“This is different. Someone from El Salvador makes complicated, risky arrangements to flee north, carrying enough money for the trip without being weighted down? I have to wonder…Where’s the rest?”
“Transferred to some bank stateside,” Mitchell said. “Or a million other places. Caymans, Switzerland, wherever money is going these days.” He nodded as the possibilities opened. “Odds are good it isn’t their money,” he said. “That’s an obvious motive.” He frowned. “But why not just pop ’em in Mexico, when he caught up with ’em? What’s the point of takin’ the risk?”
“That’s the part that doesn’t make sense to me,” Estelle said.
Mitchell grinned. “Just that part, eh? That puts you way out ahead of me.” He looked across the small lobby toward the clock. “We’re going to keep after this little shit until he gives us some answers,” he said. “The Uriostes will be here in a minute. They have some explaining to do. Are you going to talk with Naranjo?”
“Yes. If the Judiciales can help in some way, he’ll be the best contact that we have. If this is all out of El Salvador or some such, there’s not much they can do.” She held up the picture of the boy and his two guardians. “Maybe this will help as well. I’ll e-mail it to Naranjo’s office right now so he can have a look. That and the name of the boy’s stepfather might ring a bell with someone.” She shook her head slowly. “Hector makes things up as easily as breathing.” She tapped the photo. “Who knows. This guy in the bathing suit might be an innocent shrimp fisherman, just minding his own business.”
“Maybe.”
“But I’ll bet a lot that he isn’t. He looks more like Hector than his stepfather does.”
“If there is a Manolo who needs a return flight, he might be coming back this way. Be nice to be at the plane to meet him.”
Chapter Twenty
Estelle Reyes-Guzman’s pulse clicked up several notches at what she heard. Jim Bergin was contrite that he hadn’t remembered his conversations with Hector Ocate from days earlier. Perhaps in the dim light of dawn, in the excitement of the moment as he watched the speeding patrol car chasing the airplane, and then later standing well back from the scene as the boy was placed under arrest, he simply hadn’t recognized Hector.
Estelle ushered him into the privacy of her office, and she could smell the sweet tang of aviation fuel and motor oil on his clothes. “His name is Hector Ocate, Jim.”
“Yep. When Eddie got me on the phone, he told me. I feel kind of stupid.”
“Apparently he knew that you had a Chamber of Commerce meeting this past Tuesday night,” she said.
Bergin grunted in disgust, and it was obvious by the expression on his weather-beaten face that it was directed at himself. “You know, out there, I thought he looked kind of familiar. But you know how that came up?” he said. “That chamber thing? He was out at the airport one day last week, wondering if it was staying light enough now for him to take flyin’ lessons in the evening. One thing led to another, and I guess I told him that Tuesdays and Wednesdays were out. Got Chamber on the one, bowling the other. He said maybe weekends, then. Or maybe he’d wait until summer, when school was out.”
“It could have been just talk,” Estelle said.
“Obviously was,” Bergin replied. “I’ve been thinkin’ on it all the way in here from the airport. I know how he come to pick Jerry Turner’s plane. He was there last week, all right. But a few times before that. I know that he hung around in early March, when I was puttin’ a new ADF in Turner’s plane. I had taxied her down there to the main hangar, and I remember that one day, Hector spent most of the afternoon there. Helped me clean up some.”
“You’re sure it was March?”
“Yep. I can look in the repair logs to get the exact date. But early March sometime. Just a kid hangin’ out, as far as I was concerned,” he said. “I didn’t pay him too much mind, anyways.”
“Did he talk about his father’s business? The charter flying service?”
“Nope. He wondered with all this Homeland Security stuff if he was going to have a hard time taking flying lessons in this country. I remember that.”
“He didn’t tell you that he already had a license issued in Mexico?”
“Nope. I didn’t know that. He really does?”
“He really does.”
“Then the little bastard was just scopin’ me out. That’s the way it seems to me.”
“So it seems,” Estelle said. “It would be helpful if you could figure out when he first came out to the airport.”
“I’d just be guessing. This year, though. Sometime after Christmas. The first time he talked to me, that is. He coulda snuck in anytime, far as that goes. But that don’t mean he was planning to take an airplane back then. What’s he say?”
“He doesn’t yet. But we’ll get there.” She moved to her office door and opened it. “If you think of anything else, give me a buzz.”
“You bet.” He rose, hat crumpled in his hand like a little kid leaving the principal’s office.
“Thanks for coming down, Jim.”
“I’ll get the locks changed today,” he said, and grinned a brown smile. “Horse is long gone from the barn, but what the hell.”
She could hear voices out in the hall, and stepped out after Bergin. She saw Bob Torrez escorting Gordon Urioste, with Tom Mears following, one hand on Pam Urioste’s elbow. Deputy Jackie Taber followed, looking as if she needed a long nap.
“Take a few minutes with Gordon, all right?” Torrez said to Estelle. “Jackie will give you a hand. Me and Sarge will talk with Pam for a minute.”
Mears steered Pam Urioste toward the sheriff’s impossibly uncomfortable office.
“We can all…” Gordon started to say, but the sheriff cut him off.
“No, we can’t all,” he said ungraciously. “In there, please.”
Estelle held her office door open. “This shouldn’t take long, Mr. Urioste,” she said. As Jackie passed, she added, “Have you been up on the mountain yet?”
“No, ma’am,” the deputy said. She glanced at her watch. “The first riders were off at a little after nine. They’ll all be on the course in about an hour.”
“That’ll keep everyone occupied,” Estelle said. “Give us some peace and quiet.” She indicated a chair, and Gordon Urioste sat down, hands clasped nervously over his gut as he leaned forward in the chair. Two doors down the hall, his wife would be sitting on a steel folding chair in the sheriff’s office, comforted by the blank walls, government-gray office furnishings, and the unsmiling sheriff. Across the hall in the spacious conference room, Hector Ocate would not know that his host family was in the building. It would be interesting, Estelle thought, to see how the three stories puzzled together.
Her phone rang before she could close the door, and Gordon Urioste nodded as she excused herself. “We’re in Grand Central Station at the moment,” she said.
Out in the hall, she walked toward the rear exit of the building, out of earshot of any other room.
“Guzman.”
“Ah, I am so glad I reached you, señora,” Captain Tomás Naranjo said. “Is this a good moment? It is terribly early.”
“It’s a fine moment,” Estelle replied. “It’s good to hear from you.”
“We have a name,” Captain Tomás Naranjo’s quiet voice said. Estelle had not been expecting to hear from the Judiciales so quickly, and she was stunned into silence. “A colleague of mine in Acapulco knows Rudolfo Villanueva-and his stepson, for that matter. Señor Villanueva is in, how do we say, the transportation business. People who need to travel discreetly from here to there-all entirely legal, I should think.”
Or with the right people’s palms greased, Estelle thought. “A charter business, then.”
“Exactly. Nothing like what I’m hearing from you, however. That would be a new thing. But his relationship with the boy-Hector, is it? His relationship with this boy is obscure. It appears that stepfather is courtesy. He and the boy’s mother are not married, you see.”