“Good,” she said. “I’m about to load some groceries and then am heading home.”
She loaded her suitcase in the trunk and put her purse on the passenger seat as she got in. I thanked her for cooperating, then ended the call and followed at a distance after she pulled out of the driveway and sped away.
Three miles later and across town, heading toward Henderson, she pulled into the small lot of a law office I recognized. Harold G. Agnew, crusty, unrelenting, and very capable. Summer or winter, he dressed in corduroy pants, white shirts, and what used to be called a sports coat. He referred to FBI agents as “look-alikes.” He didn’t have any partners. None would have lasted anyway, and he was too cheap for anything more than a part-time secretary. But for some unexplained reason, he liked me. In the office they teased me about it. Today, it was good luck. I called him before she got in the door.
“When did a fugitive warrant go out on Juan Menderes?” Agnew asked.
“Somewhere around three a.m., July 5.”
“If she aided her brother prior to that, she wouldn’t have known he was a fugitive.”
“That’s possible.”
“No, it has to be true for her to come in now and talk.”
“Then it depends what she did.”
“She may have dropped him at a freeway on-ramp. I don’t know that she did, but she may have.”
“And who picked him up?”
“She doesn’t know.”
“Does she know where he is now?”
“No, but she’s willing to talk if there’s a guarantee of immunity.”
“You know that can’t come from me, and she’ll have to tell us what she knows first.”
“I’ll bring her in. The Bureau needs someone available who can make a decision.”
Agnew brought her in forty minutes later. He’d figured out that she knew nothing about a terrorist plot and was negotiating the immunity demand to protect herself should drug charges arise from our investigating her and Menderes. Some compromise would get reached but not until we were satisfied that she’d told us everything she knew about her alleged half brother. There was a lot of back and forth with the lawyer, Agnew, and then they got her into an interview room. I watched the interview on the video feed.
Rosamar was very nervous. She fidgeted and shifted in her chair as she recounted dropping Juan at a West Cheyenne southbound ramp on 95 at 11:10 the night of the Fourth. She knew because she’d looked at her car clock. Juan wouldn’t tell her where he was going. He’d gone over his back fence and crossed the open space between the subdivisions, climbed her fence, dropped down into her backyard, and knocked on her kitchen window. He asked her to drop him at a freeway on-ramp and lay across the backseat with a blanket covering him as she drove.
“What was he wearing?”
“Jeans, a baseball cap, new Nike sneakers, a T-shirt, sunglasses, and a backpack. He looked like a dork waiting to be robbed.”
“Who was his ride? Who was going to pick him up?”
“I don’t know.”
“Where was he going?”
“Why do you keep asking that?”
The interviewing agents turned to Juan’s drug trafficking. They embellished. They created witnesses and a confession that might implicate her, then showed her photos of the secret compartment in Juan’s Hullabaloo van.
She blurted, “He messed up.”
“Who messed up?”
“Juan did.”
“How?”
I saw Agnew shake his head, as in “Don’t answer,” but she was frightened. An agent asked quietly, “What do you mean he messed up?”
She stumbled to her feet, saying, “I need a bathroom.”
Before she reached the door, she vomited. An agent led her to a restroom. Everybody else stepped out into the hallway. I looked at Agnew dabbing a dampened Kleenex on his white corduroy pants, trying to clean vomit splashes off, before informing everyone the interview was over for now. My phone rang as he said that, but I didn’t answer. I didn’t listen to the voice mail a Las Vegas Metro homicide detective named Donna Perth left until after Agnew made it clear that everything to do with his client was on hold until an agreement was in writing.
Detective Perth’s message said, “I’m working a homicide you might be able to help me with. Adult Hispanic male, young, and possibly killed the night of the Alagara bombing outside of Jean. Please call me.”
Probably smiling when she hung up. She knew she’d get a quick call back.
19
I didn’t check in with Venuti and went out the back way to my car, though that was more habit than dodge. Thirty miles south of Vegas, hot crosswinds swept I-15, and gray dust clouded the valley east of the interstate. I exited at Jean, turned into a Shell station off to the right, and pulled up alongside Detective Perth, who was parked beneath an American flag whipping hard in the wind.
“Thanks for coming,” she said.