CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Even though I was still worried about her, I trusted her decision to work instead of rest. Her panic attack seemed to be a big one, but I had to believe she knew her limits. And if she didn’t, I’d be there to help her heal.
When we reached upstairs, she glanced at Zach’s locked door, took a deep breath, and then walked into her office. I followed her and tried to make sense of what I was seeing.
Dozens of boxes were piled around the room, all of them seemed to be filled with files .
Ben walked behind us with another box. “Where do you want this one?”
Mia pointed at the wall behind her desk. “On top of that black one, please. Thank you.”
He tipped his chin and looked around, before grinning at me. “Have fun.” He headed for the door. “Holler if you need anything.”
“What are these boxes for?”
Mia was still pale, but I admired her attempt to move forward. She leaned her butt against her table, clasped her hands, and grinned. “Well, I thought you could use a day of fun.”
“With boxes of files?”
I tried to give her the benefit of the doubt, but I couldn’t help wondering if she was trying to bury me under useless files so I wouldn’t have access to their investigation.
To be honest, I wasn’t keen on sharing my side of the investigation in the beginning. But I believed Mia and I had moved past that point and were building something different between us. Something special, even.
“Are you trying to keep me out of the way?” There was no hiding the shadow of hurt from my voice.
She gazed at me and gave me a sweet smile. “Of course, not. This will be our day of fun.” She stared at all the boxes. “Okay, maybe not fun. But useful for sure. This is my investigation on the cartel. ”
I peered around again. “What do you mean?”
“Since my days at the DEA, I’ve been collecting data about the cartel. Everything I’ve ever touched, read, or concluded about the Alacráns is here.” She wobbled to the wall at her right. “These boxes are for the cold cases I copied from the agency and the company’s investigation. Even though they were never solved, based on the timeline, modus operandi , and if you placed them with other pieces of evidence from similar crimes, I bet my front tooth that the Alacráns did it. Eventually, I want to get to the bottom of it.”
She pointed at the boxes by the door. “Those ones are for the tattoos.”
“Are you kidding?”
“Not at all. I noticed the first Alacrán around Holy Water due to a tattoo. I didn’t know Matias at the time, but I saw him with Andrea, Danny’s ex. I followed them and saw he had a big scorpion with a crown over its head and a rosary dangling from its tail inked on his back. The Alacráns’ signature tattoo. That’s when I knew we were in trouble…good times.”
She shook her head. “Anyway, that wasn’t the only occurrence. I’ve been collecting that information for years. Some tattoos are fairly common in certain types of criminal organizations. Most organized associations have signature tattoos. It’s a form to send a message and gain respect. They also help us get a sense of what their aspirations are, how high or low they are in the rank, what kind of crimes they committed. Tattoos can talk more than one can imagine.”
“How did you get that information?”
“Back at the DEA, I started to notice most of the cartel people we arrested shared some of the same ones. So, I began to catalog every image and cross it with their priors and what the men were being arrested for. I continued to do so even after I left.”
I opened the lid of the box on the top and picked up a couple of photos from it. “What did you find?”
She walked to me and fished some other pictures, showing them to me as she explained. “Well, we have the scorpion one. That means they’re a member. Some of them have teddy bears tattooed. That means they fancy young girls—or boys—to rape,” she sneered.
“Damn, that’s disturbing,” I muttered. “What else?”
“We also have Anubis, the Egyptian God of the Dead. He’s this half-human, half-jackal. It means they’d killed before. Then we must look at their other tattoos to see who their victims were. Law enforcement, rivals, their own.”
I inspected a newer picture that resembled the pyramid of the food chain. “I’ve seen this one before.”
She nodded. “I’m sure you did. It’s the cartel’s hierarchy. It tells us if they grew up in the family or if they came from outside. If they funded the organization or if they do their dirty work. I also found sewed lips. It either means they’re not a snitch, or they had snitched before, so now they’re pariahs. But it’s usually for a non-betrayer because the most common scenario is that they eliminate anyone who talks too much. So that one isn’t very helpful.”
I stared at the pictures in awe. “I can’t believe you gathered all this.”
“Oh, but there’s more. Come here.” She pulled me by the arm to another pile of boxes. “These have everything I was able to gather on their recruiting.”
“Recruiting?”
“They’re called organized for a reason. They don’t go around hiring any moron that wants some fast money. They have those for the dirty and mindless work. But the more serious ones need to be executed by someone they trust.
“When Salazar was arrested, we ransacked the place, top to bottom. That’s when I found some of the files on their recruiting. After that, since I knew what to look for, I went back on all my previous investigations trying to find more gems. Then the guys and I raided one of their bases and stole a bunch of files and hard drives, so I found some more. Now we have your software. Danny and Ben are collecting info from your program to work on exactly this.”
Mia opened one of the boxes, fished a handful of files, and handed them to me. “These are actual forms. The cartel gathers this information like a resume. It’s a way to enlist members, but also a way to enforce their chain and loyalty. Once they’re in, they can’t just leave. It’s called their baptism.”
I read the first one and couldn’t believe it. “They have everything in here! Their names, the alias, when they were officially brought in—”
“Who sponsored them, if they were in jail or on the streets at the time. But there’s more. They do all kinds of despicable things for the cartel.” She pointed at a section of the thorough form. “Then there’s that one crime that gets them in. It can be anything. Murder, kidnapping, drug or human trafficking. And there’s the exact date when the crime was committed.”
There was no denying how passionate she was. Even though I hated the circumstances, at least she was energetic again, and it was quite contagious.
“Remember a while back, when that hot shot senator was being accused of rape, but ended up being considered not guilty for lack of evidence?”
“Yes, it was all over the news.”
She rummaged through the box and showed me a new file. “Take a look at this.”
“Wait! He’s a member of the cartel?”
“Yes, and it gets worse. Check the date of his recruitment and the crime that got him in.”
“Son of a bitch! Is that the day of the crime? He got in for rape. He did rape that girl!”
“Yes!”
That flow of information was a lot to take in. I walked to her couch and pushed a few boxes out of the way, needing to sit down.
“I understand committing a crime for initiation. But—and it pains me to say this—they rape on a daily basis. Why single out a random assault to get the senator in?”
“Because it wasn’t random. When I found his recruitment, I tried to gather anything I could on the victim. A while ago, the Alacráns had some trouble with one of their routes. The police were hot on their tails and busted a lot of their shipments. The cartel tried to…reason with the captain of police in charge of the area, but he stood his ground against them. The victim was his daughter. After that, the captain retired.”
I rubbed my eyes under my glasses. “Damn. That’s so messed up.”
“Lastly, but not least—and after this, I promise to give you some time to recharge,” she picked up the box Ben had brought and placed it on her table. “This is my Holy Grail.”
I stood up and walked to her, wary of what I might find.
She took the lid off. “You know how they’re called organized, right?”
“Yes, I just saw their recruitment,” I answered flatly, still trying to wrap my head around the whole thing.
“Any association, especially a big one like this, needs rules. They need laws to enforce their decisions and guide their actions, they need a tutorial to be applied within the cartel, no matter where they are. If whatever problem happens, they need to know how to act, how to punish, how to solve their issues. They need patterns and orientation for every scenario.”
I frowned in wariness. “What the hell did you come up with?”
“Imagine that you have your criminal code and your civil code, and any other laws to be abided by citizens.” She slid the box to me. “This is it for them. This is their Code of Conduct. Well, not all of it. I’m still gathering information on that.”
I perused the documents and just couldn’t believe my eyes. “Taxes. Hierarchy. Job description ?”
“Each member has a role in the organization. You have the ones who run the streets, the ones who enforce their rules, the advisers, the middlemen between the streets and the higher ranks.”
“Pension?”
“That’s an interesting one. Whenever one of their good workers dies or goes to jail, the cartel pays a monthly amount to their wives and families. And not a measly one. I guess you can say they take care of their own. You should see how much they’re paying Salazar’s wife.” She whistled with amazement.
I peered at her office again, flabbergasted, gazed at the files in my hand, and then looked at her, not even trying to hide my wonder. “How did the DEA ever let you go? Damn, Spitfire. This is wondrous!”
She raised her scarred brow and one tip her lips went up. “Wondrous? Nham.”
She said it as a joke, but she also seemed to like my choice of unusual words. Once again, I felt grateful she was into nerds.
“Just one thing. This is like your software.” At my quizzical face, she explained, “Even though Aaron knows I’ve been collecting data—he even helped me with some—he hasn’t seen the extent of it. Aside from Benny, Danny, and my brother, you’re the only one who has ever seen this.”
She bit her lip with worry. “We all know someone at the agency is working with them, and so far, we don’t know who the person is. This,” she waved her arms at the room, “is the result of years of work. I can’t let it get in the wrong hands. We need to keep it between us.”
That bright, wonderful, maddening woman was handing me her most prized creation. She chose to share it with me when she had no reason to. I couldn’t help myself. I just cradled her face in my hands and pulled her to me for a hot kiss, to which she promptly reciprocated.
We came up for air, and I stared into her eyes, trying to convey how much that meant to me. “Thank you for trusting me.”
“Thank you for being trustworthy.” She pecked my lips. “Now let’s get to work.”
There was so much to cover, and I was curious about so many things, that I didn’t even know where I wanted to begin.
We settled with the recruitment boxes and got comfortable at her desk to work on them.
I organized some of the documents around my laptop. “How come you still have this all on paper? Wouldn’t it be easier to have it all in digital files?”
“I always wanted to. But to be honest, I’m kind of paranoid. I was afraid to have them all in a computer and they ended up getting in the wrong hands. What if they have their own genius Phoenix who can access my files without my knowledge? So, I kept them like this. I had some hidden at home, the other ones were scattered in secluded places at the storage and our vault. There used to be even more stuff. I lost a couple of them when they invaded the company.”
That couldn’t be good. “Did they get it?”
She shook her head, and her eyes turned despondent at the memory. “The boxes were destroyed. The explosion…”
I didn’t mean to bring her bad memories, so I redirected our conversation. “What if I worked on it? I could create our own program on the cartel, something safe that they could never access, even remotely.”
“That would be amazing!”
I was on a roll, already creating the software in my head. “We could compartmentalize, but in a way that made it possible to cross whatever references we chose. Imagine if we could study their recruitment and the cold cases at the same time. Or if we could have a tattoo database. We could find matches and common ground between the information even faster. You managed to pull this off on your own. If we could digitalize and organize everything in a program, the company would be unstoppable. All I need to do—”
“Good Lord, you make me hot!”
I was startled out of my loud musings and peered at Mia. Her pupils were dilated, and she stared at me with what seemed to be a mixture of desire and admiration. I pushed my glasses up my nose and felt my face get warm as I smiled at her.
“Just say the word, and I’ll do it for you. I’m your genie for the day.”
“Should I rub you?”
I snorted with surprise, but I was definitely on board with the idea. We beamed at each other; no other words necessary. Then we dove into our work.
We spent hours absorbed in our assignment. I started the software, hoping to make our lives easier, as she sorted the files, trying to make sense of their time frame, the cartel’s main resources and members, their m.o. , everything to anticipate the Alacráns' next move and what their promised attack might be.
At some point, feeling the need to stretch after being hunched over my laptop for so long, I looked up to find Mia with her eyes closed, rubbing her forehead, while opening and closing her left hand.
“Is everything okay? Maybe we should take a break.”
She shook her head and smiled, but it didn’t take away her exhaustion. Or my worry.
“I’m fine. Just a little uncomfortable.” She cleared her throat and steered the conversation away from her. “I was wondering…Shane is taking John to your parents, right?” I nodded at her. “It’s been a while since I’ve seen my parents, so I’m planning to go to their place. I’ll feel bad leaving you alone at home. Even Hugo’s coming. So, why don’t you come with me?”
I’d like nothing more than to meet Mia’s creators. They could have the answers to the many questions I had piling up about her. But I didn’t want her to feel obligated to ask me just because we were sort of living together.
“I don’t want to impose. Especially if it’s a private gathering.”
She bit her lip. “Actually, I’d be glad if you could come. I understand if you’re not comfortable with it, I know it’s a lot to ask. But it’d mean a lot to me. I can guarantee a home-cooked meal. And dessert. Also—”
“I’ll go with you.”
She grinned at me in relief. “Really? That’s…that’s cool.”
I tipped my chin in acknowledgment, not ignoring how she squinted every time she looked up.
“The light is bothering you, isn’t it?”
She shrugged one shoulder. “A little, but I’m kind of used to it.”
“Can you do something for me?” She leaned her head to the side waiting for my request, and I stood up. “It’s been too long since we ate anything. I’m going to grab us something from the kitchen.”
I pulled her hand to get her to stand from her chair and guided her to the couch. “But first, I want you to lie down, and I’ll turn off the lights for you.”
“That’s not necessary, I’m fine,” she countered but did as I asked anyway.
“Humor me.” I crouched beside her and slid her hair behind her ear. “Want anything special?”
She shook her head, and I headed for the door but stopped when she called me.
“Thank you.” For whatever reason, I knew she meant that for more than getting us a snack.
“Anything for you.”