DO

      NOT

      GO

      ON

      BRYAN FURUNESS

      Executive Editor: Diane Goettel

      Cover design: Andrea Boucher

      Book design: Amy Freels

      Copyright © Bryan Furuness 2019

      ISBN: 978-1-62557-010-9

      All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher: [email protected]

      Published 2019 by Black Lawrence Press.

      Printed in the United States.

      For Ana

      From the written statement of D.W. Boxelder:

      ADVANCE LETTER

      Sometimes people ask me if I’m jaded, or if I’ve stopped caring about our witnesses, and I can honestly say no. Apathy is not an issue. After thirteen years with WITSEC, I actively hate the witnesses. They’re hustlers and leeches, always looking for an angle on me and the Program and the American taxpayer. If you had this job, Madame Inspector, you’d hate these bastards, too.

      Then along comes a case like the one in question, and everything feels different. Not only because this case would make or break my career, but because of the family involved. Because of Ana.

      You already know the skeletal facts of the case, Madame. Which key players ended up dead or gone. How, as the Director-designate of WITSEC, I was responsible for the witness. And how, even though that witness flaked out of the Program, scuttling the case before it could come to trial, I was still confirmed as the permanent Director.

      I can’t blame you for ordering an investigation; I know how curious these facts must look out of context. But don’t confuse facts with truth. Facts, alone, are lies of omission.

      I’m not going to dispute your facts. I will put them in context to reveal the truth of the case. I will not, however, grant your request for an interview.

      Before you take a notion that I’m not cooperating fully with your investigation, take a closer look at Department Administrative Order (DAO) 207- 10, section 6, and Department Organization Order (DOO) 10-10, section 4, which you so thoroughly referenced in your summons. Note the provision for a target of an investigation to “furnish sworn oral or subscribed statements.” This is my statement, so help me God. What’s more, if the courier has done his job, this letter has reached you before our Friday appointment, which you may now consider canceled.

      I understand you’ve already heard one version of the story from Deputy Marshal Peter Crews. Allow me to be blunt, Madame: Pete doesn’t know shit. In the Program, information is distributed on a need-to-know basis, and a low-level operative like Pete didn’t need to know much to do his job, which was to keep the Easterday family safe and on track for the trial. Basically, the job of a sheepdog. Which he failed to do.

      Some might suggest that if the Department of Justice was truly interested in holding individuals accountable for blowing cases, Pete would be the one under investigation right now. I’m not naïve enough to make that suggestion. I understand this town, Madame. I understand you’re hunting big game. You want the chief’s head on your pike. And I suppose I can’t blame you for working with Pete to make that happen. After all, that’s my signature move: Flip an underling on his boss. Live by the sword, die by the sword, right?

      Only I’m not going to fall on this particular sword.

      If you’ve done your homework, Madame, you’ll know that I spent a couple years at seminary before defecting to law school. But do you know my favorite Proverb? Truthful lips endure forever, but a lying tongue lasts only a moment. That’s the advice I give witnesses when I tell them to spill it all, confess everything, even the stories that incriminate them—these are precisely the stories that make a witness credible, judges and juries tell us—and now I’m going to follow my own counsel, trusting it will deliver me through this investigation.

      Unlike Pete, I know all, and I’ll tell all. In the spirit of full disclosure, all documents related to the case will be delivered to your office on Friday afternoon, along with the rest of my statement. After you read my entire statement, you can decide whether to unseal the criminal Complaint against me and send out the requisite news release. Though I don’t think you’ll do that.

      The investigation is yours, but the apologia is mine. You keep your facts; I’ll give you the story. As you’ll see, I always keep my word.

      District of Columbia, 1996 D.W. Boxelder

      Chapter 1

      LIAR'S POKER

      Morocco, Indiana | October 1995

      START WITH ANA, before her father fell out of the tree.

      It stormed through the evening, rain lashing the clapboard of the farmhouse. In the yard, the big oak groaned. Wind rattled the doors of the storm cellar, but Ana didn’t notice.

      She should have been sleeping, or catching up on Econ homework, or doing laundry, but instead she was in the basement, huddled in a nest of dirty clothes, poring over college packets with a flashlight. Heavy stock, high gloss, filled with images of fresh-faced students, sunny stadiums, and clock towers dripping with ivy.

      All you had to do was ask, and colleges would send you a fat packet. For free. Express mail. Her habit had started small back in Baltimore. Just a few at first, all close to home: Towson, UMB, and, to toss a bone to her more-Catholic-every-day mother, Mount St. Mary’s.

      Ana’s addiction didn’t really bloom until the summer, when she fled with her father to Indiana. Now it was fall and the packets were a soft dune by the laundry tub, and Ana had become a leading expert on the form. Big schools, she’d noticed, featured labs and tailgating. Small colleges, like the one from rural North Carolina in her lap, trafficked in bucolic porn.

      Picture yourself against this backdrop of soft-shouldered mountains, this one seemed to say. Imagine yourself in mossy silence. You’d be Zen as hell. By the way, doesn’t our library look like a ski lodge?

      A ringing noise interrupted her daydream. Ana lifted the packet to see the cordless phone in her lap. Why had she bothered to bring it down here? An old habit, held over from the days when she was tethered to the phone, when she had people to talk to, people who wanted to talk to her.

      She picked up, but didn’t say anything, in case it was her mother, in which case she would—

      “Ana? Ana, listen—”

      —hang up. She opened the Warren Wilson packet again, but the mountains no longer seemed inviting. They looked like stupid clumps of broccoli and Ana could only imagine herself bored and isolated on that hilljack campus, and she got plenty of that around here, thank you very much. She winged the packet into the darkness by the laundry tub and picked up the old reliable, Pepperdine.

      Blue, blue, drenched in blue: the sky, endless waves, a boy with blue eyes and a teal Billabong shirt raising his hand in class. Ana could practically hear the hush of the Pacific. Pepperdine seemed like the farthest point from her shit life. If she was going to have to start over yet again, why not in Malibu?

      Overhead, a joist creaked. For a second she thought her father was patrolling the halls, checking and re-checking locks on doors and windows. But no, the house was just moving in the wind. Not even a storm could bring him inside anymore.

      Ana pulled on her headphones. She pushed play on a bulky tape player, and a vaguely Spanish baritone filled her ears, blocking out distractions.

      Suppress, said a poor man’s Ricardo Montalbán. To put an end to, or to prevent