by David Cole
“Now I want my part of the deal.”
“That’s what I’m trying to tell you. The deal is to find everything. What’s being stolen. Who’s doing the dirty work. Where’s it going. We don’t know where the information is going. Until we know all that, there is no deal.”
Spider’s face muscles constricted as though she were either going to spit or shout. I could see her clenching her teeth in an effort to do neither.
“It’s not like finding the clues in a video game,” Brittles said. “The first clues are the easiest. Like having a bunch of keys and finding the one that opens a door. But these cases are always more complicated than that. Not like a TV show. Not like a movie or a book. Where everything gets solved in one hour or two or four hundred pages. So we’ve learned what one of those keys unlocks. There are still lots of keys left, we know nothing about what they open.”
“It’s just…just so goddam frustrating,” she said.
“Yeah, well, now you know how crime pays. With a prison sentence. For you, eighteen months. This is only month three, and you want out already. Be realistic. It doesn’t happen like a movie.”
“Yeah. And you’re no Dirty Harry Clint Eastwood, solving the case.”
Brittles turned his face in profile to me.
“Oh, I don’t know about that,” he said. “Don’t I kinda remind you of Clint? The older Clint? Unforgiven? Blood Work? True Crime?”
“Here’s the deal,” Spider finally said.
“Here’s our deal,” Brittles said, removing papers from his briefcase but never breaking eye contact with her.
“No,” she insisted. “You did your part, getting her here. Here’s my deal. I’ll give up this identity-theft ring on two conditions. One. Plea bargain. I give you the ring, you get me released. No. Not just released. Pardoned.”
“Not possible.”
“Two. She helps.”
“Help you?” I said.
“I can give you the place,” Spider said to Brittles. “I can’t give you the people. With her, we can find them.”
“No deal.”
“Wait,” I said, “wait, wait. Spider—”
“Abbe.”
“You’ll always be Spider to me.”
“That’s your problem.”
“Why did you ask for me?” I pleaded.
“I don’t like being in prison.”
“Why are you in prison?”
She sighed, disgusted, the question not worth answering.
“Federal mail fraud,” Brittles said. “She was sending confidential credit card information to Mexico. Sentenced to two years.”
“Eighteen months,” Spider said, “with good behavior. I’ve been there only three months. The longer I stay, my behavior is only going to get worse. Then I’ll have to serve the full deuce. I don’t want to.”
“Can I help her?” I asked Brittles.
“No no no,” Spider said. “The right question, the only question that matters to me, is whether he can cut me loose. If I come through.”
“Can you?” I asked Brittles.
“It’s possible.”
“Then it’s a deal.”
“Laura. First things first. You don’t make deals unless you know details.”
“Laura.” Spider mimicked his voice. “How sweet.”
“No,” I said to Brittles. “It’s a deal.”
“You don’t even know what you want us to do,” he answered.
“Sure she does, Mister Law. She’s a hacker, she’s a cracker, she’s a down south smacker, and she’s better than I am. So far.”
“Which prison?” Brittles asked her.
“Hey. Deal with Laura here means nothing to me. Deal has to be with you. I give you what you want, you give me unconditional release. A pardon.”
“You’re assuming this is a major thing,” he said. “It’s just stealing another few hundred credit cards. It’s minor, it’s almost meaningless. Tell me what prison, how many people involved. Then I’ll decide what kind of deal to offer.”
“It’s not the crime,” Spider said to me. “He’s pretending this is just about identity theft. Check it out with him. Whisper in his ear.”
“What is she talking about?” I asked Brittles.
I could visualize him playing poker. Holding cards, holding good cards, a winning hand, but Spider still in the pot, maybe an even better hand. He sat even straighter, smiled with a very slight nod, and I knew she’d won the pot.
“Deal,” he said.
“Florence,” she answered immediately.
“How?”
“Don’t know.”
“But it’s coming from there?”
“The 800 number call center. Some inmate in the center. All I know.”
“Whoa,” he said. “I’ve been to that call center. All the computers are on a closed network. No access to the Internet. Credit card and Social Security numbers are hidden from the inmate operators. Show up as asterisks.”
“Five seven two Gates Pass Road,” she said.
“What’s that?”
“Where I lived in Tucson.”
“You live in Tucson?”
I was incredulous. I’d searched all over the U.S., I’d tracked her from Pasadena to New York City, and she once lived in Tucson?
“Eleven years ago.”
“And your point is that you remember the address?” Brittles asked.
“No. Memory training.”
“Explain that.”
“When Don Ralph was shot down in Viet Nam, he got rescued. But he knew a guy who spent five years in the Hanoi Hilton. With Senator McCain. This guy, bored out of his mind, cramped in a tiger cage and slowly going crazy with nothing to do, he hung a string across the bamboo bars one day. Went back to his math training, recreated his whole memory of calculus and differential equations, worked out the equation for that hanging string. From there, he trained his memory, sharpened his ability to retain details.”
“And inmates…smart inmates…” I could almost see Brittles’s head buzzing as he worked out the implications. “They could remember credit card numbers. I’ve thought of that. But how does that information get out of prison within twelve hours? Rarely more than twenty-four hours. That’s how long it takes for somebody to run up massive debts using those cards.”
“I don’t know.”
“And just how were you…how were we going to find that out?” I asked.
“Easy,” Brittles said. “You go inside.”
“You can’t ask me to do that,” I said to Spider. “No way.”
“Way,” she said with a smirk.
“They’d never trust me. An outsider. A woman.”
“It’s good,” Brittles said. “That’s good.”
“Ooooeee. You’re so smart, Mr. Law,” Spider said.
“Well, I’m not that smart,” I shouted. “I’m not taking any chance of going inside a prison.”
“As a computer expert,” Brittles said. “From the company that installed the call-center computer network. You come in to fix a problem. I like it.”
“So, mom.”
The word still hung in her throat, came out coated with sarcasm, cynicism, and solid anger, as though it were a pill she’d been waiting to fling at me for years.
“You really in?”
“If I say no?”
“You’ll never see me again.”
Not a pill. A fishing line, not even baited, just thrown out there with a naked metal hook that she was ready to reel in, she was that confident I’d say yes. I knew she had much more anger.
“When?” I asked.
Brittles pulled two thick envelopes from his briefcase, dropped them on the table. Spider ripped one of them open, shoved it to me after a quick scan, ripped open the other. I sorted through a mass of identity papers, most of them arrest and sentencing papers, including two prison photo cards of my face with the name Susan Elliott McBride.
“You bastard,” I said, flinging all the papers at him. “You plan
ned this all along. You weaseling bastard.”
“What happens now?” Spider asked.
“You go back to your cell and wait. No, no, I’ll keep those papers. Tomorrow morning we should be ready. Laura, you come with me.”
“I want to talk with my daughter.”
“Too late, mom.” She stood up, went to ring the bell. “You should have thought of that earlier, to stall me.” The CO came out, hooked her up for the third time, and she left without another word.
11
His cell phone jingled again, his face grimmer as he listened.
“What am I supposed to do now?” I demanded, fuming while he made three more calls and then waved at an unmarked Ford Excursion.
“I can have the chopper take you back to Tucson.”
“We need to talk about the deal. About my daughter’s pardon.”
He started to get into the Excursion. I piled into the backseat.
“Whoa, whoa,” the driver said. “Get out, lady.”
“We have to talk!” I insisted to Brittles.
“You haven’t seen her for twenty years,” he said curtly. “Why are you so dead set on helping her now?”
“She’s my daughter. Tell me if this deal is possible. A complete pardon, if I go along with what you want.”
“Come with me, we’ll talk on the way.”
“Where are we going?”
“Near the Casa Grande ruins. But I don’t think I can arrange for the chopper to meet us there. You’ll have to find a ride back to Tucson.”
He refused all conversation during the fifty minute trip.
We flew at nearly one hundred miles an hour, the Excursion rocking on its springs. Once on the freeway, Brittles took a portable flashing lamp, fed the cord out his window, and clamped the magnet to the roof. Every time I tried to say something to him, I could barely hear myself, wind whistling into his window, and I wondered if he’d put the lamp outside just as an excuse to shut me off. Somewhere past the Chandler exit an Arizona DPS cruiser picked us up, tried to pull us over until Brittles got patched through on his radio and the cruiser pulled in front of us, bubblegum lights rotating, clearing traffic all the way to Casa Grande.
Another DPS cruiser sat slantwise across the entrance road to what looked like the beginnings of a housing development. The officer checked Brittles’s ID and pulled the bright yellow barrier back so we could pass. Fifty feet or so down the road I could see a backhoe, yards of yellow crime scene tape wrapped around bushes and trees, several men and women sifting dirt through large screened boxes. Somebody in a double-banded Tilley Stampede hat directed them, several of the park’s picnic tables pulled up outside the crime scene tape, objects sorted onto each of the tables. Another man saw us coming, waved us over.
Brittles got out to talk to him quickly, talked directly into his ear before I could join them.
“Laura Wilson,” Brittles said. “Zeke Pardee. Another U.S. Marshal.”
“Just spend five minutes with me,” I pleaded. “I don’t have a clue why we’re here, I don’t even want to be here, just tell me what you’ll do for my daughter.”
“That’s in transition.”
“Excuse me?”
“I had something worked out. It won’t work now.”
“Why?”
The man in the Tilley hat climbed out of one of the trenches and walked up to us, casually brushing dirt from his encrusted jeans as though he really didn’t care if dirt was there or not. It was Rich.
Both of us were astonished to see the other. I started to smile, but he turned quickly to face Brittles. As though I was nobody, which shocked me.
“You the paleontologist?” Brittles asked.
“Rich Thompson. NAGPRA. Remains Repatriation Coordinator. Arizona State Museum, on the AU campus.”
Brittles hesitated only for a moment, shook the offered hand. He didn’t bother to introduce Pardee, but Rich grinned at each of us in turn, extending a hand to Brittles and Pardee, repeating his name. Brittles ignored him and strode to the three tables.
“Anything?” he asked Rich.
“Some great stuff. This whole Casa Grande area is built mostly on alluvium ground, not too old, a few hundred thousand years.”
“What’s on this table?” Brittles ignored the archeological lesson.
“Pleistocene fossils, maybe mammoth, camel, bison, horse, llama, dire lion, very big tortoise, glyptodont, that’s a very cool-looking thing, I’ve got some pictures in my office.”
“Fossils. This next table?”
“Haven’t identified them yet. Probably came down from nearby hills and mountains, probably volcanic or metamorphic.”
“Fossils. Lava. Why have you even bothered collecting them?”
“This is a prime archeological area.”
“This is a crime scene.”
“True, true. But…it’s also just outside a famous national monument. There are rules about how to dig through these grounds. They’re holy grounds. Sacred grounds.”
“Bones. I just want to hear about the bones,” Brittles insisted.
“Especially bones. Bones are sacred. Bones are assumed to be Indian bones. Under NAGPRA, we have to take special care to retrieve the bones and return them to the proper Indian nation.”
“This is a crime scene. This is evidence.”
Rich pressed his lips together. He started his lecture.
“In 1990, the Arizona legislature passed laws that protect human burials and associated objects on state, county, and municipal lands and private lands. These laws provide Arizona’s Indian tribes and descendants of Hispanic and Anglo settlers an opportunity to ensure that the remains of their ancestors are treated with respect and dignity. Both laws require that the discovery of burials more than fifty years old must be reported to the Arizona State Museum if the burials are in danger of disturbance. The museum identifies groups that might be related to the dead and coordinates discussions about how the burials should be treated.”
“Whoa, whoa,” Brittles said. “I appreciate your concerns for history, but I don’t want history. I need to know about these bones. The housing development can deal with your museum.”
I smiled at that and Rich saw my smile, shot me an amazed look before he pushed a finger into Brittles’s chest.
“These laws are often misunderstood,” Rich said emphatically. “The museum is prepared to respond promptly to reports of isolated discoveries and to remove remains and associated objects at its own expense. This housing developer is free to continue construction within a statutory maximum of ten days after discovery. They’ll have to begin consultation through the museum before continuing construction and they’ll have to make plans either to identify and remove burials before construction begins or to have appropriate personnel available to identify and remove burials as they are found.”
“Is the lecture over?” Pardee asked.
“Just tell us what you’ve found,” Brittles said. “Will you do that? Please?”
We all gathered around at least four hundred bone fragments scattered on the third table. Rich had made some effort to sort the bones according to size and shape, but it seemed a hopeless task.
“It’s a lot of bones,” Rich said.
“Are any of them old bones?” Brittles asked. “Animals?”
“No.” Rich took off his hat, clutched it with both hands over his chest. “No. They’re all human. The oldest haven’t been here more than a few years.”
“Why are they all broken up?” I asked.
“Fargo,” Rich said.
“The wood chipper?” I said.
“Yes.”
“What the hell are you talking about?” Pardee said.
“In the movie. Fargo. One of the bad guys stuffs the other bad guy’s body into a wood chipper.” Rich shuffled his feet, apologetic but firm. “I’ve heard through the Internet it’s something the Mexican drug cartels do to dispose of bodies. When they can’t just dump the bodies in the desert, I mean.”
> “So, these bones,” Brittles said, poking his finger at a three-inch fragment.
“Don’t touch them. Please.”
“Okay. I’ll call in a forensic anthropologist, see what he thinks.”
“That’s a rip, man. I’ve spent fifteen years looking at bones of pretty much anything, dead or alive, that’s ever walked or crawled.”
Rich pulled on a fresh pair of latex gloves, carefully separated half of the tabletop of bones from the other. I could see a pattern in what was left. Not immediately noticeable, but piles, more like groupings of similar bone fragments.
“Totally raw guess,” Rich said. “We’re looking at a dozen people.”
“A dozen?”
“Give or take. It’s my gut talking here, but…these just feel like different people. These twelve piles…these fragments.”
“Gut.” Brittles snorted at Pardee. “Zeke. Call Tucson. Get a forensic pathologist up here.”
“All women,” Rich said with a grimace. “I mean, probably. You can tell. This fragment, from a pelvis, it’s not full-grown, it’s female.”
“How many women?” I said.
“Women. Girls. Who knows? You wanted my take. That’s it.”
“Altogether,” Brittles said, licking his lips, trying to avoid the obvious question, “how many people are we talking about?”
“Best guess?” Rich said to himself. “I’d say you’ve got a real nightmare here. At the least, a dozen bodies. At the most…I can’t even say.”
revelations
William Little Bill Marriott stripped down for a full body cavity search. Bending over, he watched, not protesting, not making any facial expressions or sounds, while the Correctional Officers tossed his lockdown cell. Some COs didn’t hassle the inmates while doing this. A few COs were kickstarters, out to make trouble, not at all happy when humiliated by an inmate using the CO as a target for urine or feces. All COs got things hurled at them. Most survived the indignities by publicly ignoring them. A few couldn’t restrain their anger and humiliation, occasionally taking it out on the inmates, often griping to other COs. Kickstarters. Usually male COs, macho alpha-dog males, sniffing for trouble, baring their teeth. In some backward state prisons and jails, nearly all the COs were kickstarters. A way of life, but not one tolerated in the Arizona prison system.
