Above the Law (14 page)

“It wasn’t a well-run operation. Isn’t that obvious, even knowing the little you do know?”

This was getting interesting. Could the DEA have actually fucked up that badly? It was possible—they hadn’t done very well in storming the palace, why not go for the trifecta?

“People who were there were appalled at how it all went down.” She pointed to the thick stack of paper on the table. “It’s in there. You can interview them, if you want.”

She was spinning a web. Wanting more than advice.

“I’ll look this over and we can talk about it, but I can’t put in that kind of time.” I needed to head this off at the pass—I wasn’t getting involved. Advice, support. Not involvement.

Nora nodded, didn’t say anything in reply or argument.

“So what’s the other theory?”

“That Juarez was a double agent working for the government, his people found out, and used the bust as a pretext to kill him.”

“Um.” That made more sense. The hills are alive with subterfuge. “But if his people knew he’d turned, why do it this way? You want to get rid of someone, you don’t wait around hoping for a convenient excuse. You strike at the earliest opportunity, fit him out for a concrete garment, adios, double-crosser.”

“Unless you want to make it look like the feds did it. And knew the bust was coming down.”

“Which brings us back to go.” Finally.

She nodded. “Yep.”

“I guess…yeah, that could work.” Stuff was happening in my head, I needed to let it settle, so I took a minute. Then I went on.

“But that still doesn’t explain how they broke him loose after he’d been captured. If you buy that idea, they should’ve killed him during the firefight. Cleaner, more believable, more certain.”

My mug was getting low. Nora reached over and topped it up. “That, my dear Watson, is the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question.”

I swirled some of the brandy in my mouth before swallowing. The stuff wasn’t so bad. It was growing on me.

“So what’s the answer?”

I knew what I thought she believed, but I wanted to hear it from her. My role was to be a sounding board, corroborate her instincts. Not lead them. “What’s your true feeling?”

“He was assassinated.” She knocked back the dregs of her drink. “What else could it be?”

A federal agent, countermanding a direct order from the attorney general of the United States, murdered a prisoner who had been captured and was being held for transit. If that was true, and came out into the open, it would be an incredible scandal, rippling through not only the DEA but every federal law-enforcement agency, leaving bodies, policies, public trust, in its wake.

If it was true.

My motel room was not conducive to deep, focused thinking. It was clean—that’s all you could say in its favor. Lifeless, sad-sack décor. The television was bolted to the wall, the remote was chained to the pressed-wood console between the two double beds, which sagged in the middle like a sway-backed gelding from the weight of years of transient overnighters. I’d bet those mattresses hadn’t been turned since Dewey defeated Truman. Everything was plastic, down to and including the sheets, which were a raspy poly/cotton blend. I hate the sensation of that stuff on my body; it gives me an itchy feeling, like the bed’s full of fleas. When Riva travels with me, especially to out-of-the-way places like this, she sometimes brings her own sheets, pillows, blankets, towels. She always brings along bedding for Buck—God forbid the tender flesh of her son, the young prince, should ever touch anything but three-hundred-count percale.

I lay propped up on top of the bedspread, wearing my boxers and a T-shirt. The papers Nora had given me were scattered about in paper-clipped piles. Our parting, by my motel door, had been somber. No hugs. The heaviness of her charge hung in the air, like a rain cloud about to let loose.

After she dropped me off and said she’d see me in the morning, I’d walked across the street to an open 7-Eleven and bought a six-pack of Cokes. The motel provided the Styrofoam cooler and the ice machine was out back, by the empty swimming pool, which was covered across the bottom with six months’ worth of dead leaves. Now, Coke on ice at the ready, I looked over the documents.

Most of them were the accounts and summaries of the DEA’s investigation into the killing. Nora had arranged the reports chronologically, from the beginning of the inquiry to the present. I began plowing my way through. Contrary to what Nora had implied, they hadn’t ruled out that one or more agents in the task force were dirty. After conducting hundred of interviews with everyone involved, though, there simply was no evidence that pointed in that direction. No serious candidate for the shooting had emerged, despite what looked, from the stacks of paperwork, like a Herculean effort to find one. Every agent at the raid had been handpicked for the assignment, not only for its high profile in law-enforcement terms, but also because of the sensitive nature of the political ramifications. Not one of those men had a bad mark on his record, not even a mild reprimand. All forty-odd of them were Boy Scouts, through and through. Each one of them proclaimed his innocence, not only of killing Juarez, but of knowing who did, or why. All of them, also, were outraged that it had happened. It was a smear on them, as people and as an agency. More than anyone, they wanted this case solved.

I kept reading. Since the investigators had no evidence that the killing had been done by an agent, they started pursuing other possibilities, the ones Nora had told me over dinner. The idea that one of Juarez’s people had killed him to silence him had been floated and discussed, but that theory didn’t hold much water. I didn’t need a DEA report to tell me that.

The other theory she’d mentioned was kind of intriguing—that Juarez had secretly been working for the man, his people knew it or were suspicious, that the bust confirmed it, and they took him down. The problem was that everyone involved in the organization flatly denied that was the case. Juarez was not working their side of the street. There were no records of meetings, no payoffs, nothing to link him to them. But still, that hypothesis had its appeal. If he had turned for them, they wouldn’t want anyone to know it.

But there was a big hole in that theory. If Juarez had been turned, why would they kill him? Especially since they’d been flat-out warned not to. Alive, he could do considerable damage to dozens of like operations, globally. Dead, he told no tales.

On the other hand—a case like this has several hands, many more than two—who else besides a federal agent could have sprung Juarez from the trailer where he was being held? I kept coming back to that. At the least, it seemed to me, there had to be someone from the DEA involved, if only to help the prisoner escape. Maybe whoever did that—because somebody did, Juarez was not Harry Houdini—might have thought, or hoped, that Juarez could pull off an escape, in the dark and confusion. And when Juarez didn’t, that person killed him and then went to cover.

Not only the agents, but everyone at the crime scene, had been extensively interviewed: The county sheriff and his deputy, who had been on the scene but not active participants—the Washington boys didn’t want the locals involved, something the sheriff resented, naturally—as well as all the arrestees, who were now languishing in the federal penitentiary in Nevada, awaiting trial on the drug charges, had been grilled, for weeks in some cases. Over and over again. The agency had a hard-on for them that wouldn’t quit, you could read that in braille.

Their trial was a long ways off; it was a big, complex case, with heavy repercussions. Discovery and depositions alone would take more than a year. And the government people figured that if they were held long enough, one of them might be persuaded to cut himself a sweet deal, turn state’s evidence in exchange for a big pile of cash and lifetime anonymity in the Witness Relocation Program, and give up the information needed to make a case.

Personally, I didn’t see that happening. You can’t lose somebody anymore like in the old days. Computer information can track anyone down, if someone wants him badly enough. Maybe down the line a weak link would turn up, but I wouldn’t want to build a case on that. These fellows were all tough nuts; if it came down that they had to do time, they’d do it.

Luis Lopez, the informant who had set this in motion, had been questioned up one side and down the other. He stuck to his story like white on rice. Nobody inside should have known the bust was coming down, and as far as he’s concerned, no one did. The men inside were more prepared than he and Jerome, the senior agent he had reported to, thought they’d be. Human error. A bad fuckup, definitely. But that had nothing to do with Juarez being killed. Lopez had no idea where that was coming from.

And so on. No one knew anything. No one who had been interviewed, which was everyone who had been there, had killed Juarez, nor had they helped him escape from the trailer. Nor did they know who did either.

The case had become a classic dog chases tail. Which was why the agency was taking a breaker. They certainly weren’t going to let this case go dormant; it was too dangerous to them and their allied federal agencies not to solve it. But for now, they were stymied—they were looking to catch a break.

I didn’t read everything, but I’d read enough to assume that someone on the inside was dirty. The combination of the bust turning to shit, the prisoner who was supposed to be protected from harm at all counts escaping from tight security and then being killed, the lack of any hard evidence against any single person or group of people; somewhere a cover-up was going on. Off the top of my head I came to my own conclusion, which was hardly original: One or more people had wanted Juarez dead. Someone connected with him. He or they figured out how to botch the attack so Juarez would be killed during the firelight. When he wasn’t, they helped, or forced, him to escape. And then he, or they, killed him.

I didn’t have any answers for Nora, and I didn’t know what she wanted from me, besides a sympathetic ear and some professional advice. But I did know that she was sitting on a powder keg. A prominent killing, probably a murder, probably premeditated, had occurred in her jurisdiction. She had a stake in this.

Why
it had happened wasn’t her business, unless something weird or unexpected unfolded. But
who
—that was hers. When I was the Santa Barbara D.A., any crime that happened on my turf was my crime. Every D.A. in the country feels that way. All murders are local, just like politics.

Which was why I was far from home and family, lying on a cheap motel bed, going blind from reading garbage. Nora had to act, and she wanted someone who’d been there to tell her she should. Someone she felt she could trust.

We didn’t know each other, except from a distant, blurry past. But she needed someone to turn to, and there was no one else but me.

Nora picked me up promptly at eight. She had a bran muffin and coffee in a paper sack for me.

“Some of your basic food groups,” she said as she pulled out of the motel parking lot.

“My favorite kinds. What’s our agenda?”

We pulled out onto the highway. “Did you get to read it?” she asked, ignoring my question.

“Enough.”

“What do you think?”

“Somebody killed Juarez.” I took a bite out of my muffin. It was good, fresh. “You make this, too?” I asked, wondering how heavy a full-court press she was putting on me.

“Get real. I work for a living.” She passed a semi, swung back into the proper traffic lane. “One quality thing we have in our little town is a decent bakery.”

We were in what I assumed passed for rush-hour traffic. Pretty sparse. “What else do you think?” she asked.

“I don’t know if the DEA investigators tried to sweep anything under the rug. They’ve done a competent, by-the-book job with what they had. Nobody admits to anything. There’s so much you can do when that happens.”

“But what do
you
think?”

“Like, who did it?”

Her voice started to take on an exasperated tone. “Not
who
specifically, but don’t you think it was someone from the task force?”

“Instead of one of his own people? If those are the two alternatives, I’d say yes. That other theory’s fairy dust. But the lines get blurred.”

“Okay.” She relaxed. “That’s…okay.”

We were heading away from town. “Where’re we going?” I asked, watching the scenery pass by. I stuffed the last of the muffin into my mouth, sipped at the coffee, which wasn’t as good as the muffin. I hadn’t seen a Starbucks for a couple hundred miles; back home they’ve taken over the world, but I assumed they hadn’t gotten this far into the interior.

“The scene of the crime. Sit back, it’ll take a while. Here.” Without taking her eyes off the road she reached behind her and grabbed some computer printouts from the backseat, dropped them in my lap.
“New York Times.
Front section and sports. I access it first thing in the morning. I printed up the sports for you, in case you’re interested in them.”

“Thank you.”

She was working hard to make me as happy as I could be, given the circumstances. I started with the sports first, per usual. Basketball was in full swing; Stanford, the university with which Nora and I shared an allegiance—actually the only tie that bound us—was a favorite to take it all. Baseball was about to begin spring training. I could’ve learned this from ESPN—the motel wasn’t so prehistoric as to not have cable—but reading the
Times,
now that’s civilized.

Half an hour later, the car pulled off the two-lane and headed down a gravel road bordered on both sides by walls of tall firs. I looked up, jarred from reading about the world’s problems.

“The entrance was obscured when the druggies were in business,” Nora explained. “If you didn’t know to look for it, you never would have known. It took the DEA guys weeks to find it.” She inched ahead, bouncing in and out of potholes. “If they had asked my people, they could have found it a lot faster,” she added, her voice full of rancor. “But we’re local yokels, what do we know?”

“You knew about this operation?” I asked, surprised.