They checked intoanother Homewood Suites, which was located just off I-10, not far from Serrano’s house. They took a half-hour to get cleaned up and stash their luggage, then got back in the car and drove to the El Paso FBI offices, which were inside a boring white stone-and-glass building with the homogenized appearance of a newer post office.
After clearing through security, they met with Special Agent Klaus Anders, who told them that El Paso had at least a half-dozen known militias, and maybe a dozen more that were either inactive, fictional, or secret.
“They patrol the border, where they’re allowed to. Mostly getting in the Border Patrol’s hair. Texas doesn’t pay too much attention to them, but New Mexico has cracked down,” Anders said. He was a tall man, in his late twenties or early thirties, Letty thought. He wore glasses with gunmetal rims and had the pallor of a person who spent a lot of time indoors.
He took a paper map out of a desk drawer, and unfolded it, and the three of them bent over it. “El Paso ought to be in New Mexico... We’re way out on the tip of this triangle that sticks into New Mexico,” he said, tapping the map. “I can give you the namesand addresses of several of the leaders of the local militias... and fill you in on their backgrounds. Most of them have criminal records of one kind or another.”
Letty: “We’d be particularly interested in one run by a woman, or involving men named...”
“Duran, Low, Crain, or Sawyer, though I understand you took Sawyer off the books,” Anders interrupted, nodding at Kaiser. “The Midland office filled me in. I don’t know of a militia run by a woman, although there was one, years ago, before my time here. No criminal record, her bunch did some patrolling, but weren’t involved in any kind of threats or violence. There is one odd thing, though...”
“We like odd things,” Letty said.
“We’re hearing rumors that some other militias, not from the El Paso area, but up in the northwest, have been talking to a hard-right anti-immigration activist somewhere down in this area and it’s a woman. She apparently runs a darknet site that we haven’t been able to find, not that anybody’s been looking that hard.”
“Anything about money?” Letty asked.
“Funny you should ask—yes. Our guys up in Portland say that one of their local militias has apparently gotten some funding through her. We’ve got informants in most of those militias, but not in leadership roles. So what we get is rumor,” Anders said.
“That might be the woman we want—you should have been briefed about the oil thefts up in the Midland-Odessa area.”
“Yeah. You think that money went north?”
“Some of it, maybe,” Letty said. “Though the guys we’ve seen aren’t exactly philanthropists. And we think some of it was used to buy C-4, and they might be planning to blow up a building. We saw them apparently learning how to cut an I-beam with timed explosions.”
“I heard that... I was told the ATF is on it.”
“Any sign that anything here is about to blow up?” Kaiser asked. “No pun intended...”
“Yes. There is,” Anders said. “You heard about the Caravana Viacrucis del Migrante de Libertad?”
Letty said, “The Caravan of the Migrants’ Way of the Cross of Freedom?”
“Something like that. It’s a caravan coming up from Central America, and the Mexicans aren’t doing much to slow it down,” Anders said. “Word is, it’s headed here and there are more than thirteen hundred people in it. Buses, cars, people walking. It’s not far south of Juárez. Border Patrol is in an uproar, they’re bringing in reinforcements.”
“I don’t mean to be offensive and I don’t want to seem like an entitled East Coast witch. With what John and I have found, apparently a militia with heavy financial means from oil thefts—could be well over a million dollars—and a willingness to kill people, three murdered so far, that we know of, and another probable, and who apparently have access to high explosives and are training to use it... why are we talking to a relatively junior FBI agent? Why isn’t there some crisis-management team working here?” Letty asked.
Kaiser jumped in. “I was in the military for a long time and got wounded when some asshole set off an IED on my squad. What are you going to say if this caravan crunches into the border and gets wiped by a bunch of IEDs? C-4 is wonderful for that...”
“I’m not allthatjunior,” Anders said. “I was designated to talk with you, when we were told you were coming. We have other preparations under way, we’ve got a task force that’s... tasked with working out the probabilities and coordinating with local law enforcement... I’d point out that neither one of you is a trained investigator, from what we’ve been told...”
Outside, in the heat, walking to the car, Letty said to Kaiser, “Tasked with working out the probabilities, my incredibly well-toned ass. How long do you think it’ll take them to put a report together?”
“Jeez, who knows? Anders didn’t even look like he went outside,” Kaiser said. “What’s he really going to know about a militia? And he was their militia guy.”
“And, unfortunately, we’re not trained investigators,” Letty said, looking back at the building. “Maybe I should call Colles and get him to light a fire under their butts.”
“We could try that,” Kaiser said. “But you know what? Nothing moves slower than a bureaucracy. The only way you get speed from an organization like DHS or the FBI is if one person engineers it. Orders out the SWAT squad on his own authority. And he better be right, because if he pulls the fire alarm and there’s no fire, he’ll be in major career trouble. Safety is in numbers and numbers move slow.”
“When you’re right, you’re right,” Letty said. They started back to the hotel, and a time and temperature sign off I-10 said that it was ninety-six degrees at three o’clock. “Listen, we’re not going to learn anything by driving around El Paso. Let’s get on our computers. Read everything we can find on the local militias. Then there’s something we haven’t spent a lot of time talking about...”
“Which is...”
“Why Winks was murdered,” Letty said. “I can think of one good reason: they didn’t need him anymore. Or they couldn’t use him anymore, which is the same thing. He was a loose end, and they needed to seal that off.”
“We did talk about this—that they killed the Blackburns because Boxie Blackburn had figured something out. They didn’twant to kill Winks, which would have sealed them off even better, but he was their money man. That made sense to me. Then they went and killed Winks anyway, which means something changed.”
“Yes. Us,” Letty said. “We went after Sawyer, and I asked Sawyer about Low, and about stealing oil, which was a mistake. Sawyer told them about that, and they decided to clean up their operation. Kill Winks, burn the truck and that shack. But would they have done all that if they weren’t about to pull the trigger on something bigger?”
