In The Company of Wolves_Follow The Raven

by James Michael Larranaga

  “If I can get him discharged, you okay with me taking him out of here?” he asked.

  “Detectives want to talk to him—and you as well, Autumn,” she said.

  Autumn pulled Marta in tightly to her side. “I’ll give my statement in Minnesota.”

  She had no interest in talking with the FBI, especially the Phoenix office, she’d told Quin. She didn’t trust them. Quin would have a hard enough time getting her to Minnesota, but he knew he couldn’t leave her here.

  “Agent Kruse wants to do all this in Minneapolis,” Quin said. “We reopened the case up there, we might as well close it. Sorry to play inter-office politics.”

  Lopez shook her head. “I can’t let you do that, Quin.”

  “C’mon, Lopez, look the other way.”

  “And play the fool by letting you waltz off with them?”

  “You said you had my back.”

  She folded her arms, whispering, “You’re an ass, you know that?”

  “Tell them there was a miscommunication between the two departments. Blame it on Agent Kruse,” he said.

  “I could lose my job over this.”

  “They won’t fire you, Kruse will see to that. Maybe they’ll suspend you with pay. You wanted a break anyway, right? More time with your kids?”

  She looked at Autumn and Marta, mother and daughter standing together. It must have tugged at her heartstrings. “I’ll tell the nurses I’m transferring you. Meet me outside once Hawk has checked out.”

  Hawk signed his release forms and an orderly wheeled him to the front door, where Quin and Jimmy walked him to the truck. Carefully, they helped him into the passenger seat, riding shotgun as Hawk reminded them. Jimmy, Autumn, Marta, and the teddy bear squeezed into the bench seat in back. Quin put the truck in gear and drove off slowly over a speed bump.

  “It’s a good twenty-four-hour drive from here,” Quin said. “Jimmy, Autumn, and I will do all the driving. You rest, Hawk.”

  “We gotta make a stop on the way, though,” he said.

  “Where?” Quin asked.

  “Window Rock, to reunite you and Autumn with your family, to see Nizhoni.”

  “That will add another four hours.”

  “It’s worth it,” Hawk said.

  Quin looked in the rearview mirror at Autumn. “You okay with seeing her?”

  “I would love to see Nizhoni again.”

  Quin continued through the hospital parking lot. Hawk lowered his window as they approached Agent Lopez on the edge of the hospital grounds, smoking. Quin slowed.

  “Thanks, Lopez,” Hawk said, “for saving this old life.”

  She smiled and turned her back on them, letting them go. After puffing beautiful silky smoke rings upward into a deep blue sky, she said, “This is my last cigarette, I swear.”

  The desert landscape near Nizhoni’s home hadn’t changed much over the years. Quin and Autumn must have been eight or nine years old when they had last sat on Nizhoni’s deck overlooking a hoodoo, a tall spire of red rock. She told Marta it was a fairy chimney before she carried her on her hip inside and laid her on the couch for a nap. She returned with a pitcher of ice water and poured them each a glass and as they sat down.

  “Drink more, Hawk,” she said.

  He guzzled the water, then wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “You’re gonna drown me.”

  “It’s a miracle that you’re both here,” Nizhoni said, wiping a tear, smiling at Quin and Autumn. “When Hawk told me what you were up to, Quin, I never imagined you’d find each other so quickly.”

  “He was very brave,” Autumn said, patting him on the knee.

  “I couldn’t have done it without Hawk and Jimmy’s help. And the bureau’s.”

  “Nizhoni, tell them what you told us,” Hawk said.

  Quin listened to her describe the struggles their parents had endured in their marriage, and how Quin and Autumn’s grandparents had never accepted their father as a member of the clan. It hurt listening to her relive the day their mother left the reservation for good. Autumn crossed one leg over the other, her knee bouncing nervously.

  “I’m so sorry,” Nizhoni said to her. “I should’ve done more to look for you.”

  Autumn shook her head. “It’s not your fault.”

  “The bureau dropped it,” Hawk said, “or covered it up.”

  “Why?” Quin asked.

  Nizhoni sighed. “Remember the DEA’s War on Drugs? Then suddenly immigration became the new war. They built walls on the border, splitting towns, separating families. People were desperate.”

  “That’s when our parents began bringing people across?” Autumn asked.

  “Yes, a dangerous thing to do,” Nizhoni said. “But that’s how your mother was, always caring. Never turned her back on anyone in need.”

  “And the coyotes killed them to take over the territory,” Autumn said.

  “But why would the bureau not pursue the case?” Quin asked.

  “It’s corrupt down there,” Nizhoni said. “Lot of people looking the other way when it benefits them.”

  “See?” Hawk said to Quin. “You can’t trust the government.”

  Jimmy spoke up. “But the bureau helped him find Autumn.”

  To Quin’s surprise, Jimmy was actually defending Quin’s decision to work for the bureau. After all the bickering and arguing, they actually agreed on something; the bureau found Autumn. But he had a sinking feeling.

  What if it wasn’t true?

  All this time Quin had his doubts about RV but he hadn’t considered the possibility that Autumn’s rescue could be a hoax. What if Agent Kruse coordinated everything to make it look as if the paranormal team had found Autumn? He had access to FBI and DEA files. He could’ve known exactly where Autumn was living all these years.

  Kruse certainly had a motive. He was desperate to prove to Quin and others in the bureau that RV was an effective crime and terror-fighting tool. What if the cameras and the audio equipment weren’t for the paranormal team’s benefit, but so Kruse could edit the footage later? He could recreate the event with his own Hollywood ending. And Agent Lopez let him pull Hawk out of the hospital without any resistance. Was she part of an elaborately orchestrated plan? Was Autumn part of it, too?

  He decided to test her. “Ready to head back to Minnesota?”

  She looked past him to her daughter on the couch and then to Nizhoni. “I’m not ready to talk to anybody.”

  “You should meet with Agent Kruse,” he said. “He’ll need proof.”

  “Say I escaped, ran away.”

  “He wouldn’t believe it, Autumn. I’m a bounty hunter. Never had a skip escape after I caught him.”

  “Tell Kruse you underestimated your sister and that I got away.”

  Her responses seemed genuine. She seemed more comfortable here with Nizhoni than traveling back to meet the Agent Kruse. That was good enough for Quin, at least for now.

  “Hawk, Jimmy, and I will go back to Minnesota without you,” he said, “as long as you promise me you won’t leave Window Rock.”

  The word stress is what Candace gleaned from her conversation with Dillan. And the more she researched it, the more Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) seemed to fit the description. She’d spent quiet hours in her apartment on the couch researching PTSD, and learned that the condition manifests itself within four major groupings:

  Intrusive Memories: reliving traumatic events as if they are happening again, having flashbacks, or reacting to events that trigger memories.

  Avoidance: Obsessively blocking memories or avoiding people or places connected to the events.

  Negative Moods: Low self-esteem, feeling emotionally numb.

  Shifts in Emotional Responses: Outbursts, aggressive behavior, shame, insomnia, self-destructive behavior, and drug abuse.

  Dillan had displayed several of these symptoms during their conversation. Quin, too, had symptoms. He’d avoided Candace for months, seemed emotionally detached, and sipped ayahuas
ca as if it were nothing more than an herbal tea.

  She followed the trail of health articles, links, and videos, all leading her down a strange dark path of psychiatric disorders. It was there that she found references to the Minnesota Security Hospital, a facility an hour south of Minneapolis, nestled in the Minnesota River Valley. It was home to more than 400 adults, some of them psychiatric patients with histories of murder, arson, and other violent crimes. The violence didn’t always end when a patient was admitted to the facility. Patient assaults on hospital employees and other patients were a fact of life in such a facility.

  That was where Dillan said he’d lived and worked for the last five years before returning home. It was also where Quin had spent time, according to online news reports of his “aggressive use of force” while bounty hunting. He’d never served time behind bars other than the fence crowned with razor wire surrounding the hospital grounds.

  Why would Agent Kruse run his remote viewing team from such a facility? Were psychiatric patients the best talent pool or were they the best lab rats?

  A text message came from Jimmy’s phone: Quin wants to talk.

  Candace replied: Call me now.

  Her phone rang and she answered to hear Quin, Jimmy, and Hawk bantering among themselves. “What’s going on?” she asked.

  “We found Autumn,” Quin said.

  “Congratulations!”

  “What have you found out about RV?” he asked.

  “I met with Dillan,” she said, pacing her apartment, looking out the sliding-glass door beyond the balcony at the traffic three floors below.

  “And?”

  “He seems messed up.”

  “Everyone from that facility is.”

  “Of course, but Dillan mentioned a side effect of Remote Viewing. He has trouble unplugging. Does that mean anything to you?”

  Candace heard silence except for the hum of the road and Hawk’s tribal music on the stereo.

  “Quin?”

  “Yeah, I understand.”

  “And he mentioned stress that comes from RV, that there are harmful side effects. Dillan’s symptoms seem to fit PTSD.” Again, she waited. “Quin, is it hard to unhook from it?”

  “For some remote viewers it is.”

  “And what happens?”

  “They get sent back to the psych ward, or released from the program,” he said, with frustration in his voice.

  “Dillan said somebody named Susan is now in the locked ward.”

  “They put Susan away?” Quin said.

  “You’re right, there’s something about Remote Viewing that’s having a negative side effect on the viewers,” she said.

  “Thanks for confirming it. Send me what you have,” he said. “I thought about what you said the last time we talked, about being cautious with the FBI. Jimmy, Hawk, and I have been talking and using our phones to search the Internet while we drive. Look up these search terms: FBI, war on terror, psych patients.”

  She sat back down on the couch with her laptop and found several news articles about the FBI’s counter-terrorism efforts.

  “Look for the name Sami Osmakac,” Quin said, spelling it for her.

  She found an article about the man. “Who is he?”

  Quin gave her the highlights of the article. “Sami Osmakac was recruited by FBI informants in a sting operation that made him look like a terrorist who was about to shoot up a Tampa bar and casino before blowing himself up. Yet he had no connections to international terrorists and no money to purchase weapons. The money and guns were funneled to him by the FBI, who filmed the weapons exchange in a hotel room. Before the bust, they helped the nervous and confused Osmakac record his martyrdom video.”

  “Okay, now we’ve got something here,” she said, scrolling the page, reading along.

  “Apparently informant-led sting operations are a main staple of the FBI’s counter-terrorism program,” Quin said. “Since 9/11 more than 500 defendants have been prosecuted in federal terrorism cases, and 243 involved FBI informants. The FBI claims these cases stopped attacks, but Human Rights Watch reported that the FBI often sets up economically disadvantaged citizens, or worse, the mentally ill. Sami Osmakac was one example; a court-appointed psychologist diagnosed him with schizoaffective disorder. Despite his mental illness and the FBI’s use of entrapment tactics, Osmakac was sentenced to 40 years in prison.”

  “You’ve hit the mother vein,” she said.

  “Autumn’s rescue…” Quin said. “It all happened so easily.”

  “You’re suggesting that Kruse staged the event like this Osmakac case?” she asked.

  “It’s possible. He had me wearing a camera to record it, right?”

  “But you and Agent Lopez removed the cameras.”

  “And Kruse was angry about it. Kruse wanted to edit a story showing the FBI waltzing past the Sinaloa drug cartel to rescue an American.”

  She thought about it for a moment. “You might be right.”

  “Kruse said Sinaloa allowed us on their land, that he’d made a deal with them.”

  “What kind of deal?” she asked, waiting for his response, but all she could hear were the muffled voices of Quin, Hawk, and Jimmy.

  “What kind of deal?” she asked again.

  “I don’t know. We’ve been to hell and back, Candace. It’s time for Agent Kruse to provide some real answers. I need answers or I’ll…”

  “You’ll what?” she dared ask. “Quin!”

  Dr. Hayden checked her phone again, hoping Quin would call back and explain his threatening voice mails. He “needed answers” from her and Kruse.

  She set stacks of reports on the conference room table. It was almost midnight and Agent Kruse had just arrived without his suit jacket, his white shirt unbuttoned at the collar, wet with drops of rain.

  “You obviously didn’t call security.”

  “No,” she said. “It would only set him off.”

  “He could be in a negative spiral,” Kruse said. “He could lose his cool and God knows what he’d do.”

  “If he wants to harm us, there’s no stopping him,” she said, “unless we give him answers.”

  “What’s all this?” he said, picking up a document off the table.

  “Before he gets here, I need to bring you up to speed on his condition.”

  She sat, and he joined her at the table.

  “When Quin was first admitted to this facility, he had a complete physical. Because of his violent past and his hallucinations, he was tested for temporal lobe epilepsy. The seizures cause sensory changes, such as olfactory or visual hallucinations. People with this condition sometimes display unusual behaviors, such as hyper-religiosity. Quin’s intense focus on indigenous traditions and beliefs, his use of ayahuasca to go deeper into a hallucinogenic state, are examples. And his blackouts are a form of collapse. But after running the tests, the neurologist ruled out epilepsy and suggested we test for Bonnet Syndrome.”

  “Never heard of it,” Kruse said.

  Dr. Hayden handed him a report from the Journal of Neuro-Ophthalmology. “People with cataracts or macular degeneration can develop a syndrome where they see images that aren’t there. Birds are a common hallucination for this condition and I figured that must be it, but again the medical team was incorrect. Quin has healthy vision; his optic pathways are normal.”

  “What’s your point, Dr. Hayden?”

  “Before Quin became a patient of mine, his previous doctor documented in his medical chart that he had a mild form of schizophrenia, a complicated condition. There’s no single cause for schizophrenia, but research has shown that the disorder is more common among socially disadvantaged groups, those who live in poverty, overcrowding, or even isolation. And a person is vulnerable to the disorder in the earlier stages of life.”

  “You’ve just described Quin,” he said.

  “Right! Quin was orphaned after his parents’ deaths and moved into the foster care system at a vulnerable point in his life, which can be iso
lating and lonely. But there’s no test for schizophrenia. It’s up to a doctor to evaluate a patient to make a diagnosis. And based on my re-evaluation, I don’t think he has it.”

  “But the medication stopped the hallucinations. He said he felt numb.”

  “It’s possible Quin lied, told us what we wanted to hear,” she said.

  “And that he never stopped seeing the unseen?” Kruse added.

  “It gets even more interesting. The brief period when Quin wore the glasses in Mexico, we watched and recorded him approaching Autumn’s location. We also recorded his vitals, including heart rate and sweat rate, measuring his autonomic fight or flight nervous system. If you go back and watch what happens on the video, what he sees, and compare it to what happens, it seems as if his brain anticipates what will happen next.”

  “I’ve been saying that all along,” Kruse said.

  “It’s as if his subconscious mind feeds him information,” she said. “In those moments, he has no eye movements. He’s in delta sleep, the deepest sleep phase, while walking around, and then he’s suddenly awakened for his conscious mind to take action. This happens in short bursts, but we’ve recorded it. We only use 12 percent of our conscious mind; the subconscious mind represents the other 88 percent of our mind space. And if Quin slips into his subconscious mind more often and has the ability to stay there longer, then that might explain why he’s more mobile than other viewers.”

  “He’s sleepwalking,” Kruse suggested.

  “Or is he really more awake? What’s more real—the 12 percent of the time we live in our conscious mind, or the 88 percent we live in our subconscious mind? Dr. Carl Jung called the subconscious the super-conscious.”

  Kruse seemed confused as he looked at all the research on the table. “He either has a neurological condition or a psychiatric condition. Which is it?”

  “It’s very possible he has neither,” she said. “He might’ve developed a skill, or what you’ve already called a sixth sense.”

  “He’s an enigma,” Kruse said.

  “Yes, but he has a technique that might benefit the other viewers. There’s something about that tea.”