Fatal Intent - Jamie Jeffries Page 0,12

was different. For example, they pronounced ‘O’odham’ as ‘O’otham’. Alex wasn’t aware of their issues, though.

After introductions all around, Dawn again took control of the meeting, for that’s what it seemed to be. Rather than a one-on-one interview, Alex found herself in the middle of a protest-planning meeting.

“We know what we’re doing won’t have an impact for years, if ever,” Dawn explained to her. “But what is our alternative? For more than a century, our peoples, and I mean every tribe within the borders of the US, Canada and Mexico, have been promised things that never came to pass. We’ve been told our lands were ours, only to see them shrink when some business or wealthy rancher or miner needed them.

“Our tribe nearly starved when white ranchers and farmers north of us cut off our water. We’ve been marginalized, even those of us, like the Navajo, who were smart enough to negotiate sovereignty. We’re desperately poor and our cultures are disappearing, even our languages.

“So, we protest. We do it peacefully, not like in the old days, because Uncle Sam has clearly won. Thanks to free speech, we won’t be forgotten. We’ll go down fighting for our dignity.”

When she thought of it in that way, Alex had to admire the philosophy, as well as Dawn’s eloquent explanation of it. As a pragmatist, she hated the waste of effort. “Why don’t you do something besides protest?” she said. “Isn’t there something that will actually make the government sit up and take notice?”

“Sure,” said Dawn. “We could blow up something, but that would only land us in jail, and we can’t effectively communicate from there. We choose vocal but peaceful protest in the hope that people like you will call attention to it. Maybe someday, enough people will hear of the injustice we’ve been subjected to and things will change. Like they did for blacks.”

Alex hadn’t been around during the sixties, when everything went down with Martin Luther King and all, but she did know there was very little chance of a revolution starting in tiny little Casa Grande and reaching the level of Martin Luther King’s dream. However, she would do whatever she could to help, not only because they had right on their side, but for Dylan’s sake.

After her meeting with the protest group, who refused to give a name by which to identify them, she wrote a blog post about how unfair conditions were for these people. She then tied it into her main theme, which was naming the nameless human remains found in the desert in Arizona. She believed many or most of them were illegal aliens, trying to cross for a better life. Now, thanks to Wanda, she knew some of them were only illegal because they’d crossed without passports, having no birth certificates to prove citizenship, and couldn’t get back home except illegally.

Certainly it was a simplification. Hordes of people from further south were duped into crossing with bales of marijuana by cartels anxious to exploit their ignorance. Then you also had your professional smugglers, mules who traversed the O'odham lands with more dangerous drugs while authorities were busy chasing down the decoys.

There were no easy answers, but there were interesting questions to explore. That’s all Alex needed for her blog. Interesting questions. The rest would sort itself out, and in the process, maybe some of the unidentified remains would be identified and her quest would be complete.

Something drove her to do this, despite Dylan asking her to stop, despite her dad’s misgivings and those of Lt. Wells, the Sheriff’s department detective who had become a friend, and despite Rick Englebright’s disapproval. She couldn’t put it into words. She only knew she had to do it.

FIVE

Dylan read Alex’s latest blog post and shook his head. Her blog had started out as a way to help relatives of missing persons reach some closure, by publicizing cases of unidentified remains in the state records. He firmly believed it had already landed her in trouble. Last summer, they had discussed the blog within the hearing of the man who was later to attack her twice after she was rescued from her kidnapper, a corrupt sheriff’s deputy who was on a cartel payroll.

Nothing he’d said so far had any impact on her stubborn insistence on continuing the blog, and now it was becoming more and more political. He needed to talk to her about journalistic neutrality. This post, like a few others in recent months, was a passionate denunciation of how