Devil Cholla: Volume Three of the Arizona Trilogy

By Gloria H. Giroux

In Tucson, Arizona, the Union Jack team joins the police and FBI to investigate the facts behind the conviction and death sentence of a supposedly innocent young man. Mystifying clues stymie their efforts, and when new murders of children and prostitutes begin to multiply, the hunt heats up.

Quint, Deliverance, Wilde, and Victor find themselves in a deadly quagmire of misdirection, secrets, and pure evil. But this time around, their teenage children are drawn into the Union Jack circle. Approaching adulthood with smarts, daring, and determination, two daughters choose vocations that relate to crime investigation, while a son takes a path into the dark recesses of the mind.

As a pair of siblings insinuate themselves into the lives of the team, their fates all hinge on the mystery. Can they put an end to the ferocious threat that challenges their future, or will this villain prove to be superior and cause their downfall? The clock ticks as the source of evil becomes clear … and shocking.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Mar 6, 2019
• ISBN: 9781532068140

Gloria H. Giroux

Gloria H. Giroux was born in North Adams, MA. Raised in Hartford, CT, she graduated from Bulkeley High School, the University of Connecticut and the Computer Processing Institute subsequently embarking on a double career of IT and writing. The author of nineteen fiction novels, Keene Retribution is homage to a special place in her life in New England. She currently lives in Arizona where she is working on her next book.

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Copyright © 2019 Gloria H. Giroux.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, names, incidents, organizations, and dialogue in this novel are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

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ISBN: 978-1-5320-6815-7 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-5320-6816-4 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-5320-6814-0 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2019902417

iUniverse rev. date:   03/05/2019

CONTENTS

Author’s Foreword

Cast Of Returning Characters

Cast Of New Characters

Cast Of Additional Characters/References

Prologue

Book One

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Book Two

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Book Three

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Epilogue

Book One

Chapter One

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AUTHOR’S FOREWORD

The concept of the death penalty has been part and parcel of civilization since one Neanderthal whacked another over the head with a club because of the theft of a piece of meat or a woman. The concept has evolved over the millennia up to this very day where it is a source of heated debate and protest from both sides of the coin.

Men and women from the lowest stratum of mankind to the highest echelons of power and education have issued arguments to defend or lambast the punishment. These opinions are often set in stone forever or perhaps change with the situation and times; nevertheless, it is a passionate debate that provokes occasion violence and is often inexplicably at odds with people’s beliefs and views on unrelated matters dealing with the justice system and civilized human values. Suggestions that conservatives approve of the death penalty versus liberals who do not is vacuous at best and cannot be strictly applied to any one value-driven group.

Today most civilized countries in the western world have abolished the death penalty (AKA, capital punishment), but after a brief hiatus in the early seventies in the United States it is now part of the judicial landscape. It has been abolished in certain states; only thirty states plus the federal government and the military still employ executions. Michigan, Wisconsin, Maine and Rhode island were progressive enough to abolish the punishment in the nineteenth century; other states followed suit and for a brief period—1972 through 1976—the Supreme Court struck down capital punishment. This was, no doubt, a relief for Charles Manson and his demented followers who had been sentenced to die the year before; their sentences were changed to life.

The methods of putting convicted criminals to death has changed over the past five hundred years. Beheading by either ax or sword was a popular method to which, no doubt, Anne Boleyn could attest. The guillotine was a favored instrument of administering justice in France and was considered a humane method since it involved a split second for death to take place; burning at the stake not so much. Boiling to death, crushing with a vise or stones, and impalement were used frequently, each method often depending on the particular crime. The Chinese enhanced the brutality of their executions by developing the Lingchi, otherwise known as the death by a thousand cuts; the condemned was tied to a stake and the executioner sliced and diced his flesh as the man slowly bled to death—thousand was not an exaggeration. This death penalty method was only outlawed in 1905.

Perhaps the most brutal method of execution was the hung-strung-and-quartered. This was most often used for treason and involved hanging the criminal to the brink of death before cutting him down and disemboweling him while still alive, tossing his organs into a fire pit. The corpse would then be cut into four pieces, each piece being placed in a separate section of the town as a warning to others who might commit the same crime.

Crucifixion, of course, was not restricted to the time period of Jesus Christ, but made its presence known during the Middle Ages as well. That time period saw particularly gruesome executions for witchcraft, murder, blasphemy, and theft, including the method called sawing. This was precisely what its name entailed—the condemned would be sawed in half horizontally. The Chinese had their own method of sawing—vertically, with the man suspended upside down with his legs spread and the saw beginning its work at his genitals and ending at his neck.

In the United States hanging was a favorite selection up to the nineteenth century (and is still on the books in some states); unfortunately, the death penalty was horrifically administered as crimes during the first half of the twentieth century through the lynching of (mainly) black Americans. Vigilante justice was considered a legitimate companion to law enforcement; unfortunately, the Ku Klux Klan took this charge as their horrific mandate. Hangings were followed by increasingly innovative methods such as execution by rifles, lethal injection, the gas chamber, and the electric chair. The infamous Gary Gilmore chose to die by firing squad in Utah, and his last words were, Let’s do it. John Wayne Gacy, the Killer Clown that murdered at least thirty-three young men, chose a more in-your-face set of last words: Kiss my ass.

The United States has the distinction of having developed lethal injection, and is one of only four countries to employ it; Vietnam, Thailand, and China are the other three.

Most criminals do not plan on going gently into that good night and many condemned inmates spend years and even decades on death row waiting for their inevitable meeting with their Maker. Lawyers haggle, trials abound, appeals are denied or approved, and the taxpaying public is on the hook for enormous amounts of money to protect the rights of the convicted. Sometimes, the convicted is exonerated, particularly in this age of DNA testing, and a travesty of justice is rectified. Sometimes, innocent men and women are executed, and that consideration is one of the lynchpins of the anti-death penalty argument. The more aggressively passionate supporters of the death penalty propose that the only thing wrong with it is that it isn’t used often enough or soon enough. It is a frequent contention that some people have no right to share the planet with decent human beings and should be eradicated with no more delay or compassion than an insect deserves when stepped on.

Arizona executed twenty-eight people by hanging in the twentieth century; now, the condemned are executed via lethal injection. Execution by lethal gas began on April 6, 1934. In 1992 Arizona voted to install lethal injection as the manner of execution. In 2005 the Supreme Court disallowed execution for any criminal who committed his or her crime if they were under the age of eighteen. Hands down, however, the great state of Texas stands head and shoulders above other states in executing its most virulent criminals; as of the beginning of 2019, Texas has executed 559 people since 1976 when the death penalty was reinstated. Virginia is a distant second with 113 executions during that time period. Arizona isn’t even close, with 37 executions, and Connecticut rests at the bottom of the barrel with one, sharing that honor with Colorado, Wyoming, and New Mexico. All told there have been 1,491 executions in this country since 1976 with only sixteen of them being women. Three were hanged; three were executed by firing squad; one hundred sixty were electrocuted; and the rest received their punishment by lethal injection or the gas chamber.

We should forgive our enemies, but not before they are hanged.

Joe Abercrombie, Before They Are Hanged

But secondly you say ‘society must exact vengeance, and society must punish.’ Wrong on both counts. Vengeance comes from the individual and punishment from God.

Victor Hugo, The Last Day of a Condemned Man

I believe that more people would be alive today if there were a death penalty.

Nancy Reagan

As one whose husband and mother-in-law have died the victims of murder and assassination, I stand firmly and unequivocally opposed to the death penalty for those convicted of capital offenses … An evil deed is not redeemed by an evil deed of retaliation.

Coretta Scott King

You look at the crime and you look at the criminal. If it’s a dope dealer who guns down an undercover narcotics officer, then he gets the gas. If it’s a drifter who rapes a three-year-old girl, drowns her by holding her little head in a mudhole, then throws her body off a bridge, then you take his life and thank god he’s gone. If it’s an escaped convict who breaks into a farmhouse late at night and beats and tortures an elderly couple before burning them with their house, then you strap him in a chair, hook up a few wires, pray for his soul, and pull the switch. And if it’s two dopeheads who gang-rape a ten-year-old girl and kick her with pointed-toe cowboy boots until her jaws break, then you happily, merrily, thankfully, gleefully lock them in a gas chamber and listen to them squeal. It’s very simple. Their crimes were barbaric. Death is too good for them, much too good.

John Grisham, A Time to Kill

For centuries the death penalty, often accompanied by barbarous refinements, has been trying to hold crime in check; yet crime persists. Why? Because the instincts that are warring in man are not, as the law claims, constant forces in a state of equilibrium.

Albert Camus

Let’s get our thoughts in order concerning the death sentence. Everybody dies. Everybody is condemned to death from the day of his or her birth. Thus, executing a criminal isn’t doing anything to him that won’t happen anyway.

Charley Ross

Belief in and support of the death penalty is a very personal matter and this belief is driven by a wide variety of factors that are unique to every individual.

Do you believe in capital punishment? Vigilantism? Why, or why not?

Do I believe in capital punishment? I think the contents of the story make that answer abundantly clear.

Thank you to all of my dedicated readers. I don’t just write for myself, but for you as well.

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Glo Giroux, Palace of Versailles, France, September 2018

CAST OF RETURNING CHARACTERS

CAST OF NEW CHARACTERS

CAST OF ADDITIONAL CHARACTERS/REFERENCES

PROLOGUE

May 22, 1924, Wolf Lake, Hammond, Indiana

Wolf Lake straddled the border between two Midwest states, Illinois and Indiana. It was connected to Lake Michigan through both a canal and its northern wetlands. Although technically documented as belonging to Hammond County, Indiana, it was also unofficially claimed by the population residing in the Hegewisch section of South Chicago. Less than a thousand acres in size, it had a diverse ecological system replete with many varieties of flora and fauna that thrived despite the proximity to Chicago’s industrial areas and their chemical pollutants. People came from both states and beyond to fish its waters, which held lake sturgeon and banded killifish. The lake also provided shelter for endangered bird species such as the black-crowned night heron. Trumpeter and tundra swans abounded in three seasons although they migrated to the arctic in the summer to nest.

No one could pin down the origin of the lake’s name, but it was rumored that Abraham Lincoln’s wife, Mary Todd, nearly drowned there. The lake’s second claim to notoriety was defined on the morning of May 22, 1924.

May was on the cusp of turning spring into summer, and as such had a mild climate during the latter part of the month. The average temperature hovered around the low- to mid-sixties during the afternoon, with slightly cooler temperatures in the morning and evening. Morning walks near Wolf Lake were invigorating, but on this morning twenty-four-year-old Tony Minke was in a hurry and didn’t slow down to enjoy the brisk weather. When he started his walk near the northern part of the lake he could never have imagined that his broken wristwatch would precipitate a sequence of events that would go down in the true-crime history books.

Tony lived nearby in Roby, Indiana, and on the night of May 21st his watch stopped. He was annoyed that he’d have to get it fixed; Tony was a recent immigrant from Poland and spoke little English, and as a pump man at the American Maize Company he really didn’t have the money to spare. However, he needed that watch running so before he headed off to his night shift he dropped the watch off at a jeweler’s. Early the next morning, Thursday, he left the plant at the end of his shift and took off on a walk to the jeweler’s shop to pick up his timepiece. He caught a glimpse of something as he trudged through a swampy area. He stopped. He was torn between checking out the object or finishing his original mission, but curiosity got the better of him and he walked over to the place that had caught his attention. It was there in a culvert beside the Pennsylvania Railroad track that he stopped dead in his tracks as he gasped and stared in disbelief at the body of a young boy.

Tony backed away from the horrific discovery and ran like a bat out of hell to get help. He spied four railway workers and flagged them down, and the five men raced back to help pull the body out of the culvert. The child was naked, his face disfigured to the point of being unidentifiable by something corrosive, as were his genitals. Tony sped off again and called the police at the East Side station. The Indiana police gathered up the body and a few items they’d found around the area, including a pair of horn-rimmed eyeglasses and a sock and transferred all of them to the morgue. The coroner described the victim as an unidentified boy. No one had made the connection between the boy in the culvert and the missing boy in nearby Chicago. Yet.

Jacob Franks was a retired industrialist. Once the president of the Rockford Watch Company ninety miles north of Chicago, he now spent his days in an elegant, immense, two-story home in the Kenwood section of the Windy City at the corner of Ellis and 51st Streets—address 5052 Ellis Street—with his wife, Flora, and their three children, daughter Josephine, son Jacob, and middle child, son Robert, known to all as Bobby. Bobby was four months shy of his fifteenth birthday. Kenwood was an elite section that attracted quite a number of wealthy Jews, and the Franks were a very prominent family.

Bobby was thin and small, but he was surprisingly athletic and on that fateful day, May 21st, he was acting as umpire at a baseball game for his classmates at the private Harvard School a few blocks north of his home. The game ended after 5 PM and Bobby started walking the three blocks south to his house.

He never made it home.

His parents became more and more worried as the hours passed, and at 9 PM Jacob Franks called a close friend and they went back to the school to search. While they were gone, Mrs. Franks received a devastating phone call that ended with her fainting.

This is Mr. Johnson. Of course you know by this time that your boy has been kidnapped. We have him and you need not worry; he is safe. But don’t try to trace this call or to find me. We must have money. We will let you know tomorrow what we want. We are kidnappers and we mean business. If you refuse us what we want or try to report us to the police we will kill the boy. Goodbye.

The Franks and their friend, Samuel Etteson, discussed the matter well into the wee hours of the night and at 2 AM they called in the police. They begged them to hold off on any public notification until the morning so as not to jeopardize Bobby’s life, per the kidnappers’ demands.

It was around the exact same time that Tony Minke discovered the unknown boy’s body that the Franks received a typed letter addressed to Mr. Franks; the envelope was handwritten.

Clearly, the letter writer was an educated man based on the textual grammar and syntax, and that gave the Franks some comfort in believing that the man—or men—were rational and would keep up their end of the bargain if the Franks kept theirs. They waited by the phone for further instructions, not knowing that Bobby was that unidentified boy in the Indiana culvert. News of that body’s discovery made its way to police lieutenant Welles, who was heading the kidnapping investigation. He called Franks’ brother-in-law, Edwin Gresham, to go to the Indiana morgue to identify the body. He did and relayed the horrific news to Bobby’s parents.

By morning the kidnapping morphed into a murder investigation and the newspapers in and around Chicago blasted the public with stories of the deed and its aftermath.

The Chicago Daily News employed large capital letters to blast out, KILL BOY KIDNAPED FOR RANSOM.

The Chicago Daily Tribune also employed large capital letters to add to the salaciousness of the event by declaring, KIDNAP RICH BOY; KILL HIM. A day later their headline read, KIDNAPED BOY DIED FIGHTING.

The Portsmouth Daily Times from nearby Scioto County, Ohio, didn’t bother with capitalization but had a much longer headline— Chicago Officials Baffled by Kidnapping and Murder of Millionaire’s Son.

Cities far from Chicago also reported the crime and its progress; The Day of New London, Connecticut, had its own headline: Rich Man’s Son Murder Victim.

People were entranced trying to root out who might have been responsible for such a reprehensible crime. The police interviewed dozens of friends and teachers of the boy, particularly teacher Walter Wilson, who had taken Bobby and his brother, Jacob Jr., to Dolton’s Riverview Park; due to a missed train the math teacher hadn’t returned the boys until 1 AM.

The major break in the case came when Jacob Franks was shown the eyeglasses found near his son’s body and he confirmed that Bobby had had perfect vision and the eyeglasses weren’t his. The immediate assumption—yet to be proved—was that the eyeglasses might belong to the kidnapper. Eyeglasses were not unusual in 1924, but this particular pair had specialized hinges, and upon intense investigation the police learned that only three pairs of these Almer Coe & Company eyeglasses with such hinges had been sold in the Chicago area. Interestingly enough, one of those three pairs belonged to a friend of the boy’s second cousin, Richard Loeb. The friend, Nathan Leopold, lived just around the block from the Franks house.

Richard Albert Loeb (nicknamed Dickie) and Nathan Freudenthal Leopold Jr. (nicknamed Babe) were two teenage scions of wealthy Jewish families. Leopold was the elder by seven months, born on November 19, 1904; Loeb was born on June 11, 1905. Both were particularly intelligent, and under the known evaluations of that time period Leopold scored a stunning 210 IQ. He declared to anyone who would listen that he had spoken his first words at four months. He graduated college early, garnering a Bachelor’s degree from the University of Michigan with Phi Beta Kappa honors; he planned on matriculating at Harvard Law School in the fall. He spoke five languages and had achieved some national recognition as an ornithologist. His dark, piercing eyes were set under something of a unibrow, but he was still considered a handsome young man of the times.

So was Loeb, who had a movie-star profile of which Rudolph Valentino would be jealous and nearly as fine a résumé of life as his friend. His parents had an unusual marriage for those times; his father was Jewish, and his mother was a Catholic who reluctantly allowed her sons to be brought up in their father’s faith. Although he skipped several grades in school and graduated the University of Michigan at seventeen, teachers and friends alike thought him generally unmotivated and far too focused on pulp fiction and crime. He and Leopold were casual friends throughout their childhood, but their eventual iron-tight bond developed beginning in 1920 when they developed a deep mutual interest in crime, and particularly how it related to the infamous German philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche. The linchpin of that conjoined interest was Nietzsche’s concept of the superman, or Übermensch, a human being above the law, a man for whom laws and expectations of morality and actions expected of other people did not apply to him.

Leopold read and reread both Nietzsche and Dostoevsky, another author who had unusual and stringent views on the nature of man. One of Nietzsche’s writings, The Antichrist, struck a chord in both young men: The problem I thus pose is not what shall succeed mankind in the sequence of living beings … but what type of man shall be bred, shall be willed, for being higher in value … What is good? Everything that heightens the feeling of power in man, the will to power, power itself …

They pored over Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, homing in on the passages that supported their contention of being superior beings as proposed by the protagonist, Raskolnikov: The heart of the matter is that … all people are divisible into ‘ordinary’ and ‘extraordinary.’ The ordinary must live obediently and have no right to transgress the law. The extraordinary … have the right to commit all kinds of crimes and to transgress the law in all kinds of ways, for the simple reason that they are extraordinary. Leopold boldly underlined that last sentence.

Leopold believed himself to be a superior being above the laws of man, and he easily convinced Loeb of this belief. They set out to prove their godlike superiority by committing a series of small crimes including petty theft, arson, and vandalism. At one point they broke into a college fraternity house and stole a camera and a typewriter. They were disappointed in the law enforcement responses and needed more satisfactory forays into crime, although they never considered punishment part of that option. They were too smart to get caught.

Based on their investigation the police asked Leopold for a meeting, at which they presented the eyeglasses. Leopold blithely told them that they had undoubtedly dropped out of his pocket on one of his bird-watching forays, and he made a point of his qualifications as an ornithologist. Leopold and Loeb were called in for formal questioning on May 29th, eight days after the kidnapping and murder. They explained their whereabouts that night, stating that they’d picked up two girls in Leopold’s car for a good time. That alibi was quickly squashed when the Leopolds’ chauffeur told them that he’d been working on the car that night and it hadn’t left the premises.

The dominoes fell quickly after that and coalesced on May 31st when the confessions appeared like fireworks in the night sky. Leopold accused Loeb of devising the murder and Loeb tried to pin the meat of the matter on Leopold. As the details of the kidnapping, murder, and ransom demands unfolded, the police became more and more sickened by these two privileged, rich scions of wealth and society. The last sickening straw was Leopold’s assertion that the event was simply an intellectual exercise to prove the validity of the Übermensch theory. Leopold later told his lawyer that, The killing was an experiment. It is just as easy to justify such a death as it is to justify an entomologist killing a beetle on a pin.

The public was enraged. They demanded death for the depraved, soulless killers, and most people believed and hoped that the final denouement of the matter would indeed be death by hanging. That probability found itself in jeopardy when the Loeb family engaged Clarence Darrow as Richard Loeb’s lawyer. That choice changed the history of the death penalty in the United States.

Clarence Darrow was born to be a lawyer, although that wasn’t immediately obvious when he was born on April 18, 1857 in Kinsman, Ohio. He was admitted to the Ohio bar in 1878. Over the next decade he handled small legal matters, married, became a father to one son, and then moved his young family to Chicago for the better professional and social opportunities that city offered. Over the years he became embroiled in notable legal matters such as defending Eugene V. Debs, the leader of the American Railway Union who was prosecuted for leading the Pullman strike of 1894. He also unsuccessfully argued against the death penalty in the sentencing phase for Patrick Eugene Prendergast, who had murdered Chicago mayor Carter Harrison Sr. Darrow failed in his attempt to save Prendergast’s life—the man was hanged— but that eventually proved to be Darrow’s only failure to save a condemned man’s life.

Darrow spent his life railing against the death penalty. He considered it cruel and unusual punishment and totally unworthy of belonging in a society that was supposedly built on humanitarian values. His keen mind and his silver-tongued eloquence swayed many a judge and juror. His physical appearance was less than svelte and professional—he often appeared in rumpled clothing and presented himself as somewhat of a country bumpkin, although that affectation was anything but accurate. His reputation and accomplishments made him a natural choice for lead counsel for the notorious teenage murderers of an innocent young boy. The country was calling for their blood; he was determined to save them, not because he believed them innocent or misunderstood, but because that case would raise the visibility level of the anti-death penalty belief he held so true.

And so began what the Chicago newspapers dubbed, The Trial of the Century. The shock of the crime and the identities of the killers was nothing compared to the stunning trial strategy of Clarence Darrow—he pleaded his clients guilty. This was a daring tactic used to circumvent the whims of a revenge-thirsty jury, throwing the ultimate fate of the killers to the judge and the judge alone. The trial had turned into a lengthy sentencing hearing, with Darrow presenting expert after expert to declare the defendants mentally ill. Darrow presented the belief that the choice between right and wrong was trumped by a miasma of internal and external influences including physical and environmental factors. And so many of these types of influences contributed to the boys growing to manhood without emotions, without empathy, leading them to commit an unimaginable crime.

Reporters had a field day with the strategy and routinely lambasted Darrow as a greedy opportunist—the rumor was that the families were paying him the unimaginable sum of $1,000,000. There was shock inside the courtroom as well as from the hangers-on outside when Darrow’s summation lasted twelve long hours. Twelve.

The summation was replete with eloquence in both words and presentation. Darrow had his audience mesmerized; he liked them like that. His words raged through the courtroom and there was no one present who did not have certain statements burned into their minds forever, like an iron brand burns its mark on the hide of a steer. His comments ranged from the bizarre to the expected to the unanticipated. He talked about watermelons, and killing spiders, and hearts calloused by war. There was rarely a sound as people leaned forward with rapt attention and focused on every single word he said, every nuance of his performance.

This is a senseless, useless, purposeless, motiveless act of two boys. Now, let me see if I can prove it. There was not a particle of hate, there was not a grain of malice, there was no opportunity to be cruel except as death is cruel—and death is cruel. There was absolutely no purpose in it all, no reason in it all, and no motive in it all.

Is Dickey Loeb to blame because out of the infinite forces that conspired to form him, the infinite forces that were at work producing him ages before he was born, that because out of these infinite combinations he was born without it? If he is, then there should be a new definition for justice. Is he to blame for what he did not have and never had? Is he to blame that his machine is imperfect? Who is to blame? I do not know. I have never in my life been interested so much in fixing blame as I have in relieving people from blame. I am not wise enough to fix it. I know that somewhere in the past that entered into him something missed. It may be defective nerves. It may be a defective heart or liver. It may be defective endocrine glands. I know it is something. I know that nothing happens in this world without a cause.

I have heard in the last six weeks nothing but the cry for blood.

I have heard from the office of the State’s Attorney only ugly hate.

I have heard precedents quoted which would be a disgrace to a savage race.

I know your Honor stands between the future and the past. I know the future is with me, and what I stand for here; not merely for the lives of these two unfortunate lads, but for all boys and all girls; for all of the young, and as far as possible, for all of the old. I am pleading for life, understanding, charity, kindness, and the infinite mercy that considers all. I am pleading that we overcome cruelty with kindness and hatred with love. I know the future is on my side. Your Honor stands between the past and the future. You may hang these boys; you may hang them by the neck until they are dead. But in doing it you will turn your face toward the past. In doing it you are making it harder for every other boy who in ignorance and darkness must grope his way through the mazes which only childhood knows. In doing it you will make it harder for unborn children. You may save them and make it easier for every child that some time may stand where these boys stand. You will make it easier for every human being with an aspiration and a vision and a hope and a fate. I am pleading for the future; I am pleading for a time when hatred and cruelty will not control the hearts of men. When we can learn by reason and judgement and understanding and faith that all life is worth saving, and that mercy is the highest attribute of man.

… I (hope that I) have done something to help human understanding, to temper justice with mercy, to overcome hate with love. I was reading last night of the aspiration of the old Persian poet, Omar Khayyam. It appealed to me as the highest that I can vision. I wish it was in my heart, and I wish it was in the hearts of all:

"So I be written in the Book of Love

I do not care about that Book above.

Erase my name or write it as you will,

So I be written in the book of Love."

One could hear a pin drop when that last word, love, was spoken by the hypnotic Clarence Darrow.

Darrow’s audacious strategy worked—Judge John R. Caverly stunned the courtroom by not sentencing the killers to be hanged, but to be confined to prison for the rest of their lives plus ninety-nine years. As they were hauled off first to Joliet Prison and then Statesville Penitentiary, neither the crime, the trial, nor Darrow’s articulate, progressive speech were far from the minds of the public.

In 1929 playwright Patrick Hamilton wrote and produced the play Rope, based on the crime; nearly twenty years later Alfred Hitchcock would make that story into one of his most famous films. In 1956 author Meyer Levin wrote the book Compulsion, also based on the crime, and that was made into a film in 1959 with a riveting Orson Welles playing Darrow. Two more fictionalized novels were released in 1957—Nothing but the Night by James Yaffe and Little Brother Fate by Mary-Carter Roberts. John Logan’s 1988 play Never the Sinner homed in on a fictionalized exploration of explicit homosexual bonds between the two protagonists; Tom Kalin’s 1992 film Swoon addressed those same supposed aspects of the killers’ relationship.

Darrow’s indictment of the death penalty was one of the foundations for the future arguments against the punishment, even up to the end of the twentieth century where vengeance all too often trumped compassion and mercy; perhaps, in some cases, as it should have.

BOOK ONE

Few western wonders are more inspiring than the beauties of an Arizona moonlit landscape; the silvered mountains in the distance, the strange lights and shadows upon hog back and arroyo, and the grotesque details of the stiff, yet beautiful cacti form a picture at once enchanting and inspiring; as though one were catching for the first time a glimpse of some dead and forgotten world, so different is it from the aspect of any other spot upon our earth.

Edgar Rice Burroughs, A Princess of Mars, 1917

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Devil Cholla, Carefree, Arizona

CHAPTER ONE

April 19, 1995, Mount Lemmon, Tucson, Arizona

The sheer rock face of the cliff on Mount Lemmon spanned nearly three hundred yards from the nearly even, flat ridge that capped the dangerous cliff, down to the gently sloping floor of the gorge. The immediate landscape at the foot of the drop was cluttered with scrub brush and cacti and large clusters of sharp rocks, which angled up like huge, deadly spikes; more than one careless or unfortunate climber had met his fate impaled on the vicious projections. Only the most well-trained and savvy adventurer had any business attempting either a climb or a rappel down. Two or three men or women per year made the effort; even fewer were able to scale or descend the cliff for the full measure of its impressive height. Nevertheless, some amateurs succeeded with sheer force of will and determination.

Storm Dane-Quintana tightened the cinches on her harness as she rested her expensive hiking boots flush against a point on the sheer rock down about a hundred yards from her starting point at the top. The smooth, unforgiving surface was more intimidating than she had thought when she evaluated this latest goal in her carefully designed personal regimen. She had promised herself that she would succeed in conquering this great challenge by her sixteenth birthday, but she was already a year behind that goal. She loathed failure, particularly her own. Lithe and athletic at five-foot-eight she prided herself on her physical strength and resiliency and refused to be constrained by social expectations of what a seventeen-year-old should be and do.

She leaned back slightly and looked up towards the edge of the cliff. The imposing, sheer width of the rock loomed over her but didn’t block out the bright sun due to the early hour. The warm sunlight felt good on her face. Her long reddish, chestnut-brown hair was clasped back tightly with a silver and pearl barrette, but she could feel a slight trickle of sweat run down the back of her neck, and on both sides of her expressive face even though her head was covered with an Arizona Cardinals cap. She glanced to her right and saw that her younger brother had just dropped down to her level and was grinning at her. Wyatt was athletic from the get-go and had been badgering her for six months to take him along (As an observer—I swear!), and she had the last three times on smaller rappels, teaching him about harnesses, dropping, emergency procedures, and other tidbits that would protect him from falling to your death and pissing off Mom and Dad.

Stop there and take a drink of water, she ordered him. Wyatt nodded and took a deep swig from his canteen as his sister did the same. Ready? she asked. He nodded. Three more drops and we stop again. She had taken extra precautions with her brother and had a tether linking them together.

She blew out a deep breath and tensed her strong, lean arms and legs and began rappelling down the next section of cliff. She let the slack out exactly the same length each time she dropped and hit, dropped and hit, and paused again thirty yards farther down. They both sipped and continued back down. During the next drop her right foot didn’t hit quite right, and she slipped and hit the rock face awkwardly, banging her right knee. She groaned and paused and studied the rock carefully to see if any difference in texture might have caused her gaff. Nothing about the rock was different; she had simply made an awkward, inappropriate move that could have caused her more damage had she not been as agile as she usually was. She cursed herself silently, angry at her stupid mistake. Her ears burned red at her brother’s laugh; the little rat was as sure-footed as a mountain goat and even though this was his first try he was doing remarkably well, better than she had at his age. She had taken him on three small rappels to verify his nimbleness and commitment and was satisfied that he could attempt this rappel without serious injury. She threw a deadly scowl at the boy, who laughed even harder.

She tightened her grip on the tether and kept going, a little more slowly.

Drop and hit, drop and hit. She gave a quick glance down and saw that they had about thirty yards to go. Not too bad. They’d be done before by ten and be back at home in time to help their siblings prepare for their mother’s fortieth birthday celebration.

She looked down carefully and raised her eyebrows over her mismatched green and blue eyes as she spotted the small forms of her parents standing a quarter mile away from the base.

Deliverance and Quint stared up at the tiny figures on the rock face, which grew larger moment by moment as their children descended the sheer rock. They were standing together with binoculars aimed towards the siblings. Storm made a hand signal to Wyatt and they continued their descent.

Storm hit a flat ledge two yards from the ground and her brother descended to that same point seconds later. One more drop and she expelled an involuntary whoosh of breath as her feet hit solidly, and she realized that she had accomplished her goal. Wyatt joined her on safe, solid ground and grinned widely. They unfastened their harnesses and freed themselves from the confining apparatuses. She let her tether dangle as she turned around and walked over to her brother, helping him with one stubborn clip. She saw a very slight flicker of sun glinting off her parents’ binoculars. She smiled to herself, knowing that they were undoubtedly watching their kids’ dangerous progress with tense minds and hearts. They were far too overprotective of their various offspring, but in truth, she never minded, especially considering her family’s history.

As she reached her brother she inclined her head ever so slightly and spoke in amusement. Our parents are out there watching, she said casually as she checked his pulse rate.

Yup, Wyatt said, sighing. I saw a few glints myself. They’re predictable, aren’t they? Endearing, but predictable. He grinned saucily. Should we wave to them? Wyatt had his mother’s luminescent amber eyes and dark red hair that their father said came from his Irish mother, Aislinn Ryan. Where he got the cleft chin was anyone’s guess considering his diverse ethnic ancestors—English, Romanian, Mexican, and Irish.

Why not? The siblings turned towards the glints and jumped and waved wildly and hooted loudly.

They saw us, Quint sighed as he lowered his binoculars and gave his wife an appropriately guilty look.

Of course they saw us, Deliverance replied in exasperation as she lowered her own device and raised an eyebrow at her husband. You aren’t exactly the paragon of discretion. How could they possibly miss us?

I was simply concerned for their safety. That cliff is one of the most dangerous in the area. You saw how she slipped and banged her leg into the rock. She could have lost her grip on the tether and wound up banging some more dangerous portion of her body against the cliff. I know we gave them permission to do this damn thing, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to kick my feet up on the recliner and watch soap operas while my kids are out there defying death.

Our daughter is nearly a grown woman. She’s seventeen with the mind of a thirty-year-old. And you know she’s careful, methodical, and not given to unconsidered actions in any part of her life. We can’t protect her from everything. We have to allow her the freedom to choose her own pursuits, however they may give us heart flutters or sleepless nights. And, she would die rather than let anything happen to Wyatt—you saw that she had a double tether and made him wear a helmet and padding so that he looks like the Michelin Man. That kid ever fell he’d bounce into New Mexico.

I know. You’re right, as usual, Quint responded in a semi-annoyed tone as he sighed heavily and started walking back down the path where they’d parked their 1994 Ford Explorer. They both turned as they heard yelling from behind them. Storm and Wyatt were running towards them carrying their harnesses. A minute later the brother and sister collapsed at their parents’ feet, laughing.

What’s so funny? Deliverance asked as she fixed her face into a mock scowl.

You guys, Wyatt crowed. We’re not babies.

You’re nine years old, little boy, his father intoned seriously. And point of fact, we’ll be your parents and worry when you’re fifty. So—I suppose you want us to drive you back up to the cliff so you can get to your car without too much effort?

That’s the plan, man, Storm laughed.

Five dollars, Deliverance stated.

Five friggin’ bucks, Wyatt exclaimed, then when he saw the disapprovingly looks on his parents’ face he mumbled, Sorry.

It just went up to six, his mother said. And it’s coming out of your allowance.

Suck it up, Grasshopper, Storm said. Ain’t no way we’re in shape to hike back up. She looked at her mother and stuck her hand out. It’s a deal.

As Deliverance took Storm’s hand she elaborated. Each.

The f—, Storm started to say then cut off her favorite curse word and nodded. Okay, deal.

I thought so, Deliverance said, nodding in satisfaction. Follow us to the car.

Storm whispered loudly to Wyatt, Mom’s been particularly crabby ever since this birthday sneaked up on her. Old people—jeez. The parents refused to turn around so the kids could see their wide grins.

The four Dane-Quintanas reached the car and the kids parked themselves in the cramped back seat of the Explorer. Quint slid into the driver’s seat and before Deliverance got in she reached into a small Igloo cooler and took out two ice cold cans of Coke. She handed them to her kids who popped them open and drank the sweet cola down without taking a breath.

Quint jackrabbited and pushed the Explorer hard through rough terrain around the base of the cliff and farther afield as he reached a pothole-ridden offshoot road that they climbed to get to the Cougar parked above the starting point of the rappel. Quint smiled as he looked at the 1972 Cougar that he’d had since 1978. Wilde had bought the car when he and Deliverance sprang Quint from jail in San Francisco. Quint just loved that car and despite its age he kept it in tiptop condition all these years and bequeathed it to Storm on her sixteenth birthday. He still had his ’83 Dodge 400 convertible, but years ago they had traded in Deliverance’s Plymouth station wagon for this car. They’d had to build a fourth garage bay to hold the fire-engine red 1990 Mitsubishi Mirage that the twins, Aislinn and Alex, shared grudgingly.

He stopped the Explorer and Storm and Wyatt got out and began stuffing their gear in the trunk. Storm turned to her father and said, We’ll follow you home.

Tailgate me like the last time and you lose the Cougar for a month, Quint warned.

Storm froze and saluted pertly. Yes, sir.

She gets her irreverence from you, Quint accused his wife who just sat there with a cat-that-ate-the-canary smirk on her heart-shaped face. He shoved the gear into low and made a U-Turn, satisfied that Storm was following him at a safe distance. He picked up speed once he reached level ground and whisked the Explorer towards the route that would take them to Sabino Canyon Road. Once they hit the road it was a quick trip down until they came to the turn to their home on Fire Water Lane.

Quint hit the garage door remote and drove smoothly into the bay, followed by his daughter, who parked her car next to his. The Dodge was in the singular third bay, and he could see that Alex had washed and waxed it that morning. The Mitsubishi was also likely newly washed and sitting in the fourth bay. Aislinn rarely lifted a finger to clean their cars, but Alex was meticulous and consistent.

The kids ran into the house, hungry for a bite to eat. Quint and Deliverance followed and entered the kitchen, which was empty. They could hear the TV playing loudly from the family room. Quint grabbed an orange juice and followed his wife into the room where his kids, Tucker, and four-year-old Brennan were sitting at the edge of their seats, staring at the TV. Quint and Deliverance stood behind the couch and watched the special report on CBS. High camera angles of a decimated building flashed as some reporter summarized what was happening.

Where is that? Quint asked, stunned.

Alex looked up at his father. Oklahoma City. Someone bombed the federal building about twenty minutes ago. Half the building is gone. They don’t know who did it or how many are dead, but they think hundreds.

Dear God, Deliverance whispered in stunned disbelief. She looked at her husband. "It’s two years to the day that the Branch Davidians went up in flames in Waco. Judie Sutphin had an article about that this morning in the Sentinel. She noticed that Tucker was as white as a sheet. Alex, take Brennan into the kitchen, please."

Alex nodded and extracted the boy from Tucker’s arms and hurried away.

Deliverance sat next to Tucker. Tuck—what is it? What’s wrong?

Tucker looked at her, absolute fear spread all over his face. Iris … Iris was in Dallas for a conference. She … she called me last night and said she was flying to Oklahoma City at 6 AM for a side meeting with the ATF. He turned and stared at the shocking images on the screen. He spoke the words they already knew.

The ATF offices are in that building.

The north side of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building was gone. The entire façade of the nine-story building was missing, revealing the crumbled, devastated guts of what had been floors and offices. The blast created a thirty-foot-wide, eight-foot-deep crater on the NW 5th Street side of what was now two-thirds of a building. The blast could be heard and felt over fifty miles away, registering as 3.0 on the Richter Scale. The survivors and passersby and first responders didn’t know how many were killed or injured, or how many buildings in the surrounding area had been damaged. For the initial hour after the detonation the area was sheer chaos full of smoke and fire and rubble and shattered glass and dead and injured bodies and never-ending screaming. Even in the early stages of investigation it became clear that this was the worst terrorist incident to ever hit the United States.

Iris and her boss, Nick Lisbon, had parked their rented SUV on the northeast side of the federal building. Their ATF contact had delayed the meeting to 9:00 AM, giving them time for a carbohydrate-drenched breakfast at IHOP. They stuffed themselves with buttermilk pancakes then headed off to their meeting, finding that traffic around the area was heavier than expected. The lot was full, so Lisbon pulled the car over to N. Harvey Avenue, squeezing between a blue Ford with an impressive dent on the driver’s door and a white Subaru. Iris checked her watch and frowned; 9:01 AM. They were late, and neither of them liked being anything but perfectly punctual. As they walked fast towards the building Iris saw that traffic was tightening up, and business in the capital city was in progress. She noticed several delivery trucks and a large Ryder truck parked in front of the building. She lifted her hand to remove her sunglasses—

—And then the world exploded and the only memory she had of the next few seconds was of being lifted off her feet and slammed back against a car before everything went totally black.

She had no idea how long she was unconscious. She groaned and tried to move but every muscle in her body felt shredded. She raised her shaking hand and touched her face, confused about the warm, viscous liquid that seemed to be covering it. She opened one eye and tried to focus, and after a few seconds Nick Lisbon’s slashed and bloody face came into view. His lip was split and his mouth was moving, but she couldn’t hear what he was saying. She couldn’t hear anything and only absorbed snapshots of what was going on above and around her. She tried unsuccessfully to push herself off the ground but fell back twice. She let out a cry the second time when she banged her left arm against the car, and it took her a moment to register that her forearm was broken.

She felt Lisbon’s arm around her waist as he struggled to support her. She could see that his right arm was dangling by his side and his coat sleeve was shredded and bloody, like his face. His mouth was still moving, and a slight buzz began in her ears as she leaned back against the car and scanned the stunning scene in front of her.

Wha? Wha? she babbled, trying to focus. She reached up and touched her face and cringed as she encountered something sharp. Instinctively she pulled whatever it was out of her cheek, then stared at the sharp shard of glass that had partially embedded itself in her face. She touched her head and quickly pulled her hand away as she felt dozens of glass shards entwined in her unruly blonde hair. She grasped Lisbon’s arm to steady herself as she stared at the devastation.

The building towards which they had been walking was ripped apart, the entire northern face of the building simply gone. Shattered glass covered the streets and cars as though it had poured down from the heavens in a rain that Noah himself would have feared. Even though her brain wasn’t quite working to its maximum power, Iris knew that whatever this was it had come from Hell. She pushed herself away from the car and tried to rush towards the building, but Lisbon held her back. A bit of her hearing was returning as she struggled to understand what he was saying.

… can’t … EMTs will … need hospital … we can’t … bomb … Lisbon hoped she could understand some of what he was saying. He knew enough to know that both of them had to get to a hospital, that both of them had broken limbs and deep cuts that were bleeding like hell. Somewhere in the back of his mind he knew he had to call his wife and she had to call her husband because if this horror wasn’t already on a TV screen it would be in minutes. He desperately felt around his belt area for his IBM Simon, but the cellular phone was no longer attached. He checked Iris’s belt as he tried to keep her upright with