“Dr. Cross,” he said in thickly accented English, his eyes dancing over me, his expression amused. “You understand the rules, yes?”
“Yes.”
“Your phone, please.”
I didn’t like it but handed him my phone. He put it in a thick pouch.
“Here is our ride, then,” he said. “You will climb in the back.”
He got up, carrying my phone, walked to a white Chevy Tahoe with dark windows, and opened the front passenger door. He paused to watch me open the rear door, then nodded and climbed in.
I followed suit, was unsurprised to see a second man sitting in the seat beside mine and another even bigger man behind me.
“Hands on your thighs, Se?or Cross,” the one beside me said after I’d shut the door and the SUV had pulled away from the curb.
I did as he requested and sat passively as he patted me down. He was thorough but found nothing more than my wallet, FBI credentials, and passport.
“He’s clean,” he said.
A hood came down over my head from behind. I tensed up.
The man beside me said, “No need to panic. We’re putting headphones on you as well. I hope you like mariachi music.”
Chapter
63
John Sampson followed Ned Mahoney and Captain Eduardo Rodriguez, their Mexican liaison, down the old green-tiled halls of the central morgue in Mexico City. The place reeked of disinfectant and they saw several autopsies under way in the small operatories they passed.
Captain Rodriguez stopped at a set of double doors. “I must warn you, cell phones don’t work in here. Something about the X-ray machine and natural magnetic lines beneath this building. I always turn my phone off because it goes crazy trying to find a signal and the battery gets shot.”
Sampson and Mahoney thumbed off their phones and put them in their pockets before following Rodriguez into a huge cold-storage locker where bodies awaiting autopsy were kept in individual chilled drawers.
Rodriguez went directly to the three drawers on the bottom, opened the first one, slid the corpse out, and drew back the sheet to reveal the face of a handsome guy who looked to have been in his late thirties when he was shot with a small-caliber bullet that entered between his eyes.
“Enrique Alejandro,” Rodriguez said. “Tortured before they did him the favor.”
He drew the sheet all the way down. He’d been burned repeatedly across his torso and his groin. “The coroner says they used a soldering gun on him with different size tips.”
Rodriguez covered Marco Alejandro’s cousin, slid his body back inside the cold drawer, and opened the one next to it. The corpse was Latino, fit, early fifties, by Sampson’s guess. He too had been burned repeatedly with a soldering gun.
“General Guerra,” Rodriguez said. “His involvement is especially tragic and hypocritical. He had a son who died of a drug overdose and he always said his son’s death was what drove him to fight the narco-traffickers.”
Mahoney said, “His confession says otherwise?”
“You will read it for yourself when we are done here.”
“Give us the highlights,” Sampson said.
Rodriguez hesitated but then said, “The general was under the influence of the cartel long before his son overdosed. The tragedy of his son’s death gave Guerra cover to act as if he were fighting the Alejandros while working on the cartel’s behalf at the highest levels of the Mexican government.”
“And door number three?” Mahoney said after Rodriguez pushed the general’s body back in its locker.
He opened the third locker, pulled out the corpse, and drew back the sheet on a buff man in his mid-forties, blond hair slicked back, shot between the eyes.
“We have an ID on him?” Mahoney asked.
“I have not yet read his confession,” Rodriguez said. “So I personally do not know who he is.”
“I think I do,” Sampson said, coming closer. “Yeah, that’s him. He showed up on the scene when Catherine Hingham was found, said he was her boss and tried to claim her body as part of a CIA investigation.”
“Name?”
Sampson thought about that, remembered how condescending the man had been, how it had annoyed him. “Weaver. Dean Weaver. I’m sure this is him.”
“One way to find out,” Mahoney said. “Let’s go read those confessions.”
Captain Rodriguez got a slightly pained expression on his face as he pushed the CIA officer’s body back into its drawer. “This will be in a few hours, se?ors.”
“A few hours?” Mahoney said. “No, that is not happening.”