Devils in Exile Read online

  “DEA?” said the ME, eyeing Lash’s credentials.

  The ME was a young kid, brown-skinned like Lash, wearing a fur-hooded L.L. Bean parka over evidence-preserving Tyvek overalls and bootees.

  “Possible drug-related homicide,” said Lash.

  “Drugs? Because the decedent’s a well-dressed foreigner?”

  Lash gave the kid another look. A fellow brother, but Lash didn’t get the confrere vibe. No shorthand, no soul-brother discount on a fast friendship. No love. Kid must have got all that affirmative-action shit drummed out of him in med school.

  “Because he’s a KA. A known associate.”

  “Is cutting off hands a drug thing?”

  “It is when you steal.” Lash looked at the kid. He had kind of a natural antipathy toward lighter-skinned intellectuals that he was trying hard to overcome. Mostly because that was the same track his own college-age son was on. “How about we switch this around and you start telling me things now.”

  The ME leaned forward to take a second look at the defrosting wrist stumps. “Nice clean cut. People think wrist joints, flexible, easy to cut. The reverse is true. This was done with a table saw, looks like. Postmortem for sure. No fish bites.” The ME looked closely at the fleshy sleeve. “Or very few, anyway. Body is well preserved on the whole. Essentially mummified. But as he continues to thaw, he’ll decompose faster than usual.” He looked up to the road where his white ME van was parked. “Guy’s going to drip all over my wagon.”

  “You can’t keep him cold somehow?”

  “Pack him in dry ice? Great if we had the budget. And the time. If he was chopped up into cooler-sized pieces, I could get him home that way.”

  Lash thinking, Home?

  The ME shuffled forward on his haunches, noticing something. The dead man’s face was half-emerged from the ice, glistening. “Chunk missing from his lower lip, see there? Could be a fish bite. Or …”

  He worked his gloved fingers inside the dead Venezuelan’s parted teeth. With some effort, he slid out a wedge of melting river ice—meaning the body had gone into the water with its mouth open—then produced a small flashlight from his overalls pocket.

  “Tongue’s cut off too.”

  Lash looked in. The cut had been made at a slight angle, maybe an inch from the base at the back of the throat.

  The ME mimed the procedure on the corpse. “They went in probably with garden shears or maybe butcher’s scissors, one snip. But as they did so, rubbing the lip over this lower canine here, it cut the lip. See? Can’t get a clean angle like that.” He pulled back, flicking his gloved fingers toward the river to get the wetness off. “So what does that mean?”

  Lash sat back from the melting corpse. “Traditionally, you get your hands cut off for stealing, and your tongue cut out for squealing.”

  “Uh-oh. Mixed messages.”

  Lash stood, looking across the river at the Back Bay apartments and the Citgo sign. “He did something to piss off the wrong people. Not a lot of second chances in this game.”

  A growing rumble became a train of six cars barreling across the Grand Junction Railroad bridge, shaking the crumbling stone struts of the overhead road as it passed into the rail yards on the Boston side.

  “Did you know,” the ME said, once the train was clear, “that this is the only spot in the world where a boat can sail underneath a train running under a car driving underneath an airplane?”

  “No, I didn’t,” said Lash, unable to figure out this kid. He reached into his coat pocket for a business card. “You won’t learn much, I don’t think. They dumped him here to be found. But here’s my card with my e-mail on the bottom there. If you could, cc me your autopsy report.”

  “Sure, yeah.” The ME looked at the card, the embossed DEA seal in the corner. He was a little more interested now. “You got it.”

  Lash turned to make his way back up the embankment.

  “Hey,” said the ME. “So what does this mean anyway? Is this the start of a gang war or something?”

  Lash stopped, turned back. “You know how they say, for every one dead rat you see, there are a hundred more living in the walls around you?”

  The ME nodded. “Okay, I see what you’re saying.”

  This kid had come in with hackles up, for whatever reason, but he was basically all right. Lash wanted to leave him with something, to appeal to their shared heritage, such as it was. “My grandpops used to have this thing. He was a big tea drinker. Smoked tea too, but that’s a different story. Back in the day, tea bags were for fancy folks. Tea came loose, and you made a pot and you strained out the leaves. He’d serve me some, wait until I drank it down to the bottom. ‘Gimme here,’ he’d say, motioning for the cup. ‘I’m ’on read your tea leaves for you.’ It was a way of fortune-telling, by the pattern they left. He’d take it and look at it this way and that, swirl it around a little and squint hard, then nod and make his pronouncement. ‘You’re going to take a piss soon.’”

  The ME loosed a grudging smile.

  Lash nodded. “That’s what I get off this. Somebody’s going to be taking a piss soon. All I really know is, it won’t be me.”

  LASH HATED NARCOTICS THE WAY SOCIAL WORKERS HATE POVERTY, the way epidemiologists hate disease. Not an active, festering hatred, but as something to push against. A battle he didn’t expect to win, only to wage honorably.

  He had thirty-three years in the DEA. A third of a century. Where did it all go? is what people always say, as though they hadn’t been paying attention, or else somehow imagined it was all going to come back around again.

  But Lash knew where it went. It went into this job.

  He had been with the DEA almost since its inception. People would ask him sometimes, Why drug enforcement? as though it had to be a calling, because who else but a fool would devote himself full-time to a losing cause? Or maybe some personal tragedy in his background had propelled him into this unforgiving line of work.

  There was none. He came out of the service in 1975 with a helicopter license, a ’fro he was itching to grow, and a fuck-it-all attitude. The two-year-old DEA was a good fit. It was small and underfunded, and the agency needed a black guy with combat pilot experience more than he needed it. In the late seventies and eighties, narc work bloomed with the diversification of the drug trade. Undercover was where the action was, and for a time he lived the lifestyle, like the mirror image of a dealer. And he excelled. A black fed working UC in the early eighties was a lot less makeable than a gregarious white dude showing up in town with two days’ worth of beard growth and a spray-on tan, carrying a briefcase full of cash and looking to front some snow.

  The job had cost Lash his marriage, and any shot at a normal American life, which was never really what he’d wanted anyway. Vietnam had pretty well cured him of that. He liked action. He was used to action. He had never sought a desk job, and a street agent’s pay grade could rise only so high. But what he did get was more pull. He got some sway. That was his reward for longevity. That was how he came to head up Windfall.

  Windfall was a multiagency task force set up under his command. Cartels and drug rings had a unique problem, one Lash had come to appreciate over his career: they made too much money. Too much cash, specifically, which they then had to devise ingenious ways of getting out of the United States, requiring almost as much energy as did importing their contraband. If the average wholesale price of a kilo of cocaine equaled $30,000, that’s three hundred Benjamins going the other way, taking up as much volume as the drug, if not quite as much mass. With heroin, it’s double the dough, so now you’re moving two to one exports to imports. With the drug cartels each grossing tens of billions every year, and the United States far and away their largest market, that meant $100 billion a year in cash flowing out of this country.

  Some of this they accomplished with shell corporations and paper transactions. Some of the money they “smurf” out. Smurfing means breaking down large sums into smaller chunks of less than $10,000, to avoid fed
eral Currency Transaction Report filings. Smurfs are locals who move from bank to bank, depositing cartel money in accounts opened under various aliases, or else converting it into cashier’s checks and post office money orders under the CTR limit. For this, they earn one or two cents on the dollar.

  Eighteen months ago, Lash and his team—which included rotating agents on loan from the U.S. Treasury (IRS and FinCEN, the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network), U.S. Customs and Border Protection, Department of Homeland Security (U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services), U.S. Secret Service (Investigative Support for Money Laundering), Massachusetts State Police, Rhode Island State Police, and Boston and Providence police departments—stopped a husband and wife outside their Methuen home. They were in their fifties, which trended old, but otherwise they fit the profile: neatly dressed, inconspicuous, law-abiding foreign nationals from Mexico, Central America, or northern South America (in this case, Guatemalans), with good language skills, established in the community (their daughter was enrolled in a Catholic high school, and they had a one-year renter’s agreement on their house). Smurfs are rarely armed, notably compliant, and never see or handle the powder: the money cells and the drug cells are kept entirely separate, for security reasons.

  The woman carried a large Vera Bradley knockoff—the fashion among New England–area smurfs that year, thanks to its convenient interior pockets—so full of money, she had to remove banded stacks of cash to dig out her identification. Inside their home, in oversize blue cotton laundry bags next to the basement washer-dryer, Lash had discovered another three hundred K.

  No law, federal or local, prohibits people from keeping $300,000 in the laundry area of their home. Because of this, Windfall’s arrest rate—their total “clearance” of successfully prosecuted cases—was relatively low. To prefer federal charges, Lash had to prove that a suspect was “structuring”—laundering illegal profits into unreportable sums—which required a significant paper trail, the lack of which was the whole idea of smurfing in the first place. The smurfs who were arrested almost never cooperated with the government, knowing that family members in their native country would suffer for their betrayal. (This was also why smurfs could be trusted never to skim profits from their cartel employers.)

  But large sums of money suspected to be the fruit of illegal activity could lawfully be confiscated by the federal government and held until such time as the possessor could prove it was legitimately received or earned. The couple in this case offered no objection to the cash seizure, only requesting a receipt for the full amount, certified by an agent of the IRS: a piece of paper citing proof of law enforcement confiscation, the one thing that ensured they and their loved ones would remain alive.

  Such moneys are never claimed, the bulk of the funds turned over to the Treasury’s forfeiture fund to be applied toward reducing the federal deficit—with 10 percent recycled back into financing Windfall. Over the past two years, Windfall had confiscated over $31 million in cash and assets in the six New England states. Because Windfall was self-funded and, in this way, self-perpetuating, Lash and his team enjoyed relative autonomy.

  Going after the drugs themselves was a failure. It meant agents had to hustle harder than street dealers to make a bust, only to see the bad guys cycle through the criminal justice system as easily as the dollars they laundered. Street money was chump change, because once the product was out on the streets, the source money, the real money, had already been made.

  Disrupt the Flow. That was Lash’s mantra. Get in Their Shit. The money Windfall had seized wasn’t enough to shake the foundations of the cartels—not yet—and admittedly, drugs weren’t physically being taken off the street. But Windfall’s diligence was beginning to exact a real toll on the suppliers, Lash was sure. They could always manufacture more product, but confiscated profits were gone forever. He was hacking away at their bottom line. Getting Windfall implemented nationwide, which was his goal, might even change the face of the American drug problem—not defeat it, never defeat it, but weaken it, break it down, make it more manageable.

  LASH PULLED INTO A SPACE ON THE THIRD LEVEL OF THE PARKING garage. He exchanged his overcoat and coffee-and-cream scarf for a San Antonio Spurs hoodie. He used to wear a Celtics hoodie, but too many whites came up asking if he was Robert Parish.

  He crossed into the adjacent Museum of Science, paid the entrance fee, and headed over to the blue wing, second level, past the “Seeing Is Deceiving” exhibit. He slowed a moment there, recognizing two M. C. Escher works: the hand drawing the hand, and the stairs that went around in a perpetual up-or-down circle. Prints of these works adorned the office of his boss, the special agent in charge of the New England DEA, was really all one needed to know about the current state of conventional drug enforcement.

  At the far end of the wing was the entrance to a separate exhibit named “Butterfly Garden.” A bunch of little kids were attacking a coatrack there like locusts denuding a tree. Padded parkas of pastel vinyl, blues and reds and pinks, getting their last few wears of the season. Lash barely remembered his children from those days because he had barely been around. Rosey, his boy—Roseland Douglass Lash, named by his mother in a pregnancy-induced hormonal rush of heritage pride—was a junior at Tufts now. Lash had set up Windfall in Boston in order to be with Rosey, an engineering major and lacrosse midfielder, before the boy was out of his grasp for good. To that end, he had offered Rosey a deal with the devil: Lash had agreed to take on his full tuition if the boy agreed to share a house with his old man. They lived together on the bottom floor of an old triple on Rogers Avenue in Somerville, two bachelors at opposite ends of the spectrum. The tuition was breaking him, but this was Lash’s last chance to connect with Rosey, and he was not going to mess it up.

  The “Butterfly Garden” was a narrow, glass-walled conservatory full of exotic plants, overlooking the greater basin of the Charles River: the wide, lakelike head of the Charles that fed off Boston Harbor, before it narrowed to the icy glut that had coughed up Vasco. A twenty-person occupancy limit meant they had to stagger entrances like in the VIP section in a club. A good, small room for monitoring ins and outs. No one could tail you inside without getting made.

  Inside the door, a perfect monarch settled on Lash’s shoulder, fluttering its stained-glass wings. Butterflies were everywhere, drinking nectar out of feeders, courting among the exotic foliage, basking in the early-spring sun.

  There was a bench for sitting, and on it, hunched forward from the back slats, hands folded over his splayed knees, was a black man in his late twenties. Oversize Phat Farm T, wide-legged, many-pocketed carps, thick chains visible around the back of his neck. He was pondering a tiny, purple-winged butterfly perched on the base knuckle of the top thumb of his folded hands.

  Lash settled next to him and the butterfly lifted away.

  The man gave Lash some skin, rough-palmed and hard-nailed, and said, “M.L.”

  “Tricky-Trey,” said Lash. The man’s name was Patrique Molondre, but on the street he went by Tricky. “I’m digging the spot.”

  “Bro of mine from the inside hipped me to it. I need more of this peace in my life.”

  Some dudes get their minds shaped more by prison than by the chaos of their childhood. The Zen of the pen. The Tao of the dungeon. Time in isolation opens some up to concepts of harmony within a culture of violence. The hidden garden deep within the fortress under siege.

  Lash picked at his collar, billowing out his sweatshirt. “Hothouse.”

  “Yeah,” said Tricky. “They should be growing weed up in this mo-mo.”

  Lash smiled, Tricky having him on. Nice and loose.

  They watched two elderly women shuffle past, each with a death grip on her purse. A sign at the exit reminded visitors to check themselves for butterflies in the mirrors before leaving, and when the door opened, a blower came on, keeping the residents inside.

  “Minimum security,” said Tricky. “Nobody trying to bust out of this paradise.” He reached over,
plucking a reddish orange number off Lash’s shoulder. Held it pinched by its wings. “Brother here got six to ten for unlawful pollination.”

  “Butterflies are the white-collar criminals of nature.”

  “This boy, he goes out, drinks himself some nectar, has himself a time, right? People say, ‘Oh, well. He don’t know no better, he’s a butterfly.’ But when some fucking big-ass bumblebee buzzes over, sticks his stinger in—look out. Larceny. Shut that mo-mo up in the bee house, give him twenty years, throw away the key. Cage his black-and-yellow ass.”

  Lash nodded. “Ain’t no justice for a bumblebee.”

  Tricky watched the critter try to fly, then opened his fingers and let him go. “I guess you hearing me now?”

  “I heard you before, Trick.” Lash sat back. “I just didn’t know. Wasn’t seeing it.”

  “Won’t never see nothing till it bleeds out onto the street.” Tricky stayed forward, talking over his hands like a man in church. “They been hitting it hard. I don’t mean ambushing street-corner buys. These ain’t stickups. I mean high-line, pro licks. Takedowns. Inside baseball.”

  Tricky let that last part hang out there with the sound of the trickling water.

  Lash said, “I’m listening.”

  “Nobody knows who, or what. No one I hear from anyway. I sure don’t. But they’re tight. Laying dudes out, rodeo-wrappin’ them, pulling phones and straps.”

  “Who they hitting?”

  “It’s all vague. Nobody wants to bark about getting punked. What I do know is, peeps are gearing up. Strapping it on. All that peacetime, turf-respecting shit—that shit is done.”

  Lash had no real problem with upper-echelon dealers being taken down, per se, but instability concerned him. Innocents and the day players might suddenly find themselves in the cross fire.

  “These guys,” said Lash, “these sugar bandits. Are we talking shooters?”

  “Naw. Pros. Heavy-hitting pros.”