Karin Slaughter - Fallen

Will didn’t add that they could’ve just as easily injured or killed her and removed the body. “We’ll know for sure when we get the fingerprints. They all must’ve touched something.”

Abruptly, Amanda changed the subject. “Have you and Faith ever talked about your case against her mother?”

“Not really. I’ve never told her about the bank account, because there’s no reason. She assumes I was wrong. A lot of people do. My case was never made in court. Evelyn retired with full benefits. It’s not a hard conclusion to jump to.”

She nodded as if she was giving her approval. “The man in the trunk, the one you call Evelyn’s gentleman friend. Let’s talk about him.”

“If he was bringing in groceries, that implies they had a personal relationship.”

“That’s certainly possible.”

Will thought about the guy. He’d been shot in the back of the head. His wallet and ID were not the only things missing from his person. He didn’t have a cell phone. He didn’t have the thick gold watch he’d been wearing in the picture Mrs. Levy had taken. His clothes were nondescript—Nikes with Dr. Scholl’s orthopedic inserts, J. Crew jeans, and a Banana Republic shirt that had cost a lot of money considering he hadn’t bothered to iron it. There was a smattering of gray in the black goatee on his chin. The stubble on his shiny head indicated he was hiding male pattern baldness rather than making a bold statement in style. Except for the Los Texicanos star on his forearm, he could’ve been a stockbroker having a midlife crisis.

Amanda said, “I’ve checked with Narcotics. There’ve been some grumblings about the Asians making a play for the powder cocaine trade. It’s been up for grabs since the BMF went down.”

The Black Mafia Family. They had controlled coke sales from Atlanta to LA, with Detroit in between. “That’s a lot of money. The Family was pulling down hundreds of millions of dollars a year.”

“Los Texicanos was calling the shots. They’ve always been suppliers, not distributors. It’s a smart way to play it. That’s why they’ve survived all these years. Despite what Charlie thinks about race, they don’t care if the dealer is black or brown or purple, so long as the money’s green.”

Will had never worked a major drug case. “I don’t know much about the organization.”

“Los Texicanos started back in the mid-sixties at the Atlanta Pen. The population demographic back then was almost the exact reverse of what it is now—seventy percent white, thirty black. Crack cocaine changed that overnight. It worked faster than forced busing. There were still only a handful of Mexicans in the joint, and they ganged up to keep from getting their throats cut. You know how it goes.”

Will nodded. Just about every gang in America had started as a group of minorities, be they Irish, Jewish, Italian, or other, banding together for survival. It generally took a couple of years before they started doing worse than was done to them. “What’s the structure?”

“Pretty loose. No one’s going to chart like MS-13.” She was referring to what was often called the most dangerous gang in the world. Their organizational structure rivaled the military’s, and their loyalty was so fierce that they’d never been successfully infiltrated.

Amanda explained, “In the early years, Los Texicanos was on the front page of the paper every single day, sometimes in both editions. Shootouts in the street, heroin, pot, numbers, prostitution, robbery. Their calling card was branding children. They didn’t just go after the person who crossed them. They’d go after a daughter, son, niece, nephew. They’d cut open their faces, once across the forehead, then a vertical line down the nose to the chin.”

Without thinking, Will put his hand to the scar along his jaw.

“There was one point during the Atlanta Child Murders investigation when Los Texicanos was at the top of our list. This was early on, the fall of ’79. I was the glorified assistant of the senior liaison for Fulton, Cobb, and Clayton. Evelyn was on the Atlanta task force, mostly fetching coffee until it was time to talk to the parents, then it all fell to her. The general consensus was that the Texicanos were trying to send a broader message to the clientele. It seems ludicrous now, but at the time, we were hoping it was them.” She switched on the blinker and changed lanes. “You were around four then, so you won’t remember, but it was a very tense time. The entire metro area was terrified.”

“Sounds like it,” he said, surprised she knew his age.

“It wasn’t long after the Child Murders that one of the top Texicanos was taken down during an internal struggle. They’re tight-knit. We never found out what happened or who took over, but we know the new guy was much more business-oriented. No more violence for the sake of violence. He prioritized the business, taking out the riskier component. His motto was to keep the coke flowing and the blood off the streets. Once they went underground, we were glad to ignore them.”

“Who’s in charge now?”

“Ignatio Ortiz is the only name we have. He’s the face of the gang. There are two others, but they keep an incredibly low profile and you’ll never find all three of them together in the same place. Before you ask, Ortiz is in Phillips State Prison serving his third year of seven without parole for attempted manslaughter.”

“Attempted?” That didn’t sound very gangbanger.

“Came home and found his wife tossing the sheets with his brother. Story goes he missed on purpose.”

Will assumed Ortiz had no trouble running his business from prison. “Is he worth talking to?”

“Even if we had cause, he wouldn’t sit with us in a room without his lawyer, who would insist that his client is just an average businessman who let his passion get the best of him.”

“Has he ever been arrested before?”

“A few times in his younger days, but nothing major.”

“So, the gang’s still under the radar.”

“They come out every now and then to school the younger kids. Do you remember the Father’s Day murder in Buckhead last year?”

“The guy who had his throat slit open in front of his kids?”

She nodded. “Thirty years ago, they would’ve killed the children, too. One might say they’ve gotten softer in their old age.”

“I’d hardly call that soft.”

“Inside the joint, the Texicanos are known as throat slitters.”

“The gentleman in the trunk is high up on the food chain.”

“Why do you think that?”

“He’s only got one tattoo.” Young gang members generally used their bodies as a canvas to illustrate their lives, etching tattoos of teardrops under their eyes for every murder, wrapping their elbows and shoulders in cobwebs to show that they’d done time. The tattoos were always rendered in blue ink culled from ballpoint pens, what was called “joint ink,” and they always told a story. Unless their story was so bad that it didn’t need to be told.

Will said, “A clean body means money, power, control. The gentleman is older, probably early sixties. That puts him in on the ground floor of Texicanos. His age is his badge of honor. This isn’t the kind of lifestyle that ensures longevity.”

“You don’t get old by being stupid.”

“You don’t get old by being in a gang.”

“We can only hope the APD shares the gentleman’s identity with us when they manage to track it down.”

Will glanced at her. She stared ahead at the road. He had a niggling suspicion that Amanda already knew who this man was, and exactly what part he played in the Texicanos hierarchy. There was something about the way she’d folded Mrs. Levy’s photograph in her pocket, and he was pretty sure that she had given the old woman some kind of coded message to keep her story to herself.