Brad checked his watch. “Any of you fine people care to join me at Burger and Brew? Work out my trial strategy over a pitcher?”
“Sounds good,” Susan said. “I’m ready to pack it in for the night, and I’m starving.”
“Sorry,” Joe said. “I’m due at my folks’.”
“Melanie?” Susan asked.
“Nope. Wish I could, but too much work.”
“What happened to the Vargas we knew and loved? Never met a margarita she didn’t like?” Brad said.
Melanie laughed. “You’re confusing me with someone else. I was never that much fun.”
“Well, no time like the present to start, right?”
“Hey, doofus, leave her alone,” Susan said cheerily, punching Brad on the arm. “Maybe if you quit partying so much yourself, you’d get the big cases. Let’s go.”
“I’ll walk out with you,” Joe said.
The bulletproof door slammed shut behind them, leaving the office more silent and gloomy than before.
12
THE SKY OUTSIDE WAS BLACK, SHEETS OF WATER falling sideways in the wind. The rain pounding her window provided the only sound as Melanie hunted through a nearby box for something to read while she ate. She pulled out a random wiretap affidavit and brought it over to her desk, where the soggy plastic bag of diner food gave off a pungent pickle smell. Unwrapping the foil-covered sandwich, she bit into it and chewed the dry, tasteless turkey. Yuck. She hated bland food, but she was trying hard to be good. She thought longingly of the leftover arroz con pollo sitting home in her refrigerator. Lucky thing it wasn’t here, or she’d scarf it all in about ten seconds and feel fat for the rest of the night.
She flipped to the last page of the affidavit, searching for a date. Attested to nearly four years earlier by Special Agent Daniel K. O’Reilly of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, it said. Such a pretty name, Daniel. What did the K stand for? Something Irish? Kevin? Kieran? Maybe she’d ask him. No, she wouldn’t. She had to be careful with Dan, and she knew it. She was at a desperate place in her life, and he was too attractive. And sweet. Man, was he sweet. No. Stop thinking about him. The last thing she needed was a new man in her life. She wanted to work things out with Steve, if only for Maya’s sake. Whatever else Steve was, he was a good daddy. Yes, think of Maya. Think of Maya, think of work. Stay focused. Besides, Dan was so hot he probably had a million women. He probably wouldn’t even like her back.
The affidavit began with a background section that detailed the gruesome murder case against Delvis Diaz, the C-Trout Blades founder. She read it and finally understood the chronology. Eight years ago, when Jed Benson was still a prosecutor, he’d locked Diaz up for three murders. Three consecutive life terms for torturing, mutilating, and killing three teenage gang members who were caught stealing drugs from him. Diaz had been in jail ever since. Flush with victory, Jed Benson had left the office, gone into private practice, gotten rich, and expected to live happily ever after. Expected never to hear from Delvis Diaz again. End of story, or so everybody thought until last night.
Meanwhile, the C-Trout Blades, that many-tentacled monster, regrouped and came back stronger than ever under new leadership. They ran a massive heroin ring headquartered at the corner of Central and Troutman in the Bushwick section of Brooklyn, complete with guns, drive-by shootings, push-in robberies-all the fireworks of a modern-day drug conglomerate. Dan and Randall had gone after this new generation of C-Trout Blades and made lots of arrests, filling up enough boxes to crowd her tiny office. That case culminated four years ago, with wiretaps, search warrants, and raids that swept up nearly forty gang members. Even if Slice and Bigga weren’t gang members eight years ago when Delvis Diaz was locked up, they might well have been a mere four years ago when Dan and Randall had made their arrests. If they were, somehow they managed to escape detection. But her hope was they’d left some trace buried in one of the boxes sitting on her floor tonight.
Melanie gathered up the empty coffee cups and the sandwich wrapper, stuffed them in the plastic bag, and pulled herself to her feet. She walked out into the hallway and threw the bag into the trash by the Xerox machine to get that awful pickle smell out of her office. The hallway was completely silent, the only square of light the one shining from her own door. She returned to her office and dropped down onto the floor, facing the boxes, her back to the open door.
If she learned more about the gang’s structure, maybe she could find a shortcut to the right files. She leafed through boxes of background documents until she found a good overview of the gang. The C-Trout Blades’ drug operation was huge. Suppliers, mostly Colombians and Dominicans, delivered hundreds of kilos of raw heroin to mills set up by the largely Puerto Rican Blades in empty apartments all over Bushwick. The Blades operated eight or ten mills at a time, changing locations constantly to elude the police. In these apartments, teams of women worked in shifts around the clock under the watchful eye of a manager, cutting the raw heroin with filler and scooping individual dosages into tiny glassine bags sealed with custom-designed stickers.
The Blades sold two well-known brands of heroin. “Poison” was decorated with a scary black-and-white skull sticker, the brand name written in bloodred letters across its forehead. “Uzi” sported a realistic-looking decal of an Uzi, the brand name written in black letters along the silver gun barrel. Junkies had brand preferences like anybody else, and dealers came from as far away as Virginia and Ohio to buy these famous brands for their customers back home.
When a batch was ready, the mill manager summoned trusted junkies to test it. Too weak and it wouldn’t sell, too strong and the customers died like flies from ODs. If the batch passed muster, it was sent out to the Blades’ spots to be sold. The Blades ran retail spots all over New York City, most famously on Central and Troutman in Bushwick, where street pitchers sold dime bags to hordes of individual junkies. They also ran wholesale spots where out-of-town dealers could buy bundles of a hundred glassines at a time to sell at a markup back home. The Blades’ gross revenues from this enormous operation ran upwards of two hundred thousand dollars a day, 365 days a year. Where had all that money gone? Melanie wondered.
Dan and Randall had busted this huge operation wide open. They’d started with a single snitch, somebody they’d arrested one night with drugs and a gun. On the way to Central Booking, they’d told the guy he was looking at mandatory ten to life on the drugs alone, with a consecutive five years for the gun. His options were limited: either flip or rot in jail for the rest of his natural days. He flipped. They got him released on bail and back on the street in no time. The only difference was, now he was working for the feds.
With the snitch providing them key information, they’d applied for and gotten wiretaps on several telephones. The most important telephone was the one located at the most important heroin mill-an apartment on Evergreen Avenue in Bushwick rented in the name of Jasmine Cruz. Jasmine Cruz herself was a low-level figure, probably somebody’s girlfriend. Other than lending her name to the apartment and the telephone, she didn’t show up much in the documents. But Jasmine Cruz’s telephone served as the party line for the whole Blades hierarchy. Upper-level managers used it all day and all night to give orders to the Blades’ entire street organization. If Slice and Bigga were members of the C-Trout Blades four years ago, Melanie reckoned, they should have been intercepted talking on that phone.