by Don Travis
“That would mean—”
“That would mean he was up to no good or he was calling a girlfriend.”
I took the receiver from Paul’s hand and dialed Gene at home. He answered sounding harassed. Normal for a homestead with five kids ranging from one preteen to four already afflicted by that condition.
“Just headed out the door. Got roped into going to the fair,” he said. “Again. Be glad when the damned thing’s over.”
“This weekend, my friend.” I told him of Paul’s discovery. We examined the “girlfriend” thing, but it didn’t hang together for a series of one and two-minute calls.
“Gimme the number. I’ll have somebody check it out. Pedington still on duty?”
“Nope. Jazz invited him to the fair or to go home. He’s dropping Jazz and Klah off at the fairgrounds and heading to the station. What do you know about him?”
“Borrowed him from Bolton’s division, but Bolton didn’t give him up if he was part of his network.”
“Maybe he was on the perimeter, and Bolton didn’t want to contaminate him.”
“Doesn’t sound like perimeter to me. Look, where will Jazz and Klah go? Indian Village. Where else?”
“They were headed to the rodeo. Klah’s a bull rider recovering from an accident.”
“Okay, so looks like I’m going to the rodeo,” he said with a sigh hiding in his voice.
“Paul and I will leave now. We’ll wait for you at gate three.”
GENE, GLENDA, and the youngest, a cute eleven-year-old named Heddy, met us at the gate. The rest of the kids had already scattered, probably to the carnival rides. Glenda planned on shepherding Heddy there as well. Then she would look at a few exhibits and try to corral everyone back home in Gene Jr.’s Camaro. That likely didn’t fit with Gene Jr.’s plans, but so be it. If she got stranded, she’d give Gene a call on the cell. That settled, Gene, Paul, and I headed for Tingley Coliseum on the east end of the fairgrounds.
The rodeo had not yet started, but fans already streamed into the arena. Gene flashed his badge to gain the three of us entry to the back area where the working part of the show took place. As we stalked around in the guts of the rodeo, dodging contestants, animal handlers, clowns, officials, and a host of unknowns, Gene’s phone rang. The 385 number proved to be an unregistered cell phone… in other words, a throwaway.
My blood pressure was rising by the time we found Jazz in what appeared to be a blind alley created by arena panels. He and Klah talked to a young man in chaps, introduced to us as Pete Toadlena, Gad and Dibe’s nephew who lived here in Albuquerque. From his cautious reaction, Pete made Gene as a cop and probably nursed suspicions about me as well.
“Any sign of trouble?” Gene asked.
“Nah,” Jazz said. “These are rodeo people. Good people. Not interested in trafficking.”
“What did Pedington say on the way down? He put up any fuss at being dismissed?”
Jazz shook his head. “Glad to be off the hook, I think.”
“He make any phone calls on the landline while you were in BJ’s house?” Gene asked.
Klah and Jazz exchanged puzzled looks. “Nah,” they both said, almost simultaneously. “What’s up?” Jazz added.
Gene backed off. “Not sure. Someone mighta been trailing you. Just wondered if Pedington tumbled to it.”
Jazz glanced at Klah but spoke to me. “That stuff’s all over now, isn’t it? Nobody’s gonna traffic me again… ever.”
“I think you’re missing the point, Jazz,” I said. “Silver Wings isn’t interested in you for sex any longer. He’s looking to shut you up.”
Jazz shook his head. He was having none of it. “Why? You’ve got that other lieutenant… Bolton. And the cop, uh, Zimmerman’s dead. And we’re in the middle of a crowd.” Even as he spoke, I could see the need for cocaine rise in him, just as it did whenever tension made an appearance. He probably wished for a pipe right about now… a mug of green tea, at the very least.
My right thigh began to twinge. But that old scar was a worrywart; it broke out in a case of nerves whenever something threatened, real or imagined. A glance around showed people rushing this way or that, going about their business. Except for the roustabout, leaning on a chute gate fifteen yards away. And a clown talking up a cowgirl ten yards the other direction.
“What you want me to do? Go into hibernation?”
“Wouldn’t be a bad idea,” Gene said. “Look, guy. Twelve people are already dead because of this Silver Wings fellow. And BJ was damned near one of them.” When that brought a frown, Gene bored in and indicated Klah. “And what about this fella here? You willing to put his life in danger?”
“I can take care of myself,” Klah said.
“That right? I hear you’re banged up from a busted bull ride. You can move when you need to, can you?”
“Maybe he’s right, Klah,” Jazz said.
“What if we stay right here with friends? Nobody’s gonna try anything with this many people around,” Klah replied.
The roustabout moved on, but the clown talking to the blonde was still trying to work his magic. Wonder what he looked like beneath all that paint and the twenty-gallon Stetson? She was probably wondering the same thing, because it didn’t seem as if she knew him. That was the body language I got, anyway. I vaguely heard Gene explaining that a crowd wasn’t always safe; sometimes it was cover.
I turned back to them. “Jazz, this won’t go on forever. Haldemain…. uh, Silver Wings is on the run. When we get him, things should be over. There’s also something we haven’t told you.”
“What?”
“Your minder, Pedington, was making one-minute calls to a throwaway number from our house phone. We think it might have been Silver Wings on the other end.”
Jazz’s eyebrows rose. “My cop babysitter was reporting on me to the guy who wants to kill me? Hell, Pedington was a decent guy for a… uh, cop.” Shock suddenly sparked his eyes. “That’s why somebody tried to break in to Mrs. W.’s. He was after me!”
“Probably,” I said. “But he didn’t figure on a tiny, elderly woman being an ex-DEA agent.”
Jazz put the rest of it together. “If you’re right about Pedington, he let someone know Klah and I were headed to the rodeo.”
“Exactly. Gives somebody time to set up an ambush.”
“Here?” Apparently he recalled Gene’s caution about crowds and turned to Klah’s cousin. “Pete, do you know all these people?”
Toadlena shook his head. “Most of them, yeah. But not all. Half a dozen people right around here I don’t know. Maybe he’s right, Jazz. Maybe you oughta get outa here.”
Jazz looked defiant, but he said the right thing to his companion. “Okay. You wanna stay here or go with me?”
Klah almost looked hurt. “Go with you, of course.”
Pete gave a shout, and two tall Navajos sauntered over. “Hey, guys. Give us some cover, okay?”
With Pete in the lead, a tall cowboy on either side of him, and Klah guarding his back, Jazz made his way out the back of the building. Gene, Paul, and I were ready to follow along behind when I noticed the clown taking an interest in the procession. Gene nodded at me, and we walked around a corral fence while Paul followed the others. Watching from between the fence slats, I noticed the man take out a cell phone, punch a button, and wait. As soon as he started talking, we walked over in time to hear him say, “…out the back way.”
Gene flashed his badge as I snaked my hand back to touch the butt of my pistol in my belt. The clown took note and closed his phone immediately. “Help you?”
“Yeah. You can come down to headquarters with me.”
“What for? I got a job to do here.”
“It’s your second job I’m interested in. Who were you talking to?”
“None of your business. I got a right to make calls to anybody I want.”
“Not to warn them your mark is heading out the back door. Hand over your phone.”
“What if I refuse
?”
“Then we’ll go downtown for sure.”
The lanky man handed over his small flip phone with obvious reluctance. Gene manipulated it and then held it up before me. “Recognize anything?”
“That’s the same 385 number we saw before. Try it.”
Gene punched Redial, and a moment later said, “Hello, Haldemain. We need….” He pulled the small instrument away from his ear and shrugged. “Whadda ya know. He didn’t want to talk.” He addressed the clown. “What’s your name? Got any ID?”’
“Lenny Dogwood.”
Gene’s chin dropped. “Cripes, BJ. This guy’s a cop. I recognize his name. His old man’s a sergeant downtown.”
“That’s right, Lieutenant. I’m on the job.”
“Who’s supervising?”
“Well… uh….”
“That’s what I thought. Let’s go.”
Gene took the young officer by the arm and led him outside. We caught up with the others as they were about to enter the fairgrounds proper. Gene called Paul over and asked him to go find a policeman on duty at their headquarters tent down by the Fine Arts Building.
We waited five minutes before Paul brought up a beefy corporal. Gene turned Dogwood over to the officer and asked that he be escorted downtown and held until he arrived.
Paul and I hustled Jazz and his retinue to my Impala in the parking lot while Gene went in search of his family to let them know his weekend had been interrupted. I could imagine Glenda’s reaction. “So what else is new?”
GENE AND I sat opposite an attractive young officer with only stray streaks of clown paint at his temples and smeared in his brown hair. Paul remained at the house with Jazz and Klah. Officer Young should have joined them by now.
Gene put a touch of menace in his tone. “What were you doing at the rodeo, and don’t give me any crap.”
“On the job.” Dogwood hesitated before trying to enhance his bluff. “Something Bolton put me on.”
“Bullshit. Bolton’s suspended, and you answer to me now. Whose number did you call to say they were leaving by the back entrance? Look, son, your dad won’t be able to help you much if you don’t cooperate.”
Dogwood kept up his stubborn denials until his father, a burly, grizzled man nearing retirement, burst through the door to the interview room. Then the younger Dogwood’s defiance collapsed.
“I’m sorry, Dad. Helen and I needed the extra money with another baby on the way, and—”
“Shut up! Don’t say another word. Did you ask for your union rep?”
Lenny Dogwood shook his head.
“Well, do it. Right now.”
But the officer didn’t need a rep. By the time the official arrived, Sergeant Dogwood had pretty well worked out a deal. If Lenny’s involvement in the trafficking was limited to merely carrying messages, as he claimed, he’d be permitted to resign from the force without being referred to the district attorney’s office. Since the officer hadn’t been carrying a weapon in his clown getup, I was inclined to believe he wasn’t put there to ambush Jazz. Perhaps to earn his pass, Lenny squealed on two more cops in Bolton’s ring.
Once Gene was satisfied that end was tied up, we settled in his office to talk.
“With what Dogwood’s told us, I think we’ve rolled up Bolton’s gang,” he said. “None of them are killers, except for Zimmerman. Unfortunately that doesn’t ease things up for Jazz.”
“Not so long as Haldemain’s on the loose. I have the feeling he can call on the Bulgarians or whoever it is running the trafficking ring. Do you know, by the way?”
“Best we can figure it’s run out of Sofia, so I guess that mean’s it’s Bulgarians. And I agree, we need Haldemain in hand before Jazz is safe. Of course, Haldemain’s not much use to the traffickers any longer, so I don’t know how much they’ll go out of their way to help him.”
“True, but it’s not something I can bet Jazz’s life on. After all, Haldemain’s got enough money to buy their help.” I gave a frustrated sigh. “What about Pedington?”
“He’s in the interview room with Don Carson right now. Don will get to the bottom of that situation.”
“How sure are you of Officer Young?”
“He’s one of mine. I trust him, but I can only justify keeping him parked out in front of your place for so long.”
With those words ringing in my ears, I gave up and drove home.
WHEN I arrived in the office Friday morning, Charlie was out interviewing a young woman as part of a background check on a possible hire for a new utilities company executive. Hazel was doing Hazel work… without which Vinson and Weeks would have withered and died. She was billing.
With nothing better to do, I phoned Betsy Brockmire at CAHT to ask if she’d seen, heard, or smelled William Haldemain. She hadn’t. But she did have an idea.
“I know he has this cabin up in the Jemez Mountains. Maybe he’s hiding out there until the storm passes.”
“Betsy, this storm’s not going to pass. I’m pretty sure the APD did a property title check. They’d have found it by now.”
“Maybe not. I think maybe his law firm owns it. Or maybe he and Roscoe formed a partnership to hold title. We had a CAHT board meeting up there a couple of years back. It’s very secluded. A genuine log cabin sitting halfway back in the forest, with the front porch facing a little meadow with a stream running through it. Beautiful.”
“You don’t happen to know how to get to it, do you?”
“He made each of us a map so we could get to the meeting. I think maybe I have my copy somewhere. I’ll look for it and fax it to you if I find it.”
Ten minutes later Hazel brought me a piece of paper with a map showing a hand-drawn route to a spot in the mountains about seven miles north and east of the little town of Cuba, New Mexico. Cuba lay about eighty miles north of Albuquerque, a drive of no more than an hour and a half. But I had no idea how long the last leg of the journey would take. Experience taught me that some of those county and logging roads were slow going, dodging fallen trees and families of mule deer and herds of elk, both of which vastly outnumbered humans per square mile.
I went to Google Earth on my computer and managed to find what was probably the cabin nestled in the edge of the forest. I used the program to trace me a route from Cuba to the co-ords of the cabin and found that it followed the same general outline as the one on Betsy’s map. This was the right cabin.
The building fronted a modest meadow, transected from west to east by a small creek labeled Ria los Pinos. A state or county road ran north of the cabin, but a smaller road, probably originally a logging road, turned south and ran past the cabin to splash across the creek and then curve to the right. Then it meandered off through the Santa Fe National Forest. Two ways in and two ways out. New Mexico’s monsoon season had ended roughly a month earlier, so the roads should be in decent shape. I knew from treks to such places as Teakettle Rock in that same general area that the countryside was heavy with caliche clay, and a man might as well be driving on greased glass when the woods were wet.
I printed copies of everything and headed for Gene’s office. I had to cool my heels for ten minutes before being admitted, a sign that the brass was still a little skittish over the claims and counterclaims Gene and Bolton threw at one another… even though Bolton was the one on paid leave and yakking his head off to avoid arrest and trial.
Gene took a look at what I found and then pulled up Google Earth on his own machine. Together, we zeroed in on the cabin from a height of probably no more than a couple of hundred feet. A carport shielded the west side of the cabin, but what appeared to be the rear bumper of a car was just visible. Of course, we had no idea of how long ago the satellite passed over the area, so there was no way of telling if we were viewing the cabin in current time.
“That’s in Sandoval County,” Gene noted. “Need to involve the sheriff’s office.”
“You gonna ask them to check out the place first?”
Gene shook his head.
“That place is so isolated a plane or a chopper would arouse suspicion. Hell, you can hear a car from a mile off up in those canyons. It’s going to be hard to get in there without at least making him nervous. But odds are pretty good that’s where he’s holed up. I want to take Carson and a couple of Sandoval deputies, and that’s all.”
“What about the feds?”
He shook his head. “I want this guy for the murder of eleven men and kids. Zimmerman can probably be laid at his door too, but I’ll put that one on Bolton. I want us to take him, BJ.”
“Looks like we’re headed to the Jemez Mountains,” I said.
“You can come. But not Paul. It’s gonna take me the rest of the day to set this up and get the paperwork done. We’ll plan on hitting the place tomorrow morning. It’s a weekend morning. Haldemain won’t be expecting us then.”
“Paul will give me heartburn over that. He considers himself a member of the press.”
“Okay, but he’ll have to stay with you at least half a mile back down the road.”
“What time do you wanna start?”
“Early. We’ll chopper to Cuba and drive in from there.”
Chapter 39
WE DIDN’T actually go in blind. When Gene contacted the Sandoval County Sheriff’s Office saying he wanted to play in their sandbox, the undersheriff had a deputy do a drive-by with a man from Cuba who ran cattle in the Santa Fe National Forest and was a familiar face to the area. The deputy reported a gold Caddy Escalade in the carport at the Haldemain cabin, prompting the sheriff to authorize participation in Gene’s planned takedown.
Early Saturday morning, Gene, Paul, and I piled into an APD helicopter piloted—to my surprise—by Don Carson. He was a lad with many talents. A little more than half an hour later, we set down, not in Cuba, but in a broad meadow not more than two miles from the cabin. Two Sandoval deputies were waiting for us, each in his own patrol car.