The Rivers Run Dry Read online

“The brush is hiding something. And it’s rather significant.”

  “Such as?” I asked.

  “Difficult to say at this point. But he recognized my bluff quickly, and I believe it’s because he’s so focused on the subterranean aspects of life. When a man hides things, he looks for the same secrecy in others. And, of course, he ran. He’s the first suspect we should investigate. Then, possibly, the man named Mac, though he’s much less probable.”

  “Maybe they worked together, taking the girl,” I suggested.

  She shook her head. “This girl’s been gone, what, nine days? I don’t see this Mac as a patient man. And I can’t see those two working together. He clearly despises Suggs. And if they took her, why haven’t they sent a ransom note to the parents? They’re greedy men. Why bother gambling if they have a sure thing? The parents will pay, we know that.” She turned to McLeod. “Raleigh deserves some recognition for tonight.”

  McLeod nodded. “Harmon, you got any more questions for Lutini?”

  I shook my head.

  “Expect a call from upstairs,” McLeod told her. “Get some rest.”

  Lucia left the room, Ngo followed. And I stood, gathering notes from my interviews of Basker, Ngo, Jack, the two agents who pursued the runner, and the Tweedles, who mostly offered exclamations of fear. Now I had to write an official log, the catalogue of procedural details that took place, why we chose certain procedures, at what time, what happened. After that, the FD-302s, documenting all the facts according to each agent—facts only: what the agent saw and heard, no insinuations, no hunches, no embellishments. All 302s read like dialogue from Dragnet.

  “Write everything up tonight,” McLeod said. “They’ll want it upstairs first thing.”

  I nodded. I could hear the excitement in his voice. And I could feel the pinch in my spine, stabbing at my right shoulder blade, radiating down my arm. That is what I got for curling up like a pretzel in the truck cab wearing a bulletproof vest. It was a foolish error, nodding off, and during the post-surveillance interviews with McLeod looking on, I kept waiting for somebody to mention my mistake. But no one did. And it made me wonder how long I’d been out—five minutes, ten? Fifteen? Long enough to dream about a river of fire. Long enough to develop a crick in my neck. But perhaps not long enough for anyone to notice. At least, that was my hope.

  “When I tell the SAC that Lutini took these guys to the cleaners . . .” McLeod chuckled, shaking his head, imagining the reaction from the special agent in charge. “He’ll want Lutini undercover full time on poker games.”

  I shifted the notebooks to my left arm, dangling my right, alleviating one fraction of the pain. “Anything else, sir?”

  I caught the “sir” too late and was too tired to apologize. I wanted to go home, take a shower, sleep.

  He ran his hands over the short black whiskers, making a sandpapery sound. “Just so you’re warned, Ngo wants to write up his own report.”

  “One less 302 for me.” Besides, Ngo offered only meager information during his interview.

  “I wish he was writing a 302,” McLeod said. “But he’s writing a memo. He’s sending it to the SAC. It’s about your screwup tonight.”

  A memo. Ngo wanted a memo. So the suits upstairs could read about my dozing off.

  “I made an error,” I said.

  “Yeah,” McLeod agreed. “He’s got a point.”

  “I should have been more careful.”

  “It was a dangerous situation, Harmon.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “If you’re going to collar a runner, wait for backup.”

  “Pardon?”

  “Especially with a disabled vehicle. That was dangerous. Ngo wants it on the record that he didn’t advise you to take the runner by yourself. He says you acted without authorization—his words—and that you put yourself, and the Tweedles, in jeopardy.”

  I started counting to twenty but gave up on four. “The runner was a flight case. The order was to bring him in alive. That’s what I did.”

  “But it was danger—”

  “It was a good collar. Sir.” My throat felt tight, cinched with anger. Ngo’s memo was the same sort of over-regimented attitude that landed me in Seattle. Another addition to my personnel file, and it might keep me here. Or get me transferred to South Dakota.

  “Harmon, the end doesn’t justify the means.”

  “I’m not saying it does. But if I didn’t get out of the vehicle, if I sat there thinking about protocol instead of doing my job, would Ngo write me up because I was a coward?”

  He raised his hands, placating. “Harmon, listen—”

  “I brought in the runner. That was the objective. I met it.”

  “We all make mistakes,” he said. “You’re still a little green behind the ears.”

  Once—just once—I wanted to correct his malaprop. “I would appreciate your support. This was a nearly perfect night for Violent Crimes. Maybe Ngo wants to ruin it by offering his version of events.”

  He stared at the tasseled loafers, leaning back against the counter, crossing his ankles. Then pushed himself from the counter.

  “I can’t get in the middle,” he said. “Ngo’s not part of my squad. And Organized Crime does things their own way. If he sees a need for this, then he sees a need.”

  “What need are we talking about?”

  “Harmon, take it easy.”

  “Ngo should have stayed with the van instead of rushing into the warehouse to look like a hero. He lost the guy. The need here is Ngo looking to divert attention from his own error. Why aren’t we writing him up?”

  McLeod sighed. “You got lucky. He didn’t.”

  “I don’t believe in luck.”

  He stared at me for a long moment. “Put the reports in my box. I’ll be back in here at six.” When he reached the door, he turned. “Look at it this way. Lutini made us money. That’ll smooth a lot of rumpled feathers.”

  I typed the 302s feeling an exhaustion that made even close objects seem distant and distorted. But then a thought of Ngo and his memo would slip into my mind, and a barbed surge of adrenaline would twist into my system, fury propelling me through the dry forms. After I slid all the paperwork into McLeod’s office box, I rode the elevator down to the parking garage. My government ride was parked in the visitor’s space, and under the dim underground lights the weird purple paint looked midnight blue, a color like the one I’d seen in my dream.

  When the guard raised the steel gate that led to Spring Street, I drove through the deserted city, watching the wind lift sheets of loose newsprint, carrying it across the road like paper cranes. I got home close to 2:00 a.m. and took a hot shower, hoping the water’s heat and force would beat the pinch from my back. Madame was lying on my bed when I got out, the digital clock reading 2:16 a.m. I set the alarm, curled up with the dog, and fell into a deep and immediate sleep.

  The next morning, before anybody else was up, I pulled fresh clothing from the closet and tiptoed downstairs, scribbling a note on the kitchen pad, telling my mother and Aunt Charlotte that I hoped to see them for dinner. Before leaving, I checked the cupboards, hoping to find something to eat. But the shelves were bare.

  I drove to the office under an autumn dawn like melted pewter. I avoided the freeway, taking Madison Street into the city’s center, relishing every stoplight for the rest it provided. My legs felt weighted walking up the hill to the office, the wind buffeting every step. At my desk, I dropped my gear and walked to the conference room, money in hand, tossing two dollars in the wicker basket beside the coffeemaker, a donation that paid for Starbucks instead of Bureau-issued Folgers. I drank the first cup staring at the bulletin board—new incentives for Iraq, still not enough—then carried the second cup to my desk.

  There was a folder waiting, a background check needed on somebody who’d applied for a federal job. I pushed the file aside and lifted my calendar, counting the days. Courtney VanAlstyne went missing Sunday, October 9. Today was Thursday, October 20. I st
ared at the orderly boxes on the calendar, a sick feeling in my stomach. McLeod came out of his glassed-in office holding the documents I’d typed up just hours ago. His face was cleanly shaven, the red tie in place. But dark circles shadowed the keen blue eyes.

  “They all walked,” he said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Every one of them walked this morning,” he said. “Lawyers sprang them before we’d even finished debriefing Lutini.”

  “What about the runner?”

  “Slugs?”

  “Suggs. Ernie Suggs.”

  He tugged on his earlobe.

  “What?” I said.

  “We had to let him go. He’s filing charges against you.”

  “Charges—for what?”

  “For breaking his wrist.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “They had to pull off the cuffs in the interview room. His hand was blue. His lawyer’s the happiest man in Seattle.”

  “I did not break his wrist.”

  McLeod evaluated my face, as though searching for mendacity. “Did you double lock the cuffs?”

  I remembered the feel of the man’s clammy skin, his nearly boneless elbow. How I clamped down the cuffs right before the Bureau car pulled up and Ngo took him away. But did I punch the lock, the mechanism that kept the nickel-plated hasps from closing completely?

  “I always lock them, it’s a habit,” I said. “I keep my index finger hooked under the cuffs. When the metal hits, I stop ratcheting.”

  “But you don’t actually remember pushing in the lock last night?”

  I shook my head.

  “This will be a fresh hill,” he said.

  He meant hell, I knew that. But “hill” wasn’t far off. I was looking at a heap of internal memos and interrogations by management, subpoenas from defense attorneys, courtroom hearings, a fresh hill of paper to join Ngo’s report in my personnel file. It could take years to clear my name. If that was even possible.

  “You okay?” McLeod asked.

  I picked up the background check on the new federal worker, tapping the file against my desk. When I glanced up, I could see McLeod’s question had been genuine. But I avoided a genuine answer.

  “Sure, I’m fine.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Aside from all this garbage, she’s still missing. A couple days, okay. Maybe she’s off somewhere. But at this point, no. And I keep coming back to the casino. This guy works there.”

  He shuffled the documents in his hands. “Here. I approved the search on the casino. Shoot the request over to the U.S. attorney, ASAP.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Then I want you to write up another affidavit,” he said. “Let’s gather some probable cause for this guy’s house.”

  “The runner?”

  “The parents don’t care if his wrist’s broken. They’re still calling the Senator, he’s still calling the ASAC, and we can’t roll over because some defense attorney is about to get rich. If you say you didn’t break his wrist, you didn’t break his wrist.”

  “I didn’t break his wrist, sir.”

  “Stick to that story, Harmon. You’re going to need it.”

  chapter sixteen

  Twenty-two minutes after the faxes blistered back and forth between me and the U.S. attorney’s office, I walked north on Fourth Avenue to Stewart Street. The wind felt damp, full of a cool mist that seemed pressed out of the clouds. But it did not rain.

  Inside the U.S. District Court House, I found the federal magistrate’s office. Two suited attorneys ahead of me checked cell phones that were supposed to be turned off. When the attorneys left the magistrate’s office, they looked equally frustrated.

  The judge’s chambers smelled of thick cottony paper, the kind bound with thread into old books, and I closed the door behind me, smoothing down my wind-beaten hair as the judge read the warrants. He was somewhere in his sixties and wore the long-suffering expression of a bassett hound, the corner of every facial feature drooping. When he glanced up, his eyes appeared green-gray, like glacial lakes. He nodded at an empty Windsor chair. I sat down.

  Behind his teak desk, volumes of federal tortes bound in red leather stretched across the shelves, and I stared at a series of tugboat pictures in which the sturdy elliptical vessels pulled barges several times their size. His chambers felt like a ship—teak desk, Windsor chair, large brass hook holding the black robe—but my mind kept flashing to my father’s judicial chambers. I didn’t understand why until the judge started scrawling notes on a yellow legal pad, reading my minor petitions as if they were the Magna Carta.

  My father used to say his job description was “to seek justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with God.” When I joined the FBI’s mineralogy lab, I took his mission statement as my own, but less than a year later, after examining forensic evidence that proved beyond a shadow of a doubt what horrors man would inflict on his fellow man—and woman and child—the words of the minor prophet rang hollow to me. Murder. Rape. Child molestations that made the term perverted sound too polite. Mercy? For a guy who raped his three-year-old niece at knifepoint?

  My father shook his head. “God sees evil, Raleigh. His wrath is real. But his mercy equals his wrath. He won’t send one without the other. And neither should we.”

  I protested; an entire industry took advantage of mercy, purging psychopaths and pedophiles from prisons, extending paroles, unleashing brutalities on the innocent in crimes that grew worse with leniency.

  “I agree,” he said. “Mercy without judgment is pathetic. But judgment without mercy brings despair.”

  “But how do you know, how do you figure out what they deserve?”

  He had smiled at me. “I pay attention to the last part about walking humbly with God.”

  The judge cleared his throat. I glanced up. He stared at me over his reading glasses.

  “Indian land,” he said.

  “Pardon?”

  He held up the affidavit for the casino search. “You’re talking about Indian land here. We get into some hair-splitting legal boundaries where tribal rights are concerned. Indian land receives different interpretations under the law.”

  “Do we need more probable cause?”

  “Just be prepared,” he said. “Watch yourself. Don’t stride in there thinking the FBI is some sheriff in a Wild West movie. I’ve seen how some of you agents operate. Respect the people’s rights, but get what you need. Then get out.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Sir? Hmph.” He held up the second warrant, for Ernie Suggs’s house. “Not exactly clear-cut either, is it?”

  “No, sir.” I quickly told him about the previous night’s surveillance, how Suggs took off, how we believed he knew something about the missing girl who gambled heavily in the casino where he worked. “He’s a person of interest.”

  “Yeah, I got that. But a guy running from a surveillance operation? Let me tell you right now, the ACLU throws parties over that stuff. They’ll say, ‘Of course he ran, you’re the FBI.’ And the jury agrees with them because these days everybody’s a victim.”

  “What else do we need for you to sign it?”

  “Nothing,” he said. “But the U.S. attorney needs to know they’ll have to duke it out later in court. Watch your step on that search too, you hear?”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “Don’t thank me,” he growled. “Find that girl. I saw the story in the newspaper. Makes me sick. Used to be all we worried about was bears in the mountains. At least back then, we knew who the enemy was.”

  Outside the courthouse I looked around for Jack. He was supposed to meet me here—McLeod’s orders—and when I finally spotted his black Jeep, it was because of the curvaceous backside of a skirted woman. She leaned into the passenger window and tipped over the loading zone’s painted yellow curb, the ropy straps of her sandals winding like asps up the tanned bare legs. The wind caught the edges of her blue skirt. I heard her giggle.

  “Excuse me,” I s
aid.

  She turned around. “Oh.”

  I opened the car door, slipping into the leather seat, staring straight ahead. Her citrus perfume hitched on the wind, a scent that bit and beckoned at the same time, a smell like blood oranges marinated in rum.

  “You better call me, Jack,” she said.

  “I will, Becky.”

  She took one step back, wiggling her fingers. “You know where to find me.”

  The Jeep peeled from the curb. He looked over. “You got the search warrants signed?”

  “Search warrants?” I said. “What search warrants?”

  He braked, turning for the curb so fast I had to brace myself against the dashboard. A clutch of smokers outside the court-house turned, their faces startled.

  “You didn’t get the search warrants signed? Harmon, what were you doing in there, catching another nap?”

  “No, I was flirting. Isn’t that why we visit the courthouse, to flirt?”

  He glanced at the rearview mirror, waited one split second, and sped toward I-5. Following the highway south, he took I-90 east, and as we entered the long tunnel he reached between the seats, pulling out a plain manila envelope. He tossed it in my lap.

  “That girl you just insulted? She saved you a ton of paper-work. Check it out. Suggs has a prior, of sorts.”

  I opened the envelope and found a Maple Valley police report dated eight years ago. It described an unnamed ten-year-old girl walking home from school, taking her usual short cut through an abandoned field, when Ernest R. Suggs stepped out from behind a stand of trees and pulled her into the forest. The girls’ mother arrived home from work and found her daughter in the bathroom, sobbing, bleeding. The mother took the girl to the doctor, the doctor notified police.

  But the case never went to trial. Two weeks later, the girl recanted her story; the mother asked the police to drop the matter, and the incident would have disappeared except for a prosecutor who asked a judge to order a psychologist’s evaluation of Suggs. The evaluation was in there, too, a half page of abstract psychobabble. After reading the words “completely rehabilitated,” I closed the file. No sex offender was ever completely rehabilitated. At least, not by the justice system.