CHAPTER 13

IN SOUTHEAST DC, I was finishing my scrambled eggs, reading the Washington Post online, and drinking unusually great coffee. Ali had left for school, Bree was sitting across from me studying her laptop, and Nana Mama was upstairs changing.

I took another sip of coffee and raised my cup. “What coffee is this? It’s amazing.”

John Sampson walked into the kitchen. Before Bree could answer my question, he said, “I’ll bet it’s Blue Mountain coffee. I got it from a friend who just came back from Jamaica and I gave some to Nana last night.”

“Phenomenal taste,” I said. “So smooth.”

“The way life should be,” Sampson said, and looked at Bree. “Already at it on Malcomb?”

She nodded but did not look up.

“Anything?”

“A little.”

“Show me.”

John, my oldest friend, had become obsessed with identifying M even earlier than Bree because the alleged head of Maestro had taunted him in the wake of his wife’s sudden and tragic death, saying that Billie hadn’t died of complications of Lyme disease, as John had been told, that she had been murdered.

Sampson was forced to exhume Billie’s body to be sure. It was one of the crueler things M had done and he’d made Sampson a hardened enemy even before his men tried to hunt us down in Montana.

The evening before, as we were eating Nana Mama’s braised short ribs, we’d heard all about Sampson and Willow’s trip to Disney World, which included a “chance meeting” with a woman named Rebecca Cantrell.

“She’s nice,” Willow said. “I like her. A lot.”

We all grinned because John and Rebecca, who was the U.S. attorney for Northern Virginia, had been seeing each other quietly. The Disney trip had been set up so Willow could meet and get comfortable with Rebecca before she was told about the relationship. Willow had been very close to her mother, and they thought neutral ground would be a better place for Sampson’s daughter to get to know her father’s new love interest without the words girlfriend and boyfriend being thrown around.

After dinner Willow went into the other room with Ali and Jannie, and Bree told John about the death of Ryan Malcomb. Shocked, he pumped her for details and agreed there was something off about the entire thing.

“Why would he drive a handicap van with no snow tires up a canyon like that?”

“Exactly one of my points,” Bree said. “Here, look at this.”

She turned her laptop toward him and showed him the Google Earth image of the area: a large block of alpine terrain with snow high on the peaks. “This is the Double T Ranch, the one Malcomb was interested in buying.”

“Lot of trees, lot of grassy areas,” I said. “Beautiful terrain.”

“What’s the name of the Brazilian company that owns it again?” Sampson asked.

“O Casado Cattle Company,” Bree said, “based in Belo Horizonte, Brazil.”

“Google that,” I said.

She searched for the company but got only results regarding the ranch in Nevada. Sampson suggested translating the words cattle company into Portuguese and searching for that.

O Casado popped up with a Belo Horizonte street address and little else.

“No website?” I said.

“Not according to Google,” Bree said.

My cell phone buzzed with a text from Ned Mahoney: I’m picking you up in five. Big break in the Judge Franklin case!

“Gotta go,” I told Bree and Sampson.

I took my coat from the front closet as my wife called to me, “What’s the name of the Brazilian company that owned the Circle M Ranch in Colorado?”

“Haven’t looked yet!” I bellowed back, taking my service weapon from the lockbox.

“It’s okay, Alex,” Sampson called. “I know it.”

In the kitchen, Bree frowned. “You do?”

Sampson nodded. “Circle M was owned by Melhor Ranch and Cattle Company, Belo Horizonte, Brazil.”

She used Google Translate and soon had a listing up on the screen similar to the one for O Casado. “Again, all we have is a street address.”

“Type it in,” John said, coming around to see her screen. “Then the other one. Let’s see them on a map.”

Bree called up Google Maps and soon had the two addresses on the screen, each marked by a glowing yellow pin.

“They’re on the same block,” she said.

Sampson nodded. “Right around the corner from each other.”

“It’s the same operation, different doors.”

“Or they’re just shell companies, designed to hide the identity of the real owners.”

“Like I said, the same operation. We just need to prove it, find the common denominator.”

Sampson started studying all the recent news about Malcomb’s data-mining firm, Paladin, and Bree searched for ownership records of the cattle companies in Brazil and their ranches in the United States.

Twenty minutes later, John said, “ Wall Street Journal says that since Paladin is held privately and Malcomb was one of the primary stockholders, we won’t know for months how big a blow his death is to the value of the company, though all of the analysts contacted believe it will be significant.”

Bree looked up. “Malcomb was the brains. How do they continue to innovate without him?”

“That’s the big question,” John said. “Anything at your end of the table?”

“I found the Double T Ranch in public property listings filed in Reno,” she said, returning her attention to the screen. “Says here the agent of record at the sale nine years ago was a Reno attorney named Glenn Star.”

“Give him a call.”

Bree ran a search on him and sighed. “He’s dead.”

“How long ago?”

“Wait a second—it says here his body was found in a fleabag motel in Lockwood, Nevada; he was naked, and he’d been shot in the head. His wallet and car keys were gone.”

“So some traveling hooker rolled him,” Sampson said.

“Or her pimp,” Bree said, nodding.

On a whim, she went to Colorado property records and found the ranch outside Durango where there’d been a firefight between the Alejandro cartel and Maestro operators. It took her a while, but she located the ranch sale documents on file in La Plata County.

Similar to the transfer in ownership in Nevada, the shell company in Brazil had been represented by an agent, in this case Delores Raye, an attorney in Durango.

She googled the lawyer and whistled.

“What do you got?” Sampson asked.

“The attorney representing the Melhor Ranch and Cattle Company in the purchase of the Circle M was kidnapped, raped, and murdered fourteen months after the deal closed.”