She went back to the bedroom and fished a laptop out from under a bed and brought it back to the living room, dragging the power cord. An aging Gateway running Windows 7, the machine produced a long list of porn sites, a shorter list of right-wing political sites, and dozens of emails going back six years. Almost all the emails were routine spam, never deleted, but one, from a sender who called himself RamJam, said, “Don’t put this shit in email. Delete it.”
Rivers apparently had deleted the offending email, but not the comment about it. The delete file was empty, so he apparently knew enough to take the last step to get rid of it.
Letty noted RamJam’s email address, and continued scrolling through the mail. Kaiser chatted with Turner as Letty worked, to keep Turner thinking about something other than the laptop.
When Letty first movedin with the Davenports, in Saint Paul, Davenport had a desktop police radio tuned to the police channels. He never listened to it, and Letty asked if she could keep it in her bedroom. When she tired of listening to the cops, she fished around on the dozens of other channels available on the radio and stumbled on the cell phone frequencies.
Many of the cell phone calls involved apparent drug deals and followed a simple format: “Uh, hey man, this is me.” “Where you at?” “Down to the corner.” “How’s the corner?” “It’s all right. You working?” “I’m working.” “See you then, ten minutes?” “See you.”
Some of Rivers’s emails had the same clipped feel: “Let’s get coffee.” “What time?” “Ten.” “See you then.”
Letty couldn’t tell exactly what was going on, butsomethingwas going on.
When she was done with the email, she checked the other files on the machine, but found nothing useful. The photo file, for which she had hopes, was filled with porn. She shut down the computer and twisted the bar stool she was on, to talk with Turner.
“These people that Stony was hanging with, back in the Rand Low days—did you know them? Other than Crain and Sawyer?”
“I couldn’t tell you much about them, those I met,” Turner said. “Oil workers, most of them, the ones that had jobs. Some had been to prison. Most of them were in the Army, some of them a long time ago. Talk about it all the time. Stony never was in the Army, he felt kind of out of it when these other guys would be talking about Willy Pete or MREs or Charlie Foxtrot and that shit.”
“Names?”
She shook her head. “That was all a while ago.”
“How tight was Stony with Rand Low?”
“Rand was the one everybody listened to. He was... intense.Stony liked him for that. I knew Rand would get him in trouble, but Stony did what Rand told him... right up to the trial.”
“If I were to go hunting for him... Rand Low?”
“Not a good idea, girl. But if youwasto look for him, he wouldn’t be up here, he’d be down in the oil patch or even further down south. That whole bunch would cross over to Mexico, to Juárez, what they called the tolerance zone, and get laid. Like a fraternity initiation. Then it got too dangerous to go to Juárez, they were having the dope wars over there, so they started hitting a place they called Pussy Park in El Paso. Stony said he never went for that, but I expect he was lying. Rand and his boys would be someplace between Midland and El Paso, if I had to guess.”
Back in the truck, Kaiser said, “We don’t know for sure that he’s a dead motherfucker.”
“No, but he’s a dead motherfucker,” Letty said.
Their DHS briefer,Billy Greet, had told them to call if they needed information support during their research. On the way back to Midland, Letty called Greet, gave her Rivers’s credit card number, told her about the bank account at Wells Fargo.
“Are you in your car?” Greet asked.
“Yeah, we’re in Lubbock, Texas, we’re heading south to Midland, should be there in two hours,” Letty said.
“I’ll be back to you before then—this won’t take long,” Greet said.
“While you’re at it, we have a couple more names to check—it’d be great if we could get some addresses,” Letty said. She gave Greet the two names they’d gotten from Turner, Max Sawyer and Victor Crain. She added RamJam’s email address to see what might come of that.
When Letty was off the phone, Kaiser said, “We’re crossing over into some dangerous territory here. These guys, this posse, they might have killed the Blackburns and maybe Rivers. We really need to tell the cops about it.”
Letty: “Mmm.”
Greet called back when they were halfway to Midland. “It’s not looking that good for Rivers. His Wells Fargo statement for March shows that he had a little over four hundred dollars in his account—four hundred and thirteen dollars. He earned a few cents of interest since then, but hasn’t made any withdrawals. Visa’s put a hold on his account, it’s on hold since the first of May—he hasn’t paid the minimum the last two months and he hasn’t charged anything. I think he may be in trouble.”
“You’re wrong about that,” Letty said. “I don’t think he’s troubled. Not anymore.”
“Okay. There’s that. Max Sawyer is on probation for a gun law violation, possession of a fully automatic rifle, which he said had been left with him by the wife of a friend. The friend had died, and the woman didn’t want guns around her children. She testified to that, but the federal prosecutor thought she was lying. The U.S. attorney out there isn’t real big on gun violations, so he let Sawyer plead to a lesser charge, a misdemeanor. He got a fine and no jail time. He wasn’t convicted of a felony, so he can legally own guns. At the time he was arrested, he had a house in the town of Monahans. Utility bills in his name are still being sent there.”
As Letty took down the address, Kaiser said, “He had a machine gun. That’s not good. What about Crain?”
“Not much on Crain, couple of minor drug busts in El Paso,” Greet said. “Got fingerprints and a mugshot from those. Never did any time or anything. He shows an address in Monahans that’s right around the block from Sawyer. I’ll text you mugshots for bothof them. RamJam, that email, is a dead end. Hasn’t been active in years.”
