I looked over the group again. I like skeptics. I like a hard sale. I wouldn’t be any different listening to this than they were.
“We may get a call any minute from the CIA where they tell us they’ve 100 percent confirmed Garod Hurin’s death, and for reasons they can’t discuss, et cetera, it’s been left for the rest of law enforcement to guess about. That would end this, but we’d still be looking for Mondari and still have reason to look at the Anza-Borrego. Look, I know it’s sketchy. I know we’re short on hard facts, but we’re arguing there’s enough here that it can’t be ignored, and if the CIA says the face the Ocotillo artist drew is Hurin’s and he’s alive, well, in that case, I think we know where to look for our bomb maker.”
An analyst smiled at me. She heard drama and conjecture.
“Okay,” Munoz said. “I get that, but what if it’s as simple as Mondari and his guys burned a cartel manager then got scared when they realized they were found out. The guys take off. Mondari thinks he’s insulated, so he sticks. But his guys don’t contact him, so he gets worried they were kidnapped by the cartel, and if that happened, they probably got interrogated. So he’s thinking that as his guys were tortured to death, they put it all on him. He decides to disappear and do some special effects because you’re all over him for something he said to Agent Stone. Have you checked to see he didn’t fly away somewhere?”
“We’ve checked, and he’s also afraid of planes.”
“Maybe having a cartel hit man on him made him more open to flying the friendly skies.”
I nodded, said, “I might have agreed with you until the artist flipped through bomb-maker photos this morning, then sketched Hurin down to his linen shirt and worn boot heels. I think we’ve got our bomb maker.”
I brought up the two images of Garod Hurin I’d sent to Venuti and the ASAC. Then I did something else. I brought up the enhanced image of the wine-refrigerator installer and put it up alongside the other images. They could draw their own conclusions.
“The photo on the left is from the terrorism database. That’s the artist’s sketch on the right. We’re asking the CIA for confirmation, and we may get it today, but either way, we know the driver of Mondari’s car gassed up in Phoenix not far from the warehouse the CIA identified. The same day, though much later, the car was gassed up again in Borrego Springs. Is it just coincidence that the car of the guy who gave us a bomb-maker tip shows up in the same area where a known freelance bomb maker was spotted?”
Agents shifted in their chairs. The two analysts looked at each other, and after a few moments I looked at Munoz before repeating myself.
“In our scenario, Mondari is following orders to save himself by making a delivery. He believes it’s drugs, but we’re using drugs because it’s a drug cartel his guys were trying to rip off. Let’s say he’s been told, ‘You deliver, you get to live.’”
Munoz jumped in. “Why would they use him? Seems like an unnecessary risk.”
I was ready for that.
“No cartel wants to be tied in any way to explosives used to attack the United States. They’re not stupid. So they insulated themselves. They used a known guy, who owed them, and they were probably ahead of him and behind him as he drove. That’s the guess Lacey and I are making.”
I brought up a photo of the Mercedes, its wheel rims sitting on desert sand, the tires burned away and the paint blistered to raw metal, the interior down to blackened metal.
“And here’s a look in the trunk where the fire was hottest. There were no human remains in there, so what was all that heat about? I’m going to say they were burning away any trace of C-4.” I left the image up but brought the conversation back to Nora the Dawn Artist. “I watched her pick out Hurin’s face. She did it in a blink, then drew from memory in a few minutes without looking again at the photo. I pulled the photo away.”
I looked at Munoz and said, “I hear you, but we can’t ignore this.”
Munoz made a little circle with his hand that included himself and the agents around him, as in they were ready to go to work, and Thorpe, who had been looking at his phone and was quiet through all of this, looked up and said, “We just got our answer from the CIA. It’s Hurin. He’s alive. They knew he was alive. They’ve worried he was ready to turn active again. Let’s go find him.”
42
July 12th, 4:30 a.m.
A Nevada Highway Patrol officer rapped on the side of the pickup bed with his flashlight, then shined the flashlight beam in Beatty’s eyes, blinding him. Beatty showed both hands as he blocked the light with one and sat up. His gun was under a shirt near the clothes he’d used as a pillow. He slid his sleeping bag back over the top of it as he climbed out.
“You need to move now.”
“Can I stay here if I sleep in the cab?”
“No.”
The flashlight beam was on his face again.