The Victim (39 page)

“
How did you guys get from El Paso to Payson, Arizona?” Jack asked.

Earl thought some more. “Panhandled. Pick-pocketed. Sold tina. We ended up in Flagstaff after putting together enough scratch for Greyhound fare. That’s where we hooked up with that girl.”

Jack flexed his brow. “What girl?”

“
The one they say Ozzie murdered. What was her name? Like the Kinks song.”

“
Lola,” Anton muttered.

“
Yeah, that’s it!”

“
Earl, witness accounts place you and Ozzie with Lola at the Desert Rim Motel on March 14, 2003. That’s up in Payson. She was reported missing by her mother on the 12th. It’s believed she left home in Phoenix on her own accord. It was nothing new; she was a habitual runaway. She had been reported missing before. So what you’re telling us is that you and Ozzie arrived in Flagstaff around March 12, 2003, met up with Lola, and then went to a motel in Payson?”

Earl’s face contorted with confusion. His lips parted, baring his gray meth-ravaged teeth. “We didn’t meet up and go to some hotel. No, we spent a lot of time with her. She just kind of stuck around. Like a stray cat you feed once and never leaves.”

“
How much time?” Anton asked.

“
Months, at least.”

Jack and Anton shared a puzzled glance. They both thought that Lola Munson went missing on March 12, 2003. Now Earl was telling them that he and Osvaldo Garcia had spent months with Lola prior to her murder.

“
Were you working at the time?” Jack asked, steering the conversation back toward innocuous subjects, if only to mask his suspicion.

“
This is ’03, right?”

“
That’s correct.”

Earl chewed his lip as he tried to remember. He tapped the ash out the window. “Maybe two, three years earlier. Hadn’t been out for some time.”

“
Out?”

“
Out, as in out on assignment. After my discharge I went to work for PMCs. That’s private military company to civilian folks. You know, executive security, contract work. Escorting cargo vessels through the Gulf of Aden, sniping pirates off the bow. That sort of thing.” He took one last drag before tossing the cigarette butt out the window. “Coffee?”

Anton and Jack declined the offer. Earl walked over to the counter lining the back of the room and activated the single-serving coffee maker, hissing and dribbling into a paper cup. The room smelled of French vanilla.

“
How long did you do that kind of work?” Jack asked.

“
Good lord…six, seven years? Somalia was my last deployment, so right after that I began.”

“
Who’d you work for? Blackwater?”

Earl nodded. “Did a few assignments for them. Most of my steady work was with another PMC outfit called the Neptune Group. Mostly ex-SEALs. The meth addiction got so bad that I started losing focus. Word got out in the industry that I was unreliable. Neptune’s a multinational private security firm that couldn’t afford that kind of negative PR. Company had already gotten ass-hammered over a supposed connection to a member of the Armed Services Committee when we were given the congressional green light to unfuck what used to be Yugoslavia. Humanitarian shit, providing protection for a joint effort between the Army Corps of Engineers and a civilian contractor building roads and hospitals. But they had already lost interest in me by then.”

He poured two packets of sweetener and powdered creamer into his cup and mixed it with a stirrer. The creamer didn’t quite dissolve, formed a clumpy film on the surface.

“
So then you came back to the U.S?” Anton asked.

“
Roger. Shit went downhill from there.”

“
And somewhere along the line, you picked up a warrant. Yavapai County, possession of methamphetamine with intent to sell,” Jack informed him.

Earl nodded. “Roger on that as well. Sold some tina to an undercover. I think that was in Prescott. Got hooked n’ booked, made bail, went AWOL. The sheriff’s office had been trying to find me. My intel advised me that they’d stuck to the basics—typical law enforcement SOP. Last known address, place of employment, establishments known to frequent. No such luck. I had gone to ground, decisively off the grid. Minded my P’s and Q’s and got out of Dodge, quick turn n’ burn. Ended up in El Paso where I cliqued up with Ozzie and the rest’s history.”

“
But a minute ago you said that you and Ozzie met up with Lola in Flagstaff, a few months before Ozzie got arrested?” Jack made no efforts to mask the doubt in his voice. He was looking for answers he wished he had had ten years earlier.

“
That’s affirmative. Ozzie and I had made our way north. I’d spent years floating around Arizona. I’m from here, born and raised in Florence, where the prison is. My dad was a corrections officer if you can stomach the irony. An emotionally empty man, hated his job, relied on parenting methods that strongly resembled the way he handled the inmates he supervised eight hours a day. It was that rigidity that led me to the military, although I think I was just looking for a way to get as far away from home as possible. Ultimately, it was that void that led me to my drug of choice. Prison was ultimately the best thing that happened to me. The cops finally caught up with me in ’05, took a plea to twenty months and was released in early 2007. Cliche as it sounds, I got involved with the prison ministry and turned my life over to Jesus. Came here as a condition of my release and never left.”

Anton followed intently. He was obviously a very effective counselor.

He asked, “Can you tell us about the circumstances under which you met Lola Munson?”

“
Same way we met them all. You hang around the same spots. You get to know the same people. You share the common bond of getting high.”

Jack nodded, confirming the suspicions he had long held. “So Lola Munson was a meth user.”

“
As I recall, she wasn’t as bad as the rest. She did it not because she physically craved the stuff like I did. She did it because it was something to do. Not as bad as her friends I’ll tell you that.”

Anton’s eyes widened. “Friends?”

He sipped his coffee. “She called them her family. Said they had been through some things together but wouldn’t say what. Hell, I never asked. We all have our demons. I remember this one time, we had hitched a ride in the bed of a truck some Mexican was driving. We were going through Flagstaff and she looked toward the mountains and told me, ‘
I’ve been to hell and back over there.
’”

Anton caught his breath. “Who were these people? The ones she called her family?”

“
There were quite a few I can’t put my finger on. There were two others that I can recall. A young girl, young guy.”

CHAPTER 42

The Coconino County Superior Courthouse looked like a building on an Ivy League campus. The redbrick facade was markedly East Coast in design, replete with archways and a clock tower with a vaulted roof and weathervane. A sharp contrast to anything Arizonan.

Flagstaff was the exception to the stereotype of the American Southwest. I-17 cut a swath through dense pine forests as the highway climbed through the mountains, dusted with a fine layer of winter snow.

Anton had made the 150-mile drive in just under two hours. He checked the weather app on his phone. It was 22 degrees. He opened the car door and was pelted in the face by the frigid air. His wool sport coat did little to guard against the cold. He blew hot breath into his hands, furiously rubbing them together before stuffing them in his pockets.

“
Fuck you, Anton,” Jack blurted, easing out of the car. A rosy flush spread on his bronze cheeks. He pulled his jacket as tightly as he could around his shoulders. “I mean that sincerely.” He looked up and checked his watch. “We’re supposed to be wheels up by five. We need to head back to Scottsdale.”

Anton grinned. “We’ve got plenty of time. Don’t worry. I can drive fast on the way back.”

“
For the love of God, c’mon—”

“
Please, Jack,” he said. “Just trust me on this one. If Lola had been living in Flagstaff for months prior to her death, then there’s a chance that she got arrested while she was there. There would be a criminal record that verifies Earl Simpson’s story.”

They speed-walked into the courthouse and emptied their pockets into plastic bins as they passed through security. It was just after twelve and the courthouse traffic had likely dwindled down since the morning calendars. Anton checked the directory in the lobby and looked for the clerk’s office.

“
Lola had recently turned eighteen a few months before her disappearance, right?” Anton asked, knowing that an adult record would be easier to obtain than a juvenile record.

“
Something like that.”

Anton and Jack took the elevator to the second floor to the clerk’s office. A stocky woman in her mid-forties was seated at a desk behind a glass window, typing away. She actually smiled when Anton approached—a far cry from the deputy clerks back in Miami.

“
Can I help you?”

“
Yes,” Anton said, returning the smile. “We’re looking for some information on a criminal case. Defendant’s name would be Lola Munson. L-O-L-A, M-U-N-S-O-N.”

The woman typed the information, shook her head. “I’m sorry, sir. Nothing is coming up for that name.”

Jack nudged Anton. “Happy? You drive over two hours? We could’ve done this search online.”

Anton ignored him. He thought about the clerks’ offices in Miami-Dade and Broward. How often he had difficulty finding information about clients’ cases because names were misspelled and entered incorrectly. Databases referencing criminal case information were notoriously rigid. One wrong letter and the search would yield zero results.

Anton directed his attention to the deputy clerk behind the glass. “How about M-U-N-
N
-S-O-N?”

The woman entered the different spelling of the last name. She frowned at the computer screen. “Again, I’m sorry, sir. Nothing is coming up.”

Anton thought about it. Information in a clerk’s office database was usually extracted from an arrest affidavit. A good number of arrest affidavits were handwritten. Quick, lazy pen strokes by a cop who just wanted to finish the damn thing and get it filed. Anton had read thousands of arrest affidavits in his career as a prosecutor and defense attorney. At least half of them, especially the misdemeanor arrest affidavits where the cops put little to no effort into the required paperwork for such petty offenses, were completely illegible. If a cop had arrested Lola in Flagstaff and handwritten a report, a deputy clerk would have to decipher it in order to input the name and biographical information. An ‘M’ could have easily looked like an ‘N.’ A ‘U’ could have easily looked like an ‘O.’

“
Try this. M-
O
-N-S-O-N.”

The deputy clerk entered in the name and her eyes widened. “I do have a record for a Lola Monson. Date of arrest was January 10, 2003.”

Anton turned to Jack. “Two months before she went missing, she gets arrested up in Flagstaff.” He turned back to the deputy clerk. “What was the charge?”

She scrolled down the page. “Misdemeanor theft. Looks like a shoplifting charge. Case is closed. She still owes court costs, though. But those are in collections now.”

“
Is the court file available?”

The deputy clerk flashed an awkward smile. “Not sure. It’s an ’03 case. Let me run back and check.” She got up and disappeared into a pool of cubicles. Within a few minutes, she returned with a thick manila file under her arm. “You’re in luck,” she said, easing back into her swivel chair. She passed the file to Anton through the slot in the glass. “It was over in Archives. Feel free to look through it. If you want copies made we’ll have to charge you per page.”

“
That’s fine,” he said, taking the file.

They found some counter space in the far corner of the room. Anton opened the file. The usual documents were two-hole punched and fastened into place. The arrest affidavit was the first page on the right side of the open file. Atop a thinner stack on the left side was the bond receipt.