The Rivers Run Dry (20 page)

There was a folder waiting, a background check needed on somebody who'd applied for a federal job. I pushed the file aside and lifted my calendar, counting the days. Courtney VanAlstyne went missing Sunday, October 9. Today was Thursday, October 20. I stared at the orderly boxes on the calendar, a sick feeling in my stomach. McLeod came out of his glassed-in office holding the documents I'd typed up just hours ago. His face was cleanly shaven, the red tie in place. But dark circles shadowed the keen blue eyes.

“They all walked,” he said.

“Excuse me?”

“Every one of them walked this morning,” he said. “Lawyers sprang them before we'd even finished debriefing Lutini.”

“What about the runner?”

“Slugs?”

“Suggs. Ernie Suggs.”

He tugged on his earlobe.

“What?” I said.

“We
had
to let him go. He's filing charges against you.”

“Charges—for what?”

“For breaking his wrist.”

“Excuse me?”

“They had to pull off the cuffs in the interview room. His hand was blue. His lawyer's the happiest man in Seattle.”

“I did not break his wrist.”

McLeod evaluated my face, as though searching for mendacity. “Did you double lock the cuffs?”

I remembered the feel of the man's clammy skin, his nearly boneless elbow. How I clamped down the cuffs right before the Bureau car pulled up and Ngo took him away. But did I punch the lock, the mechanism that kept the nickel-plated hasps from closing completely?

“I always lock them, it's a habit,” I said. “I keep my index finger hooked under the cuffs. When the metal hits, I stop ratcheting.”

“But you don't actually remember pushing in the lock last night?”

I shook my head.

“This will be a fresh hill,” he said.

He meant hell, I knew that. But “hill” wasn't far off. I was looking at a heap of internal memos and interrogations by management, subpoenas from defense attorneys, courtroom hearings, a fresh hill of paper to join Ngo's report in my personnel file. It could take years to clear my name. If that was even possible.

“You okay?” McLeod asked.

I picked up the background check on the new federal worker, tapping the file against my desk. When I glanced up, I could see McLeod's question had been genuine. But I avoided a genuine answer.

“Sure, I'm fine.”

“What's wrong?”

“Aside from all this garbage, she's still missing. A couple days, okay. Maybe she's off somewhere. But at this point, no. And I keep coming back to the casino. This guy works there.”

He shuffled the documents in his hands. “Here. I approved the search on the casino. Shoot the request over to the U.S. attorney, ASAP.”

“Thank you.”

“Then I want you to write up another affidavit,” he said. “Let's gather some probable cause for this guy's house.”

“The runner?”

“The parents don't care if his wrist's broken. They're still calling the Senator, he's still calling the ASAC, and we can't roll over because some defense attorney is about to get rich. If you say you didn't break his wrist, you didn't break his wrist.”

“I didn't break his wrist, sir.”

“Stick to that story, Harmon. You're going to need it.”

chapter sixteen

T
wenty-two minutes after the faxes blistered back and forth between me and the U.S. attorney's office, I walked north on Fourth Avenue to Stewart Street. The wind felt damp, full of a cool mist that seemed pressed out of the clouds. But it did not rain.

Inside the U.S. District Court House, I found the federal magistrate's office. Two suited attorneys ahead of me checked cell phones that were supposed to be turned off. When the attorneys left the magistrate's office, they looked equally frustrated.

The judge's chambers smelled of thick cottony paper, the kind bound with thread into old books, and I closed the door behind me, smoothing down my wind-beaten hair as the judge read the warrants. He was somewhere in his sixties and wore the long-suffering expression of a bassett hound, the corner of every facial feature drooping. When he glanced up, his eyes appeared green-gray, like glacial lakes. He nodded at an empty Windsor chair. I sat down.

Behind his teak desk, volumes of federal tortes bound in red leather stretched across the shelves, and I stared at a series of tugboat pictures in which the sturdy elliptical vessels pulled barges several times their size. His chambers felt like a ship—teak desk, Windsor chair, large brass hook holding the black robe—but my mind kept flashing to my father's judicial chambers. I didn't understand why until the judge started scrawling notes on a yellow legal pad, reading my minor petitions as if they were the Magna Carta.

My father used to say his job description was “to seek justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with God.” When I joined the FBI's mineralogy lab, I took his mission statement as my own, but less than a year later, after examining forensic evidence that proved beyond a shadow of a doubt what horrors man would inflict on his fellow man—and woman and child—the words of the minor prophet rang hollow to me. Murder. Rape. Child molestations that made the term
perverted
sound too polite. Mercy? For a guy who raped his three-year-old niece at knifepoint?

My father shook his head. “God sees evil, Raleigh. His wrath is real. But his mercy equals his wrath. He won't send one without the other. And neither should we.”

I protested; an entire industry took advantage of mercy, purging psychopaths and pedophiles from prisons, extending paroles, unleashing brutalities on the innocent in crimes that grew worse with leniency.

“I agree,” he said. “Mercy without judgment is pathetic. But judgment without mercy brings despair.”

“But how do you know, how do you figure out what they deserve?”

He had smiled at me. “I pay attention to the last part about walking humbly with God.”

The judge cleared his throat. I glanced up. He stared at me over his reading glasses.

“Indian land,” he said.

“Pardon?”

He held up the affidavit for the casino search. “You're talking about Indian land here. We get into some hair-splitting legal boundaries where tribal rights are concerned. Indian land receives different interpretations under the law.”

“Do we need more probable cause?”

“Just be prepared,” he said. “Watch yourself. Don't stride in there thinking the FBI is some sheriff in a Wild West movie. I've seen how some of you agents operate. Respect the people's rights, but get what you need. Then get out.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Sir? Hmph.” He held up the second warrant, for Ernie Suggs's house. “Not exactly clear-cut either, is it?”

“No, sir.” I quickly told him about the previous night's surveillance, how Suggs took off, how we believed he knew something about the missing girl who gambled heavily in the casino where he worked. “He's a person of interest.”

“Yeah, I got that. But a guy running from a surveillance operation? Let me tell you right now, the ACLU throws parties over that stuff. They'll say, ‘Of course he ran, you're the FBI.' And the jury agrees with them because these days everybody's a victim.”

“What else do we need for you to sign it?”

“Nothing,” he said. “But the U.S. attorney needs to know they'll have to duke it out later in court. Watch your step on that search too, you hear?”

“Thank you, sir.”

“Don't thank me,” he growled. “Find that girl. I saw the story in the newspaper. Makes me sick. Used to be all we worried about was bears in the mountains. At least back then, we knew who the enemy was.”

Outside the courthouse I looked around for Jack. He was supposed to meet me here—McLeod's orders—and when I finally spotted his black Jeep, it was because of the curvaceous backside of a skirted woman. She leaned into the passenger window and tipped over the loading zone's painted yellow curb, the ropy straps of her sandals winding like asps up the tanned bare legs. The wind caught the edges of her blue skirt. I heard her giggle.

“Excuse me,” I said.

She turned around. “Oh.”

I opened the car door, slipping into the leather seat, staring straight ahead. Her citrus perfume hitched on the wind, a scent that bit and beckoned at the same time, a smell like blood oranges marinated in rum.

“You better call me, Jack,” she said.

“I will, Becky.”

She took one step back, wiggling her fingers. “You know where to find me.”

The Jeep peeled from the curb. He looked over. “You got the search warrants signed?”

“Search warrants?” I said. “What search warrants?”

He braked, turning for the curb so fast I had to brace myself against the dashboard. A clutch of smokers outside the court-house turned, their faces startled.

“You didn't get the search warrants signed? Harmon, what were you doing in there, catching another nap?”

“No, I was flirting. Isn't that why we visit the courthouse, to flirt?”

He glanced at the rearview mirror, waited one split second, and sped toward I-5. Following the highway south, he took I-90 east, and as we entered the long tunnel he reached between the seats, pulling out a plain manila envelope. He tossed it in my lap.

“That girl you just insulted? She saved you a ton of paper-work. Check it out. Suggs has a prior, of sorts.”

I opened the envelope and found a Maple Valley police report dated eight years ago. It described an unnamed ten-year-old girl walking home from school, taking her usual short cut through an abandoned field, when Ernest R. Suggs stepped out from behind a stand of trees and pulled her into the forest. The girls' mother arrived home from work and found her daughter in the bathroom, sobbing, bleeding. The mother took the girl to the doctor, the doctor notified police.

But the case never went to trial. Two weeks later, the girl recanted her story; the mother asked the police to drop the matter, and the incident would have disappeared except for a prosecutor who asked a judge to order a psychologist's evaluation of Suggs. The evaluation was in there, too, a half page of abstract psychobabble. After reading the words “completely rehabilitated,” I closed the file. No sex offender was ever completely rehabilitated. At least, not by the justice system.

We were crossing the floating bridge over Lake Washington and the road seemed to hover inches above the water, the concrete blocks fracturing the wind. To my right, lake water rippled with white caps. To my left, it stretched smooth as blown glass.

“You call it flirting,” Jack said. “But you'd be surprised what it turns up. Becky's brother-in-law works for the Maple Valley police. They've kept a file on the guy ever since.”

I turned my head toward the rippling lake, feeling the wind out of the south pulsing against the Jeep, sending a sporadic whistling sound through the door frame. We drove in silence until we reached the town of Issaquah fifteen minutes later, where the cloud cover had descended down the mountain like disapproving gray brows.

In the Burger King parking lot, two Bureau vehicles idled next to an Issaquah police cruiser and another cruiser from the state police, plus the gray Crown Vic I'd seen the first day out here, the car belonging to Detective Markel.

We followed the detective's convoy down Sunset Avenue, turning in at a manmade waterfall with the word “Talus” engraved on the polished black granite. If anybody cared, I could have explained that it was just about impossible for talus and polished granite to wind up together—talus being the broken rock found at the bottom of crags and cliffs—but I could see why the marketers had seized the word. Talus somehow insinuated wealth, exclusivity, a much better choice than its geological equivalent: scree.

We followed the newly paved road through what had once been forest but now carried trimmed shrubs and planted autumn flowers that wouldn't survive the winter. At the top of the hill, a group of new Craftsman-style homes faced east, like manufactured heliotropes ready to greet the rising sun. Down below, the blue mountains cupped Lake Sammamish like a cool drink between sturdy hands.

Ernie Suggs's house was three stories, with a driveway unsullied by motor oil stains. His neighbors' homes were similar palaces yet close enough that when I climbed out of the Jeep, adjusting my bulletproof vest, I could hear a phone ringing next door. It finally stopped.

After I got out, Jack drove the Jeep to the end of the street and parked, stationed on lookout, with another Bureau car closing the street's other end. The state trooper parked at the curb, walking toward the house. It was Lowell, the trooper I'd met in the Cougar Mountain parking lot. He nodded and we followed Detective Markel and two Issaquah deputies to Suggs's front door. We let the two SWAT agents knock.

Then a blue Toyota Camry raced down the street, pulling into Suggs's driveway. Byron Ngo leaped out, dark eyes flat as a delta, with about as much current below the surface. Ngo walked to the front door, nodding acknowledgment to the detective. The SWAT agent rang the bell.