The Renegades (17 page)

“Bakersfield. You like the music, Deputy?”

“I wish they’d make more of it. I got just about all of it they ever recorded. They put out a Bill Woods
Live at the Blackboard
in ’03. Red Simpson, Don Rich. Great CD.”

“I wish I could play an instrument. I’ve got no discernable talent for anything. Except maybe for splitting atoms, as you pointed out.”

“It was kind of a compliment. I took it as one.”

“Wish I had another beer,” she said.

“Me, too.”

“Long walk back to the cooler in this rain.”

“Let’s watch it for a minute.”

“While you tell me about Shay Eichrodt.”

He told her what he’d seen and heard. Ariel listened without interrupting, her expression dark.

“You really think Laws and Draper cuffed him and beat him?” she asked.

“Possibly.”

“I very highly doubt it.”

“I can go one uglier.”

“They killed Vasquez and Lopes and took their money, which explains Terry Laws’s sudden fortune.”

“That and a whole lot more,” he said.

Hood looked out at the rain.

“All you have is the very questionable word of a brain-damaged felon who can face a death sentence if he’s convicted,” said Ariel.

“In some simple-ass way, that’s why I think he’s telling the truth.”

“If a jury doesn’t, the state can execute him.”

“Yes, it can,” said Hood. “But what’s he supposed to do? Shut up and stay in a mental hospital the rest of his life?”

The rain roared against the shade roof above them. Hood watched the water pour off the racetrack lights, little waterfalls bent south by the wind of the storm.

“What’s all that mean to a Blood gangsta machine-gunning Terry Laws one night?” asked Ariel.

“I don’t know what it means.”

“What have the homicide guys come up with?”

“Londell Dwayne. He looks right. He’d threatened Terry. We talked to him but his alibi fell apart pretty quick. Next thing, Londell maced two detectives and blew into the wind.”

They sat for a long while without saying a word. The rain got heavier, then it slowed. Hood held her hand as they went down the wet steps and across the track to the pit.

They got into her El Camino and she gave Hood a ride to the parking lot.

“Nice Camaro,” she said. “Glasspacks and fat soft tires. Maybe you’re not immune to thrills after all.”

“I’m really not.”

She pushed the car into park and took Hood’s face in both her hands and kissed him and he kissed her back.

“Nice,” she said. “Very nice. Thank you. That’s a dumb thing to say.”

“Thank you. There.”

Hood got out of the El Camino and shut the door. Ariel gunned the engine and looked at him for a long moment, then smiled. Suddenly the El Camino burned away and slid into a big screaming one-eighty on the wet asphalt, back tires throwing up rooster tails of water, which brought her right back to where she’d started. Her window came down.

“Call me later.”

19

In the Hole’s early chill
Hood unlocked the center drawer of his desk. The CD was there—a recording of the anonymous tipper. And so was Coleman Draper’s package from HR, both promised by Warren.

He listened to the recording. It was just as Ariel had described it—hissing with wind noise, barely audible, a drunk-sounding man with an accent. Hood knew that spectrographic voice prints were not allowed as evidence in California state courts but he was still hoping that the recording would be clear enough to tell him something about the caller. Now he doubted it.

This was disappointing, but what Hood really wanted was a basic understanding of Coleman Draper.

First he scanned through Draper’s package, which was surprisingly light, even for a reservist. Hood went straight to the money, looking for signs of Draper’s cut of the courier cash, which had sent Terry Laws into the charitable trust scam. Draper’s bank was First West, and at the time of his “hire” four years ago by LASD, he had a savings account with $5,890 in it, and a money market savings account of $15,433, a stock portfolio valued at $12,740, and a SEP IRA with $8,500 in it. He was making reasonable payments on a home in Venice Beach, with a purchase price of $939,000. He owned a late-model Audi valued at $40,000. His last year’s income from Prestige German was $82,000.

Hood’s computer led him to newspaper accounts and government sites and the usual personal sites and pages. His law enforcement status got him into state and county information that a normal civilian cannot access.

He read patiently.

Coleman Marcus Draper was born on December 12, 1980, to Gerald and Mary Draper, formerly Coleman. That made him about three months younger than Hood was.

Gerald and Mary briefly made the news in 1990 when a local man named Mike Castro was gunned down outside their restaurant in Jacumba. They said he was a regular customer and a nice guy. The restaurant was called Amigos. According to unnamed sources, Castro was a suspected smuggler of drugs and human beings.

Coleman attended San Diego County public schools and graduated from Campo High School in 1998. He was the oldest of three children—his sister, Roxanne, was twelve and his brother, Ron, was ten when an explosion rocked the Draper home in Jacumba.

Hood read from the digitized
San Diego Union-Tribune
of February 5, 1995:

FOUR PERISH IN JACUMBA BLAZE

Four members of a Jacumba family were killed early yesterday morning when their home exploded into fire.

A minor and a neighbor who was spending the night survived the blast but authorities are withholding both names pending further notifications.

One firefighter suffered smoke inhalation but was treated at the scene.

A San Diego County Fire Department spokesman said the apparent cause of the fire was a propane gas leak but the fire is still under investigation.

The fire broke out in the early morning hours when the family was sleeping. It is believed that the victims died of asphyxiation while they slept.

Liquid propane turns to an odorless gas at normal pressure and is usually mixed with a strong odor-causing compound in case of leaks. Flames rapidly engulfed the wood-sided home.

A county fire crew extinguished the fire after a one-hour battle. No neighboring structures were damaged.

Jacumba is a small town of less than 1,000 on the U.S. Mexican border in East County.

George Bryan, a neighbor, said the family were lifelong residents of the quiet border town and were well liked. He said that his dogs woke him up barking in the early morning but the house had not yet begun to burn. He said “it sounded like a bomb went off” shortly before four a.m. when the house exploded.

Hood studied the page-one photograph of the Draper home after the fire—blackened and skeletal, nearly roofless, windows and doors blasted out by the firefighters’ hoses.

A follow-up story the next day identified the four victims, and the survivor, Coleman Draper, fifteen. His friend, Israel Castro, was on the property at the time of the fire, and was unhurt.

The boys were friends and sophomores at Campo High. They had been sleeping in the barn with the family dogs, something that they had done several times in the past, especially on cold nights. The
Union-Tribune
said the temperature in Jacumba that night got down to thirty-seven degrees.

There was a picture of young Coleman sitting on a blue sleeping bag on a bed of hay in the Draper barn with two Jack Russell terriers and two Labrador retrievers nearby. He looked to Hood much like the Coleman Draper he’d had breakfast with just a few short days ago—slender-faced, serious, a curl of white hair on his forehead. In the picture he had a blank look on his face; and though he was looking at the camera, his eyes seemed to be focused on something else.

Two days later a county fire department spokesman said that the cause of the fire was a faulty propane coupling on a hot water heater located in the hallway.

“The gas leaks into the home and if the people are asleep they might not awaken to the smell,” he said. “When the accumulated gas hits a pilot flame or any kind of spark, it explodes. Even static electricity can ignite a gas-filled room.”

Hood saw that one month later there was a
Union-Tribune
article about the friends Coleman Draper and Israel Castro. It pictured the two boys outside the barn, dogs present again.

The article said that five years ago the Draper family had taken in then-ten-year-old Israel Castro after his father was murdered by suspected drug cartel gunmen. Three years after that, Israel had left the Draper home and moved in with relatives living across the border fence dividing Jacumba of the United States from Jacume of Mexico.

Now, in what the writer called a reversal of fortune, fifteen-year-old Coleman was going to move in with Israel’s extended family in Jacume. It would be temporary. He would finish his education at Campo High. It was an example of good international relations.

And, as far as Hood could determine, it was the last time Coleman Draper was mentioned in the
Union-Tribune
.

A decade later, Israel Castro’s name appeared twice more, both in connection with water-rights issues and his businesses, East County Tile & Stone, and Castro Commercial Management.

Hood looked out the narrow window of his prison room and saw the morning sun reflected on the razor wire of the eastern cell block. The storm had passed and the high desert was damp, clear and cold.

He wondered how Coleman had gotten along in Jacume, if Coleman had been allowed to bring his dogs, if Draper and Israel Castro were still friends.

And he wondered what the San Diego County Health and Human Services case worker had thought of young Coleman running off to live with a friend in a smuggler’s hive like Jacume.

But most of all Hood wondered if the fire investigators could explain why the propane coupler had leaked abundantly on February 4, but apparently not before.

THREE HOURS LATER he was sitting across a desk from Teresa Acuna, head of the Child Welfare Services in National City. She had handled the Coleman Draper family-to-family living arrangement back in 1995.

“We had grant money to seed that program,” she said. She was black-haired and heavyset, early forties. “There had been some success in Ohio. The idea was to make it easier for the families of children who were friends to become foster caregivers. We wanted continuity, familiarity, cohesion. In Coleman’s case, this was complicated by the fact that Israel Castro’s extended family was living in Mexico. We’d never tried anything like that before, so we opened talks with the Baja Norte Bureau of Social Services. At first they said it would be impossible. Then they said it wouldn’t be a problem. That kind of wavering is not as unusual as it sounds, in a place where graft, corruption and dishonesty abound.”

“Jacume.”

“Jacumba. East County. North Baja. The entire border, really. It’s a paradise of iniquity out there.”

“Baja Norte Social Services changed its mind?”

“Yes. With no explanation. The Castro family was influential and I assumed that they were behind it. When I say family, I mean it loosely. I personally traveled to Jacume to see the home that Coleman had been invited into. It was neat and clean and large and had a free and open feeling to it. Although there were only an aunt and an uncle of Israel’s present that day, I knew from my Jacumba sources that the home was actually shared by three married couples and usually filled with children—cousins, friends, friends of friends. There were frequent guests. The uncle was a landowner in the Santo Tomas Valley. He grew grapes and owned a large winery. He had government connections in Mexico City. There was a taint of prison in that line of the Castros—not the uncle, but the uncle’s uncle. This was not talked about.”

“Why did you let the boy into this paradise of iniquity?”

“A good question. I wrestled with it. The good was that he would be with the family of his friend. He would be in a stable environment, and he would have at least some sense of continuity to his life. He would be on the other side of the same city he’d grown up in, as it were. The downside was obvious. What swayed me finally was Coleman himself. He was an exceptionally likable boy—intelligent and well mannered and calm. He seemed emotionally strong and capable, even though he was stunned by the sudden death of his family. I believed that he would have a good life with his friends in Jacume. I believed in him.”

Teresa Acuna sat back and folded her hands in her lap. “I interviewed Coleman when he turned sixteen, and again when he turned seventeen, and once more before his eighteenth birthday. He seemed happy. His grades were good and his citizenship was good. He played baseball. He had a group of friends.”

“When was the last time you saw him?”

She tapped her keyboard, waited and tapped again. “That last interview was November of ’98. He was getting ready to move up to L.A. He said he was tired of Jacume. He wanted to be a car mechanic. I told him that good, honest car mechanics were hard to find, and that he could do well at that. He said he wasn’t sure about the honest part, but he was a joker.”

Hood told her that he was doing a background check on Coleman because he was a person of interest in an ongoing investigation. He said he was sorry that he couldn’t tell her more but gave her a card with his cell and landline numbers.

“If he contacts you, I’d like this conversation kept confidential.”

“I understand. You will want to talk to Lloyd Sallis. He investigated the fire. We had different views.”

“I have an appointment with him in half an hour.”

FIRE DEPARTMENT investigator Lloyd Sallis had retired and now lived in San Diego. He was a large man with thick gray hair and a deeply lined face. His home was dark and the couches were slouching and he apologized to Hood for his housekeeping. He was a widower, he said, and didn’t mind a little dust.