“And because of that,” Yardley said with a tinge of hardness, “the volume of Mexican trucks on U.S. freeways increased exponentially. Customs and Border Protection can’t possibly inspect all of them. Guevara capitalized on that. And he took steps just in case.”
“Like hiding the drugs inside the synthetic corks,” Vail said.
Sebastian took another gulp of Powerade. “Yes. But that’s not all. It wasn’t just about the corks. These cartels, they’re flush with money and time and imagination. They worked on ways of maximizing what they were doing while still taking advantage of the front of being a mobile bottler. And they came up with liquid cocaine.”
Vail leaned forward. “Liquid cocaine?”
“That’s what they transport in the wine bottles. Cocaine hydrochloride is soluble in alcohol or water. Cortez uses alcohol because it’s easy to recover the drugs. You heat it to 50 degrees Celsius, or just let it sit out in the sun. The alcohol evaporates, leaving the coke.”
Vail shook her head. “Damn.”
“Damn effective is what it is,” Sebastian said. “There are about eight thousand grams of coke in a case of wine. And if you’ve got a semi full of cases, that’s a huge amount of contraband being moved around without being threatened or even challenged.”
“Brilliant,” Vail said. “They can move the cocaine around the country under the cover of shipping cases of wine, and short of opening the bottles and testing the liquid, we’d never be able to detect the drugs.”
“Exactly. Even the random screening they do at certain border ports of entry can’t pick it up. We generally use fluoroscopy, and fluoroscopy can’t detect liquids containing illicit drugs. And if it’s sealed inside a bottle, drug-sniffing dogs can’t pick it up, either. So we’ve experimented with CT scans—computerized X-ray tomography—to measure the mean opacity of what’s inside the bottles. Differences in the opacity of dissolved drugs can be detected without having to open the wine and destroy the product if it’s legit.
“But it’s extremely expensive to deploy these CT machines. You’d really need a hospital nearby to make it work. But Guevara’s already found a way around it. That liquid cocaine, it’s got what’s known as X-ray attenuation. The way he explained it to me is that when a case of wine contains identical liquid contents, the bottles have the same mean attenuation when scanned with the CT equipment. If the attenuation readings of some bottles differed from the others, that’d set off a red flag. Filling the bottles with liquid cocaine gets around that.”
“So he’s a smart shit,” DeSantos said.
“All these cartels are. You’d be surprised at the stuff they come up with. Baseball hats made of cocaine, chocolate bars, decorative globes, jet engine turbine gears—anything that can be innocently imported is a potential gold mine for them. It’s only limited by their creativity.”
Is that what John Mayfield was referring to when he said there’s more to this than you know? But how is Mayfield connected to Guevara? And what’s that got to do with the murders in Napa? Ray Lugo? And the Cortez cartel? C’mon, Karen, add it up.
“Then there are the labels,” Sebastian said.
“Labels?” Vail asked. “How can there be drugs in the label of a wine bottle?”
A thin smile crept across Sebastian’s face. “The adhesive that holds the label on the bottle is actually black tar heroin. Very sticky and an ideal glue. The label itself is made of LSD blotter paper. It’s so fucking potent they have to cover it with a plastic film so they don’t get it on their hands. And because it’s so potent, one wine label can be sliced into multiple small pieces that are placed on the tongue. It dissolves, giving the high. Again, well thought out. Maximum yield.”
Vail ruminated on that for a moment, then jumped from her seat. Sebastian flinched. “Sorry,” Vail said. “Would you excuse me for a few minutes? I’ve gotta make a call.”
DeSantos leaned back and looked at her over the top of his tiny glasses. His face said, “You’ve gotta be kidding me.”
But Vail had an idea by the tail—and she needed to firm up her grasp before it had a chance to escape.
51
Vail pushed through the door while simultaneously pulling out her BlackBerry. Dialed Roxxann Dixon.
“I’ve got something, Roxx. You in a place you can talk?”
“I’m sitting in the conference room with the task force.”
“Perfect. Call me back so you can put me on speaker.”
Seconds later, her phone buzzed. “Okay,” Vail said. “I think I’ve put a lot of this shit together. All these parts that were dangling out there, things I couldn’t add up because they didn’t seem to make sense. I think I’ve got it. Or most of it.”
“Go on,” Brix said.
“All of Mayfield’s murders, I had such a hard time profiling him, because the more information we got the less sense it all made to me. Because male serial killers don’t kill for profit. Right?”
“That’s what you kept saying,” Dixon said.
“One thing I’ve learned is there are exceptions to most of what we think is behavioral fact. There are general guidelines and tenets, but people are different. Circumstances are different. And when two converging powers find one another, they discover they have desires and needs that come together in a symbiotic relationship. That’s what we’re talking about here. Symbiosis.”
“Karen,” Austin Mann said, “you’ve lost me.”
“John Mayfield killed because it filled a psychosexual need. He marked the bodies the way he did, severing the breasts, slicing the wrists, yanking off the toenail. He did those things for reasons he wasn’t consciously aware of. He did them because they comforted him. And that made sense to me. It fit our paradigms of serial killer behaviors. But then he also did things that didn’t make sense, that didn’t add up. It was almost like he was a schizophrenic killer. The male victim, for one. That didn’t fit.”
“And you’ve figured it out,” Gordon said.
“I think so.” Vail thought another moment, then continued. “It seemed at times like he was killing for a profit motive, while at other times the victims appeared to be unrelated. So here’s what I think was going on. John Mayfield was a bona fide serial killer, with classic childhood pathologies that shaped him into what he became: someone who was selecting victims that reminded him of his mother. But there was more to this than just the classic serial killer behavioral patterns. He was working with César Guevara. This is where the symbiosis comes into play.
“Mayfield was a psychopath, but the reason why some of his victims didn’t match his ritual was because he was killing vics chosen for him, by Guevara. And they used his behavioral murder patterns as a cover to divert attention from the Guevara-ordered killings, so no one would suspect they were contract kills. And we fell into that trap.”
“But what’s Guevara’s role?” Gordon asked. “Why did he choose these particular victims?”
“Guevara’s a lieutenant with the Cortez drug cartel. They smuggle liquid cocaine in wine bottles all over the country. Heroin and LSD in the labels. And the synthetic corks—they have ultra high potency, very expensive Fentanyl hidden within them.”
“That’s why,” Dixon said, “Superior almost exclusively uses synthetic corks—because they can hollow them out and fill the inside with drugs.”