Slow Burn

by Andrew Welsh-Huggins

  “You’ve talked?”

  “We were on a panel at the Metropolitan Club last year. ‘The Future of Fracking.’”

  “How’d that go?”

  “Let’s just say neither of us behaved as well as we should have and both of us agreed it had been a mistake.”

  “Magnanimous of you.”

  “I try,” he said, tipping his glass toward me.

  “Bottom line, you disagree with their findings.”

  “That’s correct.”

  “The No. 5 is what they call an injection well.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Class II, if I have my terminology right.”

  “Correct again.”

  “You inject the leftover fracking waste down these wells.”

  “A little more complicated than that, but yes, that’s essentially right.”

  “Some of these wells have been linked to earthquakes.”

  “Some,” Dickinson said. “Key word being linked. There’s a lot of debate about this right now.”

  “The ones in Youngstown in 2011 seemed pretty definite.”

  “I’ll concede those.”

  “But not the Knox No. 5.”

  “Definitely not.”

  “Which Appletree owns.”

  “We have an exclusive contract with the outfit that operates it,” he said. “More or less the same.”

  “And Appletree is a fracking company.”

  “We’re an energy company that drills wells of all kinds looking for oil and gas. Traditional vertical wells along with the horizontal wells associated with hydraulic fracturing.”

  I wondered if he knew Glen Murphy. Was not in the mood to find out.

  “Appletree’s a pretty big company,” I said.

  “Yes, it is.”

  “Big, and growing.”

  “Something we haven’t made a secret of. There are tremendous opportunities in Ohio. Our geologists say the Utica Shale could hold trillions of cubic feet of natural gas.”

  “That’s a lot of fracking.”

  “Which we’ll do in a safe and highly regulated environment.”

  “And the leftovers from the fracking, the brine?”—he nodded—“is going to need to be stored someplace. Like the No. 5.”

  “The wastewater is a byproduct of the process. It has to go somewhere.”

  “What’s in it? The brine, I mean.”

  “Numerous chemicals, along with water.”

  “What kind of chemicals?”

  “Proprietary information. No offense.”

  “None taken,” I said. “But you’ve got a lot at stake with the No. 5. Anybody ever proves that caused the quake, the state would shut it down. Just like in Youngstown. And maybe the company’s other wells as well. And where would that leave Appletree?”

  “We’re a big company,” Dickinson said. “Just like you said. We have plenty of options.”

  “Really?” I said. “Pennsylvania banned additional brine waste storage, and New York State sure as hell doesn’t want it. Sending it west, to Oklahoma or Texas? That’s going to lop a lot off your profit margin.”

  “Andy Hayes, hydraulic fracturing expert?”

  “I’m just saying Ohio injection wells make the most sense for Appletree operations in the state.”

  Dickinson paused and took a drink of his wine.

  “We anticipate a favorable report from the state’s review of the Knox No. 5.”

  “Gridley says you’re lobbying the hell out of regulators. Throwing money around to get the result you want.”

  “My job is to make our case. Something Gridley seems to have an issue with.”

  “When’s the report due?”

  “June 1. Thereabouts. Which brings me to your call.”

  “Yes.”

  “This document. Appletree’s name is on it.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Mind if I look at it?”

  I pulled a sheet of paper out of the jacket of my sport coat and handed it to him.

  He unfolded it, took in the contents. His eyes gave nothing away. After a minute he refolded it and handed it back.

  “Mean anything to you?” I said.

  “Mind if I ask where you got that?”

  “Proprietary information,” I said. “No offense.”

  He smiled. “I’ll rephrase. Are you working on something involving Knox No. 5?”

  “I don’t believe so.”

  “Meaning?”

  I explained what led me to the document, without giving away its source.

  “Aaron Custer innocent? That’s nuts.”

  “You wouldn’t be the first person to allege that.”

  “And without telling me where you got this, you obviously stumbled across it looking into the fire.”

  “I prefer ‘obtained’ to ‘stumbled,’ but that’s about it. Now my turn: do you know Kim McDowell?”

  “I know who she was, of course.”

  “Worked for Pendergrass.”

  “That’s right.”

  I tapped my coat pocket. “Pendergrass’s name is on this piece of paper. As is Appletree’s.”

  “I don’t dispute it.”

  “So what’s the connection.”

  “Back to Door No. 1,” he said. “Proprietary information.”

  “Handy, that response.”

  “With the added fact of being accurate.”

  “So you can’t say more?”

  “Let’s just say I could be persuaded to say more if you could be moved to tell me where you got that.”

  “Ye Olde Standoff,” I said.

  “Apparently.”

  We each paid a visit to our drink.

  “Interesting business you’re in,” Dickinson said.

  “Beg your pardon?”

  “Private investigator.”

  “It has its moments.”

  “I’m sure it does. But maybe not the highest-paying gig in the land?”

  “I do OK.”

  “And to judge by the way you walk, physically demanding?”

  “I limp because I played football, not because of my job.”

  “Ever thought of corporate work?”

  “Such as?”

  “Corporate security. Protecting the assets and personnel of a business.”

  “Not really. Why?”

  “We could use someone like you. You can imagine what we deal with. The threats. Potential sabotage. Our industry’s a bull’s-eye for fanatics.”

  “Like Tanner Gridley?”

  “Like fanatics.”

  “You’re offering me a job.”

  “You interested?”

  “I’m interested in why you’re offering me a position on our first date. I thought we were talking about Knox No. 5.”

  “So we were. But I’d rather discuss it with a colleague, a fellow employee. Someone who has the same logo on his paycheck.”

  I thought about this for a second. “I go to work for Appletree, I find out some things about the well that right now you can’t tell me. Proprietary information and all that.”

  “You go to work for Appletree at a significant bump up from whatever you’re making now. Significant, if you catch my drift. And yes, we could talk about the well more freely. You and me both.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Just that I think there are some things you could tell me, if you had the professional freedom.”

  “Like what?”

  “I’m not sure. Care to offer a teaser?”

  I ignored the question. What interested me was the slightest shift in his gaze as he’d asked the question. I turned and for the first time noticed a man sitting across the room, checking his phone and pretending not to look at us. He was big and wearing a dark suit that didn’t fit him nearly as well as Dickinson’s did him. His short-cropped hair, square chin, and rearranged nose screamed ex-cop or ex-military. Or both.

  “Friend of yours?” I said.

  “In a manner of sp
eaking. That’s Rick Peirce. Head of Appletree security. Thought I’d invite him along.”

  “But not to sit at the grown-ups’ table?”

  “He’ll join us depending on how this conversation goes.”

  “How delightful.”

  “It’s Peirce, by the way. E before I.”

  “OK.”

  “Very sensitive about it.”

  “I bet,” I said, keeping an eye on said security director.

  “So what about it?” Dickinson said.

  “All right,” I said. “Humor me.”

  He did so, giving me a ballpark estimate of the money I could earn if I went to work for his thuggish-looking colleague. He was right. It was significant. To my credit, I barely dropped my jaw.

  After a moment, I said, “I’d have to drop my investigation. Into the fire.”

  “Probably.”

  “That would disappoint a paying client.”

  “Custer’s grandmother?”

  “That’s right.”

  Dickinson placed both arms on the bar. “Dropping the investigation really that big a deal? That kid did it. I know it, and I’m guessing you know it, too.”

  “Jury’s still out.”

  Dickinson looked at his watch. TAG Heuer. I’ve had more than one car that cost less.

  “Another appointment?”

  “I made us dinner reservations at Hyde Park.”

  “Did you now,” I said. The steak restaurant in the Short North was a five-minute walk from where we sat.

  He said, “Hoping we could celebrate the beginning of a beautiful relationship.”

  “I’d need time to think about it,” I said. “It’s a big proposition.”

  “Yes, it is,” he said.

  “That’s a lot of money.”

  “I was hoping you’d feel that way.”

  “Decent bennies, too, I’m guessing.”

  “The best,” he said.

  “Figured as much. As long as we’re down to brass tacks, OK if I make a counteroffer? In the spirit of negotiation?”

  “Be my guest. I’m authorized to hear you out.”

  “OK,” I said. “How about, instead of me going to work for you and Rambo over there, you just drop the bullshit and tell me what I’ve got in my coat pocket.”

  “That’s your response?”

  “That’s it. I can’t afford a blow job in the form of a fancy steak dinner, but I’d be happy to squeeze your pipe for a couple minutes behind the curtains here. If it’s all right with your friend Rick. How about it?”

  “Don’t be crass. Do you know what you’re turning down?”

  “I know the difference between a job offer and a bribe, if that’s what you’re asking.”

  “We join forces, everyone wins. Otherwise . . .”

  “Otherwise what?” I looked in Peirce’s direction. He’d stopped pretending to play solitaire on his phone and was staring at me.

  “Otherwise we go our separate ways and you have plenty of time to think about the biggest mistake you’ve ever made.”

  “Now you’re just being stupid,” I said. “The biggest mistake I ever made was on national TV for a week. What I did was so bad, I’m in books. My threshold for caring about my mistakes is very, very low.”

  “You need to watch yourself,” Dickinson said. “You don’t really know what you’re saying.”

  “You’re screwing this up,” I said. “This is the part where you go, ‘You don’t know who you’re dealing with here.’”

  “Are you always such an asshole?”

  “Only when I’m with one,” I said.

  I drained my beer. No sense letting a good drink I wasn’t paying for go to waste. Then I stood up.

  “Last chance,” Dickinson said.

  “Get it right,” I said. “It’s ‘Last chance, or else.’”

  I turned and walked away from the bar. Peirce stood up and, while not exactly blocking my way, did not exactly not block it either. I thought about giving him a shoulder shove, like in the movies, but I was guessing that, unlike in the movies, I’d be doing an involuntary face plant a moment later. Ex-cop or whatever, he looked like the real deal. Not like a guy who let himself go to seed because of a Labrador’s sore paw.

  Instead, I nodded as I moved around him. He nodded back, his face unreadable. Calm and collected. Like he had all the time in the world to deal with thickheaded gumshoes like me.

  29

  I woke up to the good news Friday morning that Dorothy’s check had cleared and I wasn’t facing bankruptcy after all. I tempered this development with the realization that another week had passed and she was in arrears again.

  She didn’t seem overly concerned when I explained the situation over the phone. An hour later I was in her living room holding another check and accepting more apologies for the snafu.

  I updated her on my conversations of the past few days.

  “You think there’s something to this?” she said. “This gang, going after Jacob Dunning?”

  “I’m bothered by it,” I said. “It doesn’t change anything that we know, including all the evidence against Aaron. But it hasn’t been checked out by anybody, and that makes me nervous.”

  “The U.S. attorney. He didn’t think much of it.”

  “He put on a good show of not thinking much of it. That doesn’t mean he’s not checking it out himself.”

  “You haven’t heard back from Aaron yet? About what Helen Chen said?”

  I shook my head.

  “I will admit,” she said, “it’s not what I’d hoped for when I first called you.” Then she added, quickly, “Which is not to say I’m not impressed with what you’ve uncovered. You’ve worked hard, and I’m so sorry about the check. I was just hoping for more by now.”

  “You and me both.”

  Dorothy’s compliments about my work ethic and apologies about the bounced check didn’t keep me from driving straight to the nearest bank and pulling up to a pneumatic tube station to deposit that week’s payment. I had just sent the check flying toward the teller when my phone rang with an unfamiliar number. The speaker squawked with a question about checking or savings, and I let it go to voice mail. I got another call after that from the American Red Cross, looking for blood donors, and a call after that from someone whose dachshund was missing and was I available. Tired of the interruptions, I gave the phone a time-out in the glove compartment and drove away from the bank and on to my next destination.

  Pendergrass Research occupies almost an entire block along Neil, and although its modern brick architecture hardly matched the restored houses in surrounding Victorian Village, with their gables and turrets and porch spindles, the attention it had paid to landscaping and preserving as many trees as possible gave it the feeling of a friendly nearby campus.

  That feeling evaporated when I went inside and handed my card to the grumpy receptionist sitting at an ultramodern desk that looked like something straight off a Dakota Jackson showroom floor. She was young, with short, dyed-black hair, orange-frame glasses, and a stud in her nose bigger than the one Karen Feinberg wore but not nearly as classy. I explained who I was and why I was there. She listened icily. Several minutes passed while she made a series of phone calls she did not appear happy about, and I bided my time on a couch and pawed through copies of Scientific American and several specialized journals devoted to chemistry, physics, and geology.

  Just as I was preparing to ask Ms. Orange Glasses what the delay might be, a frosted-glass door to the right of her desk opened and a worried-looking man stepped through. He had closely cropped blond hair, a nicely tailored dark suit, and an accent, which I deduced from extensive experience watching back-to-back episodes of Wallander sounded Scandinavian.

  He introduced himself and we traded business cards, from which exercise I learned he was Erik Petersson, Pendergrass vice president of strategic research.

  “Where did you get this?” he said when I showed him the copy of the document from Matt’s papers.


  “Friend of a friend,” I said.

  “That’s a proprietary report,” he said stiffly. “It’s not something meant for the general public.”

  Proprietary. Same word Dickinson had used.

  “I guessed that,” I said. “I’m just wondering what it is. It seems to be related to the Knox No. 5.”

  “I couldn’t really say. I’d need the entire log.”

  “So it’s a log.”

  “Something like that.”

  “If I provided the whole log, would you tell me more about it?”

  “As I said, it’s proprietary.”

  “I understand the need to protect your research information,” I said.

  “Thank you.”

  “So what if I shred the original when I’m finished with it. To ensure no one else sees it.”

  “No,” he said, a little too quickly. “That would be worse. Destruction of private property.”

  “But don’t you have a copy? Something stored electronically?”

  He seemed to wrestle with this question for a moment. Then he said, “Generally, yes, that’s true. With this type of material.”

  “Then why do you need what I’ve got?”

  “It’s not a public document,” he said. “There shouldn’t be any loose copies out there.”

  “Loose lips sink ships?”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Just an expression.”

  “I appreciate you bringing this to our attention,” Petersson said. “I’d be grateful if you could provide us the log. The original.”

  I glanced at the reception desk and caught Orange Glasses staring at me.

  I said, “That was good news about Buddy Keeler.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “The man they arrested for killing Kim McDowell. It must be a relief.”

  “Yes, of course,” Petersson said.

  “Wasn’t one of your concerns she might have been the victim of corporate espionage?”

  “It’s terrible what happened to Kim. She was a promising researcher.”

  “What was she working on?”

  He frowned. “She had various areas,” he said.

  When he didn’t elaborate, I said, “Let me guess. Proprietary?”

  “That’s right.”

  I took the paper out of his hand. I don’t think he wanted to let it go. I said, “Could it have had anything to do with this log?”