“So you don’t have any video leading up to this point? Like the van driving in or the people who were in it?”
“No. We didn’t even know the van existed until we saw the smoke.”
Well, this was a wasted flight.
Chapter 19
I pursed my lips and Jennifer could see my frustration growing. She said, “You didn’t catch anybody moving around the van? See anything before it went up?”
Chet said, “No. These cameras can be remotely controlled, but for the most part they’re on a schedule, swinging back and forth on a set parabola so that their images overlap. Once we saw the smoke, we overrode the parabola and got what you see here.”
I saw a glint in the screen, then what looked like a four-door sedan drive off in a cloud of dust. I said, “What was that?”
Jose said, “Just someone driving on the rez.”
“It looked like it came straight out from the wash.”
“Probably did.”
Getting more flustered, I said, “Well, did you investigate it? A car driving away from a burning van?”
“No. Not our problem set. We can’t track every vehicle that drives on the rez.”
“But that vehicle might have something to do with the stolen van.”
“Yeah, it might, but we didn’t know the van was stolen until we put out the fire and fed it into the system. We didn’t see the vehicle on the footage until long after. From that point, it was no longer our problem.”
“Whose problem is it, then?”
“The reservation police. They do crime on the rez. We just monitor the border.”
“You mean you can’t do any law enforcement here?”
“Well, sure we can. We’re federal law enforcement, but it’s a little different here on the rez. The TO handles all of that.”
“TO?”
“The Tohono O’odham. It’s their jurisdiction. We monitor the border, but crime inside the rez is on them. We passed the van into the system, found out it was stolen, and turned it over to them.”
Great.
I said, “Zoom in on the best frame with the vehicle you have.”
Chet did, and I said, “Looks like a Crown Victoria. Like an old police vehicle, but it doesn’t have a license plate. You don’t think that’s suspicious?”
Jose held out his hands and said, “Hey, you need to think of the rez as a giant farm in the United States. There are plenty of farm vehicles that don’t have license plates and don’t drive on US roads, being solely used for farm chores. It’s the same way here. They’re supposed to have a plate if they head off to Tucson or something, but if it’s driving solely on the rez, that’s the TO’s problem.”
I said, “So will they know where that car is? Who was driving it?”
He looked at Chet, then back at me and said, “Honestly? No. They don’t have the resources for that, and unless that van had a dead Indian inside it, they don’t really care. A car driving away from a van stolen in Utah is not high on their priority.”
Jennifer said, “But you could track it now, right? If all those cameras overlap, you could see where it went?”
“Only if it stuck to the south. The TO goes way north, into Arizona. We only monitor a buffer zone along the border. If he headed north, we won’t have it.”
I said, “Could you check?”
He grimaced and said, “That’s not really what we do.”
