by Dave Eggers
The next morning I woke to the sounds of roosters. Day Two. I got in my truck and headed south. I had my doubts, but I figured I had to keep going.
An hour later, I came to a tiny farming community called Santa Maria. I went into a market and left a stack of flyers. A small group of men was milling around a pot of coffee.
When I went back outside to the gas pumps, the guy who ran the market came out with one of the flyers in his hand.
"These people," he said. "They were here."
"Really?" I said. Somehow I doubted it.
He looked at the flyer again. "They bought water, milk, and potato chips. They asked if we sold diapers, but we don't."
His grocery list was so specific. They were here. They had to be.
"What vehicle were they driving?" I asked.
"This one." He pointed at the flyer.
"How long ago?" I asked.
"Three weeks."
The timing was exactly right.
"Did you see the children?" I asked.
"No," he said.
I thanked him and left, with a new plan. I would race straight down to the Baja Sur state line—the halfway point of the peninsula—where the family would be forced to register.
I would bribe the immigration officials for a peek at the book and confirm that Carelli and Pinkerton didn't sneak past. And then I'd double back, and I'd scoop them up like a net.
I was driving so fast now that the tires squealed on the turns. Before half an hour passed, I reached the village of El Rosario. The Pemex station there could be the last gas for two hundred miles.
I've probably filled my tank in El Rosario three hundred times. It was too important a place to not stop for a minute and hang some flyers. I jammed on the brakes and skidded across the lane into the gas station. I was posting a flyer near a gas pump when one of the attendants approached.
"Yo la vi," he said. "I saw her. The blonde."
"Where?" I asked.
"At pump number one," he said. "She asked me about a cheap place to eat."
"When?" I said.
"Three days ago."
"Three days?" I said. "Do you mean three weeks?"
"Days," he said. "Three days ago."
Next door to the gas station was a small motel. I showed the flyer to the two ladies working behind the reception desk, and when they saw it, they both shrieked and covered their mouths.
Yes, the family was here in El Rosario. They were living in a small house, just two doors away from the home of one of the receptionists. Yes, they were still driving the white car, but they had been trying to sell it in the village. And yes, the little girls were still with them, but the infant, whose name was Faith, was very sick. The blonde woman, they told me, was earning money by teaching dance lessons to children in the village for ten pesos an hour—a buck an hour.
The house was a hundred meters away. Less.
"What time are the classes?" I asked.
"Three o'clock," one of them said.
I looked at my watch. It was 2:45.
Carelli and Pinkerton were here. Now. A block away.
Things were moving so fast through my head that it felt like earth time had stopped. I could suddenly see everything that I needed to do next so clearly.
I told the women at the motel not to tell anyone about our conversation. I ran back to the gas station and ripped down the flyers and took back the stack I'd left. I needed to get my truck and its American license plates off the road. Fast. It was a tiny town. I had to assume that word would soon get back to Carelli and Pinkerton.
I drove a half-block to the town's small payphone office and hid my car behind the building. An operator connected me to the uncle in Santa Cruz.
"I found them," I said. I told him the story as quickly as I could. He gave me a phone number for a U.S. Marshal handling the case and I got him on the phone.
"I found them," I said. The U.S. Marshal seemed doubtful. Annoyed. I let him know that I could get together a team of local police and go get Carelli.
"Don't do anything," he said. "Call me back in one hour."
I looked at my watch again. It was now after three. Dance class was in session. If I called the U.S. Marshal back in an hour and he instructed me to contact the local cops—which was the only reasonable option—that whole process might take another hour. Maybe more. And it might be too late.
I went across the street to the cinderblock police station. Three cops were gathered around a small television, watching a movie with Chuck Norris and a midget. I later figured out the movie was Lone Wolf McQuade, the 1983 classic in which Chuck Norris's character makes an incursion into Mexico to take care of business.
Man: Hey Partner! Where you headed?
Chuck Norris: Mexico.
Man: Mexico!? What the hell for?
Chuck Norris: They got my daughter.
Man: Well hold on, I'm coming!
Chuck Norris: It's not your fight!
[motorcycle roars]
"I need to speak with the comandante," I said.
One of the cops leaned back in his chair. "I'm the comandante. What do you want?"
He was clearly irritated by the interruption, but he led me to a tiny room with a metal desk, and closed the door.
When I'd finished telling him the story, he radioed his off-duty cops and told them to report to the station immediately. They called for backup from San Quintin. The dance class was half over.
In the police station bulletproof vests were pulled from lockers. Weapons were loaded. One of the cops found an extra flak jacket that would fit me.
At the one hour mark, I dialed the U.S. Marshal from the telephone in the police station.
"It's no good," he said. "The paperwork is not in order." He told me we'd have to wait until tomorrow.
"There will be no tomorrow," I said. "There are two white men in this town. Richard Carelli, and me. And pretty soon he's going to know it—if he doesn't already. And then he's going to do whatever it takes to run again."
The Marshal exhaled sharply.
"Ugh," he said. "Call me again in a half an hour."
You've got to be kidding me, I thought.
I decided right then, I was not going to call the U.S. Marshal again.
The Mexican cops stood all around me, waiting for the word.
I told them that I needed to make one more phone call. I dialed the uncle in Santa Cruz.
"Look," I said. "The U.S Marshal says that we have to wait until tomorrow." I explained that it didn't have to be this way, that I didn't work for the U.S. Marshal. But this wasn't my decision. It was his family. Only he could decide.
He conferred for a few moments with the grandparents and then he said, "The paperwork will be ready by the time It's needed. Go do it."
Mexican federal cops arrived from San Quintin a few moments later—four unmarked truckloads full of guys with big mustaches and leather jackets. Most of them carried assault rifles.
One of the trucks was sent out to observe the house. They radioed back to the station that the children were out front with the mother. A few seconds later came the report that the father was now outside, too. The leader of the federal squad said " Vamonos." Then he put a hand on my chest and ordered me to stay put.
Ten minutes later they returned. Michele Pinkerton and the children were in the back of one truck. Carelli was handcuffed in another. They jerked him out of his seat and stood him in front of me, and when he saw me, the fight drained out of him. Any fantasy he might have held about the arrest being just a Mexican shakedown was dead.
He asked me why he was being arrested. I didn't respond. Viana stared out the door of the other truck wide-eyed and nervous. Michele Pinkerton was working hard to convince her daughter that everything was okay. She held the baby tightly in one arm and hugged Viana with the other, rocking them both gently against her.
We caravaned back to the federal headquarters, where a big group of cops whooped as Richard Carelli was pulled from the truck
and led up to the station. Michele and the girls were taken out of the other truck, and Viana watched in horror as her father was led through the doors. She moved onto the sidewalk and stood next to me. She was really dirty, but she seemed healthy.
"Hi," I said.
"Hola," she said.
"Speaking Spanish now, huh?"
"Si."
"You okay?"
"Si."
The cops asked me to wait in one of the offices with Michele and the girls. Viana kept asking about her father. Michele assured her that he was fine. She was trying to find another blanket to wrap around Faith. The infant was so tiny, and her breathing was raspy. Michele did everything she could to not look at me. I sat for a long time, just watching her trying to stave off this new reality. Viana leaned over Faith and kissed her forehead. The baby cooed, and Viana laughed, and Michele draped her arms around her daughters and she smiled a smile so sad that I had to look away.
Carelli was next door in a jail cell. He called to me. "Sir. Excuse me. Sir. Can you please tell me why we're here? Sir, please..."
One of the cops entered the office where we sat and grabbed a leg shackle—this heavy, black, iron thing that looked like it belonged in a dungeon. He carried it to Carelli's cell. Viana started to cry.
"I have a daughter," I said to her. "She's four. She looks just like you. She likes to play princess. Do you play princess, too?"
Viana nodded.
Michele straightened up in her chair and asked me, "Are you from here?"
"No," I said. "I'm from California."
Her eyes teared up, and she nodded. "Yeah."
This was not what I signed up for. She just seemed like a mom. Where was the screaming? The blaming? The meth-head excuses? Where was all the horrible parenting? Had they all been cured by their time here.
Suddenly I didn't really feel like I was riding in on the white horse. I just felt like I was meddling with somebody's family. What right did I have to upend the lives of these two little girls?
"What does the baby need?" I asked. "Diapers?"
Michele nodded. "Yeah. And formula."
I drove into town, and bought way too many baby supplies, and some stuff for Viana, too. Then I stopped at a taco stand and bought three dozen carne asada tacos.
Viana lit up when she saw the food.
"Did you bring food for my daddy, too?"
I asked the cops if it was okay for her to deliver tacos to her father. I helped her make a plate and then followed her to the cell where her father was cuffed to the bars.
"Hi, honey," he said. "Are you okay?"
She nodded. He held her face in his hands and kissed the top of her head through the bars. They spoke softly for a few minutes. I tried to fade as far away as I could. Carelli fought to keep it together. He looked up at me. "Are you a bounty hunter?"
"No," I said.
"What are you?"
"I'm just a guy ... trying to help."
He seemed to hold this for a long moment.
"Thank you," he said.
I looked down. "Yeah."
I called the uncle in Santa Cruz. Tried to explain what I'd seen. That the girls seemed well cared for. That they seemed loved. I told him that things were different than I had expected.
"Well," he said. "Viana loves her grandparents, too."
I drove home the next day. I didn't know it yet, but the media was already in a full frenzy. CNN and CBS and Fox were calling my office. All the news reports were pretty black and white.
Reporter.... and after a whole month, police had no luck finding the girls, but one guy did in just two days. James Spring...
They were calling me a hero. But I didn't feel like one. In a lot of ways, I felt like a home wrecker. I did a couple of interviews, but they went poorly.
Reporter. How in the world did you pull this off? You went to Mexico, and what did you do?
Spring: Basically I created a flyer in Spanish, and the thing about Baja....
So I stopped.
The one bright spot in all the coverage, the one moment that made me feel like maybe I had done the right thing, was some video shot at the airport, when Viana got off the plane in the U.S.
Viana: Grandma!
[Viana sees her grandmother at the arrival gate, and yells "grandma,"
and runs into her arms. They're both crying.]
Grandmother: It's okay, you're home now.
must have watched that video a hundred times.
All week, the phone calls didn't stop. Producers were trying to buy the movie rights. Long-lost relatives tried to reconnect. Everybody was calling. Except Viana's grandparents. I had been thinking of them a lot. I just wanted to know that the girls were happy—not happy, but, you know ... that they were okay. That they were going to be okay. But the grandparents didn't call. I couldn't call them—I mean, they had to be overwhelmed. I felt like maybe I'd intruded into the girls' lives enough already.
But I needed to do something. I sent a huge box of presents to the kids, and a notebook for Viana so she could write letters to her parents. On the inside cover, I wrote her a note. I tried to make her understand why I'd done this. It was kind of an explanation, kind of an apology. Even though I knew she was way to young to comprehend any of it.
I got no response.
And then I started learning some odd things.
On one newspaper's website, I found a comment from a guy who said he was Michele Pinkerton's brother. He called her "white trash" and said that he hoped she was brought to justice for her crimes.
A reporter told me that he'd interviewed the grandfather, and that the guy had made some pretty hateful remarks about Richard Carelli—about hoping that Carelli would become some big black guy's girlfriend in prison.
And then there was a photographer who'd been sent to take pictures of the family, who gave an equally depressing report. He said he couldn't shoot any photos in the house because it didn't look like children even lived there. No toys, no kid stuff on the walls. But of course, that doesn't mean anything. That's just cosmetic. It didn't mean they weren't taking good care of them or didn't love them.
I didn't know what to believe. I was worried about those little girls. And nothing I'd heard since Baja was making me feel any better.
Eight months passed. A trial date was set. And then one day, in the middle of the week, I got a call from Viana's grandfather.
It wasn't a thank you, but it was like a "Man, that thing you did in Mexico was really something." And I said, "Yeah?" And then he reiterated his hopes that Viana's father be raped in prison every day for the rest of his life. He told me that the trial was about to begin, and that I might get some phone calls from prosecutors. And then, the call was over.
Carelli was charged with first degree murder. He admitted the landlord had died during a fight they had, but said it was unintentional. At trial, the details came out. The landlord's lip was busted open, his nose was broken. He was badly bruised, and had been stabbed with a small knife. His body was found wrapped in a sleeping bag, bound with duct tape, and buried under a pile of trash in the back of the van. The official cause of death was suffocation.
The defense argued that meth had given Carelli a condition called hypofrontality—meaning he couldn't think straight, so he made wacky decisions, like storing a corpse in his van. And kidnapping his daughter. And fleeing to Baja. In other words, the meth made him do it. Which, as a former meth smuggler, didn't make me feel so great.
The trial ended with a hung jury. Richard Carelli wasn't convicted of first degree murder. He'd have to be retried on a lesser charge.
At some point I got a phone call from a private investigator. Michele Pinkerton's public defender had hired the guy to track me down.
"Miss Pinkerton says that you spent a couple of days with her and the kids in Mexico," he said.
I told him that seemed a strange way to describe it.
"Did you see her," he asked, "interacting with the children?"
I to
ld him that I did.
"Well, she was thinking you might have some good things to say about what you saw there..."
It took me a moment to understand that I'd just been asked to be the character witness for a convicted meth addict and accused murderer who'd taken her kids on the run. And in a way, I was really tempted. Because she did seem like a good mother on that day—a mother who loved her kids, anyway, and whose kids loved her. But I couldn't do it. None of this had really turned out like it was supposed to—not like I imagined it would. I was afraid to nudge the outcome again, one way or another. I did not want to put my thumb on the scale. I could think of too many ways my testimony might just make things worse.
This was none of my business when I went to Baja. And it wasn't my business now. Only now I knew it.
Editor's note: In the nearly two years since his fortieth birthday, dozens of people who heard about what happened have contacted James, asking him to help find their missing loved ones. He's decided to help out in a few cases. There was the paranoid schizophrenic in Laguna Harbor, the guy who's been missing for thirty years, the tow truck driver's missing wife, the father who stole his son and fled to Mexico. His current case is a missing family of four in Southern California. He says his wife is not too crazy about any of this.
Market Day
James Sturm
FROM Market Day
RACHEL IS EIGHT MONTHS PREGNANT WITH OUR FIRST CHILO.