This Is for the Mara Salvatrucha by Samuel Logan Read Free Book Online

the contents of the box that allegedly belonged to Brenda Paz, and he had identified some cassette tapes that belonged to his son.
    Along with the tapes, they found a pair of white Adidas tennis shoes stained with mud, a blue bandanna with MS 13 stitched on it, a notebook, and a few letters addressed to Brenda Paz. Wrapping up his story, the detective told him they had left the shoebox with the attending officer at his police station.
    Oseguera thanked the detective and hung up, then walked downstairs to take possession of the shoebox, with the intention of examining the contents in more detail later. At that moment, he didn’t want to focus on the contents of the shoebox. Maybe they held some clues, but this inspection would have to wait, Oseguera thought as he walked from the lobby to the evidence locker to drop off the shoebox before heading to the motor pool. He was headed to Dallas to follow up on a hunch, something he thought might be connected to the Calzada murder. He drove to the Dallas County Jail to dig a little deeper into a suspect he wanted to question in connection with an armed robbery in Grand Prairie. His investigation had revealed that there were two suspects, a young woman and a man. During the phone call with the detective from the Dallas Gang Unit, Oseguera had begun to realize that his armed-robbery suspects might be connected to the Calzada murder. He knew from Dallas Intelligence that his male suspect had been arrested on Christmas Day and was in prison in Dallas County.
    He checked in with the attendant and passed through security before rounding the corner to the holding pen where they had placed his suspect. Oseguera looked at him and saw something he had neverencountered as a veteran police officer in Texas. The skinny Latino man had MS tattooed across his forehead in bold, three-inch gothic script. Its placement shocked the detective. There was a tattooed teardrop under his left eye, and the name VETO was tattooed in a vertical line up one side of his neck. Tattoos snaked up and down his arms, forming a crude canvas of body art. He was looking at Brenda’s boyfriend, Veto.
    Oseguera didn’t know at the time, but the MS on Veto’s forehead and the teardrop tattoo were hard-earned symbols of status and power in the Mara Salvatrucha. The teardrop was a common street gang symbol that meant one thing: at some point the wearer had killed in the name of his gang. Within the MS, a teardrop symbolized murder, but it took more than one murder to earn the right to tattoo the name of the gang above the neckline. This was no wannabe. Oseguera was looking at his first true-to-the-death gang member. The gang life was his reality, and he was willing to die and kill for it.
    Veto exuded an extraordinary confidence—too much for a man of slight build dressed in a prison jumpsuit and slippers. Yet his eyes were dark and void of emotion. Despite Veto’s manner, Oseguera thought he was probably the kind of man who didn’t have the courage to stand up to someone else on his own. Oseguera got over the shocking tattoos before he cuffed Veto and signed him out for the seventeen-mile trip back to Grand Prairie. His suspect didn’t say a word the whole ride. Oseguera escorted Veto into the Grand Prairie police station, where he was read his rights in Spanish, fingerprinted, and photographed.
    “Quiero un abogado,” Veto said. “I want a lawyer.”
    Veto clearly knew his rights. He appeared to be a hardened gang member and had said nothing on the ride. He’d obviously been in a similar situation before. Oseguera concluded that Veto would never talk, so he submitted Veto’s prints and photo to the Grand Prairie police database for comparison, but little more could be done. After only fifteen minutes at the Grand Prairie police station, Oseguera drove Veto back to the Dallas County Jail. His hunch hadn’t panned out. But it was something he had to check. Leave nothing unturned, Oseguera thought as he got out of