By the time the first Border Patrol agents arrived, the windstorm had waned to sporadic gusts that pretty well left the sand on the ground where it was supposed to be. I hoped it stayed that way because the only thought that stood out from the chaos of unanswered questions in my mind was an almost physiological need to watch the sun rise from the flat desert ahead of me and abolish the darkness. It wasn’t even a pink stain in the sky when agents from the Phoenix Bureau arrived with a Crime Scene Response Team, which promptly set up portable generators and light arrays that evaporated the shadows as though they had never been. I barely caught a glimpse of the fiery red orb over the shoulder of one of my fellow agents, who was doing his best to put me through the wringer. He could scarcely contain the stench of ambition seeping from his pores, at least until he realized I wasn’t about to say a word to him. As far as I was concerned, my involvement there had come to an end.
My SAC, of course, had other plans for me. I was still the ace up his sleeve that promised promotion, but the personal nature of my entanglement in the case made it difficult to thrust me too far into the limelight, at least not until I’d been formally cleared of any potential collusion with my brother and wrongdoing in his death. The whole situation couldn’t have played out any better for Nielsen, who still got to trot his prize pony out in front of the cameras, while ultimately being the one who held the reins.
By then, I couldn’t have cared less. Getting my picture on TV or in the papers was just about the last thing I wanted to do. Trust me, that revelation surprised me, too. I think I just needed to put this whole business behind me. The sooner I was able to scrub the reek of death out of my skin the better. But there was also the matter of the spin the powers that be were putting on the situation that positively made me sick to my stomach. While there was truth to the story the reporters were fed—and utilized to their advantage with about a million breaking news segments—it was anything but the whole truth. And I figured there would be no misinterpreting the expression on my face had I been forced to regurgitate it in front the press.
Don’t let anyone tell you Lukas Walker is any man’s puppet.
A Native American male—coincidentally of blood relation to one of the lead investigators on the case—snapped and murdered five innocent people, including a decorated Border Patrol agent and the chief of the tribal police force, before being tracked down by one of the Bureau’s finest field agents with the help of Behavioral’s top profilers. Ban Rafael Walker was shot and killed during his attempted apprehension. The maze he constructed was used to illustrate his progressive sociopathic dissociation in response to his inability to find work, his animosity toward the federal government in general, and the Department of Homeland Security, his former employer, specifically.
By the time all was said and done, there probably wouldn’t be a soul alive who couldn’t recite the myth of I’itoi, the Man in the Maze, almost verbatim. That was the part of the story that made it sexy and surely sent screenwriters everywhere scrambling. The bodies unearthed from beneath his trailer warranted a passing mention, with particular emphasis on the number exhumed. Considering the paperwork involved with feeding them into the bureaucratic machine and how long it would take to identify them, if at all, the general consensus was that the victims would eventually make fine stories somewhere down the line to keep the Monster in the Maze, as the Coyote had been dubbed, in the headlines.
Despite the sketchy nature of the “truth” as it was told, some good did arise from the fallout. The plight of the Tohono O’odham people was placed front and center for the whole world to see. The everyday tales of survival in the middle of a war zone brought both humanitarian and federal aid in the form of money, food, jobs, and a whole slew of other promises I really hoped the government would keep this time. O’odham culture also reached the masses, albeit initially in a negative light, but that quickly faded as the general public developed an appetite for Hohokam lore and a people who were largely unknown, even though they’d technically been American citizens far longer than most other bloodlines. Of course, the political machine couldn’t give without exacting its due.
A hundredfold.
The suffering of the O’odham was used to railroad Congress into appropriating increased funding for the Department of Customs and Border Protection to the tune of roughly two billion dollars annually, none of which would actually be used to fortify the Arizona-Mexico border that cut right through the middle of the reservation, I’m sure. At least the Tohono O’odham Nation would be receiving an annual stipend in the low millions, which would undoubtedly get a few politicians reelected, but would also allow the tribe to build and staff an eight-bed hospital and outpatient clinic, a new casino in Sun City, closer to Scottsdale money, and rebuild its police force into something more reminiscent of an actual force. There would probably even be enough left over to buy the staff honest-to-God ceramic mugs with their names printed on them in some medium other than Sharpie.
Antone would have been proud. It may have cost him his life, but his plea had eventually reached the rest of the country. No longer was the misery of his people a political mess to be swept under the rug. The entire world was now aware of the sheer volume of drugs being funneled through his reservation and the Department of Justice, the only actual loser in the situation, had been forced to make shutting down its designated High-Intensity Drug Trafficking Area its foremost goal. In doing so, it had to sacrifice even more of its power to the Department of Homeland Security. The liberal media had also latched onto the human interest angle by exposing just how many migrants died out in the Sonoran every year, a statistic that brought to light the nature of the coyote human smuggling network and its ties to the Mexican drug cartels.
I thought about Antone’s quote from the newspaper article on his bedroom wall, about how he would put an end to this situation, even if he had to do so himself. And maybe he hadn’t ended it, but his sacrifice certainly signaled the beginning of that end. I only wished I could have learned what it was about his facial expressions that had so totally mystified me before his passing.
My Uncle Roman quickly negotiated the sale of the rights to his story for a sum large enough to allow him to disappear. He was the reservation’s pariah, the man who had created the Monster, and there would never be anything he could do to change that. He was the one who would forever bear the brunt of its wrath. I felt badly for him. His initial mistake had been in loving a child who wasn’t biologically his and the boy’s mother, who had never stopped loving someone else. He had made mistakes along the way, but his only real crime—and it wasn’t an insignificant one—had been in looking the other way and allowing the murders to continue. If I were to be totally honest with myself, I don’t know if I would have done anything differently with my own son. I hoped to track him down one day and tell him I was sorry for the lot life had given him, if he would even listen to the nephew who had robbed him on his only child; the son of the man whose shoes had proved too big to fill.
Me? I had a straight shot into the hallowed halls of Behavioral and could have cut just about any deal I wanted, financial or political, if I decided to play the game. Instead, I used the capital I had earned to negotiate a year off, with pay. I had made a promise I intended to keep. Someone needed to speak for the dead, and that someone was going to be me. I had already made arrangements with both the Pima County Medical Examiner’s Office and the various Mexican and Central American consulates to serve as a liaison of sorts in the effort to coordinate the identification of the victims and the notification of their families. It had all the makings of a sad and depressing year, but don’t let anyone ever tell you I’m not a man of my word. It also afforded me the opportunity to learn a little about my heritage, which delighted a certain librarian, who was more than happy to share her seemingly unlimited knowledge with me, even if I, like my father before me, had more than my share of coyotes nipping at my heels.