Chapter 16
Monday morning when Mike got to his office in Flagstaff there was a voice mail message from Linda Surrett of the FBI that had been left at three in the morning. “How the f* did you get involved in another terrorist case. I was trying to turn your homicide over to the Flagstaff office and be done with your coordination needs when you suddenly inquired about a current investigations being carried on in my department’s west coast division’s domestic terrorism team. Call me when you can. I’ll be researching your request and have an answer Monday morning, but Mike, please be careful. I doubt you know what you’re getting involved with. Stay safe.”
Mike knew a little about the Sovereign Citizen movement and the Posse Comitatus Act’s adherents’ and their claims of exemption from all federal laws. He suspected that this Verde Valley militia group was connected with those radicals in some manner. He also knew that there was a large percentage of his legislative district’s voters that believed Arizona should appropriate federal land for its own use or for sale to private owners. The state senator from his own legislative district had run on the bizarre platform of appropriating all federal land in Arizona. How could the poor state of Arizona afford to fight wildfires and manage the forests over millions of acres as well as staffing 26 national monuments and national parks? That same crazy woman who represented northern Arizona in the state legislature had publicly stated that it should be illegal not to attend church on Sunday and that science was a conspiracy by Satan. This anti federal feeling was extremely strong in rural Arizona, and the most radical elements were active and training for potential armed rebellion.
Mike called Linda. “Thanks for the heads up about the danger from the Verde Valley Pure Bloods and from the man who calls himself Donald Aryan. I assume they’re connected to the Sovereign Citizen movement here in northern Arizona.”
“I’m sorry Mike. I brought this connection to my boss’s attention this morning. He actually called the deputy director regarding it. The official FBI answer to Coconino County is ‘stay the hell away from this investigation’. The Deputy Director will call your sheriff this morning to give him that advice. The homicide took place on federal land in the National Forest. The FBI is claiming the case, and we officially ask you to stand aside and let us handle it. Sorry, I’m following orders. Mike, I know it hurts to lose the first homicide case in your jurisdiction this year, but leave this to the FBI. It is part of an ongoing investigation.”
“Thank you for your polite suggestion, Linda. That is what it is, merely a suggestion. Homicide is a state crime, and a homicide in Coconino County is the responsibility of the elected Coconino County Sheriff. I understand your boss’s advice, and of course I’ll back off, but only at the instructions of my own boss, Sheriff Greg Taylor. The sheriff is the only elected representative for law enforcement for the rural residents of this county.”
“Mike, I know you’re a reasonable man. The current FBI Deputy Director is not a man to cross. He’s not exactly J. Edgar Hoover, but they have some things in common, including a long memory for slights. He has the ear of the highest officials including both the Director of the FBI.”
Mike paused. He wasn’t ready to give in, but she was correct about where the actual power was concentrated. He said, “Linda, since you are involved in an investigation of your own, which is actually independent of the homicide of Paul McFarlane, I will send you a copy of everything we have, including photos of the tire tracks and the details of an additional looted site, Beaver Fort on a hilltop down in the Verde Valley.”
Mike explained everything he had learned so far about the possible involvement of Donald Aryan. He covered the attempt to sell a nearly unique prayer stick in Santa Fe, and the strange description he’d received from Mr. Dohi in Scottsdale, which looked just like Clint Eastwood in his early twenties. He would forward copies of all of his documentation to Linda within a few hours.
“Thanks Mike. Keep in touch via my personal cell phone, and call me using your own cell phone. I’ll contact you this afternoon after I look over what you send.”
Mike was a little apprehensive as he walked down the hall to the Sheriff’s office. With one glance he knew Sheriff Taylor was fuming. Mike was probably the only man in the department who would try to see him when he was in such an awful mood.
“Boss, from your expression, I assume you heard from someone very high in the FBI.”
“I lost all respect for their leadership team when be began to meddle in politics in the 2016 presidential race even before President Trump was elected and Directory Comey was fired, and I told him so. You’re still on this homicide case, but I suspect I’ll have a well-funded opponent in the next election or some other unpleasant surprise is on the way. The language I used was probably a mistake, but he provoked me.”
“I don’t think Coconino County has elected a Republican sheriff in the past hundred years, but you might need to do some extra fundraising.” The sheriff had not even had an opponent in the last election. The county had a very high percentage of Native Americans who reliably voted for Democrats and the University of Northern Arizona in Flagstaff had over twenty thousand students and faculty members who tended to be liberal. It was the most Democratic leaning county in the heavily Republican leaning state of Arizona.
Mike updated the sheriff on all he’d learned over the weekend. He also added, “Of course, I will supply all of this information to my contact at the FBI. I don’t want them to think we won’t cooperate, just to realize they can’t shut us out completely. A homicide of a young ex Marine trumps their right-wing militia investigation. The FBI seems to be hands off nowadays when it comes to these extreme politically right wing groups. I don’t know if they will ever take action unless we prove the groups connection to this homicide.”
“You’re the best we have Mike. I’m counting on you. Right now, I need to call each of the county commissioners to explain this morning’s conversation with that pompous ass before they hear about it.” Mike was sincerely glad he was shielded from local politics by the popular sheriff who was in his third four-year term.
When he got back to his office, Jimmy Hendrix was waiting. “Mike, you texted me that you had some tire impressions for me to examine.”
“I got them from another looted Sinagua site. We think they found a big clay pot that they needed a truck to take it out of the ancient ruin. It was at a place in the Verde Valley called Beaver Fort, above Beaver Creek.”
Mike took his duffle bag from behind his desk. Jimmy spent two minutes looking closely at each one before he chuckled. “Mike, if the Sheriff fires you from your current job, you could apply to be my assistant. I’ll have something for you this afternoon, but I think these are from a common type of replacement truck tire. Unless we find the vehicle, we can’t learn much from these. Can you describe the location?”
“Jimmy, I took nearly a hundred photos including many of the exact location of the tire impressions. I’ll make a copy of the disk and send it over to you in an hour or so.”
That morning, Mike had two performance reviews for his team members scheduled, but he burned the disk and had it delivered to Jimmy before the review meetings began.
The administrative assistant who was shared by the senior staff knew not to disturb Mike during a review session, but when they were over she brought Mike a note that Neil Cooper of the Forest Service had called about something important.
“Hi Neil. Have you learned something?”
“Your discovery of a missing grain storage pot may have given us another lead Mike. I examined your photo yesterday, and I agree with you that a huge clay storage pot rested in that spot until recently. I hiked out to see the Beaver Fort site for myself at dawn this morning, and your photos of the looting and your guesses about the artifacts seem perfect.”
Neil continued. “After I send my warning email to all the North American dealers, I got a quick response from a well-regarded dealer in Denver. A stranger drove to his warehouse in a white p
ickup truck with an enormous pot in a wooden crate in the back. When he removed the crate’s lid, the dealer recognized that it was similar to ones found near Sedona more than a decade ago.”
“Was there a hoist on the truck?”
“Yes. It had a hoist. The dealer thought it was a Ford, maybe a 250 and quite battered and old.”
“Did he buy the storage pot? That huge pot might have fingerprints or DNA on it from when they carried it out of the pueblo and through the enclosure to the place where they crated it.”
“No, he was suspicious. The man furnished a certified letter saying that it was found on private property near Cottonwood, Arizona. The letter was on Poole Vineyard stationary and signed by Jim Poole. The Pooles are well known to only work with the University of Arizona. It’s been that way for decades, so there should have been documentation from the university, not just a letter from Mr. Poole. Anyone can make fake stationary and write someone’s name to a letter. When he asked more questions, the man shouted a few obscenities and drove away.”
“Description?”
“His description was very close to the man in the photos from the Santa Fe dealer. I didn’t do anything to influence his description. He had met with a large man with a dark beard about an inch in length. He couldn’t say about the tattoos because the man wore a coat and gloves; this was back in January.”
“Do you have a copy of the letter from Jim Poole?”
“No, the stranger took it with him, but he said the stationary had purple grapevines around the words ‘Poole Vineyards of Sedona’.”
“That’s not what they use as a logo on their wine. They list their location as Page Springs, Arizona, not Sedona. Their wine grapes are red or white, never purple. I’ll get a copy of their stationary to check, but I think this is another false trail aimed at incriminating the Poole family. Did your dealer have any idea where the man would go next with his find?”
“The Poole family is famous among collectors. Most dealers would be suspicious of any artifact that purported to come from their property without going through the University of Arizona. Jim Poole’s father had one of the largest collections of pre-Columbian artifacts in the world. This dealer thinks the man would need to sell to a private collector who doesn’t know or care much about its provenance. He assured me that there are hundreds of wealthy residents in the Southwest who are merely decorating their houses and gardens with authentic ancient artifacts. He was chagrinned to think it might end up in somebody’s garden as part of their water feature rather than in a museum, but a private collector might pay ten thousand dollars for it just as an impressive garden decoration.”
Next, Mike called the county’s legal office and asked for one of the attorneys to obtain a warrant that would give him access to the Cottonwood Walmart store’s records and to the Department of Human Services’ SNAP records for a specific date and time. She said since it was tracking a homicide suspect, she could get the warrant by three in the afternoon. Local judges seldom dealt with homicide investigations, and everyone in Flagstaff knew of the murder at Kinnickinick Pueblo, and the death of the young highly decorated Marine veteran. It had been the lead story in the local paper for three days.
Chapter 17
At 3:00 that afternoon, Mike drove to the group of government buildings located in downtown Flagstaff. He picked up the warrant from the court clerk and walked over to the building where the Arizona Department of Human Services had its offices. When he presented his warrant to the office manager, she was extremely sympathetic and helpful. She knew about the case, and her own son was currently in the Marines stationed in Kandahar. Within minutes, Mike had the name and address of the man Margaret had seen using a SNAP card in the Walmart. Mike would confirm things later at the store, but he now had the mailing address and a name, Harold White, which the man had used when he applied for benefits. Their records for Harold White also showed that he was on long-term disability benefits from the Social Security Administration. He received eighteen hundred and twenty-two dollars a month in benefits in addition to his SNAP benefits, which showed that he was unmarried but had six dependents.
Mike asked the office manager, “Do you do anything to check on the number of dependents or confirm that he’s still disabled. He looks quite healthy in the video I have of him trying to sell looted artifacts.”
She replied, “There have been so many staff cutbacks, that we rarely check on people in person after the SNAP benefits are granted, but they need to reapply every six months. This man lives in Yavapai County, and sometimes the Prescott office uses off-duty deputies to verify the beneficiary’s file. The same is true for Social Security. In this case, Mr. White was diagnosed with PTSD so no one could tell his condition by merely looking at him in a video.”
“So does that mean he was in the military service to get his PTSD diagnosis?”
“I don’t have any record of military service, and I don’t have access to the actual disability file. You’d need another court order. It would probably require getting information directly from the Social Security Administration in Washington, but they’ll certainly fight any disclosure. Maybe the Feds could help, but your odds of getting anything quickly are very low. Sorry.”
“The address is a PO Box in Camp Verde. Do you have a street address?”
“I’m sorry; we don’t. If he’s registered to vote, you might find it from public records. To vote, you need to prove you physically live in your precinct so they require both a street address as well as a PO Box in their files. Here I can check that quickly.” She went to her computer and accessed a database of voters. “It shows no record of the registration of a Harold White anywhere in the Verde Valley. There are six in the Phoenix metro area and two in Tucson.”
“Will you check the name Donald Aryan for me.”
She checked her computer. “We don’t have anyone by that name registered in the whole state.”
“Thanks for your help.” Again a tip from his wife had helped with his case. He’d lost count of the number of times that had been true in his career.
Later that day, Mike got a call from Linda Surrett on his personal cell phone. She spoke quietly and quickly without giving Mike any opportunity to respond or ask questions. “I called to give you a heads up. Apparently, your sheriff pissed off the Deputy Director so much that you shouldn’t expect any more cooperation from the FBI. You’ll never receive information about anything you’ve sent to our lab at Quantico unless you get a court order. I’ll never be authorized to tell you that the DNA traces from the interior of the turquoise beads definitively matches the DNA sample you sent to the lab, the one taken by the museum from the femur of the ancient shaman buried at your murder site. You’ll probably never hear that the beads had been wiped clean of all fingerprints except for the ones from Mr. Dohi. You’ll also never be told that Mr. Dohi has a dubious history of shipping Southwestern historical artifacts to other countries. He’s been under investigation three different times by Immigration and Customs Enforcement in the past twenty years for dubious recordkeeping regarding ancient artifacts shipped to Europe and Japan. Of course, I’ve been instructed that any communication from Coconino County, Arizona must go through my division manager, and that the small Flagstaff FBI office will start a corruption investigation of Sheriff Gregory Taylor’s most recent campaign finance report.”
She hung up. Mike had heard traffic in the background, indicting that she’d left her office to make the call. Mike knew she probably had risked her career to give him the confirmation regarding the beads, and he didn’t want to do anything to get her into trouble. Her information had raised the prospect that Mr. Dohi was more directly involved in his case.
Mike wasn’t worried about Sheriff Taylor being under investigation. The man hadn’t even had an opponent in the last election so he had not even tried to raise much money. Mike logged onto the Coconino County Website and again reviewed the filing that the sheriff ‘s campaign treasurer had made. As he had noticed before,
it showed very small expenses, mostly related to the Fourth of July Parade in Flagstaff and a couple of charity dinners. He had purchased signs and flyers, but the total he spent was less than two thousand dollars. He had only a few donations from prominent local citizens and supporters like Jim Poole that amounted to about the same two thousand dollars.
Mike had never been especially political. He and Margaret always voted, normally for the person and not the particular party that person belonged to. He would give the sheriff the heads up about the fury of the FBI’s Deputy Director, but he’d wait a few days until Sheriff Taylor cooled down. In the meantime, Mike got busy trying to find where Donald Aryan actually lived. After seven calls, he found the address through a close friend of Margaret’s who worked at the Verde River Artesian Water Company, a private water company that supplied rural residents of the Verde Valley with water from wells near Camp Verde.
When he had the address at about 5:45 that afternoon, Mike called Sheriff Smith in Prescott to coordinate a raid with the Yavapai County Sheriff’s Department’s tactical team. He wanted to arrive in the nighttime darkness, so they set up the raid for 2:00 AM. He obtained an arrest warrant from the Coconino County Courthouse. Mike’s plan was to take Mr. Aryan into custody and transport him to the Coconino County Jail. After his call to the Yavapai County Sheriff, Mike called Deputy Matt Waldrop and asked him to obtain a search warrant for Mr. Aryan’s property since it was in Yavapai County.
Next, Mike called Sean Mark and asked him to join in the raid so that there would be two men involved in transporting Mr. Aryan to Flagstaff. Mike knew he was a large muscular man who might be quite a handful to transport safely.
Matt Waldrop, eight other deputies from the Yavapai County tactical team, Sean Mark, and Mike agreed to meet at the Camp Verde McDonalds at 1:30 AM. Everyone would be in tactical gear with night vision equipment. They didn’t know how many militia members might be present at the house, but they knew everyone there would be well armed. Mike checked out a heat detection device from the armory. It would help determine how many people were present in the house.
The Mauling at Kinnickinick Pueblo Page 12
