The Demands of the Dead

By Justin Podur

When police killed his two best friends in a supposedly accidental shooting, detective Mark Brown left the force bitter and angry, abandoning a promising career and leaving his special skills to languish. A year later, the trail of one of the killers has Mark looking south, to Mexico, just as he receives a mysterious, anonymous, encrypted message over e-mail: The dead demand much more than vengeance.

The same day, two Mexican police are murdered in guerrilla territory in Chiapas, Mexico, where the Zapatista rebels face the Mexican government in a deadly conflict in which no one is safe and no one can afford to be neutral. A US firm close to the Mexican government is contracted to do an independent investigation, and they want Mark in the field. But does anyone want the truth to come out? The Mexican police stand accused of corruption and collusion in drug trafficking. The rebels and their apparently benign supporters have secrets of their own. And the US Embassy wants Mark to use his new contacts to bolster their intelligence on the rebellion.

Drawn into the conflict zone by the connection to the deaths of his friends, Mark finds that he has to work on both sides to solve the case, in a place where any mistake could endanger lives – or reignite a war.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Justin Podur
• Release date: Aug 26, 2014
• ISBN: 9781311571533

Justin Podur

Justin Podur is an Associate Professor at the Faculty of Environmental Studies at York University in Toronto. He is the author of Haiti's New Dictatorship: The Coup, the Earthquake, and the UN Occupation (Pluto Press (UK), Between the Lines (Canada), Palgrave Macmillan (US) 2012) and contributor to Empire's Ally: Canada and the War in Afghanistan (University of Toronto Press 2013). He has also worked as a journalist, reporting from the Democratic Republic of Congo, Haiti, Pakistan, India, Colombia, Venezuela, Israel/Palestine, and Chiapas, for Z Magazine/ZNet and other outlets. His PhD is in forestry, and his scientific research on forest fires and climate change has been published in The International Journal of Wildland Fire, Ecological Modeling, Ecological Applications, and Environmetrics.

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The Demands of the Dead

By Justin Podur

The Demands of the Dead

By Justin Podur

Copyright © 2014, Justin Podur

Smashwords Edition

Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike International 4.0 license (CC BY-SA 4.0)

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

Some rights reserved.

Podur, Justin, 1977 April 15

ISBN [978-0-9938146-1-7]

Cover and book design by Suzy Harris-Brandts

First Edition

Chapter 1

About a year before the two policemen were murdered in Chiapas, the best tracker I know was disappeared off of the streets in Queens like the victim of some Latin American dictatorship and never seen again. And the second best, his older brother, was shot down on the street by four men who happened to be police. They were all acquitted for the crime. I had followed their careers closely for a year. One made patrol sargeant before he died. Two left the city and were state troopers in Albany.

The fourth was the man I awaited.

Victor Salant. Born in Queens, his parents from Valdivia, Chile. Lived in an apartment around the corner in Jackson Heights, divorced, his wife and kid in another apartment in the same neighbourhood. Former Detective with the Street Crimes Unit. He had an indifferent record, was not dirty that I could tell, and had been on a disability pension since his acquittal.

The disability pension was an NYPD method for cleaning up the kind of mess Salant had made. He was never of much value to the department, and after he killed Shawn, he was politically inconvenient. Like I became, for different reasons. Nobody offered me a disability pension after they killed Shawn and Walter, and I had been a rising star. Then again, it would have taken a little bit more than a monthly pension to clean up the mess I was planning to make.

In the forest, animals wrote their whole story in the dirt. I had studied with Shawn and Walter's father since I was a child. A tracker could read what a bear had eaten, where it scratched itself, how fast it was traveling, whether it was injured, all from patterns of prints left in mud and leaves, broken twigs and puddles of water.

In the city, the trails were different – paper records and email files, passwords and receipts, a flash of a face out in the open to be seen and photographed. But Salant was going to tell me his story as surely as any quarry I'd followed in the forest. After our teacher, Walter was the best tracker I had known, Shawn the second best. I was tied for third.

I waited for Salant sitting inside a corner Latin bakery with a view out the window. Before long, he would pass on foot, from his place to the empanada place next door. Not an early riser, Salant, not these days anyway. He had brunch there most days, met people there. I had parked my car up the street and set up in the cafe to wait for him to walk past.

I didn't have long to wait. Salant pounded past with determination in his step and more formal attire than I had seen on him in weeks. Gray suit jacket, black slacks, dress shoes, briefcase. When he passed, I waited five minutes, and repositioned in the drugstore across the street to watch him. I had barely got there when he came out of the restaurant, already biting into his empanada, and walked briskly to catch a bus downtown.

Good choice, I thought. Much harder to follow the train in a car.

Twenty minutes later, I saw him walk into a plain storefront private security office. I memorized the firm's name, parked the car, and waited. Salant was looking for a job.

Evidently his disability pension wasn't enough to pay child support.

He came out an hour later, shoulders slumped, suit wrinkled, no more spring in his step. It seemed today was not Salant's day. I drove home.

Maria had left me a cryptic message saying we needed to talk. I called her right away with no luck, and went back to studying Salant.It seemed the firm he'd applied to work at was an international one, with an office in Mexico City. I knew Salant's background was Latin, and he did live in Jackson Heights, but his international connections were a surprise.

And to Mexico?

Tracking a predator - including a human - means taking extra care to look up and see where you are, not to get too focused on reading the tracks in the dirt, because while you are tracking it, it may be tracking you. Salant's job search was starting to look like maybe he was circling back on me.

The firm I worked for was like the firm Salant had applied to. It did research for companies, and for the government. It did trainings for foreign police and military forces. It also did investigations and operations, without advertising either. When I quit the police, I didn't imagine I would become a mercenary. But I had never worked undercover for the police. Now, though, Maria and I were infiltrators in this firm of infiltrators.

The name and structure of these firms was always changing. Its employees got on the roster, then would be asked to apply for specific jobs. Mine was currently called Corporate Research and Analysis Resources (CRAR), but each subgroup had its own name and acronym, its own recruiters and business lines. Was Salant's private security company, with its office in Mexico, a subgroup of my firm, or a competitor? Whether it was or not, if he kept searching, and had the right contacts, he would get to us soon.

Mr. Manley brought us to the firm's attention with the last job all four of us did. He set us to finding an 8 year old, Brandy Rushing, who had been kidnapped by her father. Rushing was one of the firm's own investigators, who had once come to Mr. Manley's school for training. The mother was a young woman from Jersey whose record of shoplifting as a teenager meant little help from the police, among whom Rushing had plenty of friends. Mr. Manley gave us the same parameters that he claimed the Apache Scouts used, the same ones he had given us on the practice scout missions he made us do as teenagers. No violence, don't be seen, and since Shawn was an officer of the court and I was an officer of the law, we couldn't break the law. And neither of us did. Mostly.

Instead, Walter broke into Rushing's apartment and Maria into his browsing history. She found a lot of searching for cabins in the Catskills. Once we figured out where he had gone into the park, Shawn and I drove there, got ourselves a campsite, and found his cabin easily. He was trained by our teacher, after all, so we found him by thinking like we would if we wanted to stay out of sight. We set up and waited to see if we would get lucky and he would leave the kid alone in the cabin, which he did. Shawn took her back to her mother and I waited for Rushing in the cabin.

We had a short conversation, in which I convinced him to turn himself in.

The whole thing took less than 72 hours, and I didn't even need to take a day off work. Later, when I left my job, I stayed on the firm's talent roster, mostly doing trainings for them.

Walter, I remembered now, had just come back from what he said was an Intergalactic meeting in a place called Chiapas, in Mexico. A few days after we returned Brandy Rushing to her mother, Walter went straight back to Chiapas. He was spending more and more time there, never providing us with any details about what, in the years before Salant's unit disappeared him.

I had never thought much about what Walter was doing in Mexico. I thought saying he was at an Intergalactic meeting was his way of telling us to stay out of his business. It never occurred to me that it had anything to do with Shawn's murder or Walter's disappearance. My theory had always been that the killers were into some dirt here in the city, not elsewhere in the world. Dirt Shawn was exposing through his work. Now Salant was looking for a job at a firm like mine, and in Mexico, where Walter had been. So maybe it had been about Walter, and not Shawn. I had missed something in the story, and Salant was going to have to tell me.

Maria had my car the rest of that week, so I picked Salant up again a couple of days later underground, on the F and then the C train, then out at Fulton Street and into Lower Manhattan's office towers. It was bright, setting up to be a hot day. Twenty feet behind him with forty people between us, and I could feel the sweat starting to break under my windbreaker. I stopped to take it off and stuff it into my backpack.

I had to take the risk today of getting on the train into town with him even though solo foot surveillance is not recommended. You need two investigators at least. Three is much better. That way, you can switch if your target catches on. On a crowded downtown street, a single investigator can follow someone for a while, but not for very long, not without backup. I was no cop any more. I had no backup.

But I did have time. Progressive surveillance involves watching the same target during different parts of his routine. Watch him at night one day, in the afternoon the next day, in the morning the next, building up a picture of his daily round. By now I knew the Irish pub Salant liked to drink with other cops from his precinct, I knew the apartment his ex-wife lived at where he visited his kid, I knew the Ecuadorian place where he had his empanadas at lunch, and now I knew about his job search.

I followed him on Nassau, and Cedar, as he traced a path I had taken more than a few times at the base of these towers. There were a thousand places he could be headed to, from the Holiday Inn to the Marina, but I knew where Salant was going.

He was going to suite 400 in the pyramid-tipped tower that housed, among other clients, Corporate Research and Analysis Resources.

I didn't follow when Salant entered the building. I waited, counting out the time for him to get to the banks of elevators, for one to come down, for him to take one up, get to reception, talk to reception, be directed to the waiting area. The office was big enough to get lost in, but the waiting area was right in front, and I did not want to be seen by Salant anywhere, but especially not there.

Still, I wanted to get there before he left and find out what he was applying for. After ten minutes, I went to the fourth floor. There were no visitors in reception. I knew from the demeanor of the two receptionists, and the fact that it was a Saturday morning, that Salant was with his interviewer and that no one else was here. Mr. Manley called that being attuned to a person's energy, but it was really just reading the receptionists' body language.

Mr. Hoffman is just finishing the last interview, the receptionist told me. He'll be ready for you in five minutes.

I thanked her and went to the restroom, set up in a cubicle and waited. I planned to wait ten minutes, so Salant would be gone by the time I came out.

Instead, he came into the restroom. When I heard him come in, I moved my feet on to the toilet seat. Detectives were trained to notice shoes, and I didn't want him getting even a casual glance at mine.

Salant flushed and left without washing his hands. I took extra time with mine, enough for him to get an elevator, and went back to reception.

Which office is Mr. Hoffman in? I asked. The receptionist pointed down the hall, to a set of fishbowl-style offices used for briefings, with desks and chairs on wheels designed for quick assembly or disassembly. When I appeared outside, Hoffman looked at me through the glass, pushed the glass door open, and met my eyes through his own huge glasses.He clicked his teeth together. Are you sure you're here at the right time? I don't have anyone else scheduled for today. He stepped backward, though, like he didn't trust his own scheduling, allowing me to walk in. So I did.

I'm Mark Brown, I said. He nodded, and looked me up and down as he walked past me. He sat back at his desk and keyed my name into his laptop, waited for my file to come up. I waited for the usual questions.

The eclectic skill set. Mark Brown, he said. Interesting background - computer science, then law, then detective with the NYPD, a trainer in hand-to-hand combat and outdoor survival... how do you bring all that together?

I smiled. I'd never read any files on Hoffman, but I looked at him carefully. Married (he wore a ring), played some team sport, probably football (a big build that had gone a bit soft), had a PhD, probably in social science (books authored by him on the desk next to his computer), and interacted with police and lawyers a fair bit (dress style, comfort with me and my file).

Everybody has a background, Dr. Hoffman, I said.

He raised an eyebrow at the Dr., and I pointed to his book, leaning to one side to read the title out loud: "Paramilitaries and Private Armies at the end of the 20th Century, by Bradley Hoffman." He returned to his computer screen, which meant the next question would be...

The sudden departure from the NYPD. You left the NYPD very suddenly, after making Detective, First-Grade. It seemed your career was progressing very rapidly until then.

I shrugged. I liked the work, just not the... rest of it. And now, Hoffman would realize that:

I had not applied for the job. I don't remember your file, I'm sorry. He scratched the wisps of grey and blond hair on his mostly bald head. I couldn't lie to the guy. I didn't send it I said, but then added - yet.

He looked up at me, then back to his screen. You have an interesting CV, Mr. Brown.. I assume you retired from the NYPD, and were not dismissed?

You can read the letters, I said. My file included a letter from the Chief of Detectives, who had offered me six months of paid leave, promotions, my choice of posting, if I'd stay.

I had heard the news of Shawn's shooting from the NYPD and hit the street running, first to Shawn's apartment, which had already been turned upside down by someone, his computer and files gone. Then to Walter's, which had also been cleaned out and no sign of him. While I was running around in the city trying to find Walter, Mr. and Mrs. Manley, like Maria, had tried to organize the ceremony. Mrs. Manley was composed enough to speak, Mr. Manley numb. My son was so loved, she said, that it was almost impossible to find a place big enough for all of you today. To find a place that would fit all of his friends, we had to turn to you, his friends. I knew firsthand most of the stories that she proceeded to tell, about Shawn the adventurous little boy, the outrageous teenager, and the adult crusader for justice. Even though they'd found a huge church, it was too small to hold all the people and too small to contain their anger. Mrs. Manley asked me if I wanted to speak, but sitting in the first row, my eyes locked forward, more than a thousand people behind me, I couldn't turn around. I couldn't face Shawn's friends. To them, I was not an unofficially adopted brother of the victim, but a member of the department that murdered him. That whole day, I imagined the rest of my life was going to be like the funeral, turning my face away in shame from anyone who knew him. At the end of the day I went home and quit.

While Hoffman read the letters, I picked up his book and flipped through the introduction.

‘A paramilitary force is a group of civilians organized to act in a military fashion and supplement military forces. Such forces arise owing of several factors: first, the influx of illicit capital from contraband and drug activities; second, the easy availability of arms; and third, the need nation-states have for such forces in supplementing their own armies…

‘… paramilitary forces provide services that national armies cannot but that national states require. These include illegal assassinations and massacres of political dissidents who might threaten the state, protection of traffic in arms and contraband, and other counterinsurgency activities. In these cases paramilitaries might be used for activities that are too ‘dirty’ and ‘illegal’ for national armies to perform under international attention and scrutiny… Paramilitaries are used for these activities, while national authorities deny that they are linked to the nation-state…

‘While the use of paramilitaries might be expedient, they eventually contribute to a crisis of hegemony in which the state finds itself challenged not only from the dissidents or criminals against whom the paramilitaries were used, but also from the paramilitaries themselves as they grow in size and strength and establish a political program. This can lead to 1) a situation of impunity in which the judicial and legal systems of the state break down; 2) the systematic corruption of the government by paramilitary money, threats, and violence, and 3) The loss of state legitimacy, as the state finds itself unable to compete even on the field of violence with the paramilitary forces it has created…’

I snapped the book closed and Hoffman looked up.

You left your university career to work in the private sector?

Hoffman ignored my question, countered with his own. "Even