Fractures: A Detectives Seagate and Miner Mystery

by Mike Markel

  “Did she have a personal relationship with Lee?”

  This time he let us see the smile. “She was his subordinate. He was her boss. As far as I know, that was the relationship.”

  “You get to see Bill Rossman much out here?”

  “Not really.” Ron Eberly frowned. “He keeps to himself these days.”

  A woman carrying a briefcase came out of the office a few feet away. She gave us a polite smile as she passed by us on her way toward the building entrance. We waited a few seconds.

  “Why is that?” Ryan said.

  “Can’t say. Except maybe he’s twenty-three.”

  “So you used to have more contact with him?”

  “Oh, yeah, Billy was a great kid. Smart as a whip. Wanted to be an oil man, like his daddy.” He paused. “He took his mom’s death pretty hard. That was tough for him.”

  “You see him as taking a bigger role in the company now?”

  “I could see that. He’s working as a roughneck now. A lot of kids these days, they go to college, study engineering, geology—whatever—they’ve never touched a length of pipe. Hell, they never had a beer with a guy who worked a rig. But Billy’s doing the right thing. If he decides to get into the business, the guys are going to respect him. They know he gets dirty.”

  “How did you get into the business?”

  “It was Lee. He was a couple years older than me. I think he saw me as a little brother—a little brother who used to get into trouble after he picked up his pay packet.” He smiled with that mix of pride, shame, and nostalgia that I’ve never seen on a woman. “But I was straight with him, and over the years I guess I grew up a little. He came to trust me. He paid for me to take a landman course, let me do the job wrong, then learn how to do it right. You know the thing I’m most proud of in my whole life? That I can honestly say I never let Lee down. Not once.”

  “You know of anyone who might have wanted to hurt Lee?”

  “Like I said, there’s a group of landowners who think they got a raw deal from the company.”

  “Like Mark Middleton.”

  “That’s right. You ask around in town here, look at the flyers on some of the bulletin boards, you can get yourself a half-dozen names. I want to be clear: I’m not accusing the Middletons or anyone else of anything. But I am saying if you look at the videos, read the letters to the editor, check out their blog—some of them have said things that could be seen as threats.”

  “Threats to Lee Rossman personally?”

  “I’m not a lawyer. But Lee and I have talked about it off and on, last few years.”

  “What did he say about it?”

  “If you knew Lee like I did, you could predict it word-for-word. ‘Oh, they’re just running their mouth,’ he’d say. ‘They don’t mean nothing by it.’ There were a few landowners got riled up when they found out we paid their neighbors a bigger signing bonus. But everyone was going to make so much money on the royalties it would all blow over soon enough. With Lee, the glass was always three-quarters full.”

  “He didn’t take any security measures? Bodyguards?”

  Ron Eberly laughed. “Lee was a country boy. If he thought he needed security, he’d carry it in his waistband.”

  “But he didn’t think he needed any security Sunday night,” Ryan said.

  Ron Eberly gazed out over Ryan’s shoulder. “I didn’t say Lee was always right.” His eyes were shining a little bit.

  “Mr. Eberly,” Ryan said, “I have to ask you this next question. Can you tell us where you were Sunday night?”

  “Mondays are always busy. Here at the deeds office. Meeting with landowners. I’ve got a room at the Marshall Residence Inn. I was working on leases.”

  “So, you were here, not in Rawlings?”

  “You can talk to the manager. Guy’s name is Tony. I use the Business Center at the Residence Inn a lot.”

  “Thanks very much.” Ryan handed Ron Eberly a card. “Get in touch if you think of anything, would you?”

  “You bet,” he said, nodded to me, and walked back to the table where the other landmen were bent over the deed books.

  “You got that?” I said to Ryan. “Tony at the Residence Inn.” I glanced over at my partner, who was already writing in his notebook.

  Chapter 15

  Wrung out from the incident with Mac that kept me up about four hours in the middle of the night, I was glad to let Ryan drive us back to Rawlings. The snow was coming down heavy, but the tires from the big trucks carrying water, generators, tanks, chemicals, pipe, and the big steel rigs had cleared wide strips on the road out of Marshall. Still, it was hard driving because the constant truck traffic busted up some of the asphalt and grooved serious ruts and dips into the rest of it. Ryan and I sat for fifteen minutes a couple miles east of town when a truck hauling pipe spilled its load after getting in a wreck with a pickup. When tons of steel pipe hit the asphalt, they have to call in a bunch of equipment to corral it; we were lucky because there was a solid shoulder we could use to get out of there.

  “Think we’ll make it back before the chief leaves for the day?” I said.

  Ryan looked at his watch. “Unless the weather turns bad or we hit another problem, yeah, I think so.”

  “Let’s go over what we got today—before I fall asleep, I mean.”

  “Okay, Bill Rossman is following in his father’s footsteps, working on the rigs sometimes, going to college sometimes.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Plus he’s drinking and screwing girls he doesn’t know their names. But he doesn’t have much to do with any of the guys. What did he say was his reason for working the rigs?”

  Ryan was really good at remembering the phrases people used when we interviewed them. “It’s honest. No bullshit.”

  “Which of course was probably bullshit.”

  “I agree,” Ryan said, “but that doesn’t tell us who he is or what he’s doing—or whether he’s the kind of kid who’d hurt his own father.”

  “Well, we don’t have enough information to say. We could say he’s pissed at his dad for replacing his mom with Florence. Or for not replacing her with Aunt Cheryl.”

  “Or for being rich and driving a BMW. It could be anything. I think Ron Eberly might have nailed it: Bill is twenty-three.”

  “All right,” I said. I felt my spirits nosedive as I watched the snow fly past us. I realized my son, Tommy, now a sullen seventeen, started being miserable at thirteen and gave every indication of staying miserable for many more years, maybe forever. “Methane Mark Middleton. You like him?”

  “I like him for shooting up Rossman’s trucks. The fact that he does it carefully—at night, so he won’t hurt anyone or get caught—suggests that’s he’s got a healthy passive-aggressive side. Plus, he’s probably a coward—physically, I mean. I don’t see him stepping up to Lee Rossman and shanking him.”

  “You never know. He could be all weaselly, then, one day, he gets in his pickup and drives to Rawlings, pissed off because Lee Rossman won’t return his calls or whatever. He confronts him. Rossman pushes him away. Out comes the blade and before either of them knows what happened, Rossman’s on the pavement, bleeding.”

  Ryan said, “You think we ought to get in touch with their daughter? Check out their alibi?”

  “Not yet. The way Doris Middleton offered it up, it seemed a little forced. The daughter might be in on it—or at least willing to say Daddy never left the house that night. Which would be what she believes—or wants to believe. Anyway, it’s not that good an alibi to bother chasing down unless we see some other stuff that makes us like the Middletons more.”

  “One more: Ron Eberly.” The silent snow was starting to ice up on the windshield on the outside edges where the wipers didn’t sweep. Ryan turned up the defroster.

  I pulled my coat tighter as the air coming out of the vents started to cool. “Yeah, Ron. I think he’s clearly a liar.”

  Ryan smiled. “Because he’s a salesman?”

  “Hadn’t
thought of that, but yeah. That doesn’t help.”

  “What did he lie about?”

  “I think he was lying about the methane,” I said. “I believed Mark Middleton that his well was clean before the drilling—and that all the other ranchers with methane had clean water, too. He wouldn’t’ve been able to run his ranch with the water we saw coming out of his tap. The oil companies always say there’s solid rock between the water wells and the drilling. But fracking doesn’t make sense to me. The drill bit goes through the rock—the impermeable rock—then the guys set off explosives inside the pipe. No way you can guarantee there won’t be methane going where you don’t want it to go. Isn’t that a law of physics or something: how shit doesn’t stay where you put it? That it goes wherever it wants to go?”

  “Not sure that’s an official law of physics, but I get your point,” Ryan said. “Any other lies? That one might be just a professional lie. You know, a salesman saying he believes in his product.”

  “The one I’m willing to bet my life on is when he said he never let Lee Rossman down.”

  “How do you know that’s a lie?”

  “I know that’s a lie because I’m an adult. The two of them’ve worked together thirty years. No way he didn’t let Lee down. Take me, for instance. The best relationship I’ve had since I’m an adult is with you, and I’ve let you down a couple dozen times in the two years we’ve been partners.”

  Ryan was concentrating, like he was checking the math. He started counting on the fingers on his right hand, then his left. Then he did the right hand again. “Couple dozen sounds about right.”

  “Exactly my point,” I said.

  “So how did Eberly let Lee Rossman down?”

  I let out a long sigh. “Could be anything. Maybe Eberly nailed Rossman’s first wife, and Bill is his kid. Maybe Eberly steals money from the company. Maybe Eberly’s pissed that he’s still writing up contracts and doesn’t own a piece of the company, so Sunday night they go drinking at Johnny’s Lounge and Eberly knifes him. Lot of ways Eberly could let him down.”

  “We could check with the guy at Eberly’s motel to see if he can alibi him,” Ryan said.

  “Same as with the Middletons and their daughter. How much you think it would cost Eberly to get the motel guy to alibi him for Sunday night? One-hundred? Two-hundred, tops. No,” I said, “we just don’t have enough to work with on any of the good people in Marshall, Montana, to rule them in or out.”

  “It’s only about thirty-six hours since Rossman was killed,” Ryan said. “We’ll figure it out.”

  “Or we won’t,” I said as I reclined my seatback and closed my eyes. “Let me know when we get to headquarters—or when you figure out who killed him.” The rocking of the Charger put me out quick.

  I didn’t know how long I was asleep when I recognized Ryan’s voice calling my name. “I think it’s your cell.”

  I listened for a moment and recognized the buzzing coming from my leather bag on the seat behind me. I retrieved the phone and checked the screen. It was Allen Pfeiffer from the FBI. “Hey, Allen, thanks for getting back to me.” I put my phone on Speaker.

  We exchanged small talk for a few seconds. Then he said, “I’m not seeing a Lauren Wilcox on any of our databases. But maybe we can find her through facial recognition. You got a picture?”

  I looked at Ryan. He was nodding his head. “You bet. Just a second.” I said to Ryan, “Can we email Allen a picture now?”

  “Yeah, I think so. Get his email and I’ll find it.”

  “Okay, Allen, sorry. My partner thinks he can get you a picture within a few minutes. Is your email secure?”

  “Secure enough for what we’re doing. Make the subject line ‘Vacation pics.’ That way, maybe the FBI won’t open a file on me.”

  “All right,” I said as he read me his email. “Thanks a lot, Allen. We’ll get that off to you as soon as we can.”

  “Not a problem,” he said, and we ended the call.

  Ryan swiveled the computer toward me and pointed to the screen. “Start with the state DMV.”

  It took me a few seconds to get oriented, but I pulled up her photo.

  “Right click, then Save Image As.”

  I did it.

  “Why don’t you go to the Web, try cmsu.edu, then go to the Biology Department.”

  I found the faculty section of the Biology Department, but she didn’t have a photo up. “Nothing doing,” I said.

  “Try Googling her.”

  I did. “There’s thousands of hits.”

  “Go to the top of the page and select Images.”

  There she was: dozens of pictures of the frizzy-haired ecology professor. I selected and downloaded a couple of them, then attached them to an email to Allen Pfeiffer. “Okay, done.”

  “Very good,” Ryan said. “Maybe Allen will find something.”

  I was looking at my email. I had one from Harold Breen, the medical examiner. He still used email rather than messages. “The autopsy is done,” I said to Ryan. “Says he’ll be in until about six if we want to stop by.”

  Ryan looked down at his watch. “We’ll be there by five.”

  His estimate was off by five minutes. I carded us in the back entrance. “Let’s see if we can get him.” We headed down the hall and took the stairs down to the basement, where Harold Breen’s office and the autopsy room are. We hurried past the rifle range and past the office of Robin, our evidence tech.

  I could smell the autopsy room before we got there, which was a bad sign. I pushed open the heavy swinging door. Even though the HVAC system was sucking out air as hard as it could, the place still stank of shit and mold.

  Harold looked up from the table where he was cutting the scalp off a beat-up guy with a grizzled beard and long hair. “Hey, sweetheart,” he said to me. Then he turned to my partner. “How are you doing, Ryan?”

  “Listen, Harold, I don’t want to be rude,” I said. “But if I have to stand near this stiff for another minute, I’m gonna blow lunch.”

  Harold smiled. “Yes, Mr. John Doe does have a bit of a tang about him, doesn’t he?”

  “Can we at least move over there?” I pointed to the other side of the autopsy room and, pinching my nose shut, started walking over there.

  Harold was wearing a lab coat with a plastic apron over it, some kind of plastic pants, argyle socks, and orange Crocs. He put his scalpel down on a white cloth on the steel tray next to the remains of the late Mr. Doe. He began to heave his considerable bulk in my direction.

  “Do you need any of your papers?” I wanted to catch him before he started to get his big body rolling toward me. He would need a while to stop and change direction.

  “No, I’m fine.” His breathing was labored. He wiped at his forehead, which was gleaming with sweat. “Don’t need any paperwork on Mr. Rossman.”

  “Great,” I said. “You gonna tell me who killed him?”

  Harold made it over to me and Ryan and reached out to grab the edge of a desk to steady himself. “I do know who killed him, Karen. Before I tell you, though, would you mind peeling back that gentleman’s scalp, sawing off his skull, scooping out his brain, and weighing it for me?”

  I looked at him. “Is that your way of saying it’s my job to figure out who killed Rossman?”

  “That’s a very good guess.” He smiled.

  “Okay, Harold, how did he die?”

  “He bled out.”

  “That’s it?”

  “That’s it. He got stabbed. The blade tore up some blood vessels—nothing major—then penetrated his pancreas, which is full of blood. It probably took a half-hour to bleed out.”

  “What can you tell me about the blade?”

  “It was about an inch wide, double-edged. Probably a hunting knife or something like that. Nothing remarkable about it. Probably at least five inches long. The wound track was over six inches long. It’s likely the victim doubled over after getting stabbed, compressing the tissue. There was some bruising around the
entry wound, which suggests that the blade went in all the way to the handle. If you get me a knife, Robin and I can probably tell you if it was the one.”

  “Any shit on the wound that told you anything?”

  “Robin said it was clean. Only thing in the wound were some fibers from the victim’s undershirt and shirt.”

  “Tell me about the angle.”

  “The guy was holding it underhanded, which is unusual, so the blade went in on an upward trajectory. He pulled it out straight.”

  “The killer right handed?”

  “Yeah, the wound is in the left upper quadrant, three inches off the midline. The wound track is oblique, angled toward the midline. So, yeah, right-handed.”

  “How tall?”

  “The killer was between four feet tall and eight foot.”

  I just looked at him. “So we shouldn’t be looking for someone works for a circus.”

  He smiled at me, his eyes almost disappearing in the folds of fat on his face. “Most likely between five feet and six feet.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Because most people are between five feet and six feet.”

  “Are you enjoying this?”

  “I always enjoy talking with you.”

  “Male or female?”

  “Sorry, the killer didn’t leave any DNA—at least Robin hasn’t recovered any. He was probably wearing gloves. Robin tells me the knife blade was sharp enough that it went right through the two shirts quite cleanly. So an adult female of average strength could easily have done the damage.”

  “Any evidence that he was killed inside and dumped outside in the alley?”

  Harold Breen shook his head. “Robin didn’t find anything that would suggest he was picked up and moved. When we took his clothes off, his shirt was tucked in normally. No stains or anything on his clothing to suggest he was dragged. Our conclusion: He walked into that alley on his own steam. I put the report in the system.”

  “Okay, Harold, thanks.” I looked at Ryan to see if he wanted to ask anything. He shook his head.

  We left the foul-smelling autopsy room and headed down the hall toward the staircase. Robin’s door was open. I knocked.