Cold Skies

by Thomas King

  And it did.

  Thumps talked to his Volvo. Every time he got into the vehicle, he encouraged it to start, and every time he came to a stoplight, he pleaded with it to keep running. He wasn’t sure if he could manage a car that actually did what you asked it to do.

  Cruz turned a corner and brought the Escalade to a stop in front of the Land Titles building. “You coming to the party at Shadow Ranch?”

  “Probably not.”

  “Free food,” said Cruz. “Free booze.”

  Thumps opened the door and got out. “I suppose this was a coincidence.”

  “What?”

  “Us running into each other,” said Thumps. “You dropping me off here.”

  “This is where you wanted to go, isn’t it?” Cruz leaned over and looked through the windshield. “Land Titles building. County coroner. Morgue is in the basement.”

  “And you would know that because . . .”

  “Lucky guess,” said Cruz.

  Thumps squatted down next to the Escalade. “Because you’re bugging Redding’s room?”

  “That would be illegal.” Cruz tapped the wheel. “You remember the names of the horses?”

  “Cisco’s horse was Diablo,” said Thumps. “Pancho’s horse was Loco.”

  “Shadow Ranch.” Cruz pulled the SUV into gear. “Who knows what you might learn.”

  Thumps stood and watched the Escalade disappear down the block. Okay, so Cruz was more than just muscle. The man knew things. Jayme Redding. Lester and Knight and Orion Technologies. Boomper Austin. And he knew about Beth and her basement.

  What else did he know?

  The front door was locked. Thumps pressed the button and reminded himself that with two floors above ground, he had a sixty-six percent chance of staying out of the basement.

  “Speak.”

  Beth could be upstairs in the living quarters enjoying a hot cup of tea. Or she could be on the main floor, working on files.

  Thumps leaned into the intercom speaker. “It’s me. Thumps.”

  “Basement.”

  “If we meet upstairs,” said Thumps, holding down the button, “we could have tea.”

  “Basement.”

  THE LAST TIME he had been in the basement, the stainless steel table had been vacant. Now it wasn’t.

  “God!”

  Margo Knight was on the table. Beth was standing next to her, a very large syringe with a very long needle in one hand.

  “Don’t be a baby,” said Beth. “You’ve seen lots of dead bodies.”

  “No, I haven’t.”

  “You here as acting sheriff?”

  “Nope.”

  “Then I can’t talk to you.”

  “Suits me,” said Thumps, and he headed for the stairs.

  “But you can be the messenger service.” Beth waved the syringe at him. “Come here.”

  “I’m fine where I am.”

  “You can’t see what I want you to see.”

  Thumps took one step forward.

  “Closer.”

  “What am I looking at?”

  “Bullet wounds,” said Beth. “One in the chest, one in the head. Either one would have been fatal. You see the stippling patterns?”

  “She was shot at close range.”

  “She was,” said Beth. “But look at the wounds themselves.”

  Thumps leaned over the body. “Okay.”

  “Symmetrical, right?”

  “More or less.”

  “And the head wound?” Beth took two short dowels from a tray and inserted them into the bullet wounds. “This is not exactly advanced forensics, but what do you see?”

  Both dowels stood straight up.

  Beth backed away from the table. “Same stippling pattern, same firing angle,” she said. “You want to tell me how that is possible?”

  Thumps rocked back on his heels.

  “First I shoot you in the chest,” said Beth. “What would you expect to happen?”

  “I’d probably fall down.”

  “You’d probably fall down. You might fall on your back. You might fall on your face. You might fall on your side. And then I shoot you in the head.”

  “Pattern changes,” said Thumps. “Angle changes.”

  “What if I shoot you in the head first?”

  Thumps shrugged. “Same thing. Pattern changes. Angle changes.”

  “Unless?”

  “Unless Knight was already lying on the ground, on her back, and the killer was standing over her when he shot her.”

  Beth pulled the dowels out of the wounds. “I didn’t find any sign of blunt force trauma. No bruising to indicate a struggle. So, why was she lying on the ground?”

  “Drunk? Passed out?”

  “Alcohol in the blood barely registered,” said Beth. “If she had anything to drink, it wasn’t much. Not enough to put her on the ground.”

  “Drugs.”

  Beth held up a plastic sack filled with a milky yellow liquid. “Stomach contents may tell us, but your physical gave me an idea.”

  Thumps hoped he’d be able to get the sack of stomach contents out of his head before he went to sleep that night.

  “I’m going to try to test the urine for Rohypnol and GHB.”

  Thumps looked at the body on the table. Knight wasn’t going to pee into a bottle no matter how nicely Beth asked.

  Beth held up the syringe. “I’m hoping that there’s fluid left in the bladder.”

  Thumps felt a shudder go through his body.

  “If it works,” said Beth, “I’ll check Lester’s urine as well.”

  “You have a cause of death for him?”

  Beth went to her desk and returned with a folder. “Lester had a heart condition. Not a serious one in the pantheon of heart conditions. But he was taking an ACE inhibitor to help dilate the arteries and to lower blood pressure.”

  “He died of a heart attack?”

  “I’ll know when I get all the tests back,” said Beth, “but yes, I’m betting he died of heart failure.”

  “Duke is going to love this.”

  “Good thing you’re a photographer and not acting sheriff.” Beth laid the syringe to one side and took off her gloves. “I need a break before I get serious with Dr. Knight. You want a cup of tea?”

  Thumps looked around the morgue. “Upstairs?” he asked, letting a note of hope creep into his voice.

  “Yes,” said Beth. “Upstairs.”

  THUMPS TRIED TO remember the last time he had been to the second floor of the Land Titles building. Before Beth and Ora Mae broke up? Yes, Ora Mae had been painting the place a dark yellow. Now the walls were a seafoam green.

  Thumps sat down at the table. “What happened to the yellow?”

  “You liked that yellow better?”

  Thumps did a quick check to see if Beth had brought the syringe with her.

  “No,” he said. “I like green.”

  Beth put the kettle on the stove to boil. “Yellow was Ora Mae.”

  As Thumps recalled, Ora Mae had painted the place any number of times in all sorts of colour combinations. It had been an annual ritual with her.

  “You want regular or herbal?”

  Thumps’s house had come with off-white walls, and he had never really considered painting them a different colour. But maybe he should. He had read an article that suggested that the colour of walls in the home and workplace could have a marked effect on mood and productivity. Thumps tried to imagine his bedroom in a deep blue.

  “Regular is fine.”

  He could paint his living room a buttercream, maybe spruce the bathroom up with a medium taupe.

  “Ora Mae is coming back,” said Beth. “To Chinook.”

  Thumps had never asked why the two women had split up, and he wasn’t about to ask now. He’d rather brave dead bodies and creepy morgues.

  “She wants to talk.” Beth took the kettle off the stove and poured the hot water into the cups. “What do you think I should do?”

&nb
sp; Thumps knew instinctively that there was no good answer to that question.

  “I won’t bite,” said Beth.

  “Yes, you will.”

  Beth brought the cups over and banged them down on the table.

  “I should get over to the sheriff’s office. He’s expecting me.”

  “Drink your damn tea.”

  “Okay.”

  “Thought you were a photographer.”

  “I am.”

  “Then just sit there and listen,” said Beth. “You think you can do that?”

  “Sure.”

  The tea was hot and strong.

  “You know why we split up?”

  There had been all sorts of rumours at the time. Archie had told him that Ora Mae had found a man somewhere back east. Al swore that it was because Beth wanted a baby, and Ora Mae didn’t. Thumps figured that the relationship had fallen apart because that’s what relationships tended to do.

  “I’m sure you heard all the rumours.”

  “Don’t listen to rumours.”

  “Everyone listens to rumours,” said Beth. “We can’t help ourselves.”

  Thumps put his face in the cup and waited.

  “One of us wanted a monogamous relationship,” said Beth. “One of us didn’t.”

  “Tea’s good.”

  “End of story.”

  Thumps waved a hand at the window. “Looks like it’s going to warm up.”

  “What would you do?”

  “Me?”

  “Never mind,” said Beth. “It was a rhetorical question.”

  Thumps could feel his legs begin to jiggle. They did that when he had sat in one place too long. And when he was anxious.

  “Is it okay if I change the subject for a moment?”

  Beth nodded.

  “If you knew that you were going to go out onto the prairies, how would you dress?”

  “You want to know why Knight was dressed for a night out.” Beth paused and sipped her tea. “Do you know how hard it is to walk on soft or broken ground in heels?”

  “No.”

  “Another rhetorical question.”

  “So, she hadn’t planned on going out to the test well.”

  “Be my guess.”

  Thumps wondered if Knight had seen the bullets coming or if she was already unconscious when she was shot.

  “You going to talk to Ora Mae?”

  “Sure,” said Beth. “No harm in talking. Don’t men talk to women?”

  “Mostly not,” said Thumps.

  “They talk to other men?”

  “Mostly never.” Thumps carried his cup to the sink and rinsed it out. Given the choice of dealing with Hockney or talking about relationships with Beth, he’d pick the sheriff.

  “So you don’t have any advice as to what I should say to her?”

  “Nope.”

  “You’re a good friend, DreadfulWater.” Beth pulled the afghan off the back of the sofa and arranged it around her feet. “But I can get more help from the bodies in my basement.”

  Sixteen

  Evidently spring was the season to paint things. The last time Thumps had been in the sheriff’s office, the walls had been white. There were other changes as well. The ratty leather sofa was gone, replaced with two impersonal metal chairs that reminded Thumps of the chairs in Beth’s morgue. Hockney’s quarter-sawn oak desk was nowhere to be seen. Instead, the sheriff was now sitting behind a glass slab with chrome legs, in a black metal and mesh chair that looked as though it had escaped from the set of a low-budget space movie.

  Not everything had been replaced. The ugly green file cabinets were still stacked against the far wall, and the old percolator that Duke used to smelt his coffee down into black ingots had miraculously survived the renovations.

  Oliver Parrish was sitting in one of the morgue chairs.

  Thumps stood in the middle of the room and tried to find his bearings. “What happened to the walls?”

  “Dusty rose.” Hockney made a face. “Mayor felt the place needed brightening.”

  “Brightening?”

  “That’s what she said. Brightening.”

  “It was bright before.”

  “What do you think of my new desk?”

  “Not much,” said Thumps.

  “Personally,” said Parrish, “I like the look. Has a clean, corporate feel.”

  “A suit.” Hockney stretched his neck and turned his head to one side. “She wants me to wear a suit to council meetings.”

  “Are those curtains?”

  Duke cleared his throat. “Ollie here was just about to fill me in on James Lester and Margo Knight. And seeing as it’s your case, I figure you’ll want to ask some of the questions.”

  “I don’t have a case.”

  “There’s not much to tell,” said Parrish. “They were both assholes.”

  “Were they involved?” Hockney picked up a pencil and began fiddling with it. “As in sex?”

  “That was the rumour,” said Parrish. “Neither of them was married, so no harm, no foul.”

  “Ollie here is thinking murder-suicide,” said Duke.

  “Oliver isn’t thinking anything,” said Parrish. “That’s the job of law enforcement.”

  Hockney shifted in his new chair. “Sure, but let’s say, just for fun, that Lester and Knight were murdered. Who would the smart money be on?”

  Parrish frowned. “You think they were both murdered?”

  “Oh, I don’t think they were murdered,” said the sheriff. “But on the off chance they were, who do you like for it?”

  Parrish ambled over to Duke’s percolator and poured himself a cup. The coffee came out in a lump. If the man was still looking for an espresso, he was on the wrong planet.

  “Lester was a wheeler-dealer. Liked expensive things. Cars, watches, clothes. He had a condo in Sacramento, another in San Francisco near the Embarcadero, and another at Lake Tahoe.”

  “Sounds like a swell guy,” said Duke.

  “Sure, if you like egotistical, misogynous paranoids.” Parrish took a sip and instantly recoiled as though he had been struck by a snake.

  Hockney closed his eyes and pretended to be bored. “And Knight?”

  “She was the brains of the outfit,” said Parrish. “But zero social skills. She saw the world as a giant periodic table. Had a mean streak. Liked to pull the wings off her assistants. Spied on everyone.”

  Hockney swivelled his chair to one side and then he swivelled to the other. “Still, you got along with the two of them.”

  “I worked for them. There’s a difference.”

  Parrish returned to his chair and sat down. His coffee cup stayed on the file cabinet. Thumps was fairly sure the man wasn’t going back for it.

  “And if you want to know the truth, there wasn’t a week went by where I wasn’t ready to strangle the both of them.”

  “What about your competition?” said Duke. “I hear that business is war.”

  Parrish looked back at the coffee cup on the file cabinet. “RAM is cutting edge, and Lester kept a tight lid on the technology. We didn’t have any competition.”

  “What about Boomper Austin?” said Thumps.

  The sheriff swivelled around. “Boomper?”

  Parrish’s eyes flashed, as if someone had struck a match. “You know Boomper Austin?”

  “He have any reason to kill Lester and Knight?”

  “Austin wants to buy RAM,” said Parrish. “That’s no secret either.”

  Hockney shifted his weight and tried to find a comfortable position. “You have any idea what Mr. Parrish is trying to tell us?”

  Thumps eased himself into the other morgue chair. It was as cold and clammy, as hard and unpleasant as it looked.

  “I think he’s trying to tell us that if Knight’s technology worked, we’d have a precise way to map aquifers and oil and gas deposits throughout the world and that this information could be exceptionally lucrative or exceptionally dangerous, depending on who controlled i
t.”

  “That’s exactly what Oliver is trying to tell you,” said Parrish.

  Hockney rocked his new chair back and forth. “Doesn’t sound all that dangerous.”

  Parrish leaned forward and adjusted his glasses. “You ever hear of the Ogallala Aquifer in the Midwest?”

  “Sure,” said Duke. “Big pot of water that we’re draining dry.”

  “And there’s the problem,” said Parrish. “The Ogallala Aquifer is part of the High Plains Aquifer. Covers about 174,000 square miles in eight states. Right now we don’t know how much water is left in the reserve. In some areas, the aquifer is dry. If we knew exactly how much water was in the Ogallala, a number of industries could be forced to develop expensive conservation protocols they don’t want to develop.”

  Thumps crossed his legs. It didn’t help. “Stands to reason that these industries don’t want the public to know what’s underground.”

  “Sure,” said Parrish. “Worst case scenario is that the big players apply the technology, discover that the deposits are close to collapse, keep that information a secret from the public, and push ahead regardless in order to keep their profits coming in for as long as possible.”

  “And deal with the shit when it hits the fan?”

  “Just business,” said Parrish.

  Duke rocked forward. “That why you carry a gun?”

  Parrish lost a bit of his swagger. “I have a permit.”

  “Didn’t ask you if you had a permit,” said Duke. “Asked you why you carry a gun.”

  “Lester,” said Parrish. “He was a gun nut. Insisted that all his executives carry one.”

  “Calibre?”

  “No idea,” said Parrish. “You want to see it?”

  “Actually,” said Duke, “I’d like to hold on to it for a while. That is, if you don’t mind.”

  Parrish slowly opened his jacket. “You can keep it for all I care.”

  “Slowly,” said the sheriff. “We tend to get a little nervous around here when big-city folks show up with guns.”

  Parrish eased the pistol out of the holster and placed it on Hockney’s desk.

  “Knight carry a gun?”

  “She did,” said Parrish. “She liked them as much as Lester did. They used to go shooting together.”