Again, a possible trap. Let the doctor claim ignorance, then spring some bit of information that made it clear that Pardo was lying. He decided on straight denial. It was the safest of two bets.
“I didn’t know her that well. See, I’m a consulting physician. I have eight regular clients—nursing homes, long-term care facilities, and rural clinics—plus three others that call me in from time to time. I probably know Rosa better than most of the aides, but that’s just because we’re fellow Spanish speakers. I’m from El Salvador,” he added, to remind Stiles that he and Rosa were not from the same country. He wanted to add that not all Spanish speakers crammed ten people into a two bedroom duplex with an El Camino propped on cinder blocks in the front yard, that some of them were not campesinos. Wisely, he kept his mouth shut on that score.
Lieutenant Stiles nodded. He drank from his coffee, looked down at it as if surprised to discover that it was cheap, break room stuff, instead of, say, Green Mountain Coffee Roasters, then set down the cup and leaned back in his chair. “It’s odd, then.”
Pardo couldn’t help himself. “What’s odd?” His accent sounded thick in his ears.
“Here’s the thing. I had a complaint already about Rosa’s disappearance. Someone at Riverwood came by. I took a quick look, figured the girl went home or ran off with her boyfriend.”
“Right, she was an illegal alien, after all,” Pardo said. “By definition, not really stable.”
“That’s how I was thinking,” Stiles agreed. He jotted something in his notebook, then looked up and met Pardo’s eyes. “Except that earlier today I got a call from Planned Parenthood. You know, they have an office in Waterbury.”
“I’ve seen it. Little red building on Main Street.” A nervous tickle.
“That’s the one. They reported her missing.”
“Planned Parenthood reported her missing?” Pardo asked. “I don’t understand. Why would they be looking for Rosa?”
“Because she was pregnant, Dr. Pardo. She made an appointment for an abortion consultation. And when she didn’t show up, they called her house. Number disconnected. This being Vermont, and not, say, Boston, they didn’t let it go. They called her landlord. Then they called the Waterbury Village Police Department. And here’s where it gets interesting,” Stiles added. He leaned forward. “As her emergency contact, she gave your name. Get it? She said we should talk to you if anything happened to her.”
Coño. Shit.
Rosa pregnant? Supposedly, she’d been going to Planned Parenthood already for birth control pills. It further chilled him to think of his DNA carried inside the girl. Pinning him definitively to Rosa if they found her.
“Ah, I understand,” Dr. Pardo said, even as his mind worked furiously.
“Please, explain.” Still very polite, but there was a tinge of suspicion in Stiles’s voice.
“Rosa came to me a few weeks ago, distraught. Asked me if it was possible to get pregnant if the man had always pulled out before ejaculation. That’s the gist of what she tried to ask, anyway. She seemed more than a little naïve about the subject. And of course, I told her that any uncovered penetration could lead to pregnancy. Rosa said her family was Catholic and would kill her if they found out she was pregnant. I suggested she go to Planned Parenthood.”
“Why did she come to you?”
“A lot of these HTs—the aides at the care center, I mean—don’t have health insurance. Certainly not an immigrant like Rosa. I’m probably the only doctor she knows. Believe me, officer, I’m used to requests for free medical advice.” He hesitated. “In this case, it seemed like the right thing to do.”
“And you suggested an abortion?”
“Of course not,” Pardo said. He was feeling more confident now. “That was her idea. I told her not to do anything without thinking about it first. There were several options. Planned Parenthood has counselors trained for this kind of thing. Of course, they’re more than happy to help arrange an abortion, but that’s another question.” He tried to leave it neutral, or maybe slightly disapproving. Sympathetic of the girl, but disappointed in her behavior. “I guess she gave Planned Parenthood my number as her doctor because she doesn’t have one.”
“Why didn’t you tell me this straight up?” Lieutenant Stiles asked. “When I asked if you knew Rosa Solorio?”
“With all due respect, officer, you didn’t tell me what this was about. For all I knew, she’d been picked up for shoplifting and thought of the most responsible Spanish speaker she knew to get her out of trouble. Would have hardly been appropriate, in that case, to tell you she’d asked me about getting an abortion.”
“Okay.” Stiles rose to his feet. “Sorry for the inconvenience, Dr. Pardo. But I appreciate you coming down to answer some questions.”
Pardo also stood. “I hope she’s okay. Maybe she decided to trust her family about this pregnancy thing.”
“Or ran off with her boyfriend,” Stiles added. “At least it gives some possible reasons why she disappeared.”
Quite. In fact, it occurred to Pardo that this might be a blessing in disguise. The police knew about Rosa’s disappearance, true, but now they had a suspect in the hypothetical boyfriend that had got her pregnant.
The police officer led him to the door of the police station and held it for the doctor. “If you do hear from Rosa, or hear any rumors from her coworkers—anything, really—please give me a call.” He handed over a business card, but didn’t follow Pardo into the cold night air.
“Don’t worry,” Pardo said. “I will.”
Chapter Thirteen:
It took Ellen Pilson two days to find the remains of the fire. She knew it was near one of Northrock’s spring projects. She’d driven first to Northfield, south of Montpelier and scouted every side road for miles. The next morning, she rose before dawn—needing to be at work by 9:00 AM—and drove south along 100 before cutting west on 125. She found a Forest Service road a quarter mile from the cutout where they’d park the heavy machinery come spring. It had been decades since Ellen had stood on a Northrock job site, but she recognized it as the best place to put a trailer. The crew would stay in the trailer mid-week to save two hours or more of commuting every day.
Ellen parked the car next to the highway, changed her shoes for boots, then bundled herself in a ski parka and mittens. The snow fell short of her knees, indicating that it had been plowed at some point, but she was still exhausted before she’d gone fifty yards. Soon she had to pull back her hood and unzip her parka she was so hot.
But she was rewarded for the effort. She followed the road into the forest maybe a third of a mile and discovered a construction trailer sitting just where she’d expected it. Or rather, the remains of a trailer, a ruin of charred framing and warped siding. Just another construction accident, right? And just like that winter road in Maine, nobody could pin it on her brother, Bill Carter.
The weather had been terrible that day in the mountains of Maine. It had been “spitting” as they said in New England, for most of the morning, leaving a slushy accumulation of several inches. They didn’t usually work under these conditions. In fact, everything about the Moose Hollow job was unusual. Instead of moving in short stages of a mile at a time, they tackled the entire twelve mile stretch at once. To the north, someone would be blasting, others hauling away mud or rubble, others grading further down the mountain. By five o’clock, when it grew dark, stadium lighting bathed the mountain in light so night crews could work until daylight.
Elwin Carter practically lived on the site; he’d further divided the project into thirds with each third under control of one of his children. Ellen had the middle third, above the landslide that had buried the old highway and through the gap in Dibble Mountain. The mountain shuddered off piles of rubble as they blasted to widen the gap. But it wasn’t yet big enough to pass the larger equipment. Some three hundred feet back from the summit, Northrock widened and graded a cutout where they’d dumped road base and parked graders, wheeled dozers, scrapers, compactors, an
d other heavy machinery. Ellen’s other brother, Davis, was already on the far side, his survey crews working around the clock. They’d helicoptered over the most critical supplies, but they needed Dibble Mountain out of the way. Bill, the youngest, worked at Ellen’s back, further down the mountain.
Ellen’s father checked her progress ten times day. “Is that road open yet? Tell me what you need. More explosives engineers? How many? You’ll have them by 3:00.”
He woke her at 5:30 the morning of the accident by pounding on the door of her trailer. She answered in her pajamas. He looked like he’d been up for hours. Seventy-five years old and he could still work her into the ground. Sleet iced his hard hat. “You’ve got falling rock.”
Ellen stepped barefoot down the slushy metal stairs of the trailer and saw that he was right. Destabilized by the blasting, rock had fallen onto the cutout. A boulder the size of a car had rolled just fifteen feet from her bedroom on the east side of the trailer. Thank god nothing had hit the equipment. She’d heard nothing, but since she’d learned to sleep through the blasting, it could have punched into her bedroom without waking her. She squinted up at the black shadow of the mountain. That mountain had become her enemy.
“Move the equipment,” her father said. “Then get up there and knock that stuff loose.”
“What do you suggest? Should I—”
“That’s for you to figure out.” His eyes narrowed. “Don’t let the men see you dressed like that.”
“They’re just pajamas, Dad. Don’t you wear pajamas?”
“Of course, but I’m not a woman.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” A hard edge slipped into her voice.
“I mean I see you on the job and you’re wearing slacks and something…I don’t know, feminine. A young woman in a hard hat. Hell, from a distance you look like my secretary.” Her father nodded. “I want to drive by and have a hard time telling if I’m looking at you or one of your brothers. Need the foremen and laborers to think the same thing. Get it? They’re construction workers.”
“Doesn’t give them the right to act like pigs.”
“That’s not what I mean. I’m not worried about some guy grabbing your ass. You can handle that. But let me tell you something, Ellen. You think I’ll still be here in ten years? Hell, I’ll be lucky to get five. One of you has got to take over. That’d be Davis, wouldn’t it, because he’s my oldest son. Only you told me the job is yours. Because you’re the oldest. Fine, I’ll forget you’re a woman, because you’re smart and work hard.”
She was speechless. Elwin Carter’s idea of a compliment was a semi-satisfied grunt. Competence didn’t merit a pat on the back; it was expected. And he’d just said she was a hard worker. Wow.
“But if you’re going to run this place, you can’t be a woman. Not even a hard-edged bitch who knows how to crack skulls. You’ve got to think like a man, act like a man, and when you’re on the job, you’ll look like one. Even if you have to sleep in overalls and a hardhat. We clear on that?”
“Yes.”
“Good. Now prove your brothers wrong. Get that pass open!” He turned and sloshed back to the car, which swerved around a fallen boulder and a hydraulic excavator to head back down the mountain.
Ellen looked over the cutout. She could push the trailer to one side but the machinery would have to go back down to the valley. She went inside, changed, gulped down a breakfast of coffee and toast and got to work. There was some talk of a Nor’easter starting that weekend; she needed to get that pass open before it snowed. She called in anyone with a CDL-A license.
Ten minutes later and she was on the radio with her brother, Bill. “We’ve got falling rock up here. I’ve got some equipment I need to drive down the mountain. I need your guys out of the way.”
“We’re torn up at the mile three elbow,” Bill said. “I’m running a culvert. You can’t get anything heavy down until this afternoon. Give me till four-thirty.”
“No good,” she said. “I can’t blast until I knock down the loose rock, and I can’t do that before I get this equipment out of the way.”
“What about the shoulder at mile five?” he asked.
That was no shoulder. That was a spur of the slump, the part of Dibble Mountain that had shrugged away after three weeks of heavy rain. The state of Maine had sent dozers and excavators to clear first the road, then, when that was abandoned, keep the channel open for Maple Brook. Twenty-four hours later, they’d given up as millions of tons of mud continued to slide into the valley. A lake had formed behind the dammed river, flooding dozens of homes and hundreds of acres of farmland in Moose Hollow.
Some of the landslide pressed against the new, higher road at mile five. It was stable enough that her brother had stored road base and gravel on the side next to the road.
“There’s no way in hell I’m going to park four hundred tons of equipment on that thing,” Ellen told Bill.
The radio crackled. “What’s your choice? Let it get crushed by falling rock?”
“Or you could fill that hole and let me back down the mountain.”
“Can’t do that, Ellen. I’ll lose half a day. Look, that cutout is stable. I’ve got the seismic report right in front of me. It’s settled eight centimeters since January and nothing for three weeks. I don’t know what things look like up there, but if I were you I’d get that stuff down here. You could ask Dad.”
That wasn’t an option. Not after Dad’s speech. “And you’d park on it?”
“I already have. Got three trucks out there already.”
But an hour later, when she was on the edge of the slump, she saw Bill’s so-called trucks. They were half-ton pickups. She had thirty ton compactors, fifty ton hydraulic excavators, sixty ton scrapers, and even a hundred ton wheeled dozer. There was a whole line of machines snaking up the mountain. The air filled with the stink and rumble of diesel engines.
Her foreman, Harvey Drummond, pulled up his pickup truck and jumped down to face Ellen. “Jesus fucking Christ, Carter. You’re going to park on that thing?”
Drummond was in his mid-fifties, his face jowled and his nose thick and pockmarked, his skin tanned to the consistency of leather. He’d worked his way up from laborer and still had the forearms of a longshoreman. You never saw Drummond’s men standing around, watching one guy work an excavator. Men from his crews regularly won productivity awards and the fat bonuses that came with same. Elwin Carter paid Drummond what he was worth; Ellen had seen the man’s paychecks.
“Bill said it was stable.”
“Yeah, he did?” Drummond looked around. “Where is your brother?”
“Not here, but he swore this thing was good.”
A grunt. “Well that’s not enough for me. I want to see some paperwork.”
This was just the sort of man her father had been talking about. If she couldn’t win over Drummond she may as well put on heels and lipstick and work behind a desk, because she’d never get anywhere on the job site.
“Listen, Drummond, I’ve got half the fucking mountain falling down on me. Boulder damn near crushed me in my sleep. Bill said he looked at the seismic report and he’s had his guys measure slump. He says it’s stable. Now let’s get this equipment parked, get our work done on Dibble Mountain and get our stuff back up there. It’ll be here, what? Two, three hours?”
A moment of hesitation. “Yeah, all right. Long as you’re sure about that seismic.”
Drummond was cautious as he helped her position the equipment, putting nothing close to the edge. It meant that by the time they pulled the last scraper into place, it hung three feet onto the new road, which was no good, because it blocked even the smaller trucks from using the road. She and Drummond had another argument, before he finally agreed to move something forward. They found the most stable, widest part of the slump and directed the driver to inch forward with an articulated hauler/ejector. Ellen stood at the rear.
“Another six inches,” she called.
The wheels began to
turn, the treads gripping the muddy ground. And then they started spinning and Ellen frowned, her mind not yet grasping what was happening. Only they were spinning because they were off the ground and they were spinning in reverse. The whole nose of the truck was sinking, lifting the back end. Drummond and the driver shouted at each other and then the driver threw himself from the cab. He scrambled away on all fours, heedless of mud or snow. The truck leaned over the edge of the slump.
“No,” she whispered. Then cried, “No!” as she ran toward the cab.
The edge of the hillside sloughed away and the truck slid straight down. She ran to the edge, forgetting safety even as the other drivers and men sprinted toward the road, afraid the entire hill might collapse. She got there just in time to see the truck mow through a stand of small trees at the bottom of the hill. It crushed into a massive oak tree and snapped the thing like a toothpick. But the tree brought it to a stop.
Ellen stared down, her mind racing as to how she could recover the truck before her father came. It looked surprisingly undamaged. And the driver had jumped out, right? She’d have to move the rest of the trucks at once, but—
And then she looked around for Drummond and realized he was nowhere to be seen. He’d stood in front of the hauler, directing it toward the edge. He must have slipped when trying to get out of the way. She turned, her hand clamped over her mouth, fighting back a scream.
They found Drummond’s body pulped between the truck’s grill and the stump of the oak tree. They called paramedics, but it was a recovery operation, not a rescue.
Elwin Carter dressed down Bill, Davis, and Ellen as soon as he returned from the hospital with Drummond’s body. He directed most of his wrath toward his daughter. She listened while he raged, then offered her defense.
“Bill told me that hillside was stable. Bill, you have the seismic report. Show him.”
But Bill didn’t have the seismic report. He denied any such conversation, expressed bewilderment that Ellen would have dreamed of parking on the edge of the landslide. Anyone could see it was a disaster waiting to happen. If he’d only known—god, if he’d only known!—he’d have rushed up here and overruled her. And of course, more than one driver had overheard Ellen and Drummond arguing about safety.
The Devil's Deep Page 13
