Apache Country

by Frederick H. Christian

  “Liss’n, ya wanna freshen my drink f’me?” she said. She was too drunk to get up. She held out her glass and simpered. “C’mon, be a sweetie, jussa li’l one, then you can come sit by me and we’ll talk like we useta, ’kay?”

  She patted the cushion beside her coyly. She was so blasted he figured another one wasn’t going to make a lot of difference. As long as she didn’t pass out on him before he found out what he wanted to know. He took the glass from her hand and got her another drink. She was staring blankly at the carpet when he came back with it. She looked vaguely surprised, as though she had forgotten he was there.

  “You were telling me about the German,” he said.

  “Bassad,” she said automatically. “Disguss me.”

  She took a slug of bourbon and shivered as it went down.

  “You know his name?”

  “Carl … uh, something,” she said blearily, and hiccuped. “Works outa Juarez.”

  Of course, he thought. Ciudad Juarez, just across the border from El Paso, might have been invented for a dirty business like this one. In the decade following the collapse of the Colombian cartels, the international drug trade had moved to Mexico and as a result, Juarez was now the murder capital of Latin America. Gang executions were frequent, abductions and disappearances commonplace, but with every branch of law enforcement corrupted by drug gang bribes, there was little or no impetus to investigate the murders, let alone the plight of the desparecidas, the “disappeared ones.”

  As well as being the fiefdom of the gang lords, the city was also home to the continent’s largest industrial estate, where American corporations took advantage of cheap labor, low taxes and slack employment and environmental laws. Juarez’ three-hundred-and-fifty factories and assembly plants attracted a constant stream of young men and women looking for work. If some of them went missing every day – and it was a well-known fact they did – nobody cared. In the larger context, hardly anyone except perhaps the families of the missing would even notice. Pickups, he thought. Even the word they used for their victims showed their contempt.

  “’s like a produshon line,” Alice mumbled. “Jus’ arrest ’em on some phoney rap, put ’em in a car, thassit, they’re on their way.”

  Slowly it all dribbled out of her, like pus from an infected wound. The German had half a dozen Juarez police officers on his payroll. Boys or youths of the right age, mostly illiterate and without any clear idea of their rights, were “arrested” by these corrupt cops and told they were being taken to a detention center which in fact was an abandoned police facility at a place called Rancho de la Campana, about ten miles southwest of the city. From there the desparecidas were handed over to equally corrupt officers of the Border Patrol, La Migra as the Mexicans called it, who herded them across the border like cattle on the hoof. From El Paso the German transported them in semi-trailers up to Boy’s Ranch in Riverside.

  “Bring ‘m up here, put ‘m in special quarters they got down there, away from the other kids,” Alice said. Her eyes were glazed and her lips slack. “Fresh meat, they call ’m. Later the other kids show them ... what they gotta do.”

  “What if they refuse?”

  “Ha!” she rasped scornfully. “Whaddaya think they runnin’ down there, sonny, a freakin’ kinnergarten?”

  “Don’t they try to get away?”

  Alice lifted her head and looked at him, something akin to pity and perhaps even closer to contempt in her eyes. “’ss happened,” she said.

  He stared at her. “And?”

  No reply.

  “And, and, and?” he said angrily.

  “Whatcha freakin’ think?” she snapped.

  “Are you saying someone killed them?”

  “All I know is, iss taken care of, thass all I’m sayin’,” she mumbled.

  “Will you testify to what you’ve just told me in court?”

  Alice threw back her head and laughed raucously, spilling some of her drink.

  “Sure,” she said, her voice acid with sarcasm. “Sure, tessify in court, earna thanks ’f a grateful commun’ty. And then what, ha? No job, no money, no freakin hope. Who’s gonna take care o’ me, ha? — the grateful freakin’ commun’ty?”

  “If you agreed to testify I could get you into a Witness Protection Program. I’d take care of you, Alice.”

  Her expression became sullen, hostile.

  “Fuck that,” she said. “Fuck you. Fuck everyone. You wanna be a hero, go ’head. Jus’ leave me out of it, ’kay? Jus’ … lea’ me ’lone, juss ...”

  Her eyes closed and her head fell forward; after a moment she started to snore. Easton went into the bedroom and got a blanket which he draped over her, then put a cushion behind her neck and pushed her back so she wouldn’t slide forward off the chair. Then he let himself out of the house and drove away, feeling soiled and sad.

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Easton found a pay phone, stretched a Kleenex over the mouthpiece and dialed SO. They told him Tom Cochrane was on the swing shift and wouldn’t be on duty till afternoon. Deciding not to tempt Providence by continuing to use the Camry, Easton dumped it on a side street near the El Capitan school, and stole a bicycle from one of the unlocked sheds there. Sorry, kid, he thought as he pedaled away, my need is greater than yours. People who would notice and remember a man on foot never even see a bicycle rider go by.

  Cochrane lived in an old four-bed, one and a half bath house at the southern end of Missouri Avenue, between Buena Vista and Chisum in the southwest quarter of town. Coasting past the house without slowing down, Easton checked for signs of surveillance: anyone on foot, vacant houses with maybe one curtained upstairs window, an occupied car parked between driveways, an unmarked van with tinted glass windows.

  To be on the safe side he pedaled north as far as McGaffey then turned, heading back the way he had come. As he drew level with the house for the second time, Tom Cochrane came out through the backyard gate and opened the door of his car. As he did, Easton ran the bike up on to the sidewalk and coasted to a stop behind the detective.

  “Don’t turn around, Tom,” he said softly.

  Cochrane froze, half in the car and half out. “Holy Jesus,” he said. “Easton?”

  “K-Mart parking lot,” Easton said, and rode off down the street before Cochrane could say anything else. Maybe he was being watched, maybe not. It didn’t hurt to play safe. As he got off the bike and slotted it into a rack, Cochrane turned into the parking lot. Spotting Easton, he drove over and opened the passenger door. Easton got in.

  “You really are a piece of work, Chief,” Cochrane said, shaking a cigarette out of the pack.

  “You heard about Kuruk?” Easton said.

  “It was all over the news like World War Three. You and that goddamn Apache. What the hell happened?”

  Easton told him everything: the helicopter and the pursuit around Chimney Rock, the bright silver line of the arrow flashing across the clearing, the astonished disbelief in Mose Kuruk’s eyes.

  Cochrane shook his head. “That’s nothing like what was on TV,” he said. “According to the helicopter pilot, you and Ironheel shot him down, then killed Kuruk and took off with their guns. His co-pilot backed him up.”

  “Anybody ask them what they were doing up there in the first place?”

  Cochrane nodded. “They claimed Kuruk told them he was working with SO and asked them to spot for him, he had an idea where you guys might be, but he needed backup.”

  “SO confirmed that?”

  “You know it,” Cochrane said. “And if you don’t know it, Olin McKittrick called in the FBI. They took a ten-man team to the Reservation to find you and Ironheel. Tore the place apart. All sorts of hell broke loose. There was practically a riot up there. Oh, and for your information I understand Ironheel’s sister was, what is it the Feebs call it? “Comprehensively interrogated,” but they let her go. Where is Ironheel, by the way?”

  “Still up in the mountains,” Easton said. “I talked to him last
night.”

  “And he’s okay?”

  “Is there some reason he wouldn’t be?”

  Cochrane lifted a shoulder. “McKittrick was on TV last night saying he expects to make an arrest in the next forty eight hours. Again.”

  “Interesting,” Easton murmured. “This time it might even happen.”

  “Say what?”

  “Skip it,” Easton said. “Now, what did you do with those casts and photos you took at Garcia Flat?”

  “Safety deposit box, Sunwest Bank,” Cochrane said. “No one can get at them.”

  “A DA with a search warrant can,” Easton said. “Who knows they’re there besides you and me?”

  “You think I’m nuts?” Cochrane said crossly. “Nobody knows. Bad enough I ever went out there and made them.”

  “You said they matched the tires of Apodaca’s trail bike? That puts him at the scene.”

  “His bike, anyway,” Cochrane conceded. “But we’ve got no way of proving when. Produce the casts in court, all he has to do is say, sure, I went up there later to have another look around, now go prove I didn’t.”

  “He’s dirty through and through, Tom. He killed Robert Casey.”

  “You told me that,” Cochrane said. “But you never explained why.”

  “Okay,” Easton said. “Apodaca and McKittrick are involved in some kind of syndicated sex ring kidnapping young Mexicans for immoral purposes and to use them in pornographic films.”

  “Mexicans from Mexico?”

  Easton nodded. “Juarez. They call them pickups. They bring them up here to Riverside first.”

  “First? Listen, slow down, will you?” Cochrane said. “This is coming at me too fast.”

  Easton slowed down, explained it as simply as he could, from the discovery of the video through the killings at Garcia Flat, the murder of Weddle, all of it. When he stopped talking, Cochrane made an aggrieved sound.

  “You’ve been on the run, for Chrissake,” he said exasperatedly. “How the hell did you manage to find all this out?”

  “Better you don’t know, Tom,” Easton said. “Just trust me, the porno movies are made at Boy’s Ranch.”

  The detective shook his head. “You know, when you said a syndicate, I thought, yeah, it figures,” Cochrane said wearily. “But how does a syndicated sex ring get to use a Young Offenders rehab facility as a cover?”

  “Don’t know yet, Tom,” Easton said. “But you’ve got to admit it’s pretty damn clever. Last place in the world anyone would look. And as secure as a bank vault.”

  There were three kinds of sex rings, they both knew that. The simplest was the solo sex ring which involved one adult perpetrator and multiple victims, where no other adult was involved. The second type was known as a transition ring, in which the victims – and pornography, usually computerized, featuring their activities in high definition color – were exchanged between adults, usually with a money settlement.

  What they were dealing with here, however, was the third and most pernicious variety, the syndicated sex ring, which involved a secret society of adult offenders and any number of victims, all of whom were aware of – and in many cases fed on – the participation of the others.

  “There was a case in Oregon,” Cochrane said. “I read about it in the FBI bulletin. This phony clergyman set up a shelter for runaways, nobody had any idea what he was really doing. He sold more than a quarter of a million photographs inside a year, sixty thousand bucks worth. And the Feebs reckoned that was just the tip of the iceberg.”

  “What do you know about hebephiles?” Easton asked him.

  “I know it’s a term they use to classify the age of the victims. Pedophiles like small children. Hebephiles prefer male teenagers, and so on. I know I loathe everything to do with the whole dirty business, the way they ... what they do.” he said angrily. “My teeth ache just thinking about it.”

  A syndicated hebephile ring was run like a production line in a factory. At any given moment its hapless victims were being recruited, seduced, dumped. It was a big-money business. Its by-products included photographs, audio tapes, films, CDs and DVDs featuring the victims in cruelly graphic sexual situations. These were sold over the Internet or by advertising in ‘specialist’ magazines, or circulated by electronic or snail mail, using accommodation address cut-outs and box-number postal drops, often in foreign countries, simultaneously facilitating money-laundering and rendering tracing almost impossible.

  The dynamic of the ring, the means by which the offender or offenders bonded the victims, was usually a complex mix of threats, praise, peer pressure, and competition. Sometimes blackmail was used as a lever, threats by the adult to tell the police about illegal sex acts or other activities linked with them. In still other cases violence was used, especially when a desirable victim was trying to escape from a relationship the abuser did not yet wish to terminate.

  “The guy in Oregon, he used older kids he’d already seduced to force the younger ones to have sex with them. If they didn’t do what they were told they got beaten up. Once they submitted, they were photographed engaged in the sexual acts, and then the man would use them for his own pleasure. After a while he started inviting a few friends around.”

  “That’s probably what’s happening here,” Easton said.

  When the victims had served their purpose and were ‘sex-trained,’ they were often passed on ‘pre-seduced’ to larger and more sophisticated sex-rings around the country, linked to each other by e-mail or the Internet, where bulletin boards could be accessed which advertised users’ ‘special preferences.’ Later still the victims would be sold on to other rings which preferred their ‘fresh meat’ a little older. Inevitably, many victims went on to become abusers themselves.

  “Bastards,” Cochrane spat.

  “So you see there’s more to this than nailing Joe Apodaca and Olin McKittrick, Tom,” Easton said. “I want the head honcho. I want to find that German.”

  “Go get him,” Cochrane said. “His name is Gerzen. Carl August Gerzen.”

  Easton’s eyes widened. “You mean to tell me you’ve ID’d him? Why the hell didn’t you —”

  He saw the look on Cochrane’s face and stopped. When had Tom had the chance to tell him anything?

  “Sorry, Tom. You just took me by surprise.”

  Cochrane nodded, rolling the cigarette between his fingers, looking at it longingly.

  “You ever need to know where not to stay in Riverside, check with me,” he said. “I never knew there were so many fleabags in town. This guy Pete Maxwell, runs a dump called the Bluebird Motel on east Second, along there around Atkinson. When I tell him we’re looking for this big blond muscleman with a German accent, he remembers a guy who stayed at the motel the night Weddle was offed. Registered under the name Walter Horn, insisted on paying cash. Maxwell got a bit leery, took down the guy’s license plate number. I ran it through DMV, got a make, pulled his license. Carl Gerzen, lives in El Paso, runs a trucking company.”

  “Has he got a sheet?”

  Cochrane nodded. “I ran him through the National Crime Information Center. He’s originally from Bakersfield, California, that’s where he got his record. Two arrests for aggravated assault, once for possession with intent. He walked on a manslaughter charge when the witnesses failed to show, suspected of being involved in several murders associated with the drug trade …”

  “Slick as a greased gecko,” Easton said. “And just as hard to catch. Any personal data?”

  Cochrane fished out his notebook, flipped over the pages. “Carl August Gerzen, thirty-three, born Red Mountain, California. Never been married. Bakersfield cops say he was a hard man, muscle for some big porn dealer they could never lay a finger on. Gerzen moved to El Paso six years ago. Residence on Montana Avenue, runs an interstate transportation company, El Paso Transfer. You want to tell me how he fits into all this?”

  “Adam Twitchell found a pornographic DVD at the Casey ranch,” Easton told him. “Sex parties with
juveniles, all sorts of obscenity. Carl Gerzen was on the tape. Somehow Adam recognized him, so he had to be shut up. Killing Casey was incidental. It was Adam they wanted.”

  “And Weddle? How does he fit in?”

  “Ironheel told him he’d eye-witnessed the murders. Weddle called Olin McKittrick. And that got him killed.”

  “You like Gerzen for the Weddle hit as well.”

  “He’s a natural,” Easton nodded.

  Without mentioning her name, he went on to tell Cochrane the rest of what Alice Apodaca had told him. Cochrane listened in complete silence until he finished and then sighed.

  “Just tell me one thing. How much of this can you prove?”

  “In a courtroom?” Easton said. “None of it.”

  “Figured,” Cochrane said grimly.

  “Get me the Bible on this guy Gerzen, Tom,” Easton said. “High school and college transcripts, TRW credit rating, phone bills, bank statements, credit card charges, travel records, everything.”

  “I already talked to the El Paso cops. They say as far as they know he’s been clean ever since he moved there. Oh, and he’s like that with La Migra, the Border Patrol.”

  He held up the first two fingers of his right hand, crossed.

  “Interesting,” Easton remarked, and his eyes narrowed. “My source says La Migra is in on the traffic. When you think about it, they’d have to be. And there’s something else.”

  “What?”

  “I told you, they came after us in a very high-tech helicopter out of El Paso. The pilot said the guy who set it up was called Carl. Does Gerzen own a chopper?”

  Cochrane shrugged. “Not that I know of.”

  “He had to get it someplace,” Easton said. “Border Patrol would make a dirty-bastard kind of sense.”

  “I’ll check it out. What’s your next move?”

  “Ironheel doesn’t know it yet,” Easton said. “But we’re going to turn ourselves in.”

  Cochrane looked at Easton with undisguised astonishment. “Are you crazy?” he said. “The minute those guys get a fix on you, they’re going to do their damnedest to kill you.”