by Mike Markel
Ryan nodded. “Called him Billy. Anything Eberly had against Lee, it didn’t extend to Bill.”
“So you don’t see Eberly hiring a few guys to beat up Bill to throw us off the track?”
“I guess anything’s possible, Chief.” I shrugged. “But right now, I’d say no to that. If he brought in people to help, that would just increase his risk. The guys who beat up Bill wanted to send someone a message. We just don’t know what the message is—and who it’s intended for. No, there’s something big we’re not seeing yet.”
“Remember you said how Cheryl Garrity called that professor a terrorist. Pouring the fracking fluid down his throat, that’s a message.” The chief was scowling. “What’s her name?”
“Lauren Wilcox. We hadn’t thought of that one, Chief. But we did send her photos to Allen Pfeiffer at the FBI. We’re waiting on him to tell us if he’s got her in a database.”
“I don’t like Lauren Wilcox at all for Bill,” Ryan said. “It’s too brute-force for her. She likes to work the system, exert political pressure. When the attack on Bill Rossman goes public, that’s going to create all kinds of positive publicity for Rossman Mining, which is the opposite of what she wants.”
“But only if the attack can be traced to Lauren Wilcox,” the chief said. “If she’s a terrorist, we shouldn’t expect her to play by the rules. One way to look at it: two Rossmans down in three days.”
“You thinking someone’s gonna go after Florence next?” I said.
“Let me talk to Florence, see if she wants some protection.”
“Just so you know, Chief, she and I just got into it, a half-hour ago. She’s not my biggest fan right now.”
“What happened?”
“Ryan and I tricked Ron Eberly into admitting the affair with her. When we were with her at the hospital, he phoned her and told her we knew about it. That’s our guess.”
“At least, that’s what we think happened,” Ryan said. “Right after she takes a call, she slapped Karen pretty hard, Chief. And threatened her.”
“What?” The chief had his hands on his hips.
“She pointed her finger in Karen’s face,” Ryan said. “Then, ‘You’re dead.’”
“You heard that? Those words?”
“Those words.”
The chief walked over to me and leaned in to look at my cheek, which was still a little sore. Plus there was a one-inch scratch, presumably from a ring. “She do that?”
I nodded. “No big deal.”
He shook his head. “Want to charge her?”
“No. Just be aware, if she calls you, she might ask you to fire me or have me killed or something.” I tried to smile.
“I’m going to discipline you because you found out she’s having an affair?”
“Just giving you a heads-up,” I said.
“Okay, so you’re off to Marshall,” the chief said. “Stay in touch.”
Ryan and I started to leave when the chief called me back. “Can you give me a second, Detective?”
Ryan left. I stood facing the chief.
“Talking about Florence Rossman reminded me. You need to decide what you want to do, I mean, about John McNamara.”
“Oh, shit.” I had forgotten about Mac.
“I’m willing to back you up one-hundred percent. Obviously, he’d have to cop to the B&E. You know, the broken door. I don’t know about the assault. That might be your word against his. Did you go to the hospital or document it?”
I shook my head. “No, I didn’t do any of that.” I felt a pressure rising up inside my chest. “I’ll decide by tonight. Can you give me till tonight?”
“Sure,” he said. “Have you gotten in touch with your sponsor?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I did. She was really helpful.” She would have been. “Thanks for your concern, Chief.”
I met up with Ryan in the detectives’ bullpen and we got ready to head out to Marshall. The drive would take more than two hours—if the weather was good. So even if we needed only an hour out there, we wouldn’t get back to Rawlings before seven or eight. Since it was real important for Ryan to eat dinner with his wife at six and play with his little kids before they went to bed, he was not at all happy as we walked out to the parking lot.
I asked him to drive. He said sure. He probably thought I asked because my face hurt or I was upset or something, but really I just wanted to give him something to do so he wouldn’t sit there and brood. Driving to Marshall took some concentration, with one beat-up, rutted lane in each direction and gusts that threatened to push the Charger onto a soft shoulder, which could flip it and send you rolling a hundred feet into a pasture. And of course there was always the possibility that the guy steering the eighteen-wheeler bearing down on you at seventy-five miles an hour was taking a little nap.
The sky was light grey, with wispy clouds moving fast, but at least it wasn’t snowing or icing up. With all the big truck tires chewing up the road between Rawlings and Marshall, the surface was clean, and we made good time. We stopped for a quick lunch at a burger place an hour out of Rawlings. It was full of truckers. I recognized a faint odor of diesel. Ryan ordered three salads because they didn’t serve anything vegetarian.
A little after three-thirty, we pulled into the little police department in Marshall, Montana. It was brick, one story, a couple thousand square feet. There we met up with Detective Carpenter, the lead on the Bill Rossman case, and Officer Lloyd, the first officer on scene. We talked in a little conference room.
“Thanks for meeting with us,” I said to Carpenter, a tall, thin guy of about fifty in insulated rubber boots, jeans, and a western shirt with snaps. His head was shaved, and a pair of reading glasses rested on his nose.
“I wish I could’ve saved you the drive. We don’t have much to report.”
“Any forensics at the scene?”
“A thousand sets of bootprints frozen into the mud. There was a glaze of ice all over everything when Officer Lloyd got there early this morning. We’re working with your hospital to get the victim’s clothing and effects back here for analysis, but I wouldn’t hold out much hope we’ll find anything on them.”
“Either there or nearby.” Lloyd was a beefy young guy with a jarhead cut.
“Are those the photos?” I pointed to a case folder.
He pushed the folder across the table to me. The photos showed Bill Rossman on his back. He was wearing his orange overalls, which were soaked and stained with all kinds of fluids. I remembered that his overalls were stained when we talked with him yesterday. He was wearing only one glove. One of his legs was obviously busted. His face was all pulped up.
“Did you recover his other glove?”
“No,” Officer Lloyd spoke in little bursts. “Might be in the pit.”
“Your guess is that Bill Rossman was beaten up right at the edge of the pit, where his body was discovered?”
Detective Carpenter said, “There’s all kinds of nooks and crannies at a drill site where you could bring a guy and beat him up so as nobody would see you. If you got yourself a bucket of spent water beforehand, you could do the whole thing out of view, then dump him by the side of the pit. It wouldn’t take but ten seconds to carry him out there.”
“Detective,” I said, “you get a chance to interview the guys who were on shift?”
“They didn’t see or hear anything.”
“You believe them?”
“None of them jumped out at me as lying.”
“What do you mean?”
“If any of the guys knew what happened—or thought it was a good idea to beat up the guy and were in on it—they had their story all worked out and stuck to the script.”
“Give me a scenario,” I said.
Detective Carpenter waved a hand. “Could be a lot of things. Maybe Rossman found out they were violating operating procedures and was going to report them. Or he caught them smoking dope—or selling it. Anything that could happen at any workplace.”
“No CCT
V on the rig?” I said.
Detective Carpenter shook his head.
Ryan said, “His roommate at the man camp? Did you get a chance to interview him?”
Officer Lloyd spoke. “Went home for a couple weeks. No roommate at the time of the attack.”
I put my hands up in a shit-out-of-luck gesture.
Detective Carpenter smiled weakly. “Welcome to Marshall.” He let out a breath. “Want to take a ride out to the scene?”
We bundled into our coats and piled into Detective Carpenter’s big Jeep, parked behind the building. In seven minutes, we were out at the rig.
When we were here yesterday, the place was full of machine noise, with generators, winches moving pipe around, metal chains clanging on metal, and a loud background hiss of dirty water flowing through a big pipe into the wastewater pit. Today, the place was silent. “You shut it down?” I said to Detective Carpenter as we started walking toward the wastewater pit.
“Our evidence tech is not quite done.”
It was fifty yards to the wastewater pit. It stank of diesel, and the surface was orange and slick. “It doesn’t freeze?” I said to Officer Lloyd.
“Lot of chemicals in that water.”
“Show me where you found Bill Rossman.”
Lloyd pointed about twenty yards away and started walking over toward it. We followed him to where the surface sloped down toward the pit. I didn’t go any closer. With the sheet of ice on the red clay, I could see myself sliding right in. I looked around. They were right in saying the forensics at the scene probably wouldn’t help much.
“You’ve already interviewed the foreman?” I said.
“He’s the first one we talked to,” Detective Carpenter said. “He called it in when one of his men discovered Rossman a half-hour into the shift.”
“And he doesn’t know anything?”
“Only thing he knows is we’re not letting him operate his rig.”
“Can we go talk to him?”
“Sure.”
We walked over to the construction trailer where we had talked with the guy briefly yesterday. Today he looked mighty unhappy. No formalities.
“When are you going to let me get back to work?” he said to me.
“It’s Detective Carpenter’s crime scene,” I said. “Up to him.”
“As soon as we can, Mr. Doering. Soon as we can,” Carpenter said.
“You want to help Bill Rossman?” I said to Doering.
He gave me a nasty look, like I was getting off track.
“He’s in the hospital in Rawlings,” I said. “They’re patching up all the injuries. Busted leg, busted pelvis. Took out his spleen. One thing you could help with. They’re trying to figure out what was in the soup he drank out at the wastewater pit. The more they know, the better they can monitor him. Down the line, I mean. They’ve got the MSDS sheet, but it doesn’t list all the chemicals in the fluid. You know what’s in the fracking fluid you shove down the hole?”
“No, I don’t.” His expression was hostile, like I was a crazy woman who was going to ream him out about fucking up the planet. “That’s corporate. The fluid is delivered in a truck. I put it in a holding tank, then I pump it down the bore hole and collect whatever comes back up.”
“You got any ideas why someone would want to beat the living shit out of Bill Rossman?”
Doering shifted in his creaky old office chair. “I pump the fluid down the bore hole and collect whatever comes back up.”
“Thanks for all the help, Mr. Doering,” I said to the shithead.
The four of us left, got back in the Jeep, and made our way back to headquarters.
“Like I said,” Detective Carpenter said when Ryan and I were walking over to the Charger, “I wish we could help you more.”
“We appreciate it,” I said as we exchanged cards. “Keep us in the loop, would you?”
“Sure thing,” he said. We shook hands all around and headed off on the long drive back. With any luck, this would be the last time we had to visit beautiful Marshall, Montana. Ever.
I drove toward the sun, a hazy yellow glow behind the pale grey sky. The wind pushed the Charger back and forth. Ryan checked his watch and gazed out the window at the endless ranchlands and coulees. Every few minutes we saw an orange glow off in the distance, the methane being flared off a drilling rig.
“You want to stop and get something to eat?” I said an hour or so into the drive.
“Can if you want,” he said. “Not on my account.”
“I’m all right,” I said. We’d been together enough to not have to talk about the case if there was nothing new to talk about. “Kali let you wake up the kids if you get in late?”
“For some reason, she’d rather let them sleep.” He was wearing a sad smile.
We pulled into the lot at headquarters and went straight to our separate cars. I remembered I promised the chief I’d make up my mind about whether we were going to charge Mac for that attack the other night.
I drove over to the hospital and up to the ICU. The nurse at the desk told me he’d been discharged.
“Home?” I said.
“VA.”
It was only four blocks away. I headed over. A woman at reception gave me the room number. The lights in the hall were low, even though it was only about eight-thirty. The doors to most of the rooms were open. The place was full of old guys, some of them asleep, a few watching small TV sets. One room had a couple guys playing cards. I walked past two young guys, one missing both legs, in a wheelchair, the other on crutches and missing only one leg. They looked at me with hollow eyes.
I made it to Mac’s room. The police officer stationed in the hall looked at me without much curiosity. Through the window I could see two beds. Mac was in one, his head still bandaged. His daughter Maureen was in a chair up near the head of the bed. I stood there for a good three minutes. Mac didn’t move. I think Maureen was asleep, too. She shifted her position, trying to get comfortable in the chair. She didn’t open her eyes.
“My name is Seagate,” I said, showing the officer my shield. “I’m the one he attacked.”
The officer stood up.
I pulled out my phone and called headquarters. “Is Detective Pelton in?” The operator connected me. “Pelton, this is Seagate. I’ve decided not to file any charges on John McNamara. Yeah, I’m at the VA. Can you tell the sergeant? I’m gonna pull the uniform off his detail, okay?” He answered and we ended the call.
“Report to headquarters,” I said to the uniform.
Chapter 23
Thursday morning, a couple minutes after eight, I got a call on my cell. It was Allen Pfeiffer at the FBI. “Not sure when you punch in, Karen. Didn’t wake you, did I?”
“No, you nailed it,” I said. “Eight sharp. Got anything?” I put my phone on Speaker. Ryan was already at this desk. He opened his notebook.
“Yes, I do.” He sounded upbeat. “The facial-recognition software for domestic terrorists gave us a hit on your professor, Lauren Wilcox. She used to be Lauren Atherton when she was in Earth First!”
“Shit, what did she do?”
“We know she was a researcher. This was in the eighties. She’d track companies they didn’t like—loggers, resort developers, that kind of thing—then publicize their activities on their newsletters, make it easier for protesters to mobilize against them.
“So she was nonviolent?”
“She did some monkeywrenching. You know, destroying equipment, chaining herself to trees. Setting off pipe bombs to start fires at building sites. We have outstanding federal warrants on her for destruction of private property at a resort near the Tahoe National Forest and another incident at the BLM Wild Horse and Burro Corral in Litchfield, California.”
“She ever kill anyone?”
“Not that we know of. But she wrote this defense of a terrorist op that killed a logger when his chain saw hit a spike.”
“You don’t know if she was involved in the op?”
“
Correct.”
“All right, Allen. What’s she looking at?”
“She’s going to go to jail, probably at least ten years. And there’s a number of tort judgments against her and the group for monetary losses.
“Is that additional jail time?”
“No, that’s a lot of companies lined up to take all her money.”
“Can you hold off a little bit before picking her up?”
“How little?”
“We got this case, the oilman knifed in the alley three days ago. Then, yesterday, someone beat the shit out of his son, made him drink a bunch of poison drilling fluids.”
“He dead, too?”
“No—at least not yet.”
“And you like Lauren Atherton on those two?”
“We don’t think it’s the same person did both of them, but we’re not yet ready to clear her on either of them.”
“I can give you twenty-four hours.”
“Forty-eight?”
“She’s a flight risk.” Allen Pfeiffer’s tone was calm. He was just explaining what he was going to do—and why. All very reasonable. “If she gets a whiff you know who she is, she can get to Canada in two hours, anywhere in Europe before nightfall.”
“She’s a professor. In the middle of a semester. You really think she’s gonna run?”
“I think it’s quite likely. She’s been underground for almost thirty years. She knows what she’s looking at.”
“Okay, twenty-four hours.”
“Don’t let her know, Karen.” Now his tone was firm. “We really want to clear this case.”
“I hear you. Thanks, Allen.” I ended the call.
Ryan stood up and slipped into his suit jacket. “We need to tell the chief.”
We walked out of the bullpen, down the hall.
“Is he in?” I said to Margaret. She picked up her phone and talked to him, then told us to go in. The chief looked up from his computer. “There’s a federal warrant on our professor.”
“What kind of warrant?”
“She was an eco-terrorist in the eighties.”
“The FBI going to grab her now?”
