She shrugged. “Not really. We knew that an airstrip was being built. The sheriff wanted to get inside, put a man in undercover. But nothing ever happened.”
“Why not?”
“For one thing, this is federal land, which gets sticky. I’m sure you know how that works.”
I nodded. Anything in your county is in your jurisdiction, but when there are competing agencies, the whales tend to swallow the minnows.
“It used to be tribal,” she continued. “The tribe swapped land with the government during World War Two. The boundary lines are all screwed up, the area hasn’t been properly surveyed for fifty years.”
We emerged into a clearing. Nora parked her Explorer and we got out. I looked around. “Here?”
A rhetorical question—this was the killing field. Down below, in a shallow ravine, were the remains of the compound’s main house.
“Place really blew,” I commented, looking at the remains, about half, that were left standing.
“It really blew.”
“They didn’t know what was inside.”
She snorted. “Obviously not.” She shrugged. “Or maybe they didn’t give a damn.”
Agents killed, buildings blown sky-high. This had been a disastrous raid on every level. Could Juarez have been murdered by one of the agents whose frustration level was pushed too far? I wondered. Instinctive human nature takes over in situations like this, even with professionals. So-called professionals. Whoever had killed Juarez, regardless of who he was or what he’d done, was no professional in my book.
Nora showed me around the location, told me how the raid had developed and then unraveled, where Juarez had been held in custody and escaped. She walked confidently from place to place.
“You know your way around well,” I observed.
“I do now. I’d never been here before the killing, but in the last six months, I’ve come quite often, trying to dope this out, pardon the expression.”
We went into the house. I looked into Juarez’s hidey-hole in the kitchen freezer. Pretty secure place; without dogs he wouldn’t have been found.
Coming out again, we headed toward the wooded area in the direction Juarez had run, trying to escape. The ground under our feet was damp. Spring was in the air. There was dogwood, wild peach and cherry amongst the oak and fir, the blossoms just beginning to bloom. It was pretty here. And extremely isolated, the drug operation could have thrived here for years before they were detected.
A thought about that came to mind. “How did the DEA know about this place, anyway, if they weren’t consulting with you?”
“The usual way. They busted one of them, a guy named Lopez, on something else, and he gave them the operation to save his hide.”
“Snitch-driven.”
“Yep.”
We came to the place where the body had been found, about a quarter mile from where Juarez had been held and then escaped—a small clear area surrounded by thick trees. DEA stakes had been planted in the ground to signify where the body had been. I checked out the tree where the bullet had been found—an old live oak. Someone had spray-painted a white circle around the area where the bullet had hit.
“Who found him?” I asked. I put my finger in the bullet hole.
“No one seems to know. Another curious black hole. A bunch of them got here at roughly the same time.” She made a face. “That’s their story, anyway.”
“And he was already dead.” All this was in the report, but seeing it live made a difference. I tried to visualize the body, lying there, still warm, blood oozing from the head wound. It was an ugly picture—like the one from the desert I’d carry to my grave.
“Dead as he was ever going to get.” She kicked at the ground with a booted toe.
I looked around. Whoever had fired the shot that killed Juarez could have done it from the cover of the tree line; or he could have done the killing and then gone back into cover. It had taken the agents thirty seconds or more to get to the body after they heard the shot being fired.
We headed back to her car. “Which way’s their airstrip?”
She pointed back toward where we’d come from. “A couple hundred yards further. There’s a road from the compound, but he wasn’t on it, obviously.”
“Were there any aircraft present?” I hadn’t seen anything in the DEA summaries, but they might not have included that.
“No. The agents on the ground there had that buttoned up. They reported seeing and hearing nothing.”
Why would he have run that way then? I thought. Instinct, probably, or sheer coincidence.
We arrived back at Nora’s car. “Refresh my memory,” I said as we got in. “How many were in the compound?”
“A dozen.”
“All accounted for? Dead or captured?”
She fired up the Explorer. “That’s one of the unanswered questions. We don’t know.”
“So people could’ve come and gone.”
She headed up the gravel road toward the highway. “It would have been difficult to get in unobserved. The place was under surveillance from when Lopez cut out.”
We bounced in a deep winter pothole. “Sorry.” She gripped the steering wheel firmly. “He contacted Jerome from when he was still inside, so they had it buttoned down pretty tight.” She gave me a quick glance. “You’re thinking someone, or maybe more than one of them, came in. after Lopez left? Someone unaccounted for?”
“It fits with the DEA’s thesis. And it’s possible.”
She didn’t like hearing that. “But it’s so complicated, the way it happened. It could have fallen apart a million ways, there were dozens of variables that all had to work together. The DEA almost didn’t find him, for instance, and how would someone other than an agent get access to Juarez when he was under guard?”
“I don’t know anything, except what’s in the summary you gave me. Let’s say, for the sake of argument, there was an internal hit on, but they couldn’t do it inside the compound. So when the raid came down, they took the opportunity.”
She thought about that. “That almost sounds like a conspiracy between the inside and the outside.” She slowed the car to a crawl. “That’s the scariest theme I’ve heard yet. Do you really think that’s possible?”
“No,” I answered promptly. “It would mean the whole thing was premeditated, including the blown raid. But now that I’ve seen the location, it’s obvious there are dozens of places to hide in the forest. Especially if you’re familiar with the terrain. Which points to an insider.”
“I doubt any of the bad boys were familiar with anything outside the compound and the airfield. They weren’t your Paul Bunyan types.” She was stubborn about this. “And what about the dogs? They found Juarez buried under a mountain of rubble; they easily would’ve found someone out in the open.”
“Yeah,” I admitted. I’d forgotten about the dogs.
Reaching the highway, she pointed the Explorer toward town. There wasn’t a car or truck to be seen in either direction. “One more stop, then we’ll go to my office and talk. And you can meet Sheriff Miller.” She smiled. “I think you’ll enjoy that.”
The cemetery was on a knoll north of town. It was small, bordered by a low wrought-iron fence, similar to those you see in Civil War battlefield graveyards, particularly in the South. There were a few old, bent trees, and not much vegetation—grass around the graves, but dirt elsewhere. The modest gravestones and tombstones weren’t arranged in an orderly fashion; they lay in loose angles to each other, as if each one had been placed without regard for any of the others.
Dennis’s grave was near the top, toward the northeast corner. The small marble stone was set flush to the ground. I read the inscription:
DENNIS WAINWRIGHT RAY
1948–1995
BELOVED HUSBAND, FRIEND, SCHOLAR
And then, in Old English script:
A MAN FOR ALL SEASONS
Nora had a small bouquet with her. It had been on the backseat when she picked me up, although I hadn’t noticed it. Ordinary flowers, the kind you buy in a supermarket. She watched me while I read the inscription, then she kneeled at the foot of the little marker and placed the flowers diagonally across it.
For a moment we were both still, me standing, her kneeling. She was bareheaded, and the breeze caught her hair and spiderwebbed some strands across her cheek. A finger moved them away, behind her ear. I assumed she was silently praying, or talking to him. I could feel my heart beating in my chest. This was a man I had known who had died before his time. Without the fulfillment of his promise.
Nora stood up, next to me.
“I come about once a week. It’s on my way.” She looked down at the stone. “It’s only a marker.
He
isn’t there, I know that, but I like to know that the only thing symbolizing him on this earth isn’t being neglected.” She shoved her hands into the pockets of her coat. “At the end, I was all he had. We were each all we had, for each other. So…”
Her voice trailed off. For a moment she was somewhere else. Then she came back. “You liked Dennis, didn’t you, Luke?”
Her question caught me off-guard. “Of course I did,” I said. “Everyone loved Dennis. He was our shining star.”
“But for real,” she persisted. “Not as an icon. Flesh-and-blood real.”
“Yes, Nora, I liked Dennis a lot. You know that. I admired him tremendously.”
That seemed to satisfy what she needed to hear. She took my arm. “We should be getting to my office.” She looked at the grave again.” ‘Bye, sweetie,” she said. “See you.”
We walked toward her car in silence. I thought about what she’d asked me—how I had felt about Dennis.
It wasn’t as simple as the instinctive reaction that had come out of my mouth when she asked the question, I realized. Yes, I liked Dennis, as I’d told her. Everyone had, as far as I knew. Many of us virtually worshiped him. But as I thought about it more deeply, I tried to separate the man from the memory. Did we all love Dennis, or was it the image of Dennis, the dream he seemed to personify?
I could feel Nora’s arm, resting lightly on mine as we made our way down the incline to the parking lot. She was flesh and blood, walking next to me. And I liked her, I felt I had liked her then and did now. But as I thought more deeply about her question, I couldn’t be sure what my real feelings were toward her late husband; did I like him, too, as a man, a human being, or was it what he exemplified for all of us: the dream become attainable.
So we had thought then, twenty-some years ago.
The sheriff of Muir County looked like he had stepped out of a John Ford western. Small, wiry, tightly wound. Skin the texture of a tobacco leaf that has been hanging in the barn for a month. He was dressed Western-style, but not duded up—twill slacks, hand-tooled leather boots, crisp khaki shirt with snaps instead of buttons, corduroy sports coat with the county insignia over the lapel pocket. His handshake was firm, his gaze direct, almost confrontational. Thin lips that didn’t promise smiles. He appeared fit for an older man—I pegged him in his late sixties. He had the physical demeanor of a high-country cowboy—I presumed he was native to the region—but he radiated the tough energy of a man who knows where the bodies are buried. He definitely looked like someone who didn’t like to be fucked with.
After Nora introduced us, she said to me, “Sheriff Miller used to be a big shot with the FBI, before his retirement.” She winked at him, almost daughterishly. “So he’s familiar with how federal agencies work.” As if to say, he shares my skepticism about their investigation.
Her thumbnail description changed my superficial take on the man. He was more sophisticated than I’d casually assumed. One thing it told me was he didn’t like to be idle, regardless of his age.
“I’ll leave you two,” Nora said. “Come back to my office when you’re finished here, Luke.” Pausing at the door, she added, “The sheriff and I are the only people in town who know who you are. You can talk freely with him.”
We were in Miller’s office, down the hall from hers. Miller sat behind his desk. I took the chair facing him.
He immediately took charge of the conversation. “That was a hell of an ordeal you endured down in the desert there, being held hostage and then killing those two black-sheep police.”
“I wouldn’t want to go through anything like that again.” I didn’t want to talk about that. Not with a hard case I didn’t know.
“Pretty heroic behavior.”
“I had no choice.”
“Most people, they’d do nothing and hope their guardian angel will rescue them.”
“Doing nothing wasn’t an option, not if I wanted to stay alive.” I was talking about it despite myself. “And unfortunately, there weren’t any angels around at the time.”
“Never are when you need ’em, are there?”
I shrugged. Enough with the amenities already, I thought.
He picked up on my vibe. “Known our D.A. long?”
“We were in law school together. We were friends there. She and I and her late husband.”
He frowned upon hearing me mention Dennis. Reaching into his center desk drawer, he took out a can of Bugler tobacco and a pack of Zig Zag cigarette papers.
“Mind if I smoke?”
“Feel free.”
“Technically I shouldn’t, this being a public space. You won’t bust me, will you?”
“It’s your office.”
Deftly he tapped a line of tobacco down the center of a sheet, rolled a tight cylinder (not one-handed, mercifully), licked the paper, and lit up with a kitchen match he sparked off the sole of his boot.
He was showing off for me. I managed to refrain from applauding.
“Nora’s a good woman.” His blue-smoke exhale curled up toward the ceiling. “She’s been through a lot.” He sat back in his swivel chair, boots on the edge of his desk.
“Yes, I understand that.”
He picked a loose piece of tobacco off his lower lip. “Why are you here?” he asked me.
He knew the answer, and he knew that I knew that he knew, but he wanted to hear it from me, not Nora.
“To consult with Nora about the murder that occurred up here. Be a sounding board.”
He sucked on his cigarette. The dry paper crackled. “That’s all?”
I wanted to ask him questions, not the other way around. He was conducting this meeting as an interview, an interrogation. His attitude put me on edge—he was playing the cop when the circumstances didn’t call for it. “Do you think there’s something else?”