Apache Country (44 page)

“I’m going to have to lean on you, Dave,” he
told Easton at their first meeting. “In both senses of the word. As
sheriff, and I hope, in time, as a friend, too.”

“Works for me, Jack,” Easton said.

“Then we’ll get along just fine,” he
said.

Easton found out real fast that when Jack
Thornton said he intended to do something, he did it. And when he
asked you to do something, he expected you to do it, just as
thoroughly and just as fast.

“Our first priority here is to clean up
McKittrick’s mess and restore the reputation of this office,” he
said. “And I’m going to do it – correction, we are going to do it –
right down to the last speck of mouse shit. And if that means we
have to work twenty four hours a day seven days a week until it’s
done, that’s what we’re going to do.”

Easton served on the honor guard that
accompanied Bob Casey’s coffin to the grave in South Park cemetery,
and attended a small family service for Adam Twitchell in the
little chapel behind the ranch in Pacheco. He had not seen Ellen or
Kit since. The scars were still too fresh; only time would heal
them.

About a month after he took office, he got a
call from Millard Goodwin from the FBI office in Albuquerque.

“You heard about McKittrick?” he said.

“Something break?”

“Happened yesterday. He cut a deal with the
prosecution,” Goodwin said.

“What kind of deal?”

“All singing, all dancing,” Goodwin said.
“They get Apodaca for Casey and his grandson. McKittrick
co-operates with State and Federal investigators in breaking up the
porno syndicate, names, addresses, dates, places. In return he gets
a nolle pros.”

Nolle pros was legal jargon that meant the
prosecution would decline to proceed against the defendant.

“So he’s going to walk?”

“He may get his knuckles rapped,” Goodwin
replied. “Expelled from the bar. But he won’t do hard time.”

“Shit.” Easton said it very emphatically.

“It’s the system, Dave,” Goodwin said
wearily. “And crawly bastards like McKittrick know all the best
ways there are to manipulate it.”

“I want to know what happens,” Easton said.
“Will you keep me posted?”

“Bet on it,” said. “How you getting along
with Jack Thornton?”

“I like him.”

“Funny, he said the same thing about you.
Must be love.”

Easton hung up and sat for a long while just
staring out the window, thinking of all those young lives, all
those grieving parents, all those cruel lonely deaths. He thought
about Kit and wondered who would comfort her, and about Ellen Casey
and Alice Apodaca and the private hell both of them would live in
for the rest of their days. He thought of Bob Casey and his
grandson dead on the uncaring earth in Garcia Flat. He thought of
Mack Gallerito, burned alive in his cluttered cabin. And James
Ironheel, sleeping the big sleep on the hill above Whitetail
Canyon.

He had not expected to be invited to his
funeral, but Joanna Ironheel insisted.

“He would want you to be there,” she said.
“Please come.”

The ceremony was extended one. No formal
rites were performed over the body, for Apache consider death to be
the final foe and not something to be celebrated. He was dressed in
his best clothes. His hair was parted and brushed smooth. His
wrists were covered with bracelets and beads. Everything that
belonged to him had been placed inside the blanket-shroud with him
and then they buried him facing the morning sun high above
Whitetail Canyon.

After the committal, ashes and pollen were
sprinkled in a circle around the grave, beginning at its southwest
corner. This, Joanna Ironheel told him, was considered to be a
prayer that the soul would safely enter O’zho, heaven. Ironheel’s
name would never be mentioned again. In earlier times, they would
have burned down the cabin, too.

The wake lasted a long time. At about hourly
intervals, the ceremonial tulapai –“white water,” a drink made from
twice-fermented corn — was passed around gravely by the shaman, or
medicine man, and everyone drank to one of the sacred regions, to
one of the gods who, according to Apache tradition, hold up the
four corners of the earth. Throughout the ceremonies, the wailing
lamentations of the women were soft and sad. Nobody minded Easton’s
tears.

He looked at the calendar.

Joanna Ironheel had told him Apache mourn for
a month. It should be over now. He picked up the telephone and
called her number. She answered after the first ring and he was
glad to hear her voice.

“I’ll be passing your door tomorrow,” he
said. “I’ve got to pick up Jessye. She’s staying in Las Cruces with
friends.”

“Oh, I’d love to meet her,” Joanna said.

“I’d like that, too,” Easton said. “Why don’t
I pick you up and bring you down to Cruces with me? I’ll even
spring for dinner at La Posta in Mesilla.”

“I’m not sure ...”

“Try,” he said. “Please.”

“It’s a long time since I went to La Posta,”
she said, and he imagined her smiling.

He looked at Susan’s picture on the desk.

“It’s just dinner, Suze,” he said. But he had
a hunch Susan knew better.

It must have been about six months later
Easton read in the Riverside paper that the badly-decomposed body
of former district attorney Olin McKittrick had been found by
backpackers in a gully in the Sagrado Mountains. The coroner had
determined the cause of death as a gunshot wound to the head,
possibly self-inflicted.

After giving evidence at Joe Apodaca’s trial
and the subsequent trials of a number of men arrested by the FBI on
charges of operating a syndicated sex-pornography ring whose
tentacles extended from Oklahoma to California and as far north as
Idaho.

McKittrick had been given a suspended
sentence and released, the report continued.

His estranged wife Karen told the reporter
she had not seen her husband since their separation the preceding
summer, and that he had been drinking heavily for some time.

Easton called Grita in from the kitchen and
read the news item to her.

“I wish I could say I sorry, patrón,” she
said. “But I’m glad he’s dead. He was malhechor, evil.”

“All of them were,” Easton said.

McKittrick’s testimony had let the whole
dirty cat out of the bag. Masterminded by Carl Gerzen, who fed the
Mexican youngsters into the system and distributed the pornography,
the whole operation protected and concealed by McKittrick’s and
Apodaca’s manipulation of the legal and law-enforcement system, the
Riverside sex-porn syndicate had been a smoothly functioning
license to print money until Adam Twitchell accidentally found that
damning DVD.

Those who had been involved in the
investigation were astonished when McKittrick testified that the
DVD had not belonged to Bob Casey but, by a stroke of bitter irony,
to Adam’s father, Ralph Twitchell. When Adam told his grandfather
what he had seen on it, Casey demanded immediate action from Olin
McKittrick.

Which
put
McKittrick between a rock and a hard place: if Gerzen was exposed,
they would all go down. So Apodaca set up a meet with the old man
and his grandson on Garcia Flat. Casey realized that Apodaca
intended to kill the boy and tried to protect him,
but
Apodaca shot him dead and
Gerzen killed Adam. They were in too deep to get out, anyway. The
rest everyone now knew.

The next time he was up at Junta, Easton
called in at the County Courthouse and asked to see the coroner’s
file on the McKittrick autopsy. It was the usual bundle of folders,
documents, statements by the kids who’d found the body, the
deputies who responded, the evidence found. The photographs were
pretty unpleasant. McKittrick’s body had been out in the open for a
long time and the scavengers had had plenty of time.

Easton carefully put everything back into the
envelope and left. There didn’t seem to be any point in drawing
anyone’s attention to the fact that the body was lying with the
head pointing due east.

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