by Mike Markel
“That doesn’t sound good.” I was crying again.
“Don’t get ahead of yourself. It doesn’t necessarily mean anything.” Ryan paused. “It’s that man you were with? Earlier this year?”
I nodded.
“I’m sorry, Karen.”
“Let me put some clothes on.” I got out the cruiser and tried to run into my house but I slowed it to a walk when I felt some acid flowing north into my throat. It took me just a minute to throw on my Cop Casual outfit: a pair of wool slacks, a blouse, a sport coat, and pair of flats with thick soles in case I had to spend any time outside. I also grabbed a couple of Tylenol and swallowed them.
Getting dressed for work helped me focus. I really wanted to get back to thinking about the case, not about this mess with Mac. And I wanted Ryan to think of me as the senior detective, not as his fucked-up older sister who his mother told him he had to take care of.
I tried to lock my front door, but the frame was too busted up and the door wouldn’t even stay shut. I went back inside, grabbed a magazine rack and pushed it up against the door so it at least closed and looked normal. I left the house by the back door and made it to the driver’s side of the cruiser. Ryan lowered the window. “Let me drive,” I said.
“You sure?”
I opened the door and he got out. “All right,” I said when we got in the Charger. I looked at my watch: 8:42. “Thanks for letting me stop.”
“We’ll get to campus on time.”
On the way to the university, we went over our strategy for the interview. My usual approach is to display my stupidity and ignorance, the theory being that if the suspect is innocent, no harm done, but if he’s guilty, he’ll lie to us or at least mislead us, which might make it a little easier to catch him out.
Ryan was arranging some things in his leather briefcase. “I take it you want to stay away from her writing?”
“I’m not going there since I can’t figure out most of what she’s saying. But I’m fine with you doing whatever you want.”
We pulled into the lot at the Sciences Building on the Central Montana State University campus. There were only a handful of grumpy-looking students in sight. I was hot from all the heat the big engine in the cruiser pumped out, but the frigid air cut through my cloth coat when we walked the forty yards to the building.
We took the elevator to the third floor and found room 319.
I pointed to a shiny silver sign over the door. Rossman Mining Environmental Laboratory, it said. “Look at that,” I said.
“We should ask Dr. Wilcox about that,” he said.
The door was closed, but the light from inside was visible through the drawn blinds on the glass wall. I knocked.
Lauren Wilcox opened the door fast. She was about fifty, with too-long, frizzy salt-and-pepper hair parted down the middle. Her eyes, green with gold flecks, were bright. She looked at me, and then at Ryan, and broke into a big smile, showing long crow’s feet. “You the detectives?”
“Karen Seagate.” I gave her my official smile. “My partner, Detective Ryan Miner.”
She was wearing a thick plaid wool shirt, reds and tans, which I could tell was officially women’s only because the buttons were on the left. The brown corduroy pants and engineer’s boots could have gone either way. No jewelry, no rings, no makeup.
“This is our new home,” she said with a broad smile.
It was as big as the detectives’ bullpen back at headquarters, maybe twice the size of a standard classroom. Off to one side were some round tables for students. Along one wall were eight or ten different pieces of equipment, most of them with places in front where you would load in some kind of soil samples or liquids for testing. All of them had computer screens of various sizes, and a few of them were hooked up to wide printers.
But the star of the show was this enormous fish tank, maybe three feet wide and twenty feet long, with all kinds of plumbing running along the floor to feed it.
“This is our new flume,” Lauren Wilcox said, pointing to it like a proud mother. “Come take a look.” She walked me and Ryan over to it. “It’s a stream—but a stream we can control. We put the water in it.” She gestured to the wall where the tank was attached. There were knobs and controls and a big computer screen built into the wall. “But we put in exactly as much as we want, from any number of locations. And we put whatever we want on the stream bed.”
Ryan was wearing a big grin. “This is so cool,” he said. “You use this for showing fluid behavior?”
She cocked her head, surprised. “Yes, in the intro courses. Laminar and turbulent flow, sediment entrainment, transport, depositional processes. That kind of thing.”
“And in the advanced courses?” Ryan said.
“We’re working on modeling how the pollutants from flowback water get into the rivers and then the purification plants.”
“We put the dirty water right into the streams?” I said.
“No,” she said. “By which I mean it’s illegal to do that. But that’s where a lot of it ends up. Five years ago they used to put it directly on the roads to keep the dust down. And since it’s full of salt, they used it for de-icing. Now it gets into the streams from runoff, pipe leaks, spills. And leaks in the containment ponds.” She shook her head. “So we use the flume to test different models of what happens to it when it hits the sediment. You know, whether it gets bound up in it.”
Ryan said, “What doesn’t get trapped gets into the water supply?”
Lauren Wilcox smiled. “You study some engineering?”
“Just enough to be confused.” He turned on his big smile. He was officially in Flirt Mode now. She nodded and held his gaze for a few moments.
I pointed to a shiny aluminum contraption straddling the glass walls of the flume. It looked like a high-tech range hood. “What’s that thing?” I said.
“That’s the data-acquisition cart. It rides along the top of the flume, taking laser and sonar readings of the sediment surface as it moves. So we can map the flume in real time as water moves through it. It lets us extrapolate what’s going on in different rivers and streams with different bed conditions and organic materials.”
“This is amazing,” Ryan said.
Lauren Wilcox looked at him and smiled. In that instant, I saw what she looked like thirty years ago—and what kind of guy she would’ve gone after.
I turned to face her. “I noticed this lab is named for Lee Rossman.”
She nodded, her expression serious. She’d heard about Rossman’s death. “He endowed this whole thing.”
“Help us understand that,” I said. “Aren’t you two on opposite sides?”
“Yes, we were. But there was one project we were working on that caught his attention.”
“Which was?”
“We’re working on a fracking-fluid tracer, a substance you put into the fracking fluid when you inject it into the shale. The tracer acts like a fingerprint. If that tracer ends up in someone’s well water or municipal water, that tells you where it came from.”
“Why would Lee Rossman want to help you do that?”
“From his perspective, it makes him look transparent. He says the chemicals don’t pollute. It’s a way to prove he’s right.”
“You don’t see it that way?”
“I’m not going to speculate about his motives. But I look at it differently. If he looks transparent, that buys him time before the public demands that the industry disclose the chemicals they pump into the ground. Right now, the actual mix of chemicals is legally a trade secret. Companies don’t have to disclose it. But the public is waking up to the obvious problem. Rossman—and everyone else in the industry—was betting the public would be satisfied if there are tracers.”
“That’s a pretty big bet, though, isn’t it?” Ryan said. “What if the tracer shows up? They’re opening themselves up to millions of dollars in damages, aren’t they?”
Lauren Wilcox turned to him. “The industry is betting that the tracer
s won’t actually work. Right now, they only last a few weeks before they degrade. They can be destroyed by UV light, by interactions with other chemicals. All that the oil companies will need to do in court is introduce reasonable doubt. If the tracers don’t work perfectly—every time, in every circumstance—we’ll be back to where we are now: We can’t prove you’re drinking Rossman Mining’s chemicals.”
She gestured to a small, round conference table and sat down in one of the four plastic stacking chairs. “What do you need?” she said, leaning toward me.
“We assume you’ve heard about the death of Lee Rossman,” I said.
She nodded. “Caught it last night on the news.”
“We believe it was murder.”
“They said that.”
I paused. “Do you know of anyone who would have wanted to hurt him?”
“‘Hurt him’? If by ‘hurt him’ you mean injure him or kill him, no. Make him get out of the oil business? Renounce everything he has ever done to rape the planet? Donate his many millions of dollars to repair an infinitesimal portion of the damage he has caused over the decades? Go away and never come back? Yes, absolutely. Almost everyone I know would welcome any or all of those things. And put me at the top of that list.”
“Could you tell us a little about the student group you oversee?”
“I founded Students for a Green Montana right after I got here, four years ago.” She nodded. “I wanted to educate students about environmental science—sure—but really I wanted to help them understand how to engage in public life, how to work constructively with various stakeholders. The only way the environmental movement is going to become a potent force, especially in a conservative state like Montana—where the zeitgeist favors extractive industries, and the ethos of radical freedom and government non-interference is well-entrenched—the only way is to become enmeshed in the business and political environment.”
“Tell us about the students in the group.”
“Most of these kids are twenty years old.” She gave me an “it’s all about the kids” smile. “They’re full of enthusiasm, and they don’t understand how people who come from the land, who’ve worked this land sometimes for four and five generations, can poison it—for a few bucks. To be honest, I don’t, either.” She shook her head in sadness. “And when some of my kids write inflammatory things in the paper, it’s my job to rein them in. But for me the question is simple: Would you rather have a generation of kids lined up, eager to join the polluters, or a bunch of kids who sometimes go a little overboard in criticizing their predatory business forces?” She tilted her head. “I know what my answer would be.”
“I hear what you’re saying.” I nodded. “Anyone in your group you think might be capable of violence?”
She closed her eyes and exhaled, like she understood I had to ask it but I was way off base. “No,” she said. “Not in a million years. They’re just not fully housebroken yet.”
“Tell us about Nathan Kress of Rivers United.”
“I work with Nathan. He’s always very generous about letting my kids work with him: you know, internships and volunteer activities with him.”
I waited for her to continue, but apparently that was all she wanted to say. “You don’t think Rivers United does valuable work?”
“Nathan and I have a very good professional relationship, and I believe he’s a good person. A very good person. But I believe—and I’m not telling you anything I haven’t told him to his face many times—he lets himself be used by the political-industrial complex.”
“How’s that?”
“He’s happy to play the role of the official environmental guy in town. He’s the one who sits on all the panels and commissions, right alongside the mining guy and the Chamber of Commerce guy, and they sort of balance each other out. Then the county planning board, the public-utility commission, and the governor all nod their heads solemnly and say they’ve listened to all the voices, this has been very valuable, we’re going to have to give this serious thought, et cetera.”
“Isn’t that what you want?” I say.
“Then they go ahead and waive the corporate taxes, suspend the oversight, and grant the permits. The game is rigged. We always lose. No, that’s not at all what we want.”
“What is it you want?”
“We need to replace the current paradigm.” She looked at me, then at Ryan, to make sure we were paying attention. I remembered some of my professors doing it. “Today, we think of the environment as an interest that needs to be balanced against other interests, such as energy needs and employment. If the mine produces pollution, that’s a negative. If it creates jobs, that’s a positive. That’s the model. What we need is a paradigm that sees the environment not as an interest but as the ecosystem in which we all live. When we’re talking about an industry—especially an extractive industry such as mining, and this kind of mining, which is so damaging to the land, the water, the air—the first question needs to be this: Should we even consider it in the first place?”
She paused to give us a moment to take in what she was saying. “We have to get to the point where an initiative is off the table as soon as its potential environmental damage is determined. I say potential because you can’t predict what the damage will be, but common sense tells you that if the industry won’t even divulge what’s in the carcinogen cocktail they blast into the shale, there will be significant damage. Once you get into a debate where one side says an industry is poisoning the earth—to some extent, and one day we’ll be able to prove it—and the other side says it provides cheap energy or it creates this many jobs or whatever—today—well, it’s game over.
“Nothing demonstrates this better than global warming. Every year, the tipping point—the date when the earth will no longer be able to support human life if we don’t eliminate global warming—is re-calculated, and it always gets closer. Yet half the population thinks there’s no such thing as global warming. It’s insane. It must stop.” She paused and shook her head, like she couldn’t believe there are people out there so stupid. “It is our responsibility to stop it.” Lauren Wilcox sat back in her chair and took a breath.
“Professor Wilcox,” Ryan said. She turned to him. “Can you tell us where you were Sunday night, after, say, nine o’clock?”
She flinched, then gave him a confused look. “You’re kidding me, right?”
I put on a sad expression. “Unfortunately, no,” I said. “It’s just a routine question we have to ask all of the victim’s associates.”
“I was by no means an associate of Lee Rossman,” she said, a flash of anger in her eyes, “which I have just explained in considerable detail.”
“I apologize for saying that.” I put up my palms in a show of contrition. “But can you tell us where you were Sunday night, after, say, nine o’clock?”
She sat up straight in her chair. “I’m sorry.” She lowered her eyes, then raised them again and gave me a smile. “What I just said was rude.” She turned to Ryan. “I apologize, Detective.”
Ryan shook his head to dismiss it.
“When I start to talk about fracking …” She paused, then exhaled a long breath. “I mean, what we are doing is just so tragic. And so unnecessary. When the detective asked me where I was Sunday night … I understand you’re investigating a murder. It just caught me by surprise.” She turned to Ryan and bowed her head. “Again, I’m sorry.”
“Don’t mention it,” Ryan said, smiling. Then the smile disappeared. “So, can you tell us where you were Sunday night, after, say, nine o’clock?”
“I teach two classes Monday. Sunday night I was at home, preparing.”
“Can anyone corroborate that?” Ryan said.
“Unfortunately, no. I live alone.” She smiled.
I stood up and pulled a card from my big leather bag. “All right, Professor, thank you for that information. Would you get in touch if you can think of anything that can help us in this investigation?”
“Of
course,” she said. “I’m sorry I couldn’t be more helpful.” She turned to Ryan. “Detective.”
“Not at all,” I said. “You’ve been very helpful.” Ryan and I turned and left her office.
When a suspect calls the victim a rapist—of a woman, a kid, or even of a planet—yes, that could be very helpful, indeed.
Chapter 11
“We wanted to catch you up.” We were sitting in the chief’s office, having just gotten back from campus. He nodded, telling me to go on. “We finished up our first round of interviews here in town, and we want to go out to the rigs.”
“No forensics yet?”
“Harold said later today,” Ryan said.
“Who’ve you interviewed?”
“We already told you about Florence Rossman.”
“Yeah,” the chief said, shifting in his chair. He saw me squinting a little. The light was coming in from the window behind his head. He turned and adjusted the blinds.
“Thanks,” I said. “We interviewed a bunch of people at the bar where Rossman’s body was found.”
“And?”
“And zilch. Guy who owns it is a scumbag, and some of the girls might be hooking, but nothing about what Rossman was doing in the alley.”
The chief let out a long, slow breath. He was looking down at his desk, his brow furrowed, like he was thinking about how to phrase something. He looked up at me. “Maybe Harold can put someone’s DNA on Rossman.”
I shrugged. “We could get lucky. Maybe he was doing one of the employees. But we’d still need probable cause to be able to make that link. Same night, there might’ve been a hundred girls—amateurs—willing to suck him for a quick hundred.”
The chief looked at me, his face a blank. “Next?” he said.
“We interviewed Cheryl Garrity, his director of operations. She’s a little strange.”
The chief turned to Ryan, signaling for him to comment.
“I couldn’t get a clear read on her.” Ryan raised his palms. “Maybe she was traumatized—I think we got there right after they heard. She was kind of robotic. Maybe it was how she handles stress.”
