The Unyielding Future

by Brian O'Grady

  The media remained consumed by the continued disappearance of the two children and the former city councilperson, Mindy Rashard-Tyler. Early on, it was assumed by most that the two cases were related, but the FBI and APD issued a statement in late June that in their opinion they were two separate events. Eris had taken to sending pictures of the two girls to the papers or the local TV stations on a regular but unpredictable schedule. They were never published, of course, but Eris had been kind enough to include us in his e-mailing. Occasionally, we got a glimpse of Nitrox, who seemed to have recovered some of her former health. The kidnappers of Mindy, however, remained completely silent, and I’m sure everyone was bracing for body parts to suddenly turn up in novel locations. Her husband made an impassioned plea from the Federal Correction Institute in Bastrop, Texas, but nothing came of it. The murders of Carlos Gallegos and the Lees were occasionally mentioned, but only in passing and usually only in relation to the disappearances. There was a brief flurry of news reports about the vulnerability of the homeless, and even a small organized march to the state capitol building, but nothing changed, and Carlos Gallegos faded away as well.

  Adis had also dropped off the radar. I hadn’t seen him since Tom and I watched him climb aboard a Cap City Metro bus more than two months earlier.

  For a time it seemed as if everyone (with the possible exception of Eris) had taken a vacation. But as we all know, vacations come to an end.

  You may recall that in the summer of 2016 the United States was struggling with a massive influx of unaccompanied illegal immigrant children, most fleeing poverty and gang wars throughout Central America. No matter what your politics and who you want to blame, it was hard to ignore the images of small, scared children standing in lines waiting for a meal or a place to sleep. It quickly became a humanitarian crisis as more than 50,000 unaccompanied minors overwhelmed resources from Texas to California. Faced with no good options, the government started shipping bus and planeloads of the children to distant locations. Unoccupied schools and government warehouses were quickly refurbished and turned into temporary living quarters until a more permanent solution could be found. There was considerable resistance to what many considered to be back-door amnesty, and even more resistance by several accepting communities. Organized protests were often successful in blocking the final disembarkation of the children, and the press corps was there to film it all. I will dip a toe into this political morass and say that I agree and disagree with both sides of this issue. As hints of widespread amnesty coming from the administration probably contributed to the mass immigration, we had to do something once it happened, and I think the government came up with the solution that was the least bad (my editor will put another [sic] notation here). This was a “shit happens” moment and we had to deal with it in the best way possible. Okay, enough of that.

  On Sunday, August 14, McAllen Independent School bus #5863 left the McAllen US Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention facility carrying thirty-seven children between the ages of five and eleven. All were recent and illegal immigrants to the US from Guatemala. Leased by the federal government, the bus and its occupants were destined for a school complex outside Dallas. The sprawling facility had been on the brink of receivership for a year and the trustees jumped at the chance to rent the property to the government for as long as they needed it. The five-hundred-mile route would take seven and a half hours, most of it up I-35 through San Antonio and Austin. They pulled out just before 4 a.m. in hopes of both avoiding most of the daytime heat but also the two dozen protestors who had camped out in front of the detention centers gates after they had promised to block them. They did catch most of the protestors asleep, but unfortunately that was not the end of the story. For the first two hundred miles everything went smoothly, but just before San Antonio a rolling blockade of cars and semis intercepted the bus and slowed it to a crawl. Larger vehicles and tractor trailers carried banners that decried the president’s decisions and “open door” policy. More banners were draped from overpasses, each with a tag line written in English letters three feet tall for maximal TV exposure. Cars were honking and the big rigs sounded their air horns. To the children it all seemed like great fun, and they waved at all the colorfully draped vehicles. Inexplicably, they had become the main attraction in an American parade. They had little fear even as a man no one had noticed before began walking up the bus’s aisle taking pictures of them as well as all the commotion outside the bus’s dirty windows. A number of cameras outside the bus also captured images of a middle-aged man with a beard snapping photos, presumably with a cell phone. Just after the parade had passed through San Antonio, the bus began to slow and eventually coasted to a stop. The protestors also slowed and stopped, but a moment later the bus lurched back to a crawl and the convoy got moving again. The man with the beard was now driving, and the children, presumably exhausted from their early start and all the excitement, had disappeared from the windows. For the next thirty miles the bus and convoy rolled on. The cars and trucks began to thin, and by the time the bus reached New Braunfels they were once again alone and driving close to the speed limit. It was about here that the GPS failed and the bus disappeared.

  Four hours later, the bus had yet to reach Austin and a second rolling convoy of protestors. The organizers of the protest contacted the Immigration Service in McAllen, in part out of concern but also to see if a last-minute route change had been made. They were politely told that this type of information was not available to the public and that they would look into the overdue bus. In fact, they had been looking for the bus for almost four hours. As soon as the GPS signal was lost, the Texas State Patrol was notified, and with each passing hour the search widened and became more intense. Helicopters from four different municipalities and armed services were flying racetrack patterns over a 500-square-mile portion of central Texas, all searching for bus #5863. Which would never be found.

  To this day, even with everything that happened later, even with my Adis connection I can’t tell you what happened to the bus, the driver, the four volunteers, and thirty-six of the thirty-seven children. With the exception of five-year-old Hector Gomez (not his real name), not one of them was heard from again. Attention and suspicion naturally fell on the confederation of small groups that had organized the rolling convoy, but after the FBI expended thousands of man-hours investigating the forty-six individuals they concluded that the rolling blockade, although well-coordinated, represented the organizational limit of the grass-roots movement, and that making a forty-five-foot bus and forty-one people disappear without a trace was well beyond their capabilities. Evan Grand’s remaining three confederates were also bandied about, but like the bus they too were never heard from again. At this point almost every possible scenario has been debated in every possible venue, from network television programs to drunks in bars, but I don’t believe any of them have got it right. Without a shred of evidence, I am convinced that either directly or indirectly this was the work of Sida.

  Hector Gomez was of course found sleeping on a picnic table the following morning at Canyon Lake Park (about twenty miles west of New Braunfels and I-35). His discovery helped localize the search some, or perhaps it purposefully deflected it. Nobody really knows. Hector has a severe learning disability and was only able to communicate that a man came out of the light and told him to stay away from the water. Despite a concerted effort by a number of child psychologists, Hector has never been able to give anything more.

  Monday, August 15 was a surgical day for me, and I learned of Hector as I was finishing up a small back operation. My scrub nurse came back from her break and filled us in. The discussion naturally swung to the weekend’s event, and the consensus was that the rest of the children would be found in short order. Maybe it was my long dormant psychic ability finally asserting itself, but I knew that Hector would be the one and only survivor of the bus trip. When I got home that afternoon Leah told me that she had had the same feeling all day. An hour later, the fiv
e o’clock news at least for the moment proved us right.

  I managed to watch about half of the program before I drifted off to sleep with the idea that I would awaken for the network news. I was only vaguely aware that Leah’s phone had begun ringing and have no recollection of what she said before I was rudely shrugged out of the most relaxing sleep I had had in hours. Leah had planted herself on the arm of our sofa and her butt nudged me into semi-consciousness.

  “You do know that this phone is tapped?” she asked in her Mother-Bear’s voice. I recognized the tone and the intent and was instantly awake. A small, tinny voice that could only be Eris answered.

  “I just want to talk, to get your opinion on recent events.” He sounded somewhat sincere, or perhaps less like he was playing with us. “I’m concerned about those people on the bus. I don’t think any more will be found. Do you have that same feeling?”

  “Is your concern more for their welfare or for the fact that you have been bumped off of the front page?” I asked.

  “A fair question, and I will admit that I don’t like to share.” He paused long enough for Leah and me to share a glance. “I have been thinking lately that we have something in common. Have you seen your friend Adis recently?”

  “No,” Leah answered definitively. She was correct, as I said earlier we hadn’t seen or talked with Adis in weeks, but even if he had been sitting next to her Leah would have given the same answer. There was no way she would ever share anything with this crazy man.

  “That’s too bad. I wanted to ask him a question.” He sounded pensive and not the least bit threatening. “If you see him, can you ask him if he has any relatives?”

  “Certainly. How do I reach you with his answer?” Now I was being cordial. Sneaky cordial. Obvious, but still cordial.

  “Clever.” He laughed and I felt a trace of his menace. “How about if I just pop by your house one day and I ask one of your children?”

  “How about if I . . .” I pulled the phone from Leah’s hand and cut off her response. I was more interested in knowing why he had developed a sudden interest in Adis than I was in her threat. We struggled for a moment but I won. She punched me in the shoulder.

  “Now why would you start that?” I asked with an aggrieved voice. “You ask a favor and then issue a threat. That is rude. What would Hannibal Lecter say?”

  “Only what Thomas Harris would have him say. But you are right, and I apologize to both you and to Leah.” Now he was being cordial. “I have met someone similar to Adis, and this concerns me.”

  “What concerns you?” I asked, and wondered how long it took to get a trace on a cell phone call, or even if the police were aware that Eris had called to chat.

  It took him several seconds to respond. “I think that I am being manipulated. Perhaps directed would be a better term. I’m not certain I appreciate it.” He was being pensive again, but more important he was confirming the suspicions Adis had shared with us two months earlier. “For instance, why would this cell phone have Leah’s number in it?” Leah went pale, and I’m sure I did as well. We both shared the same thought that he had done it again. Someone else we had known had been murdered, and quite possibly their child was now locked in a basement. We waited for more but all we heard was the electronic hiss of her iPhone speaker.

  We both sat and listened for two, maybe three, minutes more before either of us moved.

  “We need to call someone,” I whispered, worried that I would be overheard, but I knew that Eris was gone. He wanted the phone and his recent horror to be found, not to eavesdrop on us.

  “Who?” Leah matched my whisper. We quietly debated and in the end we settled on Special Agent Gordon Anderson. Leah retrieved his card and I dialed his cell but got his voice mail instead. “Great,” she said. “Try Detective Sharpe. He’ll find out soon enough; it might as well be from us.” Sharpe answered on the second ring and ten minutes later we had police streaming into our kitchen.

  The kids were ordered to gather around the kitchen table and be quiet. Their predictable resistance to being pulled away from computers, the Internet, and TV was countered by Leah’s withering glare and six words. “I am in no mood for this.” Each child demonstrated varying degrees of petulance as the adults went about their business. The spectacle generated very little interest now that a police presence had become a semiregular occurrence in their lives.

  “I thought all this was over,” Mika said to no one and everyone, carefully balancing her frustration and boredom.

  “I suppose we’re having sandwiches for dinner,” Tom surmised. “I hate sandwiches for dinner,” he added, and he slumped into a chair.

  I caught Mia’s eye and we shared a conspiratorial moment that communicated volumes. All of us knew that she was the focal point of her mother’s concern, and that she had done nothing to make herself a target aside from existing. We had told her a hundred times that none of this was her fault, something that her brother and sister understood, but that understanding was being eroded away by their mother’s increasingly harsh words and attitude. I put my hand on Leah’s elbow and was about to guide her to a quiet spot so we could talk about it when John Sharpe called to us.

  “The signal cut out before we could get a trace,” he said dismissively. He didn’t look up at either of us as his fingers flew across his phone’s keyboard. “You need to tell me everything that he said.”

  Reflexively, I took a step back the instant I heard Leah take the breath that precedes unpleasantness. “Excuse me, Detective, but you can at least have the courtesy to look at me when you demand something from us in our house.” Her voice carried through the room, and the half-dozen policemen standing in the kitchen suddenly looked very busy. Our children, on the other hand, suddenly looked very interested. “It was my understanding that you had placed electronic taps on our phones. I know that because we signed releases authorizing you to record our conversations, which means that if you were doing your jobs you would already know what he said and quite possibly where he called from. Wasn’t that the purpose for all this?” She waved her cell phone in the air.

  Sharpe took a step back, Leah’s rebuke having the same effect as a slap in the face. “The, ah, authorizations were only good for forty-five days. No one has been monitoring your phones for a while now.”

  “You mean for a month now,” she clarified. “And, you didn’t think that this man, who has been two steps ahead of you all along, would figure that out?” She waited for an answer but got only silence. She shook her head, and I heard her whisper the word “Great” under her breath.

  Sharpe looked over at me and we shared a conspiratorial moment that communicated his disdain for my habit of allowing my wife to speak for us. I smiled and purposefully took a full step back, isolating the two in the middle of the room.

  He turned back to Leah. “Can you please tell us everything that this man told you?” He was much more civil. Leah eyeballed him for a long moment and then began to relay the two-minute phone conversation while he took notes. “So it was your understanding that this guy, who you’re now calling Eris, has met someone like Adis, but not Adis himself, and Eris feels that this new individual is manipulating him.”

  “Directing him,” I clarified. “I also got the impression that he wasn’t particularly happy about it.”

  Sharpe nodded, but didn’t look the least bit surprised about the sudden addition of a new character that had more than a passing similarity to Adis. I would later learn what you learned only a chapter ago, that Sharpe had recently heard a similar story from the late Evan Grand. “Have you had any recent contact with Adis?” He used his professional “cop” voice, but beneath it was a slight tremulous undercurrent. At first I thought it was just the excitement that a hunter gets after a brief glimpse of his prey, but the break in his voice and the tension that radiated from him told us that there was something more. He looked desperate. Both Leah and I stared at him, and it was clear that the pressure of this case had aged him. He was all out
of ideas, capable only of reacting, and exhausted from the relentless demands for progress. I think that was the first time I saw him as a man, not as an asshole who recklessly used his authority.

  Now I shared a conspiratorial moment with Leah that communicated the question of whether we should tell him what we had found. “Come with me,” I said after Leah had given me an imperceptible nod. I led him to my study and my very fancy, state-of-the-art six-year-old computer. “We found this on the Internet. It was also on the news, but you had to look closely.” I found the clip of Natalie Price’s grisly discovery and played it at normal speed. Sharpe looked at me and his expression said, “So?” “Watch this figure.” I pointed at Sida and then played the clip at normal speed and then slow speed. The lights suddenly came on in Sharpe’s head.

  “He didn’t turn. He just kept walking.” He nodded his head slowly. “How do you know that’s not Adis?” It was a good question, and neither Leah nor I had an answer, just an impression. A really, really strong impression.

  “It’s not,” Leah said flatly. “It’s a man we call Sida.” Leah sat in my sofa and for five minutes finally told the police everything, or her version of everything. In truth, it was more of a sanitized version of her everything. She skimmed over the depth of our relationship with Adis and some of his strange ideas. She left the more unusual ones for me. Sharpe remained standing but listened quietly, his ever-present notebook tucked away in his suit jacket. I had the strong impression that none of this would find its way into a police report. When Leah finished he slowly, robotically sat down next to her.