Jeffery Deaver: The Deliveryman

“Ah, that is good news.” Latex gloves, unlike cloth, pick up fingerprints quite well (on the inside) and have adhesive properties that retain trace. Smart criminals burn them into nothing, the not-so-smart throw them out, for police to find and, soon thereafter, make all sort of helpful discoveries to aid in arrest and conviction.

“Friction ridges first.”

Wearing his own set of gloves — a similar shade of blue — Mel Cooper extracted and tested them. There were two, a right and a left. Rhyme hoped they belonged to whomever Rinaldo had met in the armory, as they already had Rinaldo’s identity.

They did not, as it turned out. Only the victim’s prints were inside the gloves.

Rhyme was frowning. “Curious. He left them in the armory after the meeting. He wasn’t that concerned that they’d be found so he wasn’t particularly troubled about leaving his prints there.”

“But,” Sachs continued his thought, “he was worried about prints on whatever he was holding — something that either he or the other driver had with them.”

“He was a deliveryman,” Rhyme pointed out. “And since the truck was empty when he was killed, and locked, he either transferred something to the other driver or took delivery and then dropped it off at another location.” He frowned. “What the hell was the shipment?...Mel,” Rhyme ordered, “find out what trace there is on the outside of the gloves.”

He prepared the sample.

As he did, Rhyme’s computer dinged with the sound of an incoming email. He read the subject and the sender. “Ah, it’s from Rodney.”

Rodney Szarnek, their computer crimes expert down in One Police Plaza.

“He cracked Rinaldo’s phone,” Rhyme said, reading. “It was a burner, naturally.”

Prepaid mobiles with no link to the purchaser or his or her actual address had made cops’ lives far more difficult.

Rhyme continued. “It had only four texts. And five incoming calls from the same number — also an untraceable burner, now out of service. The calls weren’t answered. Voice mail wasn’t set up.”

She walked around behind him and he could feel her gloved hand on his shoulder, just north of the DMZ where all sensation stopped.

They read the messages. The first one, from Rinaldo’s burner, was sent at eleven forty.

Have package. Will hide. Have good place. Will meet U @ 7, where planned, with details. Tonight, you’ll be the king of the dead.

And the below was the simple response

K

At four thirty there, Rinaldo had texted the other phone:

All hidden. We’re good. No tails. Seems safe.

The answer again:

K

The incoming calls, Rhyme observed, were all made a few minutes apart and they started at 7:05 p.m., presumably his client calling with increasing agitation to inquire as to why Rinaldo was not at the delivery site. He had been murdered, Rhyme recalled, at 6 p.m.

Sachs said, “So, that answers the question. Rinaldo took delivery at the armory and then hid it somewhere, in anticipation of taking it to the final consignee that night.”

King of the dead, Rhyme reflected. He had a thought. “Mel, do you have the results of the trace on the gloves?”

“I do.” The tech said, “Present are—”

Rhyme said, “Lead, antimony, and barium, calcium, silicon... and, I’ll go out on a limb, rubber.”

“Well, no silicon, but yes, everything else. And in significant amounts. How on earth did you figure that out?” He was smiling.

But the expression faded as he regarded Rhyme’s grim face. “King of the dead,” he mused. “The chemicals’re gunshot residue. And the rubber from a silencer of some sort. I said ‘out on a limb.’” He scowled. “But of course there had to be rubber. From baffles of a silencer. Rinaldo tested the product he was picking up to make sure it worked... and he could hardly fire off a gun in Midtown without using a silencer.”

Sachs said, “And given the amounts of the residue you mentioned, it’s automatic weapons?”

“I hadn’t thought of that. But yes, of course. There’s our answer: Mr. Echi Rinaldo was taking delivery of machine guns. And I’d imagine quite a few of them, given the size of the trucks involved. The good news, I suppose, is that he didn’t deliver them to the purchaser.”

The bad, which went unstated, was that a large number of deadly weapons were loose in the City of New York, free for the taking to whoever found them first.

The mantle of King of the Dead was apparently up for grabs.

As head of the 128 Lords, Miguel Ángel Morales was largely oblivious to politics.

Oh, there were Harlem councilmen and the occasional cop who had to be paid off (the NYPD was a lot less receptive to bribes than it used to be, though). But at levels higher than city hall and various administrative bureaus, politics didn’t much come into play for an OG like Morales.

He had, however, made a study of one political matter: NAFTA, the free trade agreement between Mexico, Canada and the United States, which eased trade restrictions — and the physical movement — of products over the borders.

Everyone knew it was politically correct to decry the flow of drugs moving north and the ebb of guns going in the opposite direction, and politicos and administrators made certain that loosened border controls, thanks to NAFTA, didn’t facilitate this terrible commerce.

Who could argue? Morales certainly didn’t.

But listening to an NPR segment about the trade agreement a year ago, an idea had occurred to him. After some research he learned that while drugs were still interdicted enthusiastically going north and guns going south, the customs system under NAFTA had grown careless when it came to these commodities going in the opposite directions. Resources, after all, were limited.

Could one, Morales asked, make money smuggling guns north ?

On one of several trips to Mexico that he and Connie made, he learned that it was very hard to get good weapons of American or European make over the border. Fifteen thousand pesos for Cuernos de Chivo , “goat horns,” as AK-47s were known in Mexico, and six thousand pesos for a Glock. Even realistic toy guns — used in the many of the one hundred armed (or seemingly armed) robberies in Mexico City alone every day — were expensive. Oh, you could negotiate some when you went to buy weapons in the pungent, filthy Tepito district of Mexico City — the drug and weapon bazaar — if you survived the experience (which a lot of people did not).

To fill this gap and bring prices down, an innovative cartel boss in Chihuahua had come up with an idea. He bought high-end guns — H&Ks, Glocks, Rugers — and he had them reverse engineered, created the tools and dies necessary for their manufacture and went into business, manufacturing quality firearms under the guise of creating auto parts. There were so many American manufacturers shifting jobs to Mexico that nobody noticed that his operation did not, in fact, have a connection with Ford or GM or Toyota.

The cartel head’s main market was Mexico and points south. Morales, though, saw an opportunity and decided to go into partnership with Señor Guadalupe. He commissioned an order and paid for it, then arranged for transport north. The NAFTA-sanctioned trucks, the partners reasoned, would proceed largely unimpeded into the United States and, if they were stopped, it was to check for drugs; those Labradors and Malinois were certainly clever but also scent-blind when it came to stocks and receivers of deadly weapons. They smelled after all just like car parts.

The shipment that Echi Rinaldo had picked up in the armory yesterday was Morales’s first purchase and its disappearance was a real problem. He had buyers lined up, true, but more troubling: his reputation. He wanted to be, as he’d said in all seriousness to Rinaldo and his compadres, New York’s King of the Dead, and anything that diminished that reputation was not acceptable. He certainly had the product: These weapons were among the most sophisticated in the world, some with laser and radar sights, some so silent they were — as Guadalupe had told him — no louder than a hiccup de un bebé.