J. Bertrand - Nothing to Hide

“Never mind.”

“Is everything all right?” he asks.

I should be asking him the same question. “Fine, sir.”

I get a few steps away, then he stops me. “Hey, March, you sure you’re okay? You’re walking kind of funny.”

“It’s nothing,” I say. “I must have twisted something the other night when I took that spill.”

“Get it looked at,” he says, turning away.

All during the runoff election last year, he’d been an absentee boss, present in body but absent in spirit. Things got better, but never back to normal. Now there’s a hollowness to him I don’t like to see. Maybe it’s just knowing that he’s not long for the job.

“I’ll do that, sir,” I say. “Thank you.”

His eyebrows raise a twitch at the thanks, but he doesn’t say more. He heads back to his shuttered office as I run to catch up with Lorenz.

The sign pushed into the grass in front of Brandon Ford’s house says FOR SALE, so the first thing Lorenz does is snatch a flyer from the plastic dispenser. The address has taken us all the way out to Katy, to a neighborhood offering LUXURY LIVING STARTING IN THE 300s, so new it could have been thrown up overnight. The brick-fronted houses squat massively on their lots, their wide concrete drives free of cracks and unspotted by grease. Instead of the typical suburban grid, they hunch beside gently curving streets arranged concentrically around a man-made lake. I see ducks swimming out there, and a spout of water that shoots up thirty feet.

“Price is a little high,” Lorenz says, handing me the flyer. “But at least there’s a pool.”

To my surprise, the flyer gives the construction date as four years ago. In all that time, the surrounding properties have managed to stay pristine. Only half the houses along the road yield signs of habitation-a freshly waxed Tahoe, some abandoned toys, a yard card in the shape of a soccer ball giving the jersey number of the child within. One or two in addition to Ford’s have Realtor signs, and even some that don’t sport the empty drives and naked aluminum windows of homes completed but never occupied.

We walk to the front door, peering inside through the unobstructed side window. Past the carpeted stairway, there’s a high-ceilinged great room with a gas fireplace and rustic-looking twisted iron chandelier and French doors that open onto the back patio. There’s no furniture inside, no decoration on the towering walls.

“If he ever lived here,” I say, “he doesn’t anymore.”

Lorenz heads around one side of the house and I take the other, glancing in windows, testing doors. The house is locked tight, but the garage door isn’t. I push through into the stifling heat of the enclosed space. There are no vehicles inside. A wall of cardboard boxes three deep and five or six high occupies one side of the garage, each one labeled in black marker: OFFICE, CLOTHES, SHOES, CHINA, BEDROOM, TOYS. The list goes on. I run my finger over one of the boxes, leaving a trail in the dust. They’ve been in storage for a while.

Using my lockblade, I open a couple of the boxes to see if the labels and contents match up. They do. There’s a box marked PHOTOS, which contains baby albums, framed wedding portraits, and stacks of loose pictures. I grab some and start sifting. The man in the tux kissing the bride, the man cradling the newborn in the crook of his arm is the same one in the photo Bea Kuykendahl gave me along with the file. This is a lot of trouble to go through to build a cover. Too much.

“What did you find?” Lorenz asks.

“A bunch of photos.”

I’m about to toss them back when one of the images catches my eye. It’s a photo of Brandon Ford flanked by two other men, his arms draped over their shoulders. Behind him, an older woman looks into the camera, her eyes red from the flash. There’s something about the expression on their faces-maybe the confidence of youth, maybe the camaraderie-that speaks to me. Here’s my victim, alive and happy. Seeing him that way helps to humanize him. I tuck the picture inside my jacket and close the box.

“I’m gonna call the ex-wife, since she doesn’t seem to live here.”

“I’ll make the call,” I say. “You drive.”

I dial the number from the front seat of the car, the air-conditioner blasting. She answers after five or six rings, sounding frazzled and breathless. I can hear cartoons in the background, children’s voices. I keep it brief, identifying myself and asking for a location where we can meet face-to-face. She gives me the address of an apartment complex on Westheimer outside Beltway 8, maybe halfway between our present location and downtown if we swing down south a ways. I tell her to expect us within the hour.

“What did she sound like?” Lorenz asks.

“She sounded young. She sounded confused, maybe a little worried. I could hear kids in the background. There were two in the photos.”

While he drives, I kill time going through his research. Brandon Ford has a gun dealer’s license, but he doesn’t seem to have a storefront. Instead, he works out of a rental office on a by-appointment basis, specializing in exotic longarms for collectors, everything from elephant guns to high-powered sniper rifles. According to his website, which Lorenz printed in its entirety, he also travels to a variety of Texas gun shows where he operates a booth.

“I printed out pictures from the site,” he says.

“I see that.”

They are low-resolution images. One depicts a tall curly-haired man in a blue polo shirt standing behind a table laden with imported tactical rifles. Not the AK-47s that Bea mentioned. These appear to be top-dollar European models. In the second photo, the same man wearing the same shirt poses with an old school FN FAL battle rifle mounted with a massive starlight scope, cutting edge in the seventies and eighties and no doubt highly collectable now.

“I’m surprised you can make a living that way,” Lorenz says.

“Was he making a living? His house is on the market.”

“What I mean is, it’s weird people buy and sell this stuff.”

“It’s weird people buy guns in Texas?” I ask.

“This kind of gun, yeah. I mean, I’m on the front lines every day and I don’t have an arsenal like that. I couldn’t afford it, for one thing. Can you imagine knocking on this guy’s door? He’d have the SWAT team outgunned.”

I’m not interested in getting into an argument about guns. That’s something I don’t do anymore. I grew up with them, and to me you either get it or you don’t. And if you don’t, fine. Brandon Ford, if he really existed, would have gone through enough of a background check to put my mind at ease. He wouldn’t worry me any more than the club members at Shooter’s Paradise do. But I wonder what Lorenz would think of my extracurricular activities. All those armed citizens might freak him out.

Then again, maybe not. He surprises me sometimes. But there’s no point in getting into all that. Brandon Ford doesn’t exist. The photos, along with everything else, were staged. That’s what I’m meant to believe, anyway. The question is, for whom? The way Bea made it sound, somebody wanted a big shipment of assault rifles, which suggests the Mexican cartels. The headlines have been full of Federal cases against dealers shipping their wares down south, profiteering from the drug war. The only problem with that theory is that a sting operation making use of a fake gun dealer would be designed to snare the buyer. If the buyer’s a Gulf Cartel drug lord, what’s the point? It’s not like the Policía Federal or the DEA don’t have enough on those thugs already.

“Is there something wrong?” Lorenz asks. “You’ve been funny all morning.”

“Everything’s fine.”