Power and Empire

She had little to pack and her toiletries were loaded and her suitcase zipped in under two minutes. She handed Ryan a business card — blank but for a telephone number. “I am not so stupid as to think you will not try to find a flight to Japan. If you work for who I think you do, and you are able to get there in the next few days, please give me a call.”

She gave a slight bow and then was out the door, leaving the entire team alone in her apartment.

“Okay,” Chavez said, snapping his fingers at the rest of the team. “She doesn’t realize we have our own airplane. I would have offered her a ride, but the fact that we don’t have any bona fides as government intelligence officers might have posed a problem when we landed. Better that we go in on our own as tourists. I don’t plan to get in the way of the Japanese government, but I’ll be damned if I’m going to just sit back and wait to see how this plays out. There’s no quick way to get to Tokyo. Our asses need to be on that plane ten minutes ago.”

49

Nada. Zip. Zilch.

No, this was worse than zero.

Special Agent Callahan pounded the hood of her Ford Expedition and screamed at the night sky. A whip-poor-will answered her back from the line of cedars that grew along the fence beyond the twenty-two other police cars. The creepy bird was probably confused by all the strobing red-and-blues. Callahan had read somewhere that whip-poor-wills could sense death. This one sure knew its business.

The cartel guy tied to the tree on the side of Emilio Zambrano’s ranch house had been dead a couple hours at least, but not quite long enough for the fire that killed him to burn itself out. What was left of his head glowed like the poster for the Nicolas Cage Ghost Rider movie. His face was unrecognizable — gone, really — but they’d be able to get one set of fingerprints. The corpse was missing a hand, probably since birth. That should help to identify him. The killer had wrapped the guy’s head in what looked like a bath towel, taking care to leave the area around the mouth and nose exposed so he wouldn’t suffocate and die too quickly. One of the crime scene techs said he’d seen it before. They’d doused the towel in lamp oil so it burned more slowly and lit the turban from the top to make a human candle. A slow and extremely painful way to die.

Maybe Caruso’s scary friend had done this. He certainly had the eyes for it. Callahan was pretty sure he’d whacked the woman in the swimming pool, and the dead guy by the grave. Some would call what he did a service, like taking out the garbage. But there were lines you just didn’t cross. She would catch him eventually, and that was sad because he was making a difference.

Just hours before, Fort Worth PD had received a bizarre Skype confession from a guy who was obviously under duress from someone off camera. Even conservative Texas courts would throw out that confession. According to the FWPD detective, Parrot Villanueva had been stabbed to death with a screwdriver. Maybe the sobbing confessor had whacked him. Captive girls had been rescued in both those cases.

She couldn’t help but believe that if the vigilante had killed the one-handed guy, Zambrano’s body would have been tied to the tree along with him. No, this guy had committed some infraction against the cartel. Zambrano had murdered him for it and then vanished. Callahan would catch them both, Zambrano and Caruso’s friend. Eventually.

She stared at the shadow of the smoldering corpse across the yard and smacked the Expedition’s hood a final time for good measure. A couple of the Dallas County SWAT guys gave her better-luck-next-time shrugs. Her logical brain said they were only trying to assuage the guilt of her failure. But Callahan wanted to feel guilty.

Special Agent John Olson came out of the house on his cell, squinted at all the flashing lights, and then started toward Callahan when he found her. He dropped the phone back in his pocket and approached tentatively.

She gave him a hard look that he didn’t deserve. “What?”

“No ID yet on the dead guy,” he said. “But get this. Witnesses where that guy got killed up the street from you reported seeing a Hispanic male hanging around just before the murder — and he was missing a hand.”

Callahan just nodded.

“Anyway,” Olson said, “I thought you’d want to know.” He shot a sympathetic look to Caruso, who’d taken refuge in the shadow of a big pecan tree on the other side of the Ford. “Okay, then. I’ll leave you guys to it.” He turned and went back inside the house.

The ranch was about as close to the middle of nowhere as one could get and still be within an hour of the population centers of Dallas — Fort Worth. Rolled bales of Bermuda grass hay moldered in shaggy fields surrounding the two-story brick house, remnants of some prior year’s cutting. The gate had been unlocked and open — which should have been a sign that they were all wasting their time.