Apache Country (41 page)

“He has to do what you say, doesn’t he?”

“Theoretically,” Hatch said drily. “But
that’s as far as it goes. And you can bet your ass the last thing
he’s going to do is welcome us in with open arms. If we turn the
reservation upside down and come up empty, the whole thing will
turn into public relations catastrophe. I’m serious, I don’t think
the Mescaleros will co-operate, and absent their co-operation I
can’t see where we can hope to achieve anything meaningful.”

“I appreciate your concerns, Ed,” McKittrick
replied smoothly. “But let me just remind you we’re dealing with a
hostage situation here. Not to mention three homicides. I’m looking
for a result. Even the powers that be, who don’t usually don’t give
a shit about anything that happens more than ten miles south of
Santa Fe, are watching this very closely. The Bureau’s image is not
my problem.”

“I’ll talk to Dick Reardon,” Hatch said
reluctantly. “But I can’t see him sanctioning it.”

Richard Reardon was the FBI regional director
in Denver. Someone had once described him as an idea whose time
would never come. There were plenty of people who thought that was
too fulsome a compliment. Reardon was renowned throughout the
Bureau for giving new dimension to the art of playing safe.

“Wrong,” McKittrick said. “I’ve already
cleared your participation with him. Reardon says you’re oaky to
put all the facilities of your office at our disposal immediately
and draft in any extra manpower you need.”

“You won’t mind if I just confirm that?”

“Go ahead,” McKittrick said, ignoring the
sarcasm. “But get back to me, okay? And the sooner the better.”

In spite of Hatch’s protests, Reardon had
overruled him, and a full-scale search of the Mescalero Reservation
had been mounted, with exactly the dire results Hatch had
predicted. From the moment the heavily-armed FBI agents appeared at
the Agency’s administration building until the moment they left,
the ambient hostility of the Apache was thick enough to cut with a
knife. Agents were jostled and spat on; jeers and insults followed
them as they went doggedly about their work. Cars parked at the
Agency were defaced with paint stripper or daubed with white paint
slogans: FASCIST BASTARDS INCORPORATED was one. FEDERAL BUREAU OF
IDIOTS was another.

Each of the several ten-strong team of agents
involved left Mescalero complaining bitterly about having been
assigned to such unpleasant and unrewarding duty, every one
secretly relieved to get off the Reservation before the situation
deteriorated even further. On his return to Albuquerque, Ed Hatch
reported to his regional director, not without some satisfaction,
that not only had the whole undertaking been the PR disaster he had
predicted, but it had also been a waste of time. What he did not
share with Reardon was the information Joanna Ironheel had given
them, or the new avenues of investigation it had opened up. Which
put him on something of a knife-edge. If he was right, Reardon
would be up shit creek and he, Hatch, would be a star.

But if he was wrong …

“No way could she have been making it up,” he
said to his partner, letting it hang there. “Is there?”

Smith shrugged by way of reply.

“It fits real tight,” Hatch reasoned.

“Maybe too tight,” Smith said. “And hell’s
own job to prove.”

“I know that,” Hatch replied.

“Okay,” Smith said. “We assume Ironheel is
innocent and we make Joe Apodaca our prime suspect. God, I can’t
believe I just said that, it sounds so weird.”

“Weird is right,” Hatch said sourly. “Maybe
we ought to just hand the whole thing over to Internal Affairs,
keep our noses clean.”

“We do a lot of that,” Smith observed
gently.

“Yeah,” Hatch said. “Too much.”

Smith got the message, nodded. “So – where do
we start?”

“I want to do some serious digging into
Apodaca’s background. McKittrick’s, too. Look for a connection
between them and Gerzen. The whole shmeer, George. Womb to
tomb.”

“You got it,” Smith said.

“You want to tell me just what the hell is
going on inside that devious brain of yours?” Cochrane said.

“Answer me this first,” Easton said. “You
know Ed Hatch, runs the FBI bureau in Albuquerque?”

“Sure,” Cochrane said. “Good man. He was in
charge of the team that searched the Mescalero Reservation. What
about him?”

“How tight is he with McKittrick?”

Tom shook his head. “Not. In fact, the
opposite. They banged heads hard over this business of Apodaca and
McKittrick insisting on search and interrogations at the
Reservation. Hatch wouldn’t buy it, said it was a waste of agency
time and resources, and that it would antagonize the Tribal
Council, not to mention a lot of very bad PR. So McKittrick went
over his head and twisted the regional director’s arm and Hatch had
to do it anyway. I imagine he’s still seriously pissed off.
Especially because it turned out just like he’d said it would.”

“Okay, Tom. What I want you to do is tell
Hatch we want to turn ourselves in, we’ll only deal with him.”

“You crazy?”

“Maybe. Will you do it?”

“Sure. And he’ll say, ‘Why would they want to
do that?’ Ed Hatch is a decent cop, Dave, but he’s still a Feeb.
And you know the Feebs. They’re not exactly what you’d call
simpatico.”

“I know,” Easton said. “But do it anyway.
Tell him everything, Tom. The whole story -– Gerzen, Boy’s Ranch,
all of it.”

“Hatch doesn’t shoot from the hip,” Cochrane
said. “He won’t move without evidence.”

“That’s why I want you to call him, Tom,”
Easton said. “Maybe he doesn’t have a lot of imagination, but I’ve
heard he’s straight as a die. More important, he knows you are.
Hand over the DVD, the phone records, the tire casts, whatever you
can get on Gerzen. He’ll believe you. Besides, what’s he got to
lose? If we’re telling the truth, he breaks up a sex ring and gets
the people who did all the killings. If not, he gets us. Either
way, he’s a hero.”

Cochrane nodded slowly, thinking it through.
He took the battered cigarette pack out of his pocket and opened
it, tapping it with a forefinger.

“So I call Hatch and he listens,” he said.
“What happens then?”

“Get him to send a full-strength FBI team to
bring us in. And this is important, Tom – it’s got to be at
precisely four o’clock tomorrow afternoon. Radio silence, absolute
secrecy. Ironheel and I will be waiting for them at the Bureau of
Land Management facility at Mescalero Sands.”

Forty miles east of Riverside, just below the
caprock bordering the Llano Estacado, bare dunes that turned red as
blood in the evening sun rose sixty feet above the plains, moved
about a foot each year by the prevailing southwest winds. Invisible
from the highway and accessed only by a gravel road, Mescalero
Sands was wild and empty and – central to Easton’s plan –
uninhabited.

Cochrane frowned. “I thought you said
Ironheel was up on the Reservation? How the hell is he going to get
from there to Mescalero Sands?”

“How the hell do you think, Tom?” Easton
said. “You’re going to drive up to Mayhill, take the Cherry Road
north as far as Whitetail Canyon. He’ll be waiting there for
you.”

“That’s all, is it? And when does all this
happen?”

“Tomorrow. Aim to get there around noon,
bring him down the hill. It’s that simple.”

“Simple,” Cochrane said, leaning even more
heavily on the irony. “Why can’t you just surrender to the Feebs up
there in the mountains?”

Easton shook his head. “Just trust me on
this, Tom,” he said. “It’s got to be the Sands.”

“I must be crazy,” Cochrane said. “But all
right, I’ll do it. Just tell me one thing: what do I do if I hit a
roadblock?”

“They’re not going to search an SO vehicle,
Tom,” Easton said. “You’re in your own jurisdiction. You’ve got as
much right to be there as they do.”

“Mescalero Sands,” Cochrane said,
reflectively. “That’s Apache country out there. If Apodaca or
McKittrick got wind of this, you guys’d have no place to hide.”

“Then we’ve just got to hope Hatch goes for
it,” Easton told him, hating to dissimulate but knowing he had
to.

“You’re still taking a hell of a chance.
Suppose Hatch says no? Suppose he passes the word to McKittrick?
Suppose he sends in a State Police SWAT team? Once you set it in
motion this thing could go any damn whichaway.”

“‘Even Apache will only run so far’,” Easton
said.

Cochrane frowned. “Huh?”

“Something Ironheel told me. That there’s a
point where you have to say, I’m through running.”

“And this is it?”

“This is it,” Easton said.

“There’s a problem, Joe,” McKittrick said.
His voice sounded accusing, angry, and apprehensive all at the same
time. “And it’s major. Can you talk?”

“Go ahead,” Apodaca said.

“Easton was here. In Riverside.”

Apodaca stifled a curse. “God damn, I knew
it,” he said angrily. “And I’ll bet a year’s pay Ellen Casey had
something to do with getting him here.”

“Damn right she did,” McKittrick gritted.

“Do we know where he went? Who he talked
to?”

“Indeed we do,” McKittrick said, a vicious
snap in his voice now. “He talked to your wife, Joe. Your goddamn
lush of a wife. He opened her up like she was fitted with a zipper.
While you were drinking coffee with Ellen Casey and discussing the
goddamn funeral.”

Apodaca stared at the wall, stunned.

“And that’s not all,” McKittrick went on
inexorably. “She told him everything.”

Apodaca shook his head, still trying to get
some kind of handle on what McKittrick was telling him. Ellen Casey
in her elegant Riverside home, smiling, serving coffee. Charming,
warm. And all the time knowing while he was with her, Easton was
talking to Alice, the one person in the whole fucking world he knew
for sure he’d never ever have to worry about.

“She’s got dates, Joe,” McKittrick was
saying, his voice accusing. “Documents, photographs, God alone
knows what else.”

“Wait, wait a minute.” Apodaca’s mind was
functioning again now, racing. “How do you know? Who told you all
this?”

“Ellen Casey’s phone,” McKittrick snapped
impatiently. “We hacked it, remember? Easton called her and told
her the whole story.”

Apodaca frowned. Something was wrong here.
Easton wasn’t a fool. He would surely have anticipated their having
Ellen Casey’s phone tapped. Could that mean he wanted them to know
what he knew? And if so, why?

“Joe! You still there?” he heard McKittrick
say.

“Yes.”

“Then say something, for Chrissake. What are
we going to do?”

“Leave this to me,” Apodaca growled. “It’ll
take a couple of days, but I’ll straighten it out.”

“Will you get real, for Chrissake!”
McKittrick shouted, his voice fluty with tension. “We don’t have a
couple of days! We’ve got to do something now! Easton and Ironheel
have cut a deal with the Feebs. They’re going to surrender to them
this afternoon. You hear me? Today!”

He was just about holding down the panic, but
only just, Apodaca thought. If it had been up to him McKittrick
would never have been in the loop in the first place, but Gerzen
had insisted: in order to be absolutely fireproof they had to have
him. That didn’t make the self-centered bastard any less of a pain
in the proctology.

“Tell me the rest of it,” he said.

“The Feebs have got the DVD with Gerzen on
it.”

“That’s impossible. Casey gave it to
you.”

“He must have made a copy. Someone did. And
they’ve given it to the Feebs.”

“How the hell did they do that?”

“Easton used one of your SO people as a
go-between.” McKittrick’s voice was poisonous with accusation.
“Right under your fucking nose.”

Apodaca let out a long angry exhalation of
breath. He could feel his growing fury seething inside him like
lava in a volcano waiting to erupt. All these years, everything
he’d worked for. Shit. Shit, shit, shit.

“Cochrane, right?” he whispered. “Tom
Cochrane.”

“You mean you knew? And you did nothing about
it?” McKittrick shrilled. “What kind of a goddamn moron—”

“I didn’t know, dammit!” Apodaca rasped,
cutting off the jabber. “But I had a hunch someone inside SO had to
be giving Easton and Ironheel support. Just before you called I was
checking mileage logs, phone calls, looking for anything that ought
not to be there. And Cochrane kept coming up odd. His mileage was
all to hell. The day after the Feebs searched the Reservation his
car was seen up there. Another time over in Albuquerque. And his
charge card records list calls to FBI cover numbers.”

Even as he spoke, his options were flashing
through his mind. All that mattered now was his own survival. One
thing he knew for sure:
whoever
the
fuck went down, it wasn’t going to be him. He modulated
his voice, making his tone persuasive, conspiratorial.

“Olin, listen to me, we can still turn this
around,” he said. “Just don’t panic. Take it one step at a time.
First, do we know where Easton and Ironheel are now?”

“Somewhere out near Mescalero Sands. They’re
going to surrender to the Feebs there at five o’clock.”
McKittrick’s said the tension in his voice still audible. “Five
o’clock. That’s just a few hours … there’s no way we can—”

“Olin,” Apodaca said, calming it down. “Get a
hold of yourself. It’s going to be all right. Just pull yourself
together and listen. Olin? You listening?”

“Yes, yes, what, what?”

“First, we’ve got to make absolutely certain
the Feebs don’t turn up for that meet,” he said, ideas exploding in
his head like skyrockets in a summer night sky. “If we can swing
that it will give us a window, we can take Mescalero Sands at our
own speed. Easton and Ironheel will be on their own out there with
no place to hide.”