Nothing but Trouble_ A Kevin Kerney Novel - Michael Mcgarrity [52]
Kerney used his time to talk to some of the town residents who’d assembled to watch the filmmakers. Those he spoke with knew about the death of the Mexican on the highway, and several people wondered if it meant that smuggling activity along the border was on the upswing. Kerney probed a bit deeper and learned that over the past six to eight months, border-related incidents had dropped. One man recounted stories of how half-starved migrants had once routinely wandered into town, and speculated that they now avoided Playas because it was an anti-terrorism training center. While the man’s argument made sense, Kerney wondered if the fall-off in immigrants passing through the town was also tied to the smuggling operation Fidel’s undercover agent had infiltrated.
A woman he spoke with criticized the Mexican government for handing out desert survival pamphlets to the illegals who were planning to cross the border, calling it nothing less than an attempt to flood the United States with undocumented workers. Her husband, an older man with a U.S. Navy anchor tattooed on his arm, thought the problem was tied to not having enough Border Patrol agents assigned to the Bootheel.
When Kerney asked about drug trafficking, he was told that the unmanned drones the Border Patrol had put into service to track aircraft crossing from Mexico hadn’t reduced the number of nighttime flights by any significant degree. Rumor had it that large amounts of marijuana, cocaine, and heroin were still being flown in on a regular basis, off-loaded at remote locations, and trucked north.
Kerney wondered if his take on the death of Fidel’s agent was all wrong. Was it possible that the murderers had had no intention to leave their victim in the middle of the highway with ligature marks on his wrists? Had he fallen out of the van, as Officer Sapian had suggested? And if so, did the driver fail to stop because he or she had seen Kerney rubbernecking at the side of the road almost within shouting distance of where he would find the dying agent, and didn’t want to chance turning around to retrieve the body?
The more Kerney thought about it, the more he seriously questioned his initial analysis of the crime. Why would the killers deliberately dump the body of a man they knew to be an undercover cop on a highway to be found? Wouldn’t it be better to simply make the agent disappear altogether and avoid becoming hard targets as cop killers?
Agent Fidel had told him a corrupt ex-policeman in Mexico ran the immigrant smuggling operation, possibly aided by some dirty Border Patrol officers. Bringing the feds down around his head by dumping the agent’s body would be the last thing a coyote would want to do.
There were two ways to test the theory: either find and take statements from the people who were in the panel van, or inspect the rear door latch on the vans owned by Walter Shaw and Jerome Mendoza, the motor transportation officer, to see if either was defective. Locating the smuggler’s clients might be hard to do, but checking out the rear door latches to the panel vans shouldn’t be difficult.
Services ended at the Baptist church on the outskirts of town, and the number of onlookers swelled, bolstered by ranch families and a few folks from nearby Hachita who’d come by to watch the happenings. One of the people was Ira Dobson, the water works manager Kerney had met at the smelter. He was dressed in his Sunday-go-to-meeting best: a pair of blue jeans with razor-sharp creases, a starched white long-sleeved Western shirt, and a pair of polished black cowboy boots.
“Have you signed up to work on the film?” Kerney asked.
“Not me,” Dobson replied. “I’ve got enough to do without taking on any more responsibilities.”
“I understand the Granite Pass Ranch borders the company’s property,” Kerney said.
“Pretty country,” Dobson allowed. “It runs for a far piece along our eastern flank.”
“Do you know the Jordans?” Kerney asked.
“Good people,” Dobson