“It is dry,” Letty said, peering out at the landscape through her sunglasses. “And hot. I’d hate like hell to walk across this country.”
* * *
Pear Tree Lane was buried in a housing development of single-story brick and stucco houses with flat roofs built on gently curving blacktop streets. The houses, mostly earth-colored, had minimal lawns and little foliage around them, cypress trees here and there, some pines, an occasional palm. The backyards were tight boxes pressed against similar tiny backyards from the next street over.
They cruised by Alice Serrano’s house. An old Pontiac slumped in the left half of the short driveway, like it might have been there, unmoving, forever. The back window was covered with dust, and one tire was visibly low.
“Doesn’t look like the house belonging to a leader of the revolution,” Kaiser said. They continued down the block, around the corner. “You want to make another pass?”
“One more,” Letty said.
They made another pass, still saw nothing moving in Serrano’s house.
“Maybe she’s at work—I mean, it’s likely she’s at work,” Kaiser said.
“All right. Let’s go find the hotel.” A minute later, she frowned and added, “I saw something back there that wasn’t right. Saw it on the first pass, didn’t see it on the second. Don’t know what it was . . .”
“Don’t focus on it. Let it marinate. It’ll come floating up,” Kaiser said.
* * *
They checked into another Homewood Suites, which was located just off I-10, not far from Serrano’s house. They took a half-hour to get cleaned up and stash their luggage, then got back in the car and drove to the El Paso FBI offices, which were inside a boring white stone-and-glass building with the homogenized appearance of a newer post office.
After clearing through security, they met with Special Agent Klaus Anders, who told them that El Paso had at least a half-dozen known militias, and maybe a dozen more that were either inactive, fictional, or secret.
“They patrol the border, where they’re allowed to. Mostly getting in the Border Patrol’s hair. Texas doesn’t pay too much attention to them, but New Mexico has cracked down,” Anders said. He was a tall man, in his late twenties or early thirties, Letty thought. He wore glasses with gunmetal rims and had the pallor of a person who spent a lot of time indoors.
He took a paper map out of a desk drawer, and unfolded it, and the three of them bent over it. “El Paso ought to be in New Mexico . . . We’re way out on the tip of this triangle that sticks into New Mexico,” he said, tapping the map. “I can give you the names and addresses of several of the leaders of the local militias . . . and fill you in on their backgrounds. Most of them have criminal records of one kind or another.”
Letty: “We’d be particularly interested in one run by a woman, or involving men named . . .”
“Duran, Low, Crain, or Sawyer, though I understand you took Sawyer off the books,” Anders interrupted, nodding at Kaiser. “The Midland office filled me in. I don’t know of a militia run by a woman, although there was one, years ago, before my time here. No criminal record, her bunch did some patrolling, but weren’t involved in any kind of threats or violence. There is one odd thing, though . . .”
“We like odd things,” Letty said.
“We’re hearing rumors that some other militias, not from the El Paso area, but up in the northwest, have been talking to a hard-right anti-immigration activist somewhere down in this area and it’s a woman. She apparently runs a darknet site that we haven’t been able to find, not that anybody’s been looking that hard.”
“Anything about money?” Letty asked.
“Funny you should ask—yes. Our guys up in Portland say that one of their local militias has apparently gotten some funding through her. We’ve got informants in most of those militias, but not in leadership roles. So what we get is rumor,” Anders said.