Mike sniffed, as Lissa would recall. “Been drinking much?” he said.
“No,” she replied dryly. “It’s hand sanitizer.”
She followed Mike through the station offices and into a small spare room where Trudell joined them. Trudell was in his early thirties. His face, soft and clean-shaven, looked to her like the face of a Boy Scout. She had googled Trudell weeks prior to their meeting and learned he had been a student of her mother’s at Minot State University. He was “a good student,” Irene had said when Lissa asked about him, “always respectful.” Irene had been surprised to hear Trudell was now “a cop.” After college, he had worked as a parole officer and then as an investigator for the U.S. Secret Service based in Philadelphia. When Lissa called him, Trudell had been in the Department of Homeland Security little more than a year.
She passed him the stack of courthouse documents and watched as he leafed through them. Finally, Trudell looked up. “We could’ve gotten these,” he said.
“I know,” Lissa replied. “But you didn’t.”
She blustered past his comment with other things on her mind. She was thinking again of the anonymous caller who told KC’s grandfather that KC was in Montana. If Trudell requested Robert Clarke’s phone records, she thought he might identify the caller, whom she suspected was James. She promised to send Trudell Robert’s phone number and the recording of their visit, and she had a new lead on “the drug angle” from the investor, Jed McClure. Recently Jed had told Lissa that the friend who introduced him to James had first-hand knowledge of James’s efforts to copy prescription opiates. Unfortunately, the friend was unwilling to speak to Trudell, and Lissa was beginning to wonder if drugs, alone, made a weak case. She believed Trudell would have better luck pursing a RICO case, as she had explained to Mike Marchus already, by classifying Blackstone as a “corrupt organization” for its swindling of investors and employees. If Jed was correct in his suspicion that James and Sarah were concealing Blackstone assets, both might be guilty of fraud.
Trudell did not sound convinced. The suit Jed had filed was civil. Trudell needed evidence of a crime, but he promised to call Jed anyway.
Four days after Lissa’s meeting with Trudell, she arrived home from work to find two cardboard boxes taking up the kitchen. Percy was on the couch, looking stronger.
“What’s this?” he said. “You getting bodies sent here, Sis?”
“No,” Lissa said. “But I’m putting you to work.”
* * *
—
WHEN PERCY WOKE the next morning, he staggered to the kitchen table, donned a pair of blue latex gloves, and lifted a handful of flyers from a box. There were five thousand in all, stamped and pre-addressed to the governor, every legislator in the state, and most homes and businesses in the oil-field region, including the reservation. Percy recognized many of the addressees. He imagined his friends and relatives opening the envelopes and studying the flyers, but in his daydreams, the recipients tossed the mailings without much thought. The flyers were a waste of time—too “old school,” Percy believed. Still, he felt he owed his sister, and although it hurt him to move, he liked having something to do.
According to Lissa’s instructions, he was to mark the front of every mailing with a stamp she had specially ordered—a website address—which would direct recipients to an online database where they could read more about the case and peruse original documents; and he was to wear gloves whenever handling the flyers so that no one could trace his fingerprints. Lissa had decided that they would mail the flyers from Dickinson, a town south of the reservation. Blackstone was the return address, so any failed deliveries would end up in the company PO box.
For three days, Percy rose after Lissa left for the welding shop. He worked at the kitchen table, which was cluttered with papers and dirty plates and baggies of loose-leaf tea, as the boys wandered in and out. Sometimes CJ or Micah sat and helped, but more often Percy was left alone, the apartment silent except for the heavy steps of a woman upstairs and the jingling of keys in the hallway.
Percy finished on a Friday. That afternoon, Lissa loaded the envelopes into totes, and together they set off for Dickinson. The day was overcast and dry. Lissa was in a good mood. Later, they both would laugh as they told the story: How Percy assumed they would carry the flyers inside and deposit them with the postmaster. How Lissa had said this was a terrible idea, and, instead, they had donned fresh pairs of latex gloves and stuffed all twenty thousand through the drive-through slot. How long this had taken. How cars had lined up behind them. How, when the slot filled, Lissa had reached in with her arm to pack the flyers down. How a man started honking—they let him through—and when at last he fit his own letter into the slot, he yelled in their direction, “What the fuck are you guys doing?”
Percy was embarrassed. “Oh man,” he said. “We probably look like a bunch of meth cases. Or terrorists. ‘Hey, look at those terrorists putting anthrax in envelopes.’ ”
When he and Lissa finished, their hands damp with sweat, they peeled off their gloves and threw them in the trash and then drove north to the reservation.
What struck Percy as paranoid at first—the gloves, the return address, the driving hundreds of miles to deposit the mail to fool the recipient with a postmark—in fact made some sense. Only a week earlier, when they had driven to Minot for his doctor’s appointment, they had hardly made it an hour out of Fargo when Lissa’s van swerved and bucked and came to rest on the highway shoulder. Lissa had gotten out to inspect the wheels. The bolts on one were loosened, the wheel nearly fallen off. They spent the night in Valley City and, the next morning, had the van towed to Fargo where they rented a car, continuing on to Minot. It was during their ride in the tow truck that Lindsay, Lissa’s daughter, called. She had been driving her own car, she explained, when a wheel had fallen off. Lindsay did not know what to make of the incident, but it did not seem a coincidence to her that her car lost a wheel only a day after her mother’s almost did. She suspected her mother was being targeted, perhaps due to her work on the case. “I’ll never fucking live with you again,” Lindsay told Lissa. She was moving out.
When Lissa and Percy returned to Fargo from mailing the flyers, Lissa walked the perimeter of her apartment building, the rows of parked cars. She felt unsettled, like she was being watched.
“Mom, I have a serious question for you,” Obie said when Lissa returned inside. “With the shit you’re doing, are we safe?”
“No,” Lissa replied, “so you should be alert.”
She had been cautious in the beginning—now she became more so. She installed blinds on the patio so that people could not see her when she went outside to smoke, and she was rarely spotted with her children on the streets and sidewalks that ran past the apartment; they staggered their departures and rode in separate cars. Lissa instructed the boys never to speak of her. If a stranger asked, “Is Lissa your mom?” they were to reply, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Micah accepted these measures stoically. It was harder to tell what Obie thought. He had become withdrawn in the months since Christmas. It seemed he wanted nothing to do with the case. “Hungry as hell bring something home to eat!” he wrote on his mother’s Facebook wall one weekend while she was gone. His anger was unpredictable. One Sunday, Lissa returned to Fargo and found the kitchen spotless, the dining chairs stacked artfully like a cairn in the center of the floor.
Then, one night, Obie lost his phone and asked Lissa to call it. She discovered it on her desk under a heap of papers. The caller, she noticed, was “Nadia.”
“Why does it say ‘Nadia’?” she asked.
“So that if anybody ever took me, they couldn’t find you,” Obie said. “I’d never want them to ruin what you’ve got going on.”
If Obie meant this as a reproach, Lissa did not notice. Later, she would recall the comment without a hint of guilt as the momen
t at which she knew her sons’ lives “had totally changed to accommodate the case.” Obie’s anger deepened her resolve. “I never want what happened between Jill and KC to happen between you and me,” she told him. But it seemed that her work on the case had only generated more tension—first with Shauna, now with Obie and Lindsay, and finally with Percy.
In April 2013, Percy returned to Fort Berthold and found work in New Town at the Northern Lights building, mopping floors and setting up tables for events. He did not go on another search with his sister. After he moved out, he and Lissa rarely spoke. Lissa would assume that her brother was scared—that the numbness he inhabited in the wake of his accident had lifted, revealing the true stakes of their involvement. But Percy denied this. It was true he was cautious and did not tell anyone about the flyers, but this had little to do with fear, he said. He figured, rather, that no one would believe him. When friends and relatives mentioned seeing the flyers, he found it easiest to say, “What do you think about that?” or, “Jeez, that’s too much,” as if he knew nothing about them. To Percy’s surprise, after he returned to the reservation, he saw the flyers everywhere he went, in the windows of main-street businesses and on the walls in tribal offices. One day, while getting gas at a station in Parshall, he discovered a flyer taped to the pump, and when he went inside, another was resting on the countertop.
“What do you think about that?” he said to the cashier.
“I see them in here all the time,” she replied, as Percy would recall. “You’d never know they’d killed a guy.”
Percy would later say that people had tried to kill him before—“over money, or something bad happens to someone’s relative, and someone says you did it. They don’t ask no questions. They don’t get to the bottom of it. They just come after you.” It wasn’t fear, he insisted, but drugs that made him draw away from his sister. “I was getting high again. So I quit hanging around her, out of respect.”
7
The Church
THE TRIBAL POLICE WERE AMONG the first who noticed the change on Fort Berthold—track marks creeping up handcuffed arms, paraphernalia tossed in the backseats of cars. In 2012, for the first time, officers arrested a tribal member for heroin possession, and after that, a majority of crimes they responded to had something to do with drugs. The boom expanded the market for meth, while pills, more common among oil workers, became common among tribal members, as well. Local drug dealers yielded territory to men and women from out of state who, in an effort to increase demand, hawked drugs for free. It was money, more than the demand for drugs, that drew these dealers to the reservation—money that deepened the addictions of those already addicted and made families without money more vulnerable. This was another of the many ironies that had come to define the boom: The generosity Madeleine and Irene observed among rich families did not end with blankets or meat. Addicts with royalties were similarly generous: They got poorer people high.
In the summer of 2012, the U.S. Department of Justice reported that over the three years prior, federal case filings on reservations in North Dakota had risen 70 percent. I was curious if this had to do with the oil boom, so I called Timothy Purdon, the U.S. attorney of North Dakota. He resisted my theory. In 2010, the same year that the Department of Justice declined to prosecute 62 percent of criminal cases referred to them from reservations in North Dakota, Congress had passed the Tribal Law and Order Act, which established an Indian Law and Order Commission to examine how the federal justice system systematically failed tribal communities. As part of the reform effort, the federal government gave more money to prosecuting crimes in Indian Country, enabling attorneys to pursue more cases, and in 2011, Purdon appointed an assistant U.S. attorney to work specifically with the MHA Nation. There was a growing sense among Native American victims that the crimes they reported would be prosecuted, he explained, and this had encouraged more victims to come forward. Still, Purdon said, the boom was having an impact. Just that summer, he had noticed that more cases than usual coming from Fort Berthold involved non-Indian perpetrators. “We had five or six in a month,” he told me. “We realized it’s non-enrolled folks moving to the oil patch.”
I returned to the reservation that summer to report on the rise in crime. It was a July evening when I arrived at the tribal police station in New Town, a brick building with an aquarium-blue lobby that had not been renovated in some years. I had arranged to ride along with an officer named Dwight Sage, a tribal member in his thirties with short-cropped hair and a shy smile. When he appeared in the lobby, I followed him outside, and we drove west out of New Town, emerging through a pass on the edge of a butte, where we could see flares flickering on the horizon and trailers clustered in pockets of the prairie. We ascended a bluff toward Sanish and turned onto a dirt road. The sun was setting, clouds gathering to the west, birds dipping in and out of the grass. A trailer appeared, and then a dozen campers parked down a hill where some oil workers had gathered, chatting. A tribal member emerged from the trailer. He had called in “a domestic,” Sage said—a fight over oil royalties, the man and his sister in a pushing match—but the sister had fled. I remained in the car while Sage spoke to the man, the workers eyeing us warily. Then Sage and the man waved goodbye, and we headed back north.
“He’s a bad alcoholic,” Sage told me. “He started getting his oil money last summer, and that’s when things got really bad. His wife was getting him drunk, taking his pills. The whole family has been fighting over money since they leased their lots to a company to house oil workers. They’re pain pill users. Hydrocodone. Valium.”
It had begun to rain. We turned west and crossed the bridge. Sage pointed to his landmarks: a café where he detained two undocumented workers and had them deported; a street where he found a white sex offender with shotguns stashed in his trunk; the ditch where a truck hauling contaminated water tipped, spilling 1,200 gallons; the yard where Sage chased two white roughnecks after they assaulted a Native woman; the house where he kicked in a door too late, where a tribal member died of an overdose.
On the main road, Sage stopped an SUV with Wyoming plates for going sixty-five in a forty-miles-per-hour zone. Although tribal police have no criminal jurisdiction over non-Indians, they can ticket reckless drivers. It was the only legal power the tribe had over non-Indians, and the records did not carry off the reservation. “Forty dollars, no points,” Sage announced when he returned. “When I tell them that, they’re pretty happy. This guy asked, ‘Will I get in trouble if I don’t pay?’ I said, ‘You won’t really get in trouble, but we’ll have you on record if you get stopped again.’ ”
I thought of the mechanics I met in the casino parking lot more than a year ago. You can do anything short of killing somebody. What they had said was not technically true—cases that fell outside tribal and federal jurisdiction belonged to the state—but several tribal officers had told me that crimes committed by non-Indians on Fort Berthold were a low priority for deputies and sheriffs, who were already overworked by the oil boom outside reservation borders. Each county overlapping Fort Berthold had only one or two deputies stationed there. If an incident required a deputy, he could take hours to arrive due to the volume of calls he received and the reservation’s enormity. The sheriff of one county admitted to me that his deputies often escorted non-Indian drunk drivers home instead of arresting and delivering them to county jails, which were far away and often full. If jurisdiction was ever in question, getting the right officers on the scene could take a while. “Time is sensitive,” a tribal criminal investigator told me. Sometimes it was the difference between finding a perpetrator of a crime or having no evidence at all.
Fort Berthold, like many reservations, already had a long history of crimes slipping through jurisdictional cracks. According to a report issued by the Indian Law and Order Commission, “When Congress and the Administration ask why the crime rate is so high in Indian country, they need look no further than the archaic s
ystem in place, in which Federal and State authority displaces Tribal authority and often makes Tribal law enforcement meaningless.” Now tribal officers told me that the boom had exacerbated the problem and that the tribe’s lack of jurisdiction over non-Indians had created a culture of lawlessness. Most could recount being told by an oil worker, “You can’t do anything to me.” According to Sadie Young Bird, director of the tribe’s domestic violence unit, rates of violence against women were rising. Recently, three oil workers had offered a tribal member a ride home from the bar in New Town, driven her to a remote area, raped her, and left her on the road. They returned several times and, each time, raped her again. The woman survived, but finding these men would be difficult. Once, when Young Bird visited a man camp to check on a domestic violence victim, the manager told her women were not allowed there. “Perpetrators think they can’t be touched,” she told me. “They’re invincible.”
Regardless of the effort to prosecute more crimes on Fort Berthold, no one I spoke to could deny that the crime rate had risen with the boom or that the violence had turned inward. In 2012, the tribal police reported more fatal accidents, sexual assaults, domestic disputes, gun threats, and human trafficking incidents among tribal members than in any year prior. According to the police chief, since the reservation population had, by some estimates, tripled with the boom, the tribe needed forty officers, and yet the department struggled to retain them and rarely employed more than thirteen at one time. Affordable housing was hard to come by, and some officers lived in their cars. Sage told me that most did not stay long in the job, forced so often into taking double shifts. Several had quit; one committed suicide. The longest-serving officer had been in the department for five years. His name was Nathan Sanchez, and he was twenty-five years old.
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