Death Rattle

by Alex Gilly

  “All right. I’ll deal with that,” said Joaquin.

  “I need someone to dig out the paperwork they’re asking for.”

  “On it,” said Natalie.

  “Okay. I’m going to make a list of people I want to get depositions from. I want to get to them before Wolfeson, White do.”

  Mona could feel the blood pumping through her veins. Her remorse had evaporated.

  “Joaquin?”

  “Yes?”

  “Thank you. Really. I mean it.”

  * * *

  For the next seven days, Finn and Mona barely saw each other. She was putting in fourteen-hour days at Juntos, and Finn was back on night patrols, which meant he was out on the water by the time she came home, and she was gone by the time he returned to shore. They left each other notes on the kitchen counter and sent each other the kind of ordinary texts that sustain the marriages of busy people: Miss you. Don’t overdo it. Dinner’s in the oven.

  The Juntos office in Boyle Heights became a hive of activity. Everyone on the team knew that Wolfeson, White were waging a war of attrition. The mega-firm was counting on their vast resources and their client’s deep pockets to bleed Juntos dry. You need armies of lawyers and vaults of money to fight legal battles against large corporations. “You, Ms. Jimenez, have neither,” Scott had said. Mona was working to prove him wrong.

  Through his recruitment agency, Joe Rodriguez seconded them three lawyers, on his dime. The expanded team succeeded in quickly having Wolfeson, White’s motion to move the case to Washington dismissed. Natalie managed to find all the documents they had requested, except the employment record at the nonexistent auto-parts factory in Tijuana. Mona drafted dozens of documents, then sent them by messenger to Wolfeson, White’s office downtown, insisting that someone there sign a receipt for every piece of paper she sent. It was an expensive but necessary move to prevent their crucial documents from mysteriously going missing—a classic delaying tactic.

  And indeed, Wolfeson, White tried everything. They would delay responding to requests for documents for as long as they could get away with and would then bombard Juntos with boxes of completely irrelevant paperwork. Couriers delivered document box after document box to the Juntos office, until the corridor was lined with them. The team had to review thousands of pages of cases that Wolfeson, White claimed were pertinent—only to discover that the claimed pertinence was either tenuous or nonexistent.

  Tempers frayed. There were squabbles. Joaquin slammed his door more than once. One of Rodriguez’s seconded lawyers called in sick and never came back. Once, Mona went to the bathroom and found Natalie sobbing in a stall. She took her out for lunch. The days went by. Summer arrived. No one took a break.

  Meanwhile, Michael Marvin’s nomination for secretary of Homeland Security gathered pace. When Mona learned that he was scheduled to appear before a congressional confirmation committee on the twelfth of June, she called everyone she knew with even the slightest influence in Washington and told them about Carmen’s death and conditions in Paradise Detention Center. She asked them to get a committee member to press Marvin on deaths in custody. She watched the hearing on C-SPAN, first with anticipation, then disappointment, before switching off the TV in disgust. The committee members threw Marvin questions so soft, they may as well have been pompoms. It wouldn’t have surprised her to learn that the committee members were reading questions drafted for them by Wolfeson, White. They were handing Marvin the nomination on a platter.

  The next day, Mona called Marius Littlemore to find out what progress he had made with the $5.8 million that the BSCA had paid AmeriCo. He said they hadn’t yet figured out what the money was for.

  “Without the quid pro quo, we don’t have any crime to prosecute,” he said. “Michael Marvin’s got a lot of powerful friends. There’s a lot of pressure on us to drop it.”

  “What about from AmeriCo? Can’t you find anything on that side?”

  “We’ve talked to their financial officer. Maws was the only one who was there when the deal was made. With him dead, no one knows anything.”

  Mona had called the lead detective working on Maws’s murder every week since she’d witnessed it over the phone. She called him again after speaking with Littlemore.

  “We’re not getting anywhere on the corruption angle,” said the detective. “So now we’re interviewing pimps and sex workers, see if anyone had any dealings with him. The theory is, Maws did something to a girl and a pimp decided to do something about it.”

  “What makes you think that he did something to a girl that warrants getting killed?” said Mona.

  “We went through his porn viewing history on his computer. He was into some pretty nasty stuff,” said the detective.

  Mona remembered Maws’s clammy hand.

  “What about the recording from my phone?” asked Mona. “Why did he say ‘lawyer is lost’ before he died?”

  “I don’t know what that means. The forensics techs couldn’t come up with anything conclusive from the audio. There’s no database of voices that we can use to identify the voices.”

  Mona hung up in frustration. Neither Littlemore nor the police had made any progress. She reminded herself to focus on her own job. She knew Littlemore was competent, and she had no reason to believe the cops weren’t. It was frustrating, but that’s how things stood.

  Right then, Natalie came in. “I finally got you a meeting with your snake guy,” she said.

  TWENTY-TWO

  THE snake man’s name was Stewart Butterfield, and Mona had been trying to see him since April. He was the guy Finn’s Fish and Wildlife colleagues at LAX had called in to get the snakes off the trafficker from Vietnam.

  Turned out that snakes were an enthusiasm rather than a vocation for Butterfield; his day job was designing robots for the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. He explained apologetically that he’d been in Tokyo at a robotics conference, and then he had had to fly to Chile for a satellite launch, and anyway he was sorry it had taken so long to schedule a meeting. Butterfield was obviously a busy man, but Mona found that he was more than happy to talk to her about snakes—she got the impression he could talk to her for hours, so long as the subject was snakes. They were seated in comfortable armchairs in his office on the JPL campus in Pasadena. Mona had her yellow legal pad out. Butterfield wore an open-collar Oxford shirt and tortoiseshell spectacles. On the wall behind him was a framed blueprint for some kind of space vehicle.

  “Is that the one that went to the moon?” asked Mona, being polite.

  “Actually, that one we sent to Mars. The Sojourner rover. It’s interesting, the Sojourner ended up with traditional wheels, but one of my early designs was based on the sidewinder.”

  Seeing Mona’s incomprehension, Butterfield elaborated, “You have to remember, Mars is a sandy planet, and if you want to design a robot that moves efficiently over sand, you could do worse than mimicking Crotalus cerastes, the sidewinder rattlesnake. The sidewinder undulates across the sand like a sine wave.” Butterfield waved a finger in the air to illustrate. “The sections of its body that touch the ground don’t move; only the sections lifted off the ground are in motion. That way, it never disturbs the sand. Wheels, on the other hand, move. Wheels can dig themselves in if the sand’s really soft. We didn’t know then how soft the sand was on Mars, and it doesn’t seem very clever to spend billions of dollars sending a robot to another planet just for it to get stuck.”

  Mona nodded as though she followed. She was worried that if she admitted to not knowing how a sine wave moved, he’d illuminate her by making use of the whiteboard by his desk. Right at that moment, she was more interested in snakebites than sine waves.

  “Sorry, I don’t mean to bore you,” said Butterfield, seeing through her polite smile. “I find snakes really interesting from a design point of view. How can I help?”

  Mona told him about Carmen. He listened intently.

  “I’m suing the corporation that operates the detention center for wron
gful death,” she explained. “My case is based on the demonstrable fact that they built the detention center in known rattlesnake country, yet took no steps to either protect their detainees from the snakes or provide adequate treatment in the case of being bitten. I’m hoping you’ll be willing to go on the record as an expert witness on rattlesnakes.”

  “Paradise is right in the heart of snake country, there’s no question. Hikers do get bitten out there, predominantly by western diamondbacks. Still, what happened to your client is extremely unusual,” he said when she had finished.

  “Why?”

  “Most rattlesnake bites occur late in the summer. Yet in your email, you say that your client was bitten on April 22.”

  Mona sat up straight. “Do snakes hibernate?” She hadn’t even thought of it.

  “Well, some species of rattlesnake brumate when the temperature drops. It’s a type of semidormancy, not unlike hibernation, except they wake up for a sip of water every now and then. But in April, they are beginning to be active anyway.”

  “So they’re not fully asleep?”

  “It’s not impossible that the snake that bit your client had come out of its den, for instance, to bask in the sun if it was unusually warm. It’s just extremely unlikely.”

  Mona didn’t remember the day being unusually warm, but she made a mental note to check.

  “And then there are some species—like the sidewinder, as a matter of fact—that aren’t dormant at all,” continued Butterfield. “They’re nocturnal in summer and diurnal in winter. But the sidewinder’s pretty shy. When people get bitten by rattlesnakes in California, most of the time it’s by a diamondback, as I said. And you hardly ever see a diamondback outside of summer.”

  “Is there a way of telling what kind of snake bit her? From the venom, I mean?” asked Mona.

  “Did they do a toxicological analysis?”

  Mona had brought the coroner’s report with her. She handed it to him now. While he read it, her gaze drifted to a framed photo hanging by the door. It was of a rocky, rust-colored sand hill. It looked like rattlesnake country. The plaque read Mount Sharp. Mona realized, with some wonderment, that it was photo of a mountain on Mars.

  “This is odd,” murmured Butterfield.

  Mona turned her focus back on him. Butterfield removed his spectacles. “Like I said, most envenomations in California are by diamondbacks, and that’s what I would assume bit your client, even if it was strangely out of season. But the thing is, diamondback venom is primarily hemotoxic, rather than neurotoxic. It poisons the blood, not the nerves. If they found neurotoxin in her blood, it couldn’t be from a diamondback,” he said.

  “Is there a kind of snake that would have neurotoxin in its venom?”

  “Oh sure, many. The Mojave rattlesnake, for instance, has neurotoxic venom.”

  “So maybe that’s what bit her?”

  Butterfield put his glasses back on and read some more. After a moment, he said, “No. Definitely not a Mojave.” He leaned forward and pointed out to Mona a chart consisting of numbers and chemical symbols. Like many nonscientists, her eyes had skipped over the complex-looking chart when she’d first read the document and had gone straight to the prose summary.

  “See this? It’s a chemical analysis of the toxins they found in her blood. This is the neurotoxin they found. It’s a type called dendrotoxin, and there’s only one snake in the world that produces it.” Butterfield touched the tip of the arm of his spectacles to his lower lip. He was clearly pleased with himself for connecting the dots. “The world’s most dangerous snake,” he said. “The black mamba.” He paused another moment, then added, “Endemic to central Africa.”

  Mona’s heart raced. “How would someone get hold of a black mamba?” she asked.

  “Legally, you mean? With great difficulty,” said Butterfield. “It’s easier to buy a semiautomatic rifle in this country than it is to buy an elapid. There’s no constitutional amendment for cobras.”

  “What about illegally?”

  “Well, there are ways,” said Butterfield vaguely. “Traffickers and so on. But I’m afraid I’m not involved in that world and can be of no help to you there.”

  “You’ve been immensely helpful to me already, Dr. Butterfield.”

  * * *

  The first thing Mona did when she left Butterfield’s office in Pasadena was call Finn. She told him what she’d learned.

  “If it’s from Africa, that means someone brought it into the country. I’ll call Wilkins, my buddy at Fish and Wildlife, see if he’s heard anything about a black mamba,” said Finn.

  “Thanks,” said Mona. She hung up. Then she dialed Paradise Detention Center and asked to speak to the warden.

  “It wasn’t a rattlesnake that bit Carmen,” she told Pischedda. “It was a black mamba, from Africa. Someone brought it into the center. I want a log of everyone who entered PDC on April 22.”

  There was a long silence on the phone. Finally, Pischedda said he would be happy to release the visitor log to Mona.

  “All you have to do is submit a request in writing to our legal department in Washington,” he said. “I’ll send you the log as soon as I get a green light from legal.” Pischedda hung up.

  Mona reached her office when her phone started to ring again. She checked the screen. It was Finn.

  “Wilkins said he hadn’t heard of anything like that, but he’d keep an eye out,” he said.

  Mona thanked him. She tilted back her office chair and looked out the window at downtown. “Carmen dreamed Soto had found her,” she said.

  “I know.”

  “Maybe he found a way to get into PDC.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Nick?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Before she died, Carmen said she got a prison job in the canteen.”

  “Okay.”

  “Maws said AmeriCo sends two trucks a day out there, delivering food. To the canteen.”

  A long silence.

  “I’ll pick you up in twenty minutes,” he said.

  TWENTY-THREE

  WHEN Finn arrived to pick her up, Mona noticed that he was still in his utility uniform, the words CBP FEDERAL AGENT stenciled in large letters across his back. They drove to the AmeriCo office in Anaheim and pulled in next to the loading dock, where five or six workers were loading a truck.

  Mona considered them for a moment. She turned to Finn.

  “Some of those guys, if they see you dressed like that, might get a fright they don’t deserve,” she said.

  Finn leaned on the steering wheel and watched the workers. “You need me, just wave.”

  Mona got out of the truck and climbed the short flight of stairs to the loading dock. She waved at a young guy pushing a pallet jack—the same guy she’d spoken with last time she’d visited. He took out his earbuds.

  In Spanish, Mona said, “Remember me? I’m looking for someone who I think might work here.”

  “Who?” said the young guy.

  Mona took out her phone, brought up a picture of Soto, and showed it to the guy. The guy nodded.

  “I’ve seen him. One time only,” he said.

  “When?”

  He scratched the side of his head.

  “Not long after Easter, maybe the end of April? He came with us in the truck.”

  “Where to?”

  “Out to the desert, to the prison out there.”

  “You mean Paradise?”

  “Yeah. We usually go in pairs. But that time we were three, with that guy in the middle.”

  “Who told you to take him?”

  “The boss. He died.”

  “Had you ever seen this guy before?”

  “No.”

  “Have you seen him again since?”

  “No. Like I said, just the one time.”

  “What did you talk about in the truck?”

  “We didn’t talk.”

  “It’s a four-hour drive. You didn’t talk?”

  “We didn’t talk.�
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  “What did he do when you got there?”

  “He helped us unload. He acted like one of us. He was wearing overalls like us.”

  “Then what happened?”

  “He told us to wait in the truck, he had something to take care of.”

  “Did you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Where did he go?”

  “Into the prison.”

  “How long was he gone for?”

  The guy shrugged. “Maybe one hour? I slept in the cabin.”

  “What happened when he came back?”

  “We drove back here.”

  “Then what?”

  “Then I went home. I don’t know where he went.”

  “Anything else stand out about him? Anything you remember?”

  The guy thought for a moment. “He carried a stick.”

  “Like a walking stick?”

  “No. With a hook on the end, like they have on boats.”

  “Do you remember what he used it for?”

  The guy shook his head.

  “I don’t know. It was creepy looking, though,” he said.

  * * *

  Mona got back into Finn’s truck. They drove out of the business park. She dialed Marius Littlemore. She had promised to let him know as soon as she found out anything relevant to the suspicious payment or Maws’s death.

  She told him what the worker on the loading dock had told her about the passenger in the truck.

  “I’ll ask the judge for a warrant to get the PDC’s visitor log for that day,” said Littlemore. “And I’ll get their surveillance footage, too. It’ll take a few days. I’ll keep you in the loop.”

  Mona thanked him. Then she asked him what he’d learned about AmeriCo.

  “There are only two shareholders,” said Littlemore. “Maws’s ex-wife has 49 percent. The rest is held by an entity called Loyola Holdings, in the Cayman Islands. Maybe the ex-wife knows more than she’s saying.”

  “I’ve met her. I don’t think she’s involved. Can you find out who owns Loyola Holdings?”