Missing Justice sk-2

by Alafair Burke

cabinets, that kind of thing." Then I remembered I wasn't just a

  sympathetic human being; I was a prosecutor. "Look around if you

  choose to as a private party, I mean, not as an agent of the

  government."

  I could almost hear a small smile. "I get what you're saying. And,

  Samantha, thanks a lot."

  "No problem."

  I hung up pleased that I had earned Susan's trust. Even though

  prosecutors aren't victims' attorneys, they should in most cases be

  their advocates. If I could handle a busy caseload and still find time

  and compassion for the people in that caseload, I'd be proud of my

  job.

  I went back to searching for the envelope from Jenna Mark-son, working

  backward from my office, starting with the mail slots on the sixth

  floor. It could have been worse. The envelope hadn't made it into the

  slot for MCU, but I found it when I pawed through a bin of mail left in

  front of the boxes. The mail guy had probably checked out at precisely

  5 p.m.

  Inside I found the printouts Jenna had run on Gunderson. They

  contained exactly what I was looking for: a list of the properties

  Gunderson had owned when he had filed for Chapter 11.

  It was too late to get into the public library's archives to do the

  research I was planning, so I headed home for a long run before Chuck

  was scheduled to show up. By the time I finished, I had mustered up

  the energy to call my father, but all I got was his machine. I hung up

  without leaving a message.

  When Chuck showed up twenty minutes late with beer on his breath, I was

  good and didn't ask him where he'd been. Then he was better and

  apologized for being late, explaining how he'd gotten trapped at a

  sit-down with Calabrese. Apparently Mike and his wife were having a

  hard time adjusting to life with a new baby.

  We were total gluttons and ordered a large pie from Pizza-cata half

  pepperoni for him, half goat cheese and artichoke for me. An hour and

  a bottle of chianti later, we were starting to fool around on the sofa

  while Chris Matthews and his guests played hardball. Some folks might

  have a problem getting turned on with talking heads going at each other

  in the background, but with Chuck and me, anything could lead to

  fore-play, even those icky surgery shows. One minute I'm trying to

  grab the remote from him, and the next, we've got our own doctor show

  going on my coffee table.

  Around the time Chuck had flung my bra into the empty pizza box and I

  was beyond caring, the phone rang. I started to wiggle out from

  beneath him, but his warm breath in my ear stopped me. "Don't even try

  it."

  I heard my own voice on the machine. "You've reached Sam and Vinnie.

  Maybe we're home, maybe not. At the tone, proceed at your own risk."

  "Hi uh, sorry to call so late. I'm going to assume that's a joke so I

  can hold on to my remaining self-esteem in the event no one picks up.

  This is a message for Samantha Kincaid."

  See? It works. Ever since Roger moved out and Vinnie moved in, my

  Frenchie had been my other half on the all-important outgoing message.

  No reason to advertise your woman-alone status to every creep out there

  dialing random numbers for kicks.

  "This is Graham Szlipkowski."

  My wiggling resumed. In fact, it escalated to an outright scramble.

  When Chuck realized I was serious about getting to the phone, he sat

  up, clearly frustrated.

  By the time I picked up, I heard Slip say, "I'm sorry to bother you on

  the weekend, but I need you to contact "

  "Slip, it's Samantha."

  "You mean I made the cut? I've earned some honors in my career, but

  "

  "Slip, it's eleven o'clock on a Friday night. Get to the point."

  "I looked at the present you dropped on me this afternoon. Needless to

  say, I want to check it out, the sooner the better."

  "So check it out," I said, "and tell me if you find anything."

  "That's why I'm calling so late. I want to track it down with the

  banks tomorrow, but the bureau won't release the key to my investigator

  without your OK."

  "That's fine. Whom do I need to call?"

  "I'm sorry about this, but they need a fax."

  What a pain in the ass. I jotted down the fax number for the property

  room and assured him I'd figure out something.

  When I hung up, Chuck threw me a skeptical look. "Why do I have a

  feeling that I don't want to know why a defense attorney's calling you

  at home?"

  "Because you probably don't."

  "Most guys, their girlfriend gets a phone call from another man late at

  night, it means one thing. If only I had it so good. Just promise me

  you're not doing anything dangerous."

  "Hardly, unless you consider clerical work dangerous." I tried to hide

  my glee that he'd used the girlfriend word. Down the road, he'd need

  to settle on more mature verbiage. For now, though, I reveled in the

  general sentiment.

  "Get back over here, then," he said.

  "Sorry. I've got one more thing to do. I can either drive to Kinko's

  or figure out how to send a fax on my computer."

  "You have no idea how to use your computer, do you?"

  "Sure. It's a giant typewriter with a button that puts me on the

  Internet."

  "I'll make a deal with you. I'll send your fax and you turn off

  Matthews and get your ass in bed. And no sleeping."

  It was a win-win situation.

  OOl

  Eleven.

  I kicked Chuck out the next morning so I could get to work, but not

  before convincing him to pull DMV photos of Larry Gunderson and Billy

  Minkins for me.

  At first he balked. "My lieutenant will be all over me about Saturday

  OT on Jackson," he said, "unless, of course, I can tell him why it was

  essential."

  When that didn't get an explanation out of me about who Gunderson and

  Minkins were and why I wanted their pictures, he finally relented. I

  was ready to go by noon.

  I'd get the pictures to Slip soon enough, but my first priority was the

  downtown public library.

  No doubt about it, the library crowd's an interesting one: Birkenstock

  moms, amateur academics, and burnt-out hippie homeless people, all in

  one quiet beautiful place.

  I pulled the volumes I was looking for and searched for an empty table.

  Finding a work spot was not an easy task, given my criteria: no

  children, schizoids, or stinky people.

  I finally dumped the books on a corner table, retrieved a county map

  and the envelope from Jenna Markson from my briefcase, and settled in

  for what I thought would be the first day in a full weekend of

  research. As it turned out, the task at hand tracking down Gunderson's

  stake in the urban growth boundary over the years was easier than I had

  imagined.

  First, I marked all of Gunderson's seven properties on the map. Without

  exception, the properties would have been considered the boonies when I

  was a kid, but they had been developed by the time I was out of

  college. The next step was to figure out where the properties fell

  along the growth
boundary.

  Fortunately, the library maintained a series of maps depicting the

  original boundary line and all the changes made in the twenty-five

  years since. The trend became obvious immediately. Six of Gunderson's

  seven properties fell just inside the original boundary line. The land

  would have been rural at the time, then made valuable by the sudden

  restriction against future growth. The seventh was brought within the

  urban area after the first boundary expansion.

  Either Larry Gunderson was the luckiest landowner in Portland or I was

  on to something.

  I found a records librarian and asked her if she could pull the

  legislative history for the Smart Growth Act, which had established the

  original growth boundary in the summer of 1980. She looked at me like

  I had to be kidding, then sighed heavily and walked away when she

  realized I wasn't.

  A good hour later, she reemerged with a handcart stacked with ragged

  and dusty binders. "I can't tell you exactly where it is in here, but

  each binder has an index by bill number. Do you need help finding the

  number too?"

  "No, I've got it. Thank you so much. I really appreciate it."

  I gathered from her look of confusion that she rarely heard those

  words.

  The rest of the afternoon was spent wading through hundreds of pages of

  legislative findings, debates, floor speeches, and other forms of word

  combinations that hardly deserve to be called part of the English

  language. Most of the talk was about whether to limit urban growth and

  how. What captured my attention, however, were the pages detailing the

  debates about where to draw the boundary line itself. I couldn't make

  sense of it all, so I fell back on my handy dandy anti confusion

  treatment, list-making.

  Using a legal pad, I listed the various property areas in dispute, then

  located each on my map. Four of the six Gunderson properties within

  the eventual boundary had not been included for development under the

  original proposal.

  Next I turned to the legislators involved in the debates, noting their

  names and where they stood on permitting development within each

  disputed geographic area. For the most part, predictable

  pro-development and pro-environment patterns emerged, with the act's

  opponents favoring open development across the board while proponents

  favored restrictions. But one legislator was clearly pushing the

  expansions that favored Gunderson more than he was pushing others:

  Representative Clifford Brigg.

  I went back to the records librarian and asked for anything she could

  give me on Brigg within six months of August 1980.

  "Unfortunately," she said, "the articles from back then aren't

  computerized, so you're going to have to do it by hand." She led me to

  a table in another corner that contained the old microfilm machines,

  pulled a couple of notebooks from a nearby shelf, and explained they

  were the indexes of Oregonian articles from 1980 through 1981. If I

  made a list of the ones I wanted to see, she'd pull the rolls of

  microfilm I needed.

  If it involved making a list, I could handle it.

  Brigg was no stranger to the press. Some of the articles appeared to

  concern the growth legislation, but most seemed campaign-related. It

  must have been a reelection year.

  I requested all the articles that looked like they might relate to the

  growth boundary and a handful of the ones about the campaign.

  My new best friend had the rolls of film in just a few minutes. After

  a quick refresher course on how to use the machine, I jumped in,

  turning first to the stories on the growth legislation.

  Most of the articles were brief, containing competing sound bites from

  developers and environmentalists, with a few remarks from legislators

  thrown in for flavor. But a longer feature offered a good overview of

  the debate and Brigg's role in it.

  The first section of the article described the rapid growth that was

  swallowing rural land along the 1-5 corridor from Salem to Seattle.

  Although the last decade had seen only an 8 percent increase in the

  population of the Willamette Valley, the geography of the urban area

  had sprawled 22 percent.

  The article explained the Smart Growth Act and the general policy

  arguments on each side of the debate. Planned growth versus the free

  market, environmental preservation versus human use of land, the

  collective good versus individual choice, open space versus affordable

  housing, blah blah blah.

  Then the writer got to Brigg:

  The future of the Smart Growth Act is likely to be determined by a

  handful of moderate legislators who appear to favor the theory of an

  urban growth boundary but who are focusing upon the particularities of

  how that boundary will be drawn. Key among these detail-oriented

  legislators is Rep. Clifford Brigg. Staff members to several other

  legislators report that Brigg has been active behind the scenes,

  working to ensure that the line is drawn to his satisfaction before he

  lends his support. In a statement issued in response to inquiries from

  the Oregonian about these reports, Brigg stated, "If we publicly

  debated every bit of minutia about every piece of legislation, we'd

  never get any work done as a body. So, yes, I have been talking to my

  colleagues about what I'd like to see in this legislation for me to

  support it. I'm in favor of the idea, but we need to do it right. My

  eventual vote will be public and open to scrutiny."

  As Brigg put it, all he was trying to do was to make sure that the line

  was drawn properly, so the prettiest, most sacred land wasn't turned

  into a Kmart. It sounded perfectly logical, but was it coincidence

  that Clifford Brigg's notion of smart growth just happened to deliver a

  windfall to Gunderson?

  Once I finished plodding through the Smart Growth articles, I had just

  enough time to take a quick look at the reelection stories before the

  library closed. The campaign pieces were quaint compared to today's

  politics: Brigg eats ice cream at a strawberry social, Brigg feeds

  ducks at the Rhododendron Gardens, Brigg is in favor of a new fire

  station.

  Then, in the background of the next photograph, I saw a familiar face

  in an unfamiliar uniform. The shot was a closeup of Brigg shaking

  hands with a former secretary of state who had come to town for a

  commencement speech. The face in the background was my father's.

  When I picture my father in his work gear, I see him in his standard

  green forest-ranger togs. Not that I'd remember it, but I didn't think

  I'd ever seen him in the Oregon State Police dress blues he wore in the

  photograph. Those would have been the exception even when he was a

  state trooper. For just a second, I enjoyed the chance to see my

  father as he was then. His light brown hair was silver now, and his

  face was thinner, but he was still just as handsome. I looked at the

  date of the article. Dad left the state for the forest service just

  two months later.

  Then, for reasons I did
n't fully understand, I found myself wishing I

  hadn't stumbled onto this picture at all. What was my father doing

  with a man like Clifford Brigg?

  I looked up to give my eyes a rest and to stretch my neck. When I had

  reached into a full extension on my right, I noticed a man standing by

  the table where my books of legislative history were still open. Did

  he want my table, the books, or maybe just to stand there being

  weird?

  Before I made it across the room he had disappeared behind a bookshelf

  next to the table. I took a quick tour of the floor, but he was

  nowhere to be found. Damn. There had been something familiar about

  him, but there was no way I was going to place him without a second

  look.

  I put an end to the search when the friendly librarian started making

  the rounds to tell everyone that the doors would be closing in ten

  minutes. I noticed that she looked directly at me when she mentioned

  our ability to support our local library by cleaning up after

  ourselves.

  I stole a final look at the photograph of my father. I felt foolish.

  My occasionally overactive imagination was at it again. No mystery men

  were following me, and my father wasn't wrapped up in anything

  nefarious with Clifford Brigg. Surely he was there as security for the

  event.

  I pushed print on the machine before tucking away the film. Dad would

  get a kick out of the picture, and he might even have some background