Free The Execution by Dick Wolf Page A

of mountains that had no name on Cecilia Garza’s map. It was a road that led, in essence, to nowhere—the country dry, stony, empty.
    “You’re too poetic,” said Cecilia Garza, seated next to him. “The village was founded by a group of escaped slaves from the United States. They came here about one hundred and fifty years ago. The people here still consider themselves to be black.”
    Four Policía Federal vehicles pulled into the center of the town, stopping in a cloud of dust. Everyone piled out. The center of town—such as it was—consisted of a few open-air stores, a stucco church, and several acres of packed, weedy dirt surrounding a statue of the Virgin. The pedestal on which the Virgin stood was badly cracked and canted forward a little, so that even the Virgin looked as though she were preparing to break into a run.
    Two dozen people in the streets surrounding the square all stopped. Men wearing cowboy hats and boots, women carrying string bags full of dried beans and rice and meat wrapped in bleeding butcher’s paper. They all stared apprehensively. But unlike the Virgin, they showed no impulse to flee.
    Garza watched MacClesh walk around the square, his thumbs in his belt. He sized up each of the citizens, then approached perhaps the oldest man, hatless, his skin darkened by the sun. He had a weather-beaten face, curly hair, and what at first looked like a sizable facial tumor but was in fact a large plug of chewing tobacco lodged inside his left cheek.
    MacClesh looked at the old man. “Those are some very fine boots, señor.”
    The old man looked down at them as though he didn’t realize he had them on.
    MacClesh said, “I am ashamed to compare them to my own.”
    MacClesh showed him his—and the old man flinched, as though he thought he was about to be kicked.
    MacClesh smiled at the old man. He stepped closer to him—almost close enough to touch his forehead with the brim of his hat.
    “You know why we’re here,” said MacClesh.
    The old man spit tobacco juice on the ground between the toes of his fine boots, but did not answer.
    MacClesh smiled again, then stepped back. This left enough room between them for another of Garza’s men to step up and punch the old man in the stomach.
    It wasn’t a hard punch, out of respect for the man’s age. But it was more than enough to double him over.
    The old man dropped to his knees, bending forward until his forehead touched the dusty ground.
    Garza preferred to let her men operate without her direct instructions. She did not like to be the mother hen. Nor did she care for their predilection toward casual violence. But it was a part of the macho culture of the PF, and Garza had to be judicious about interfering with it. So when she stepped in here, she did so not with the appearance of ending the violence, but of capitalizing on it.
    “Pick him up,” she said.
    Two men grabbed him, one at each armpit, and hoisted him to his feet. His face was empty, though he was gasping for breath. The lump in his cheek was gone. A string of amber saliva stretched across his dark chin, in contrast to the powdery oval of white dust on his forehead.
    The brown plug of tobacco lay in the dirt. Next to it, a device that had fallen out of the old man’s pocket. It was a cell phone.
    “His phone, please,” said Garza.
    Garza stood before the man. She did not smile, she did not play the “good cop.” She did not indulge any of her femininity. She was not soft. This was about finding and stopping a violent murderer.
    One of her men placed the old man’s phone into Garza’s hand.
    “There are no secrets in this world, señor,” she said to the old man.
    The old man’s eyes, damp from the force of the punch, looked off toward the Virgin.
    “There are satellites in the sky, airplanes with cameras, helicopters, radar. Even these . . .” She waggled the man’s cell phone in the air in front of his face. She brushed off the whitish dust. It was the latest model,