videos of the soaking cop crawling out of the river were uploaded to YouTube within minutes.

His fall cracked out the ice chunk containing the body, and backup patrolmen used long poles from a sculling shed down the river to pull in the corpsicle. They saw that his hands had been removed at the wrists, and left the deceased out to thaw in the sun while awaiting the arrival of homicide detectives.

The left flap of his sage green jacket defrosted quickly. Tucked inside the breast pocket was a wallet of expensive lambskin, the oversize passport-style favored by international business travelers. The issuing country was Venezuela. His name was listed as Señor Gilberto Vasco.

Running the name tripped a Homeland Security watch-list alert, which routed a bulletin to the Drug Enforcement Administration’s New England Field Division, headquartered in the JFK Federal Building on Sudbury Street alongside Boston City Hall and the Government Center plaza. The DEA’s NEFD then notified the agent who had flagged Señor Vasco’s card via Immigration and Customs in the first place.

That agent, Marcus Lash, had been lunching on a tuna melt at the Busy Bee on Beacon Street near the St. Mary’s T stop, just minutes from the BU Bridge. That was how he came to be squatting down on the Cambridge side of the river, next to a young medical examiner from the coroner’s office, before homicide arrived and the meat wagon took Señor Vasco away.

“DEA?” said the ME, eyeing Lash’s credentials.

The ME was a young kid, brown-skinned like Lash, wearing a fur-hooded L.L. Bean parka over evidence-preserving Tyvek overalls and bootees.

“Possible drug-related homicide,” said Lash.

“Drugs? Because the decedent’s a well-dressed foreigner?”

Lash gave the kid another look. A fellow brother, but Lash didn’t get the confrere vibe. No shorthand, no soul-brother discount on a fast friendship. No love. Kid must have got all that affirmative-action shit drummed out of him in med school.

“Because he’s a KA. A known associate.”

“Is cutting off hands a drug thing?”

“It is when you steal.” Lash looked at the kid. He had kind of a natural antipathy toward lighter-skinned intellectuals that he was trying hard to overcome. Mostly because that was the same track his own college-age son was on. “How about we switch this around and you start telling me things now.”

The ME leaned forward to take a second look at the defrosting wrist stumps. “Nice clean cut. People think wrist joints, flexible, easy to cut. The reverse is true. This was done with a table saw, looks like. Postmortem for sure. No fish bites.” The ME looked closely at the fleshy sleeve. “Or very few, anyway. Body is well preserved on the whole. Essentially mummified. But as he continues to thaw, he’ll decompose faster than usual.” He looked up to the road where his white ME van was parked. “Guy’s going to drip all over my wagon.”

“You can’t keep him cold somehow?”

“Pack him in dry ice? Great if we had the budget. And the time. If he was chopped up into cooler-sized pieces, I could get him home that way.”

Lash thinking,
Home?

The ME shuffled forward on his haunches, noticing something. The dead man’s face was half-emerged from the ice, glistening. “Chunk missing from his lower lip, see there? Could be a fish bite. Or …”

He worked his gloved fingers inside the dead Venezuelan’s
parted teeth. With some effort, he slid out a wedge of melting river ice—meaning the body had gone into the water with its mouth open—then produced a small flashlight from his overalls pocket.

“Tongue’s cut off too.”

Lash looked in. The cut had been made at a slight angle, maybe an inch from the base at the back of the throat.

The ME mimed the procedure on the corpse. “They went in probably with garden shears or maybe butcher’s scissors, one snip. But as they did so, rubbing the lip over this lower canine here, it cut the lip. See? Can’t get a clean angle like that.” He pulled back, flicking his gloved fingers toward the river to get the wetness off. “So what does that mean?”

Lash sat back from the melting corpse. “Traditionally, you get your hands cut off for stealing, and your tongue cut out for squealing.”

“Uh-oh. Mixed messages.”

Lash stood, looking across the river at the Back Bay apartments and the Citgo sign. “He did something to piss off the wrong people. Not a lot of second chances in this game.”

A growing rumble became a train of six cars barreling across the Grand Junction Railroad bridge, shaking the crumbling stone struts of the overhead road as it passed into the rail yards on the Boston side.

“Did you know,” the ME said, once the train was clear, “that this is the only spot in the world where a boat can sail underneath a train running under a car driving underneath an airplane?”

“No, I didn’t,” said Lash, unable to figure out this kid. He reached into his coat pocket for a business card. “You won’t learn much, I don’t think. They dumped him here to be found. But here’s my card with my e-mail on the bottom there. If you could, cc me your autopsy report.”

“Sure, yeah.” The ME looked at the card, the embossed DEA seal in the corner. He was a little more interested now. “You got it.”

Lash turned to make his way back up the embankment.

“Hey,” said the ME. “So what does this mean anyway? Is this the start of a gang war or something?”

Lash stopped, turned back. “You know how they say, for every one dead rat you see, there are a hundred more living in the walls around you?”

The ME nodded. “Okay, I see what you’re saying.”

This kid had come in with hackles up, for whatever reason, but he was basically all right. Lash wanted to leave him with something, to appeal to their shared heritage, such as it was. “My grandpops used to have this thing. He was a big tea drinker. Smoked tea too, but that’s a different story. Back in the day, tea bags were for fancy folks. Tea came loose, and you made a pot and you strained out the leaves. He’d serve me some, wait until I drank it down to the bottom. ‘Gimme here,’ he’d say, motioning for the cup. ‘I’m ’on read your tea leaves for you.’ It was a way of fortune-telling, by the pattern they left. He’d take it and look at it this way and that, swirl it around a little and squint hard, then nod and make his pronouncement. ‘You’re going to take a piss soon.’”

The ME loosed a grudging smile.

Lash nodded. “That’s what I get off this. Somebody’s going to be taking a piss soon. All I really know is, it won’t be me.”

L
ASH HATED NARCOTICS THE WAY SOCIAL WORKERS HATE POVERTY
, the way epidemiologists hate disease. Not an active, festering hatred, but as something to push against. A battle he didn’t expect to win, only to wage honorably.

He had thirty-three years in the DEA. A third of a century.
Where did it all go?
is what people always say, as though they hadn’t been paying attention, or else somehow imagined it was all going to come back around again.

But Lash knew where it went. It went into this job.

He had been with the DEA almost since its inception. People would ask him sometimes,
Why drug enforcement?
as though it had
to be a calling, because who else but a fool would devote himself full-time to a losing cause? Or maybe some personal tragedy in his background had propelled him into this unforgiving line of work.

There was none. He came out of the service in 1975 with a helicopter license, a ’fro he was itching to grow, and a fuck-it-all attitude. The two-year-old DEA was a good fit. It was small and underfunded, and the agency needed a black guy with combat pilot experience more than he needed it. In the late seventies and eighties, narc work bloomed with the diversification of the drug trade. Undercover was where the action was, and for a time he lived the lifestyle, like the mirror image of a dealer. And he excelled. A black fed working UC in the early eighties was a lot less makeable than a gregarious white dude showing up in town with two days’ worth of beard growth and a spray-on tan, carrying a briefcase full of cash and looking to front some snow.

The job had cost Lash his marriage, and any shot at a normal American life, which was never really what he’d wanted anyway. Vietnam had pretty well cured him of that. He liked action. He was used to action. He had never sought a desk job, and a street agent’s pay grade could rise only so high. But what he did get was more pull. He got some sway. That was his reward for longevity. That was how he came to head up Windfall.

Windfall was a multiagency task force set up under his command. Cartels and drug rings had a unique problem, one Lash had come to appreciate over his career: they made too much money. Too much cash, specifically, which they then had to devise ingenious ways of getting out of the United States, requiring almost as much energy as did importing their contraband. If the average wholesale price of a kilo of cocaine equaled $30,000, that’s three hundred Benjamins going the other way, taking up as much volume as the drug, if not quite as much mass. With heroin, it’s double the dough, so now you’re moving two to one exports to imports. With the drug cartels each grossing tens of billions every year, and the United States far and away their largest market, that meant $100 billion a year in cash flowing out of this country.

Some of this they accomplished with shell corporations and paper transactions. Some of the money they “smurf” out. Smurfing means breaking down large sums into smaller chunks of less than $10,000, to avoid federal Currency Transaction Report filings. Smurfs are locals who move from bank to bank, depositing cartel money in accounts opened under various aliases, or else converting it into cashier’s checks and post office money orders under the CTR limit. For this, they earn one or two cents on the dollar.

Eighteen months ago, Lash and his team—which included rotating agents on loan from the U.S. Treasury (IRS and FinCEN, the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network), U.S. Customs and Border Protection, Department of Homeland Security (U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services), U.S. Secret Service (Investigative Support for Money Laundering), Massachusetts State Police, Rhode Island State Police, and Boston and Providence police departments—stopped a husband and wife outside their Methuen home. They were in their fifties, which trended old, but otherwise they fit the profile: neatly dressed, inconspicuous, law-abiding foreign nationals from Mexico, Central America, or northern South America (in this case, Guatemalans), with good language skills, established in the community (their daughter was enrolled in a Catholic high school, and they had a one-year renter’s agreement on their house). Smurfs are rarely armed, notably compliant, and never see or handle the powder: the money cells and the drug cells are kept entirely separate, for security reasons.

The woman carried a large Vera Bradley knockoff—the fashion among New England–area smurfs that year, thanks to its convenient interior pockets—so full of money, she had to remove banded stacks of cash to dig out her identification. Inside their home, in oversize blue cotton laundry bags next to the basement washer-dryer, Lash had discovered another three hundred K.

No law, federal or local, prohibits people from keeping $300,000 in the laundry area of their home. Because of this, Windfall’s arrest rate—their total “clearance” of successfully prosecuted cases—was relatively low. To prefer federal charges, Lash had to prove that
a suspect was “structuring”—laundering illegal profits into unreportable sums—which required a significant paper trail, the lack of which was the whole idea of smurfing in the first place. The smurfs who were arrested almost never cooperated with the government, knowing that family members in their native country would suffer for their betrayal. (This was also why smurfs could be trusted never to skim profits from their cartel employers.)

But large sums of money suspected to be the fruit of illegal activity could lawfully be confiscated by the federal government and held until such time as the possessor could prove it was legitimately received or earned. The couple in this case offered no objection to the cash seizure, only requesting a receipt for the full amount, certified by an agent of the IRS: a piece of paper citing proof of law enforcement confiscation, the one thing that ensured they and their loved ones would remain alive.

Such moneys are never claimed, the bulk of the funds turned over to the Treasury’s forfeiture fund to be applied toward reducing the federal deficit—with 10 percent recycled back into financing Windfall. Over the past two years, Windfall had confiscated over $31 million in cash and assets in the six New England states. Because Windfall was self-funded and, in this way, self-perpetuating, Lash and his team enjoyed relative autonomy.