Deviations (11 page)

“I will personally look through every piece of email
received by every person who’s got a university account. And I will look at
every Web site visited by every university member. That will take a while,
’cause we’ll have to print out a lot of material. In the meantime, we’ll file
the papers for the obstruction-of-justice case against the university. Probably
best to hold a news conference. Maybe Ron Gershen, the editor of the
Herald
,
will get his hands on some of the stuff we print out. You can’t tell with these
cases.

“So if even one of your people has tried to find
someone to adopt her kitty, it’ll be in the paper. If one of your people has
downloaded a picture showing some tit, it’ll be in the paper. Am I
communicating with you here?”

“Really, Detective, I fail to see the need for—”

“If you’ve got a student buying a term paper,
it’ll be in the paper. If you’ve got a student calling someone a faggot, it’ll
be in the paper. If you’ve got someone looking at pictures of naked children,
it’ll be in the paper.

“And I tell you what, if you’ve got a faculty
member who’s in bed with the Nazis, I’m going to find him. And you can bet
that’ll
make it into the paper. When I’m done with your server, you might as well hang
a For Sale sign on this place, because you’re gonna be out of business.

“I don’t like to talk like this, Ms. Brandt, but
we’re investigating a homicide. We need to understand if one of your faculty
members was involved—or knows someone who was. So let’s not talk about how the
president’s schedule is very full today. Because I am going to solve this case,
and I just don’t give a shit if I have to embarrass this university in doing
it. Are we starting to come to an understanding on this, Ms. Brandt?”

“I will get back to you by noon today, Detective,”
Cynthia Brandt said, standing up and looking at me not so friendly anymore.

“Thank you for the coffee, Ms. Brandt.”

* * * *

“You okay, Karen?” I was
gripping the steering wheel pretty hard.

I shot Ryan a look. “Yeah, I’m okay, but she was
treating us like dumb shits. She had to know the university owns those emails.
They’re not the employee’s property. And she had to know we couldn’t touch the emails
without permission or a court order. I was treating her politely, giving her a
heads-up rather than just walking in with the court order and shutting down the
whole system.”

“Yeah, I know that,” Ryan said. “She was just
testing us.”

“I understand that, Ryan. But I don’t need her
testing me. I’m done with tests—from her, from the chief, from anyone. I’m
trying to find out who raped Weston and bashed her head in. And if the lawyer
thought about it for just a moment, she’d realize that the smartest thing for
her to do is let us get in and out and cross Fredericks off the list.”

“She’s an attorney. Her job is to put up a wall
whenever she can.”

“Yeah, and my job is to bust through that wall.”

“I understand that, Karen, and I agree with you.
But I’d rather not signal her that we’ve got her figured out. That gives her
information that she can use to obstruct us. It’s better if she thinks we’re
stupid. That way, she won’t worry about us that much, and we’ll have more
options. If she thinks we’re a threat to her, she’s going to work harder to
block us.”

“Yeah, yeah, I know.” Why don’t people let me be
me? It’s not like I screw up or anything.

Chapter 10

“You already know what the
1488 means,” Nick Corelli said. He was throwing a PowerPoint presentation onto
the pale yellow wall of the conference room. He clicked to another slide,
showing photos of 1488’s spray-painted on the wall of a synagogue, tattooed
across an inmate’s chest, and beneath a swastika on a flag.

“The two different fourteen-word slogans were written
by a man named David Lane, a member of the white supremacist terrorist group
The Order.” The photo of Lane showed a man in his forties, gray hair going on
white, full beard, dark, piercing eyes, and an expression that said, Don’t dare
fuck with me.

Corelli had just arrived this morning. The chief had
met with the prosecutor. They agreed that Weston’s murder was a hate crime, and
that we should bring in the FBI.

Corelli was about my age, a couple of inches under
six feet. Maybe one-ninety or two-hundred, stocky and powerful. His hair was
shoe-polish black, thick and curly, cut short. He wore a full beard, black with
some red flecks in it. He kept it trimmed, but down around the neck it looked
like he was losing the battle. The thick chest hair, sticking out of his
collar, was moving in on the bottom of the beard. His skin was kind of
Mediterranean olive.

When he introduced himself five minutes ago, I said,
“Agent Corelli—”

“Call me Nick, okay?” He showed his teeth, which
were unnaturally bright. It was one of those smiles that appeared suddenly and
then disappeared just as suddenly, like a guillotine coming down.

“Lane died in the Federal Correctional Complex in
Terra Haute, Indiana, in 2007. He was serving a 190-year sentence for various
crimes, including the murder of Alan Berg, a Jewish lawyer and radio host in
Denver in 1984.” Up came a photo of Berg, sitting at his microphone. “Berg was
the original shock jock—liberal, sarcastic, totally obnoxious.”

Ryan said, “That the reason Lane targeted him?”

Nick said, “Berg used to go after white
supremacists all the time on his talk show. One night, he’s getting out of his
car in his driveway, and four guys, including Lane, put thirteen bullets into
him. Which was the plot of
The Turner Diaries
.”

“Say again?” I was losing the thread.

“
The Turner Diaries
was a novel published
in 1978 by a white supremacist, about how these guys killed a Jewish radio host
when he stepped out of his car in his driveway.”

“Lane and his buddies knew about this book?”

“They used it as a script. Lane’s group, The
Order, was named after the white-power group in the novel.” Nick looked at me.
“Know who else liked that book? Timothy McVeigh.”

Ryan said, “Oklahoma City?”

Nick nodded. “In the book, they blow up a big
government building in Washington, D.C. Kill a bunch of people.” He turned back
to his laptop. “Lane wrote the two versions of the fourteen words.” Up came the
next slide, showing the quotations. “And he found the eighty-eight words from
Hitler’s book. The number 88 also stands for Heil Hitler, with H being the
eighth letter of the alphabet.” Nick paused, his gaze going from me to Ryan,
then back to me. “Any questions so far?”

“No,” I said. “Keep going.”

“All right,” Nick said. “I’m going to show you
some video from an interrogation of a white supremacist that I did a few months
ago in Arizona. His name was Lawrence Pinelli. He’d been in trouble since he
was fourteen. One of his running buddies flipped on him when we were
questioning him about buying large quantities of fertilizer. There’d been some
explosives stolen from construction companies in the area. We got a
probable-cause warrant and searched Pinelli’s trailer, where we found explosives
and triggers that we traced back to the construction companies, all kinds of
bomb-making stuff, white-power literature, lists of known white-power guys,
some outside, some in prison.

“First scene, he’s been in custody maybe six or
eight hours. I was trying to see if there was a target and a date. I’d already
explained that terrorism is a federal offense, punishable by death. Told him we
had the guy who’d given him up, that the prosecutor was making the deal with
this guy for a reduced sentence. Explained how he’d never be able to get back
in the brotherhood now, how we’d take care of protective custody,
witness-relocation, whatever it took. Nothing was working.”

Ryan said, “Killing innocent women and children?”

“We’d already tried that. We’ve got all kinds of
pictures and videos of victims from Oklahoma City. Kids who were maimed.
Everything. He told us we’re at war, and civilians get hurt in war. We’ve seen
that before: collateral damage makes them feel more powerful—like they’re
really soldiers on a holy mission. Remember, a lot of these young guys would be
rejected by the Army because of priors, no high-school diploma, low IQ. Part of
the appeal of these white-power groups is that the uniforms and flags and all
the paramilitary props make these losers feel like they’re part of a larger
cause. Anyway, he was fine with the idea of killing innocent people. So I tried
a different tack.”

The video started, with a date and time stamp in
the corner showing it as 11:42
pm
,
in late February. It was in color, a sharp picture. We still use a
black-and-white VCR. Pinelli looked about twenty-five, white, with
close-cropped hair and a goatee. Swastika tat in black on the right side of his
neck, a red thunderbolt with black edges on the left side. He had on a dark
brown t-shirt, couple of long rips, with some kind of jagged logo and the words
“White Strike” under it. His right arm was cuffed to a bar on the top of the
table. He looked cocky, defiant, even with a fresh two-inch gash over his right
eye, a pink bruise on his left cheek, and a busted lip that was dripping blood.
Nick looked like he looks now: white shirt and tie, but his jacket was hanging
on the back of the chair opposite the suspect.

In the video, Pinelli is sitting there, chin held
high, Nick is pacing. Finally, he sits in the chair opposite Pinelli and starts
questioning him.

“You know Immigration and Customs is part of
Homeland Security, Lawrence?”

Lawrence shrugs. I’ve seen my kid do that. It’s
halfway between “I knew that” and “Who gives a shit?”

“Immigration and Customs is in charge of border
security. Starting around May, when the desert is 115, 120, they get a lot of
bodies on Burrito Alley. You knew that, right?”

This time the guy didn’t even react.

“You know what they do with those corpses? They
bring ’em in for processing.” Nick paused. “Except when they don’t.”

The guy raised his eyebrow, like he was saying,
You want to get to the point?

“If the body is too badly decomposed, too bloated,
they just don’t want to go to the trouble getting it into the truck. And the
paperwork. It’s hours. So what they do, especially if there’s more than one or
two of these bodies—all full of flies and shit—they just bury them out there in
the desert.”

“The fuck do I care?” the guy said. “More dead
Mexis, the better.”

“Well, here’s the point, Lawrence. Sometimes, it’s
not just Mexis end up in those trenches. I know three cases where U.S. citizens
ended up there with ’em. It’s not local or state police who put ’em there. It’s
the feds. They get really pissed when they pick up guys like you. You see, they’re
not allowed to rough you up too bad to get the information out of you. But if they’ve
got you in custody and a bomb goes off—that looks really bad, them not being
able to get a time and a target from you.

“So they want to get you out of the system. Make
sure nobody’s gonna ask how come they didn’t prevent it. You see where I’m
going, Lawrence? A bunch of guys with Immigration and Customs want to send a
signal to the white-pride groups that they can’t go around killing innocent
people—and if they do, some of their own people are gonna pay the price. A guy
like you, low-level, you’re not really worth that much to local law enforcement.
But to Immigration? If you can stop a bombing? They can set you up in a new
city, new identity. Hell, they’ll even pay to get your tats removed. But if it
goes the other way, as soon as it happens, you don’t have any cards left to
play. You could have an accident, out in the desert.”

Nick paused the video.

I said, “What’d the shithead do?”

“Nothing,” Nick said. “That’s my point. He didn’t
break. Even a low-level soldier like that was willing to take the chance that
we were making a deal with his buddy, willing to take the fall. We held him a
few more days, tried all kinds of things on him. He didn’t crack.”

Ryan said, “Was there a terrorist act?”

“Not exactly sure,” Nick said. “We think they
aborted because we had two of their guys. But a couple of weeks later, a
Mexican woman married to a white guy in that same town disappeared and hasn’t
been found. We think it was that group. After a few days, we charged Lawrence
Pinelli with theft and some other minor offenses, but the federal prosecutor
didn’t think they had enough to make any terrorism charges stick.”

“Did you ever get anything useful from him?”

“No. He was fine telling us about his movement. He
wasn’t as dumb as he looked. He’d done a lot of reading. He knew all about how
the feds did the Oklahoma City bombing and 9/11, so they’d have to pick up the
real patriots, which would lead to a great armed revolt across the country; how
the Mexicans are taking over the country by getting onto the school boards and
local government.”

I said, “So you think you might have prevented an
explosion.”

Nick said, “Way I’d put it, I think we postponed
an explosion—and probably cost that Mexican woman her life. My point is that
these guys are pretty tough. We walked right up to the edge on what we could do
to this guy. He stood tall. That’s what we’re dealing with here, with Senator
Weston’s killer.”

Ryan said, “You thinking Weston’s killer is a
couple of notches up from a guy like Lawrence Pinelli?”

“Yeah, I think so, Ryan,” Nick said. “Pinelli was a
soldier, just muscle. Not senior enough to carry out a mission. But Weston’s
killer, his identity is based on what he believes is a superior understanding
of how the world works. He might be anything: a professional guy, businessman,
tradesman. Could be a cop. Even if he’s unskilled, unemployed, he doesn’t see
himself as a stupid man who doesn’t have what it takes to keep a good job. And
since he probably spends a lot of time running around in the woods with
like-minded patriots, he certainly doesn’t see himself as lazy. He’s not a
loser; he’s a victim of a rigged system.”

“Okay,” I said. “Because he has this special
understanding that average people—including cops—don’t have, he can give us a
head start and still outrun us.”

“And if it turns out we catch him because he
didn’t outthink us or outrun us,” Nick Corelli said, “we still don’t have a
right to put him in prison because we don’t have any jurisdiction: he’s not a
citizen of Montana or the United States. He’s a ‘sovereign citizen’ who owes no
allegiance to any state government or to the nation. Plus, since the president
is a Fourteenth Amendment citizen—not a sovereign citizen—even if he gets the
needle or dies inside a federal facility, he’s still smarter than we are.”

“In other words,” I said, “he really is kind of a
dumb fuck.”

Corelli looked at me, hard, and didn’t say
anything for a long time. “I’m not sure you got my point, Karen. Even a guy
like Lawrence Pirelli is extremely dangerous. If you don’t understand that, I
can’t have you on the case. You’ll get yourself killed. Maybe Ryan. Maybe me.
Maybe some unis.”

“No, Nick, I’m sorry. I totally get what you’re
saying. It’s just a stupid thing I do sometimes. I try to distance myself from
the murderer a little bit, for some objectivity. Calling him a dumb fuck is my
way of telling myself he’s no evil genius who’s going to outsmart us. He’s not
going to transform me and Ryan into paranoid Nazi zombies. That’s not gonna
happen, because he’s just another dumb fuck, and me and Ryan are smarter than
him. I’m just not feeling that good. And what you’re telling us—it’s just
weirding me out a little. I’m absolutely taking it serious.”

“When I was down on the Arizona border, we had an
op went bad. We lost two agents and a detective. I knew all of them,” Nick
said. “They were all tortured. All three of them. We needed dental records to
identify them.”

I felt myself getting woozy. “I’m sorry. No excuse
for what I said.”

“You think you’ve seen men like this before?
You’re wrong. You haven’t. What’s different about these guys is that they have
no interest in money. They’re not like cigarette smugglers or drug runners.
What these guys do, it’s not a business. These guys are terrorists. The world
they live in—it’s not the world we live in. We’re not merely obstacles to what
they want to achieve. We are worse than that: we are evil.” He paused. “And I
need you to understand this. If they capture you, they will kill you. So if you
don’t feel up to this, tell me now. I’ll take you off the case. No penalties.”

“I’m in.” I looked him straight in the eye. “I’m
in. How do you want us to go at the Weston investigation?”

“Start by telling me what you’ve got so far.” Nick
was shutting down his slide show.

“We reached out to this professor, Willson
Fredericks, a historian at the university. Heard of him?”

“Name rings a bell.”

“Great credentials. Knows everything about Nazis.
He confirmed everything you said about the patriot movement.”

Nick said, “Was that helpful?”

“Yes, it was,” Ryan said. “I think we understand the
general outlines of what these groups are up to and why.”

“He give you anything you can work with?”

“Well, that’s the thing, Nick,” I said.  “He told
us a lot of stuff—we met with him yesterday—but we’ve gotta figure out what he
was actually saying.”