Chapter 32
By early afternoon, I was back in Willow Run. After parking, I walked first to the newspaper office. It was locked and dark, with the same family emergency sign still in the window. I called Joseph Custer, and got his voice mail. Without leaving yet another message, I turned and went to the library.
Inside, Allison had her back turned to the door arranging books on a cart. The patrons consisted of several women leafing through magazines, two men reading papers, and three teenage girls rummaging among the DVDs. I noticed that the computer terminal was in use. That was unfortunate. I’d have to wait.
“Hi, Allison.”
She turned as I approached, placed a hand on my arm, and kissed me lightly on the cheek. That brought a burst of giggles from the girls in the DVD section and a burst of color to our embarrassed faces.
“That will stir up the rumor mill,” Allison said mischievously.
“But it was worth it,” I said, smiling in return.
We locked eyes for a few moments, and then she asked, “More searching today?”
“Yes. I had a most interesting visit to the Missoula campus this morning, and now I have questions to answer.”
“A campus visit? Aren’t you a little old to be going to college?” she teased.
“You know what they say. It’s never too late to learn, or something philosophical like that.”
“Are you going to tell me about this interesting visit? Or do I have to wait for your book to publish?”
“Attempting to pry secrets out of me?”
“If you’ll tell me what your book is about, maybe I can help you search,” she offered innocently.
“Nice try, but I’m not ready to talk about the plot. It needs to come together a bit more. It’s just not ready to be shared,” I offered defensively.
“I know, I know. The mysterious secrets of an author,” she said with mild exasperation. She pretended to pout. Or maybe it was not pretend. She sounded a bit like her pride had been wounded, like she was not trustworthy enough to be drawn into the inner circle. I felt guilty holding back, and it surely showed in the expression on my face. I was about to say something soothing when she flashed that winning smile.
“Gotcha,” she giggled. “You go do your searching. I have work to do.”
I smiled. “Yeah, you got me good.” She scooted off to her desk.
Turning toward the computer terminal, I saw an empty chair. The person who had been using it had just gotten up, so I hustled over there to sit down before someone else could take it. I noticed out of my peripheral vision that someone else had been marching that direction also, but I avoided eye contact. I might have chiseled in line, but the person didn’t challenge me about it. If I did chisel, I was certain that also would be in the gossip wire before the day was out. I would survive that too.
I went to the Internet. I had my suspicions of what happened this morning with Rose Barker. She seemed to be concerned if I had picked the plants. So I started by searching for endangered and threatened species. Picking these plants would be illegal. The search revealed there are 746 such plant species in the US listed under the Endangered Species Act. I had to narrow that down. Even searching just for Montana, a long list resulted. This was impossible for me, the non-botanist. I had a bag of wilted plant parts and a very long list of species to compare against. Impossible. I jotted down the web addresses for these hits. Maybe I’d come back to those later if my other route did not pan out.
The other route was more likely. Rose Barker called campus security. You don’t call campus security because someone picked an endangered plant. You call campus security for drugs. She was following the SOP, the Standard Operating Procedure. Step one is most likely to call campus security. So she called them. Step two might be to try to get more information or to keep the perpetrator talking until security arrives. She probably went way beyond the intent of the SOP by trying to detain me in the greenhouse. The last thing she would be prepared to handle is a cornered desperate man. The consequences could have been unpleasant for Rose and her colleague George.
While I had made arrests for drug possession in my days as a cop, it was always the finished goods, such as white powder. I did not recall actually ever seeing a live plant from which drugs are derived. I did recall seeing pictures of marijuana plants at some point along the way. Live plants, though, never showed up in any investigation I was involved in. But there was plenty on the Internet. Pictures, instructions on how to grow and harvest the plants, procedures for processing the harvest into useable recreational drug, descriptions of the euphoria of drug use experiences. It was all there.
Of particular interest, I found references to illegal marijuana being grown in National Parklands in Idaho, Colorado, and California. In the past, the guilty apparently were mom-and-pop operations growing a few plants for personal use or for sale on a small scale. But now the culprits responsible were illegal immigrants from drug cartels in Mexico. With the increased security along the US’s southern border, drug production was moved into the States as a way to avoid drug shipment seizures in border crossings. In Pike National Forest in Colorado, a football field sized planting of marijuana was found. These operations were even recruiting other migrant workers to plant, tend, and harvest these fields.
With the federal cutbacks on staffing, the numbers worked out that each National Parkland ranger was responsible for overseeing 500,000 acres, an impossible task. Ranger Pine had mentioned staffing problems in the Lewis and Clark National Forest. He and his skeleton crew could not possibly oversee it all. Actually, it could be used as a convenient excuse for claiming ignorance about what’s going on in Spring Valley. With the valley in a replanting operation handled by an outside group, he could just let it run on autopilot, not bothering to be distracted by monitoring their efforts. He’s too busy doing his job, so he lets them do theirs without any question. It might be a drug producer’s dream: plenty of land, little chance of being discovered, and a cooperative ranger watching over the entrance. That was my new emerging story. I hoped that the facts would let me stick to it.
I didn’t have much to go on, just these brown fragile pieces in a bag. I rummaged through them, one at a time, comparing what I had with what was on the computer monitor screen. They clearly were not marijuana, which has long thin leaves with finely serrated edges.
Then there is the coca plant from which cocaine is derived. I didn’t know what the plant looked like. A quick Internet search revealed a picture. There were small clusters of flowers on the stem. The leaves were long, oval, and smooth along the edges. I pawed through the leaves in the bag again, and saw that some of them might fit that description. I couldn’t be certain if there was any relationship between them. A sense of frustration swept over me at my ineptitude with plants. I could really use a botanist right about now, one that wouldn’t call the cops on me.
That is when the three teenage girls walked past the workstation and eyed what I was doing. They wore very strange facial expressions at seeing me sitting there with a bag of debris scattered out on the table top next to the keyboard. I just flashed them a deadpan expression, and they wandered off giggling. I ignored them.
I then pulled out my cell phone and found the pictures I had taken on my first day on Monarch Trail. While the images were focused on the brown paper, there was also some greenery in the scene. They were on the ground and might have some connection to what I was looking for. Those green leaves were also not marijuana, I was certain of that. And they were not from the coca plant. Nothing else jumped out at me. I decided for now to set aside consideration of coca plants and return later if necessary.
Then there is the opium poppy plant. An Internet picture of it revealed a long thick stem with a bulbous flower. The leaves were wrinkly and jagged on their edges. Probably not scientific terms, but that is what I saw in the picture. In spite of the poor focus on the green leaves o
n my cell phone screen, there were definite similarities with what was on the computer monitor. After poking through the contents of the bag one more time, I found two leaves like that attached to a short thick section of stem. The leaves of the specimen in the bag, the picture on the computer monitor, and the image in my cell phone all looked very similar.
But it turns out there are many kinds of poppies, going by names such as wood, oriental, and even California wild. And the flowers appear in a spectrum of colors, such as red, yellow, orange, purple, and pink. While the Internet pictures focused on the flowers of all these various poppy varieties, they all seemed to have wrinkly jagged leaves. I suppose someone trained in botany might be able to distinguish opium poppies from any of the other varieties based on the leaves alone. Someone such as Rose Barker, who saw the telltale leaves and called campus security.
I felt a surge of excitement. This investigation of mine had turned into something bigger. So now I have a Hispanic guy running through the woods carrying poppy plant parts. No one would be chasing him if he had ornamental California poppies. You only chase someone if they are going to let the cat out of the bag about your opium poppy patch. He was carrying the plant parts as evidence of the activities in the valley. And he wasn’t just running. He was escaping. And so was the man who was arrested while trying to steal a car in Willow Run.
But how did it tie into the military that, according to Jake Monroe, were guarding the fenced area in the National Forest? To help Uncle Sam fund the war effort? Not likely. More likely, the guys were a rogue military group growing their early retirement, their own version of an IRA.
I could go to the law with what I had. But what did I really have? There was the chain-link fence. Yet the rest was still conjecture. I had poorly supported suspicions based on a dead guy, who everyone else thought was alive and skipped town with his lady friend Cortina. I had a few pieces of plant that I, a non-botanist with some crispy specimens in hand, had concluded from an Internet search was an opium poppy. I still needed more. So I continued reading about the opium poppy.
There were many sites on the Internet that discussed the topic. Cultivation of the opium poppy, Papaver somniferum, dates back thousands of years when it was called the flower of joy. The plants are hardy, able to grow in many environments. The seeds are planted after the last snow. Here in Montana, the last snow can come late in the spring, often into May. So planting might have to be delayed to account for that. Three months after the seeds are planted, the flowers appear. When the petals fall off, a bulbous seedpod is exposed. The pod contains an opaque milky sap, which is crude opium.
The pods are slit with a knife vertically, and the sap seeps out. Exposed to air, it darkens and forms a brown-black gum. The gum is collected, bundled into various shapes such as bricks, and often wrapped in plastic for transport to a processing facility, which for convenience is often close to the poppy fields.
The processing facility is usually done on the cheap, using oil drums as the cooking vats. The crude opium is mixed with lime in boiling water. Organic waste sinks to the bottom, while white morphine floats to the surface. The morphine is taken off, reheated with ammonia, filtered, and boiled again to reduce it to a brown paste called morphine base.
Heroin is a derivative of morphine. The chemical name for heroin is diacetyl morphine, which is produced by combining morphine with the chemical acetic anhydride. The mixture is heated for several hours. Then there are various purification and filtering steps to yield heroin. Numerous levels of concentration and purity are sold to users. Those who inject it use fairly crude material. Higher purity heroin can be inhaled or smoked. But because of the wide variations in the heroin sold to users, deaths can occur from impurities and overdosing. I was certainly familiar with the accidental deaths. I had been called to the scene of some of those back in Cincinnati.
There is legal production of heroin for medical applications. But that is highly regulated and is on a relatively small scale. In contrast, the annual world production of illicit raw opium is estimated to be 4300 tons, which translates to about 430 tons of heroin. Half of that ends up sold on the streets in the United States.
OK, I thought. So maybe they’re growing opium poppies in the valley. But it’s certainly not for medicinal purposes. Not in a National Forest. Not secretly hidden behind razor wire, using captive Hispanic laborers. This has to be an illegal operation that has eluded detection.
The geography of the valley was perfect for that illicit activity. The steep-walled, horseshoe-shaped terrain is a natural barrier. Put some fencing around it, and no one is getting in or out easily. The fencing is embedded in the forest on top of the surrounding ridge so it’s not visible from the air. And if they were using some type of camouflage, the activity in the valley itself wouldn’t be visible either.
They couldn’t just start growing poppies in the valley unless they got rid of the native vegetation. Thus the fire. So the fire was probably not the campfire of a careless backpacker. It was a planned ground clearing in the fall for planting the next spring.
On a whim, I typed in the search terms fire and poppies. Up popped an interesting news story from an Orange County, California paper in February 2008. It discussed a fire in Santiago Canyon in California in October 2007. I remembered reading something about that fire previously. It was intentionally set, burning over 28,000 acres. Many houses were destroyed. Over 1100 firefighters battled the blaze, finally bringing it under control in November. A terrible case of arson. The February article though was not about the fire itself. I read the brief story.
The destructive Santiago Fire in October 2007 prompted fire officials to warn residents in low lying communities to prepare for evacuation if heavy rains arrive since the lack of vegetation on the scorched hillsides could permit destructive mud slides.
Winter storms however brought only gentle rains that both eased the long-standing drought and also provided the necessary moisture for new growth of plants to help anchor the ravaged hillsides. If the normal pounding rains had fallen, huge mudslides would most surely have resulted, threatening to bury the hundreds of homes in the valleys.
While the danger is not yet over since heavy storms could still sweep in from the Pacific and loosen the weakly anchored soil on the hills in Cleveland National Forest, officials are encouraged by the gentleness of the weather so far this winter. And all those who have recently peered upward at the charred slopes are now seeing green, not the dusty brown and blackened landscape of just a few weeks ago.
Not only is greenery returning, but also wildflowers are bursting forth across vast stretches of the hillsides. So that the public can view the profusion of colors, some areas such as Caspers Wilderness Park and Laguna Coast Wilderness Park have been recently reopened for limited visitation.
The seeds of many rarely seen wildflowers often lie dormant in the soil, according to John Murten, a park manager in Orange County. “When the slopes are cleared of vegetation and the rainfall is just right, these fire-following plants emerge. The conditions are just right this year. It’s unlikely people will see this abundance again in their life times,” he said.
While the burn areas themselves remain off limits to the public, the wildflower profusion can be viewed from parking areas in the parks. The public is being allowed in limited numbers to enter these parking areas to view the blooms, but cannot leave the paved lots. This is to prevent disturbance of the unstable ground and to protect the fragile seedlings from foot traffic. Park rangers are there to ensure compliance.
The most impressive display of flowers is the bloom of wild California poppies. Their yellow-orange blossoms stretch up the hillsides, in some areas as an unbroken mass of color stretching to the tops of the surrounding ridges.
John Murten indicated that park officials are discussing when the parks can be reopened completely for enjoyment by the public. That likely will be sometime in the summer.
The article was accompanied by photographs showing masses of California poppies stretching up the hills in all directions. So if these poppies grow well on burned-over ground, perhaps the same is true for the opium variety.
The Hispanic car thief, the first running man, escaped in the fall long before the opium growing started. He was probably part of the crew installing the chain-link fence. If he was just a hired hand, he could have walked away from the job at any time, or at least waited until the end of the day before skipping out. So he was doing forced labor and could not just quit. He had no choice but to escape. He tried to get away and got as far as Willow Run before being captured. No INS agent came to pick him up from Willow Run. If INS had picked him up, he would have eventually encountered someone who spoke Spanish, and the man probably would have talked. So he was either taken back to forced labor or disposed of. By Deputy Enid Powell?
What had Allison said? Enid was angry that he missed out on his chance at fame and fortune in football because of a knee injury. So here he was back in the same small town where he grew up, maybe locally famous for his high school athletics, but certainly not rich. His anger could be great enough that he would turn to crime as a way to get that fortune he so craved. And with the Sheriff near to retirement and turning the police duties over to Enid, Deputy Powell had the run of the town.
He could well be protecting the guys in the valley from outside interference. Dealing with the car thief, making the problem go away, making him disappear. Perhaps he also helped Cortina Perez and Joseph Custer disappear because they were a threat. Cortina could reveal that she did not even know the dead guy from the trail. He was dead, and he was not her boyfriend. She did not just run away. She was eliminated. The note Enid claimed that she wrote was a fake. And Joseph left me a message saying he had discovered something. Then he disappeared. That coincidence just did not set well with me.
Enid Powell. A local boy, local hero, who turned bad. He turned against the people of Willow Run, the very ones he was sworn to protect and to serve. I pictured in my mind Deputy Enid Powell in his brown uniform.
I then remembered the brown paper that had been in my backpack in the pile of litter. While I sent it to Ed Garvey for fingerprint analysis, I had a photocopy of it. I pulled that out of my pack to study it.
Printed on the paper were the letters M and E. The M was next to the shredded edge of the paper. It suggested there had been more printed letters that were lost during the guy’s run through the forest. Not ME as in medical examiner. But they could have been part of a word, with letters such as L and I missing. LIME. This coarse paper could have come from bags of lime for processing the crude opium right there in the valley. This piece of paper might have been taken from one of those bags and used for another purpose. That purpose was to tell part of a story once it was removed from the valley.
If so, then the effort in the valley was very complex. And very expensive. Fencing, probably camouflage netting, guards, housing, lime, maybe ammonia, drug processing building, supplies, and vehicles. Certainly heroin can bring in a lot of money, but they would need a lot of up-front money to start this. Was the military secretly producing heroin as a money-raising campaign in this tight economy? Sure, it could be worth millions of dollars and maybe even a few billion, but that seemed like rounding error compared to the huge size of the US military budget. They were spending hundreds of billions of dollars each year in Iraq alone.
Or would they be producing heroin to compete with the Afghanistan production of the drug? Put the Afghan drug lords out of business, and money for the Taliban and terrorism begins to dry up. That might actually work.
These scenarios bestowed some honor on the guys in the valley, raising money for the military objectives over there. But both of these distorted possibilities still put drugs on the streets of America. Maybe it’s just creative thinking put into action by an over-zealous or misguided military unit. Yet I suspected it was the usual motive for such activity. It was most likely being done for personal gain. It was simply greed. It always was.
But I was letting my imagination run away a bit with this. I had no real proof of anything. Just circumstantial bits and pieces of my conspiracy theory.
I studied the photocopy of the brown paper again. In addition to the letters M and E were dark streaks or smudges. According to the material I had just read, that was the color of the sap that oozes from a slit opium seedpod after it has darkened when exposed to air. I peered at the dark streaks more closely. There was a pattern to them, nearly parallel curved lines on the paper, like the residue from a slit pod. I had not seen any pod in the paper. I rummaged again through the plant parts in my bag and did not see anything that resembled the pod I had seen on the computer monitor. I was certain that is what the paper had probably contained, but it had been lost somewhere out there in the forest. That could be confirmed by Ed. He could have the paper I sent him analyzed for morphine residue. That should be simple enough for him. It’s the kind of thing that is probably done routinely, even in the Cincinnati crime lab.
Now I felt more confident about interpreting that the dead man I found on Monarch Trail escaped from the valley. But unlike the car thief in the fall, he was also carrying opium plant parts wrapped in the brown paper torn from a bag of lime as proof of what was going on in the valley. But he never got to deliver that proof. He died running off the cliff. And the guys in the valley took away the evidence, the body and plant parts and the brown paper I had seen on the guy. But he had also been carrying a second set of evidence, a back up, that he dropped when he went over the cliff. And I picked it up only because I am a nut case about litter. A coincidence. A very freaky coincidence.