“Yeah, it’ll work. They’ll keep his fingerprints on file until he crosses back through that border gate. And he’s not crossing back through, so he’s in their system. They just don’t know it.”
Jose came through the door, looking a little aggravated. He said, “What now?”
He took one look at my bruises and said, “Who lumped you up?”
I said, “You should see the other guy.”
He chuckled and said, “What do you need?”
I said, “I need to access your logs for the TO border crossing.” I held up a thumb drive, saying, “On this I have the biometrics of the threat I’m after. I’ve confirmed that he went through your CBP gate on TO land into Mexico. You guys have his fingerprints, and I want to know the name he’s using.”
“Your threat is a Papago Indian? Bullshit. They mule for the cartels, that’s about it.”
“Look, just run these prints into your system.”
“We don’t take prints. We scan their TO IDs. If he crossed the border using one of the walking gates, he had an ID, and if he had an ID, he’s Papago. There’s a lot of backgrounding to those things—not from us, but from the tribe. They don’t hand them out willy-nilly.”
“I was told that if someone loses an ID they can get a temporary, andthe temporary doesn’t go through a rigorous process. I was also told that if they use a temporary, you take fingerprints because the temp ID doesn’t have an RFID chip. True?”
Jose exhaled and said, “You learned a lot in a little bit of time. Yeah, that’s true. It’s rarely ever used to cross. In fact, almost never.”
“But itisused, correct?”
“Yeah, but our agreement is we delete the data. The TO doesn’t like the system, so we meet them halfway.”
“But you don’t delete them until they cross back over, right?”
“Yeah, but if they do, we have an agreement.”
“Okay, well, run this and see what you get.”
He took the thumb drive and said, “Okay, but it’s not going to tell you anything more than you already know. He crossed into Mexico.”
“I don’t know the name he’s using.”
He nodded and said, “Wait here.”
He left and I looked at Jennifer, saying, “Fingers crossed.”
A minute later, he came back, making me think he had nothing. He said, “Let’s go back to my office. This’ll take a few minutes.”
We followed him, taking up the same positions we had before, but this time, he didn’t seem inclined to talk about Charleston.
He said, “Where’d you get all this information?”
“I found the guy driving the Crown Vic.”
“And he just... willingly talked?”
“Uhh... no. We had to convince him. Speaking of which, we had a little bit of a gunfight over at Menagers Dam Village. I don’t think they’re going to complain, but just so you know.”
He leaned forward, incredulous, saying, “You had a shoot-out? And you didn’t mention that the moment you walked in?”
I held up my hands, saying, “Hey, you didn’t want to get involved, and you yourself said the police on the rez would be no help, so I went on my own.”
“You have no jurisdiction here!”
“Everyone keeps telling me that, but they still talked to me.”
