Fields of Wrath (Luis Chavez Book 1) (23 page)

“Dammit,”
he said, sighing.

“Help you with something, old-timer?”

Realizing he might’ve spoken louder than he’d meant to, Henry turned apologetically to a grinning old man in a postal uniform, who’d sidled up next to him.

“Who are you calling old-timer, old-timer?” Henry said. “Blake, right?”

“Wow! Good memory there, Marshak,” the postman nodded.

“Yeah, except for police stations. I thought that was right here.”

“Well, you’re half-right,” the postman said. “About once a week I find a contemporary out here doing the same thing as you. The station moved back in nineteen eighty-
eight
.”

The postman pointed across the street to a large building Henry had mistaken for a trade school.

“Ah. Thank you kindly.”

Henry moved his truck from the post office parking lot to a curb across the street. Behind the front desk in the station’s lobby sat a middle-aged man with a sergeant’s stripes on his bicep. He looked too overweight for street duty.

“Morning,” Henry said, finding his usual cheerfulness left behind in his truck.

“Can I help you?” the desk sergeant replied, giving Henry an officious stare. “Unfortunately, yes,” Henry said, nodding and moving close. “I’m here about the murders of Anne Whittaker, Santiago Higuera, and his sister, Maria Higuera.”

The sergeant’s features froze, though his hand traveled to something Henry couldn’t see under the desk.

“Right now Maria Higuera is simply missing. Do you know otherwise?”

“She’s dead, Officer,” Henry explained. “I’m the one who killed her and the others. Do you have somebody I can talk to?”

Everything happened quickly after that.

XXVIII

Maria Higuera’s car was still smoldering in the fields when the first federal agents came upon it. Due to the haphazard way it’d been torched, a theory quickly circulated that the perpetrators knew law enforcement was onto them. Still roped to the trailer, the car had been abandoned in the middle of a field of bell pepper plants just off the main road and set alight. Deep ruts in the soil and chewed-up foliage marked the path of the truck that hauled it.

They’d done a fairly professional job with the burn, lighting up the interior instead of the exterior and breaking the windows to provide plenty of oxygen. They’d poured lighter fluid across the seats and dashboard as well, leaving the empty canister to burn up inside the car.

Even then the vehicle’s make, model, and color were still identifiable as matching those of Maria Higuera’s Camry.

“If they were in that big a hurry, then they might have forgotten to destroy the security footage from the warehouse cameras,” Michael told the warehouse team leader over his cell phone. “See if you can pull it and send it over to me this morning.”

Michael hung up. He was in a convoy of four highway patrol cruisers and two SUVs bearing the door sigils of the Marshals Service en route to the Marshaks’ corporate campus in the Santa Ynez foothills a few miles from the unmarked warehouses. The road was flanked by fields, workers already pulling up the day’s harvest. Unlike the anonymous fields Luis had described to him, you couldn’t go a hundred yards without seeing the Marshak name on a water tank or truck.

When all the arrests were done and the trial under way, Michael hoped he would at least come away with a sense of why a company as prominent as the Marshaks’ would embrace illegality in such a broad and reckless fashion. As he was learning, corporate slavery in America was nothing new. It was believed many food companies benefited from the wide-scale use of illegal workers in the Florida sugarcane fields, where conditions were even worse than here. But these corporations insulated themselves behind endless fronts and shell companies to establish unimpeachable, plausible deniability.

The Marshaks seemed to have ramped up their foray into human trafficking with the zeal of a convert and the forethought of a child. It didn’t make sense.

The convoy entered the parking lot of the Marshak campus, its yucca- and cacti-lined sidewalks still wet from the morning sprinklers. Michael called DA Rebenold’s cell to get an update.

“Everyone’s in position at the offices and accounting firms,” she told him. “INS and the marshals are in the foothills around the housing complex but won’t move in without our say-so.”

“The team at the warehouse is almost there as well. They found the Higuera car burning out in the fields.”

“Jesus Christ. What about the desert location? La Calavera?”

“Still en route. They’re out of cell range right now, but they’ve got a helicopter with them, so we should hear something soon.”

Michael checked his watch. It was 7:48.

“Okay. Give the word and I’ll pass it,” she said.

“Let’s do it.”

When Michael emerged from the lead Tahoe, a curious security guard met him at the front door of the Marshaks’ admin building. He glanced from Michael to the row of vehicles and back again.

“Good morning,” Michael said. “I’m Los Angeles Deputy DA Michael Story. We have warrants to search and seize company documents, computers, and hard drives. The FBI will be here soon to set up a command post to facilitate this. We’re going to need help turning away workers and sealing the building.”

The guard gave Michael the kind of look that suggested he’d long believed a visit like this was in the cards.

Glenn watched as Donald Roenningke’s eyes traveled between a page in his right hand and an image on his phone in his left. He compared their salient points with care, eyes flicking back and forth. He looked like a professor trying to determine which of two pupils might have cheated on the final. On the other side of the table, Glenn ate his breakfast in peace, as if the billion-dollar deal hanging in the balance was the farthest thing from his mind.

They were seated in the Bella Vista restaurant in the Santa Barbara Four Seasons, overlooking the ocean. Though its breakfast buffet was one of the highest rated in the country, Glenn had ordered from the menu to keep their ups and downs to a minimum. He wanted Donald’s focus. He wanted him to know just how misinformed he’d been about his company.

His counterpart finally lowered the pages.

“I owe you an apology,” Donald said finally. “Of course, I’ll need my legal team to go over this, but as a lawyer myself—”

“As a lawyer yourself, you know what you’re looking at,” Glenn interjected.

“Yes. I should’ve known better. It’s not the first time we’ve been approached by fraudsters looking to disrupt deals, but it’s still embarrassing that I gave it credence over not only your word but that of my own due-diligence team. For that I apologize.”

Glenn shrugged as if Donald had done little more than lose a borrowed pen.

“They’re getting good, these ‘fraudsters,’ to use your word,” Glenn said. “They used to have a reason: a disgruntled employee, a competitor. Now you’ve got folks just doing it to see if they can get away with it.”

“Well, forgive me all the same,” Donald stressed. “How about we extend the terms another year to make it up to you?”

Glenn laughed.

“So we can’t renegotiate once we’ve surpassed our performance milestones for another twelve months? That is a definite no. Nice one, though.”

“Can’t fault a guy for trying,” Donald said, palms up. “At least let me buy you breakfast.”

“That I can agree to,” Glenn said, though he hadn’t seen a bill in this place for years.

Their cell phones rang in unison.

“We’re popular,” Glenn announced, fishing his cell from his pocket. “Hello?”

“Where are you?” came a worried voice.

It was Jack Iskander, senior partner at Baringer & Iskander, who had been one of the Marshaks’ primary counsels for thirty years.

“Jack! You’ll be happy to hear I’m sitting with Donald right now concluding our business—”

“You’re in Santa Barbara?” Jack interrupted.

“I am,” Glenn replied, seething that it had not been acknowledged that he had earned a victory Jack and his team should’ve delivered. “But maybe you didn’t hear me. I’m with Donald Roenningke, from Crown Foods.”

Glenn glanced over to catch Donald’s reaction to his show of bombast, only to see that he looked furious.

“Donald?”

“Fuck you, Glenn,” Donald said as he rose and walked toward the door.

“What the hell . . . ? Jack, Donald just stormed out of here.”

“He probably got the same news I did. Something big is going down. There are warrants being served at all of your office locations, warehouses, and accounting firms. They’ve even come here.”

Warrants?
Against
my
company?

“What on earth for? What are the charges?” Glenn roared, ignoring the sidelong glances of his fellow diners.

“We don’t know.”

“Don’t they have to say on the warrant?”

“They’re vague. They do cite an unimpeachable informant, but they seem to be casting a wide net in hopes of shaking new witnesses and evidence out of the tree.”

“Bullshit!”
Glenn spat, slapping his hand on the table. “Who’s behind this? Is this the same people who tried to screw up the Crown deal? Or is some jumped-up politician who couldn’t get his name in the paper trying to use mine?”

Glenn’s teeth were clenched so tight his jaw popped.

“We have to get out in front of this,” Jack said, trying on a calming tone. “You need to start thinking of ways to deflect this from your personal portfolio.”

Glenn went still.
Nothing about containment?
Nothing about riding it out? Was his lawyer actually talking exit strategy already?

“Are you serious?”

“I’ve never seen anything like this,” Jack admitted. “People are already lining up on the sidelines to watch. No one thinks the DA would make such a move without something to back it up.”

Where there’s smoke there’s fire,
Glenn thought.

“But none of it’s true,” Glenn offered.

“You’ve been around long enough to know that doesn’t matter. I’ve been putting calls in to judges we’ve known for years. They’re not calling back. Apparently Crown got a stack of witness testimonials and stills purporting to show undocumented workers in your fields and warehouses—that was the shot across the bow. What it looks like the DA’s got is the broadside, financials purporting to show that this was some kind of widespread and carefully organized effort with players on both sides of the border.”

“Are you . . . ?” Glenn stammered. “That’s insane! I marched with Cesar Chavez! I signed the first deal with his United Farm Workers in this state!”

“Look, we’ve been tipped that the DA is giving a press conference in forty-five minutes. We’ll know more then. I need you to get down here as quickly as you can.”

Even as his pulse returned to normal, Glenn still couldn’t believe what he was hearing.

“I’m on my way,” he said wearily. “One question: Where’s Jason?”

No one in the Blocks knew what to do when the INS vans pulled up. The trucks hadn’t come for them that morning, so the residents were already on edge. As the vans idled out front, everyone gathered their things and waited, but the agents didn’t emerge. Instead, they eyed the apartments, talked into their phones, talked amongst themselves, and made more calls.

Odilia watched all this from her window. She refused to let herself be hopeful. Deportation took time, but maybe this was the first step.

An hour after they arrived, two men got out of the first van.

This is it,
Odilia thought.

Then they just lit cigarettes, stared at the makeshift apartments, as if having no idea a thousand people were looking back at them, and laughed about something. When the smokes were done, they got back in their air-conditioned vehicles.

Military vehicles arrived about fifteen minutes later, two dozen trucks with a handful of national guardsmen in each. They pulled up in front of the apartments, and a man in an officer’s uniform hopped out to consult with the INS agents. After a ten-minute back and forth, the officer gave a lazy wave to his men, and they poured out of their vehicles and lined up to be directed by the INS agents.

In another unit, someone screamed as if believing a massacre was imminent. Behind her, Odilia heard crying and hushed voices. Another woman, an apparent veteran of such events, told the women what phrases to use in order to get moved to the safer, more responsive medical wing of the facilities they’d be taken to. Things like “sudden and acute” and “sharp pain.”

“But they keep track of who comes in more than once,” she admonished. “So use them sparingly.”

Someone passed the window and knocked on the door.

“Are you able to open this door?” came a voice speaking American-accented Spanish.

“It’s locked from the outside,” Odilia replied. “What’s going on?”

“This is
not
a raid. We have been informed of your status and been in contact with the government of Mexico as to your treatment here in the States. We’re here to get you out of this situation.”

It wasn’t the best-rehearsed speech Odilia had ever heard, but it said all the right things. She couldn’t imagine how this had happened, until a realization spread over her.

The priest. It was the priest.

Tears swelled into her eyes. He’d done it. Somehow he’d done it.

The door handle and bolt were unlocked, but it took the INS agents a few tries to remove the jamb. When it was finally down, the door swung wide. The agent stared in at the twelve women for a moment before waving over a female guardsman, a Latina with Carrizales on her name tape. She eyed the women with undisguised horror.

“How many of you are there in here?” she asked.

“Twelve,” Odilia replied. “There are five or six women’s units, but I’m not sure which are which.”

“Can you provide information about the fields where you worked?”