Wild Instinct

31

Forty-eight hours after his intake at Orange County jail, Vernon Jeffs is released.

Undersheriff Elke Meyer calls Gale.

“Lew, what kind of an arrest was that?”

“Jeffs played Knox like a fool.”

“Sounds like he played you and Mendez like fools. Button down, Lew. I need an arrest clean and fast. Not dirty and weak. Kersey needs it.”

After seventeen hours of questioning, District Attorney Chris Knox has decided the people can’t arraign on conspiracy and murder for hire based on Jeffs’s recanted and comically flimsy story involving two men he’s barely seen and can’t identify.

Jurors won’t believe it and neither should you, Knox told Gale and Mendez.

Whom — much to their disappointment but no real surprise — have found exactly no money and no Halliburton on the Jeffs’s property, or the Bear Cave, or a small storage unit up on Bolsa, just two miles from his Huntington Beach home. The DA seems surprised that the detectives arrested Jeffs in the first place. He says all he can do is order Jeffs to keep his fat ass in Orange County or risk a flight charge. Maybe he’ll produce Steve and Curtis, he says, on the off chance they do exist.

Now, very late on this Saturday night, Gale and Mendez stake out the parking lot of the Bear Cave from across the street.

This is the first time they’ve been here since recording Act I of Jeffs’s conspiracy confession, days ago, when the white Lincoln Navigator allegedly appeared here in this lot.

And the first night the big, limping red-haired man Vern and his small skinny wife have been back to work.

Gale and Mendez have good views of Jeffs’s white Econoline and the rear kitchen door, closed in the cool night. A coastal fogbank has locked in above them, smudging the streetlamps and the blue neon Bear Cave sign.

Just minutes ago, Gale surreptitiously affixed a magnetized tracking device on the rear chassis of the white van and synched it to his smartphone, propped up and facing him in a console cupholder.

“Glad we get overtime for this,” says Mendez. “I could be home with my son.”

“Put the money in Jesse’s college fund.”

She looks at Gale as if he’s just said something absurd.

She continues staring at him, the silence long and uncomfortable for both.

“Jesse is surrounded,” she says. “I don’t know what to do. I don’t want to talk about it. No, second thought, I want to talk about it. I want to talk about it.”

So Mendez unloads, her voice soft and fast: Jesse is under Lulu’s sway; Lulu’s tight with the Barrio Dogtown Vatos; both Jesse and Lulu are consorting with Bishop Alfredo Buendia, a reformed La eMe kingpin now running Camp Refuge for troubled boys.

“Like there’s such a thing as reformed eMe,” she says. “God knows what he’s putting his camp boys up to.”

She tells Gale about the drone and the phones that Jesse and Lulu collected from various gangland haunts and stashed in the trunk of Buendia’s sweet 1955 aqua-on-white Bel Air.

“The hell do you think of that?” she asks.

“I’m pondering.”

“Maybe the phones and drones are just plunder, and they’re fencing it off to the bishop?”

“That comes to mind,” says Gale, thinking back to the drones they used in Sangin. Not the big armed ones hurling missiles to earth, flown remotely from Texas or California, but the smaller, quieter ones for surveillance and target acquisition. The kind that helped him kill the old opium user with the hunting gun and the Cheetah athletic shoes.

“Always a market for phones,” he says. “Drones, I guess if you know the right people.”

“Yeah,” says Mendez. “Reformed eMe, they know all the right people. Hopefully they didn’t steal the swag. What can I do, Lew? Confront Jesse? Show him I know some things? Play dumb and hope he makes good choices?”

“I could talk to him,” says Gale. “That way he’ll think it’s the Sheriff’s Department shadowing him as part of an investigation of Buendia. That way you’re not blown. Right department, wrong deputy.”

Silence then, as Daniela consults her phone. “At least he’s home now,” she says. “Hopefully alone. Lulu’s last text is two hours old. I know what you’re thinking, Gale. And yes, I do feel like a scumbag, spying on my own son.”

“I might do the same,” he says, getting that sense of wonder — grown fainter by the years — of what it would be like to have a child or two, be a dad, have a family.

“Mom from hell?” she asks.

“Not at all.”

“I lied to him about his dad,” she says. “I’ve lied to everyone about his dad since before Jesse was born. His dad didn’t die. His father is still very much alive. I can’t tell you more than that, regarding his, Jesse’s... nativity.”

Gale tries to solve this mystery, fails.

“Then that’s who should be talking to Jesse,” he says.

“That is impossible for reasons you will never know.”

“Oh boy.”

“Yeah,” says Mendez.

“Have to let this one cook.”

“I’ve been cooking it for nineteen years, Lew.”

“I’ll talk to him if you want me to.”

“You are a kind and generous man,” says Mendez. “I wish you were his father. No, sorry. I don’t mean it that way, literally, I mean. Just, you know, like as a theory. Shut up, Dani, shut your mouth and cut your losses. Do your job and earn your overtime. For your son’s college fund.”

They watch Jeffs throw open the kitchen door and limp toward a dumpster with a bulging white bag. He’s got on the same baggy shorts from days ago, and his knee bandage is noticeably smaller.

He throws open the lid with one hand and slings in the trash, the heavy lid clanging down.

“Do you still think he did Tarlow?” asks Mendez.

“Yes, you?”

Mendez shrugs. “I can’t figure out if he’s dumb as he looks, or if he’s a crafty pro and a great liar. The more I think about the white Lincoln and Steve and Curtis, the less I believe them. Photographic memory, especially for voices? Come on.”

“We didn’t find the money because he put it somewhere else,” says Gale. “Steve and Curtis aside, I think he took the job from somebody, got paid, and killed Tarlow as contracted.”

“Then why implicate himself in murder for hire?”

“He’s just sending us after phantoms.”

“Well, he sure played that one cool. Cool enough to convince our district attorney that a jury won’t convict.”

Gale watches Vernon Jeffs swing open the kitchen door, take a long look at the parking area, and go back inside.

An hour later, at the Bear Cave closing time, Jeffs and Mindy cross the lot hand in hand, Jeffs with a stylish wooden cane. He climbs into the passenger seat.

Gale at the helm gives them a two-minute head start, then pulls onto fog-shrouded Yorktown Avenue.

To Main, headed away from the coast, the old Econoline blending with the fog.

Not the way home.

Mindy takes the 405 north to the 22 east, into Garden Grove. Pulls into Store ’N Save, punches something into an intercom keypad on a stanchion outside the office.

Gale glides past in the fog, U-turns, and heads back. The Econoline has already disappeared into the rows of brightly lit concrete bunkers, each with a roll-up door.

The woman answering the intercom asks for Gale’s passcode, and he IDs himself as a sheriff’s deputy. He can see her through the window.

“Is there a crime in progress here?” she asks.

“You better hope not,” says Gale, holding out his badge.

“You’ll need a warrant if there isn’t.”

“This is a murder investigation,” Gale says. “An innocent man has died. Open the gate. Now.”

A beat, then: “Yeah, sure.”

The gate rolls open on small black tires, and Gale hits his fog lights. Then noses his SUV up and down the wide drive, marked with big red arrows for a one-way flow of traffic. There’s a surprising number of vehicles here this late on a Saturday night.

Lights spill from the opened storage units, people move in and out, some taking away, others loading in. Like ghosts, Gale thinks.

Gale goes very slowly, knowing he’ll be on top of the van before he sees it if he goes faster than a crawl.

Rounds a corner and sees the Econoline a few hundred feet ahead, on his right, and strong light coming from inside the unit.

Hulking Vern, cane-free now, sets what looks very much like a rifle case through the van’s side door, Mindy not visible to Gale, perhaps still behind the wheel. The case is relatively short, Gale notes, for a carbine or an AR-style gun, or a cut-down combat shotgun.

Mendez already has her night-vision binoculars up, and Gale worries the darkened lenses will reflect the yellow caution lights illuminating the unit numbers on the walls.

“Steady with the glasses,” he says.

“Got it.”

Jeffs goes back inside his storage box and comes out with a small, thick pistol case in each big hand, puts them in the van one at a time, and closes the door.

Reaches high and pulls down the door by its rope, then leans down to close the padlock.

Before getting into the van, Jeffs looks through the fog at Gale’s Explorer, then awkwardly climbs in, using a hand to hoist in his wounded leg.

A minute later Gale tracks them back onto the Garden Grove Freeway, westbound now.

The fog has lightened and the traffic is light and Mindy holds the Econoline steady in the third lane.

Gale holds three cars back and one lane over.

“Looked like cases for a short assault rifle and handguns,” says Mendez.

“Maybe a cut-down shotgun.”

“That’s a vicious thing. Kept one under my bed until Jesse was born. Now I’ve got a locked 1911 Gold Cup he can’t open.”

“I’ve got one, too. Sweetest shooting handgun there is.”

“Stop a tractor, too.”

Mindy merges with the 405 south, retracing her route from the Bear Cave and, perhaps, home.

“Okay, Gale, are we going to pull them over and rattle their cage? We’ve got no warrant, no cause for a search, not even a broken brake light. No authority to open those cases.”

“And no reason to spook them for nothing.”

“I hate it when people get away with shit,” says Mendez. “And you watch them get away with it. You just sit there like a dumbass with your hands tied.”

In the periphery of his vision, Gale sees that Mendez is looking at him. Sees her sharp dark eyes catching the dashboard lights.

“Thanks for talking to Jesse,” she says. “Best if he thinks I’ve got nothing to do with it. Tell him you’re after Bishop Buendia, which is how you know about their lunch at El Jardin, and the drone and cell phones. He’ll be suspicious of you, but maybe a little scared, too. He also might respect you.”

“I’ll scare him straight.”

In his periphery again, Gale sees a slight smile on her hard, pretty face.

Ahead of them the white van lumbers past the turnoff for the Bear Cave and the Jeffs home.

“Well, well,” says Mendez.

Gale follows.

Forty minutes later he’s headed east/northeast on Ortega Highway, passing the entrance to Caspers Wilderness Park.

“Interesting,” says Mendez. “Tarlow and the Killer Cat and Jeffs’s Econoline, all right here just a few nights ago.”

“I see the cat in my dreams,” Gale says. “I catch him looking at me. Stalking and studying.”

“What about Tarlow and Vern?”

“More the cat.”

“Oh boy.” They climb the steep, fogless mountains of Cleveland National Forest, the sky above them black and alive with stars.

Half an hour later Gale brakes through the Ortega’s treacherous downslope turns, morning’s first light climbing in the east ahead of them.

A sign comes at them in the headlights: LAKE ELSINORE 5 MILES.

The white Econoline pokes in and out of view on the curvy grade and, ten minutes later, Mindy slows and makes a right.

Gale passes the PACWEST MINING sign — a painting of snowcapped mountains and a lake set into a river-rock monument and lit from above.

Makes a U-turn.

“Kyle McNab of PacWest Mining had dinner with Tarlow and Kevin Elder at the Grove, the week before he was murdered,” says Gale. “Velasquez the bartender said McNab was pissed.”

“What’s a biker outlaw like Jeffs have to do with PacWest Mining?” asks Mendez. “And what’s he doing here at five-fifteen in the morning with a van full of guns?”

“Floating them down the iron river,” says Gale. “Our enormous, invisible black market.”

Gale makes the left at the PacWest sign, takes another quick look at the snowy mountains and the blue lake.

“I don’t like this,” says Mendez. “Vern Jeffs and his crazy-ass wife with a van full of guns, out in the middle of nowhere. Calling on a Tarlow Company subcontractor, who, last we heard, was pissed off about something at the Grove. We’re out of jurisdiction here, so if something goes froggy, it’s Riverside Sheriff’s for backup, which of course they may not provide in a timely manner.”

“It’s just a knock and talk. We’re here about McNab’s dinner with Tarlow, and Jeffs came up in the net.”

“No one will believe that at six in the morning.”

“Trust me.”

“I do but I still don’t like it.”

Gale parks on the shoulder, lets his SUV idle. A PacWest pickup truck dims its brights and swooshes past.

Then another.

Followed less than a minute later by a tractor trailer loaded with an immense drilling rig doing less than ten miles an hour up the grade, Gale’s guess. The augur sways and rattles loudly. The Peterbilt engine groans.

“Daniela,” says Gale. “We need to go in now.”

“You’re the boss, boss. Let’s let the sun come up. I want to see what I’m doing. Sorry, just a little nervy about this.”

Ten minutes later Gale pulls into a large gravel parking lot in front of a wooden, Swiss chalet — style building, brown with scalloped white trim. Red geraniums bloom in barrels and flower beds.

The Econoline and three PacWest pickup trucks are parked in front of the office. One of the trucks backs out as Gale and Mendez crunch across the lot.

In a meadow adjacent to the chalet office, Gale notes the battalion of excavators, backhoes, earth-diggers, loaders, boom trucks, and drill platforms, all surrounded by a ten-foot chain-link fence topped with razor wire.

The office porch light is on and the door is open.