Chapter 36
I went back to my motel to continue summarizing all that I had done here in Willow Run. I needed to put it all down. My superficial reason was that it would be the start of my book. But the reality was that I was preparing an investigative summary.
I sat in the plastic chair outside my room, banging on my laptop keyboard. My focus was broken by the chirp of my cell phone.
“Hello.”
“You really do need to get caller ID.” It was Ed Garvey. He sounded angry, again. “You’ve stepped into something big, so you better know who’s calling you next time.”
Excited by the prospect of something big, I eagerly asked, “What are you talking about?”
“The dog tag. It belongs to a guy who is deployed to Afghanistan. Except he’s missing.”
“What do you mean missing?”
Ed continued without answering my question. “Actually, he is and his entire platoon are missing.”
“As in missing in action?”
“No, as in AWOL, Absent Without Official Leave. Since you found one of them, chances are the rest of them are there too.”
“Interesting.” I was pleased. Things were clicking into place. Military guys from Afghanistan, AWOL in a burned-out valley, growing opium poppies. I sensed my probing was on to something big. My methods might be a bit sloppy, my resources might not be readily available, but I was feeling like detective-worthy material.
“Interesting, my ass,” Ed blurted. “I just hope I don’t get buried in the backlash from this. If it comes back to me, I’m sorry, but I’m gonna have to give up the source. That’s you.”
“What backlash?”
“You can’t possibly be that naïve, can you? AWOL is a serious matter. When it’s a whole platoon, you can bet the feds are gonna jump all over this, and you don’t want to be in their sights. There may be a new administration in DC, but there are still a lot of rogue spooks out there who like their jobs too much.”
Ed was right. His information was exciting to me because it revealed something big, showed I was onto something important. It showed that I was right. But it could indeed ignite a firestorm if not handled well.
“Understood, Ed.”
“I’m not so sure you do understand,” he said forcefully. “The shit is going to hit the fan on this one. I don’t want to be caught in the spray. Neither should you.”
“OK, Ed,” I said soothingly. Then a thought occurred to me. “Where are the AWOL guys from?”
“You mean what state?”
“Yeah,” I replied.
“Don’t know, didn’t ask, and don’t care,” he said gruffly. “And that’s not all,” he continued harshly. “I got back the fingerprint results. Yours are there. No surprise. Also a guy named Enid Powell. Is that your local cop?”
I had anticipated that might be the case. He had searched my backpack after arresting me and must have touched the paper.
“Yes, Ed. He’s the Deputy here in Willow Run.”
“Well, there’s more,” Ed added. “A third set of prints. They belong to an Afghan who is supposed to be in prison over there. He disappeared in March. Assumed to be an escapee. And now you turn up his prints in Montana? What the hell’s going on out there?”
All along I had been thinking my dead guy was Hispanic. But he was Afghan. Did my pursuit of the Hispanic angle lead to the disappearance of Cortina Perez? That was a very troubling thought. And what about Joseph Custer? Did it in any way impact what might have happened to him? I couldn’t know the answers to those questions right now. Those had to wait.
The guy was Afghan. But not just any guy from Afghanistan. He was a prisoner of war from that country, probably a militant, maybe from the Taliban, perhaps a member of al-Qaeda.
That made me consider that the handwriting on the brown paper was Arabic. It had to be. I didn’t know what it said, but now I could guess it was a plea for help. It was insurance so that if the guy died in his escape attempt, the paper might eventually get translated. I had intended to do that yesterday at the university. His mission had failed, but in a sense it had also succeeded. I found the paper and now knew what it meant. He died, but his message got through.
“I think I know what’s going on. At least, some of it. I need to dig just a little more.”
“Yeah, dig is right. Dig a hole and go hide in it because now that this fingerprint has shown up, Homeland Security is going to want to know who found the print and where. A prisoner of war from Afghanistan running loose in the US? That will feel like a terrorist plot unfolding on US soil. They’re going to swarm all over it. Arrest everybody and ask questions later.”
Homeland Security had expansive powers, and they controlled enormous resources. Ed was right. The shit would hit the fan.
“How well protected are you, Ed?”
“I don’t know. I think it’s OK. But you don’t need to know the details of where I got the information. Suffice it to say, I got a hard copy of the federal arrest warrant for the whole lot of the AWOL soldiers and the output on the Afghan guy from the fingerprint check. I had already eliminated your fingerprints and Deputy Powell’s from my request, so only the Afghan prints ended up being run through data bases outside our lab here.”
There was a long silence on the line. “Are you at the motel, and does it have a fax?” Ed finally asked.
“Let me check.” I pulled out a motel business card I’d taken from the front desk when checking in. Sure enough, there was a number printed in the lower left corner. I read it to Ed.
“OK. I’m going to an office supply store to send this to your room number. If they require a name, I’ll send it to Liberty Valance. That’s you for the purposes of this transmission. I’ll send it anonymously in the next few minutes. I suggest you should be standing right there at the fax machine to receive this. You can do what you want with it, but I suggest you then call this one in. Better yet, call it in anonymously and go far off the grid for a while.”
I would call it in. I would tell it all. But it would not be anonymous. I wanted the credit for this. I needed the credit. I needed to be right. It might be messy, but it was my way back out of the unemployment trap I was in.
Throughout his speech to me, Ed spoke forcefully and his tone rose, not in anger, but to convey the urgency he felt. And he continued his urgent discourse. “Nathan, just go far away so the spray doesn’t hit you. Go on some frickin’ month-long trek in the wilderness. Just get lost.” He paused before continuing. “I’m scheduled for some vacation time. I’m taking it before school starts. The family and I will go to a cabin in the woods where there’s no TV, no Internet, no phone. I figure in a week, maybe all this will blow over, and I can come back to civilization. I hope you’re still alive then.”
Ed sounded a bit paranoid, but he was also right. Rather than debate with him, I just said, “OK. Thanks for the advice, Ed.” I waited a beat and added, “But I do have one more request before I disappear.”
He responded angrily. “You haven’t heard anything I’ve said! No. We’re done. I don’t care what Samantha expects me to do for you. After I send this fax, there is no more. Just turn it over to the authorities and end it. Now.”
He hung up without saying goodbye.
Ed was normally slow to boil. But he was hot with anger, at me and probably at himself for letting me drag him into this. I was sure we could still be friends when this was all over, as long as he did not get caught in the spray. He was probably not really concerned about himself. But he had a family to protect, and that had to be his number one priority. If I had jeopardized that in any way, I would never forgive myself. Neither would Ed.
I went to the motel office. No one was there, but through the side window, I saw the desk clerk smoking and talking on his cell phone. I noticed a sheet of paper starting to spill out into the fax tray behind the counter. I leaned sideways against the c
ounter, picked up a pamphlet on tourist attractions in the area, and pretended to read it.
With my free hand, I reached over the counter and fumbled around until my fingers touched the plastic fax tray and then the paper inside it. The noise from the machine seemed so loud. Surely the guy outside could hear it and would come inside to see what it was. Or maybe he could hear it and just didn’t give a damn. I hoped that was the case.
It seemed like an eternity for all the sheets to spill out, even though in reality it was probably far less than a minute. I scooped up the sheets and stuck them under my arm. I opened the office door to leave when the clatter of the machine started up again. Quickly closing the door to muffle the sound, I reached over the counter again, and grabbed another sheet as soon as it popped out.
I looked up to see the desk clerk staring straight at me as I leaned against the counter. With the angle he had, I hoped he couldn’t see my arm extending over the counter. If he could, he would probably assume I was trying to get into the cash drawer. We locked eyes for a second, and he started marching purposefully toward the office.
I thought for sure he was going to hang up and rush toward me. But then the other party must have said something to send him off because he stopped, yelled into the phone, and kicked a garbage can nearby, spraying trash over the parking lot. It seemed like the kind of outburst he might aim at his beloved sister-in-law. But he was also the kind of guy who likely had issues not just with her, but with many people. And that was fortunate. He wasn’t paying attention to me anymore. Venting his anger at someone on the other end of the line, he cursed into his phone. And I cruised out the front door of the office, trying hard not to appear in a hurry.
As soon as I was out of sight of the desk clerk, I checked to make sure I had all the sheets. The cover sheet indicated there were eleven pages. I had the eleven pages and one more. The twelfth, the last one to be spit out of the machine, was the log sheet stating that the transmission had been completed. I was glad I’d gotten that sheet. Otherwise he would be looking for the fax that accompanied it and might contact the sender, the office supply store in Cincinnati, to ask what had been sent. Or probably he just didn’t give a damn and would not bother checking. But I felt better with it not being in his possession.
I then considered that I didn’t want to give that page to anyone else since that would allow it to be traced back to Cincinnati. It would be too easy in an official investigation for Ed to be found that way. So I tore up the cover sheet and log page, shoving the pieces into a partially opened pizza box in a trashcan. I could see that it contained some type of sauce, fries with ketchup, beer, and stale cigarette butts in there also. No one would be rummaging around in that disgusting soup to retrieve those page fragments, which were already absorbing the sloppy mess in which they lay.
Tossing the cover page and log sheet might not protect anything. It seemed everything could be traced: phone calls, emails, computer data from a damaged hard drive, or even deleted pictures from a cell phone. Fax transmissions are probably also equally traceable. But it felt like a step in the direction of secrecy just to dispose of the pages.
As soon as I got back to my room, I read over the remaining ten pages of the fax. It was mostly the federal arrest warrant, which contained a lot of legal language that was difficult to wade through. Of greater interest to me were the last two pages.
The last one was not part of the arrest warrant. It was separate and discussed the fingerprint analysis, indicating that the prints submitted belonged to a male Afghan named Salah bin Tariq Al-Fulani, age 35. He was captured in a battle with US forces in Afghanistan, incarcerated in that country, and scheduled to be shipped to the detention center in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. He was missing and presumed escaped.
So here was my dead guy from Monarch Trail. A captive who was forced into labor in Spring Valley to grow opium poppies. This actually made a lot more sense than using Hispanic labor. Opium farming is rampant in Afghanistan. This Al-Fulani guy probably had experience growing poppies and was chosen for that skill. The question, though, was how did a bunch of AWOL soldiers get him over here to do their bidding? And it wasn’t just him. There were surely more, maybe dozens more, of them. They didn’t just get on a commercial jet and fly over here. That was something I would have to come back to.
I flipped to the next-to-last page. It contained a list of the AWOL soldiers who were reported absent last summer, just before the fire in the valley. All were from a National Guard unit in Montana, though the page did not specify where specifically the unit was from. So here were Jake Monroe’s military guys. Were they the ones who joined in fighting the fire and then just never left? Perhaps. There were a couple dozen names. None of the names meant anything to me, except for two: Ross Browne and Joey Hammons. Enid’s bounty hunter buddies who left that profession and apparently joined the military. Son of a bitch, I thought. So Enid is certainly involved, up to his eyeballs. A dirty cop in Willow Run. Collecting money under the table.
Enid, having been a bounty hunter, had the right stuff, the right mentality, to take cash for his services. The would-be car thief in Willow Run last fall was not picked up by INS. Enid simply handed him over to his two buddies in the valley to return to forced labor, or worse. They could not take the chance of handing him over to INS since his fingerprints also would eventually have been matched. Or he might encounter someone who could translate his Arabic language. Then, in the course of events, someone in authority would learn everything that was occurring in the valley.
So Enid was also involved in an opium producing operation. The newspaper report I’d read indicated both Ross Browne and Joey Hammons were originally from Montana, so somewhere Enid met them in this state. Were they originally from Willow Run? College acquaintances? How, where, when, exactly what brought these guys together? I could ask Allison. She might know or could find out. I could ask Joseph Custer, if I ever saw him again.
Deputy Powell could serve a very helpful role for the activities in the valley. He was already basically running the show in Willow Run, since the Sheriff had long ago retired on the job. Enid could protect the interests of the guys in the valley. He tried hard to keep me corralled and out of the action. Maybe I should be thankful he didn’t take it farther by turning me over to his military buddies. In hindsight, maybe he wished he had. I had been out there alone with him in the forest. It might have been easy for him to do that. A missed opportunity for him.
Now the opportunity was mine. I made the call.