Natalie sat in the shade of the awning on the rooftop patio, sipping southern sweet tea, barely aware of Zach’s phone conversation with Rowan, her gaze riveted to the dossier he had put together for her on Cárdenas. There were hundreds of pages, most stamped “CLASSIFIED” in big, red letters, some with photographs, all describing the actions of a man who could only be described as evil.
Cárdenas had been arrested on suspicion of rape at the age of sixteen, rape and murder at seventeen, and numerous counts of drug trafficking at eighteen. Arrest mug shots showed a skinny, angry boy with hate in his eyes and a smirk on his face. By the time he was twenty, he’d been arrested almost a dozen times, and the smirk had become a fixed sneer. He had reason to scorn the police. They’d arrested him again and again, but the charges had never stuck. According to background notes, his father had paid handsomely to keep him out of prison, buying off judges, cops, witnesses.
It was his father’s money that had opened doors for him when he’d joined thefederalesat the age of twenty-one. The arrests had stopped, and he’d risen through the ranks, eventually joining a newly formed elite team created to combat drug trafficking throughout Mexico. By the time he was in his mid-thirties, the Pentagon and the State Department had invited him and other members of his unit—known as Los Zetas—to come to a special training facility in Virginia called the Americas Institute for Tactical Training (AMINTAC), a U.S.-funded school for Latin American law enforcement and military officers, designed to teach them advanced tactical skills.
Cárdenas had filled out by then, no longer a skinny teenager. Tall with a heavy mustache, he seemed to like posing in his uniform, gun in hand. There were more than a dozen photographs of him standing with U.S. military and intelligence personnel, a broad smile on his face, his hair cut in a mullet, aviator-style Ray-Bans covering his eyes.
You think you’re so cool, don’t you, Cárdenas?
Even the sight of him sickened Natalie.
The concept behind AMINTAC was to help democratic governments keep the peace and counter organized crime. But keeping the peace was apparently not what Cárdenas had had in mind.
Not long after he’d returned to Mexico, DEA memos showed that some agents had begun to suspect the Zetas of selling the drugs they confiscated from cartels, using weapons and tactical training provided by the United States to carve out their own drug empire, slaughtering cartel members—and anyone else who got in their way. And then things had really gotten ugly.
U.S. agents began to suspect Cárdenas of playing a role in the disappearance of young women around Ciudad Juárez. Hundreds of girls and women had been found dead in and around the city, all of them victims of sexual violence, all of them battered, their bodies brutalized. Some had been as young as fourteen. None had been older than thirty.
Such terrible suffering. So young to die.
Natalie couldn’t bring herself to look closely at the photographs. She’d seen some of them the day before she’d been kidnapped—horrific images of young women lying naked and dead in the desert.
That could have been me.
She forced her emotions aside, read through several reports about Cárdenas that focused mostly on the organization of the Zetas and their drug operation. But some of the reports indicated that Cárdenas was a suspect in at least some of the femicides. Then he’d ordered the death of an American on U.S. soil, a former business associate who’d become an informant for the DEA. Zeta snipers had shot the informant through the window of his El Paso home, killing him in front of his wife and children.
That’s when the U.S. Marshal Service had taken over.
Natalie had no trouble distinguishing Zach’s reports from the others. His neat handwriting. His sharp, declarative sentences. His ability to separate facts from conjecture and organize both.
That’s when she found it—the report on the sixteen-year-old girl tourists had found lying more dead than alive in the desert.
As soon as she realized what she was reading, Natalie tried to turn the page. She didn’t want to know what it said. And yet she couldn’t stop herself.
It was perhaps the most chilling report she’d ever read, the young victim describing her ordeal in detail. How she’d been kidnapped and stuffed in a trunk on her way home from working late at one of themaquiladoras. How Cárdenas had brutally raped and beaten her over a period of days, until she’d wanted to die. How he’d brought her into a little chapel and had raped her for hours in front of an altar dedicated to La Santa Muerte. How he’d strangled her, calling her beautiful, his face inches from hers as she slowly lapsed into unconsciousness.
Oh, God! That’s what he would have done to me.
And then it was too much.
Natalie stood, pushed past Zach, who was still on the phone, and raced to the nearest bathroom, where she threw up her lunch, her body shaking, her blood gone cold, an image of the Zeta with the tattoo on his arm fixed in her mind.
Él te sacrificará a la Santa Muerte.
He will sacrifice you to La Santa Muerte.
Trembling, she flushed the toilet, got unsteadily to her feet, and rinsed out her mouth, splashing water over her face, still feeling nauseated.
“Natalie?” Zach’s voice came from beside her. “Are you okay?”
She nodded, reached for a towel, and turned to find him watching her, a concerned frown on his face. “I’m . . . I’m fine.”
“The hell you are! You’re white as a sheet.” He touched his wrist to her forehead, apparently feeling for fever.
“I’m not sick. I was reading the dossier and . . .” Tears blurred her vision. “Oh, Zach, what he did to that sixteen-year-old, what he did to all those girls. It’s beyond horrific. It’s what he would have done to me, isn’t it?”
The answer was on Zach’s face, in his unflinching gaze. He drew her into his arms and held her. “That can’t have been easy to read.”
Natalie sank into the shelter of Zach’s embrace. “You knew. When we were locked up, you knew exactly what he had planned for me. You told me the truth.”