Death and Desire (17 page)

“You admit you forged balance sheets, took a duffel of cash, and watched them auction off your heritage. I need an expert to look at this before I do anything. You're welcome to take them to the police.” I held out the papers to him.

“No.”

I softened. “You can't go back to work. You realize that. You need to take your family some place safe. Tonight, Gage.”

He nodded morosely.

I turned the camera off. “Go home and tell your wife,” I said quietly. “Get out tonight. And, Gage, stay in touch.” I handed him my card with my personal cell number.

He wiped his nose on the back of his hand and gave a halfhearted nod.

The sun was low when I made it back to Flag. I texted Trace and Louis that I was on my way home. No reply from either of them.

L
ouis was booting his computer when I arrived at work carrying coffee for both of us.

“Listen to this, Louis.” I plunked the camera down in front him.

“You shot video of a side door panel?”

“I didn't say look—
listen
,” I said excitedly.

I leaned over to put the camera closer to him and the bag slid out of the front of my shirt.

“When did you start wearing a medicine pouch?”

“Since Yanaha gave it to me.”

“She got you blessed?”

“How did you know that?”

“I guessed. Makes the pouch more protective. How's that working with your Scottish beliefs?”

“Fine, I hope. I nailed a horseshoe upside down on the front door to keep the evil out. That's a Scottish belief.” I threw up my hands and shrugged. “I'll try anything. Just listen to this.” I played the audio from Gage's interview. Marty heard the audio begin and bulled his way over to my desk. He stared at the ceiling as he listened to Gage. “Who is that guy?”

“Gage Notah, an accountant at Dinetah. I promised him his name wouldn't be used.”

“You got those records he's talking about?”

“Yes. You told me to get corroboration. Here it is.” I pointed at the camera and the paper files.

“You gonna blow this town up. That mine is the biggest employer in the area.”

“Are we going to turn a blind eye to corruption?”

He harrumphed. “I'm damned sure smart enough to run what you got past the station's legal adviser. You know this guy could be playing you, wanting to get revenge on his employer.”

“Then he gave an Academy Award-winning performance of terror. He's real, Marty. I'll get a forensic accountant to review these statements.”

“Make me a copy.” He gestured to the statements. “And copy of that audio, too. I'm getting the lawyer on the phone.”

I burned the files to a flash drive, walked down to Marty's office, and laid it on his desk. He picked up the USB, idly running it through his fingers. “Best accounting firm in town is Madler and Associates. Station uses them. Here's their card. Talk to Madler—not one of those kids he has working for him. I told him you would be calling.”

“Will do. Thanks, Marty.”

I called Mr. Madler's office and begged for an appointment in the morning. “Nine sharp and I don't have much time to give you on such short notice,” Madler grumbled.

 

I left town too tired to grocery shop, so when I got home I fed Mac and fumbled through the pantry looking for something to eat. All I found was a jar of peanut butter and a package of unopened dates. I took them and a glass of wine back into the living room and flipped on the TV to cable news. I mindlessly dipped the dates in the peanut butter and popped them in my mouth while CNN told me every bad thing that had happened anywhere on the planet in the last twenty-four hours.

Mac ambled over and sat on my sock-clad feet, warming them. I flipped through channels and stopped the roulette game of what to watch by settling on the Travel Channel. I capped the peanut butter and began to relax, letting Rick Steves take me to Italy.

I felt the vibrations before I heard the sound. Drumming? I glanced at the clock. At eleven o'clock? I had been half-asleep while the TV droned on. Couldn't have been drumming. I must have dreamed it.

I shook off my drowsiness. Mac was up and his ears pricked forward. Low, clear, rhythmic booms punctuated the night stillness. Easing over, I turned off the lamp and TV. “Shush, boy.” I grabbed his collar and pulled him with me to the back window.

The outside lights were off, but a half-moon cast an eerie light across the deck. My eyes were slow to adjust to the gloom. Mac lowered his head, rumbling out a deep growl.

Movement rippled through the darkness. A figure was slinking inside the yard. Just as I covered my mouth to stifle a scream, moonlight caught his shirtless body in the cool night. Fur covered his head. He lifted his head to scent the night and caught our smell. He rotated his head slowly, and leered at us. Mac went wild barking and clawed the wall.

Black stripes on his face glinted in the moonlight. Long fur trailed down his back, waving in the wind. He went to step up on the deck. He stumbled, tried again to take the stair, and lost his balance, going down on one knee.

The steps were only six-inch risers. Why couldn't he get up on the deck? I held my medicine pouch in front of me, praying,
Oh God, help me.

He tried a third time to step up on the deck, but it was as though an invisible wall kept him out. Fear shot through my gut and the room temperature dropped to an intense cold. Foreboding hung in the heavy air and the yellow eye of the reptilian side of my brain lazed a wink.

I fingered the medicine pouch with one hand and clutched Mac's collar with the other.

The shape-shifter put his hands out in front of him, feeling and tapping the invisible barrier between us. He threw back his head, opened his mouth, and keened a high-pitched, chilling howl. His red eyes bored into the house before he turned and made a standing broad jump over the six-foot cedar fence.

Instantly, Mac's body relaxed. He stopped barking, wagged his tail, and brushed against my legs.

I was rooted to the floor, dizzy for air, my heart banging in my ears. Sweat dripped down my face. The drumming had stopped. I couldn't remember when it had stopped, but all that remained was Mac's panting and the soft sigh of the wind through the pines.

I looked down at my chest. My right hand had never left the pouch around my neck. I heard Yanaha's soft whisper,
You will be protected.

Holy crap! I hurried through the house, checked the doors, windows, and blinds. I already knew the house was secure, but it felt reassuring to confirm it was. I sank back in the chair with Mac beside me. He looked perfectly at ease. Of course. He was a dog. He lived in the moment. Why wouldn't he be at ease?

I could call Trace or even Louis, but somehow I knew I was safe. Because I had amulets against evil now? A medicine pouch and an upside-down horseshoe? My rational brain scoffed at myself.
Yeah, I think I do!
I shouted at the resident cynic in my brain.

All those laboratory-science theories drilled into us in high school.
Only what is able to be duplicated in a lab is truth. Only what science can measure and study exists
. I was maintaining a tenuous handhold on western scientific theory as the scope of my reality
.
Or was I? The question jarred me. What was happening to me was not measurable, but it was real.

I called Mac into the bedroom and went to bed clutching the pouch.

L
ouis and I were seated in Madler's austere accounting office by nine o'clock the next morning. Gray was the predominant color of decor: carpet, walls, and modern furniture with a touch of smoky metal.

A side door into the private office opened and Madler entered. I stood, offering my hand.

“Marty said you have some financial information to be analyzed.” Blunt. To the point. No handshake.

I handed him a copy of the papers Gage had stolen and remained silent. I didn't want to spoil his objectivity by telling Gage's story.

He thumbed through the stack of documents. “A lot here. I'll call you when I have an opinion,” he said, giving us our leave.

I handed him my card, scribbling my cell on the back.

In the elevator to the parking garage, I told Louis, “Let's go somewhere and study these in peace, not back to the station.”

“My place. Eric's at work. Your wheels are turning. Give.”

“I need a calculator and some time. Now that Gage has explained some of the process, the stuff makes more sense.”

 

We commandeered the dining room in Louis's home. Legal pads and pencils, calculators and coffee cups cluttered the tabletop. After three hours of playing with numbers and drinking enough coffee to wire me to the max, I threw down the calculator. “We're missing something.”

“I'm ready to quit if you are.” He wiped his tired face with the back of his hand.

“Not yet, there's a pattern emerging. The profits from the mine's sale of uranium slurry to Tri Ore is less than a quarter of the revenue on the books. I pointed to a column of figures. Tri Ore paid by check for the uranium and the money was entered in the balance sheet. That much looks straightforward. But the total receipts from Tri Ore's purchase of the uranium is not enough to pay the bills. Dinetah deposits a lot more money than they took in from selling uranium. If you extend these figures from one quarter of the year to an annual cash flow, Dinetah is taking in nearly fifty million dollars and it's sure as hell not coming from mining uranium.”

“That's not unrealistic for sophisticated pot hunting. They're miners. They got all kinds of instruments that can see down in the earth. They're probably real efficient at going into one of those canyons and locating the goods.” He stood up and stretched his back. “Remember I told you the market for American Indian artifacts, particularly Anasazi pottery, is hot in Asia and Europe—the Saudis are buying that stuff like crazy. A technical mining operation? Yeah, I think you could clear that kind of money looting graves.”

“Fifty million dollars of artifacts is not all coming out of Kaih Canyon or out of that road bed they're grading over there. Burial sites yield a pot or two, an old blanket and maybe a rotting pair of sandals. It's not like a pharaoh's tomb where you get the mother lode of treasure,” I countered.

“We don't
know
they're not digging all over that end of the Navajo Nation. Lots of finger canyons and wide-open spaces back in there. Plus, there are no sheep camps out there because of the lack of water and the sulfur stink from the mine. Did Gage mention they were digging in other areas?”

“No. But he's not the kind of guy to ask a lot of questions. He clung to his tunnel vision and deposited his pay check.” Pacing the room felt good after hours of sitting. “So they dig up all these pots and turn them into cash and then launder the cash through the business. You know what we're missing in this sweet little side business?”

Louis whistled. “The fence. The go between guy between Chavez and all that cash.” He chewed on the end of the pencil. “Maybe Tsosie was right and most of the ore was played out and Chavez just wanted the rights to the mine to loot all those Anasazi sites.”

“Let's see those deposit slips again.” I tapped my pen on a row of deposits. “Each deposit is slightly less than ten thousand dollars on these First Bank of Flagstaff receipts.”

“You can't deposit any more than that without the bank reporting the transaction to the IRS,” Louis explained. “The Bank Secrecy Act from back in the '70s helped put a kink in the Mafia laundering money by requiring banks to report cash deposits greater than ten thou.” Louis pulled on his bottom lip.

“Look here,” I cried excitedly. “Deposits to two banks, First Bank in Flag and the Southwest Desert Bank in Phoenix.”

“I never heard of Southwest Desert Bank in Phoenix. But same thing, multiple deposits under ten grand, and a lot of them.” Louis tapped on his iPad. “Southwest Desert Bank has only one branch in existence, the one in Phoenix, owned by a holding company. Hard to penetrate the corporate veil so Chavez gets an extra layer of protection.”

“They're washing the cash from pottery through their own bank.”

“What if all those men bunking in those dorms
are
illegal and frightened enough to do whatever Chavez tells them, including make cash deposits to a bank.”

“Yeah, I say it's time to learn more about Chavez,” Louis replied.

I opened my laptop and typed in my username and password for the databases the station paid for us to use for research. “Sancho Chavez. Let's see what we can get down and dirty on him . . . Okay, he's forty-three, has dual citizenship, and graduated from the mining school in Mexico City he mentioned. Most of that we knew from meeting him. I'm not coming up with any brushes with the law.” I scrolled through a long list of data.

“Look at this,” Louis said. “Looks like he was from a dirt-poor family in the slums of Mexico City. He got a scholarship to the Institute.”

“Here's an arrest! No, sorry, it's his brother, Mateo.” I kept scrolling through the hits on my screen.

“What was he arrested for?” Louis tapped quickly on his iPad. “Whoa, gal, Mateo Chavez is a bad dude.”

“What? What have you found?” I looked at Louis's screen.

“Remember that race track in New Mexico—the one in Ruidoso the feds raided? Mateo was arrested for using his horse-breeding operation and the racing stable at Ruidoso Downs to launder money.”

“How'd he do it?”

“Fed's claim Mateo paid Mexican businessmen to wire payment or write checks for horses bought in the US so the business looked legitimate. Mateo sent runners with cash across the border to the Mexicans.

“You can bet he was bribing the Federales and everyone else in Mexico. Everyone got a piece of that action,” I said.

“Crap!” Louis exclaimed turning the iPad to me. “How crazy could you be? Mateo named one of his racehorses Cartel Uno.”

“Cartel? As in Mexican cartels? Why didn't Mateo just hang a sign over his track?” I clicked a link on my laptop. “Listen to this quote from the US Attorney's Western District concerning Mateo, ‘Mateo Chavez had a ton of money and no explanation how he made it.' Get this part, ‘He has a family member we suspect is also involved.' He's talking about the Ruidoso case.”

“Why couldn't he just name the family member?” Louis complained.

“Sancho Chavez is probably that family member. The brothers have four sisters. Mexican cartels aren't loaded up with women.”

“What's the name of the fed from the DA's office they quoted?” Louis demanded.

“Answered in fed language, ‘a knowledgeable person associated with the US Attorney's Western District.' ”

“Scared to attach his name to the statement?”

“Could be. I've got a contact in the US Attorney General's Western District office down in Phoenix. I'll call him.” My mind was working in overdrive, scrolling through my mental Rolodex of contacts and experts. I was humming with the anticipation of bringing this story in. “He's an expert on the Zeta cartel. They control the territory west of El Paso to the California coast.”

“The Zetas? They chop the heads off journalists and string up the bodies as a warning. Hell, they have a scorched-earth policy.”

“I want to keep my head just as much you. I'm not going into Mexico to stick a microphone in the face of the governor of Sonora and ask him if he's paid off by Zetas. I know an agent in the IRS office here in Flag. She's a member of the criminal investigation unit.”

“Keeping my head is numero uno,” Louis mumbled.

I waved away his distress. “This is all speculation. We don't know Mateo and Sancho have Zeta ties. Plus, we have to connect them to laundering millions in cash from a massive digging and looting operation. We could be way off base, but I don't think so.”

“We going to Phoenix? Cross the border into Mexico?” Louis asked.

“Phoenix, yes. Mexico, maybe . . .” I looked at him critically. He had a mix of gray and dark hair and big brown eyes. He could pass. “You speak Español? Spangleesh?”

“
Sì
. I can pass in Mexico.” He pointed his finger at me. “You, Little Miss Blue Eyes, you'll be my woman.” He whooped in delight.

Before I could answer Louis, my phone danced on the tabletop.

“Hello? Yeah, Louis is here with me. When did you get the call? We're on our way.”

“What's up?”

“The news room picked up on the scanner a missing-persons report. Remember those two Navajo kids who were stopped with meth and stolen pottery?”

“Yeah.”

“Their parents reported them missing yesterday when they didn't come home from appointments over at the Indian Health Service.”

“Been twenty-four hours since they went missing so now it's official.” Louis shrugged into his jacket. “Damn shame for the people who have to sit around a whole day with their thumbs up their asses before the cops start looking for missing people. Trail's sure colder.”

We jumped into my Rav, and I drove over the speed limit to the tribal police headquarters in Tuba City. “I wonder if those boys are still alive.”

“Maybe. They could have run off, or be hiding from their old meth boss,” Louis offered.

“I have a bad feeling about this. Trace says they're good kids, ashamed to disgrace their families. They've never said where they got the meth. If the Chavez brothers do have links to the Zetas, it's gonna be bad.”

“You gonna share the Zeta business at the cop shop?”

“No,” I hedged, “we're guessing.”

I parked in front of the headquarters where one other civilian car was haphazardly pulled into two spaces, a beat-up Ford that belonged to a news reporter at the Flag paper.

Louis greeted him in the visitor's area. “Hey, Thornton. See you listen to the police scanner, too.” Louis sat down beside him.

Thornton took the ribbing good-naturedly. “Yeah, we print boys don't have the toys you do, but we can manage a police scanner. At least our media is physical and can be reread.” He stretched out his back. “Sure is good to work in a medium that hangs around longer than thirty seconds.”

“You mean gets tossed in the parrot's cage,” Louis gibed.

“Funny guy.” Thornton smiled and shot Louis the finger.

Officer Etisitty bustled to her desk. “Here's the department's press release.” She thrust out two copies.

There was nothing more than what Marty had gotten from the scanner. “We'd like to see the officer in charge.”

“Officer Nez is out working the case,” she replied.

“Okay, we'd like to talk with Captain Yazzie,” I requested.

“I'll see if he's available.”

The three of us stood around reading the statement on the off-chance we missed something. Officer Etisitty stuck her head out of Trace's door. “He can only give you a few minutes.”

Trace rose when we entered, and he shook all of our hands. “We're reconstructing the boys' movements and talking to anyone who might have seen or spoken to them. We hope you will help us by keeping their pictures and the tip line before the public.”

“Did you know who called you about the boys heading up 89?” Thornton asked.

“No.”

“Any guesses?” Thornton pushed.

“We're not in the guessing business.” He gave me a small smile.

Louis asked impatiently, “Where do their parents live? At their sheep camp or over in the government row?”

Trace answered, “The families live in the housing development.”

That saved us the time of checking the housing records for the Nation. It's a public record, but knowing still shaved a few minutes off finding them.

“Thanks, Captain.” Thornton tipped his ball cap. “Be seeing you.”

Trace looked at me. “Officer Etisitty will make regular public statements to the media.” A look of discomfort raced across his handsome face. I nodded to him and smiled.

Back in the Rav, Louis tapped me on the arm. “You two having the hots for each other gonna hurt us doing our story?”

“Fair enough question and the answer is no.”

“Uh-huh, let me know how that goes.”

“Don't be such a Debbie Downer! We can handle this.”

“You're not kidding, are you?”

“No, I'm not. So please leave it alone and let's find those boys' parents.”

He squeezed my hand. “Gotcha.”