An Inconsequential Murder (35 page)

“
I want you to find out where Dean Herrera is.”

“
You confuse me with one of your colleagues, Captain; I’m not a detective,” said Lupe laughing.

“
No, but here’s my idea,” said Lombardo. “Remember that the Dean has a ‘friend’ to whom he is very emotionally attached, to put it nicely?”

“
They’re lovers,” said Lupe.

“
Yeah, they’re lovers.” Lombardo said that he was sure the Dean was communicating with him. “Not, by cell phone—the Dean knows they are too easy to trace—but the old-fashioned way, by email.”

“
What makes you think that?” asked Lupe.

“
Because among the many things Victor Delgado squirreled away into that encrypted archive were the Dean’s personal email files. And after having read some of them, it wouldn’t surprise me if that is how this whole encryption thing started; that is, the Dean wanted his email files encrypted and when it became dangerous to have the emails of their jolly little group in files their enemies could steal, they decided to encrypt those, too.”

“
So, the intruders that Victor was chasing the night he was killed were probably snooping around trying to find the emails and other documents.”

“
Yeah, they wanted to find out the names of all of the conspirators that were pushing the drug legalizing thing. They were especially interested in knowing who was getting money from the Cartels. Can you imagine what they could do with that information?”

“
OK, but why do you want to find the Dean?”

“
The men who killed Victor are dead. They were killed because I wanted to arrest them and their buddies thought that would be too embarrassing and would lead to too much exposure for a couple of governments and the DEA, FBI, and who knows what other foreign agencies that are running around loose in this country. The people who tried to stop me from investigating Victor’s murder thought that by killing them, the case would grind to a halt. The bad guys are dead, there’s nothing more to investigate.”

“
That seems reasonable,” said Lupe.

“
Not to me. The people that had Victor’s murderers killed are guilty of much more than just those killings and Victor’s murder. And the Mexicans who opposed them are just as guilty of who knows how many crimes. Their damned little wars are turning this country into a killing field. They have to be stopped.”

“
It seems to me, Captain, that although it is a noble proposition, it is a very dangerous one. If these people won’t stop at killing some of their own, what do you think they’ll do to us if they find out you’re still pursuing the case?”

“
But, you see, I am not going to pursue the case. I am going to let the case pursue itself.”

He explained to Lupe that once he had found the Dean, he would tell him that as long as he was running around the world, his life was in danger. If these guys caught up with him, he would be dead and at the bottom of some river in no time. The Governor had fled into the witness protection system because he was probably ratting on all of his former colleagues in the pro-legalizing drugs lobby. He was valuable to them for that, but the Dean was a danger, and of no use, so he was a prime target for elimination. But if the Dean came back, with a copy of the documents in his hand, he would probably find that the politicians, whom the Governor had antagonized with his ratting, would help him and protect him in a safe jail.

“
That’s in theory,” said Lupe, “who knows how it will play out in real life.”

“
All I can do is try,” responded Lombardo. “So, can the emails, if they exist, be traced?”

“
It can be done. Once we find the recipient, all we have to do is hack his account to get one of his emails. Unless the Dean is very careful and uses an anonymous mailer, we can use the
header to trace it. But, let’s see what we can do.” As he started to type away on his computer’s keyboard, he added, “By the way, I am charging my usual hourly fee for this, OK?”

The first thing that had to be done, according to Lupe, was find the Dean’s friend’s ISP—Internet Service Provider—for that he needed the Dean’s friend’s name. Lombardo provided that easily. He made a couple of phone calls, including one to a gay theater director who was very active in gay rights movements. The name that came back, Gilberto Jaramillo, was that of a professor in the Visual Arts Department of the University.

When Lupe queried a search engine with the name, a dozen references came up, several of which mentioned his email addresses. He had the usual Hotmail address, which it was Lupe’s guess was probably used only for chat purposes; he had a Gmail address, as did a gazillion other people in the world; he had an address at the University, and he had an address with a local ISP.

“
My guess is,” said Lupe, “that the local ISP is the one he is using to communicate with the Dean. If he is using the Hotmail or Gmail accounts, the only way to get to his emails would be to hack his personal computer, and that might be a desktop or a laptop, which I would have to get to when he is online. That, my friend, would take time and luck.

If he is using the University account, which I doubt, you can squeeze David to give you access to whatever he has stored there. My guess is there will probably be just University business in that account.

No, I think we should start with the local ISP and see if he had left copies of his emails there. Lots of people don’t check the option to delete copies of their emails once they are safely loaded to their own machine, so the ISP stores its copies for a long time.”

“
So, what can we do then?”

“
I suggest,” said Lupe, “that you
go lean on David to give you access to this guys emails that will be stored in the University’s email server. As I said, I doubt he’ll have anything that’s useful to us there, but let’s do it for completeness sake. Meanwhile, I’ll see if I can hack into this local ISP. If it is too difficult, I can ‘human engineer’ them and use your scary name to get them to let me see his emails—assuming he has left copies on the email server.”

“
OK, that’s a good start. You get busy on that and I’ll call David on my way to the University.”

As Lombardo walked to his car, he mused about the amount of information that is just floating around on the Internet. “It’s a con man’s dream,” he muttered to himself, “but it could be useful to cops as well. I’ve got to ask Lupe to show me some of his tricks.”

His car was not where he had left it. According to the sticker pasted on the curb, it had been towed away.

Chapter
41: The Awful Truth

Lombardo didn
’t ask permission from the new Director to leave the country; it is customary for police officers and other law enforcement officials to ask their superiors for permission to do so if they are going abroad on official business. But Lombardo wanted to talk to the Dean before he confronted the powers that be again and he certainly didn’t want the Director to know where the Dean was hiding.

He looked at the printouts that Lupe had given him and the handwritten notes on them. The signatory of the latest emails that the Dean’s friend had received was a “Juán Pérez,” the Spanish equivalent for “John Doe.” Lupe had traced those incoming emails to an ISP in Houston, Texas and had printed the results.

Although no names were used, other than the phony signature, it was clear from the way the two correspondents addressed each other—discreet endearments and understated wishes to be reunited again—that “Juán Pérez” was most likely the Dean.

Police work and investigations always depend o
n a bit of luck to get results; in this case, Lombardo was lucky that Lupe had read a series of emails in which “Juán Pérez” and the Dean’s friend agreed to meet in San Antonio’s Ingram Park Mall the following Monday. The Dean had told Jaramillo that he didn’t want to meet where he was staying because in case of “trouble,” he would spare his hostess any legal, moral, and emotional hardship. From that email, Lombardo guessed that Dean Herrera was probably staying with a friend or relative in Houston.

“
Juán Pérez” gave precise instructions that detailed the place, within the Mall’s gigantic parking lots, where his car would be parked. Jaramillo was to meet him there; they would then drive away together to a more discreet place—a nearby motel. “
Cherchez la fame
” advised the old French cliché; it seemed to work just as well for love between any combination of genders.

The meeting was set up for the afternoon to give Jaramillo time to fly to San Antonio and then drive to the Mall.
Lombardo took a late afternoon flight on Sunday, rented a car, and drove to the Holiday Inn Express that is just half a kilometer from Ingram Park Mall. He wanted to be at the rendezvous point before the Dean arrived.

He spent Sunday night watching banal television programs and thinking about how he was going to persuade the Dean to go back to Mexico. He would have to convince him that his life was in danger. He decided that his argument would be that if the ex-Governor had gone into the FBI’s witness protection program, in exchange for giving away all the information he had on all of the co-conspirators he knew on the pro-legalizing drugs group, the Dean’s name would be on the list. He would also argue that Victor Delgado’s death proved that the anti-legalization forces knew the Dean was involved and maybe even had access to the poisoned emails and documents. The anti-legalization forces would conclude that the Dean would have to be “neutralized” in one way or another. If he stayed out in the cold, the Dean might suffer the same fate as Victor.

Lombardo turned off the television and the lights and unlike the other night, he promptly went to sleep.

The next day he woke and was startled for a few seconds by that feeling, so common to frequent travelers, of not knowing where you are. He looked at the clock—it was eight in the morning.

He got up and decided to shower later after having coffee and something to eat. He went to the small cafeteria to get his “courtesy continental breakfast,” which consisted mostly of cereals, industrial pastry, and watery juices and coffee. The place was full of squealing kids and adults in Bermuda shorts and t-shirts—the hotel was near several theme parks. He got a cup of coffee and a pastry wrapped in a cellophane bag and went back to his room.

He watched the news while having his breakfast. After the usual sound bites from the President of the United States and other politicians about the upcoming signing of the Bilateral Trade Agreement in the Rose Garden, there was a bevy of reports on the latest victims in the Cartel wars. Finally, there was a report on the Mexican presidential campaign. The newly named conservative candidate called for a tougher stance against the Cartels and the use of the Army in the fight against them, citing the fact that police forces were usually outgunned when going up against cartel soldiers, but not the fact that a lot of those policemen had little incentive to get killed for the miniscule salary they got when they could stay out of the fight and get rewarded handsomely by the Cartels.

Leobardo Contreras, the
center-left Liberal candidate, on the other hand, promised to find new, less violent ways, of meeting the challenge of the “drug problem”—he didn’t refer to it as a “war.” He also hinted that more responsibility for the problem would have to be assumed by the “great consumers” of the drugs since “if it were not for such a huge illegal market, there would be no problem.” He was also adamant about the U.S. curtailing the amount of guns and other weapons being sold to the Cartels by American gun stores and dealers.

One didn’t have to be a genius to guess where this idea of a “new” drug policy was heading. He was scaring and displeasing the conservatives on both sides of the border with these hints at a possible drug legalization initiative if he was elected. It was even rumored that the President of Mexico, who had personally picked him as his successor, was surprised and annoyed at the way the PLR’s candidate was running his campaign.

Lombardo turned off the television and showered. He checked out of the hotel and drove to the Mall. He read the email again in which the
Dean described where they were going to meet. He parked his car at a discreet distance, backing up into the parking spot so that if a car parked next to him, it would partially hide his car but allow him to see the spot where the Dean intended to park. Also, it would be easier to drive out of the parking space when the Dean and his friend left for the motel.

Lombardo looked at the time on his cell phone. He had forgotten to wear his watch. It was 11:00 a.m.. He had time to wander around the Mall and then have lunch in the food court.

Lombardo spent
an hour walking slowly through the huge building. There were a few people about—the throngs having shopped until exhausted on the weekend, and, after all, this was a workday. There was little of interest to him. The spacious corridors were lined with the same stores offering the same articles as in practically every other mall he had ever visited. He went into a book store and bought a magazine.