The Victim (43 page)

But Earl Simpson had provided several key pieces of new information, Anton explained. For one—and this was confirmed by the misdemeanor record in Flagstaff—Lola Munson had been 150 miles from home three months before she was reported missing.

“
Like the Casey Anthony case,” Mandy said, drawing the same comparison as Anton had to the high-profile murder case that had garnered international attention. “Little girl is missing for a full month before it’s reported to police.”

“
Yeah, only difference is they found a body in that case. Lola’s somewhere in the Tonto National Forest, if the animals haven’t gotten to her.”

Mandy’s brow lifted as he nodded, realizing a possibility he hadn’t previously thought of.

“
That could explain why a body wasn’t found.”

“
The foothills of Eastern Arizona are a different landscape. It’s mountainous, paradise for hunters and outdoorsmen. It’s why we drove up there to go camping. You don’t bury a body deep enough and it’ll get eaten by something. Bones leftover can get swept away by monsoons or buried under fallen pine needles. It’s not like the open desert where a body will bake and dry out.”

“
This Earl guy was a former SEAL operator, right? I’m sure he can hide a body so that nobody will ever find it. Hell, he evaded a felony warrant for years. Even Jack couldn’t locate him.”

“
My point exactly. There’s more than one way to skin a cat in this case. Maybe Lola’s mother had her killed. Maybe because Lola was the daughter of a DEA informant, somehow her father’s past came back to haunt her. Maybe Earl killed her and let Ozzie take the fall. Above all, Mandy, Earl said that in the time he spent with Lola before she went missing, she was with other people, namely a young guy and a young girl. She called those people her family.

“
If you remember, when I called Kelsie McEvoy’s mother in Yuma, she said Kelsie didn’t have a sister. I wonder what kind of make-believe family existed? Young guy, young girl? Could that have been Evan Rangel and Kelsie? Could Daniella have been there? Remember, Daniella, Kelsie, and Evan all had the same tattoo on their wrists. I’m starting to think they were part of some kind of cult. One thing Earl specifically remembered was that Lola once pointed to the mountains in Flagstaff and told him, ‘
I’ve been to hell and back over there
.’ That stuck with me because it was so specific. This guy’s brain is chicken-fried but he remembered that one detail. I think it stuck with him, too.”

Mandy chewed his bottom lip, pondering the what ifs. He looked up.

“
You’ve said before that this boy, Evan Rangel…his only next of kin listed on the crash report was an uncle in Washington? No family in Arizona you’re aware of?”

“
Yeah.”

“
Huh. And when you spoke to Kelsie’s mom, she said Kelsie was never an easy child?”

“
That’s right.”

“
And as Jack’s said, Lola had a pretty extensive juvenile record, including being committed to a juvenile facility?”

Anton held out his hands as if awaiting the point. “Yeah?”

Mandy took a long loud sip, squinting out the window at the sun reflecting off the stillness of Biscayne Bay. The water was smooth as glass.

Then it dawned on him.

“
Have you ever heard of wilderness therapy?

CHAPTER 45

“
Is this some of your new age crunchy granola bullshit?”

“
Nah.” He waved off the insult. “Wilderness therapy. It’s very popular out in the Southwest. Colorado, Utah, Arizona. There are these companies that take troubled kids and bring them into the wilderness. Teach them about the land and survival except it’s full of life lessons. It’s kind of like a boot camp. Lot of discipline, teamwork exercises. That sort of thing. The problem is, a lot of these counselors that take the kids out into the wilderness resort to extreme methods of punishment to get the kids in line. Beatings, starvation, emotional abuse. Shit, one of the first cases I ever handled as a PI was for a civil suit involving a company called Expedition Hope. Very wealthy family from Coral Gables had a sixteen-year-old son who they couldn’t control. The dad was the brother of a friend of a patrol sergeant I used to know back when I was with Miami Beach. That’s how I got the referral. So this kid has been kicked out like four private schools. Smoking weed, crushing up oxycodone and snorting it, getting into fights, shoplifting. Parents can’t get through to him. They try to take him to see a therapist but he won’t go. So they sign him over to Expedition Hope.”

Mandy explained that Expedition Hope was a sixty-day program that took troubled teens into the Utah wilderness.

“
They charged the family twenty grand for sixty days in Zion National Park. Another twenty-five hundred to ‘escort’ the kid from their house in Coral Gables to Utah. By ‘escort’ I mean that two very large men pull up to the house in a van in the middle of the night, barge into the kid’s room, hogtie him, blindfold him, and throw him in the van. The parents have signed a waiver basically giving this program permission to forcibly kidnap their son. They were armed with stun guns in case the kid gave them any resistance. Fortunately, they didn’t have to use them.

“
They stick the kid in the van and drive him to Tamiami Airport where a chartered jet is waiting for him, along with a handful of other kids being taken from the South Florida area. Mind you, this kid has no idea what’s happening or where he’s going. All he knows is that he’s been pulled out of bed and tied up. He’s restrained in his seat with the blindfold still on. No food. No water. Nothing. They land at a private airstrip in Springdale. They’re hauled off the plane, still restrained and blindfolded. No bathroom breaks. Some of these kids have pissed their pants. They’re seated in a van and driven to the base camp where the blindfolds and restraints are removed and the fun begins.

“
The company motto was ‘discipline, teamwork, and self-respect.’ Not quite how things turned out. They loaded these kids up with eighty-pound packs and had them hiking up to fifteen miles a day. These kids were not in any condition to do this. These types of treks are for people who are not only trained but are in peak physical condition. Food and water deprivation were methods of punishment. The kid, his name was Carlos Sandoval, slipped on a rock and fell hard. He ruptured his spleen. Complained of serious pain, told the counselors he couldn’t go on. They just told him, and I quote, ‘Quit being a whiny bitch.’

“
To punish him for complaining they deprived him of sleep and food for the next twelve hours. Before sunrise the next day they had him on his feet with his pack strapped to his back. He hadn’t eaten or had a drink of water in nearly a day. This was four weeks into his program. He was a hundred and sixty pounds when he left Coral Gables. I think the medical examiner’s report had him at a hundred and forty pounds. Two miles into the day’s hike he collapsed. His spleen had bled out into his abdominal cavity. They airlifted him to the nearest hospital, but he was already dead when he arrived. Eyewitnesses said that while he was dying on the ground, counselors were kicking him in the stomach, telling him to get up.” Mandy shook his head, clicked his teeth. “Those
comemierdas
had the nerve to say that Carlos died because his continued drug abuse had weakened his immune system. Can you believe that? Expedition Hope’s lawyers actually wrote that in the response to the wrongful death lawsuit.”

“
I’ve been to hell and back over there,” Anton whispered to himself, repeating Lola Munson’s cryptic words to Earl Simpson. “It never crossed my mind that Lola and the people she was with, including Kelsie McEvoy and Evan Rangel, could have been involved in some type of wilderness program. But these kids had no families. At least no families that could afford twenty grand to send them into the woods.”

Mandy shook his head, grinning like he was a step ahead. “That doesn’t matter. During my investigation of Expedition Hope I learned that almost seventy-five percent of the kids sent to them were through the Utah Division of Juvenile Justice Services. Expedition Hope bills the state for those referral cases at a lower rate than the private clients, but it’s still good money. A lot of these private companies contract out to the state.”

Anton picked his fingernail, mulling the alternatives. “Do me a favor. Check into wilderness programs around Flagstaff, Arizona, 2002, 2003. Let’s see if anything comes up.”

Mandy took a sip from his bottle. “Done. Now, what else you find out there?”

Anton reached for the photocopied misdemeanor file, neatly stacked and held together with a binder clip. He handed the papers to Mandy.

“
I had this Xeroxed at the clerk’s office in Flagstaff. Sure enough, Lola Munson had an arrest while she was up there. Makes sense if she had run away, shoplifting and all.”

Mandy thumbed through the documents. “Who bonded her out? Girl had no money.”

“
Someone named Frank Wheaton.” Anton pointed to the signature line on the bond receipt. “Who may be related to Danny Wheaton, Lola’s father. Paid a five-hundred-dollar cash bond, but a few days after she’d been arrested. I imagine that Wheaton was not somebody who was in close contact with her. I’m guessing she had to reach out to him from the jail. Otherwise, he would’ve just posted the bond once she was arrested.”

Mandy shrugged. “Unless he had to come up with the money. Maybe sell some drugs or something. Those are the kinds of people this girl was hanging around with.”

Anton sat in his chair and brought up the Arizona Department of Corrections website on his computer. He scrolled through the homepage and selected the inmate datasearch tab. In the search parameters, Anton realized that he could check both active and inactive offenders, meaning that if Frank Wheaton had ever served time in prison or had ever been placed on probation in the State of Arizona, Anton could find out the dates and the charges.

Anton first checked for active offenders named Frank Wheaton. The page returned the message “no records found for this search.”
He then clicked the box searching for inactive offenders. A record for Frank Wheaton complete with a thumbnail mugshot appeared. He clicked on the profile.

The page loaded, presenting a much larger, possibly out-of-date mugshot. Frank Wheaton appeared to be in his late forties at the time the photo was taken. He had spent 2007 through 2012 in prison for trafficking in methamphetamine. An offense, the site indicated, for which he was still on probation. He had dark, sun-ravaged skin and long, reddish-gray hair that was pulled back in a tight ponytail. Gritty stubble covered his jaw like sandpaper. Beneath his right eye was a keloid mass of scar tissue that looked like a caterpillar crawling across his cheek. Clearly the work of a prison blade fashioned from something not quite sharp enough to make a seamless cut.

His eyes were cold, squinting at the camera as if daring it to try something. The letters
nlr
were tattooed across the front of his throat. Beside them on the left side of his neck, barely visible in the frame, was the
Schutzstaffel
emblem—the
ss
letters shaped like sharp lightning bolts.

“
Offender profile says that Frank Wheaton did his last stint at Florence. Funny. Earl Simpson told us his dad was a corrections officer there. Wow. Shitload of write-ups,” Anton said, reading a chronological listing of Wheaton’s inmate disciplinary record. “Assaults on staff, assaults on other inmates. Possession of weapons, possession of drugs. I’m assuming the NLR tattoo on his throat means Nazi Low Riders,” he said, drawing upon his knowledge of prison gangs. “Big in the Southwest. They have an alliance with the Aryan Brotherhood. Usually these white power prison gangs run the show out on the streets. If Frank Wheaton is Danny Wheaton’s younger brother, which I’m presuming based on the guy’s age, I’m wondering if he’s still involved with the Romans Motorcycle Club.”

“
Doubt it. Isn’t the running theory that the Romans killed Danny Wheaton for putting in work for the DEA?”

“
That’s what Jack told me. He’d know more about this than I would. If that’s the case then I don’t think Frank Wheaton would be a patched member.”

Mandy came around and glanced at the screen over Anton’s shoulder. “He’s not a Roman.”

Anton craned his head, looking up at him. “How the hell can you tell?”