“Sit down. Garrison.”
“Luke.”
“Luke. Come on, sit down.”
I sat down.
“You want a Coke?”
“Sure.”
He took two cans out of a small refrigerator, handed me one. I popped the top. He did the same. Then he went to his filing cabinet and took out several thick file-folders, carried them back to his desk, set them down.
“All our interviews. Everyone who was there that night. They’re complete.”
“Can I see them?”
“Not on the record. Invasion of privacy, the laws are strict.”
I knew that. I thought maybe he’d bend them, in the spirit of cooperation. If I wanted to see them, I’d have to get warrants. I might have to, I thought, somewhere down the line.
“I can summarize them for you.”
I didn’t know how much good that would do without seeing the raw data. “What about the Shooting Incident Team report?”
“That I can give you. I don’t have a copy here, it’s back in D.C., but I’ll get one for you. The bullet went right through Juarez’s head and lodged three inches into a tree. The impact from that stripped the casings. We couldn’t get a ballistics match.”
“If there had been,” I said, “we probably wouldn’t be having this discussion.”
“It’s a bitch.” He shook his head at the incredibleness of it all. “We’re still working at it, though.”
That was a surprise to me. “You have people up there currently?” Nora hadn’t said anything about that.
He shook his head. “Not officially.”
“But unofficially?” An agent prowling around up there could foul up my investigation. Not that I could stop them.
“This isn’t a dead case, not by any means. We have some irons in the fire. Which is another reason I wish you wouldn’t do this.”
“Give me a reason not to,” I said. “Give me a name.”
“I can’t. But we’ll have something, sooner or later. I can’t say more now. In the meantime, you could mess us up badly. I really wish you’d reconsider this.”
He wasn’t going to give me a name, or anything else. Shutting the state and Muir County out, once again.
“Sorry,” I said. “We’re moving ahead.”
“None of our people did it,” Kim said. Not defensively; with certainty, and anger.
I hate it when people insist on their rightness. “What makes you so sure?”
“Because it would have been too hard to contain.” He hefted the interviews, a heavy bundle. “Every agent there was questioned, each one individually. We really grilled them, this wasn’t patty-cake. The questionnaires alone took a couple hours to fill out. We had to do this right, we don’t want to cover anything up.” He pointed to the report Nora had given me. “You know what we think.”
“One of his own? I can’t buy that, it’s preposterous.”
“You don’t live in that world. It’s totally dog-eat-dog, cutthroat. Don’t forget, Juarez had a huge bounty on his head. That supersedes any loyalty, not that there is any, nada, zero.”
He finished his Coke, three-pointed it into a trash can near the door. Nothing but net.
“But we’ve given that one up,” he admitted.
“Oh?”
“It didn’t pan out. But something else came up that was much more plausible.” He took another file out of the case, handed it to me. A thin document, half a dozen pages. “This you can look at, but you don’t have to now, you can take it with you, examine it later. I’ll tell you what it is.”
He opened it. “Somebody infiltrated his gang. Someone from another gang, probably another Mexican gang. He was waiting for the big buy to go down, but when we kiboshed that, he took Juarez out instead.”
So that was their case; I’d figured we’d get there eventually. “Did you get anyone in your raid who fits that description?”
“Not that we know of. But we don’t know if we got everybody.”
I shook my head. “You don’t believe that, so don’t expect me to. You’d find that out. You’d have it on the front page of every newspaper in the country. TV, the works. You’re not an agency to hide their light under a bushel, not with the crap publicity you’ve been getting.”
He didn’t have a comeback to that.
“Has anyone claimed the reward?” I asked.
He laughed. “And get snuffed within twenty-four hours? The informant, Lopez, he’s getting a taste, but shit, no. Two million’s chump change for the size deals they’re doing. We’re talking huge, man. Nine figures. Enough snow to float the world.”
Anything’s possible, I thought, but I wasn’t buying this.
Kim was reading my mind. “There’s only one way, in my opinion, that someone on that task force could’ve done this.”
“What way is that?” Now this was worth listening to, even if I decided it was bullshit or con. It would point me toward the direction they wanted me to go, which would be a strong sign not to. Or watch out for.
“It couldn’t have been one agent. They were too clustered, no one man could’ve pulled it off without someone seeing a piece of it happening, or figuring it out.”
“Two men, then?”
“No. For something like this to work, they all would have to be dirty. Or many of them, most of them. It would have been a major conspiracy, not some spur-of-the-moment rump action. And that could not have happened. There aren’t that many dishonest agents in the DEA, let alone on one strike force. These agents came from different jurisdictions, all over the West. Some barely knew each other. It doesn’t fly, any way you look at it. And…”
Here he paused, too dramatically, I thought, but he wanted me to really get it.
“If somehow, some one-in-a-trillion chance, there had been a conspiracy? It wouldn’t have held. It would’ve been too big. Someone would’ve cracked. Think of the prestige, not to mention the reward—two million. If one of ours had killed Juarez, and another agent fingered him, we’d have paid that reward to the informant.”
That didn’t sound right to me. An agency encouraging agents to rat out each other? Great for morale, not to mention one’s physical well-being. That would’ve been a quick frag, no questions asked.
“Why?” I asked.
“Because we can’t tolerate a dishonest, dirty agent,” Kim said, his voice rising. “If I thought one of ours did this, I’d draw and quarter the motherhumper personally. I mean that. So this idea that we covered up something, or didn’t investigate it as fully as we could, put that notion out of your head.”
“Okay. I hear you.” I was impressed; not at his utter candor, necessarily, but at his conviction.
“But you’re going to pursue your investigation anyway.”
“Of course. No matter what your reports say, someone killed the guy. So what if he deserved it, we’re not the jury, right?” I took the report about the gang wars off his desk, held it in my hand. “Maybe this is how it happened. And maybe I’ll find it out.” I dropped it back on his desk. “We want a suspect, Winston. A living, breathing person. Someone we can prosecute, or at least point to. Not a report, not conjecture.”
He leaned back. “Well, Luke, I hope you find one. But it won’t be one of mine, I can assure you of that.”
If he’d been a friend, I’d have bet him a steak dinner. But we weren’t friends, now or in the future.
“I hope not,” I said truthfully. “I hope it’s a bad guy. A real bad guy, not a dirty agent.” I gathered my stuff. “We’ll be talking again, I imagine.”
“You know where to find me.”
“Thanks for your time.” I got up. “And for seeing me, and for getting me that shooting report you said you’d send. You can mail it to my Santa Barbara office.”
He escorted me out. We said good-bye and shook hands. It wasn’t a warm parting.
MY KIND OF PEOPLE
I MET WITH MY team of investigators at what was left of Juarez’s house, which had been conf
iscated by the DEA after the raid. They’d flown in from various parts of the country the day before. All of them—two men, one woman—were experienced investigators from various counties in California. I could have brought in people from anywhere, but after giving the matter some thought, I decided to go this way. It would save some money, and it would keep the case where we wanted it—in the hands of Muir County, and the state.
This was a quickie trip, for us to get a feel for each other and check out the lay of the land. The real work, forming a special grand jury, beginning to interview the participants and to investigate everything, would start in the following weeks.
Kate Blanchard, the lone female in the bunch, would be my lead shamus. She’s the only female private eye in Santa Barbara, and the best of either sex, for my money. I use her on everything. She was a cop in Oakland before she moved to S.B. and fell into her present occupation, which she’s been doing for about six years now. I trust her explicitly—she’s an extension of my own eyes and ears out there.
Louis Alvarez is from LA. His specialties are big actions—murders and such—and investigating police brutality cases, which makes him a logical, albeit controversial, fit for my team. He’s outspoken, sometimes provocative, the kind of guy who likes to throw oil onto the flames.
The obvious qualification Louis brings to this particular case (besides ability) is that he’s Latino, second-generation Mexican-American. He grew up in the barrio, he knows the players. If it turns out that Juarez’s murder involved his own people, or a traitor in his midst, Louis will be our best hope for finding that out.
Keith Green’s another big-city detective. If you’ve heard of any of us, he’s the likely candidate; he played defensive end for the Raiders for a couple of years in the early eighties, before he blew out his knees. Being a prosecution investigator is a way station for him; he’s a semester shy of getting his law degree, after which he’ll move into either prosecution or criminal defense.
A black man working on the side of the police can be held suspect by his own people, but he handles his situation with aplomb. He’s straight, everyone always knows where he stands with him. He will play the reverse race card if he has to. He has strong connections with the big black gangs up and down the state, which could be important to our cause, because of the various associations they have with the Mexican, Central American, and South American gangs, including Juarez’s people, those who survived the raid.
One thing about Keith—he doesn’t run from his roots. He doesn’t let the police give him one ounce of shit, he’ll come down on a bad cop, white or black, faster than a white man will. Nobody’s an angel in his book, nobody’s untouchable. He was the lead investigator for a commission a few years back that wound up bringing significant indictments against a dozen crooked cops, some of whom were black, men he’d known growing up in the hood. He’s like me in his strong belief that bad policemen, or bad anythings in the law community, are worse than regular scumbags, because they have so much unbridled power.
The rooms in the compound’s main house were large (those still standing), on a baronial scale, high ceilings with redwood cross-beams, sparsely furnished in big Spanish-style pieces. The government had partially refurbished the parts that had been burnt and shot up. Once their investigation, and now ours, was finished, the compound would be sold to the highest bidder.
The place was sealed off—it was still a federal crime scene. They’d let us in, reluctantly. A call from Fishell’s office to the Justice Department in Washington took care of the access, but it was made clear to me that my colleagues and I were being tolerated, not welcomed.
Before we got down to business, I led the others on a quick tour. The compound was impressive, even in its current shape. The way rock stars or pro basketball players live, I imagine.
The coolest rooms were the VIP bedroom suites—half a dozen of them, decorated in Playboy Mansion style, circa 1970: king-sized beds (one shaped like a Whitman’s chocolate-box valentine), all covered with velvet or fake animal-skin covers. Every room featured large gold-flocked mirrors, some of them on the ceilings. The bathrooms were equally ornate, big Jacuzzi tubs, gold-plated faucets. Nicely arrayed in the drawers of each bedside table were ample supplies of condoms, along with an assortment of sex toys—vibrators, dildos, leather bindings, french ticklers. Topping off this hedonistic potpourri, there were about a hundred porno videos in the TV room, featuring almost every variety of sexual activity the human mind can conjure, with the notable exception of male homosexuality. Most of the videos had melted in the fire—only the charred covers remained.
It hit me, looking at this stuff, that nothing bad been touched (except to be inventoried, I supposed). Normally, items like these are taken like booty, a perk of the job. In this case, because of the circumstances surrounding Juarez’s killing, the DEA was playing everything scrupulously straight.
The kitchen was huge—the occupants ate like lords (according to their taste, which ran to Mexican food, red meat, anything microwaveable). The industrial freezer, where they’d found Juarez, was stocked with frozen pizzas, tamales, other such items, as well as haunches of beef and venison, sides of bacon, legs of lamb. In the large pantry, dozens of bottles of expensive tequila, vodka, cognac, Scotch, bourbon, and cases of Coors, Heineken, and Corona beer were jammed in the big refrigerators.
Leaving the house, we circumnavigated the property. I showed them where the DEA task force had set up its principal bivouac, where the various players were when the house was raided, the location of the trailer in which Juarez had been sequestered, the direction he ran when he escaped. where his body was found. I pointed out the stakes where the body had been found, the bullet hole in the tree.
We ended our tour by walking to the airstrip. It wasn’t fancy, a single runway long enough to take about any size jet made, and a tin-roof shack off to one side that had the bare-bones equipment needed to get the planes in and out. Looking east, you could see for a hundred miles, and nothing was there, except for some carrion-seeking buzzards circling high up in the bleached-out sky.
“Great hideaway altogether,” Keith commented. “Almost impenetrable.”
We stood at the edge of the runway, bracing ourselves against the dry wind coming off the high-plains desert. The stark solitude invited reflection. I didn’t know what the others were thinking, but I was pondering the aborted raid.
In my mind’s eye, Juarez and his men are emerging from the compound into the night, the sky dark and starry, driving the narrow access road to the strip, all of them eager, anticipating, Juarez cool, emotionless, waiting to do the business he came here for, then flying out on the money plane. They watch as two airplanes come out of the southern shy, backlit by the pre-dawn false sunrise, one after the other flying in low, touching down. There are some quick introductions, perfunctory greetings. Juarez checks out the money—one hundred million dollars in cash. No bills larger than hundreds, a cornucopia of cash, it would have weighed hundreds of pounds. Taxpayers’ money, bait to snag a killer whale. His counterpart, the moneyman, Jerome’s man, would have checked out the drugs and found them satisfactory. He would have been jumping but of his skin in excitement and nervousness. Meanwhile, shadowing Juarez’s movements, Jerome and his band of sixty have made their way to the strip under the cover of darkness and are in place, waiting for the exchange. And then, at the precise, perfect moment, they swoop in, the arrests are made, and heroes have been created. Now Juarez is picking lint out of his belly button in an isolation cell in the toughest federal prison in the country, as are his men. The ripples from the arrest have traveled the length of the country, the entire hemisphere. And Juarez is still alive, and Jerome’s career is in the ascendancy, he’s riding high.
And I’m not here. I’m home with my family, enjoying my life.
But it didn’t happen that way. Even if it had, Juarez would still be dead. Because that was the plan—whoever’s it was who killed him. This drug lord wasn’t leaving here alive, and th
e entire Justice Department could kiss somebody’s ass. Whoever pulled the trigger had his own agenda, and that meant Reynaldo Juarez was a dead man.
The DEA had satisfied itself that the killer wasn’t one of theirs. Perhaps that would turn out to be true. I was dubious, but I hoped so. Better that Juarez was killed by one of his own than by a cop. But however it fell, somebody had killed him.
Back in Blue River, my team and I gathered at the motel bar. They were taking off in the morning, going home to tie up loose ends. I’d commandeered a plane to fly them to Reno, where they would catch commercial flights to wherever they were going.
After having a drink and a short discussion about methodology with them, I went back to my room, called home, spoke to Riva and Bucky. She was about to get him into the bathtub, no easy feat, so it was a short conversation.
“I’ll see you in a couple days,” I said. I was flying home Friday night.
“We’ll be waiting.”
We kissed over the phone. I showered and changed and headed out into the night.
Nora had prepared an elaborate dinner—roast chicken, wild rice, green beans with almonds, a fresh tossed salad, a chilled bottle of white wine. I hadn’t expected that—I’d told her I’d come over at the end of the day and informally fill her in on where we were going. After that I figured a pizza back at the motel and a movie on cable TV. Now here was this fancy dinner, which she’d obviously put her time and energy into, much more so than the first meal I’d had here with her. She’d taken time to pretty herself up, too; she had a discreet amount of makeup on, something I hadn’t seen before, had pulled her thick hair back into a French braid, and was wearing a nice outfit, a dusty rose silk blouse and matching slacks that highlighted her good features and downplayed the others.
“I hope you’re hungry,” she said gaily as she led me into her house. “I rarely get to cook for someone who has good taste.” She blushed. “Actually, never. I hope you didn’t make other plans,” she added coyly/expectantly.
She was flirting with me; friendly like, but the scent of it wafted off her like a mysterious and vaguely disturbing perfume. At the same time, it was a posture she was unfamiliar with, so there was a nervous edge to it.
Above the Law Page 18