A Desert Reckoning

by Deanne Stillman

  There is nothing like the pomp and circumstance of funerals for members of law enforcement or the military who have gone down in the line of duty. Sometimes, to those who reside in the civilian world and know little or nothing of how it is among the men and women who walk that thin blue line so others can be protected, such ceremonies seem overblown or in some way excessive. They make people feel uneasy and wary of the warrior way. But this is how it must be, with flags and dirges and uniforms; can you picture it otherwise, lesser tribute, for citizens who spill their blood in service to town and country?

  On the sixth day of the manhunt, at Lancaster Baptist Church, one of the largest Baptist churches in the West, several thousand people gathered to say farewell to the resident deputy whose mission was short-lived and profound: the boy who had wanted to help people for as long as anyone could remember had grown up and continued doing exactly that, for five decades, until the end. It wasn’t a glamorous calling, and the acts of kindness had been carried out in silent ways, but few among us follow their first path, and now the impact was loud and clear. Getting groceries for the housebound or cleaning up an elderly person’s squalor or speaking up on behalf of cleaning ladies or old vaqueros who ran feed stores—the list went on and up and down the pews as friends and acquaintances remembered, privately and to each other.

  In the moments before the service, video screens on the church walls showed photographs of Deputy Sorensen as a baby, with his parents (no longer living at the time of his death), with other deputies, and at his wedding. Most photographs showed Steve with his son, Matthew, his greatest joy, holding him on his shoulders or inside a judge’s office for a visit, or happily astride his horse, his arms around the toddler as they went for a ride. It was a testament to the bond between father and son—a counterpoint, or in a strange way, a parallel to the other father and son story that, unbeknownst to authorities, played out in the awful thing that had gone down six days earlier and brought everyone to this church.

  Among the mourners there were some who wondered how their old friend made his way to the desert, not even knowing he had been there for so many years until they saw what happened on the news. There sat Julie Franks for instance, Steve’s neighbor in Manhattan Beach, one of the girls who had a crush on the cute surfer who did odd jobs for the folks on his street whenever there was a need. She hadn’t seen him since he left for the army long ago, with his polished boots on the front lawn announcing his departure, as if—it seemed in retrospect—the very shoes had made the man, just like the old saying goes. Nor had Kimberly Brandon-Watson seen her former beau since many years earlier, when they had broken up in Manhattan Beach and gone their separate ways. She felt compelled to attend the funeral for her old boyfriend, stunned by what had happened to the young man who forsook the waves and endless promise of surf for what she had long regarded as a darker place—with some vague fear she had long held now confirmed.

  Yet all of the hows and whys were quelled, if only for a few moments, as pallbearers entered the church carrying Deputy Sorensen in a flag-draped casket, with sheriff’s deputies and members of the California Highway Patrol standing at attention in double lines leading up to the pulpit, saluting their fallen brother. Then two deputies lifted the flag and folded it, handing it to Sheriff Baca and Captain Carl Deeley, Sorensen’s commander at the Lancaster station. Baca and Deeley knelt and handed the flag to Christine Sorensen, Steve’s widow, who was sitting in the front row with family members and friends. “Greater love has no one than this, that one lay down his life for his friends,” said Captain Deeley, as he eulogized Deputy Sorensen before his family, Governor Gray Davis, and thousands of spit-shined deputes and cops from all over the country who filled the pews and spilled out onto the somber streets. The utterance from John 15:13 is oft-quoted at such funerals, but that does not render it less true; it is the ancient mandate regarding duty, a word that is generally spoken on patriotic holidays and in military and law enforcement circles, but not much elsewhere, sadly bereft of meaning in a country without any form of required national service or sacrifice.

  Next to make a tribute was Sheriff Baca. “I think I have a right to be mad as hell,” he said. “I think everyone here has the same right, but I don’t want all that to get in the way of what this means to all of us. I want to focus on Steve Sorensen.” Then he turned his attention to Steve’s widow. “Chris,” he said, “I’m so sorry. It is manly to weep. We’ll continue in Steve’s way.” Several years after the killing of Deputy Sorensen, I sat in Sheriff Baca’s office in east Los Angeles, talking with him about the incident. An intense man admired and scorned for his spirituality and sensitive manner and, as this book goes to press, in trouble as his department faces a raft of scandals, he seemed to pulse with a calm kind of outrage when we got to the heart of the conversation: What happened to Steve? I could tell that he was still angry about the loss of his man and the way in which it happened, and we spent a long time talking about the nuts and bolts of the manhunt, and the task that had sent Deputy Sorensen down the rutted driveway into what Sheriff Baca referred to as Kueck Nation. As we spoke, I could feel the full force and history of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department coming right through him, 160 years of standing on the thin blue line.

  “If you’re here to ask about the fire,” he said, “I’d do it again.” He was referring to the final conflagration, a thing that became the subject of controversy and an investigation. That wasn’t why I was there, I explained; others had looked into it, written about it, and I was telling another part of the tale, the one that kept leading me right back to the same big question.

  “Where is God in this story?” I asked the head of one of the most powerful law enforcement agencies in the world, hoping he might have a clue. “You know the answer,” he said, and then was silent for a moment, maintaining his gaze, making the most penetrating eye contact I have ever experienced and working the fingers on both of his hands as if reliving Steve’s final moments and the entire manhunt as well. “This is an old story and it never ends.”

  At Lancaster Baptist, the story went on, and the grief-stricken cops who knew it were uneasy. The thing that bothered them from the moment the pursuit began was still on their minds. What if Kueck were hiding somewhere, now looking through a rifle scope at the congregation as they laid their fallen deputy to rest? They prayed for their fellow officers who were still out searching for Kueck, wondering why nothing could flush him out, not the bloodhounds, not the two-bit snitches, not the cell-phone signals, not the thermal-imaging helicopters, not even bad luck. They knew that every outlaw in the desert was suddenly living with a proud defiance—one of their own had outsmarted the system. The world was watching, and if Kueck got away, the cops would be nothing.

  Then, shortly after the bagpipes sounded and an honor guard placed Deputy Sorensen’s coffin into the hearse for the last ride, they got a call. A phalanx of black-and-whites screamed out of the church parking lot and into the desert sands. Kueck, they were told, was cornered.

  THE ALLIES ARE SUMMONED

  Everyone comes to a meeting with a point of view.

  —Simon Baker, “The Art of Decision Making,” www.myCEOlife.com

  IT WAS ANOTHER FALSE LEAD; KUECK WAS NOT CORNERED AT all—at least in the sense that the cops were hoping for. Although no one knows for sure, it seems most likely—and this is the conclusion that many searchers came to themselves—that by day six of the manhunt, Kueck was hiding in the tunnels that tips kept pouring in about, emerging at night, like all desert creatures, to hunt. Unlike those who were chasing him—equipped with all sorts of elaborate gear and optics—he had no need for such trappings, knowing well how to take advantage of such things as the excellent nocturnal visibility of the Mojave Desert. “Its light-colored soil,” wrote the naturalist Raymond B. Cowles, “varies from pale buff to soft pink, and the plant life is so scanty it throws few shadows. All the natural light from moon, sky, and star, vivid in the clear air, remains to aid one’s vision.�
�� In just a few minutes, with automatic ocular adjustment, Don was able to move easily through the night, foraging, drinking, and returning to his subterranean safe house before sunrise.

  Is it possible to know which tunnel our hermit would have hidden in, on this, his last day of freedom? Perhaps it was the one near his trailer, with the periscope that he had shown Jello’s friends. Or perhaps it was an outlying tunnel, which he had shown no one. Or perhaps it was a tunnel that even he had not seen before, had only read about as he wandered the pages and visions of the old shamans. A portal might have appeared out of nowhere, drawn open by some unseen power or force, or there might have come an opening to a pack rat’s nest, and it might have enlarged, or possibly it was already large enough for a man to crawl through and into, entering a world that could have held him for who knows how long. There’s a strong chance that the tunnel in which Kueck was hiding in these final hours was not really a tunnel, but a kiva, a holy room, possibly the very one in which the shaman that had been unearthed by the bulldozer at the Anaverde development nearby may have once danced and prayed, in what manner we do not know, for so little is known or understood about the Indians of the western Mojave, the place that seems to have removed so much of its past and even recent history, as if in defiance of being remembered.

  Given that Don may have been inside a kiva, of which tribe might this room of worship have been affiliated? Among the first peoples of the Antelope Valley were the Shoshone, and then there were their descendants, the Kitanemuk, the Vanyume, the Serrano, the Southern Paiutes, the Northern Mojave, and the Kawaiisu. All of these tribes invoked animal totems, some carving depictions of these creatures on rocks and on basalt walls, in tribute and perhaps as a route of spirit access, after certain plants were ingested or appropriate ritual was carried out.

  Inside the kiva, on this, his sixth day as a fugitive, Don may have been undergoing withdrawal from powerful pain medication; he may have lost considerable weight, the result of not being able to acquire enough food or water in spite of having quenched himself at his friend’s house and at various caches and quite possibly faucets in the yards of the unsuspecting. He may have been hallucinating, seeing all manner of ghosts and demons, and was it not in a moment such as this that the Devil had come to him some time ago and shown him the way out?

  With the walls literally closing in, he may have called on certain powers he had read about in his beloved collection of books, some of which or whom he may have communed with at one time or another. Like many of his generation, he had read the works of Carlos Castaneda, the celebrated and mysterious author who had journeyed to Mexico and encountered the Yaqui shaman Don Juan, who guided him on the inward journeys that transpired after ingesting magic plants, instructing Castaneda about the parade of power animals that crossed his path and loaned the pilgrim special powers. In a book found in Kueck’s belongings when it was all over, The Second Ring of Power, Castaneda encounters a powerful female figure called la Gorda, and finds himself confessing all sorts of personal torment while sitting in a desert gully. For example, he tells her that he once had a son whom he dearly loved and then one day forces conspired to take the boy away. To understand this dilemma, he had gone to consult Don Juan, asking the sorcerer to help him regain his son. Don Juan explained that a true warrior should not seek comfort after the fact. Instead, he could achieve results simply by the force of his own awareness and intentions. But it’s too late even for that. “If I would have had the unbending intent to keep and help that child,” Castaneda laments, “I would have taken measures to assure his stay with me. But as it was, my love was merely a word, a useless outburst of an empty man.”

  Alone in the ground, Kueck may have replayed these words over and over, flaying himself with rebuke, simmering down in a self-obsessed stew of regret and shame, crying out what little water he had left, calling out to his son, and trying again to make contact, just like Dr. Moody had said you could do, his mind now a big mishmash of pathways and crackling neurons, fear and disbelief. Yet all of the good doctor’s suggestions for how to contact the dead were not working. In fact, they never had—who was this guy kidding, no wonder his relatives locked him up; there was only one way to talk to the dead and everyone knew what that was, and Jello, my son, do not fear, I am on my way, even though I am many days late and dollars short, but here I come you fucked-up son of a fucked-up father, here I come.

  But first there were a few more things to take care of, farewells to be made, or hey, who knows, maybe I can still get away, it’s still a free country, right, and I’m still a free man, I got my rights. . . . It was time to call in his friends the animals. Oh, you could always count on them when the going got tough. They didn’t judge the way people did; they didn’t care if you ate your meals out of a can or snarfed drugs from the dirt if you ran out. And so here came Scorpion, who said, ‘Stay stealthy,’ and here came Bobcat, who advised that perhaps the time had come, but not without a fight, and then raven came—and Don thought, Raven? Underground? You are indeed some bird, one helluva bird if I may say so, and I thank you for finding me in my hour of need—and the black creature with the chevron wings hopped on Don’s arm, as always, and then the hermit looked him in the eye and saw his own reflection and he looked so bad and gnarly that it scared him. “Fear not,” Raven said. “I will help you fly away.” And then Don gave that some thought, and as he pondered, there came Ground Squirrel, and then several, and they hopped on his lap and on his shoulders, and they were running up and down his shattered body and chattering and just as the Indians used to say, they had come with news of the forest—or in this case, the desert, ha ha, the joke was on Don, for what they said was “You cannot win, my friend, give yourself up, there’s thousands of men out there and believe you us, they are heavily armed,” and the hermit knew that what they stated carried great weight and that he should probably heed their words.

  Yet there was one tribe not yet heard from and this was Snake. Their absence disturbed him, as this was their domain, and he knew that some of the ancients, the Hopi in particular, that most unknowable of tribes, would go underground, taking snakes with them, and there they would dance, imbuing the rattlers with prayers for rain and then later sending them out to the four cardinal directions when they emerged, understanding that the snakes would carry the desires of their people with them and answer with the seasons and cloudbursts and life. Where were the Mojave greens who stood sentinel at his doorstep and who permitted him to handle them with no interference just because he lived with no fetters like they did out in the middle of nowhere? He couldn’t bear that the very creature who embodied the thing that he lived for—Don’t tread on me—had now forsaken him. And as he thought and thought and mulled it over, finally one of his beloved snakes may have appeared, though in a way that was not friendly, making it clear that he was no longer an ally. “Everything is out of whack,” Snake said. “Things are not right with you. We can no longer be of service.” It was all over then; there was clearly only one way for Don to get where he needed to go.

  Or maybe it did not happen like that at all.

  Darkness swept the sky on the night of August 6, 2003, and our hermit made ready for his last stand, figuring out how he would get from where he was at this moment to the place where he wanted to stand his ground. Sometime before daybreak, deep under the Mojave sands, Donald Charles Kueck understood that there was no refuge except what was supposed to happen, so he emerged from below to play the last scene out, promising himself that he would go out like a motherfucker. “Bring it on, old man,” came a voice, maybe his son’s. “Let’s see what you got.”

  It was August, after all, the time when the end of things is on the wind; leaves are beginning to turn and fall, and even in the desert, the light is shifting, recalling, signaling, for those who have known it, the coming coolness and snap of impending freeze, the time of hibernation, sleep, and death.

  DAY

  SEVEN

  LAST STAND

  Let’s do
it.

  —Gary Gilmore at his execution before a Utah firing squad, January 17, 1977

  I will meet them as a bear that is bereaved of her whelps, and will rend the caul of their heart, and there will I devour them like a lion: the wild beast shall tear them.

  —Hosea 13:8 (King James version)

  “MRS. WELCH, GET OFF THE PHONE.” HOMICIDE DETECTIVE Mark Lillienfeld was calling Kueck’s daughter on the special cell phone that another investigator had given her the day after Kueck killed Sorensen. The trap and trace operation that was running since Day Two of the manhunt had picked up a signal from Don’s cell and traced it to Rebecca’s phone. Kueck, it told them, was back at C.T.’s place, but this time, his buddy was gone; fearing for his life, he had moved to a local motel. Inside his unmarked Crown Vic, Lillienfeld was tearing through a mountain pass across the 60 to Riverside and then placing the urgent call. “Your father is trying to call you,” he said. Becky knew from the tone of Lillienfeld’s voice that things were reaching a finale. But one of her kids had knocked the receiver on her land line off the hook, and the phone was busy. She immediately replaced it and awaited her father’s call.