Van continued, “Inspector Garcia was told that Mr. Nelson was holding retreats for like-minded individuals. Every week, six Yankee frat boys would show up with their suitcases. At the end of the week, they’d go back across the border, then six new frat boys would show up in their place. It went on like that all through the summer.”
Faith had questions, but she quickly answered them herself. Before the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Americans only had to show their driver’s license to go through the border crossing into Tijuana, and no one was keeping records. There was no facial-identification software. No license-plate readers. No digitized passports.
“This is the villa that Pedo was renting.” Miranda showed another photo, this one of a two-story ramshackle house with a large porch. Red Swastika flags were draped over the railings like drying beach towels.
Van said, “Garcia couldn’t go undercover for obvious reasons, but he called in reinforcements. They started tailing the frat boys from the villa. What they saw was, most of them were hanging out with Pedo on the beach. One guy was sitting in the bar outside the bathrooms. A girl, nine years old, went into the toilet. The guy at the bar waved to his buddies on the beach. They waved back. Then the guy at the bar got up and went into the toilet.”
Faith’s hand went to her throat. “Did he hurt her?”
“The Federales stopped him before anything physical could happen. He had his hand over her mouth, but that was it.” Van said, “They dragged him down to the station. They put him in an interview room and he started talking.”
“Wait—” Faith had to know. “Was it Dash?”
“Bingo,” Van said. “Garcia put him in a room to sweat it out. When they got to him, Dash was ready to talk. He said his name was Charley Pride.”
Another country music singer. Also an African American, which had to be a racist, inside joke.
Van continued, “Dash apologized profusely for being in the wrong toilet. Said he’d had too much tequila, didn’t speak Spanish, it was an honest mistake, he put his hand over her mouth because she was going to start screaming and he panicked. He was a real polite kid—yes, sir and no, sir and I’m sorry, sir. He told Garcia that he was a senior at UC-San Diego. Got a late start because he was in the Army. He came down to Mexico with a friend who wanted to attend the retreat. He claimed he didn’t know his friend was a Nazi until he got down there.”
“Garcia believed him?” Faith asked.
“Not at all, but even Federales need evidence, especially when they’re jamming up an American. The murder of Kiki Camarena casts a long shadow. So, Garcia had to kick Dash loose and close the investigation, but—”
Van held up his hand, telling her to wait.
“Two weeks later, Garcia starts to get annoyed about the situation. On his own, he goes to the resort. He dresses like a tourist. He sits at the bar and watches. This is what happens. Same set-up as before: Pedo on the beach with the frat boys. One guy at the bar. A girl goes into the toilet—eight years old. Bar guy exchanges a signal, but this time, another girl, maybe eleven or twelve, goes into the toilet. She comes out with the first kid. She takes her down to a shed where surfboards are stored, and she leaves the kid inside. The frat guys from the beach show up a minute later. One goes inside. The others stay outside and wait their turn.”
Faith pressed her lips together so she wouldn’t beg him to stop.
“Garcia was on his own. The guys outside the shed ran off the second he showed up. He grabbed up the frat boy inside before he could do anything.” Van stopped. “I mean, other than psychologically damage this poor little girl for the rest of her life.”
Faith asked, “What name did the frat boy give? Tim McGraw?”
“Garth Brooks,” Van said. “Which was pretty stupid. He was the biggest act on the planet at the time. It took about five seconds of pushback from Garcia before the guy says his real name is Gerald Smith, aged twenty-one, resident of San Diego. He tries the same story Dash gave him—‘Sorry, sir, I was a little drunk, sir, I didn’t know the girl was in there, sir, I thought it was a men’s toilet, so that’s why my jalape?o was hanging out, sir.’” Van shook his head. “Garcia brings in his bosses. He sends Gerald to holding. Next thing he knows, Gerald is gone.”
“Did the inmates kill him?”
“Unfortunately, no. Garcia thinks he was allowed to slip back into the US. Pedo disappeared at the same time. The frat boys ghosted. Garcia was vague on the details, but I got the feeling his superiors saw Gerald and Pedo as American problems, and figured America could deal with them.”
Miranda said, “As a coda, there’s not a significant overlap between the white supremacist movement and pedophilia or child molestation. At least not one larger than the population as a whole.”
“What a relief.” Faith wanted to go home and take a scalding hot shower to wash the stink of these men off of her. She hoped like hell that Dash wasn’t around any children right now.
Something occurred to her.
She asked Van, “How did you connect the Dash from the IPA to the 1999 Dash from Mexico?”
Van said, “I got Carter shitfaced. He was always tight-lipped about Dash, but something was different about him. This was around the same time Carter started pulling at his leash. We were halfway into a second bottle of Johnny Walker Red and he started telling me about Dash’s war service in these real hushed, reverent tones—how Dash was a Navy SEAL who did Black Ops until he knew too much and the government sent an assassin out to kill him and—” Van made a jerking off motion with his hand. “Anyway, I pried it out of him that Dash had a really old tattoo on his calf. It’s in script, yellow ink with a blue outline: Freedom Is Not Free.”
“That’s a military tattoo,” Faith said.
Miranda provided, “It’s predominantly Army. SEALs go for the frogman, bone frog, Seal Tridents, anchors, toughest of the tough. Back in ’99, regulations forbade a sailor from having a tattoo on his lower leg. And no Navy man would highlight the color of cowardice.”
Van took over again. “I ran the tattoo through the FBI’s biometric database, and nada. Then I ran it through INTERPOL. Usually, when you get a hit, you click on a link and you can read the arrest warrant or sometimes the case file. All I got was a name and phone number. Norge Garcia, Inspector Jefe with the Policía Federal.” He shrugged. “So I jumped on a plane and went down for a conversation.”
“He remembered quite a lot of detail,” Faith said.
“He still had the files, photographs, notes, statements. It stuck with him. That’s why he put the tattoo on INTERPOL. They didn’t have computers in ’99. As soon as he figured out what a computer was, he told one of his guys to enter in the information. Garcia felt like he’d missed something with Dash. Spidey senses. Even twenty years later, he still had a bad feeling.”
Faith sat back in her chair. Her brain was so full that she could barely hold it all in.
She told Van, “Novak has a daughter. She would’ve been ten or eleven years old around the time he was being Pedo on the beach.” She waited, but Van said nothing. “The girl who took the kid into the surfboard shed was around that age. Novak had his own daughter trick out little kids for him and his buddies, right? That’s what you’re saying.”
Miranda had one more photo. “This is the most recent picture we have of Gwendolyn Novak. Taken when she was nineteen.”
Faith looked at a photocopy of an ID card from Georgia Baptist Hospital. Gwen Novak was plain-looking, with mousy hair and sad eyes. Faith wanted to read something into the sadness. Gwen had been her father’s pimp. She had lived in a house full of pedophiles. There was no way she hadn’t been abused. But then she had become an instrument in the abuse of other children.
Miranda said, “Gwen was an orderly with dreams of going to nursing school, but at this point, she didn’t even have her GED. She already had two children, a ten-month-old boy and a five-year-old girl.”
“At nineteen?” Faith felt ashamed of her judgmental tone. She had been fifteen when Jeremy was born. And she hadn’t been raised by a racist pedophile. “What about the father of her children?”
Miranda shook her head. “Both birth certificates leave that area blank. The girl was eventually enrolled in an elementary school on the westside, but she was pulled out after a few months. The department of family and children’s services was sniffing around the baby. One of the neighbors suspected abuse. But Gwen followed in her father’s footsteps and dropped off the grid. No credit cards, bank accounts—not even school records on the girl. Joy, the daughter, would be fifteen now.”
“Joy,” Faith wanted to hold on to the name, to believe that Gwen had protected her daughter from her rapist father and his friends. “What about the baby?”