yardbird.com: The Midnight Ride of Jonathan Luna, by William Keisling, Chapter 1

1
Ice cold

     His car was found idling a short distance from the road, near the trees, in the dark of the night in the heart of Pennsylvania Dutch country. It was just a few minutes drive from the Pennsylvania turnpike. Blood, personal effects, and small sums of money were strewn around the inside of the car.
     His body was found outside the idling car, near the front bumper, face down in an icy December stream, water running around him. His throat slashed, his back stabbed, his body pierced and cut dozens of times. His hands were cut to ribbons, slashed to the bone defending himself. The ultimate barbarity was that his scrotum too had been slashed open. Yet these vicious stab wounds had not finished him. He had been pulled or had crawled terrified from the car, and had drowned in the stream.
     It was as if some strange bird of misfortune had fallen here. In older days, people in these parts painted hex signs on their barns to ward from their doorsteps this very sort of bedevilment. Tulips, spinning emblems, and Pennsylvania Dutch birds, meant as talismans of good fortune, still wink from colorful hex signs all around Lancaster County, into Reading, heading north on the "Hex Sign Highway" into Allentown.
     But here's an ominous bird of a different feather carried by ill winds from the south. A strange and unsettling crime. A witching murder in Dutchieland, or so it might seem.
     The death seemed all the more disquieting and mysterious as the body belonged to a federal prosecutor, thirty-eight-year-old Jonathan Luna. As he lay in the stream, Luna was still dressed in his court clothes, with a Justice Department ID badge hanging from his neck.
     Luna was due in court later that morning for a case he was prosecuting. The case was going badly. It involved a hip-hop record producer and an associate who had been accused of selling large amounts of heroin in Baltimore. A little before midnight, facing problems with a plea agreement designed to end the case, Luna had inexplicably gotten up from his desk and walked off the face of the earth. He landed face down in the stream, some seventy miles from his office.
     He'd vanished from the U.S. attorney's office in the federal courthouse in Baltimore, of all places. In his office he'd left behind personal effects including his cell phone and his eyeglasses. And he’d left something else behind: an oddly unfinished plea agreement, typed on his office laptop computer, on his desk, by his unseeing eyeglasses and his untalking cell phone.
     That morning the prosecutor wouldn't be filing any papers in court. He was dead, his final appeal unheard. He had taken a deeply mysterious and wild midnight run across four states before landing dead in the stream.
     There are clues in the stream with him. Or so we'd be told.
     In reality, there are clues all around Luna, washing around him like an alluvial deposit. Some of these clues investigators refuse to pick up, lest they lead upstream, back to the investigators, back to a mother load of political and judicial intrigue, strewn detritus whose trail ultimately leads to the highest reaches of state and federal government.
     I've come to see Jonathan Luna as a white-collar canary in a coal mine, his broken body strewn like mining waste in a blackened stream of broken hopes and dashed promises.
     On his right hand, in the stream, Luna wears a law school ring depicting scales of justice. I can't help thinking justice had gone down in a cold backwoods field, not very far at all from the place where America government had started.
     It was December 4, 2003. Almost Christmas.

This is an excerpt from the book The Midnight Ride of Jonathan Luna, by William Keisling. © 2007 William Keisling. All rights reserved.