Anyone But You

by K. G. MacGregor

  “I can go somewhere else if it’s easier.”

  “No, I like it there. With the parking garage, I don’t feel so exposed.” It was a half hour until checkout and already she was fantasizing about their next time together. “Can’t wait to use my little vibrator tonight, especially since the last person it touched was you.”

  “And when I want to remember you, I’ll just eat a juicy peach.” Stacie’s main phone rang, the first time all weekend, and her brow wrinkled as she checked the number. “Sorry, I need to take this.”

  As she disappeared behind the bathroom door, Cathryn closed her laptop and packed the last of her belongings. She couldn’t be annoyed at the intrusion since she’d spent practically the entire morning answering work-related emails. All in all they’d done well to turn off their jobs for the weekend but it was time to get back to reality.

  “Is everything all right?”

  Stacie smiled. “It’s fine. I just need to meet someone this afternoon when I get back to town. And no, it wasn’t some hot chick on SappHere.”

  “Good thing. Fooling around with other women could be hazardous to your health,” Cathryn said with a playful sneer. “Should I be on the lookout for any surprises this week?”

  “Not that I know of, but the week is young.” Her smile faded and when she spoke again, her voice was serious. “I’ll do my best not to blindside you again, Cathryn. You should know that one of my friends sneaked out to the lake and took some more samples. I dropped them off for analysis on Friday at the Department of Health. I know what you said about this being heavy oil, but it sure looks like bitumen to me.”

  “It isn’t just what I said. I’ve seen the preliminary results from the EPA’s report. Ninety thousand gallons of heavy crude. That’s it, and they’re digging out the last little bit right now. Between you and me and the bedpost, I’ll admit Nations Oil was careless. They should have done maintenance on that pipeline. I wish I could tell you they learned their lesson, but we both know it could happen again tomorrow. If you ask me, that’s an argument for why we need to build the Caliber Pipeline, because there’s still a lot of oil in America’s future and it ought to be transported safely.”

  “The reason there’s oil in our future is because no one is investing in the alternatives. Our taxes are subsidizing the oil industry, whose profits are already obscene.”

  “And every government pension fund in America reaps the benefits.”

  “Come on, Cathryn. You make it sound like it’s a public good.”

  “If you live in Texas, it is. Forty million dollars in wages every year.”

  “But at what cost to the rest of us?”

  “Have you seen what people in Europe pay for gas? How do you think Americans would feel about forking over ten dollars a gallon at the pump?”

  “They might as well, instead of hiding the true costs inside our tax structure. What if we taxed all the oil companies at a fair rate and put our subsidies toward clean energy development? High-speed rail, mass transit, green space, retro-fitting public buildings with eco-friendly technology.”

  Cathryn had heard it all before, and knew exactly where to push back. “That might work for people in New York, but what about the farmers and plumbers in Kansas? Or the teachers and nurses? They all have to get to work, and you can’t move a rural population with mass transit.”

  “But there’s no good reason their cars and trucks can’t be electric with zero emissions. Our tax dollars should be going toward that technology.” Obviously, Stacie had heard it all before as well.

  “And where do you think all that electricity comes from? You can’t store wind and solar power.”

  The amazing aspect of their point-counterpoint, Cathryn realized, was that both were passionate, maybe even a little agitated, but so far neither had risen to anger. They just disagreed. That didn’t mean it was a pleasant conversation, and she wished they’d stuck to their pact not to talk about work.

  “They can’t store it right now. Let’s see if research dollars can change that,” Stacie said. “We have to pull our investments out of the past and look to the future. You don’t start a diet by saying you’re going to eat all the junk food in the world first. You guys have already picked the low-hanging fruit. With every year that goes by, a gallon of gas costs you more money, more energy and more resources to produce. And it’s taking a bigger toll on the planet. I understand the profit motives. They’re selfish as hell, but at least they’re rational. What I don’t get is how seemingly intelligent people can deny the science and justify destroying the planet their grandchildren are going to inherit. The only thing I can figure is they must be counting on passing their money down so their family can blast off in a spaceship to an unspoiled world.”

  “You’re one to talk about money, Stacie. You’ve never not had it.” With that retort, Cathryn knew she’d stepped over the line, and felt bad immediately.

  Stacie was clearly stung and reacted by retreating across the room, where she folded her arms and assumed a defiant posture. “That’s true for Hoss Bower too. His family practically started the Texas oil boom, and he’s never wanted for anything in his life. The difference between Hoss and me is what we do with our money. He spends his to make more. I spend mine to make better.”

  “I’m sorry I said that. It was out of line.” She rubbed her face in her hands and sighed. “I should never have brought up work. I don’t want us to end our weekend like this. The rest of it was so sweet. We both have our jobs to do, and I know you’re not deliberately trying to hurt me. I’m not deliberately lying to you either.”

  “I know,” Stacie said, nodding solemnly. “This is all so ironic, you being the voice of an oil company. Why couldn’t you have been just an ax murderer instead?”

  “You’d really prefer that?”

  “Wouldn’t matter. I’ve already let my feelings slip out. As crazy as it is, I’ve managed to fall in love with you.”

  A warm shudder caused her to smile. “That’s got to be the most unromantic declaration of love I’ve ever heard.”

  “It was pretty awful, wasn’t it? Let me put it a different way.” She kissed each of Cathryn’s hands and guided them around her neck. “I’m crazy about you, and I’d go even crazier if you felt that way about me too.”

  “That was marginally better. Now kiss me while I pretend to act like I’m still thinking about it while in fact my little heart is doing cartwheels around the room.”

  “Cartwheels, huh?” Stacie kissed her gently at first but then with enough passion to nearly drive them back into bed. “This…what we feel…it’s precious. We have to find a way to make it last.”

  They could do that, but only as long as they kept their relationship hidden from their friends and co-workers. Cathryn appreciated her privacy, but she didn’t care much for high-stakes secrets. The stress of worrying she’d be found out would wear on her over time. The question was whether or not Stacie was worth it. Right now the answer was yes.

  * * *

  Stacie juggled the steering wheel with her elbows while adjusting the earbuds she had plugged into Marlene. “Okay, I’ve got it now. What were you saying?”

  Jenn was still chuckling with her news. “Izzy was crawling around in the woods and got into a bed of poison ivy. He called begging us to bring him some itch cream. Marty’s in the pharmacy right now picking it up.”

  So far Stacie had handled all the secret drops. “Did he tell you where the culvert was? I usually pull off just past the first bridge on State Road 194. That way I can walk along the edge of the woods over to Lake Bunyan Road.”

  “Yeah, he told us to come just before dark. That’s about three hours from now. He’s going to sneak out around midnight to pick it up, if he can last that long.”

  “That’s dangerous. They’ll be out on patrol.”

  “He sounds pretty desperate. What about you? Did you have a good time? You should be well past the U-Haul stage by now, or is this a different woman?”


  For obvious reasons, Stacie had shared very few details about who she was seeing, a fact made easier by staying at the hotel downtown. One of these days she’d come clean with Jenn, but not until this episode was well behind them. “I had a great time but that U-Haul thing is a little tricky since neither of us lives in Duluth. But if I need any help moving, you’ll be the first person I ask.”

  The call she’d taken earlier in the bathroom was from Brian Murray, who had some urgent news to share. She bypassed her hotel and followed Marlene’s directions to Colleen’s house.

  Brian met her at the door, his eyes burning with anger. “We got the son of a bitch.”

  “Are you serious?” She followed him into the living room where Colleen, still in her neck brace, was sitting on the couch. Stacie joined her and carefully patted her knee. “Feeling better?”

  “Anything’s better than being in the hospital.”

  A stack of photos sailed across the coffee table as Brian pulled up another chair. “See for yourself. There were some pictures from the rally in the newspaper, and my investigator noticed you could see the parking lot in the background in one of them. He went down to the paper and asked the photographer if he could look through all his shots, and there was this one.” He laid out a photo and pointed to a blurry figure squatted beside a car. “That’s Mom’s car, and you can tell this guy’s messing with it.”

  The figure had a full head of dark hair and appeared to be wearing jeans and a red T-shirt, but his face was unrecognizable from this distance. “Is this the clearest picture he had?”

  “From that angle, yes. So then he looked through the pictures of the crowd to see if he could find anyone dressed like that, and here he is on his way over to the car.” In the second photo, the man was walking from the rally toward the parking lot, but this time he was facing away from the camera.

  “Could have been anybody.”

  “Could have…but then here’s the money shot.”

  The third photo caused her stomach to drop. The man—same jeans and T-shirt with dark, bushy hair—stood behind the volunteer table. It was Marty Wingate.

  “Oh, shit. I know him.”

  That explained what happened to her first set of samples, and also how the SWAT team had found them at the farmhouse. Marty was selling them out to Depew. He’d been seeing Jenn for three months, and while CLEAN had tangled with Karl Depew on several occasions, she never once considered he might try to infiltrate their group. That kind of subterfuge required cunning and patience, and Depew favored the sledgehammer approach.

  There was another possibility, one she could barely bring herself to acknowledge—the feds. Big Oil had lots of important friends. They bought a lot of influence with their campaign contributions and what they expected in return was for the government to do their bidding. Organizations like CLEAN got in their way.

  It was no accident the SWAT team had treated them like terrorists. That’s how they justified what they did, as if disrupting the fossil fuel industry’s profits were a threat to national security.

  No, it couldn’t be the feds, she realized. They could be unscrupulous but there was no way they’d allow an undercover agent to have a sexual relationship with a target. Marty “belonged” to someone else, or perhaps he was an independent contractor like all the former cops and military tough guys that made up Depew’s security brigade. They weren’t bound by laws, nor apparently ethics.

  Based on the investigator’s speculation that the accident should have happened in the parking lot, Marty probably hadn’t meant to hurt Colleen, though he was still responsible for her injuries. “Brian, you realize we can’t prove he did this from a blurry photo, even if we’ve got him kneeling next to your mom’s car. He could say he dropped his keys or something, and all the other physical evidence has been compromised.”

  “I’m not interested in proving anything. I just want to beat the shit out of him.”

  As tempted as she was to let that happen, Stacie had other problems, including the fact that Marty was about to discover the location of their drop zone at the lake. She needed to warn Izzy.

  “Can I keep these photos?”

  “Sure. He gave me digital copies.”

  In exchange for Brian’s promise not to track down Marty and beat him to a pulp, she gave up his name and the fact that he might have a Colorado driver’s license, since that’s where he and Jenn had met. His investigator could dig into Marty’s background and find out who his contacts were.

  The moment she got back in her car, she dialed Izzy. “You guys need to bug out fast. This new boyfriend of Jenn’s, he’s somebody’s snitch and now he knows where you are. If you go anywhere near the culvert, you’ll be walking into a trap.”

  With Izzy looking at an online map of the perimeter road, they planned an alternate rendezvous location and a pickup time an hour before Jenn and Marty were to drop off the lotion. Once her friends were safe, she’d figure out how to break the news to Jenn. Even more important was seeing that Marty got what was coming to him.

  Chapter Twelve

  “This doesn’t make any sense,” Woody said. His hair was standing on end from where he’d rubbed his head in frustration. “I must be reading it wrong.”

  Cathryn walked around his desk to peer at the spreadsheet on his screen. The tables charted the flow of oil from one pump station to the next, beginning at the Provincial Oil Fields and ending at the port in Hartford, Illinois. “What’s the problem?”

  “These are the numbers from twenty-four hours on each side of when we first heard about the spill. We had over half a million gallons go through the pump station at Canosia. That’s the last one before the rupture. The next one’s down at Cloquet and here’s what passed through there.”

  “A hundred thousand and change.”

  He tapped the numbers into a calculator. “So that’s about four hundred thousand gallons we have to account for.”

  “Ninety thousand of which was spilled.”

  “Right. Larry said the contractors got down here and sealed the leak within six hours, so the rest of it had to be stuck in the pipe. It couldn’t go down to Cloquet because they’d shut down the pump.”

  “And they recovered it and trucked it down to Hartford. That’s what all those tankers were doing here when we first arrived.”

  “That’s what I thought.” He clicked a tab to switch to a new spreadsheet. “Except if you look at the transport logs, they couldn’t have moved that much.”

  At nine thousand gallons each, there weren’t enough tankers to move it all. “You’re still missing at least two hundred thousand gallons.” That was a lot of loose change, but she was convinced they were overlooking something obvious.

  “The first tanker convoy was subbed out from Childers Oil in South Dakota, and we paid mileage for them to go back to Sioux Falls. Since when do we ship oil there? It should have gone down to Hartford.”

  “Woody, there’s no way two hundred thousand gallons of heavy crude just disappears.”

  He threw up his hands and shook his head. “That’s why I’m pulling my hair out, because here’s where it gets really screwy. Thirteen hours after they shut off the pump, another two hundred thousand gallons went through Canosia. Why would you send oil through a pipeline you know is broken?”

  Woody was right. The numbers made no sense, but Cathryn was even more convinced the flow management software had somehow failed. “The time stamp has to be off or something. That would explain it. These numbers must be for the wrong date.”

  “It isn’t just the time stamp, Cathryn. The pressure went down too and so did the temperature. It’s like they flushed the pipes or something.”

  “Weird.” They needed high pressure and heat to move heavy oil.

  “I’m going to print this off and go ask Larry about it,” he said. “The answer’s probably staring us in the face, but if it isn’t, then something’s wrong with the software.”

  Cathryn had studied reports like these for years and
never had trouble making sense of the numbers. If there were a glitch in the software, it would show up across all their pumping stations, not just the two on either side of the spill. There was another explanation…and she didn’t like it. Using the thumb drive on her keychain, she downloaded Woody’s files to study later.

  Amy entered the trailer, her eyes wide with excitement. Cathryn had sent her to the other side of the lake to scout the public park for next week’s press conference with Senator Washburn. “You won’t believe what I just saw. There’s a bunch of storm troopers over there on the other side of the lake. They’ve got guns and helmets and who knows what else, and they’re going from one cabin to another. No idea what they’re looking for but they scared me half to death.”

  Cathryn knew exactly what they were looking for—Stacie’s friends, the ones who were flying drones overhead and taking pictures of the cleanup. The show of force was exactly like the one at the farmhouse where Stacie had been hurt. As much as she hated to admit it, there was little doubt Nations Oil was behind this one as well.

  When Amy stepped into the restroom, Cathryn sent a message through SappHere. “SWAT team at cabin now.”

  Moments later her pocket dinged. “Got it covered. Thx.”

  * * *

  Two cars were parked at the farmhouse, but that wasn’t unusual because the volunteers often rode into town with Jenn. Stacie hoped that was the case today because what she needed to do required total secrecy. After checking the house to make sure she was alone, she set to work in the room Jenn and Marty shared.

  It bothered her to violate their sacred rule against getting into other people’s belongings, but she had to know for sure if Marty Wingate was a spy. All night she’d tossed and turned, halfway convincing herself it was only circumstantial, that maybe Marty really had just dropped his keys near Colleen’s car and she was getting paranoid over nothing. The text this morning from Cathryn, however, made that unlikely. It couldn’t be coincidence Depew’s SWAT team stormed the cabin only hours after Marty learned where it was.