“Holy shit!” Peavy yelled from his station on the bow of the RHIB. “That’s a hell of an explosion for a twenty-footer.”
“Chief Rose,” Gitlin said, willing his voice to stay calm—and the sailboat not to explode until they’d moved farther away from the RHIB—“put some distance between us and that sailboat!”
Belowdecks on Lucky Strike, Mamat dragged himself forward with his good arm. The other was shot away, the elbow joint exposed in a sickening mess of meat and bone. Both legs had taken rounds. He didn’t know how bad, but the pain was nearly unbearable. He was certain to pass out if he chanced a look at the wounds. The sound of the Navy boat’s departure was a knife to his heart. He cursed himself for his mistake. He’d held off detonating the explosive, waiting for the sailors to tie up alongside in order to inflict maximum damage.
None of the Jemaah Islamiyah planners or their Abu Sayyaf financiers had thought it would be possible to get anywhere near the larger ship. The ammonium nitrate in the fishing vessel had been put in place on the off chance the captain of the USS Rogue had been lax or inexperienced. He turned out to be neither. But the deaths of six sailors in the inflatable would have been a mighty blow to the Great Satan—if Mamat had not been so stupid.
He should never have allowed the boy to tie the woman at the bow. She’d gotten loose at the worst possible time, warning the boarding party. The boy had panicked at his mistake, shooting through the deck at the women and drawing fire from the U.S. vessel. Mamat was struck in both knees early in the gunfight, causing him to topple sideways and drop the push-button detonator that was hardwired to the explosives. Then the foolish boy chanced a shot with the RPG and took an American bullet through the eye for his trouble. He lost the back of his skull in the process. Even as the sailors ran for their lives, rounds continued to punch holes in both the sailboat and Mamat. He must have lost consciousness for a moment because the sound of the boat motor was dying away when he came to.
At last, he was able to drag himself to the detonator and grasp it in a bloody hand. The Navy boat was gone, but it was much too late to change his mind now. Closing his eyes, Mamat bin Ahmad said a final prayer and pressed the button.
Nothing happened.
Mamat shuddered, flooded with a heady mixture of relief and shame. Then he shifted his weight, moving the wire under his chest. The movement completed the shorted connection and the cabin vaporized in a ball of orange flame.
29
Special Agent Kelsey Callahan could not recall the moment, but she’d seen photographic evidence that her father had broken down and cried when he dropped her off on her first day of kindergarten.
The elder Callahan was a well-respected heart surgeon at Providence St. Patrick Hospital in Missoula. He was also a champion of strong women—forever pushing his only child to “get out front” and “show them how it’s done.” A burly, buffalo-plaid-wearing Montana man who looked more like a logger or mountain guide when he wasn’t dressed in hospital scrubs, he was also the most overprotective father Kelsey had ever heard of.
Big Ben Callahan made it clear to every boy Kelsey dated in a jovial, not-quite-joking way that he was capable not only of saving lives but also of ending them in quiet and undetectable ways.
Kelsey made the mistake of sneaking out of the house late one night during her sophomore year of high school. Somehow her father had known, and he approached the boy’s pickup just as they were about to drive away. He materialized from the shadows of the tall blue spruce in their front yard—nearly causing the poor kids to pee their pants when he knocked on the passenger window. If that wasn’t bad enough, when the boy rolled down the window, Big Ben Callahan leaned in across a mortified Kelsey and asked in a quietly piercing voice if he’d brought a gun with him.
“N-n-no,” the boy stammered.
“A big-ass knife?”
“Of course not!” The boy looked like he was about to cry.
“Some kind of stick or club?”
“No, sir.”
Her father had considered the answer for a moment, then said, “You’d better bring one the next time you come to my house in the middle of the night.” Then he opened the door so Kelsey could get out and follow him back inside.
It turned out that Austin Herbert McKay had been carrying a knife that night. He was just too terrified of Ben Callahan to use it. McKay went on to sexually assault three girls around Missoula—all of them redheads—over the next few months before he was finally arrested. Ben Callahan never once rubbed the incident in her face—though he had, over the years, raised an eyebrow at her questionable taste in men. Sadly, he hadn’t been around to run off her ex-husband before she’d tied the knot.
Her dad had grown misty-eyed when she graduated with honors from Hellgate High School, but he’d broken down completely when she graduated from FBI training at Quantico, admitting that the thought of her strapping on a gun every day terrified him. She reminded him of that night he’d stood under the spruce tree—and pointed out that there were a lot of bad guys in the world. He’d understood with no further explanation, returning to Missoula and his life as a cardiac surgeon while she went hunting for all the Austin Herbert McKays she could find.
Kelsey Callahan inherited her father’s protective nature along with his sense of justice, but she’d gotten a penchant for expensive silk blouses, her red hair, and her defined hourglass shape from her mother. If anyone ever asked what happened to those underwear models in the Sears, Roebuck catalogs, Sue Callahan would point out that some of them married cardiac surgeons and raised promising young FBI agents. Her mom’s previous career wasn’t something Kelsey ever talked about in high school—she didn’t relish the idea of boys knowing there were pictures of her mom in lacy bras floating around out there—especially since Kelsey looked so much like her.
Her first posting, to the Los Angeles FBI field office, had quickly hardened the starry-eyed Montana girl—and dispelled the notion that she’d be out hunting bad guys all day. When she wasn’t interviewing people with foreign names who’d signed up to take flying lessons, she was helping senior agents prep evidence for court cases or sitting in a telephone closet listening to wiretaps. It took her three years to escape L.A. and get a spot in Dallas—where she immediately volunteered to work the Internet Crimes Against Children squad. The ICAC was not a particularly sought-after job, so she was able to take on a lot of responsibility early in her career. By five years in she was second-in-command at the CAC Task Force. Two years later she’d doubled the number of agencies involved and sent the stats through the roof. Her success came at the expense of a personal life—but she was still in her thirties and decided she could have one of those in the future. Someday. Maybe.
In a stats-driven bureaucracy like the FBI, Kelsey Callahan became a shooting star. Her task force saved kids and made arrests at a near superhuman rate. The special agent in charge kept her in Crimes Against Children, long after she’d reached the normal time allotted to rotate out of such a soul-crushing job. There was no doubt that the sadness and grind of it all were taking their toll. It was impossible to work a job where you might find some kid’s head in the freezer and not have it affect you.
Then this Dominic Caruso guy showed up. What a breath of fresh air—even if he was a spook. There was something about the easy way he carried himself, as if he’d been on a break from the byzantine politics of the FBI. Even now, as she drove them toward an interview of their second former child prostitute who’d fallen back into “the life” after adulthood, he stayed off his phone and nodded his head in time to some tune he hummed inside his head. Her dad hummed inside his head when he was thinking—and that habit alone put Caruso up a notch in her book.
She’d been awake since before five, and the last cup of coffee sloshing around in her gut was causing her stomach to rebel. She’d caught Caruso early at his hotel room with his scary-looking friend, John the mystery man, so she figured he
was probably ready for breakfast as well.
He caught her looking at him and grinned from behind a pair of extremely sexy Wiley X sunglasses. Of course this one would be spoken for.
“You doing okay?” Caruso suddenly asked.
The question caught her off guard. As the CAC Task Force commander, she was responsible for checking on the well-being of her team, but it was a rare moment when anyone, particularly a stranger, checked to see how she was holding up. The toughen-up-buttercup culture was changing, and the Bureau had programs to be sure, but FBI agents weren’t exactly the type of individuals to admit weakness.
“I’m fine,” she said, her words automatic and unconvincing, even to herself. “Why do you ask?”
“Well,” Caruso said, as though he’d thought this through while he was humming. “You gotta see some of the worst shit imaginable.”
“Sometimes,” she said. “But I’m not sitting around boohooing myself to sleep or anything.”
“I wouldn’t even suggest that,” Caruso said. “But you must be taking in more evil than some kind of sin-eater.”
“We save a lot of kids,” Callahan said. “Makes my petty problems seem small.” Talking about herself had always made her uncomfortable. “You hungry at all?”
Caruso nodded. “I could eat.”
“There’s an IHOP off—”
The cell phone in her pocket began to hum.
She grunted hello, then listened, her chest tightening with each word.
“What?” Caruso asked, after she’d hung up, looking over the top of the Wiley X shades.
“Somebody found Matarife’s place before we did,” Callahan said. “Johnson County got an anonymous tip. They’re already on scene and the Texas Rangers are en route.”
“Barricade?” Caruso said.
“No.” Callahan shook her head. “A homicide. Multiple, in fact.”
She pounded the flat of her hands against the center console. She wasn’t in the mood to deal with the Rangers, least of all the one who she knew would show up at this scene.
• • •
They were already in South Dallas, so a quick hop over to State Highway 67 courtesy of Callahan’s lights and siren took them straight down to the sleepy little town of Alvarado, which was situated along the I-35 corridor, a favorite route for traffickers of narcotics and humans.
Caruso was grateful for his sunglasses because Callahan had not stopped interrogating him with her eyes from the moment she’d gotten the call. It only got worse when she pulled around the circular drive in front of the big red-brick house and no longer had to focus on the road. Three Johnson County SO cars were parked on the grass, along with two black-and-white Texas DPS Highway Patrol sedans, an ambulance, and a blue Expedition.
“Damn it!” Callahan muttered under her breath. She’d parked behind the other cars on the front lawn so as not to disturb any possible tire-track evidence. “He beat us here.”
“Who beat us?”
A brawny man with a white straw hat stepped around the corner of the house. He wore navy blue dress Wranglers and a starched khaki shirt. The silver cinco peso badge of a Texas Ranger was pinned to his left breast pocket, over a kettledrum chest. The silver horseshoe buckle caught the light of the morning sun and a 1911 pistol rested in a tooled leather holster over his hip. Caruso guessed him to be in his mid-forties. He smiled and tipped his hat when he saw Callahan, revealing a full head of curly blond hair.
“I’m guessing you know him,” Caruso said.
“You might say that,” Callahan grumbled. “We were married once. Worst ten minutes of my life.”
The man hugged Callahan, then gave Caruso what could only be taken as a serious case of stink-eye.
“Lyle Anderson,” the Ranger said, taking Caruso’s callused paw and pumping it up and down like an overgrown Bamm-Bamm Rubble on The Flintstones.
Caruso, not one to measure his manhood, said, “Easy there, hoss, I shoot with those fingers.”
Ranger Anderson’s face spread into a wide grin. “You and I are gonna get along,” he said. “Except for Kelsey, I never met an FBI agent that wasn’t worthless as tits on a boar hog. But I do respect a man who says what’s on his mind.”
Callahan fished a wad of blue nitrile gloves from her vest pocket and peeled them apart. She handed a pair to Caruso.
“What have we got?” she asked, nodding toward the back of the house, ready to move on.
“I’ve been doin’ pretty well,” Anderson said. “Thank you for asking. Good to see you, too, Kelsey.”
Callahan just stared at the Ranger, playing a game of nonverbal chicken.
Anderson finally flinched and flipped open his notebook. “According to Johnson County,” he said, “an anonymous male called in and advised that there were girls out here being held against their will—oh, and, by the way, a few dead bodies to boot.”
“How many girls?”
“Live ones?” the Ranger said. “Two. I’m guessing that neither of them is over fifteen. We’re still waiting for someone to get here who can say more than ‘put your hands on the car’ in Spanish. Paramedics are giving the girls fluids now. They were both recently branded and have been on the receiving end of some pretty nasty whippings. Nothing appears to be broken.” The Ranger shuddered at some memory. “Physically, at least.”
Caruso gave a slow shake of his head. “You said they were branded?”
Ranger Anderson tipped back his hat with the crook of his finger and nodded. “Looks like somebody burned ‘LSM’ on the side of their necks. Not a very professional job, either. I’m thinking they were branded with a red-hot coat hanger or something.” He winced. “Had to hurt like a son of a bitch.”
“LSM . . .” Caruso said, thinking out loud.
“Or maybe ‘4SM,’” Anderson said. “It’s sorta flowery writing, and, like I said, not very professional-looking. Damnedest thing, really. We’ve seen this brand more than once on dead prostitutes.”
Callahan’s head snapped up. “These girls are prisoners, not prostitutes!”
Anderson held up both hands. “Easy-breezy,” he said. “I didn’t say they were prostitutes. I’m talking about other cases—in which I’m sure the FBI would have no interest.”
Caruso said, “You said something about a couple bodies.”
“Caller said a couple,” Anderson said, turning and motioning for them to follow with a flick of his hand. “We have four so far. Three in the field and a floater in the pool around back.”
Callahan stopped in her tracks, as if steeling herself. “Another girl?”
Anderson shook his head as he walked on. “This one was all grown up. Pretty sure she’s one of the bad guys.”
“Cause of death was drowning?” Caruso asked.
“Nope,” the Ranger said. “She was belly-down in the pool when we got here, but the cause of death was a bullet to the throat. Punched a hole right through her spine.”
Caruso followed Anderson through the open gate in the fence. He stooped beside Callahan on the pool deck to examine the body of a Hispanic female who was laid out faceup on top of a yellow body bag.
“The Johnson County deputies recognize her as Guadalupe Vargas,” the Ranger said. “AKA Lupe or Lupita. She’s been arrested a couple times for heroin and turning tricks in a massage parlor outside of Cleburne, but nobody’s seen her for a year. They were all surprised she was still around.”
“Recognize the tats?” Callahan asked without looking up.
“Death?” Caruso said, scanning the woman’s legs. “. . . And another death.”
“That female skeleton on her thigh is La Santa Muerte,” Ranger Anderson said. “Patron saint of shitheads. We see it a lot around here, statues, tats, paintings on black velvet.”
“La Santa Muerte . . .” Dom said. “LSM.”
Anderson raised an eyeb
row. “I’ll be damned,” he said.
“Yes, you will,” Callahan muttered. She leaned in closer with her cell phone, snapping a photo of an entry wound in the dead woman’s neck. A sizable chunk of flesh was missing in what was likely the exit wound, exposing the glistening white of her trachea. Callahan ignored the gore and bent even closer. “Looks like a contact shot,” she said.
Anderson stepped back, making sure he didn’t block their view with his shadow. “See that burn signature?”
“Yep,” Caruso said, feeling his gut tighten.
“Either of you two Feds think that looks like the business end of a suppressor?” Anderson asked. “Because I sure as hell think it does.”
Callahan held up the phone. “Why do you think I took the photo?” She looked at Caruso. “This mean anything to you?”
Shouts came from the back field before Caruso had a chance to answer.
Anderson’s phone rang. He fished it from the pocket of his Wranglers, listened for a moment, then dropped it back in.
“Johnson County says they’ve got at least three bodies buried under the three we already knew about. From the looks of it, one of Lupita’s guys was out with his tractor, dumping bodies in a grave among the sorghum plants when some unknown person capped his worthless ass.”
“Do they recognize the dead male?” Callahan asked.
Anderson nodded. “Fat guy named Salazar, they said. His brain’s half toasted up from huffing gasoline when he was a kid. Anyway, unless you guys intend to take over the case, I’m going to have the sheriff’s office order up some construction lights and ground-penetrating radar. Looks like we’re gonna be here awhile.”