“And Dog, too,” Shooter interjected. “Presuming Dog’s one of our other unknowns.”
“You have a theory on that, Agent Brancato?” Frank asked.
“I have a bunch of thoughts on all this stuff,” Richie replied. “No theory.”
“Let’s hear ’em,” I said.
“I’ve been contemplating what each of these two men knew about each other,” Richie said. “If they’re friends, El Médico knew what Freddie was into, right? With the Sandoval crew?”
“Perhaps,” I said.
“Well, there were two guns in that mobile home. Let’s put aside the antique rifle. That’s probably a personal weapon of Freddie’s.”
“Agreed,” I said.
“As to the handgun,” Richie said, “we’ve been operating under the assumption that El Médico didn’t take that because he knew what Freddie was doing and didn’t want to cross Sandoval.”
He looked to Shooter and me. “But you two didn’t find the cash from the last batch of ATM pulls in the trailer that night. Per the text you found on his phone, Freddie missed a drop.”
Meaning the cash was in the wind.
“But if El Médico took that cash,thatwould be crossing Sandoval,” Cassie said, putting her hands on her hips. “Even more than grabbing a handgun.”
“Exactly,” Richie said. “It’s odd, right?”
“Maybe he doesn’t need a gun,” Frank offered. “Maybe he has some other way of subduing his victims. His shooting Freddie was the exception. After all, in the six bodies you dug up, there was no sign of gun injury, right?”
“Right.”
I glanced back at Richie.
“I believe you’ve tied the two men together sufficiently,” I said. “Nailed down El Médico as the probable killer of Freddie Pecos. Everything else… is just a guess. But if we find this guy—” I pointed at the sketches of El Médico taped to the far wall.
“When we find him,” Shooter said.
“Whenwe find this guy,” I continued, “if there’s no cash on him, there’s only one possibility.”
“Freddie had already taken it,” Cassie said. “Blew it on something else.”
Which changed how we’d been thinking of Freddie Pecos.
We all contemplated this in silence. Then Richie said aloud what I’d been thinking.
“Even if these two cases aren’t tied together, the two men definitely are.”
“And we still have no idea how,” Cassie said, finishing my thought.
Frank clapped his hands together, grabbing our attention and refocusing me and Cassie on the task at hand.
“Okay,” he said. “Getting back to the man weknowisactuallytransporting guns… Camden and Pardo—we leave here in two and a half hours. The U-Haul is en route still, and ATF is scrambling to find a command center without knowing where the hell that truck is gonna land.”
I nodded. “I’ll find a cube to work in.”
We had a limited amount of time before we had to leave for Dulles. Quickly, I found and printed an assessor’s map of D.C., studying a grid of the homes in Foggy Bottom.
We had spent three months getting to know the personality of J. P. Sandoval, and now I needed to predict his behavior. In his day job, Sandoval owned a chain of gun stores in Florida and Georgia. But from the notes Richie had taken on his meetings with Freddie Pecos, we knew a decent amount of what Frank would call “the color of the man.”
Sandoval’s operations were secretive and ruthless, and nothing proved this better than Travis Wells being brutally murdered inside the storage unit. Or Daniel Horne, drowned in a toilet at the Rotten Coconut. Still, when Pecos had spoken of Sandoval, he had done so in the same way that followers speak of evangelistic CEOs, or cult members speak of cult leaders. The picture he painted was idealized: a patriot in touch with some greater sense of right and wrong.
