by Jeff Miller
“This is goddamn unincorporated land, and that means I have jurisdiction over this site!”
Beamer shook his head. “This is Bilford City, and it’s the Bureau’s case, anyway.” He turned to Dagny as she approached. “He brought the press past the checkpoint.”
“Like hell I’m going to let incompetent Feebs run this show,” Marigold sneered. Saliva was hanging from his overgrown mustache, and the tantrum had left him drenched in sweat. “I will roll over you and this crime scene with my tank if I have to.”
Dagny walked up to the news crew and flashed her creds. “This is a crime scene. I need you to leave right now. Everyone who is here is impeding forensic work.”
A young man in a suit extended his hand, but she didn’t take it. “Jack McDaniel,” he announced. “Field producer for Channel Two News. Sheriff Don said he was bringing us onto the property.”
“Full transparency,” the sheriff barked. “I am a champion of the free press.”
She ignored the sheriff. “You and your crew have three minutes to pack up and leave, or you’ll all be arrested for obstructing this investigation.”
“Like hell, young lady!” Marigold shouted. “This is my county and my people, and I’m not going to sit back and let you botch it all up.”
McDaniel looked at Dagny for a moment, seemingly uncertain of what to do. “Now you have two minutes, Jack,” she said.
The cameraman lowered his camera, but the young brunette reporter next to him yanked it back up, pointed it at Dagny, and slid into the frame next to her. “This is Allison Jenkins for Channel Two News. What can you tell us about the silo?” She shoved a microphone toward Dagny’s face.
Dagny turned to Jack and said, “One minute.” Jack made a slashing gesture across his throat, and the cameraman turned off his camera. Jenkins pouted as they packed up their gear.
Sheriff Don glared at the crew. “What are you doing? You cowards! Turn that camera on. I’m going in there with a tank, and you’re going to film it.”
The television crew ignored him. Marigold turned back to Dagny. “What’s your name, girl? I’m going to need it for the lawsuit I file. The Constitution guarantees me freedom of the press.”
“Too bad it didn’t guarantee you an education. Or manners. Or hygiene.”
The sheriff charged forward and stuck his face in front of hers. “This is unincorporated property in Bilford County, over which I have jurisdiction. Murder, if there was any, is a state crime. And the FBI can’t take over a case without the consent of the proper local authority, which is me.”
It was true—the FBI couldn’t stop local law enforcement from investigating a crime within its jurisdiction. The thought of investigating the scene in tandem with Marigold was horrifying. She turned to Beamer. “Is this unincorporated?”
“I think it’s in the city of Bilford. Near the line, but still the city.”
“Dog shit, it is!” Marigold said.
Dagny turned to Beamer. “What’s the county auditor like?”
“Completely honest and reasonable. Nothing like the sheriff,” he said.
One of Marigold’s deputies laughed, and the sheriff spun to search for the offender. “Who was that?” No one gave him up.
“Call the auditor,” Dagny said to Beamer. “Get him out here with deeds and papers and survey equipment if he needs it.”
He made the call, and then they waited. Forty minutes later, a man arrived with rolled papers and a sack filled with equipment. They explained the urgency of the situation, and he got to work. Over the course of an hour, they watched over his shoulder as he consulted documents and moved his tripod and viewfinder to various locations on the farm.
The auditor pushed his glasses higher on his nose and announced, “Part of the farm is within the city limits, and part is unincorporated.”
Sheriff Don started to march onto the property, but Dagny stopped him with a stiff arm. “Where is the silo?” she asked.
The auditor looked back down at his papers and spun around to face the silo. Shielding his eyes with his hands, he announced, “The silo is in the city.”
“What about the farmhouse?” the sheriff barked.
“All the buildings are in the city. The fields over there,” he said, pointing to the right of the farmhouse, “are unincorporated.”
“What about where we’re standing right now?” Dagny asked.
“City.”
She turned to Sheriff Don. “Leave. Now.”
His men started to leave, but Marigold walked closer to her. “I’ve got friends in high places and an electorate that loves me. I’m not going to let some silo full of illegals tear apart everything I’ve worked for. This is a murder case, not some liberal-agenda, amnesty-now talking point. Whoever did this thing was trying to make this county look bad because we believe in America. I’m not giving up the fight. We may be leaving, darling, but the war ain’t over. If you think I’m going to lose to some dyke Feeb, you are sorely mistaken.”
As he started to walk away, Dagny said, “I feel sorry for you.”
He turned back. “What did you say?”
“I said I feel sorry for you.”
He narrowed his eyes and clenched his fist. “You’re lucky you’re a woman.” Shaking his head, he stormed away.
All too often, deeply flawed and preposterous people found great success in politics. Wealthy scions who drove girlfriends off bridges. Movie-star action heroes. Hockey moms. Real-estate billionaires. Appalachian-trail hikers. Serial adulterers and their enabling spouses. Normal people don’t succeed in politics because they don’t crave stardom or power. Only the crazy want the spotlight, so only the crazy get it.
This all made for entertaining newscasts, but not for very good government. The desire for power over others is the character defect that makes one unsuitable for the role. Bilford needed a good and decent candidate to run against Sheriff Don. But what good and decent person would put up with the fight?
Dagny turned to Beamer. “You should run against him.”
He laughed. “You don’t know anything about this place, do you?”
“I know that he has to go.”
He laughed again.
“I’m serious. I’m not joking.”
“Dagny, people around here aren’t going to elect someone like me.”
“Why not? You’ve got law-enforcement experience. You’re a likable guy.”
“Not going to happen.” He shook his head and started to walk away.
She grabbed his forearm. “Why not? I’m serious.”
He shrugged. “I’m too young, first of all. And I have no political experience or connections. You need to work within a party. And, I . . .” He stopped without finishing the thought.
“You what?”
“Nothing.”
“No, you were going to say something.”
He sighed. “Let’s go check out the farmhouse, okay?”
CHAPTER 30
As Diego walked from Beamer’s house to his own, he worked his way down the contacts list on his cell phone, placing calls to members of his congregation. When the first call went unanswered, he didn’t think anything of it. But after more calls went to voice mail, it was obvious that the community was avoiding him. In the end, only one man answered—Juan Sanchez, the car dealer.
“Why won’t anyone else talk with me?” Diego asked.
“Father Vega, we came to you because we thought you’d be discreet. Now there’s a national investigation and news crews roaming the streets. People are scared and angry with you. No one signed up for this.”
“I didn’t sign up for this, either. But what did people think would happen?”
“People thought you’d find these boys and bring them back home.”
“I wish it had been that easy. But this was a mass murder—”
“Which people found out from the news this morning. That’s a rough way to hear about a son or husband.”
Diego knew that was true. “I had no
control over that.”
“These families have been through so much loss and pain, and now they all think they’re going to be deported because of you. They’ve been holding out for amnesty, and now they’re going to be kicked out before a bill passes.”
“Juan, again, I don’t have control over these things.”
“You brought that woman here and made everyone trust her.”
“She didn’t do anything wrong.”
“Used to be only the boys were afraid to leave their houses—now everyone’s in hiding.”
“She has nothing to do with that. It’s news because the unsub blew up a silo, not because of anything she did.”
“What’s an unsub?”
“The guy who did this.”
“Is that an FBI term or something?”
“Yes.”
“That’s exactly what I’m talking about. You’re supposed to be a priest, Father Vega. Not a federal agent.”
Diego wanted to argue. He wanted to tell him that he was only acting like an agent because the community had drafted him into an investigation. But he needed Sanchez’s help, not approval. “I need to get everyone together. We have to talk as a community.”
“Not going to happen. People are panicked.”
“All the more reason we need to meet. If we’re going to catch this murderer, we need to work together. We need to share information. People need to help identify bodies.”
“Where do you think this all leads? A trial? Where the nationality of every victim’s family becomes a public record? If they put this man away, even if they put this man to death, do you think the story ends? What will Sheriff Don do? What will ICE do? All of our people settled in Bilford because they wanted to be invisible. Instead, we’ve got news vans setting up camp all over downtown. This is going to be a media circus, probably for months.”
And then there was silence. Juan Sanchez had hung up on him.
CHAPTER 31
In July 1877, the American Journal of Microscopy and Popular Science published a lecture by Thomas Taylor titled “Hand Marks Under the Microscope,” which suggested that hand and fingerprint identification could solve crimes. To the layman, the idea that a criminal could be caught merely because he touched something sounded like alchemy or witchcraft. If people had read Taylor’s article, they might have been convinced otherwise. But nobody read it.
People did read Mark Twain and his 1894 novel Pudd’nhead Wilson, the story of a young lawyer who solved a small-town murder using fingerprints. Shortly after the story was published, prisons began cataloguing the fingerprints of their prisoners in order to create a resource for crime detection. In 1911, a jury found a former prisoner, Thomas Jennings, guilty of murder based upon fingerprints he left in wet paint on a porch rail at the scene of the crime. It was the first successful use of fingerprints in a courtroom. Hours before Jennings’s scheduled execution, the Illinois Supreme Court halted the proceedings in order to consider whether fingerprints were reliable. After consideration of expert testimony, the court ruled that fingerprints were scientifically trustworthy and could support a jury’s verdict. Other courts followed suit.
The value of fingerprints is generally expressed in terms of their uniqueness, but their resiliency is almost as important. A good set of prints on the right material can last forty years. So in a space as large as the Hoover farmhouse, there should have been hundreds of residual fingerprints on the walls, doors, and windows, but Dagny found none.
Although there was dust in the air, there was none on the windowsills. She remembered the cigarette stub she’d bagged the night before. The house had smelled like smoke then, but less so now. “He wiped the place clean right before we got here,” she said. “We need all of the property records. Can you get them?”
“Sure,” Beamer replied. She stared at him for a moment. “Oh, you mean now?”
“Yes.”
After Beamer left, Dagny opened her backpack and pulled out the clear bag containing the cigarette stub she’d found. Sitting on the floor, she peeled the cigarette paper from the butt and set it flat on top of the bag. Reaching into her backpack, she withdrew her fingerprint kit and opened it. She dabbed her brush in the black carbon powder and held the brush over the cigarette paper but didn’t lower it. Powder didn’t pick up fingerprints as well as luminescence and chemical agents, and infrared spectroscopic imaging was even better. Everything was a calculus—was it better to get instant results with a mediocre process or to wait for a better process but lose time? She put the brush back with the kit. Even if they couldn’t get a good fingerprint off the cigarette, it was possible that it contained saliva residue, which would give them a DNA sample. She would let the lab do it.
Dagny started to put the butt back into its bag but stopped. She had collected it without a warrant. If it yielded usable prints or DNA, there was always the chance that a judge could decide to exclude it from evidence. She grabbed another clear plastic bag, wrote the current date and location on it, and dropped the paper and filter from the butt into it. Now it was the product of a warrant and unquestionably admissible. Investigations were built on small cheats like this.
She packed up her things and walked out of the house, toward the silos. Construction workers waited idly by their equipment while Bureau technicians gathered evidence. Dagny talked to each of them, reviewing the evidence they had collected. Most of it was inconsequential. One had found a piece of a digital timer, which suggested that the unsub had left the scene prior to the detonation. She had wondered whether the unsub had placed a trigger on the ladder or if he had been watching from a distance and remotely detonated the silo when he saw them climbing up it. Apparently, the fact that they had been climbing up the silo when it exploded was only a coincidence.
Another technician found a piece of a rusted barrel with a good amount of liquid cupped in its fold. Dagny waved her hand over the piece to catch its fragrance. It didn’t smell quite like gasoline, which meant it could be diesel. Diesel wasn’t a very good explosive. Either the unsub didn’t know what he was doing or he didn’t want to destroy too much of the silo’s contents.
She remembered the explosion from the newspaper, pulled out her phone, and added another item to her to-do list: investigate whether there was video from the gas station.
When the technicians finished the bulk of their work, Dagny had the crane lower her inside the silo once again so she could take video and pictures. This time, the silo was cool enough that no fire suit was required.
Under the light of day, the bodies in the debris were more distinct than before. One young man’s lips were cracked, and his face was coated in dust. The top of his skull had burned to a black char, but the fire had left one good eye staring up at her. All of the bodies on the top of the stack were like this—half cinder, half man. She assumed that the bodies farther down in the pile had been there longer. They may have escaped the fire but were more likely to have decomposed. Removing them from the silo was not going to be easy.
Dagny called the crane operator with her phone and had him lift her out of the silo. She gathered the technicians and construction workers and explained the task at hand. Calls were placed to augment to the team and procure additional equipment. Experts debated and disagreed, and she had to play referee as to methodology.
At first, they attempted to chisel away at the top of the silo, but hours of this yielded little progress. Eventually, they employed a wrecking ball, which was not used to smash down the silo but simply grazed it to cause fissures in the walls without having them collapse inward. Once the silo walls were weakened, the crew attached chains drawn by trucks to the silo’s top edges, which tore apart the walls. It took several hours, but eventually the top half of the silo was entirely removed, leaving an eight-foot lip above the content they would have to extract.
A makeshift platform was constructed with lumber and placed across half of the top of the remaining silo. Technicians dropped down from this platform into the debris, gatheri
ng pieces and placing them into sacks, which were carried by crane to stations for cataloging. Bodies and body parts were loaded into refrigerated trucks. By midnight, the team had excavated a third of the silo’s contents. A new team of technicians and agents tagged in, and Dagny stayed to direct them. By morning, another third of the silo had been emptied, and she rode in the truck that carried them to the makeshift morgue. She hoped Victor had it up and running. On the way, she dialed John Beamer.
“I’ve got the property records,” he said.
It had taken a long time. “Great. Get them to the Professor. Who’s the county coroner?”
“Beatrice Minor.”
“Is she good?”
“She’s a strange one. But good at her job, and you can trust her.”
“That’s all I need to know.”
CHAPTER 32
When she got to the high school, Dagny went to Principal Geathers’s office to thank her for her assistance. Before she could finish, a man threw open the door with such force that the principal’s diploma frames rattled against the wall. He was spewing words in such an animated frenzy that they tumbled all over one another.
“This is unacceptable. Not in the least, for crying out loud. Absolutely can’t take it,” he said. He was wearing shorts and a golf shirt, and carrying a basketball under his arm as if for emphasis. “It’s completely wrong. Everyone needs to get out of here. It’s . . . unbelievable. We’ve got a game against Madison tonight—”
Principal Geathers shook her head. “I rescheduled it. You’ll play at their place tomorrow.”
“But this is a home game!”
“The whole season will be away this year,” Dagny said.
He turned to her and threw up his hands. “That’s not fair! This is the last year we have Jackson and Collins. This is a big season. We’ve got a shot at a state championship.”