Saving Jason (24 page)

H
al stood to my left, slightly in front. Robertson was on my right with the state lieutenant to his side. The deputy marshals flanked us on both sides. I may have quit the program, but they weren’t quite ready to walk away. Reyes and Geary, however, remained in the house.

“I’m going to save you all some research time. My name is Jason Stafford. I’m from New York. Until a few minutes ago, I was protected by the WITSEC program as a potential witness in federal court.”

They were all screaming questions long before I finished speaking. I ignored them all and continued.

“Yesterday morning, my seven-year-old son went missing. We believe that he’s up in the hills. I’m going looking for him as soon as we are finished here. You’ll understand if I leave suddenly. I’d like to get started.”

I began to pick out particular voices and their questions in the melee. I answered as best I could.

“No, I will not comment on a federal investigation. I’m here to talk about finding my son.”

“Yes, it’s true. My son has ASD. He is verbal and intelligent, but his likes and dislikes, fears and strengths, are all varying and unpredictable.”

“No, I don’t believe he has been taken by any person or persons. There does seem to be a rumor to that effect going around.”

“I believe he’s gone walkabout. It happens to forty percent of kids on the spectrum. He is probably disoriented, lost, hungry, and thirsty, and I’d like to go find him as soon as possible.”

“Yes, I believe he is alive, but I think that is a dumbass question. I will believe that until I see good reason to change my mind.”

“Ask Mr. Robertson, he’s the expert.”

Robertson took over and the crowd quieted down. They knew him and proffered him a modicum of respect. He answered their questions tersely, but gave them a few good lines of copy, too.

“Mr. Stafford! Mr. Stafford!”

The woman didn’t need to yell, everyone else had calmed down.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“How does it feel to have your child lost in the high desert? What are you feeling right now?”

“Impatience. I’m very worried for my son and want to get started.”

“You don’t appear to be distraught. Are you always so controlled?”

She had already written her story.

“Yes, I am.” I turned to Robertson. “Can we go now?”

At the back of the crowd a deputy sheriff who had been sitting in his car at the head of the driveway put on the lights and siren and peeled out onto the road. Heads whipped around to watch him leave. The rest of us stood in various stages of amazement or confusion.

A second sheriff’s car came hurtling down the road from up in the hills. Lights, no siren. Two reporters turned and ran for their cars. The rest of them looked like they thought it might be a good idea.

The state police lieutenant strode over to his car and conferred with his driver. A moment later he burst into action, running around the car and jumping into the shotgun seat. The car fishtailed twice leaving the driveway.

The reporters all turned and ran for their vehicles.

The marshals were standing around like bachelors at a bridal shower. They knew they’d rather be somewhere else, but weren’t sure where.

Reyes burst out the front door. “Mount up. I want no radio chatter.”

Robertson stepped in front of him. “You mind telling us what’s going on?”

“I just got it from the FBI. Those four Maras? They stopped for gas just up the road from Ribera. A deputy saw the truck and radioed it in.
They’re now holed up in the store. There’s a tactical team coming up from Albuquerque, and CIRG has a SWAT team on standby.”

“I suppose they were on their way here?” I said.

“That’s a working hypothesis,” Reyes said.

“And now they’re not.”

“You’re cocky, Stafford, and I don’t like that. In my business, overconfidence is the number-one killer. If those punks were on their way here, it was because someone gave you up, and that someone is still out there.”

I didn’t have an answer. He waited to see if his words had made any mark. They had, but I didn’t give him the satisfaction.

I let his words in and examined them for the first time. There were plenty of weak links in the chain of events—too many alternative explanations for a series of coincidences to be considered evidence of a possible attack on me or the Kid. But if by some remote possibility, the few facts did add up to a real threat, the consequences would be ghastly.

The call from Las Vegas to Mexico City was key. If someone had recognized me and made such a call, who was it? The odds of it being a random stranger were impossible to calculate. At any rate, much too low to consider. That left only the people who knew where I was—the marshals and bodyguards, Skeli, and Larry. The last two were out of the running. Much as I hated to admit it, the marshals also had to be excluded. They had too much to lose. That left Hal and Willie.

An image came to mind of Hal sitting on the hillside in his makeshift blind, watching the road below, and talking on his cell phone. Another arose, this one of Hal questioning me about my past history with the Mijos and Castillo on the drive from Tucson.

Willie had been there, too, and with his frequent trips to town, he had ample opportunity to make the call in question. And the Kid didn’t like him, had never trusted him. The Kid was afraid of almost everyone outside of a very small group. But my mind kept coming back to our conversation soon after Willie first arrived. “He’s bad.”

R
obertson was on the phone, checking on his order for a pair of ATVs to get us all up to the LKP camp—I would have been useless on horseback. They would be arriving momentarily. Hal filled backpacks with bottled water. He looked different to me already. His solitary, stoic nature now seemed mendacious and sinister. I plunked myself down on the couch and tried to look like I wasn’t going mad with a psychic mix of paranoia and impatience. I landed on the Kid’s iPad. Again.

The computer survived the experience. So did I. I held it in my hands and felt the Kid’s presence. Emotion threatened to overwhelm me, and I forced myself back into front brain mode. I was going to find my son, and to do that I needed a clear head.

I turned on the iPad and put in the Kid’s password—8, 1, 1, the number of our apartment at the Ansonia. His magic image-finder app was open and running. It hit me. It was too simple. Anyone could have taken my picture, run it through this app or one like it and found my true identity. I wasn’t exactly a celebrity, but my face had been in the news more than a few times, most recently thanks to Blackmore’s machinations. How that unknown person had known who to call to sic the Maras on me was a separate mystery, but I thought I had the first clue. Leaving the witness protection program was the wisest thing I had done. Nowhere was safe. Hiding didn’t work. If I had to live the rest of my life with a constant bodyguard, that was a better existence than cowering here at the end of the road. It all fit and made sense to me. The Kid and I were going home—just as soon as I found him. It took only another minute to find that all of my deductions were wrong.

I swiped the page to see what pictures my son had last researched.
Cars. The marshals’ Cuda. A swaybacked, bone-thin dog from Deming. An ancient Chevy pickup he had photographed on the street in Las Vegas. A blurred long shot of the valley that, after some manipulation, revealed four indistinct shapes that could have been javelinas. There was only one picture of a person. Only one. Willie. The Kid had caught Willie at the kitchen counter the previous morning, looking directly into the webcam. The picture must have been taken moments after I went out for some “outside air.” It was a good shot. It looked just like him. I touched the search button and waited.

The app flashed rapidly, one image appearing instantly as the previous near miss was rejected. Sometimes the mistakes were ludicrous—women or old men—sometimes even humorous—a sleepy-eyed cartoon mule. The program began to slow. Fewer pictures appeared, but they were much closer to the original than any of the previous possibilities.

“Ready to roll?” Robertson said.

I looked up. He and Hal were standing by the door.

“Give me one minute. I just came up with something,” I said.

Robertson looked surprised. “Okay.”

“I’m loading the off-roads,” Hal said, walking out with three bulging backpacks.

The app continued to work. From the rejects, I could see why the program was being forced to work so hard. Willie had an unremarkable face. He looked like a thousand other men. There were too many faces that were almost a fit. Willie was the noncelebrity. The face that would disappear in any crowd.

Then the screen stopped flashing and resolved into four quadrants. Each held a headshot of a face that could easily have been Willie. One man had a mustache, small and groomed, no bigger than a toothbrush, but it practically jumped off the screen. Another face was half covered with a thick black beard, but I could see why the app had chosen it. The shape of the eyes, the nose, and the forehead were an excellent match. They could all have been the same person.

I kept staring. The fourth face looked the least like Willie. The
nose longer, the cheeks less angular. But the eyes were very much like Willie’s. And then I saw why the computer had chosen that image.

“Would you ask Hal to come back in here?” I said. “I want him to see this.” I clicked on the one face that was, without a shadow of a doubt, Willie’s.

They were both back in less than a minute.

“Take a look,” I said. “You know this guy?”

Hal took the iPad. “What is this?”

“This is the Kid’s iPad. That’s what he was playing with yesterday. Just before he took off.”

“Well, they all
look
like Willie. But this guy
is
Willie. He’s had some work done since this picture was taken—the nose for sure—but there’s no doubt. It’s him. Look at the ears. There can’t be more than one set of ears like that in this world.”

“Click on that face. See what you get.”

He touched the screen. “Oh shit.”

W
illie was a dead man.

EX-DEA MAN KILLED IN METH LAB FIRE

Huntingburg, Indiana
—Justice finally caught up with the killer Walter Lee Collins this week. The ex–DEA agent and convicted murderer, currently under federal indictment in the Southern District of Florida for soliciting and accepting bribes, drug trafficking, money laundering, and a host of other related charges, was killed in an explosive fire that erupted during an eight-hour siege by U.S. Marshals, federal agents of the DEA, and Indiana state troopers of a farm in this rural section of southwest Indiana. According to ISP 1st Sgt. Adam Wheeler, “The farm was being used as a meth factory. We don’t yet know what initiated the explosion, but there were large containers of volatile chemicals on the premises.” Identification is pending on the bodies of two other individuals, assumed to be co-conspirators, found in the ashes of what had once been a hog-raising housing system on the property.

Collins was a ten-year decorated veteran of the federal agency and a member of an elite task force that operated in Southern Florida. The team was restructured in 2008, and two senior members were allowed to resign after allegations of abusive and possibly illegal practices, though no charges were ever filed against either agent. After reassignment, Collins’s performance evaluations slipped dramatically, triggering an internal investigation that eventually revealed a pattern of criminal activities going back three years. Local authorities in Florida believe that Collins was tipped off to the investigation and was able to flee prior to arrest. Today’s events end a two-year nationwide search . . .

“Your son could read this?” Hal said.

“No. But he knows enough to get the gist.” He knew the word
kill
.

“How old is this article?”

“Three years. Our Willie has managed to fly under the radar for quite a while.”

“We have to get the marshals back here.”

“I have to get up into that backcountry and save my son.”

“And I need to protect my people,” Robertson said.

“Then let’s move,” I said. “No radio. He might be listening in. Cell phones only.”

F
rom the air, the foothills had appeared desolate and unmarked, but coming up on the ATVs, we followed well-used trails through a forest of short trees. I understood much better the problems of tracking someone through this wilderness. Off the trail, the ground was rough, rocky, and as dry as moondust. Tracks might show up in the sand or be filled in by the merest puff of wind. Outcroppings of rock might be a single large stone, or the tip of an underground mountain.

Two miles up a series of dusty trails was the LKP camp. It would have taken us an hour to hike up to it. The ATVs got us from the canyon where the road petered out and up to the camp in ten minutes.

They had set up self-supporting tents in a semicircle. A rope was stretched between two trees, and six horses were tied to it. They looked miserable. Facing the tents was a canopy about ten feet a side. Hanging from it, like a decoration at a Brooklyn block party, were strings of multicolored Christmas tree lights. Underneath it—the only shade in sight—was a long folding table and camp chairs. Betty sat there with a handheld radio, a cell phone, and a map. All the tools she needed.

“I’ve called all of my teams,” she said as we approached. “Your man is out along this area here.” She pointed at the map.

Robertson and I huddled over it. The lines of elevation through that section were close together, indicating a steep series of inclines.

“They don’t get much signal over there, unless they’re up on a rise.”

“Can you show me where you found the yellow threads?” I asked.

She dug in a backpack and retrieved a large plastic ziplock freezer bag. “Here they are. The patch of stickers where we found it is just down that trail—maybe ten meters.”

They were the same color as his shirt. “We’ll start there,” I said.

“Hold up,” Robertson said. “I don’t want to bump into this nutter stumbling down the swash of some gully over here.”

“I’ll be with you every step,” Hal said.

Robertson smiled at him. “That goes without saying. But I want to avoid trouble. We’re here to get the child. Let the marshals come back and take on the bad guy. It’s their job.”

“I think we now know who called in those Mexican shooters,” Hal said. “If I get a chance to take him out, I will do it.”

“Well, let’s hope you don’t,” I said. “Who takes point?”

“I do,” said Robertson. “You two stay close. Betty, if you hear shots, call all your people in and get them back down to the house. I don’t want any of our volunteers taking a stray bullet.”

“Clear,” she said.

Robertson led the way. I followed a few steps back, with Hal not far behind me. We strode quickly at first. That section of the trail had been covered extensively already.

“Let your eyes relax. You’re not looking for something specific. You’re trying to find an anomaly. Broken twigs, bits of color that don’t belong, marks on the ground. We stop and look at anything.”

A quarter of an hour later, I was already feeling the effects of dehydration. Sweat evaporated faster than it ran, so it was hard to explain why my lips felt like they were cracking and my brain was working at half speed. How had the Kid survived twenty hours of this? There was something about that question that began working on me. How had he survived? Answer that, and I had a good chance of finding him.

We stopped for a drink of water and a quick planning session.

“I want to cover this section from this cliff to the arroyo over here,” Robertson said, pointing them out on the map. “Once we get over this next rise, you’ll be able to see the cliff. It’s a big rock face due south of us.”

“It’s the biggest chunk of rock out here,” I said.

“We’ll hike down to the arroyo. It runs roughly parallel. We can then do diagonal sweeps between the two, working our way up toward the end of the valley. Questions?”

“The cliff faces north. The base will be in at least partial shade all day.” I was trying to think like a lost child. My lost child.

“Good point, Mr. Stafford.”

Crossing the top of the next rise, we were hit by the full heat of the morning sun. I pulled my cap lower, but it was like looking into a furnace. Color disappeared. My eyes were so dry it hurt to blink.

“How’s everybody?” Robertson said. “It gets hotter, if you can believe it. I started doing cave rescues years ago, because climbing down into dark, rattlesnake-infested holes in the ground beat walking around in a hundred-and-twenty-degree desert heat.”

He was talking to keep us alert. It was too easy in that heat to let the mind drift and concentration slip. It worked. I shook off the lethargy and focused on the Kid.

We came to the arroyo. The sides had once been steep, but too many dry seasons had caused them to collapse. Vegetation had spread across the wide, dry creek bed. We stuck to the trail.

“Javelinas probably cut this. There’s deer and elk farther up in the mountains, but they don’t get down this way much. Nothing for them. But if you see a family of those pigs coming through, don’t hesitate. Jump off the path or they’ll run you right over. They’re aggressive sons-a-bitches and they’ve got tusks. They’ll hurt ya.”

“There are a lot of them here, too. We’ve been seeing small herds of them every day since we arrived,” I said.

“Could be the same group. They move around a lot. You probably saw them most in the morning and late afternoon. Watch your step. There’s a rattler under that tree.”

The little pine was about six feet off the trail and only about knee-high. It was almost bare of needles and looked more dead than alive. The snake was curled around the base, hugging the sparse shade, and so well camouflaged I had to stare hard to make out the triangle-shaped
head against the mottled, dusty brown soil. It was smaller than I expected—only three feet long or so.

“Keep moving and he won’t mind you. Most people get snakebit because of curiosity. That or stupidity.”

I was not curious. Neither was Hal. We both stayed on the far side of the trail as we moved past it.

The Kid
would have been curious, I thought. Not stupid, but not knowing any better. That cold hollow returned to the pit of my stomach. I refused to answer the question of what I would do if we didn’t find him.