Session 04 — The Station on Mund Street

31 July–1 August 1996 · San Carlos Apache Reservation / Globe, Arizona

Campaign: The Weight of Knowing · Scenario: Puppet Shows and Shadow Plays

Teaser

In Globe, Linda Reardon finishes her shift at the county assessor’s office and locks her desk.

She has been trying to reach Dennis since three. Dispatch said desert call-out, which means no radio, which is normal, which she has never quite made peace with in eighteen years of this.

She stops at the grocery store on the way home. Frozen pizza. A six-pack because Dennis will want one when he gets in. She is thinking about whether Travis has baseball practice tomorrow.

She is not worried yet.

In San Carlos, Patricia Goseyun stirs a pot she has been tending since four. Across the table her daughter Maya, eight years old, sits with her long division homework open in front of her. Two-year-old Joseph sleeps sideways on the sofa beneath a thin blanket.

Raymond was supposed to call at six.

It is six-fourteen.

Patricia turns the heat down and watches the window over the sink.

Two streets from the station house, Edna Declay waters the pots on her porch. She can see the station from here. She has been able to see it since Calvin started working there three years ago. It sits exactly where it always sits — low roof, radio antenna, two cruisers in the lot.

Calvin’s dog started howling three hours ago.

Not barking. Not at anything she can see. A long, low sound that rolls out across the street and does not stop.

Edna tells him to hush.

He ignores her.

A few minutes later he lies down beside the front door and refuses to move from it.

Act One — The Chimney

The cave is where they left it.

Sterling finds the rock that is not a rock almost immediately. It sits at the edge of the fire circle, pale and unremarkable, except that it weighs less than it should. He turns it over in his hands and says nothing. He has no framework for it yet. He writes its dimensions in his notebook anyway.

O’Brien finds the fingerprints on the bone and understands at once what they mean. The profile has been assembling itself in his mind since the Begay ranch: trained operator, military background, patient, precise, working alone. The cave confirms it. Everything the shooter left behind confirms it.

Garcia finds the chimney.

A narrow fissure in the back wall of the cave, rising at an angle into darkness. Someone went up it. Someone knew it was there.

The team rigs a belay. Garcia scales it first, placing pitons, trailing rope, emerging into flat light on the top of the mesa. He calls down what he sees and then goes quiet for a moment before he says the rest of it.

The same signs O’Brien showed him at the Begay ranch. The trained absence. The ground made to say nothing.

The shooter is heading north. On foot. Through the mountains, toward Phoenix, which on foot in July is a rough proposition for almost anyone.

Almost.

They bring the team up one by one, leaving the two remaining tribal officers in the valley with the dead. There is no graceful way to do this. They do it anyway.

Act Two — Grief and Protocol

Chief Colorados arrives with support and sends a chopper for the agents, which is a way of communicating something that does not need to be said out loud.

He will deal with his dead people himself.

On the flight back, Shaw begins thinking through the names that haven’t been named. She knows enough about Apache traditions by now to understand why. The dead are not spoken of directly — not because they are forgotten but because the boundary between the living and the dead requires careful maintenance. To name them carelessly is to risk pulling them back.

She keeps this to herself for now.

At the roadblocks, Garrett is waiting. He delivers his assessment of Colorados’s handling of the operation with the particular bitterness of a man who has already decided where the blame lives. His officer Reardon is dead. He will not forgive the tribal police for that.

Garcia listens and says nothing.

The agents wind down at the casino. O’Brien calls Mary. It doesn’t go well, which is not unusual, which does not make it easier.

Act Three — The Coyote

At two in the morning the howling starts.

Sterling and O’Brien wake in separate rooms. Both go to the window. Below, in the parking lot, a coyote stands under a streetlight and looks directly back at them. Unhurried. Waiting.

Sterling puts on his hotel robe — musk pink, aggressively civilian — and heads downstairs. The desk clerk is somewhere far away behind his music and his evening. Sterling tries to establish the basic facts of the situation. The basic facts of the situation resist establishment. He goes back to bed with earplugs.

O’Brien goes outside.

The coyote does not run. It moves — always one streetlight ahead, always just visible — and the howling lifts up around it as the dogs join in, building into something that feels less like noise and more like direction.

It leads him to the station house.

The front door is ajar. Light floods out across the dark street.

Act Four — The Station House

O’Brien draws his weapon and goes in.

Three officers at their desks. Not sleeping. Not moving at all. He gets closer before he understands what he is seeing.

Their skulls have been flensed.

Handcuffed to their chairs, skin removed from bone with something precise, no sign of struggle, no disturbance anywhere in the room. Whatever happened here was not fast. It chose to take its time.

O’Brien clears the station, hits the panic button, and calls the team.

Shaw, Sterling, and Garcia arrive just before the first responders, just before Colorados, who walks in through the door and goes a completely different shade. He has been Chief since before most of his force was old enough to drive. He stands in the middle of the room and seems to contract slightly, as though something structural has been removed.

Across two scenes he has lost nearly half his department.

The door opens.

Three men enter: two in suits doing their best impression of non-military bearing, one in his fifties who requires no impression. He identifies himself as Agent Smith. His credentials suggest military intelligence. He does not explain further and does not appear to expect questions.

Smith’s gaze moves across the room, catalogues everything, and returns to Sterling.

He would like a word.

Act Five — Interview Room

The room is small. A table. Two chairs. A woman already seated.

Blonde. Composed. The kind of composed that is also a form of pressure.

She identifies herself as Agent Jones.

She has questions for Sterling. Why CDC. Why here. Who is Agent Shaw and why did she bring a scientist to a federal homicide. Sterling’s answers are careful and give nothing. Jones writes nothing down and seems to miss nothing.

Then she quotes from his field report.

Some constituent elements of the tranquilizer compound do not appear in any available literature. Further analysis is required to confirm, but the current data is not consistent with any known synthetic or organic compound of terrestrial origin.

She asks what he means by that.

Sterling attempts an answer.

She asks about the rock.

Where is it, exactly.

Sterling notices that she has not mentioned the three dead officers in the next room. Not once. They did not happen, or they happened and they are not the point, or she already knows what happened to them and does not need him to tell her.

He gives her nothing useful about the rock.

She thanks him pleasantly and opens the door.

Act Six — Outside the Room

O’Brien calls Hobson from the station phone.

Hobson tells him to cooperate fully and hand over anything requested.

O’Brien hangs up and considers the ceiling for a moment.

Smith’s two associates have not moved from the entrance. Garcia attempts conversation. Smith deflects it with the practised patience of someone who has been where he is many times before. O’Brien tries federal statute — argues that they cannot question a federal agent without due process. Smith points out, pleasantly, that Sterling is a civilian.

He is correct.

Sterling walks out of the interview room.

O’Brien and Sterling create a distraction — nothing elaborate, just enough — and Garcia slips into the evidence room.

The rock is not there.

Whether MAJESTIC took it before the agents arrived, or the Dischorder returned for its ship while the station was empty, or something else moved faster than either — nobody knows. The absence is the only fact available.

Garcia returns to the group. They say their condolences to Colorados, who receives them with a grief that has nowhere useful to go. He tells them to be back at seven in the morning for neighbourhood canvassing. He tells them to try to get some sleep.

Act Seven — The Morgue

Shaw has already left the room before she stands up.

By the time the others realise she is gone she is already driving, using numbers she has called few times before. When the call connects, the voice on the other end delivers two instructions: leave now. Don’t worry about the rock — stop what came in it.

She hangs up.

Heads outside.

O’Brien follows her out and tries to bring her back. She makes a counter-offer: come with me instead. When he tells her he can’t leave the others, she nods once and drives off in a tribal police cruiser.

She goes to the morgue.

She makes calls from there.

The fingerprints from the cave come back.

Master Sergeant Emanuel Santana. Apache, forty-eight years old. Deserted U.S. Army Special Forces in 1971, on compassionate leave to attend his mother’s funeral. At the time of his desertion, Santana was on detached duty to the CIA’s PHOENIX Program — a counter-insurgency operation in South Vietnam. His disappearance was classified a national security concern.

He has not surfaced since.

Until now.

Shaw sits with this for a while.

Then she steals a van and heads back to the casino.

Coda

The station house sits quiet behind its police tape.

Inside, three men remain handcuffed to their chairs. Their names will have to wait for morning. The Chief knows them. The Chief knows their families. The Chief knows who to call.

The rock is gone from evidence. Whether MAJESTIC took it, or the thing returned for it first, or something else entirely — nobody in that station house knows. The absence is the only fact available.

In a hotel room, Sterling lies on his back and stares at the ceiling and thinks about a quote from his own field notes.

Inside the station house, the Chief knows three names he cannot yet speak.

Across the reservation, three families are still waiting for the telephone to ring.

Somewhere north, something wearing the body of Master Sergeant Emanuel Santana walks patiently toward Phoenix.

It is not in a hurry.

It has six months of practice disappearing.

Morning is only a few hours away.