Apache Country (40 page)

The dynamic of the ring, the means by which
the offender or offenders bonded the victims, was usually a complex
mix of threats, praise, peer pressure, and competition. Sometimes
blackmail was used as a lever, threats by the adult to tell the
police about illegal sex acts or other activities linked with them.
In still other cases violence was used, especially when a desirable
victim was trying to escape from a relationship the abuser did not
yet wish to terminate.

“The guy in Oregon, he used older kids he’d
already seduced to force the younger ones to have sex with them. If
they didn’t do what they were told they got beaten up. Once they
submitted, they were photographed engaged in the sexual acts, and
then the man would use them for his own pleasure. After a while he
started inviting a few friends around.”

“That’s probably what’s happening here,”
Easton said.

When the victims had served their purpose and
were ‘sex-trained,’ they were often passed on ‘pre-seduced’ to
larger and more sophisticated sex-rings around the country, linked
to each other by e-mail or the Internet, where bulletin boards
could be accessed which advertised users’ ‘special preferences.’
Later still the victims would be sold on to other rings which
preferred their ‘fresh meat’ a little older. Inevitably, many
victims went on to become abusers themselves.

“Bastards,” Cochrane spat.

“So you see there’s more to this than nailing
Joe Apodaca and Olin McKittrick, Tom,” Easton said. “I want the
head honcho. I want to find that German.”

“Go get him,” Cochrane said. “His name is
Gerzen. Carl August Gerzen.”

Easton’s eyes widened. “You mean to tell me
you’ve ID’d him? Why the hell didn’t you —”

He saw the look on Cochrane’s face and
stopped. When had Tom had the chance to tell him anything?

“Sorry, Tom. You just took me by
surprise.”

Cochrane nodded, rolling the cigarette
between his fingers, looking at it longingly.

“You ever need to know where not to stay in
Riverside, check with me,” he said. “I never knew there were so
many fleabags in town. This guy Pete Maxwell, runs a dump called
the Bluebird Motel on east Second, along there around Atkinson.
When I tell him we’re looking for this big blond muscleman with a
German accent, he remembers a guy who stayed at the motel the night
Weddle was offed. Registered under the name Walter Horn, insisted
on paying cash. Maxwell got a bit leery, took down the guy’s
license plate number. I ran it through DMV, got a make, pulled his
license. Carl Gerzen, lives in El Paso, runs a trucking
company.”

“Has he got a sheet?”

Cochrane nodded. “I ran him through the
National Crime Information Center. He’s originally from
Bakersfield, California, that’s where he got his record. Two
arrests for aggravated assault, once for possession with intent. He
walked on a manslaughter charge when the witnesses failed to show,
suspected of being involved in several murders associated with the
drug trade …”

“Slick as a greased gecko,” Easton said. “And
just as hard to catch. Any personal data?”

Cochrane fished out his notebook, flipped
over the pages. “Carl August Gerzen, thirty-three, born Red
Mountain, California. Never been married. Bakersfield cops say he
was a hard man, muscle for some big porn dealer they could never
lay a finger on. Gerzen moved to El Paso six years ago. Residence
on Montana Avenue, runs an interstate transportation company, El
Paso Transfer. You want to tell me how he fits into all this?”

“Adam Twitchell found a pornographic DVD at
the Casey ranch,” Easton told him. “Sex parties with juveniles, all
sorts of obscenity. Carl Gerzen was on the tape. Somehow Adam
recognized him, so he had to be shut up. Killing Casey was
incidental. It was Adam they wanted.”

“And Weddle? How does he fit in?”

“Ironheel told him he’d eye-witnessed the
murders. Weddle called Olin McKittrick. And that got him
killed.”

“You like Gerzen for the Weddle hit as
well.”

“He’s a natural,” Easton nodded.

Without mentioning her name, he went on to
tell Cochrane the rest of what Alice Apodaca had told him. Cochrane
listened in complete silence until he finished and then sighed.

“Just tell me one thing. How much of this can
you prove?”

“In a courtroom?” Easton said. “None of
it.”

“Figured,” Cochrane said grimly.

“Get me the Bible on this guy Gerzen, Tom,”
Easton said. “High school and college transcripts, TRW credit
rating, phone bills, bank statements, credit card charges, travel
records, everything.”

“I already talked to the El Paso cops. They
say as far as they know he’s been clean ever since he moved there.
Oh, and he’s like that with La Migra, the Border Patrol.”

He held up the first two fingers of his right
hand, crossed.

“Interesting,” Easton remarked, and his eyes
narrowed. “My source says La Migra is in on the traffic. When you
think about it, they’d have to be. And there’s something else.”

“What?”

“I told you, they came after us in a very
high-tech helicopter out of El Paso. The pilot said the guy who set
it up was called Carl. Does Gerzen own a chopper?”

Cochrane shrugged. “Not that I know of.”

“He had to get it someplace,” Easton said.
“Border Patrol would make a dirty-bastard kind of sense.”

“I’ll check it out. What’s your next
move?”

“Ironheel doesn’t know it yet,” Easton said.
“But we’re going to turn ourselves in.”

Cochrane looked at Easton with undisguised
astonishment. “Are you crazy?” he said. “The minute those guys get
a fix on you, they’re going to do their damnedest to kill you.”

“I know,” Easton said. “In fact, I’m kind of
banking on it.”

If anyone had asked him, FBI Special Agent
Edward Hatch, senior agent in charge of the FBI office in
Albuquerque, would have told them he was pissed off, frustrated
anger putting two deep lines between his eyebrows.

“Another mess like this and Washington is
going to give us a very hard time,” he said to his deputy, George
Smith.

“Hell, Ed, it wasn’t our fault!” Smith
protested. “The both of us warned Reardon, and he still screwed
up.”

“I don’t blame Reardon. I blame that pushy
asshole McKittrick down in Riverside,” Hatch said. “I never did
like that guy.”

“Hell, Ed,” his partner smiled. “You have to
get on line to dislike Olin KcKittrick.”

“I hate to admit it, but it may be we owe
him, at that,” Hatch said. “If it hadn’t been for him we probably
never would have gone up there and talked to the Ironheel
woman.”

“You believed her, then?” Smith said.

Ed Hatch looked out of the window, the frown
still in place. Fiercely honest, a man who truly hated crime and
criminals, he knew all too well ‘believe’ was a word that came in a
variety of different strengths. And what Joanna Ironheel had told
them took a lot of believing. Even so ...

“Damned if I can see how not to,” he said
reluctantly.

The preceding day, while their team of FBI
agents diligently scoured the outlying settlements of the
reservation for Ironheel and Easton, Hatch and Smith had spent
several hours questioning – “comprehensive interrogation” in
Bureauspeak – Joanna Ironheel. At first she had refused to talk to
them at all.

“You’d better talk to us, Doctor Ironheel,”
Hatch told her. “Or there may be consequences.”

“Are you threatening me, Agent Hatch?”

He smiled. “I’m offering you a little
friendly advice,” he said. “If you refuse to tell us everything you
know, we would have to assume you are hiding something.”

“You won’t believe me,” she replied angrily.
“I know you won’t. You people aren’t interested in the truth.”

“How can we respond to that meaningfully when
you won’t tell us what you believe the truth to be?” Smith asked
her.

“This is not a matter of what I believe,” she
said with great dignity. “Truth is truth. Da’adiihí.”

“Spare me the homilies, Doctor,” Hatch said,
making it weary. “The truth is that your brother killed an old man
and a young boy, took an officer of the law hostage, and now he’s
killed one of his own people. We’ve got to stop him before he harms
anyone else.”

She turned away, staring at the timber-dark
hills across the valley. She was an attractive woman, Hatch
thought, and wondered why she was unmarried. Maybe she was caught
in the cleft stick of the classic racial dilemma, too aware of the
difficulties of marrying one of her own race, too Apache to marry
anyone else.

“We’re trying to save a life here, Doctor
Ironheel,” Hatch said. “We need your help to persuade your brother
to bring in the man he’s holding hostage.”

To his surprise, Joanna Ironheel whirled
around, eyes blazing with anger.

“David Easton is not a hostage!” she snapped.
“He is out there trying to prove my brother’s innocence!”

“You really believe that?” Hatch said.

“Yes, I do!” she said. “Why won’t you?”

Hatch looked at Smith, giving him an eye
signal. Both of them were pragmatists. In their line of business
you did whatever you had to do, used whatever came your way,
without shame, without compunction. Grief was a key. Sadness was a
handle. Loyalty was a word on a plastic card. They could use Joanna
Ironheel’s anger to find out what they wanted to know. They had
worked together a long time. Each knew every move the other would
make.

“Okay, let’s say for a moment we believe
you,” Hatch said. “Easton is trying to prove your brother is
innocent. Tell us the rest of it.”

“No,” she said. “I don’t trust you.”

“Ma’am?”

Hatch’s wounded look was the result of much
practice. It didn’t work on Joanna Ironheel.

“They sent you up here, didn’t they? Apodaca
and McKittrick, those crooks. They told you to question me. Go on,
talk to her. She has to know where they are. That’s what this is
all about, isn’t it?”

“The Bureau works with the civil authorities,
Doctor Ironheel,” Smith said. “Not for them.”

“Of course,” she said hotly. “Not for them.
Just hand in glove with them.”

“Doctor, if you have information on this
matter which you wish to remain confidential we can—”

Joanna Ironheel shook her head again. “My
brother was right. He told me not to trust any of you.”

“Why do you think he said that, ma’am?” Smith
asked softly.

“Because you’re all …” She bit off the end of
the sentence, but the anger won. “You’re all in it together.”

“In what?”

“All of it. The kidnappings, the young men,
the whole filthy business. My brother told me all about it.”

Hatch glanced at Smith. This was something
new.

“I’m sorry, ma’am, you’ve lost us,” Hatch
said. “Maybe if you explained ... What’s this about
kidnappings?”

“You people don’t know anything,” she said
impatiently. “Not the murders, not my brother’s escape, nothing at
all. Can’t you understand? David Easton is not a hostage. He knows
my brother didn’t kill anyone.”

“How does he know that, ma’am?” Hatch asked
gently.

“Because James told him who really killed
them.”

“And who was that?”

Joanna Ironheel looked at them for a long
moment. They waited tensely.

“You have to help them,” she said. “You
must.”

“Then you’re going to have to tell us more
than you’re telling us at the moment, Doctor Ironheel,” Hatch said.
“We can’t do anything until you do.”

She nodded, as if making up her mind.
“They’re trying to kill them.”

Hatch glanced at his partner again. “Who’s
trying to kill whom, ma’am?” he said.

She shook her head impatiently. “The men who
are behind all this.”

“Which men would that be?” Smith asked.

They saw her hesitate, then decide. “Sheriff
Apodaca. Olin McKittrick. And a man named Gerzen, a German who
lives in El Paso,” she said.

Hatch managed to keep his face
expressionless. He looked at Smith, who raised a quizzical eyebrow
to indicate he knew what Hatch was thinking. Joanna Ironheel had
just rung a very large bell. Several months earlier, in the face of
mounting evidence of the existence of a chain of sophisticated
hebephile rings throughout Arizona and New Mexico, the Southwestern
Regional Director of the FBI had created a hand-picked task force
to conduct a top secret undercover investigation codenamed Blue
Boy.

Attention was presently focused upon the
activities of a group of men in El Paso and Ciudad Juarez whose
names had recurred frequently in the task force’s investigations
into the disappearance of young men, many of them Mexican. One of
the recurring names had been that of an El Pasoan named Carl
Gerzen, but getting anyone to talk about him or offer hard evidence
against him, or indeed any of the other men involved, was like
trying to nail mercury to a wall.

Which was why, with every man at his disposal
fully occupied with the ramifications of Blue Boy, Hatch had been
less than enthusiastic when Baca County D.A. Olin McKittrick
contacted him to submit a request – in effect an order – for a
comprehensive all-points search on the Mescalero Apache reservation
for a fugitive Apache holding hostage a law officer. Not inquired
if it was possible, you understand, not checked to see whether he
could handle it. The FBI did not take kindly to being pushed around
by small-town law-enforcement.

“You know how big that damned Reservation
is?” he had protested. “You know how many people live on it?”

“Twenty seven miles long, thirty six miles
wide. And at last count there were something like three and a half
thousand enrolled members of the Mescalero tribe up there. Anything
else you’d like to know?” McKittrick had snapped back.

“Come on, Olin, you know damn well what I’m
talking about,” Hatch protested. “There are settlements all over
those damn mountains. Three Rivers, Elk Silver, Carrizo, Whitetail,
Mud Canyon. We could be up there for a week. Always supposing we
can get any sort of co-operation at all from the Tribal
President.”