Page 20 of The House of Cross

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 Journalsays 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.”

CHAPTER 14

Baltimore, Maryland

TWO HOURS AFTER NEDtexted me, we met with an FBI agent working organized crime. Adriana Lopes, a handsome woman in her early thirties, climbed into the back seat of our car, which was parked by a strip mall. Lopes was dressed for the street: jeans, hoodie, and a bandanna around her hair. A bunch of bangles clinked on her wrists.

Mahoney introduced us. Lopes said she’d been working undercover for the past thirteen months, slowly infiltrating the Haitian arm of a loose federation of organized crime families in Baltimore.

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