The Victim (49 page)

“
There’s no denying that these four people are connected to each other, Jack. You’ve got the same tattoo on each of them. We know from Earl Simpson that Lola was with a young man and a young girl when they were with him and Ozzie. And we know that Lola was in Flagstaff months before her mother reported her missing. Arrested and bonded out by a guy who could be her dead father’s brother. We’ve discovered more in the past month about this case than you can imagine. All I know is that my life is a living hell. I’ve got a woman claiming to be Kelsie McEvoy’s sister who has a sex tape and murder confession hanging over my head. I have to find out what this is about.”

Before Jack could respond, Mandy stepped in. “I think I can explain the Flagstaff thing.” He bent down and retrieved a thick stack of papers from the Garcia box.

Mandy brought Jack up to speed on the Expedition Hope Investigation he had conducted several years earlier.

“
After I had put it together, we shopped around for a good lawyer out in Utah. Found this guy, Gabe Wallace, a real bulldog. Offices out in Salt Lake City. Anyway, he takes my findings and runs with ’em. Sues Expedition Hope for wrongful death; bankrupts the damn company. Settled for seven million. It was the largest settlement in that type of case in Utah at the time. Put the whole wilderness therapy industry on notice. I handed him that case on a silver platter and it netted him a contingency fee of about two-point-three mil. So he’s eternally grateful. I called him last night and asked him about wilderness programs in and around Flagstaff around ’02 and ’03. He had done his homework before he filed suit, checking out other cases of abuse with other wilderness programs in the Southwest, you know, wanting to see what his suit might be worth. He knew all about it.”

“
Knew all about what?” Anton asked.

Mandy held up the stack of printed pages. “He emailed this to me as a PDF this morning. It’s a copy of a federal grand jury report he was able to get before he sued Expedition Hope. Winter of 2002, the Department of Justice went after Miles of Mountains, Incorporated.”

Mandy handed Anton the report. In December of 2002, the DOJ had shut down Miles of Mountains, a wilderness therapy program headquartered out of Flagstaff. The program consisted of ninety days in the San Francisco Peaks, a volcanic mountain range to the north of the city with summits as high as 12,000 feet.

Crudely referred to as “brat camp,” the Miles of Mountains program was known as one of the more rigorous in the wilderness therapy industry. As had been the case with Expedition Hope, Miles of Mountains accepted nearly fifty percent of its clientele through the State of Arizona’s Juvenile Justice Services.

“
What’s more than likely,” Mandy said, “was that Kelsie, Evan, and Lola were in the juvenile system already.” He turned to Jack. “Hadn’t Lola been committed to a juvenile facility at some point?”

Jack rested his chin atop a checkmark made with his thumb and forefinger. “Best I can remember, yeah. But the judge in that case had ruled that her juvenile criminal history was inadmissible. It was more prejudicial than probative, served to ‘put the victim on trial,’” he said, using air quotes. “Other than her history as a runaway, I couldn’t get into her juvenile criminal record. So I never bothered looking through it. Had enough to deal with as it was so we focused on those issues. Besides, Lola was eighteen at the time of her murder. She was beyond the jurisdiction of the juvenile courts.”

The grand jury report detailed nearly two years of findings by the Department of Justice, which included interviewing hundreds of Miles of Mountains participants.

“
The names aren’t listed because they were juveniles at the time,” Mandy said.

The federal grand jury report outlined horrific methods of discipline doled out by the program’s counselors, likely justified as tough love. Deprivation of food and water was standard. Beatings were routine. There were even allegations of sexual assaults by staff members.

Anton ran his finger along the page. “Says they made a kid piss into a canteen and drink it when he complained of feeling thirsty.”

“
It gets worse,” Mandy added. “You know, they’re hiking in the dead of winter. It’s fifteen degrees out. They’re malnourished. Beaten. Their clothes are falling apart. Kids were getting frostbite. They even mention in there that one kid had to have his toes amputated.”

Lola’s cryptic words to Earl Simpson played over and over in Anton’s head.

I’ve been to hell and back over there.

The report went on to say that the Department of Justice intervened after Coconino County sheriff’s deputies spotted a group of teenagers hitchhiking along I-17.

Anton read, “The deputies were on routine patrol when they observed six teenagers walking northbound on Interstate 17. Upon stopping to investigate, the deputies discovered that the teenagers were wearing dirty, torn clothing. They displayed cuts and bruises on their hands and faces. Some indicated that they had not eaten in several days.” Anton looked up. “You suppose the four of them were part of this group?”

Mandy shrugged. “Who knows. It doesn’t identify them. The report goes on to say that the sheriff’s office found out that they had left the Miles of Mountains program, had wandered out of the forest on their own. They believed there were more kids who had simply left but they couldn’t locate them all. The sheriff’s office contacted the program manager and they were able to locate the rest of them. They arrested the counselors for child endangerment and turned the matter over to the feds. Additional charges came later.”

“
So they had run away,” Anton said. “Kelsie, Evan, Lola, Daniella. They must have been there. Think about it. December of ’02 this all happens. They’re in Flagstaff in January where they must have hooked up with Ozzie and Earl. A bunch of wandering runaway teenagers getting caught up with a couple of meth addicts.”

It all began to make sense. The tattoo that all four of them shared must have had some secret meaning, rooted in their shared experience in the mountains north of Flagstaff.

“
You guys are both missing the point,” Jack said, annoyed. “Through all of your speculation you guys never considered the fact that Garcia confessed to the crime!” He brought his hand down hard on the desktop. “He sat in that interview room for over seven hours. It’s clear as day. He admitted to killing her.”

“
Did he, though?” Mandy asked. Jack sat up in his chair, taking a defensive posture. “I ain’t trying to second guess you, Jack, but I sat through that interview today. I watched every second of it. All seven hours, fourteen minutes. All I gotta say is…I’m a little bothered by it. The content of the statement is mainly ‘I don’t know, I can’t remember.’ It’s like the cops knew he was a burnout with serious mental problems. They likely convinced him that he may have done something while he was high.”

Jack’s brows formed sharp angles over his eyes. “Mandy, if I were to ask you ‘have you ever killed anyone,’ and your answer to that was ‘I can’t remember,’ do you think that’s a normal, reasonable response to that question?” Mandy and Anton stood there, silent. “Exactly my point. God, you guys don’t think I haven’t seen the video of his confession at least three dozen times? That I haven’t analyzed every question asked, every answer given?”

Mandy reached into the box, retrieving the CD. “Jack, nobody doubts your courtroom skills,
mi hermano
. It’s just that seven hours, fourteen minutes will wear on anybody’s eyes. Which is why I don’t fault you or the jury for missing it.”

Jack cocked his head. “What did I miss?”

Mandy walked around behind Jack’s desk and slid the CD into the computer’s disc drive. The motherboard warmed up as the CD icon popped up on his desktop screen. Mandy double-clicked it and the video file opened.

“
I’ll show you.”

CHAPTER 52

The high angle of the interview room camera captured the scene. Three men seated around a square table in a tight space. Halogen tubes flickered and buzzed in the ceiling, casting white strobes on the laminate tabletop.

The big man, Special Agent Ray Laurie, sat with his back to the camera, his sloped shoulders so broad they seemed to stretch across the room. The light panels glimmered off his bald spot, illuminating the circle of bare scalp into something that looked like a yarmulke. His bear arms were folded on the table, his posture hunched in. He waved his finger at Osvaldo Garcia, the poor audio only picking up faint murmurs.

Mandy turned up the volume full blast.

“
Osvaldo, there’s no denying that the girl was seen with you two days ago,”
they could make out amid the hushed static.

The younger agent sat to the side, an inadvertent mediator between Ozzie and Special Agent Laurie. He couldn’t have been more than thirty. His dress shirt was too white, too much starch in the collar, his posture too upright and unnatural. The muscles in his jaw flexed and loosened as he nodded along in agreement with Special Agent Laurie’s questions. A legal pad in front of him was full of notes, written in perfect cursive. A plethora of rolled-back pages highlighted his diligence.

Ozzie looked like a zombie itching for a fresh kill. Greasy clumps of hair clung to his scabbed forehead. His pupils were so dilated his eyes looked like black stones. He was fiending hard, furiously scratching his wrists. The styrofoam cup that served as a makeshift ashtray was half-filled with cigarette butts. Five empty Coke cans were lined up in front of him. His fingers trembled as he brought the cigarette to his lips. A vent in the ceiling sucked up the drifting smoke.

The time on the status bar read 5:14:24. There were still two hours left in his statement. Anton knew that at the conclusion of his seven-hour, fourteen-minute interview, he was handcuffed and taken into custody. He imagined that Ozzie had gone through the painful symptoms of withdrawal while in federal detention.

Mandy clicked the
stop
button on the toolbar. “You all see that big-ass copy machine in the corner?”

Jack was seated at his desk. Anton and Mandy stood behind him, leaning in to get a better view of the computer screen.

“
Yeah,” Jack said, tossing up his hands. “I know it’s there now. I knew it was there ten years ago. What’s the point?”

Mandy flashed a shit-eating grin. “
Oye
, ten years ago, technology was shit. I got the software on my computer to digitally enhance the image.”

Mandy clicked into full screen mode. The still frame consumed the entire screen, the resolution grainy as the picture enlarged. Within seconds, the pixilation improved, the frame coming into sharp focus. The image was as clear as a photograph.

Mandy dragged the mouse over to the copy machine in the upper left-hand corner of the screen. Given the fixed angle of the camera, just a little more than half of the copy machine was in view. It was a large Xerox model on four wheels.

Mandy formed a box over the copy machine with the mouse. The image on the full screen shifted into a close-up view of the tray on the left-hand side of the copy machine. A half-inch stack of paper sat in the tray, the result of whatever document was being fed into the copier.

Anton tilted his head, trying to make out the word printed in bold type on the top sheet in the stack. A shadow bleeding through from the pages beneath it showed that each page was the same.

Mandy toggled with the view, rotating the image clockwise until the copy machine was on its side, the tray front and center.

He zoomed in once more on the stack of papers.

The word
lie
was printed on the page.

Jack’s forehead wrinkled in confusion. “A bunch of papers in the tray that say ‘lie.’ I don’t get it.”

Mandy laughed as if he’d seen it all before. “The old copy machine trick? You never seen it? C’mon, Jack, in all your years of defense work, you’ve never seen this?”

Jack wasn’t amused. “No.”

Mandy explained the ruse. It didn’t work on intelligent suspects, only those whose minds could be manipulated. Maybe drugs, lack of education, or mental illness. Defendants whose IQs were not low enough to get a confession tossed, but just past the threshold of retarded. The trick worked well on immigrants who didn’t understand the American legal process.

Once the detectives had gauged the vulnerability of their suspect, they would wheel a copy machine into the interview room. A single piece of paper would be laid facedown upon the glass, covered by the copier lid. The paper would have the word
lie
printed on it. The detectives would tell the suspect that the copy machine was a lie detector. They would inform the suspect that they were going to ask him some questions using the lie detector. Upon each answer the suspect gave, one of the detectives would press the button on the machine, photocopying the page on the glass. What would fall into the tray would be the purported result of the lie detector test.