Counterplay bkamc-18

by Robert K. Tanenbaum

  Karp turned to another slide. This one showed the skull from the front, next to a photograph of Teresa Stavros. “Is there any way to match this skull to this woman?” he asked.

  “Yes, we call it superimposition,” Gates said. She explained that more than one hundred physical points of the skull had been mapped out onto a graph.

  “When we compare one person’s face to another, we see things like high cheeks, or a long chin, or a wide forehead, or note that the distance between the eyes is greater or smaller than a person standing next to them. These characteristics are caused by the structure of the bones beneath the skin. So that when I lay the graph of the skull over a photograph…”

  Karp switched to another slide that showed the graph from the skull on top of the photograph of Teresa Stavros.

  “…I compare the points from the graph to see if they match similar points on the photograph. And as you can see here, this is a very good match-ninety-two percent of the graph points match those of the photograph, plus or minus four percent.”

  “Is this method infallible?” Karp asked.

  “Hey, that was my question,” Anderson said and looked back to see if the blond reporter was laughing. But she, as well as the other courtroom observers, was too fascinated by the testimony to pay attention to him.

  “You may ask it again in a minute,” Karp said. “Doctor?”

  “No,” Gates conceded. “Photographs are not exact. A person may seem to have certain characteristics that may not be as pronounced in another photograph. Also, people gain or lose weight, which can disguise certain physical attributes. For that reason, superimposition is better at ruling someone out than saying with certainty that a skull matches exactly one person. We accept that superimposition has a ten to fifteen percent margin of error.”

  “Which is like telling us that by using superimposition you are from eighty-five percent to ninety percent sure that this skull belonged to Teresa Stavros?”

  “That’s probably fair,” Gates replied. “And when you add up the other things we know about the remains-age, gender, childbirth-I think I can state with a high degree of scientific certainty that the remains we exhumed in the defendant’s yard belonged to Teresa Stavros.”

  Karp looked at the judge and back at the defense table. The celebrity attorneys were all making notes, then shaking their heads and whispering behind smirks, as if they’d seen through a parlor magician’s trick. “No further questions,” he said.

  “Mr. Anderson?”

  The defense attorney pursed his lips and looked up at the ceiling, turning his head so that the blond reporter could see his “good side.” He stood up suddenly and walked partway across the courtroom toward the witness stand rubbing his chin. “Just one question, Your Honor,” he said, looking up at the witness. “Dr. Gates, could these be the remains of someone other than Teresa Stavros?”

  Gates shrugged. “Yes, I think it’s highly unlikely, but-”

  “Thank you,” he said, cutting her off. “No further questions.”

  The courtroom was quiet as Anderson took his seat. Judge Lussman again bowed his head in thought. He looked up at Emil Stavros. “I think the people have established the foundation to allow the evidence to go to the jury, and I will allow it. We’ll let the jury decide how much weight to give these expert witnesses, but Mr. Anderson, if I were you, I’d find some good ones of my own.”

  Court was adjourned. Emil Stavros was handcuffed and led away with a look of hatred back at Karp and Guma. “You’ll pay for this, Karp,” he shouted just before he disappeared through the security door that led him back down and through the tunnel to the Tombs.

  “Whew!” Anderson said to the other defense attorneys. “I need a drink. How about we reconvene at Restaurant 222 on West Seventy-ninth?”

  The celebrity attorneys left the courtroom laughing and arranging golf dates. “What do you think?” Detective Fairbrother asked as Karp and Guma gathered their papers at the prosecution table.

  “I think Mr. Anderson mostly just wanted to see how our experts performed in a courtroom,” Guma answered. “How about you, Butch? Butch?”

  Karp heard his name being called but he was thinking about Kane’s face turning blue with his hands around the man’s neck. He tried to kill my kids!

  20

  The throbbing pulse of the drums rolling across the high plains desert from the pueblo dictated the pace and nature of Marlene’s sleep. Even the people in her dreams danced like Indians with stylized tribal masks of carved wood and feathers.

  Despite the disguises, she knew who was behind the masks. Kane’s demonic mask seemed to shift, his body a formless smoke, as he pursued Lucy, who wore a Corn Maiden mask and was dressed in a fringed white doeskin dress and knee-high white doeskin boots.

  Butch danced after them in a Great Horned Owl mask that Jojola had once shown her, which was used by the tribe’s warrior clan, while David Grale stamped along behind him wearing the gray-brown, mud-covered mask of a water spirit. Swirling around all of them was a woman, or the shadow of a woman in black whose raven mask covered only the top part of her face; Marlene assumed from the mole on her cheek that she was Samira Azzam.

  Moving in and out of the assemblage, John Jojola soared and screeched like the golden eagle he represented. Eagles, Marlene thought in her dream, John believes that they carry prayers to the Creator. The sight of the Indian police chief filled her with such an overwhelming sadness that she cried out in her sleep. Hearing her, he turned and winked before flapping his great wings and rising above the dancers, circling up and up until he was lost in the sun.

  Then Vladimir Karchovski appeared in the middle of the dancers. He was not dressed differently than he would have been for any of his summertime walks along the Brighton Beach boardwalk, just the usual linen suit and black beret. He gazed fondly at Marlene as he did whenever she came to visit, and held up a piece of paper.

  Before she could reach out and take it, however, a shadow passed between them and stole the note. Marlene realized that the shadow was Azzam, who began trilling in the way of Arab women who have lost their men, circling the old man like a-

  “-vulture, not a raven,” Marlene said aloud as she sat up in the dark of the room of the mission house where she was staying on the Taos reservation.

  She got out of bed and walked over to the door leading to the Spanish-style courtyard outside her room. The stars overhead shone brilliantly-not the weary specks of light she was used to in the East, but three-dimensional bodies of light that had substance and dimension. “Billions and billions of stars,” she said as she entered the courtyard and sat down in a hanging chair next to a large clump of lilac bushes. The fragrance of the tiny lavender flowers permeated the predawn morning.

  The drums from the pueblo were growing louder and seemed to be trying to match the syncopation of her heart…or maybe it’s my heart trying to keep the beat. Holding her breath to listen, she heard the far-off high-pitched keening and chanted songs as the people of the Taos Pueblo mourned the death of their police chief and warrior John Jojola. A coyote’s howl joined in the grieving from a bluff near the house.

  She would have liked to have attended the funeral. But it was a private ceremony, part of the sacred rituals that the Taos Indians had kept secret from all outsiders ever since the Spanish conquistadores arrived in 1540.

  The pueblo was thought to be the oldest continuously inhabited site in North America, and its people had been one of the only tribes that had not been forced from their lands by other Indians or whites. The seven pueblos in the Rio Grande Valley, of which Taos was the best known, even spoke a unique language, Tewa. They didn’t teach the language to anyone else. However, Marlene’s daughter, Lucy, a language savant, had a passing knowledge of it from listening to conversations as she helped out at the Catholic mission on the Taos reservation.

  Even allowing Marlene to stay in a house on the reservation’s Catholic mission grounds was a breach in tradition while the reservation’s
borders were closed to outsiders, as they were now. When she was dropped off at the house, she’d been told, politely, that she was to remain in the house until someone from the tribe arrived to escort her to the memorial service in the morning, now only a few hours away.

  Closing the reservation to everyone except the Red Willow People, as the Taos people were known, wasn’t unusual. It happened several times during the year for special ceremonies, as well as for most of the winter. About fifty families, including Jojola and his son, lived year-round in the actual pueblo-an apartment-like complex as high as five stories made of adobe, a mixture of mud and straw, that had been there for perhaps as long as a thousand years. Most of the rest of the tribe’s population of nearly two thousand lived in houses and trailers scattered around the reservation. During the winter and on festival days, many of the families living outside moved into their ancestral homes in the pueblo to touch base as a people and pass on their extensive oral history to their children and grandchildren. The ceremonies and dances performed in those times were for themselves, not the tourists with their cameras.

  The reservation was also closed sometimes during times of community trauma, or to discuss matters important to the future of the Taos people, or to mourn the passing of a leader like Jojola. At the word from the tribal council, police officers wearing the traditional black skirts over their pants maintained roadblocks at the reservation entrances and patrolled the roads to keep the curious and un-invited away.

  Marlene knew that decision to let her stay she owed to the legacy of Jojola, and the thought of her friend’s death brought tears to her eyes again. He’d once told her that he didn’t fear death because it represented only the passing of his spirit from one world into the next. But it wasn’t a world she could enter, not without leaving her family, and she missed her friend. The lethal rage she felt toward Kane, the old street justice anger at injustice and the evil of men who perpetrated it-an anger she’d tried to leave in the past with Jojola’s help-threatened to blind her at a time she needed to stay levelheaded to protect her family.

  The morning after Jojola’s death, she’d flown to Albuquerque where she was met by a Taos County sheriff’s deputy who drove her to the town of Taos. She’d insisted on going straight to the hospital where she found Lucy sitting in a chair asleep with her head on Ned’s chest.

  Ned had been wide awake but trying not to disturb her daughter. Hello, Mrs. Ciampi, he whispered when she walked in the room.

  Hi, cowboy, heard you’ve been taking on the James Gang.

  The young man blushed. Tell the truth, I was scared, but it was either fight or die, he said. Lucy was the brave one. And John and Tran who got there just in time…for us.

  And that, of course, is pure hogwash, said Lucy, who’d awakened. Ned was better than John Wayne ever dreamed of being.

  Ned was now turning a dangerous shade of bright red, which only got worse when Marlene kissed him on the cheek. Thank you for saving my daughter’s life…again.

  Lucy burst into tears. But John died saving us. They’d all cried then, even Ned.

  What about Tran? Marlene asked, wiping her eyes.

  He’s okay, Lucy sniffed. You know Tran. He didn’t want to be there when John’s men showed up. I think he’s gone back to New York.

  She’d left Lucy with Ned, not that she would have been able to coax her away, and was driven to the house on the reservation, where she’d called her husband. She’d told him that Jojola would have understood, but in reality she was relieved that Butch had remained in New York. Her relationship with Jojola-call it teacher to student, brother to sister, one old soul to another-had been a private one, and she preferred to say good-bye to him in her own way. When the memorial service was over, she hoped to watch the sunset on a rock outcropping above the Rio Grande Gorge where they’d spent many hours talking.

  A thin gray line was separating the sky from the black silhouette of the mountains to the east, and the coyote howled again, much closer. Getting up from her chair, she wondered if she might see the animal if she went over to the gate leading to the desert beyond the courtyard. In Indian folklore, the coyote was known as the trickster-always playing practical jokes, not all of which turned out well for himself or his subjects. Jojola had a special affinity for the animal.

  A second coyote howled, only differently. She hesitated, the second coyote sounded to her like a person trying to imitate a coyote. Slipping into her room, she retrieved her gun from beneath the pillow on her bed and returned to the courtyard. Marlene aimed at the gate. Then a voice said, “Oh please don’t shoot honorable Vietnamese man, Missy.” The voice’s owner laughed.

  “Tran! Goddammit,” Marlene whispered, trying not to wake the Franciscan monks who lived in the house. “I might have shot you!”

  She ran up and threw her arms around the thin shoulders of the former schoolteacher turned Vietcong leader turned gangster. A sob escaped her. “I can’t believe he’s dead.”

  Tran shrugged. “What is death? You’re talking to a Buddhist. This was preordained, his karma; he will return soon in another body to continue the journey. His own beliefs also had him on this path where death is only a doorway into the next room.”

  “Nice you can be so matter-of-fact about it,” Marlene sniffed.

  “I miss him, too,” Tran said. “We still had many things to talk about…some issues still to resolve from our old enmity. But there is nothing I can do; it was his fate. I expect to meet him somewhere down the road so we can continue our discussion and friendship. I expect you will find him in the future as well.”

  Tran nodded toward her room. “John’s men are spread out all around here and a snake couldn’t get through without them knowing. But Kane has eyes and ears all over this town.”

  Once they were in the room, Tran described what happened after they discovered the dead agents. “They looked like they’d been dead for at least an hour, maybe more,” he said, “and I was worried we might already be too late. But then I heard the shooting from the direction of the cabin, which meant someone was still fighting. As John thought when he talked to you, we couldn’t get through to his office on his cell phone.”

  With the sun setting, they’d driven the remaining few miles to the cabin until reaching the last hill providing cover and hid Jojola’s truck off the road. “I was surprised that they’d left no one to guard the rear, but I don’t think that they expected Ned to put up such a fight. We were about a mile away, but the first thing we saw was a truck overturned off the road with several bodies lying around.”

  There seemed to be a lull in the fighting, which they thought meant that the terrorists were waiting for it to get completely dark. “Which gave us about a half hour to cover the mile between us and them without being spotted,” Tran said.

  By following ravines and moving from rock outcropping or patch of mesquite brush to the next, they’d made it to within fifty yards of the attackers without being noticed. But they still weren’t close enough. The only weapons they had were Jojola’s police department-issued 9 mm Glock in the glove box, which he gave to Tran, and his hunting bow and hunting knife. None of the weapons had the range to be of much use against automatic rifles, which meant they too were going to have to wait until dark to close with the enemy.

  They split up; agreeing that their signal to attack would be when the assault on the cabin commenced. “It wasn’t going to be easy,” Tran continued. “We were moving in the dark, but we had seen that the attackers had night-vision goggles. I was lucky that their attention was focused on Ned and Lucy because there was a patch of open ground I had to cover and would have surely been seen if they were looking behind them.”

  However, the attackers were caught off guard when one of their number who’d crept up close to the cabin was shot and killed by Ned. “He barely made it back to the cabin.”

  The action had then moved quickly. Under covering fire, the main body of attackers began to rush forward. Then someone inside the cabin-“I lear
ned later it was Lucy”-shot a flare into the bales of hay. “Two guys got caught in the open and Ned picked them off like shooting fish in a barrel.

  “I saw the hay bales catch fire, and I took off running to reach my targets,” Tran said. “The first guy heard me coming, but I think the fire had also ruined his night vision because he was looking right at me but his shots went wide. I shot him and didn’t stop running until I got to the next guy, who never saw me coming.”

  Jojola had also sprung into action. His first target was a man kneeling next to a rock and firing at the house, trying to keep Ned pinned while the others rushed in. The former commando didn’t bother to use an arrow but instead drove his knife into the base of the man’s skull as he ran past.

  Notching an arrow as he moved, Jojola shot another of the terrorists just as the man was throwing a grenade at the cabin. Instead of going through the window the device-“a flash-bang type”-bounced off the outer wall and exploded. “Lucy believes that the men had orders to try to take her alive.

  “Another terrorist reached the door and appeared about to shoot when John put an arrow through his chest. Then it was over, or so we thought.”

  The man Jojola had shot was still alive, but he refused to answer questions Lucy put to him in Arabic, Chechen, and Russian. “We were stupid. We failed to check him for a secreted weapon,” Tran said sadly, not quite as much the Buddhist as his initial comments to Marlene.

  Suddenly, the terrorist had raised a small pistol he’d palmed and pointed it at Lucy. Poshyelk chyerto, he’d cursed her.

  “John was closest and jumped in front of her,” Tran said. “He took the bullet before I could knock the gun from his hand.”