Digging For Trouble

by Linda Fairstein

  “I’ll start with the tire tracks. Turns out the Road Warrior model is all over town,” Katie said. “There’s an Atlas dealer in Big Timber, and the machines are way cheaper than the John Deere tractors. There must be two or three hundred of them in and around my dad’s ranch. That makes it so much harder for us, don’t you think?”

  “It makes it so much harder for Kyle,” I said. “We’ve got enough to do on our end.”

  “What’s his assignment?” Katie asked. “He and I are going to FaceTime later tonight.”

  “Cool,” I said, shaking my head at Katie’s puppy love. “I’ll forward the photographs I took of the tire tracks last week. When he finds an Atlas, he’ll have to see whether or not the tread is worn out in places, like it seems to be in my pictures.”

  Katie didn’t say anything.

  “Are you still there?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” Katie said. “I need to tell you something, but you can’t go deducing anything from it, okay? Will you promise?”

  “I won’t jump to any conclusions, if that’s what you mean. Deducing, however, is like second nature to me.”

  “Maybe I shouldn’t—”

  “C’mon, Katie. Every little factoid helps.”

  “Well, Kyle’s dad has an Atlas Road Warrior,” she said as softly as she could speak. “You met Mr. Lowry. You know he didn’t drive it onto the hillside during the night. You just know that.”

  This wasn’t the moment to ask Katie if Kyle’s dad had an alibi. This was a time to trust the people we knew and liked.

  “I’m really glad you told me,” I said. “The Lowrys are our friends. You can tell Kyle to relax. And that his dad’s tractor might be a good place for him to practice, just to see if there’s a difference in the tread marks the tractor makes in his own driveway and the ones I photographed. You sure you’re not upset?”

  “Thanks, Dev. I feel better just saying it out loud.”

  Even with Kyle searching, I wasn’t hopeful. I had no idea how we could find our Road Warrior among two hundred of them, like a needle in a haystack that was known as Big Timber. “Did you find anything out about Chip?”

  “There are Donners all over Sweet Grass County,” Katie said. “Some are related to one another and some are just out there on their own.”

  “What does Kyle know about Chip?”

  “Nothing yet. We can’t even figure out which one he is,” Katie said.

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “In the county phone directory, Dev, there are four Donners whose first name begins with the letter C,” Katie said. “There’s Charles A. Donner, and Charles Q. Donner, and Charlton Donner, and Chester, too.”

  “Hard to tell which one of those might have Chip as a nickname, I guess. I was hoping there would just be a plain old Chip or Chipper.”

  “There is a Chipper, Dev. But she’s a woman,” Katie said. “Not our guy.”

  I pulled my steno pad out of my rear pocket and wrote down the four names Kyle had given her. “Good job, Katie. Tell Kyle I’ll e-mail these over to Sergeant Tapply so he can do a background check on each of them.”

  “I hope they’re good clues,” she said. “What are you and Booker doing now?”

  I had to keep up the pretense that Booker and I had gone to the Statue of Liberty and not the museum. “You know how long that ferry ride from Liberty Island takes, Katie. I’ll talk to you later. Thanks for this.”

  “Let’s walk through the park,” Booker said. “Grab some ice cream.”

  “Give me a sec to call Tapp, okay?”

  I dialed the number and Tapp answered. “What’s up, Dev?”

  “I’ve got some names for you. Would you mind running them through CLEAR?”

  “I promised you that much, didn’t I?” Sergeant Tapply asked me. “You’re not making an arrest without clearing it with the commissioner, are you?”

  “These four guys live in Montana. I mean, I know about the long arm of the law, Tapp, but even if my mom deputizes us, Booker’s arm won’t stretch that far,” I said. “It’s all just background.”

  “Let me have ’em,” he said.

  I read off the names of the four Donner men and told Tapp that was all I knew about them. Not their ages or occupations or any other stats.

  “I’ll be back to you later, Dev.”

  “Thanks, Tapp.”

  Booker and I walked into the park, bought two ice-cream cones at the entrance, and started winding our way on the footpath until we arrived at the lake. The ice cream we got was dripping down the sides of our cones nonstop.

  We rented a rowboat and glided around, under Bow Bridge and up to the far corner of the lake—Booker manning the oars, letting me hang my feet over the edge into the water, warning me about the approach of snapping turtles as they came up to catch the afternoon sun.

  I couldn’t believe more than half the summer had flown by. Booker was going on about his fall classes, but I was thinking about fossils I’d always done some of my best thinking on rowboat lake.

  After a lazy hour, we returned the boat to the attendant, I put my sneakers back on, and we were about to split up—Booker to go west to his home, and me to the east to mine—when my phone rang.

  “Dev?”

  “Yeah.”

  “It’s me. Tapp. I think I found your man,” he said. “You’re just looking to credit this guy in Katie’s essay, right?”

  “That’s what we had in mind.”

  “Well, it’s not Charlie A. or Charlie Q. Donner,” Tapp said. “And it’s not Chester, either. But Charlton’s got himself an aka, Dev.”

  “An aka? What’s that?”

  “Sorry. It’s cop talk for ‘also known as,’ like an alias. And Charlton Donner’s alias is Chip.”

  “That’s so helpful, Tapp. Maybe you’ve got a home address and a phone number, too,” I said. “That would really save our friend Kyle some time.”

  “I got all that, Dev,” he said. “But I’ve also got some news that might interest you to know.”

  “Shoot, Tapp.”

  “Chip Donner must know the sheriff pretty well. He seems to have spent some time in the Sweet Grass County jail.”

  “What?” I shrieked, grabbing Booker’s elbow as hard as I could. “What was he arrested for?”

  “It looks like he got a little disorderly with folks at a local event three years ago,” Tapp said. “Might have been some rowdy fans at a football game, from the location of occurrence. But the charges against him were dismissed.”

  Chip Donner was a large man. I wouldn’t want any guy I knew to be on the other side of any kind of a problem with him.

  “That’s good,” I said.

  Disorderly conduct didn’t signal any kind of dishonesty, as my mother had told me often. It could have been an attack of some sort—which would have been bad—or it could have been a matter of self-defense, like Tapp suggested.

  “I owe you, Sergeant Tapply,” I said. “I’m baking cupcakes with Natasha tomorrow. I’ll see you get a batch of them on Monday.”

  “Hold on there, Dev,” Tapp said. “Don’t you want to know the rest?”

  “There’s more?”

  “Chip Donner has an open case pending in Sweet Grass County.”

  “What’s the charge?” I asked, holding my breath.

  “Grand Larceny in the Third Degree,” Tapp said.

  “He stole something?” I asked. “Chip Donner’s a thief?”

  “Nothing’s been proved yet,” Tapp said. “I’ve got to remind you of that.”

  “Well, what’s he accused of?”

  “It says here he stole a vehicle. That’s all that’s in the public record.”

  “But we’ve got to know, Tapp,” I said. “Is he a car thief, or is it something else?”

  “I’m looking it
over again, Dev. The fact that it’s third degree means the value of the vehicle was pretty cheap,” Tapp said. “It could have been a car if it’s an old one, or a used one, without a lot of value.”

  “I guess it could have been a small tractor, too,” I said, leaving deductions in the dirt and leapfrogging to conclusions. “Some of them are cheaper than cars. What if Chip Donner stole a Road Warrior?”

  20

  “What a nice surprise,” my mother said to Booker, when she and Sam came through the door at six thirty that evening. “Did Dev bring you home to rope you into walking the dog for her?”

  “Hey, Aunt Blaine,” Booker said, kissing her on the cheek, before he went in for a one-armed hug with Sam “I was planning to go home but—”

  “It’s more serious than that, Mom,” I said. “I had to stop Booker from going back across the park to get home for dinner. And yes, Asta’s been fed and walked.”

  “Then what’s so serious?” she asked, dropping her tote bag full of case reports and police files on the floor in the dining room, where she used the table as her office. “Sam’s making his famous burgers for dinner, Booker. I’ll call your mother. You can stay and eat with us.”

  “I need to update you on the Montana investigation,” I said. “Can we all sit down in the living room? I think we need your help.”

  Asta practically attached herself to my mother’s side until she sat on the sofa and scratched the dog behind both ears.

  “There is no investigation in Big Timber, Dev,” my mother said. “Case closed. I thought you understood that.”

  “I’ve been doing a little more digging.”

  “Have you hit another mudflat, dear?” she asked.

  My mother slipped out of her high heels and put her feet up on the sofa. Sam was getting us all something to drink.

  “Nope. My neck is still above the muck,” I said. “So I asked Tapp to run some names for us through the CLEAR program.”

  “Fortunately, that man has very few secrets from me. Go ahead.”

  “Here’s where we need your help.”

  “‘We?’ Have you dragged Booker into this one, too?” my mother asked. “I thought you two were going to the museum to pick out a spot for the party.”

  “Did all that, Mom. I called Mrs. Cion and she’s very appreciative.”

  “So Booker’s here because—?”

  “Because you have so much more respect for his judgment than you have for mine. Well, sometimes you do.”

  “I have great respect for your sense of justice and for your doggedness and for your enthusiasm, darling. It’s just sometimes your instincts mislead you,” my mother said. “And mislead Booker. And mislead Katie. What is it you want me to do?”

  I started to explain what the name check on Chip had turned up, but my mother’s reaction was flat.

  “You just don’t know enough to be distrusting him and everyone who was on that hillside, Dev,” she said.

  Sam came back into the room with their drinks. “You know your mother isn’t from the ‘where there’s smoke, there’s bound to be fire’ school of prosecution. She likes hard proof before she accuses anyone of a crime. That’s part of what makes her good at what she does—part of what gives her credibility.”

  “I get that, Sam,” I said, “but how about where there’s not only smoke, but there are actually sparks—sparks that could turn into flames at a moment’s notice.”

  “Show me a spark, Dev,” my mother said.

  I was sitting on the living room floor. I reached up to the mug on the coffee table and grabbed a handful of pencils.

  “Here’s Steve Paulson,” I said, laying a pencil on the carpet. “He had a job in Patagonia not too long ago—maybe on a dig there—”

  “Maybe,” my mother said, slowly and with emphasis.

  “And he was terminated.”

  “In which meaning of that word?” she asked. “Did the job he was doing reach an end? Was he fired? Did the entire project just terminate?”

  “I don’t know, Mom,” I said, pursing my lips. I had seen her cross-examine the smartest experts and reduce them to an endless list of ‘I don’t knows’ in a courtroom. It wasn’t pretty.

  “Do you want me to ask him why?” she asked.

  I held out my arm. “Not yet, but thanks. Please listen to me like you would to a grown-up, okay? I’m really aiming to be methodical.”

  She took a sip of her white wine.

  “Then you have Ling Soo, who told Katie and me she was a grad student at Yale.” I put the second pencil down, placing it across the first one—touching it, but going in another direction.

  “But she’s not, Aunt Blaine,” Booker said. “Sergeant Tapply said the system shows that she’s withdrawn from the university.”

  “And yet Steve says she’s still there,” I said. “Both can’t be true.”

  “When did he tell you that?” Sam asked.

  I sat straight up. That had been a sloppy slip on my part, admitting I had talked to Steve.

  “Um—today—at the museum,” I said. “Booker and I ran into him.”

  My mother rested her head back on the pillow behind her and closed her eyes. Stories about how I conducted my investigations often had that effect on her.

  “That’s a bit of luck in a museum half the size of Rhode Island,” Sam said.

  “To be honest—”

  “I hope you’re always honest, dear,” my mother said, still in her “I’m-not-sure-I-want-to-hear-what-comes-out-of-your-mouth-next” kind of mood.

  “Of course, Mom. I mean as soon as Booker and I settled on a place for Katie’s slumber party this afternoon, I thought I’d check whether Ling was around and say hi. You know, after the news story last night, I figured there was a good chance she might be at the museum.”

  “If you’re a dino guru, you go where the dinos are,” Sam said.

  “Exactly my point, Sam.”

  “So where did you run into Steve?” Sam asked. “At the T. rex or the Triceratops?”

  “The guard let us go to the office where our team from Montana is working,” I said.

  “Promise me, Booker Dibble,” my mother said, holding the cold glass of wine against her forehead, “that you both had better sense than to climb down into one of those dungeon-like stairwells to look for these people. I count on you being the brakes on Dev’s gusto.”

  “No basements, Aunt Blaine,” Booker said. “We kind of bumped right into Steve in the workspace the paleontologists use. It’s upstairs, not down.”

  “That’s when Steve told us Ling was back at school.”

  My mother opened her eyes and sat up to take another sip of wine. “Could be she enrolled in classes again. Ling’s obviously a very smart young woman.”

  “Now let me give you the third piece of news,” I said, “that Booker and I just got from Tapp on my way home.”

  “I hope you’ve done nothing that will spoil my appetite, Dev,” she said.

  “It’s not about me, Mom. It’s Chip Donner,” I said, stacking a third pencil on top of the others. “You know, he’s the guy that made Katie give up her fossils the first night. And he even left the campsite that same night because his wife was sick at home.”

  That was another good piece of circumstantial evidence.

  “Yes, Chip Donner,” my mother said, chiding me a bit. “The really nice man who laid down on the ground and held on to you for dear life so you didn’t sink any deeper in the mud. I’m familiar with his name.”

  “He’s got an arrest record, Mom. A rap sheet, with two collars.”

  “You’ve got my lingo down to perfection, Devlin Quick,” Sam said. “Don’t let your grandmother hear you talking like that.”

  “Too late, Sam. Lulu wants a gold shield, too.”

  “Arrested for what?” my mother asked.

/>   “An assault,” I said. “No weapon involved. A fight with someone at a football stadium that was dismissed. But the second case is still pending.”

  “Tell me about it,” she said.

  “Chip Donner stole something, Mom. A vehicle of some sort. Not a fancy one,” I said. “Because Tapp said the level of the crime is based on the value of the thing that was stolen, and this is only third degree.”

  She was taking me more seriously now. She put the wineglass on the table and leaned in, steepling the fingers of her hands. “You’re thinking of some kind of tractor or compact dozer like the one that left tracks on the dig site last week?”

  “I can’t call Sheriff Brackley, Mom. I know he won’t give me any information without checking with Sam or you first,” I said. “That’s why I need your help.”

  “That’s an easy call to make, Dev. I’ll do it while Sam’s getting dinner ready,” she said. “And I’m grateful that you’ve come to me, instead of going out of control and doing things you shouldn’t be doing.”

  “You’re the best, Mom!” I said, reaching out to squeeze her hand.

  She straightened out her legs to get up. “I don’t get the point of your pickup sticks,” she said, pointing at the pile of pencils on the floor. “You better put them away before one of us slips on them, Dev.”

  “They’re not pickup sticks, Mom. I want you to think of them as logs at a campsite. Put a match to each one of them—Steve or Ling or Chip—and I’d bet anything there’d be more than smoke and sparks,” I said. “I know how serious it is to say someone is guilty or innocent—”

  “You’re right about that,” my mom said, leaning over to look at my little pile of logs.

  “If you rub these three together,” I said, thinking of Steve and Ling and Chip, “I bet we’d be looking at a full-on fire.”

  21

  “Still no sign of fire,” my mother said, standing behind me at the front door, as we said good night to our company at nine o’clock. Sam was going upstate for the weekend and he agreed to give Booker a ride home. “We’ll all just have to relax and wait for the sheriff to return my call.”