“Or agency,” Louis added.
“Let’s take Lopez at his word this one time, for the sake of conjecture,” I said, wanting to look at this angle a bit more before we moved on. “That they didn’t know there was going to be a raid, and that their security was lax. Doesn’t that point to an informant from the outside? And wouldn’t that have to be someone on the task force? No one else knew.”
“Which leads us back to a suspect from within the task force,” Louis said. “Where we’ve been from the beginning.”
“For the raid,” I pointed out, “not the killing. There’s cross-purposes working there. Especially for Sterling Jerome.” I was thinking out loud. “Jerome doesn’t go in if he thinks there’s going to be resistance, because Juarez could be killed and that fucks him up. He was emphatic about that. We knew about his impassioned statements to his people before the raid—‘Take Juarez alive, that’s the reason we’re doing this.’ So maybe it does fall on Lopez—that he lied to Jerome about that.”
“Like I said, a snitch is a snitch,” Kate proclaimed.
“Let’s table Lopez for now,” I said. “What Curtis Jackson told Keith is more disturbing to me. With deeper implications as to how we’re going to conduct our investigation, I think.”
The others concurred.
Keith turned to me. “How do you feel about the possibility that our local D.A. and sheriff are orchestrating this because of the shabby way they were treated?” he asked. “She’s your friend. Could she be using you?”
“I can’t imagine it,” I said. “But anything’s possible.”
I had to say that. I didn’t believe it, but I couldn’t deny the possibility, however remote.
“I don’t believe it,” Kate averred. “It’s Jackson shooting off his mouth, trying to influence this. The more muddled it all gets, the more suspicion is spread around. Which is good for criminals. It’s like taking sides with the Iraqis against the Iranians. You get in bed with wrongos because you think you’ll get something out of an unholy alliance, and in the end you get screwed regardless.”
“Jackson had a point, though.” Keith tapped a ballpoint pen against his palm. “The DEA was damaged by Juarez’s being killed. And Juarez’s people were saved the possibility of being ruined by their boss turning evidence. They’re still out there, and now the government has to be a hell of a lot more cautious in going after them.”
“What about the notion of Juarez being mixed up with the DEA? If he’d been turned, that would be cause for killing him, wouldn’t it?” Louis asked.
“I think it’s the opposite,” I said. “He can’t help them if he’s dead.”
“But he could rat out that DEA agent. Or the whole agency,” Keith reminded us. “If his handler thought that was going to happen, killing him makes sense.” He paused. “You think Juarez could’ve been on the DEA’s payroll?”
“That would be wild,” I said. “We can try to check it out. I don’t think we’ll get anywhere, seeing as how we’re on their shit list. But I’ll see if we can find anything out.” I went on, “About Juarez’s own people snuffing him. Does anyone buy into that?”
I looked at them. It wasn’t a popular proposal.
“No,” Keith said, speaking for everyone. “lf that’s the case, then they don’t wait until after the bust to kill him. They do it during. We’ve been through that already.” You could hear the frustration in his voice; and we were just getting started.
“It doesn’t hurt to repeat it,” I said. “Sometimes the circumstances change your thinking. Or fresh evidence.” I paused. “There’s one situation where it’s possible, though.”
“What’s that?” Kate asked.
“When all hell broke loose, Juarez hid out in that freezer without his people knowing it. He knows he’s in jeopardy, so he hides and hopes either that the DEA will find him first, or no one will.”
“Jesus, Luke, that’s really pushing it,” Kate said. “Besides, he would have come out when the shooting stopped. What’s he going to do, wait in there until he freezes to death?”
“He wouldn’t have known it was over,” Louis pointed out. “You can’t hear in there. Anyway, even if he could, how would he know his side lost? They had superior firepower, or thought they did, they usually do. What does it look like if he does come out and all his guys are waiting right by the door? What’s he gonna say, ‘I was looking for a Popsicle’?”
Everyone laughed; hollowly.
“I know it’s a lame notion,” I said, “but we have to examine all the possibilities, even if they’re foolish and stupid. This is a bizarre case. We shouldn’t assume anything is the way it ought to be, or normally is.”
Louis interjected another wrinkle. “Did you hear they might file a lawsuit against the DEA for illegally raiding them?” he asked, his voice rising in weary indignation—this would not be the first time the bad guys sued the good guys for doing what their job description says they must do. “The warrants were issued for a drug deal, which there wasn’t one, technically. Their lawyers are going to marshal a strong argument that the raid had no standing.”
“Too bad the scumbags get the same rights as the good people, ain’t it?” Keith said. “Better. They have better lawyers.”
I nodded; I’d heard about that lawsuit. Why shouldn’t they? They had nothing to lose. If some misguided judge let a motion like that in the door, there’d be more egg on the government’s face. The bad guys become the good guys. Ruby Ridge all over again, with even less justification. Which were potentially the circumstances here. It was the reason Nora had brought me in, after all. We were still, essentially, at ground zero.
“If a DEA agent killed Juarez and we find evidence to support that, then we’ll go to trial,” I said, concluding the meeting. “Regardless of our personal feelings. If it was someone else, we’ll prosecute that. Whoever we can find to prosecute,” I said, spreading my arms wide, “we’re going for it!”
They tried to muster laughter. It wasn’t easy.
“Listen, people,” I said. “If the Supreme Court, in its infinite wisdom, says a president of the United States can be criminally indicted for lying about getting a blow job, then a DEA agent sure as hell can be held to the same standards for killing an unarmed drug dealer. Even if he deserved it.”
That evening Nora and I had dinner at her place. She asked; having kept her out of my loop I couldn’t say no, even though I wanted to.
“How’s your investigation going?” she asked. “Or shouldn’t I ask?”
“Too early to tell anything. You know how that goes.”
“Tom Miller told me you took his deposition and his deputy’s.”
I nodded.
“Does that mean they’re in the clear?” She caught herself. “You’re not supposed to discuss the case with me, are you?”
“You’re right,” I said, trying not to let her hound-dog look of supplication bother me. “But to answer you anyway, we did, and they are. I have to go by the book.”
“Like talking to me? Or not? You’re not going by the book now.” She tried out a smile. It didn’t work very well.
“We’re friends, Nora. Friends are allowed to talk to friends.”
“I agree. They should.”
I sipped some wine. I was buying time, to try to figure out how to respond to this conversation.
Nora and I were old friends. We’d been in school together, an important time in people’s lives. Having dinner, talking about work that was important to both of us, should have been not only allowable but natural, candid. And she was the lead player in this; she’d hired me. We should be talking about this case as much as she wanted to.
But I was holding back.
If Nora was Norman, a male friend from law-school days, it would be different. I’d be telling him whatever came to mind, even using him as a confidant, a partner. With Nora, I wasn’t doing that. It wasn’t that she was a woman and I was a man—many women lawyers are my friends, and I have easy, comfortable re
lationships with them when it comes to work, values, so forth.
My uneasiness was about need—her emotional need. The musk of it was in the air, nothing you could define or give an identity to, something ethereal out there, like air, unseeable, untouchable, but you know it’s there, you breathe it in and out. I don’t like the word vibe, it seems sixties antiquated, but that’s what came to mind—there was a vibe between us.
The problem was that it was one way, from her to me. Under any circumstances that wouldn’t have been good; in these, it wasn’t only bad, it was dangerous. She was physically horny, I’m sure, but that wasn’t the main ingredient. She was looking for warmth, closeness, and validation. And there was no one around to give it to her. Her husband was dead, a failure as a lawyer, non-father of children, almost everything. All her eggs had been in their little basket, and none of them had hatched. They were long gone now, withered and cracked and blown away in pieces. But her essence, her feminine drive, that was still alive.
She hadn’t overtly said or done anything to confirm that my instincts were true, of course. She wasn’t that foolish, or bold. But I knew they were. Which was why I was keeping her at arm’s length, professionally as well as personally.
And yet here I was. I didn’t know why I was doing this, except that she needed me. She needed my friendship, and I couldn’t refuse it. Not back when she had phoned me out of the blue and asked me to come see her, not when she had inveigled me into her scheme to investigate this mess, not when she had done just about everything in her power to be a part of my life, if only tangentially, and not when she had come at me sexually; subconsciously, maybe, I didn’t know, but it was there.
She was needy, and I was guilt-ridden. I had been up and down, but I had a great life now, and she had a crummy one. We had started out evenly, more or less. In fact, she’d had the advantage then, she was from a privileged background, she was a brighter star, she was associated with the brightest star, and together she and Dennis had the potential and clout to go further than any of her classmates. Instead, I, and most of the others in our class, had surged ahead of her; so that now, when she had this chance to regain some ground, I felt obligated to help her. To say no to her, to dash any slim hope she had of recapturing the dream, would have been an act of cruelty.
So I told her what we were doing. The interviews with Agent Kim and Lopez the informant and Curtis Jackson the rival drug kingpin, the concern among members of the team that this could be more complex and unsettling than any of us had initially thought.
By the time I was finished reciting my litany, we had finished dinner and were having what had become our ritual postprandial cognac in the living room. This time our bodies weren’t touching, not even close. It was as if she sensed my uneasiness at that kind of proximity and was being careful not to violate my space.
“Do you still think there’s a possibility someone other than a DEA agent could have shot Juarez?” she finally asked.
“I don’t see how, but there must be. I’m worried,” I told her, finally admitting it to myself.
“About what?”
“A conspiracy, what else?”
She nodded. “Yes,” she agreed softly. “It’s what I’ve always thought, Luke. Or at least felt was a possibility.”
I sighed; I was tired. “I’m feeling the prosecutor blues. I haven’t felt them in a long time—I haven’t been a prosecutor in a long time, it’s a hard switch to throw, it’s like you have to flip your brain one hundred eighty degrees. You do defense lawyering, you develop a mentality against the system. Now I’m the system again, and I’m investigating the system.”
“But if someone in the system commits a crime, haven’t they forfeited their position in the system?”
The angels-dancing-on-the-head-of-a-pin argument was spinning inside my head: If the good guys do something bad while fighting the bad guys, is that at the same level of badness as the bad guys doing something bad? Is crime all black-and-white, or are there gray areas? Absolutist or situational?
“Of course. But if I wind up indicting a DEA agent for killing a man who everyone in the world knows was an evil bastard who deserved to die, I’m not going to be dancing in the streets.”
“But what if it was premeditated? If there’s something conspiratorial going down, then isn’t that as bad as anything Juarez or any other criminal could do?”
She leaned over and touched me, her hand on mine. There was no sexual energy in the touch; it was one of a friend reassuring another friend. “You got into this because of those rogue cops you killed out in the desert, isn’t that right?”
I nodded, my mind flashing back, the fear, rage, the blood pumping so hard I thought my heart would burst out of my chest.
“It’s a good thing you did kill them. Because if you hadn’t, you’d be dead,” she declared bluntly. “Which supersedes any anxiety about going after rogues. So if this turns out like that, then isn’t prosecuting and convicting the bastards the right thing to do? The only thing to do?”
What could I say? She was right. And she understood how I felt, trying to balance the tightrope-walking nexus of objective justice and subjective righteous retribution.
I hadn’t been looking at her for real. I’d only seen the superficial trappings, some false front in my mind, not the person behind it. I had been thinking that the emotional protection was one-sided, me toward her. But it wasn’t.
“You’ve got a great head on you for seeing through the bullshit, Nora.” I almost felt like apologizing, but I didn’t want to get into emotion, there was already too much of that. “I shouldn’t try to fight that, because of some legalistic protocol. You definitely can help me.”
“Thank you.” Another quick touch, fingers to back of hand. “We can help each other, Luke. Whatever justice there is in this, we can find it, together.”
She held out her hand. I shook it.
“Partners,” she said. “To the end.”
“Yes,” I agreed with relief. “Partners.”
IF YOU BUILD IT, THEY WILL COME
WAYNE BEARPAW’S MOTHER, LOUISA, was one of the elders of their tribe, the White Horse Nation. The term nation is a generous characterization of the tribe—there are less than five hundred members, for over a century there haven’t been more than that, and they have never occupied more territory than they do at present, a thousand square miles situated in the most rugged, desolate part of the county.
Unlike her son and most of his generation, Louisa had never moved off the reservation. She’d traveled to various parts of the country, mostly on tribal business; she also enjoyed her vacations, primarily to Vegas and Reno, where she was an aficionado of the one-armed bandits and crap tables. But she had always made her home on the barren piece of land where she was born.
This was not to say Louisa was content with her life. About to turn sixty (she could easily pass for fifty; her long hair was still black, her figure strong and tight), she had fought long and hard for a better life for the members of her tribe. Better housing, better schooling, better medical care, programs to combat alcoholism and drug abuse, more jobs. She had been successful in all these endeavors, but to a degree that fell short of what she wanted, conditions that would make life on the reservation comfortable and enjoyable, rather than the past and still-current situation, which was having to work your ass off just to maintain the basics of life.
More than anything, they needed jobs, industry on the reservation, so the young people wouldn’t have to leave it to have a decent life. Some money was available, from mineral-rights royalties, but that wasn’t work. Having money’s only half the struggle—jobs provide value, self-worth. She wanted jobs for her people, full employment within their own boundaries. Only then would they feel complete.
The infrastructure, as on most poor reservations, was derelict. The roads were terrible, even by Muir County standards; the public buildings, such as schools, fire stations, and so forth, were old firetraps. Reservation housing was crummy, but
at least the structures had plumbing, electricity, natural gas, the basic amenities that have long been taken for granted in the rest of the country but hadn’t been available on many reservations, including this one, until recently.
Many of these improvements had come about as a result of Louisa’s tireless lobbying for them at the county, state, and most importantly, federal level. There’s money out there and she works hard to get as much as she can for the tribe. Sylvan Furness, the regional BIA director in Sacramento, has her phone number on his speed-dial, that’s how much they talk.
Which was where she was on a midweek spring morning, sitting in Furness’s office with three other tribal leaders, two men and another woman, Mary Redfeather. They had driven down the night before in Louisa’s Dodge Caravan, bunking with a member of the tribe who works here in the state capital as a field rep for State Fish & Game. Sometimes they stay in a cheap motel, but if they can save money, they do. The tribe’s paying for this trip, which means it’s their own money they’re spending. Dinner had been takeout from Taco Bell and a six-pack of Tecate.
“Hey, you guys,” Furness said, greeting the delegation in his outer office. He hadn’t kept them waiting for more than a few minutes; Louisa gets on his case if she has to cool her heels. He’s known her a long time now. Staying in her good graces makes life a lot easier and less complicated. Louisa has no qualms about firing off a fax or an E-mail to Washington, to the congressional committees on Native American affairs, to anyone she thinks can help.
“Hey, Sylvan,” Louisa greeted him back, speaking for the group. She’s a forceful speaker, she usually takes charge. “You got any good coffee around here?”
“How many?” he asked.
They all raised their hands. He took a twenty out of his wallet, handed it to his secretary.
“Get four coffees from Starbucks and some croissants,” he instructed her. “Come on in.” He waved his guests into his office.
A short while later, coffee and pastries in hand, they sat around his conference table. A letter on tribal stationery was in front of Furness.
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