Winks’s office gave up nothing useful. Letty called the sheriff and asked him to contact the state patrol to see if anyone whose name they had—Sawyer, Duran, Crain, Low—had any traffic tickets of any kind, from anywhere.
Rhodes called back and said that Sawyer had gotten a speeding ticket in the past twelve months in El Paso. “You going down there?”
“Actually, I think we’ve seen something about El Paso,” Letty said. “I’ve got to read through my notes.”
“If you go, take it easy down there, girl. Things can get rough on the border.”
“But not in Santa Anna County?”
“We’re peace-loving folks here, by and large,” Rhodes said. “With a few outliers.”
* * *
“Are we going to El Paso?” Kaiser asked.
“Those guys spent a lot of time down there,” Letty said. “It’s probably the headquarters of this Jeep militia. I mean, the militia patrols the border and the border isn’t here. This was the moneymaker.”
“So we go down there and talk to who?” Kaiser asked. Then, “Should have a big FBI office, maybe they’ve got something on the El Paso area militias? Wouldn’t be surprised if there’s a half-dozen of them.”
“Maybe the Border Patrol would have something. Can’t be many militias that have a woman as a leader.”
“You know who’d have something?” Kaiser asked.
“Who?”
“Google. Or Bing.”
* * *
Google and Bing did have a lot of information on border militias, but none mentioned a woman as a leader, though there seemed to be a lot of women in the militias in general. “We’re gonna have to go down there,” Letty said.
They were sitting in the hotel lounge with Kaiser’s iPad on the bar. Letty got carded every time she ordered alcohol in Washington or Virginia, but the Texas bartender hadn’t even looked like he was going to ask. He slid a margarita across the bar with Kaiser’s beer, and Kaiser asked, “You’re only gonna have one, right?”
“Right. I don’t like alcohol, but this day made me thirsty. For more than water.”
“Good. Have one and quit,” Kaiser said. “I’d hate to see what you’d do if you were liquored up. Probably start fights in the parking lot.”
“My mother—my natural mother—was an alcoholic. She didn’t wait to get into the parking lot. She’d fight you right in the bar,” Letty said. “I’ve done some reading and some authorities think alcoholism might run in families. Not because of culture, but because of DNA. Something in the genes. So I’m careful.”
“I was an alcoholic for a while, but it was cultural,” Kaiser mused. “Right after I re-upped for the first time, with the Army. I was twenty-four, just made sergeant, thought about quitting, but the thing was, I was good at it and I liked it. I re-upped for six years and I started drinking. Like everybody else. This was up in North Carolina. Then some guys and I went to this crappy resort on the Outer Banks when we were on leave, I was with this chick who didn’t drink . . . We had this little cabin to ourselves and there was a garbage can out back. We weren’t cooking, we were eating every meal in a diner or restaurant, so I wasn’t putting anything in the garbage can. This girl would clean up my beer cans and throw them away every morning. Toward the end of the week, I picked them up myself one morning and took them out back and the damn trash can was half-full of beer cans. Just beer cans. I thought, Holy shit, I’m an alcoholic.”
“And you quit?”
“Not right away, but yeah. Then I got made a staff sergeant and I was already Ranger-qualified, and decided to try out for Delta. And I made it. Culture changed. Figured I could drink two beers a day and I’ve stuck to that.”