by Alex Gilly
“I’m so sorry,” said Joaquin.
Natalie got up and hugged her. “You okay?”
“Yes. I mean, no. I don’t know. I think I’m still in shock,” Mona said. She’d left home feeling better after Finn’s breakfast, but hearing Michael Marvin’s name on the radio had set off the jitters again.
“Take some time off. Go somewhere. I can cover your caseload,” said Joaquin.
Mona shook her head firmly. “No. I’ve got work to do. I owe it to Carmen.”
“It’s over, Mona,” said Joaquin gently. “There’s no more case. I’m sorry.”
“There’s still a case.”
“What do you mean?”
“We can sue the BSCA for wrongful death.”
An awkward silence ensued. Finally, Joaquin said, “You know, Mona, sometimes things are exactly as they appear.”
“If we were in court, I’d object on the grounds that you’re being obscure,” said Mona.
“The hospital said Carmen was bitten by a snake. So, maybe that’s what happened. She was bitten by a snake.”
“She was bitten by a snake.”
“So what grounds do you have for a wrongful death suit?”
“If a diabetic inmate dies because the prison didn’t provide her insulin, the prison is liable. Carmen was bitten by a rattlesnake, yet no one gave her antivenin. She died on the way to the hospital. That’s neglect, Joaquin.”
More silence.
“A wrongful death claim can only be brought by the victim’s estate,” said Joaquin.
“I know.”
“Have you contacted her family?”
“No.”
“So you have no one to represent.”
“I’ll find them.”
“How?”
It was a good question. She didn’t have much to go on. Carmen had told Mona that she’d grown up in Ciudad Nezahualcóyotl but that she’d left for Tijuana and that she’d had no contact with her parents or younger sister since leaving. So all Mona knew about Carmen’s family was that they either lived or had lived in Ciudad Neza.
“I’ll go to her hometown. Someone will know her.”
“Where’s she from?”
“Ciudad Nezahualcóyotl.”
Joachim’s face tightened. “A million people live in Ciudad Neza. You’ll never find them.”
“I can try.”
“And even if you do find them, what then? The BSCA is the biggest private-prison operator in the world. The CEO is going to be the next secretary of Homeland Security. We’re not the ACLU, Mona. We don’t have the resources to fight them.”
“It’s the right thing to do, Joaquin.”
“You’re going to make me go prematurely gray,” he said.
Natalie, who was standing next to him, looked up at his head.
“You already are. I can see it in your roots,” she said.
Joaquin ignored her.
“Okay, let’s just say by some miracle you find her parents and they agree to sue,” he said to Mona. “Break it down for me. What would be your strategy?”
Mona had spent four and a half hours driving back from the detention center thinking about exactly that. To win the wrongful death claim against the BSCA, she would need to jump through a series of legal hoops: first, she would have to prove that the BSCA had a duty of care to Carmen; second, she would have to prove that the corporation was in breach of that duty; and finally, she would have to prove that Carmen died because of it.
“The BSCA built its detention center in known rattlesnake country. That’s indisputable. There are signs all along the highway out there warning people not to stray from their cars. A reasonable person would assume that the BSCA’s duty of care would include protecting the inmates in their facility from the rattlesnakes. Yet they put in place no measures to keep the snakes out. They don’t stock antivenin in their medical center. And their training program for their guards is woefully inadequate: Why did it take so long for Carmen to receive medical attention? If they had intervened in a timely manner, she might not have died, Joaquin.”
“You realize they’ll throw everything at you, right? Armies of lawyers getting paid hundreds an hour picking over every word you submit. They’re a Goliath.”
“Good. That makes me David. David won.”
Joaquin’s shoulders slumped.
“Listen, I can’t stop you,” he said. “I can imagine how you feel. But Carmen is dead. There are hundreds—thousands—of living people in detention who need your help right now. The right thing to do is help them. Nothing you do will bring Carmen back.”
“If I don’t fight for her, Joaquin, no one will.”
* * *
Going against her long-standing habit, Mona closed her office door. She felt like she was going to burst into tears, and she didn’t want to do that in front of Joaquin and Natalie. She sat down at her desk. With the door closed, the tears came. Maybe her grief and anger had made her lose sight of her mission. There were migrants in detention who needed her help right now. Carmen’s death was a tragic accident, a bitter irony, one more wretched border story. But nothing Mona could do would bring her back.
To distract herself, Mona started doodling on the internet. She checked her social media accounts. She visited an online shopping site and bought some shoes she didn’t need. She checked her social media accounts again, which were now filled with banner ads for the shoes she’d just bought. An acquaintance had a new job. A college friend had broadcast to everyone she knew that she was feeling sad, without explaining why. A colleague who worked for the ACLU had posted a link to a story from the LA Times with the hashtag #resist. Mona clicked through to the story. The headline read:
President Nominates Head of Private-Prison Firm for Secretary of Homeland Security
The Times had run a photo of Marvin wearing a puffer jacket with a fur-lined hood. The caption read “Michael Marvin arriving at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, in 2018.”
He was a jowly white man with wavy hair, a fake tan, and, through a wide smile, obviously whitened teeth.
Mona stared at the picture. The man in charge of the prison where Carmen had died of neglect was one Senate hearing away from being in charge of the entire southern border.
At that moment, looking at that photo, Mona knew exactly what her mission was.
She had some translation work to do.
TEN
WHILE Mona was working in the office, Finn went out to the Long Beach station for the second time in three days. Klein had left him a message, saying he had good news.
“So, I spoke to Salazar,” said Klein. “He’s taking this straight to the FBI.”
David Salazar was the commissioner of Customs and Border Protection. He answered to Steve Fishman, the acting secretary of Homeland Security. Fishman answered to the president.
Finn was taken aback. The FBI was part of the Department of Justice, whereas the CBP was part of Homeland Security. In Finn’s experience, government departments jealously guarded their own, even the criminals.
“Salazar’s going to the FBI?”
“He says if he goes to Fishman, he’ll want to keep it in-house. He’ll just give it to the Office of Inspector General, and the Office of Inspector General is, as you and I both damned well know, an unsatisfactory outfit. The FBI knows about cybercrimes. They’re geared up for it.”
“If Fishman finds out that Salazar went to Justice without going through him first, he’ll fire him,” said Finn.
“He’s not going to find out. We’re going to keep this thing quiet, the FBI are going to investigate, and by the time they’ve figured it all out, Fishman will be gone and we’ll have Marvin. Marvin will be glad we got it done. He won’t care how.”
“I don’t know, Keith.”
“Listen, this is how it works in Washington. I don’t like it any more than you do, but I want to catch this hacker, or mole, whoever he is, and I want to do it before they force me to retire, all right? I want to leave
a clean house. The FBI knows what they’re doing. They’ll find him, and they’ll find him quickly. Speaking of which, they want to speak to your computer science kid. What’s her name?”
“Detection Enforcement Officer Leela Santos.”
While Klein wrote it down, Finn scratched his chin.
“So now what?” he said.
Klein capped his pen. “Salazar says hang tight, wait for the FBI to contact you. Meanwhile, I’m putting you back on the water. Gomez, too.”
Finn was surprised.
“You don’t look pleased,” said Klein.
“I thought you said that once it had gone to the inspector general, it’s out of your hands.”
Klein leaned back in his office swivel chair. “What’s the date today, Finn?”
“April 24.”
“April 24. In ten weeks, they’ll give me a gold watch and tell me, ‘Thank you for your service.’ Until then, this is still my station, and I will not have my best marine interdiction agent sitting on the dock. If anybody’s got anything to say about that, they can talk to me. Hell, they’re kicking me out anyway, aren’t they? What more can they do? Go fishing, Finn. It’s what you do best.”
ELEVEN
TWO days later, a Friday, Finn and Mona were on an early-morning flight to Mexico City. Finn had switched shifts with a colleague so he could go with her, and now, sitting in the plane looking out the small window, he was struck by how similar Mexico City looked to LA, with its sprawl and nearby mountains. He could see no sign of its notorious smog, and indeed, a half hour later, he and Mona stood in clear, bright, high-altitude sunshine in the queue for a cab outside the terminal. It was Finn’s first time in the Mexican capital, and the airport alone elicited in him a discordant sense of both arriving somewhere new and discovering it to be familiar, as though, after years of staring at the moon through a telescope until he could recognize its every sea and crater, he was for the first time seeing its dark side. Mona—who, Finn knew, had spent a semester in Mexico City during college—seemed lost in another world entirely.
They climbed into a cab and asked the driver to take them to Ciudad Nezahualcóyotl. The guy shook his head. No way, he said. The driver of the car behind him refused as well. So did the next one. Finally, they gave up and went back into the terminal, where Mona asked someone where they could catch a bus.
On the bus, Mona explained where they were going.
“Carmen told me she grew up in Ciudad Neza and that she could hear the crowd roaring from the stadium whenever the home team, the Cementeros, scored a goal. So I looked up the stadium. Then I did a search for middle schools within shouting distance of it. There’s only one. That’s our starting point.”
Finn shook his head in wonder. “You’re a genius, you know that?”
Mona gave him a sad smile, then leaned her forehead against the window.
The bus dropped them outside the school gate. Finn looked around. The school’s perimeter wall was entirely tagged in graffiti. The high metal gate was locked. Across the street was a row of double-story, flat-roofed, informally designed buildings, some of them plastered, some plain cinder block. The only consistent feature was the bars on all their windows, both street level and upper floor. Several shops were open for business—a bodega, a cell phone shop, a man standing under an umbrella selling carnitas from a pushcart. Most of the vehicles traveling by were recent models. The sidewalk was in need of repair, and pedestrians skirted around large muddy puddles that remained from a recent rain. To Finn, they seemed like regular, middle-class people—women with strollers, guys in collared shirts, old folks. A couple of mangy-looking dogs trotted past, their ribs showing. Still, it didn’t match Finn’s idea of a slum. Grimy, unplanned, low income, sure. But why call it a slum?
Mona smiled. “The meaning of a word is its use,” she said.
“What?”
“Something I learned in college. Half the people here don’t have running water. No running water is one of the academic definitions of a slum.”
Finn reflected on that. “I guess I was expecting something worse, the way the cabdrivers reacted,” he said. “So, where do they get their water?”
“They buy it from those guys.” Mona pointed at a donkey-drawn cart ambling down the street. The cart had a water tank on it. People were placing plastic drums on the sidewalk. “The city gives away the water for free, but the residents have to pay the middleman. They buy what they can afford, then ration it month to month.”
Finn watched the man get down from the cart and attach a hose between the tank and a blue drum. Money changed hands. He looked up and noticed the water tanks perched on stands above the houses.
Mona pressed the security intercom button by the school gate. A woman in dark slacks and a cardigan appeared at the gate. Mona spoke to her in Spanish. Finn didn’t catch everything, but he understood when Mona explained that a former pupil had died in the United States. They wanted to notify her parents, she said.
The woman, who Mona said was the principal, invited them in. Finn and Mona followed her through the yard, where kids in uniform stopped their playing to stare at them. In her office, the principal asked them to sit and went to a filing cabinet. “Qué pena,” she said, flipping through files. She said some more, which Finn didn’t catch. Mona translated for him. “She says she remembers Carmen well. She was a spirited girl.”
“Ella quería ser actriz,” said the principal.
The principal pulled out a file and hesitated a moment before opening it. A conversation ensued that Finn couldn’t follow.
Mona said something, and then the principal nodded, relieved. “Pobre Carmucha,” she said, writing something down on a piece of paper and handing it to Mona.
* * *
Outside, Mona explained why the principal had hesitated. “Carmen has a little sister, Clara, who is a student at the school. The principal wanted to know whether she should tell her. I said no, wait for us to go to the parents first.”
Mona followed the directions on the piece of paper that the principal had given her, and Finn followed Mona. After a five-minute walk, they came to a narrow house. Mona pressed the buzzer. A potbellied man with gray hair opened the door but not the grille. Through its bars, Mona asked if he was Señor Jorge Amado Vega. He nodded warily. “We’re here about your daughter,” she said in Spanish.
“Clara?” he said.
Mona shook her head. “Carmen.”
He unlocked the grille. Jorge Amado Vega shook Mona’s and then Finn’s hand with a rough-skinned palm. They followed him through a lounge, down a lightless corridor, to a kitchen where a short, wiry woman stood at a counter, husking corn, dropping the husks into a bucket by her feet. Jorge Amado Vega introduced her as his wife, Maria Elena. Finn recognized Carmen in her features—the big, gleaming eyes, the golden skin stretched over high cheekbones. If Maria Elena was surprised to see them, she didn’t show it.
Finn looked around the room. He got the impression that Jorge Amado Vega had built the house himself. There was a kitchen table with a plastic tablecloth, a crucifix on the wall, and a TV on a sideboard. At the back, a dutch door gave onto a tiny yard. The top half was open, and something squealed from the yard. He glanced over the half door and saw the biggest hog he’d ever laid eyes on—a great, pony-sized beast too large for the yard containing it. He wondered if it could even turn around in there. Maria Elena emptied the bucket of husks into the yard, washed her hands, and invited Finn and Mona to sit. She sat across from them and stared. Finn got the feeling that she knew what was coming and was steeling herself. He assumed she would react with the forbearing he’d come to expect on the faces of so many of the migrants he had intercepted. Yet when Mona broke the news, tears burst from Maria Elena’s river-stone eyes. “Lo siento,” he heard Mona say.
Finn paid close attention. He wanted to follow the conversation with his limited Spanish. He was fortunate in that Carmen’s parents spoke slowly.
“It was the telenovelas,” said Jo
rge Amado, leaning against the doorjamb. He made no move to comfort his wife. He pointed at the television. “She watched that rubbish all day. It gave her foolish ideas.”
Mona turned to Carmen’s mother. “Señora Vega, when was the last time you heard from Carmen?” she said.
Señora Vega pushed herself up from the table, went to a drawer, and brought back a postcard. Mona read it, then handed it to Finn.
“She must’ve bought it at the commissary,” said Mona in English. “She didn’t tell me she’d contacted her parents.”
Finn looked at the card. On the picture side was the California flag. The card had been postmarked in Paradise, California, on April 3—three weeks earlier, and the day before Carmen’s arraignment before Judge Ross.
Carmen’s last words to her mother, scribbled in a childish script, were in a Spanish basic enough for Finn to read: “Mama, I am in the United States. God willing, I will make a new life here. I am sorry for leaving you and Clara. One day I will bring you both here, I promise. I love you like the sky. Carmen.”
Maria Elena asked how her daughter had died.
Finn noticed Mona hesitate.
“They think a rattlesnake bit her,” she said.
“A rattlesnake?” said Carmen’s mother, startled.
Mona put down the postcard and pulled a sheaf of documents from her bag. “These are copies of the reports from the hospital where they took Carmen, the coroner who examined her, and the police who investigated. I have translated all three into Spanish.”
Maria Elena looked at the pile of documents with a defeated expression. She made no move to reach for them. “Tell me what they say,” she said.
Mona nodded. “The detention center is in the desert, north of Mexicali. There are rattlesnakes there. The guards found Carmen unconscious on a bench. The doctor came, but it was too late. The snake had bitten her three times on the arm. Nobody saw it happen. They took her to the hospital, but she died in the ambulance.”
“What will they do with her body?”
