Apaches - Lorenzo Carcaterra [81]
Lucia often missed Carlo and sometimes regretted that she had had him killed. But he was getting in the way of her business, and Lucia would allow no one to do that.
Especially not a husband.
• • •
SHE GOT THE idea for using babies one night while watching a Johnson & Johnson TV commercial. In the high-end drug circles in which Lucia traveled, babies were easy to get, easy to transport, and even easier to dispose of. By the mid-1970s, the black market was a bull market for newborns; this back-door, middle-of-the-night, cash-on-receipt business was a multimillion-dollar-a-year operation.
Within six months of watching the commercial, Lucia had made her mark on the baby industry. She opened clinics in eight states, each of them catering to unwed-and-pregnant teenagers on the low end of the income scale. The girls were all looking for good homes for their babies, some cash in their pockets, and the news of their pregnancies to be broadcast to no one. Lucia used third parties to hire only those whose medical credentials were beyond reproach. Once born, the babies were sent to safe homes, where they were fed and nurtured for six months. Then they were picked up by one of Lucia’s soldiers, dropped off at a drug transfer center, usually a newly bought condo on quiet resort property, and killed.
The empty cavity of a dead baby could hold as many as six kilos of cocaine on the front end of a long flight and $100,000 in cash on the return. Each baby was good for three round trips and then shipped to local funeral homes, where his or her remains were cremated and tossed in next to the most recent of the dearly departed.
At no time did the horror of her actions ever bother Lucia. For her, the infants were nothing more than a tool, a safe and inexpensive means of transport, allowing her to move large quantities of drugs and cash free and undetected. If what she did made her enemies in the drug trade fear her even more, then that was a dividend.
Over time, as the demand for baby transports began to far outstrip her dependable supply, Lucia began to send her troops out to the streets. There she found hundreds of willing partners unafraid to deal in the hot item of the moment. They kept tabs on runaways and drifters, prime candidates to get pregnant and either abandon or sell their children. They tracked birth records at hospitals located in low-income areas, where record-keeping tended to be as shoddy as the security, helping to make any newborn a perfect target. They secured welfare rolls, scanning the lists for mothers who had a drug problem or record and more than three children. Lucia’s emissaries then offered them a better deal than what the state allowed.
The cartel leaders were so pleased with this grisly but safe method of operations that they offered up, free of charge, babies born to their string of prostitutes. A number of other gangs willingly sold Lucia the women with whom they had grown tired, from old girlfriends to older wives, and, in some cases, their own daughters.
All done in the name of profit.
And at the expense of the innocent.
• • •
LUCIA WALKED AROUND the kitchen of the Sedona house, cradling a six-month-old boy in her arms. She ran a finger softly under the flabs of his chin and got him to smile. She loved the smell of a fresh-washed baby and kissed him on both cheeks before handing him to one of the men in the dark glasses.
“Get him ready,” Lucia said to the man, her eyes still on the smiling baby. “The flight leaves in less than two hours.”
She stood there as the man walked past her, opening a thick wood door to the basement, where he would perform