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“Do you have an objection?”

“Not at all. I just didn’t credit you with so much sophistication.”

I drank my coffee and instantly felt better. The same couldn’t be said for anyone seated within sight of me. If I’d owned the Bankery, I’d have asked me to eat with a bag over my head or have me hidden away behind some bouquets. That nobody did either was a testament to the kind nature of the staff. Now, at the Bankery’s most secluded table, Louis shared with me all he had learned from Zetta Nadeau.

“She confirmed that Riggins and Emmett Lucas did the grunt work,” he said, “helped by some local talent and a pair of antiquities dealers—a Mexican and an American out of Palm Desert, California. On this side of the border, a couple called the Swishers provided contacts and advice on transportation and preservation. They also storedthe children for a while, and performed repairs and restoration. Funding came from multiple sources, but Devin Vaughn was the instigator, and one of the principal investors. His mentor, Donnie Ray Dolfe, was another.”

“And the rest?”

Louis shrugged. “I think Zetta would have told me if she knew.”

Riggins and Lucas had traveled to Blas Urrea’s stronghold of Guerrero in late fall to scout the terrain, before returning to the United States to prepare for the extraction, where they stayed for a few days with Hul and Harriet Swisher in Virginia. The Swishers schooled them on the proper care, handling, transportation, and storage of delicate human remains. Zetta, said Louis, had found the mechanics of the process familiar, being not dissimilar to how fragile artworks are handled. The two men had then flown to Morelia in Michoacán, the neighboring state to Guerrero, where the equipment they would require was shipped to them from a number of unconnected suppliers. The cache included aluminum-coated Cellite boards fitted with a layer of Plastazote covered with calico, with an additional tier of Melinex to act as a cushion between the calico and the children’s clothing; five plywood and timber crates treated with waterproof paint; and Tyvek-covered foam pads to fill the negative space. The children were to be placed horizontally on the Cellite boards and packed singly into the crates, with those crates to then be strapped into the back of an air-ride truck to dampen vibration.

Riggins had settled on Michoacán as a base since they would be less likely to attract attention from Urrea loyalists, and he retained reliable contacts in Morelia from previous employment. Michoacán was also within striking distance of themunicipioof Zirándaro, where Urrea was storing the children. In Morelia, Riggins and Lucas were joined by two of the former’s contacts, whose names Zetta did not know, and in a warehouse the four men practiced assembling the material, carryingplaster models on the handling boards, packing them into crates, and doing dry runs for the raid.

They drove into Zirándaro as Mexican/American duos, each in separate vehicles. One additional member of the team was already in Zirándaro, watching the old church that served as the shrine for the children. He confirmed the presence of only three guards, all casual to the point of somnolence because Urrea considered himself untouchable in Guerrero. The two trucks came to a halt within sight of the church, and Riggins and his colleague, assisted by the sentinel, took care of the guards after a brief scuffle.

“But Riggins didn’t want to eliminate them, right?” I said.

“Zetta claims Riggins isn’t a stone killer,” said Louis. “Neither was Lucas. Call it professional ethics. Special forces soldiers don’t kill anyone without a gun in their hands, not unless they have to. But Vaughn also liked the idea of avoiding casualties. He thought it would add to Urrea’s humiliation. The whole operation took less than an hour, from the moment the first guard went down to the time the trucks drove away with the bodies. They crossed back into Michoacán, switched the crates to a larger single truck in case the others had been noticed, and Riggins and Lucas took it to the Port of Lázaro Cárdenas. The Mexican dealer had the connections to get the crates safely on a ship to San Diego and off again at the other end, and the Palm Desert guy took care of getting them from San Diego to the Swishers in Virginia. And that was it, until Urrea tracked down the first of the Mexicans from Michoacán.”

I went over the tale again in my mind, or the region of it unaffected by misery and medication.

“You mentioned five crates,” I said, “but only four children. So one crate was a spare?”

“There was an additional corpse in the church.”

“A fifth child?”

“No, a woman: centuries older than the rest, and discovered in the same cave. Riggins and Lucas were ordered to bring her along if they could, but she wasn’t as desirable as the children. According to Riggins, it was hard to tell that the body was even female because it was curled up in a ball. Only the long hair gave it away. Anyway, there was a problem with securing her crate, and Riggins was worried that it might come loose and damage the rest, so they dumped the woman and left her to rot. She wasn’t important. The kids were Urrea’s real good-luck charms, and he’d paid a lot of money for them. But more than that, they were his responsibility. They’d once been offered to a god, who had presumably accepted them. Maybe they should never have been removed from the cave, just left to be buried when it collapsed, as it was set to do within a few years. But once the decision was made to retrieve them, a duty of care was implied, regardless of any payment involved, and that duty was Urrea’s. Losing them was bad for business, bad karma, bad everything, and most of all, it made him look weak. Now, not only does he want them back, he needs them, which is why the locals who helped steal them are dead, Bilas is dead, Emmett Lucas is dead, and who knows how many others. Urrea is on the warpath through his proxy, Eugene Seeley.”

“Given the corpses he’s left behind, Seeley’s quite the proxy,” I said, “but he can’t be working alone.”

“Urrea must have men on this side of the border,” said Angel.

“But would they defer to Seeley?” I asked Louis.

“They’d do what Urrea told them,” he replied. “But if I were Seeley, I’d use my own crew—except for seriously dirty work, which I’d leave to Urrea’s gunmen. Urrea might have placed a lieutenant alongside Seeley, though, someone whose loyalty goes beyond money.”

“Loyalty to Urrea or the children?”

Louis shrugged. “How about both?”

“So, again, who now has the children?”

“Zetta claimed not to know, only that Vaughn definitely had one and Dolfe another. It was Dolfe, not Vaughn, who suggested using Riggins and Lucas. They were all from the same area, more or less, and Riggins and Lucas ran with Dolfe’s kids. Dolfe is also dead, by the way, and the Swishers too.”

“I heard,” I said. “Carrie Saunders told me before I got knocked on the head.”

“Someone stole into his home a few nights back and cut out his heart,” said Louis. “The death was covered in the newspapers, but the particular about the heart is being held back for now because the law is also looking at a link to the killing of the Swishers, who died in a fire in Loudoun County the same night. The husband’s body was badly burned, but the wife’s remains were less damaged—aside from being dead, that is, and missing a heart.”

“Might they still have been holding on to one or more of the children?”

“Like I told you, Zetta couldn’t say.”

“Couldn’t?”

“I stopped short of hurting her,” said Louis. “I kept hearing your voice, objecting. I can go back. I don’t like her art very much, so I’d be acting as much out of an aesthetic motive as any other.”