Dead Land

by Sara Paretsky

There weren’t any chairs or benches outside, so I squatted under the awning next to Bear, feeding him bits of sandwich and pie. I’m not much of a dessert eater, but if I was going to talk to Kelly Morton, I’d have to compliment her baking.

  Passersby commented on me and the dog, some thinking we were cute squatting there together, others telling me, sharply, that loitering was against the law in Salina.

  “Officer Gerber’s on patrol this afternoon,” I said to one of the critics. “Call 911 and tell them to send him over.”

  A choking sound and the woman moved on, muttering under her breath. I try to spread sunshine wherever I go.

  When the crowd inside the bakery thinned out, I went back in and introduced myself to the woman at the counter. I praised the meal I’d just eaten and asked if I could speak to Kelly Kay Morton.

  “I can pass on a message,” the woman said. “She isn’t talking to reporters.”

  “Journalism is a noble profession,” I said, “but it isn’t mine. Chief Corbitt probably told her, or maybe you, if you’re the owner here, to expect me: V.I. Warshawski, a detective from Chicago.”

  I was tired from travel, from being with strangers, from not knowing what was going on around me, and so I didn’t have a polished pitch, but the mention of the chief’s name did the trick: the woman went into the back. After a few minutes she returned with a second woman, younger than I’d been expecting, perhaps in her forties, brown hair pulled away from her face in a ponytail. She was sturdily built, skin freckled from the sun, biceps straining the sleeves of the lime-green Origins T-shirt all the staff wore.

  “This here is the detective from Chicago. You want me with you when you talk to her, hon?”

  Morton’s round shoulders slumped forward—fatigue and depression. “I’ll be okay, Nancy. Nothing anyone can do to me worse than has already happened.”

  Out on the sidewalk, we talked first about where to talk—not in her home, not in the nearby Starbucks, where her coworkers might see her. We finally settled on the public library, about a ten-minute walk away.

  Bear came to heel as we set out. I hoped Morton might exclaim, I know that dog, but the two didn’t pay any attention to each other. I worried that the library staff might make me tie the dog up outside, but they let me bring him indoors, as long as we stayed in the entry area, away from other patrons.

  The building was new, modern, and filled with children on some kind of field trip. Morton and I settled into chairs in a corner of the foyer, but people still kept looking at us, or maybe at Bear: he’s a big dog and his tawny fur stood out in the modernist entryway.

  “Sheriff and them say you’re trying to dig up dirt about my boy.”

  I sidestepped the criticism. “I’m curious about the lawyers. Clarence Gorbeck and Rikki Samundar. Have they stayed in touch with you since your son died?”

  “You want help finding them?” She was derisive. “You’re in Chicago, they’re in Chicago.”

  “They’re easy to find in Chicago,” I agreed. “Not so easy if you’re in Salina. But I hear they came to you, not you to them.”

  Her eyes filled with tears, as unexpected to her as to me, and she worked fiercely at her fingers, digging flour from beneath the nails. “We had a public lawyer, a nice boy, he was working hard for Artie, but those Chicago lawyers said, they thought—they had all this experience that the public lawyer didn’t and they said they could do a better job. They said the company that bought our farm, they would take care of the bills.

  “I was desperate for someone to listen to Artie’s side of the story, so I said to go ahead. But in the end, all they did was get a jury to say Artie was guilty. They said they’d keep him from the death penalty, but then he was killed anyway.”

  “The Wichita paper said he died from too many nicotine patches?” I said.

  “That’s right, but I don’t know where he got those patches. The doctor said there was eight of them, up and down his back. How he even put them on, the guard at the jail couldn’t say. Wouldn’t say.” She was concentrating on her left thumb, gouging so hard that a trickle of blood spilled onto her jeans leg.

  “Did anyone ever tell you who wrote a prescription for the patches?” I asked.

  “The doctor said it was just as well to—I can’t think of how he put it, like forget about the past, but he made it sound like a church hat with a little veil on it, the way my mother and her friends used to wear.”

  “To draw a veil over the past?” I ventured.

  She looked up at me, startled. “Were you there? Did the doctor talk to you?”

  “No, ma’am,” I said. “I’ve never met the doctor or the guards or any of those people. It’s an expression that I’ve heard people use in similar situations.”

  She continued to eye me suspiciously. “The big lawyers from Chicago didn’t let Artie tell his side of the story. They said it would be a mistake to let him testify, that it always went badly in a murder trial.”

  “What was Artie’s side of the story?” I asked.

  “That these other people told him to do it. They sent him messages on the Internet, on these web pages he looked at, telling him to go to this thing at Horsethief Canyon. He never even heard of the event, Tallgrass Meet-Up, what kind of thing is that for grown people to be doing? Songs about Mexicans and Indians, protesting their treatment, when people like me and Artie’s dad lose everything and no one even bats an eyelash?”

  I looked at her rough hands and pain-filled face and felt my heart twist with pity. “Did you see the messages from these other people?”

  “Artie told me about them, but of course the government came and took his computer and when I came here to look at the web page on their computers”—she gestured toward the interior of the library—“all his messages had disappeared. The librarian did her best and she knows a lot about computers, but not even she could find them.”

  I tried to digest that. It was such a strange claim, akin to someone claiming he’d heard voices that goaded him to violence. I found it hard to believe.

  “Did anyone ever try to talk to you about the messages? I mean, besides the police and the lawyers?”

  Her lips curled in disgust. “Are you serious? People called from all over the world. First it was the FBI and the state cops and then it was reporters and then it was people snooping. They wanted to talk about how Artie—like, they took for granted that Artie committed all those murders—and they wanted to know, how did he do it, did he practice first, did he stake out the area? People wanted souvenirs. They wanted his guns or his clothes, someone even wanted the clothes he was wearing when—when he passed.”

  She was panting, overwhelmed by the memories. “They treated him—they treated me—like we were some kind of sideshow at a carnival. I—we’d been living in a trailer park outside town, but people started showing up, even some crazy girls on motorcycles who wrote love letters to Artie, like he wasn’t fighting for his life! I had to move out. Until the trial was over they put me up in a room over to Manhattan.”

  I thought of the people who showed up at the Zamir house, wanting a piece of Lydia. It’s not something you think of when you imagine the fallout from a mass shooting, the ghouls who pick through the bones of the lives of those involved.

  “It sounds unbearable,” I said. “In the midst of all that chaos, I can’t imagine you noticed if anyone paid particular attention to what Artie saw on his computer.”

  She lapsed into a silence that went on so long I thought she’d decided the interview was over. I was wrapping Bear’s leash around my hand, ready to get to my feet, when she said, “There was one man came around one night wanting the computer and all. He must have been someone important from the government—he didn’t talk himself, he had another man with him, like a bodyguard, like Secret Service, you know. I told him how the government already had all of Artie’s things, his computer, even his old high school papers—he didn’t write much, but the government, they wanted a journal.”

  She gave
a wry smile. “Getting him to write his homework, that was almost as much work as cooking and cleaning. The idea that he’d write a journal! Anyway, this high-up man, he paid me fifty dollars to look through Artie’s things, but of course there wasn’t anything there.”

  I tried getting more details on this strange man from the government—what he looked like, what kind of car, did he speak at all? Of course it had been four years ago and it sounded as though the entire Aryan nation had shown up at her trailer. It wasn’t surprising that she only remembered him because of the bodyguard.

  Yes, she said impatiently when I asked, she was sure it was a bodyguard. “He was like someone in a movie. You could see the gun under his jacket when he moved his arm. The man himself, he dressed the same as everyone around here—shirt, jeans, but you don’t buy shirts like his in Salina. I sew, I used to make our clothes, mine and Big Artie. I never saw fabric like that. It made me want to touch it.”

  Her words made me think of the men who had come to the SLICK meeting with Larry Nieland. It was ludicrous to imagine a connection between Chicago’s parks and a Kansas killer, but I still pulled up Nieland’s website on my phone and showed his picture to Morton.

  She looked at it apathetically. “It wasn’t him. Anyway, I had other things on my mind than paying attention to one more strange-acting man in a world that’s full up of them.”

  She made it clear she’d come to the end of any time she wanted to spend with me. As I got to my feet, I asked if she’d gotten the computer back after her son’s death.

  Kelly Kay curled her lip. “What would I do with his old computer—stare at it all day like it was a field I was waiting to sprout and grow? They wanted to give me the clothes he was wearing when he died and I thought, you are as disgusting as the biker girls, thinking I’d want them. Guess I could have sold them to the biker girls, but what use do I have for money, anyway? The farm is gone. Artie’s gone. His daddy’s gone. What I make baking pies, that pays the rent. That’s about all I need.”

  40

  The Invisible Hand

  I walked Bear back to the car and drove him to the Smoky Hill River east of town so he could cool off in the shallows.

  I sat on the riverbank, dangling my feet in the brown water, while I called Gabe Ramirez, the public defender whom Devlin & Wickham had shoved off the case. Ramirez was polite but cautious when I told him who I was and that I was calling with questions about Arthur Morton’s history. I’d planned on asking for a face-to-face meeting, but Ramirez said he’d been transferred to Wichita, some hundred miles to the south.

  “I’m not here to second-guess you or anyone else.” I explained my history with Lydia Zamir and the inexplicable intervention by Devlin & Wickham into my inquiries. Ramirez thawed a bit when I mentioned my own stint as a Cook County public defender. Like PDs everywhere, he had too many cases and too little time to give any of them the attention they ought to have, but of course he remembered Arthur Morton.

  “I’m hoping you can tell me about the transfer of Morton’s defense from your office to Devlin & Wickham’s lawyers.”

  “At first, I was happy,” he admitted. “Preparing defense for a crime like that, you need paralegals and an unlimited budget for research. And the murders were so horrific—seventeen dead, including that baby! The psychological toll on the community was devastating. It was hard to get my mind in the game, so to speak.”

  “There was no doubt about Morton’s guilt?” I asked.

  “State police found him with the weapons stockpile, and there’s no doubt he had the AR-15 that fired the bullets. He hadn’t even cleaned it.”

  I told him about my conversation with Arthur Morton’s mother. “Did you ever see the emails she talked about?”

  “They weren’t emails.” Ramirez spoke slowly, trying to recall evidence he’d last seen four years ago. “At least, I don’t remember emails ordering him to shoot anyone. What I saw were messages embedded in the website. They didn’t call out Morton by name, but they said something along the lines of ‘These are the people who stole farms from good Americans. Someone should strike a blow to protect other farmers.’

  “What bothered me, why it sticks in my mind, aside from the rhetoric, of course, was they gave specific details: they said the Tallgrass Meet-Up, which would be full of foreigners, Jews, and ‘mud people,’ would be a perfect place to make a stand on behalf of white farmers. And the messages described the caves that overlook the area where the Meet-Up was being held.”

  I paused while the details sank in. “Someone engineered those deaths.”

  Ramirez grunted agreement. “I was going to plead diminished responsibility because of that, but the big-shot lawyers had a different strategy. They said it would be impossible to prove that Morton was acting under someone else’s direction. The state had to share Morton’s computer files, of course, and I gave the guy—Gorbeck, yeah, that was his name: Clarence Gorbeck—everything I had from Morton, with markers to the website messages, but they claimed Morton made them up. Gorbeck’s assistant said that I’d been too lazy to check for them myself, which I should have done because they didn’t exist.”

  “Someone erased them? Or Gorbeck pretended not to see them?”

  “I was angry; I made them let me come in to look. The messages had vanished. They were never visible on a public machine, anyway, only on Arthur’s: whoever sent them targeted him. They had skills way outside my department’s forensic abilities.”

  I realized I was digging my fingers into the soft mud, as if getting a purchase in the ground would show me how to anchor myself in this hall of mirrors. A very sophisticated third party had been at work, preying on Arthur Morton’s troubled mind, hoping to goad him to murder, and then erasing evidence of their actions.

  “But what changed as a result of the deaths?” I blurted. “If someone else was pushing Morton—or maybe other unstable local people—into homicide, they must have felt they’d gain from it. Did land change hands as a result of the deaths? What effect did they have, besides the ruin of lives?”

  “I never thought of that question,” Ramirez said after a pause. “I don’t know if Sea-2-Sea or any of the other corporate landholders took over more land, but even if they did—that was going on all the time, without a shot being fired. All the big-ag companies out here chipped in to support the Tallgrass Meet-Up. Even if local farmers had a grudge against Sea-2-Sea and the rest of them, slaughtering people at the event would only stop festivals, not the corporate buyout of farms.”

  “Did you attend the trial?” I asked.

  “Of course: I wanted to see what kind of law you got for sixteen hundred dollars an hour, which I learned was the lead guy’s going rate.” Ramirez grunted. “I was underimpressed.”

  “I met Morton’s mother earlier today. She mentioned some person who showed up at her home late one night, wanting to see her son’s computer. Do you know about that? No?” I repeated what Kelly Kay Morton had told me.

  “He might have come to the trial,” Ramirez said. “The day the jury brought the verdict in, there were journalists from all over, New York, even someone from Australia. And this older guy—I wondered if he was head of the FBI—he looked important, and his clothes, he had on a suit that you somehow could tell he’d paid a lot of money for.”

  I pushed him as best I could, but again, of course, a lot of time had passed, a lot of trials, he couldn’t remember if the man had been white or a light-skinned person of color. Not fat, that was the best he could do, and rich enough to buy a beautiful suit.

  “What about Morton’s suicide? Did that raise any red flags?”

  “That didn’t surprise me, at least not the suicide. You’re a city person, maybe you don’t know the passionate attachment people in a place like this have for their land. Morton’s brain was tied into knots by his father’s suicide and what he saw as his failure to get revenge on the people who’d caused them to lose their farm.”

  I digested that. “But the method—that’s a hor
rific method, eight prescription-strength patches.”

  “Jail should have had a suicide watch, no doubt about it.”

  “His mother says the patches were on his back.”

  “He could have persuaded a guard to put them on.” Ramirez’s tone was indifferent. “The guards had a lot of sympathy for him, believe it or not.”

  “What, was he some kind of local hero?” I couldn’t keep the outrage out of my voice.

  “No-o, but—hard to explain. They knew he’d done the murders, but they thought he was a victim, too. In the end, I think the mother made a mistake, letting the Chicago lawyers take over—the jury were local people who reacted badly to a big-city firm. Even I, Mexican-American that I am, was preferable because I grew up around there. If that’s it—?”

  I was thanking him for his time, when he said, “I just remembered one other thing. Morton said he thought someone was lurking nearby when he was in the cave. He told me he kept thinking he was hearing footsteps overhead. If he was, probably a coyote or a bobcat. There are a lot of wild animals in the canyon. Thing is, he claimed there was another shot when he stopped firing. But those AR-15s, they make a hell of a noise. I doubt he was wearing ear protection.

  “I told the Chicago team—even though I didn’t believe him, it still was a good distraction. Or I thought. They didn’t agree. Maybe they were right. You can’t ever figure out what a jury will or won’t believe, not a hundred percent.”

  “What made Morton stop firing when he did?” I asked.

  “Oh, that—he was a sitting duck himself—he could see the security people had pinpointed his location and were heading his way. He had a mountain bike at the ready and took off, leaving most of his weapons behind.”

  He hung up. I wiped my fingers on the marsh grasses to get the mud from them, over and over until my fingers were raw from the spiky edges of the plants. All the grasses of Kansas . . .

  Bear came to me, muddy himself, but giving me a softer look than I’d seen on him before. It reminded me that I’d forgotten to ask Ramirez whether he knew Coop. I caught him as he was leaving for court—an emergency hearing in the late afternoon. Ramirez didn’t know Coop but he remembered a man outside the courthouse with a big dog, buttonholing people for news of the trial.