Of course, Mike wanted Mr. Aryan in custody in Flagstaff. He was concerned by the claim from the young man at Poole Vineyards, Jarod Baldwin, that some of the guards at the nearby Yavapai County Jail in Camp Verde were members of the Verde Valley Pure Bloods. That jail seemed to be the center of recruiting for the local militia group, and Mike was not confident in keeping Donald Aryan there. The homicide of Paul McFarlane had occurred in Coconino County so Mike had priority claim on the suspect.
Mike used Google Maps to get a close up look at the property. It was near Beaver Creek in an area of large cottonwood trees that obscured most of the property from the aerial view. The suspect’s house was on a low hill about fifteen feet from Beaver Creek, and seemed to be two mobile homes connected by a covered walkway. Nothing of the house was visible from the rural road on Google street view except for a gravel drive that twisted between the trees. He considered letting Linda Surrett know about the raid but decided at this point, the less contact he had with her, the better for her career. He did go to Sheriff Taylor’s office and updated him.
“Mike, I’m going too. I’ll take care of getting the arrest warrant and meet you and Sean at the McDonalds at 1:30. I can’t resist being there in person.”
“Yes boss. I’m checking out vests and assault weapons; do you want them too.”
“Make sure they say Coconino County Sheriff’s Office on the vest. Some of our vests do and others just say Law Enforcement. I want some photos of us with the suspect.”
It was in Yavapai County’s jurisdiction, but Mike was not inclined to argue with the boss over the details. He went to the armory and found Sean there getting outfitted too. After collecting his gear and Sheriff Taylor’s equipment, he went home for dinner with Margaret. He thought he might as well have a comfortable evening at home.
After he told the whole story to Margaret, she looked uncomfortable about something. “What’s wrong? You know I’ll be a supervisor, not the first guy to charge into the house. We’re using the Yavapai County Tactical Team for the actual takedown.”
“Sweetie, I’ve lived with the danger of your job for over three decades. What actually concerns me is that the militia may be waiting to ambush you and the others. Your source at the vineyard indicated that deputies at the Camp Verde jail were involved in recruiting militia members. If that’s true, the word of your raid might have leaked already. You told me there are nine deputies from Yavapai County involved. That might easily have produced a leak to a militia member who is also a deputy. In addition, it’s possible that the FBI has an informant in the militia that they’re protecting, and that’s why they want you to back off. I think maybe you need the FBI involved even if the Sheriff told off the Deputy Director.”
Mike called Linda Surrett’s cell phone. “Linda, there is a raid scheduled at two AM Mountain Standard Time for the residence of Donald Aryan, AKA Harold White. I wanted to give you a heads up in case you have someone on the inside who might be in danger.”
“Hold on.” There was a click and a pause before Linda came back on the line. Mike assumed she was checking on something.
“The man who currently calls himself Donald Aryan, left his house at 6:10 this evening; that’s about an hour and twenty minutes ago. Currently, we don’t know his location. His surveillance team lost him when he entered the Cliff Castle Casino by the main entrance and left by a side door where someone was waiting in a white panel truck for him.”
Mike said, “Thank you for the information. He might have been warned. Some local deputies were reported to be part of his militia group.”
“His white Ford 250 pickup truck was left in the north parking lot of the casino in the row farthest from the entrance. You might want to examine its tires to compare to the imprints you told me that you took from the Beaver Fort ruin. His old and beat-up truck has a rear power lift. Mr. Aryan and the driver were out of sight by the time his surveillance team turned onto I-17 to follow the second vehicle, but they were headed south toward either Prescott or Phoenix. However, the team was not certain where they were going; they might have taken the road to Cottonwood and still be in the Verde Valley. That’s the route that the agents checked without seeing the vehicle again. Mr. Aryan’s truck’s license tag is a Families of Fallen Officers support style tag. It’s yellow with the letters, VVPBM. Good luck. I left a message to contact me if the team reacquires your suspect. Oh, and we believe no one is currently in the house. Mr. Aryan lives alone and never has had any guests over the past two months.”
“Thank you, Linda.”
“Mike, one other thing. We’ve found booby-traps at the houses of similar militia groups. You might be better off to postpone until daylight.”
Mike immediately called Sheriff Taylor to see if he wanted to go through with the raid. “Mike, if he was forced to leave quickly, he may have left important evidence behind. Let’s get a good look at his place. I’ll bring Jimmy Hendrix with me when I drive down to Camp Verde. We’ll stop at the suspect’s white Ford 250 pickup truck to check the tires against the impressions you made and get fingerprints from the vehicle. We’ll see you at 1:30. Then, we’ll decide whether to merely stakeout the house until dawn. I don’t want anyone hurt, especially if we’re not going to find our man on the premises. And Mike, I may have a temper, but I’m glad you’re smart enough to keep in contact with someone at the FBI. I assume it was Linda Surrett. Thank her for me the next time you speak with her.”
Mike updated Margaret on the side of the two conversations that she had not heard. “Linda’s right. It’s foolish to rush into the place in the dark if there’s no one to apprehend.”
“You’re right as usual, my sweet. It’s likely to be a long night while we wait. I’ll need a big dinner to hold me until dawn.”
Margaret smiled and took the Whole Foods roasted chicken from the warming oven. She retrieved three side dishes also from Whole Foods. It was located in the same shopping center as her new employer. She put everything on the kitchen table. Mike put out silverware and dishes. Mike was pleased that Margaret loved her new job, but he looked forward to her famously delicious cooking to return once she got caught up with the new customers.
Chapter 18
The Camp Verde McDonalds was near Interstate 17, and it was one of the few places that stayed open all night in the small town. By 1:30 it was crowded with thirteen law enforcement officers and one crime scene technician. Jimmy Hendrix had confirmed that Mr. Aryan’s truck matched the impressions Mike had made near the Beaver Fort ruin, and the sheriff had arranged for it to be towed to the impound lot in Flagstaff for further examination.
The possibility of prints revealing who had been in the vehicle with Mr. Aryan was exciting to Mike. Getting one of the looters to incriminate the other men was probably his best way to get a case strong enough for a conviction, but he hated the idea of a plea bargain with murderers. He wouldn’t be happy with any deal that let one of them off with a lite sentence. He needed better physical evidence to strengthen this case.
The sergeant who led the group from Yavapai County agreed that if no one was at the targeted house, they would wait until dawn to investigate it. He had two men on his team who had experience in detecting IEDs and traps while they were in the US military. He would send them in at first light.
By 2:00 they had staked out the rural gravel road near Aryan’s property, blocking access in both directions. A team of three deputies had moved to the section of the property that bordered the river to block any attempt to escape in that direction in case there was anyone still present. A deputy used the heat detection gear; it didn’t show the heat signature of anyone within the property, but that equipment was far from perfect if the person was blocked from view by heavy objects. The law enforcement personnel waited in the cold spring dawn until first light at 6:10.
Mike watched as the two men with experience with IEDs advanced on the house. It was clear in the dim light that they had found trip wires and other improvised devices set to guard the pr
operty. On the riverside of the house, the deputies found a freshly killed deer that had set off an IED sometime before law enforcement had arrived that night. It was unlikely that the IEDs were armed prior to Mr. Aryan’s leaving the previous evening because the animals would have regularly set them off. Deer and javelina had created many game trails through the tangle of brush and cottonwood trees to get access to the water in Beaver Creek. The area was high desert and the spring-fed creek was the best source of water for many miles.
It was about 7:00 AM when the two deputies, who had disarmed the IEDs and investigated the area, motioned for the rest of the law enforcement detachment to move in. The two dilapidated mobile homes were connected by a plywood structure about five feet long. The first mobile home could be entered directly; it was the living quarters. The second mobile home was for storage and could only be entered through the plywood passage or through a sliding glass door on the side facing Beaver Creek.
The house was neat but contained dilapidated furniture and no personal items. Mike noticed a desk, which had connections for a computer that was no longer in the house. There was a single book on the desk with a strange cover in black, gray, and orange. It was The Fourth Turning by Strauss and Howe. The dining table was a card table with a single chair pulled up to it. The refrigerator was empty except for beer and milk, but the freezer section held about twenty frozen microwaveable dinners. There was no TV or radio in the house.
The double bed in the single bedroom was made and covered in a quilt with an American eagle design. The clothing was neatly stored or hung. At the back of the closet, one of the deputies found a human skull wrapped in a towel. It was clearly ancient and had been long buried. Mike asked Sean to deliver it to Dr. Whittier for comparison with the DNA of the shaman of Kinnickinick Pueblo.
One of the first things Mike noticed when he entered the storage mobile home section of the structure was a large crate with the lid off. He was certain that it was the huge pottery grain storage jar from the Beaver Fort ruin. The pottery has the same sort of markings as the potshards he’d photographed. The exact detail of pottery was often unique to a specific tribal group of Sinagua Native Americans. Mike asked Jimmy to do a full print investigation before it was taken to the evidence room at the Flagstaff Law Enforcement Building. It was heavy enough that it would require three or four men to carry it. Aryan must have had help moving it to his storage area.
After a brief look around, Mike saw other artifacts that might have been looted from Sinagua ruins. It would take experts to determine if any of them fit with the looted items from Kinnickinick Pueblo. He was hopeful that some of them would prove a connection between Donald Aryan and the homicide site. Aryan’s plan to flee didn’t include taking any of his possessions with him. Even a single suitcase when he entered the Cliff Castle Casio would have tipped off the FBI surveillance team that he wasn’t there to gamble.
There was one especially important object. On a shelf near the huge pot was a prayer stick with the end shaped like a human hand. It had been carved from juniper and buried for a long time. Mike didn’t know if it would yield the DNA of the ancient shaman buried at Kinnickinick, but he was fairly certain that the object would exactly match the impression mold taken from the bottom of the looted grave. Mike hoped that the object could directly connect Mr. Aryan to the homicide. Merely finding the object in his home was probably not enough to convict him of the murder because Aryan would certainly claim he either found it or bought it from a stranger.
Near the trailers was a small structure made of concrete blocks. It was concealed beneath the trees, and its metal roof was painted in camouflage colors of brown, tan, and pale green. It looked like homemade construction and a stack of unused concrete blocks had been left nearby. After investigating the door for booby-traps, one of the deputies used bolt cutters on the padlock of the sturdy metal door. It was a storage bunker for racks of semi automatic weapons and cases of ammunition. Mike quickly counted fifteen long guns and seven pistols on the racks or hung from the pegs. A single short-barreled automatic combat-style shotgun was leaning against a corner. All of them were weapons of the types that were legal in Arizona; only convicted felons were prohibited from owning any types of firearms in the gun-friendly state. In Arizona, there was no limit on the number and types that could be owned as long as they complied with federal rules. However, Donald Aryan was a convicted felon and should not have been able to purchase this arsenal.
Sheriff Taylor decided to take all of the weapons into custody to test for matches to rounds recovered from various crime scenes, but unless they secured a criminal felony conviction, the county would return them all to Mr. Aryan, assuming he had the guts to show up and request their return. Mike grew up and spent most of his law enforcement career in California, and the lack of controls of firearms in Arizona had surprised him when he moved to Sedona.
Sheriff Taylor commented, “Mike, we’ve matched the truck to the Beaver Fort looting. I think we’ll prove that the four-foot-high pot you found here was looted from that site. That looting is a fairly minor crime, which actually occurred in Yavapai County. Did you notice anything that would connect him to our murder?”
“Boss, I’m almost certain that the prayer stick with a carved hand that he left in the storage area will match the one from the homicide scene. We have the video of Aryan trying to sell it in Santa Fe two days after the murder. The box of shotgun shells contains rounds with the same size shot we found in our victim, but we probably can’t prove that this shotgun was the actual murder weapon. So far we have enough circumstantial evidence for an arrest, but probably not enough for a conviction.”
“At least Mr. Aryan is now a fugitive because of the looting at the Beaver Fort ruin. Jimmy dusted the suspect’s truck for prints, and he hopes to have recovered fingerprints that will lead to the other two men involved. Aryan must have had help with him at Beaver Fort to move that huge pot. We may need to make a deal with one of them to get convictions of the other two. We’ll try and get Mr. Aryan’s photo in the newspapers and on TV. If he stayed in the state, we’ll have a good chance of apprehending him if we act quickly.”
Mike could tell by the sheriff’s tone that he didn’t like the fact that it would be Yavapai County who needed to pursue and prosecute the suspect for a crime in that county unless they developed more solid proof that Aryan was involved in the death of Paul McFarlane. Mike hated the idea that they might need to negotiate with one of the three suspects to get convictions on the other two. That was not what he’d told Paul McFarlane’s parents. After a few minutes of discussion, they decided to charge Aryan with the murder of Paul McFarlane while they continued to look for additional evidence.
One of the Yavapai deputies approached Sheriff Taylor. “Sir, I found a laptop computer in the creek. It looks like it hasn’t been there for long.”
Mike called for Jimmy Hendrix to come along to retrieve it. The deputy pointed to the shiny metal object resting in the rocks on the bottom of the clear and fast-moving creek. Jimmy went to get his waders from his truck, and used hiking poles to steady himself in the current as he walked out into the three-foot-deep area of the creek. In addition to an Apple MacBook Pro, Jimmy found an inexpensive burner-type cell phone. Both objects had been in the water less than a day, but Mike assumed the insides were completely ruined.
Once Jimmy was back on the bank, he explained, “This laptop might still contain useful information, but I have no hope of retrieving it without a password. The Apple security and encryption system is excellent. I think only the FBI lab has any chance of recovering information from the suspect’s hard drive. Aryan removed the battery from the cell phone before he tossed it into the river so water would penetrate faster. It’s probably useless too, but it’s a cheap one that might have poor password protection. If I get it dried out enough to work, I can probably access his contact list.”
Mike knew that the FBI had been watching Mr. Aryan, probably for months. If they had a warrant to monit
or the cell phone and computer, they might already know the men and women he’d called. The list of contacts might tie all of the militia members in this militia group together, leading him to the other people who’d been at Kinnickinick. The question was; would they part with any such information? Any issue involving domestic militia groups had become especially complex in the highly politically sensitive FBI. Unless this militia group actually planned an attack of some kind and got close to carrying it out, it was most unlikely that the current administration would admit they were investigating a domestic group. All of their focus was moving toward “Radical Islamic Terrorists”. In fact, Mike suspected some very highly placed administration officials tacitly supported and even secretly cultivated such white supremacy militia groups because the groups were strong supporters of their immigration policies.
By noon, Mike had returned to his office in Flagstaff. After being up all night, he was not at his sharpest when he received a call on his personal cell phone. It was Linda Surrett. He could hear children playing in the background. She must be in a park since she had no children of her own.
“Mike, I’m not authorized to tell you this so let’s keep it between us. Yesterday evening, Mr. Aryan got a call. It said the phrase ‘the red coats are coming’. There was no identification of the caller at the time, but this morning we traced the caller’s cell phone to Mr. Matthew Waldrop of the Yavapai County Sheriff’s Department. He purchased the burner phone at the Circle K in Prescott Valley, Arizona. I’d be in serious trouble if higher authorities realized I just disobeyed direct orders, but I decided it was too dangerous for you not to know. I saw from the reports regarding your investigation at the Poole Vineyards that Deputy Waldrop was present. What happened last night?”
The Mauling at Kinnickinick Pueblo Page 13
