A Mother's Vow

by Ken Casper

  Jeff hated having to add to her pain, but there was no alternative if they were going to get to the bottom of her husband’s death. He’d come to accept that Jordan Tanner had been murdered. And he wanted to learn more about the woman he’d left behind.

  “What can you tell me about Jordan’s last day?” he asked.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  * * *

  “HE ARRIVED at his office that Wednesday morning round eight,” she said, “chaired a meeting of the editorial board at nine, then went to see the mayor at ten.”

  “What for?”

  “The paper was covering the upcoming school board elections, and the mayor was worried that a couple of the candidates were getting bad press.”

  “Were they?”

  “No more than they deserved,” she said. “Jordan’s policy was to report everything that could have a bearing on a candidate’s ability to serve, including character issues. For instance, Davy Cordova had been arrested for drunk driving twice in the previous year and had a long record of family violence and assault. Philippa Moore had been implicated in several money-laundering investigations at the credit union where she was a member of the board. The charges were always dropped, but on technicalities, not evidence.”

  “What was Jordan’s response to the mayor’s concerns?”

  “We never got to talk again after he left the house that morning, but he would have refused to hold back pertinent information on public figures of either party just because it might make them uncomfortable.”

  “How long did this meeting last?”

  “About three-quarters of an hour. He left city hall around ten-forty-five, according to the mayor and signed the log at the front desk of the athletic club at three minutes after eleven, so he must have gone straight there.”

  “Was the athletic club part of his normal routine?”

  She nodded. “Three times a week. On Mondays and Wednesdays he ran outside on the jogging path through Memorial Park. Fridays he played racquetball or squash.” She bit her lip. “He kept in good shape, Jeff. He watched his diet, did all the things the doctors tell us to do, and then he dropped dead.”

  “The autopsy said it was a heart attack.”

  She breathed out. “Brought on by dehydration. The temperature that day had reached a hundred degrees by noon. Which was why Tyrone decided not to go with him. The medical examiner learned later that Jordan had drunk a couple of cups of coffee at the mayor’s office. Coffee’s a diuretic, so Jordan could have been low on electrolytes without realizing it when he started his run.”

  “He wouldn’t have taken water with him?”

  “He drank Gatorade on his runs, but apparently not that day.”

  “Though it was sweltering. Why?”

  “It didn’t make sense to me, either. Jordan was too smart not to take fluids.”

  “He could have stopped to drink at the fountains in the park.”

  “That’s what everybody said. Then Stuckey reported seeing him drinking from a Gatorade bottle.”

  “Did you attend the autopsy?”

  She shivered. Jeff understood why. As a homicide cop she would have attended more than one postmortem. It took a strong stomach and a determined mindset to see a corpse cut open. He was willing to credit her with the professional mettle in the case of a stranger, but emotional detachment when the body on the slab was the person you lived with and had made love to was another matter.

  “I wasn’t that brave,” she said, her voice brittle rather than strong. “When I brought you into my office and fired you, why didn’t you fight me?”

  “What?” The jump in topics caught him off balance. Disturbing him was something this woman seemed to be exceptionally good at.

  “I sent you packing, and all you did was glare at me and walk away. Why didn’t you challenge me, if not then, later?”

  He was struggling to keep up with her. What did his not ranting at her have to do with her husband’s autopsy? Suddenly he understood. While she was dealing with him, her husband’s body was being sliced open on a pathologist’s table. She’d been expecting a fight, probably welcoming it as a distraction from the ugly images parading through her mind.

  “I couldn’t have won. Not then. Not there.” He had the strangest feeling he’d let her down, instead of the other way around. “The deck was stacked. The atmosphere in the department had been polluted against me. I was better off getting on with my life.”

  “You caved in,” she said with a hint of contempt.

  “If you remember, Chief, you were the one who screwed up. Or was that admission in my office the other day just a ploy to rope me into this obsession of yours? Maybe you think I really am a racist.”

  She glared at him. He’d regretted his outburst even before the words had left his mouth. Her lips thinned to a straight line. “I expected you to fight me because it was the right thing to do,” she said, “not because it might be profitable.”

  She was calling him a wimp. No one had ever accused him of cowardice before. Her uncanny ability to reverse tables had his blood drumming with sudden temper, but there was admiration behind it, too. She was good at what she did, and he was glad they were at least theoretically on the same side this time. She’d make a formidable enemy.

  He wandered over to a wrought-iron chair in the breakfast nook and sat down. She was right. He had fled rather than fought. He hadn’t considered it running away but exercising the wisdom to realize what couldn’t be changed. Now he had to question that decision.

  He was also becoming too aware of Catherine Tanner as a woman, and that wasn’t good. She was a client, yet his reaction to her spooked him, made him feel vulnerable and unprofessional. He couldn’t afford that, either. This was a job, nothing more.

  “Maybe I’m putting too much into what this Stuckey character claims he saw,” she acknowledged. “The guy probably can’t remember what he drank yesterday, much less what took place a year ago. He could have imagined it, or gotten it confused with something else. A man actually did have an epileptic fit in the park a week before, and the paramedics had to be called. Maybe Stuckey’s mixing that up with Jordan’s death.”

  Without thinking, Jeff reached across the table and took her hands in his, then probed her sad eyes. “But if he’s telling the truth, it means Jordan was poisoned.”

  She tried without success to hold back tears.

  He got up, circled the table, extended his hands. Tugged her gently to her feet, wrapped his arms around her. She didn’t respond at first, then slowly she hugged his waist and rested her head on his shoulder. She felt so right there. He wanted to kiss her, but had to be content with pressing his lips into her hair. A minute passed and she was crying softly, her tears dampening his shirt.

  “I’ll find him, Catherine,” he murmured, “I promise.”

  LATER THAT EVENING, trying very hard not to dwell on the memory of Catherine’s body pressing against his, of the way they fit so comfortably together, Jeff danced his fingers over his computer keyboard. Since the environmental cleanup of the old waterfront district was a matter of public record, he had no difficulty finding out which of the Rialto facilities the Superfund was handling. The larger question was who was leasing the warehouse when it shut down in ‘77.

  Uranica Corporation.

  He checked a variety of resources but could find no record of the company anywhere in the U.S. or Canada. He extended his search to Central and South America. Nada. Europe. Zero. Asia. Zip. He considered calling Derek Pager. Maybe the computer genius could come up with a lead, but then he thought of someone else. First, though, he sent an e-mail to a friend of his in the FBI.

  The following morning he received an answer back.

  “No record of Uranica Corp on file.”

  Another dead end.

  Sunday was a good day for visiting people, so just before noon he phoned Kermit Nagle. He had met Nagle several years ago when he was investigating a double murder in Sunnyside. Nagle was a neighbor of the d
ead couple, and his memory for quirky details had proven a godsend in identifying the killer, who was later apprehended. Jeff had also found the middle-aged former mining engineer to be far more intelligent than his offbeat, politically incorrect and sometimes irreverent humor suggested.

  Ten minutes later he was on his way to the man’s house.

  The Nagle yard reflected Kermit’s past profession. A small duckbill ore car sat on a short length of steel track in the flower bed near the front door. Leaning against it were a couple of well-worn shovels and a rusty pick. A weathered kerosene lantern completed the display. Jeff reached for the bell, but the door flew open before he had a chance to push the button.

  Years of relative inactivity had added bulk to Kermit’s wide frame, but didn’t disguise the essential brawn beneath it. He had massive shoulders and big, scarred hands. His nose had been broken twice, once while working, once in a barroom.

  Those hell-raising days were long gone. Kermit Nagle had retired from mining ten years ago at the age of forty-five. He now lived on his investments and the supplemental income he earned writing short stories, shoot ‘em up westerns and offbeat murder mysteries.

  Announcing that his wife was out spending his hard-earned money, he led Jeff into his book-filled office. The “safe” in the corner behind his desk was actually a small refrigerator.

  “Stella wants me to shed thirty pounds,” he grumbled, “so she has me off my brew and on diet cola.” He shivered dramatically. “I keep telling her the stuff is bad for you, but she won’t listen. No reason you can’t have one, though.” He opened the fridge, which was filled with canned beer and soft drinks.

  “Misery deserves company,” Jeff said. ‘”Cola is fine.”

  Frowning—no doubt in disappointment that he wasn’t being given an excuse to defy “the little woman”—Kermit extracted two cans, handed one to Jeff and parked himself in an old-fashioned wooden swivel chair. They popped the tops. “You said you had some questions I might be able to help you with.”

  Jeff hadn’t wanted to give any particulars on the phone. “What can you tell me about uranium?”

  Kermit raised an eyebrow and reached over to a side table, picked out one of the various rocks scattered there and tossed it to Jeff. “Here’s a sample.”

  Jeff caught it. though his instinct was to shy away from the substance that conjured up images of people glowing in the dark. The gray, baseball-size rock was heavy, coarse and unimpressive.

  “It’s not dangerous,” his host assured him.

  “But it is radioactive, right?”

  From the drawer in the same table Kermit removed a piece of equipment that resembled a voltmeter. He pressed an on-off button, adjusted a dial and extended the instrument across the desk. The device clicked more rapidly as it neared the rock.

  “This is fairly low grade,” he said. “Not much more than you might get from a piece of granite.” Jeff gaped.

  “Granite’s radioactive?”

  “Most potassium-rich rocks are to some degree.” Kermit laughed and held the Geiger counter over Jeff’s wrist watch. The clicking again accelerated. “You have a radium dial. There’s no danger in the miniscule amounts we’re dealing with here. I worked a couple of uranium claims back in the sixties. We mined it the way we did any other mineral, mostly because we didn’t know any better. Nowadays you have to take all sorts of precautions. Except nobody’s mining it anymore.”

  “Why not?”

  “Not worth it. Back in the fifties and early sixties processed uranium—yellowcake—was going for anywhere from six to eight dollars a pound. By the mid-seventies it had skyrocketed to over forty, before beginning a slow decline. Then came Three Mile Island and Chernobyl. The bottom fell out of the market completely, and the price of yellowcake plunged to four or five bucks a pound. It’s back up again now, I think, but not enough to cover labor and heavy-equipment expenses, much less the cost of processing it under the new strict environmental regulations. Today there are only a handful of mining companies left that even deal in the product, mostly overseas.”

  Jeff regarded the soft drink in one hand, the chunk of radioactive mineral in the other.

  “We have plenty of uranium stockpiled to meet current demands for nuclear power and weapons,” Kermit went on. “The big concern today is what to do with the waste products. There have even been proposals to put it in rockets and send it deep into outer space. Now if you could come up with a peaceful, productive use for the spent fuel, you’ll get the Nobel Prize for saving the world and become very, very rich.”

  Jeff put the rock on the desk in front of him, convinced he wasn’t going to be able to solve that particular problem. His interest was closer to home. “Ever hear of a company called Uranica?”

  Kermit stroked his chin, then shook his head. “Nope. Should I?”

  “They leased a warehouse on the Houston waterfront but abandoned the place and the yellowcake stored there in the late seventies.”

  Kermit sucked down the rest of his cola and tossed the can into the wastebasket at the side of his desk.

  “You’re referring to the forty barrels the Superfund had to dispose of.”

  On the way over, Jeff had debated with himself about how much he could tell Kermit. Instinct and experience told him he could trust the guy, and leveling with him might reveal new information.

  “There’s reason to believe sixty barrels were left behind.”

  Kermit’s bushy eyebrows rose, as he whistled through his teeth. “Twenty barrels are unaccounted for?”

  Jeff nodded. “We can’t be sure. That’s why I want to find out what happened to Uranica Corp, so I can check their records.”

  “If they have any.” Kermit supplied. “Back in the boom-and-bust years of the Cold War, uranium companies were formed overnight, a lot of them by con men. A few made huge profits, mostly in stock trading rather than operations. Many of the operations that actually found, uranium folded because the people running them didn’t know what they were doing. For the legitimate ones, buyouts and consolidations were the only roads to survival.” Kermit scratched his head. “Uranica. Sounds like any one of dozens of fly-by-night outfits.” He paused to stare at the ceiling, then shrugged. Reaching back into his safe, he extracted two cans of beer. “This requires serious cogitation.”

  Jeff laughed and accepted the proffered brew. “The sun is over the yardarm somewhere. Thanks.” He sipped away the foam that bubbled out when he sprang the top. “What would twenty barrels of yellowcake be worth?”

  “Officially? At the current price, you’re looking at ten to twelve thousand dollars a barrel. Multiply that by twenty barrels . . . upwards of a quarter of a million. On the black market, I would guess it could fetch ten times that. Maybe more.”

  “Terrorists have deep pockets these days,” Jeff noted. “How can I find out what happened to Uranica? I’ve done the usual search for registered corporations, domestic and foreign. Nothing. The FBI says the company doesn’t exist. Claims they interviewed a bunch of senior miners out west, but none of them ever heard of it.”

  “Those old-timers wouldn’t talk to the feds. Might as well put on a suit and ask a hillbilly where you can buy good moonshine.” Kermit pursed his lips. “I wonder . . . ”

  Jeff waited.

  “Let me make a few phone calls. I have some friends in Arizona and Nevada who’ve been around most of the mines in the southwest. One of them might be able to tell us what happened to this outfit.”

  “One other question,” Jeff said. “Assuming someone did steal the twenty barrels of yellowcake and sell it to terrorists, what would they do with it, and how would we find it?”

  “That’s two questions.” Kermit upended his beer can, stretched back in his chair and stared again at the ceiling, as if the answers were written there.

  “They would have to get it out of the country,” he said, “to a place with a nuclear weapons program, like India or Pakistan. Creating an atomic bomb isn’t something you do in y
our basement or backyard. You need a nuclear reactor to turn the raw product into useable material. As for getting it there—”

  He stuck out his lower lip. “Hundreds of cargo ships go through here every year, each carrying thousands of containers. A barrel weighs around six hundred pounds. Assuming they left the powder in the barrels and didn’t split it into smaller units for easier transport, you’re still not looking for excessive weight or distinctive shapes.”

  “But it would be detectable with a Geiger counter.”

  Kermit frowned. “That’s one of the ironies I don’t understand myself. Yellowcake isn’t particularly radioactive. If it was enclosed inside a shipping container, it probably wouldn’t emit any more radiation than any other cargo.”

  Jeff blew out a breath in frustration. “Are you saying we can’t trace this stuff?”

  Kermit shrugged. “It’ll be tough. Your best bet will be to work backwards. Isolate shipments going into target ports from Houston, then see if you can determine if they were suspicious.”

  “We’re looking for a needle in a haystack.”

  “A hot needle that could set the whole barn ablaze.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  * * *

  “YOU’RE NOT ASKING MUCH,” Derek told Jeff in his office the next day.

  The task was daunting, but Jeff also got the impression the computer geek was eager for the challenge.

  “I won’t be able to do this overnight,” Derek warned him.

  “Take a couple of days if you need to,” Jeff said with a facetious grin. The assignment could take months.

  “Great. I’ll do it between naps and chocolate bars.”

  Jeff could see the guy’s mind was already sorting through ideas on how he could break into the computer systems that stored the port of Houston’s data.