Chapter 19
I pursed my lips and Jennifer could see my frustration growing. She said, “You didn’t catch anybody moving around the van?
See anything before it went up?”
Chet said, “No. These cameras can be remotely controlled, but for the most part they’re on a schedule, swinging back and forth
on a set parabola so that their images overlap. Once we saw the smoke, we overrode the parabola and got what you see here.”
I saw a glint in the screen, then what looked like a four-door sedan drive off in a cloud of dust. I said, “What was that?”
Jose said, “Just someone driving on the rez.”
“It looked like it came straight out from the wash.”
“Probably did.”
Getting more flustered, I said, “Well, did you investigate it? A car driving away from a burning van?”
“No. Not our problem set. We can’t track every vehicle that drives on the rez.”
“But that vehicle might have something to do with the stolen van.”
“Yeah, it might, but we didn’t know the van was stolen until we put out the fire and fed it into the system. We didn’t see
the vehicle on the footage until long after. From that point, it was no longer our problem.”
“Whose problem is it, then?”
“The reservation police. They do crime on the rez. We just monitor the border.”
“You mean you can’t do any law enforcement here?”
“Well, sure we can. We’re federal law enforcement, but it’s a little different here on the rez. The TO handles all of that.”
“TO?”
“The Tohono O’odham. It’s their jurisdiction. We monitor the border, but crime inside the rez is on them. We passed the van
into the system, found out it was stolen, and turned it over to them.”
Great.
I said, “Zoom in on the best frame with the vehicle you have.”
Chet did, and I said, “Looks like a Crown Victoria. Like an old police vehicle, but it doesn’t have a license plate. You don’t
think that’s suspicious?”
Jose held out his hands and said, “Hey, you need to think of the rez as a giant farm in the United States. There are plenty
of farm vehicles that don’t have license plates and don’t drive on US roads, being solely used for farm chores. It’s the same
way here. They’re supposed to have a plate if they head off to Tucson or something, but if it’s driving solely on the rez,
that’s the TO’s problem.”
I said, “So will they know where that car is? Who was driving it?”
He looked at Chet, then back at me and said, “Honestly? No. They don’t have the resources for that, and unless that van had
a dead Indian inside it, they don’t really care. A car driving away from a van stolen in Utah is not high on their priority.”
Jennifer said, “But you could track it now, right? If all those cameras overlap, you could see where it went?”
“Only if it stuck to the south. The TO goes way north, into Arizona. We only monitor a buffer zone along the border. If he
headed north, we won’t have it.”
I said, “Could you check?”
He grimaced and said, “That’s not really what we do.”
“I get that, but can you pretend that vehicle is a clown car stuffed full of MS-13 drug runners and you want to know where
it stopped?”
I could tell he was on the verge of helping and he just needed a push.
Jennifer gave it to him, saying, “We can’t detail the threat we’re tracking, but trust me, it’s real and it’s foreign.
That car might have nothing to do with it, and we’re not asking you to determine if it does.
We’re just asking for some help locating it. ”
He said, “Okay, okay, Chet, can you make that happen?”
Now Chet got surly, saying, “Do you know how much work that’ll be? Checking the feed of every camera for a car for days of
video?”
Not wanting to cause a disruption inside the FOB, I placated both of them, saying, “Chet, just look at the time stamp and
track that plus or minus, say, an hour. We know the car’s headed west, so ignore the east. If you pick it up, you pick it
up. Speed up the videos.”
He mumbled something but nodded his head in agreement.
The supervisor led us away, going back to the hallway and taking us to his office. It was spartan, with a harsh overhead fluorescent
bulb and no knickknacks of service time or family photos one would usually find in such a place.
Jose took a seat behind his desk and said, “This might take a while.”
Jennifer and I sat in a couple of folding chairs. I said, “Yeah, but I bet not. He speeds up those videos from the camera
arc and he can get through them pretty quickly. Especially if he uses the vehicle direction from the first video. If it’s
not found early, it probably went north.”
“You sound like you’ve done this before.”
“I have, but really, so has just about anybody in law enforcement in today’s age. Ever since they jacked every security camera
and private cell phone video hunting for White Hat and Black Hat from the Boston marathon bombings, it’s like step one of
the playbook.”
He nodded and I changed the subject, saying, “You guys are living pretty rough out here. Is this like a permanent station?”
He chuckled and said, “Yes and no. It was built to be temporary, but you’d have to define that term for me now. It’s been
here since 2004 and we rotate out to it on two-week shifts. Since it’s ‘temporary,’ everything is fixed with a Band-Aid. Nobody
wants to invest infrastructure into a ‘temporary’ facility.”
Jennifer said, “Well, somebody’s going to have to invest something because this place is starting to fall apart.”
He said, “What’s your place like? Where are you out of?”
Uh-oh. I was frantically trying to think of a location that was real but he’d never been to, when Jennifer said, “FLETC in Charleston,
South Carolina. It’s fairly new and a hell of a lot better than this place. I feel for you.”
Well, well, well, look who actually did some research. FLETC stood for Federal Law Enforcement Training Center, and there was one in Charleston—run by Homeland Security. The best part was both Jennifer and I had been on it.
Perfect.
He said, “Yeah, I’ve been there on a training package. That place is sweet. How do you like Charleston?”
From there, we were off and running, killing time by talking about something we didn’t have to outright lie about. Jose grew
more comfortable with us as we bullshitted about the Holy City, rambling on about the food scene, tourist sites, and what
we knew about the CBP posture at the port—which told me he was seriously looking for a change of scenery. Before I knew it,
thirty minutes had passed, and our chitchat was interrupted by a knock on the door.
Chet poked his head in, saying, “I got it. Come take a look.”
We went back to the computer room and Chet began clocking video, saying, “I first picked it up on camera Romeo Twelve, but
only for a split second. From there—”
Jose cut him off, saying, “Cut to the chase. Did you find out where it ended up?”
Deflated, Chet went to the last video and said, “Yeah. Menagers Dam.”
I saw the vehicle driving right along the border fence, then go north, disappearing off the screen. I said, “Did I miss something?
Is there another video?”
Chet said, “This is the last video, but the camera’s Romeo Seventeen and there’s nothing on that road but Menagers Dam. That’s
where he’s headed.”
“What’s that?”
The supervisor said, “It’s a border town on the rez.
Chet’s right, it’s literally the only place he could be going.
There’s nothing else but desert. If that video was Romeo Two or Romeo Three, I’d say he could be leaving the rez and headed to Tucson, or he could be going to town X or Y on the rez, but in this case, it’s Menagers Dam or nothing. ”
I nodded, saying, “Okay, but that doesn’t really help me. All we’ve necked it down to is a town.”
The supervisor said, “Trust me, you get out there, you won’t have any trouble finding if he’s present or not. Calling it a
town is being generous. One pass through and you’ll have seen every vehicle there is.”