“Please, you must help me.” It sounded as if the boy was beginning to panic, odd behavior for a kid with steely nerves who could pilot a stranger’s overloaded aircraft across desert and mountains at night, landing on a narrow, unlighted strip of macadam.
“Help you?” Estelle asked. “Help you how?”
“Please-I will tell you what I know.”
“Let’s get him out of here,” Torrez said impatiently, and he turned to the airport manager, who waited quietly beside his truck. “Jim, will you make this thing secure?”
“You bet,” Bergin replied. “He leave the key in it?”
“Yes. Can you find a way to button up that hangar so this doesn’t happen again?”
“Bigger lock is about all I can do,” Bergin said.
“Well, we’ll find somebody to sit the place until we know what’s what,” Torrez said. He reached out and took Hector by the elbow. “Let’s go,” he said, and the boy looked to Estelle beseechingly. It seemed clear to her that the youth wasn’t going to talk to the brusque sheriff-if Torrez gave him the chance in the first place. But the sheriff was right. There was something to be said for keeping Hector Ocate off-balance and apprehensive.
Chapter Nineteen
Three morgue photos were fanned out on the table in front of Hector Ocate. He tried not to look at those incriminating, grotesque faces. Instead, he concentrated on his hands clenched in his lap.
“Tell me who did this,” Estelle said. “You know what happened.”
The teenager didn’t respond. Despite his momentary eagerness out at the airport, now that he was sequestered inside the county building, Hector had retreated to some distant place. The boy knew he was in trouble, that was obvious. But it was equally obvious to Estelle that he was having difficulty weighing his options.
“Right now, you have two choices,” Captain Eddie Mitchell said, understanding the boy’s dilemma. Mitchell sat on the edge of the conference table, his fingers busy pinching a corduroy pattern in the rim of his foam coffee cup. He wore his best neutral expression, perhaps encouraged by being awakened after so little sleep. “You can spend a hell of a lot of time in a prison here, or you can spend the rest of your life in a prison in Mexico.” He turned his head to regard the boy. “I’m sure there are some folks who’d like to talk to you down home, ¿verdad?” The Spanish grated, the one word using up about half of Mitchell’s fluency. “That’s just about the extent of your choices.”
“Tell me their names.” Estelle pushed one of the photographs toward Hector. The high-contrast black-and-white photo, a head and torso shot, showed the corpse who had been found closest to the runway. Cactus thorns studded the man’s right cheek. The 9mm slug had not exited after its path from back to front through the man’s skull, but it had lodged in the globe of the left eyeball after bursting through the thin orbital bone, leaving the left side of the man’s face pulpy and grotesque. The other eye was open, death coming before surprise.
“You don’t know who this is?”
“They called him Guillermo. I heard her say that.” He touched the edge of the photo of the heavy-set woman without picking it up. “This one talked so much-”
“Her name?” Sheriff Torrez snapped.
“I…I don’t know.”
“So now we’re supposed to believe you’ve never seen these people before,” Torrez said. “Who did the shooting? You know that?”
“I picked these ones up outside of Culiacán,” Hector said. “They are from El Salvador. That is what I heard. I was told to meet them…at Culiacán.”
“Told by who?”
“The man who promised to pay for the flight. That is where he got on the airplane as well,” the boy amended.
“He is not one of these?”
“No.”
“His name?” Estelle asked.
Hector hesitated. “Manuel, I think. No…Manolo.” The boy took a deep breath. “I knew when I saw him that…that…no sé,” he finished lamely.
“You knew him, you mean? Before all this happened?”
“No,” Hector blurted. “But he had a…I don’t know the word. Actitud.”
“A way about him? An attitude?”
“Yes. Exactamente. The command.”
“Is he the man who hired you in the first place?”
“Yes. I think so.”
“You think so?”
“I cannot be sure, agente. But I believe he is the one who contacted me originally.”
“While you were living with the Uriostes?”
“Yes.”
Estelle sat for a moment, regarding the boy. “I don’t understand, Hector. A group of Salvadorans somehow make arrangements to rendezvous with a flight north out of Culiacán, across the border at night into the United States. The assassin-whatever he is, whoever he is-contacts a kid who is a student in the United States to steal an airplane and do the flying? That doesn’t make any sense.”
“But is true.”
“I don’t think so,” Estelle said. “How did he contact you, then?”
“Through the e-mail, agente.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Mitchell said. “How would he know your e-mail address unless you had sent it to him? What, you met him on an assassins’ chat room, or what?”
Hector frowned deeply, his lips pressed into a white line.
“You may be a hell of a pilot, fella, but you’re a piss-poor liar,” Mitchell observed.
“All your communication was by e-mail?” Estelle asked.
“Yes.”
“His address?”
“I have it, yes.”
“I suppose you do,” Estelle said. “What is it?” She slid a small pad of paper across to him, along with a pencil.
“E-mail,” Mitchell scoffed as Hector jotted down the electronic address. “All that tells us is that he’s on this planet…probably. And half the world has e-mail with that same search engine.”
“It’s something,” Estelle said. She turned the paper and looked at the address. “Neat. All numerical.” She handed it to Mitchell, who in turn passed it to the sheriff. “When did he first contact you?”
“In March. Yo creo que sí. It was early in March.”
“Two months ago?” Estelle asked incredulously. “How would he know your e-mail address?”
“I…I don’t know.” His eyes flicked toward Torrez, as if he feared the silent sheriff was going to reach out and smack him.
“So out of the blue, somehow,” Estelle said, “cuando menos se lo esperaba, here comes an e-mail asking that you do this, and you jump at the chance.”
“No…yes.”
The undersheriff sighed loudly. “Caramba, Hector.” She tapped the table with the eraser end of the pencil. “We’ll come back to this. Tell me what he asked you to do.”
“Only that I should pick up these people at Culiacán, and that he would ride with us north across the border, because he had unfinished business in the north.”
“Business with whom?”
“He did not say.”
“When he first contacted you, how did you know you could find an airplane to use?”
“Is easy,” Hector said.
“I see. Is easy. You chose a time, figured out how to take the plane without being noticed, and flew south.”
“Exact.”
“To Culiacán.”
“Yes. Direct there.”
“The four people were waiting?”
“Yes.”
“Then what?”
“When we were in the air, Manolo told me that he needed to deal with people in Albuquerque.”
“Deal how?” Estelle asked.
“I don’t know. But…” He stopped again. “He did not want me to fly him to Albuquerque. To be exposed at the International Airport, perhaps. I don’t know.”
“Tell us what he looked like,” Mitchell said.
“Not too tall, perhaps,” Hector said. “As tall as me, I think. Heavy.” He held his fists clenched, flexing his muscles. “He is like the bull. Strong. And quick.”