“Suits?”
“You kind of have to see it to believe it. Come with me.”
Russell drained his mug and stood. Sasha followed him through the glass door stenciled with gold lettering that read Sheriff and out into the hallway. As they followed the corridor around the corner to the left, the clacking of their shoes striking marble was drowned out by the sudden clamor of dozens of conversations drifting down the hall.
At the far end there was a door identical to the one they’d just come through, except its gold letters spelled out Recorder of Deeds. But that wasn’t what Russell wanted her to see. It was the suits.
Long wooden benches flanked the door for twenty feet on each side of the hallway. The benches were packed with men, interspersed with women here and there, sitting elbow to elbow, knee to knee. They were all wearing suits, mainly black pinstripes, but there were some navy blue renegades in the mix. Rows of briefcases lined the floor at their feet. Overflow suits who couldn’t find seats milled around, crowding the hallway.
From the too-hearty laugher and shouted conversations, Sasha could tell the suits weren’t strangers. They also weren’t friends. But it was clear they’d whiled away long hours sitting on those hard benches together. She recognized the signs of enforced camaraderie. She’d lived it, in long-running, multi-party cases where, for the first months or years, the defense group clustered together on one side of the room and the plaintiffs’ attorneys kept to themselves on the other. But after the first year or two of circling around each other at depositions, hearings, and status conferences, they’d lean across the aisle and ask after one another’s families. They’d share the big news—a daughter’s marriage or a parent’s cancer diagnosis—and the mundane news—an alma mater winning a championship or someone getting a new car—before standing up in front of the judge and accusing one another of being, at best, misguided buffoons, or, at worst, scum-sucking subhumans. Then it would be back into the hall for some more backslapping and chitchat.
As Sasha and the deputy drew closer to the office door, Sasha noticed a deli counter ticket machine resting on a table next to a water cooler.
“Is that for real?”
Russell nodded. “Yep. The oil and gas suits installed that, too. After the fire chief told them the fire code limited occupancy in the office to thirty people, it got hairy. People started camping out on the courthouse steps to be the first ones here when the doors opened. That violated the vagrancy code. Then I had to break up a fistfight when one of the gals saved another one’s place in line while she used the facilities. The Recorder tried an appointment system, but these jackals kept canceling each other’s appointments and signing up for seven, eight blocks of time at once. All sorts of dirty tricks. Finally, Big Sky Energy showed up with the ticket machine. Runs a lot smoother now.”
“What are they all doing here? Filing mineral rights leases?”
“This is where they file them, yeah. But the frenzy is over researching new ones. They go in there and pull old deeds from the archives to find the landowners who haven’t yet signed away their mineral rights.”
“At this rate, there can’t be many left, can there?”
Russell gave her a resigned look. “Clear Brook County spans approximately five thousand square miles. They’ve barely scratched the surface.”
He nodded to a few of the waiting researchers then turned to leave. “Let’s call Bricker’s Auto and see how they’re making out on your car. Then I guess I’d better get your statement.”
CHAPTER 5
Across the street, Dr. Shelly Spangler walked Miriam King to the door. As she reminded the woman to check her blood sugar more frequently, she saw her sister approaching.
Shelly pasted on a smile and said goodbye to her patient.
“Oh, hi, Commissioner Price,” Miriam said, excited by her brush with minor celebrity, as Heather rushed past her.
Shelly watched as her sister’s political instinct kicked in, compelling her to stop and shake Miriam’s hand with that two-handed clasp that all elected officials seemed to use.
She had taught her old spaniel, Corky, that trick. “Shake like a politician,” she’d say, and Corky would offer up a paw, wait for Shelly to take it, then put his other paw down on top of her hand. Now, every time she saw Heather do it, she had to resist the urge to toss her a treat.
“Is my sister taking good care of you, Mrs. King?” Heather asked, radiating concern.
“Oh my goodness, yes,” Miriam burbled, “I just need to lay off the pastries, I guess, right, doc?”
Shelly nodded. “You’ve got it,” she agreed. “Now, you give Ken my regards.”
As Miriam stepped out onto the sidewalk from the doctor’s office, Heather swept inside, rolling her eyes.
“Perhaps a glimpse in the mirror should have clued her in to the need to lay off the pastries,” she cracked, dropping the politician act to ridicule the woman waddling away.
Shelly ignored it. The easiest way to deal with Heather’s mean streak was just not to feed it.
“What’s the occasion?” she asked instead.
Heather rarely stopped by unannounced.
“Oh, I just wanted to check on the preparations for the grand opening. Aren’t you going to be excited when I turn that dump next door into a decent restaurant?”
Shelly shrugged. Bob’s served perfectly good food, as far as she was concerned, but Heather was dead set on bringing organic, locally-sourced, farm-fresh cuisine to town. It wasn’t a bad idea, as many of Shelly’s patients could stand to eat a healthier diet. Of course, the café wasn’t for them, it was going to be geared to the oil and gas crowd, with their ample per diem stipends, so people like Miriam King probably wouldn’t be able to afford the beet and goat cheese salad or whatever Heather was planning to serve.
Heather was waiting for an answer, her eyes narrowed to slits.
“Oh, uh, yeah, I can’t wait!” Shelly enthused.
Satisfied, Heather draped herself over a waiting room chair and crossed her legs, letting her high heel shoe dangle off one foot.
Shelly sat across from her and waited. Apparently, Heather was in the mood to chat.
Heather cut her eyes to the empty reception desk. “Where’s Becky?”
“I sent her out to the store. We’re getting low on some office supplies.”
“Did you hear about the attack?”
“What attack?”
Heather’s eyes, so blue they were purple, sparked with excitement.
“Apparently, one of Danny Trees’s idiot followers attacked an out-of-town lawyer with a stick in the municipal lot this morning.”
“Was he badly hurt?”
“First of all, it was a she, and she wasn’t, but I guess he was,” Heather said with a laugh. “She grabbed the stick off him and beat him with it.”
“Good for her!”
“Yeah,” Heather agreed, “good for her. But not for you.”
“What?”
Shelly’s heart dropped because she had no idea where this was going, but most surprises from Heather weren’t the nice kind.
“Well, Shelly, it seems Judge Paulson appointed the stick-wielding lawyer from Pittsburgh to represent Jed Craybill at his incapacitation hearing. Didn’t Marty Braeburn call you?”
“No, he didn’t say anything. Now, why would Judge Paulson go and do something like that?”
Shelly was annoyed, but she didn’t think it was a big deal.
Her sister, however, was working herself up over it.
“I don’t know, Shelly, maybe that old fool finally caught on to us. We can’t afford this, you know that, right? We need that land, and we need it now.”
“Calm down, Heather. Just because Jed has an attorney doesn’t mean anything. Paulson will declare him incapacitated, I’ll take control of the property, and we’ll move forward. At most, it’s a tiny delay.”
“You better hope so, Shelly. That parcel is the key to the rest of our plans. Not just the wells, you know,
but the hotel and all of the rest of the development. His lot abuts Keystone Property’s land. His house is going to have to go; I don’t want tourists to have to drive by that old shack on their approach to the resort.”
Heather and her flipping hotel resort were driving Shelly crazy. Her job was to get the leases. Period. But, Heather was always yapping about building the next Nemacolin Woodlands right here in Cold Brook County. For one thing, Shelly thought Nemacolin was bizarre. There you are, just driving through Uniontown, as rural as could be, and some giant building modeled after a French castle pops up over the hill. It was off-putting if you asked her. But, of course, Heather hadn’t asked her, and, as long as the money flowed in the way Heather said it would, Shelly didn’t much care about the aesthetics.
“Anyway,” she said, “even if the judge denies the petition, we can just appeal.”
Heather shook her head so hard the Prada sunglasses perched on top wobbled.
“No, Shelly, we don’t have time for appeals. Not for this, not for the declaratory judgments. Time is money. Haven’t you learned that by now? I told you all along you should have gotten the county to use Drew instead of Marty for this work.”
Shelly didn’t want to get into it.
Drew Showalter was the county solicitor; he advised the commissioners. Heather firmly believed she controlled him through a combination of desire and fear. Shelly had no doubt Drew both wanted and feared her sister, but every once in a while she thought she saw something like regret or conscience spark in the man. Anyway, it wasn’t her call. The Department of Aging Services used Marty because he was cheaper than Drew.
“Well, what does Drew say?” she asked.
“I don’t know, he’s always yammering about evidentiary standards and elements, four-pronged tests, yada yada. It’s like he’s getting paid by the word.”
“He is, isn’t he?”
The sisters shared a good laugh over that. Shelly was glad to have distracted her from this latest issue. Keeping Heather happy was becoming a fulltime job.
CHAPTER 6
Back in Russell’s uncomfortable chair, Sasha was heartened to find her coffee still warm. She wrapped her hand around the mug while the deputy called Bricker’s to see if her tires had been replaced yet. After reporting that the mechanic had replaced her windshield but had had to send someone out to Hickory to get the replacement tires, he told her it would be at least a few more hours.
“Sorry you’re stuck here for a while,” he said, untangling the cord to his tape recorder. He bent down and worked the plug behind his desk, feeling around for the outlet. Then he ejected the tape from the recorder, wrote her name and the date on it with his pen, and returned it to the deck. He depressed the “record” button and waited for the reel to start turning. He cleared his throat and set the recorder on the desk equidistant between them. He announced the date and her name, then gave her a smile.
“Let’s do this thing,” he said. “Ms. McCandless, what were you doing in town today?”
It looked like Russell was going to skip all the formalities about name, address, occupation. Sasha recognized the approach. She used it herself in depositions of fact witnesses from time to time. By adopting a conversational tone, you could make the witness forget she was being recorded. The result was more fully developed answers, because she wasn’t choosing each word with care. For the first time, she got the sense that the coffee-loving deputy might actually be a skilled investigator.
“Well, I was in town for a discovery motion before Judge Paulson this morning.”
“So, you’re an attorney?”
“Yes. I practice in Pittsburgh.”
“What firm?”
“Presc.. .,” she caught herself, “The Law Offices of Sasha McCandless.” The habit of identifying herself as a Prescott & Talbott attorney was dying hard.
“So, who’s your client up here? And what was the hearing about?”
She hesitated then decided to answer. It was a matter of public record. “VitaMight, Inc.”
He waited.
“VitaMight has a distribution center outside town. The commercial landlord, Keystone Properties, terminated the long-term lease on the property with no notice. It’s a breach of the lease agreement, so we sued. The landlord has refused to turn over e-mail messages related to the lease termination, so we filed a motion to compel. The judge granted it.”
She was pretty sure the attack hadn’t had anything to do with the interpretation of clause 14(G)(iii)(c) of the lease, but she knew Russell had to cover all the bases.
“Why’d Keystone break the lease?”
“I honestly don’t know. That’s why we want the discovery—they haven’t shared the basis with us.”
He was silent for a minute. She watched him try to decide if there was anything more to the discovery dispute.
He looked down at his notebook, scribbled a sentence, and moved on.
“After the hearing, did you go straight to your car?”
From his tone, she knew he already knew the answer, but she hadn’t told him. Probably the other deputy—the one assigned to the courtroom—had already filled him in on Jed Craybill’s outburst.
“No. As I was packing up to leave, Jed Craybill burst in yelling at Judge Paulson. Somehow, when the dust settled, I’d been appointed to represent Mr. Craybill at an incapacitation hearing that was scheduled for this morning. Mr. Craybill and I went to Bob’s Diner to get a bite and prepare for the hearing. At the hearing, I argued that the county failed to meet its burden to show that Mr. Craybill needed to have a guardian appointed to manage his affairs, and Judge Paulson scheduled a hearing and ordered us to brief the issue.”
Russell reached out with his index finger and paused the recording. “Do you think old Jed’s incompetent?”
She shrugged. “I only met him this morning. What do you think?”
He considered the question. “I think he’s a cranky old coot.”
He nodded and started the recording again. Sasha walked him through her visit to the court administrator’s office, her conversation with Showalter, and her uneventful walk to the parking lot. Then, she gave him a blow-by-blow of the attack and described the two men to the best of her ability. Russell let her go without interruption and stopped her after she recounted Maxwell’s arrival at the scene and before she could describe the jurisdictional pissing match.
“Thank you, Ms. McCandless.”
He turned off the tape recorder, popped out the tape, and reached under the desk to unplug the recorder.
After depositing it back into his drawer, he leaned back, tipping his chair on two legs and regarded her.
“I don’t know anyone by the name Jay or anyone who matches that description. But the guy who got cold feet, that sounds like Danny. Little guy, wild black curly hair. He’s pretty much the leader of PORE.”
“PORE?”
“Protecting Our Resources and the Earth,” Russell said. He suppressed a chuckle. “Gotta be Danny Trees.”
“His real name is Danny Trees?”
“No, his real name is Daniel J. McAllister, III. Heir to the McAllister timber fortune. But after all that timber money sent young Danny to college at Antioch, he grew quite the conscience and has devoted himself to environmental activism. He finances PORE with his trust fund.”
Sasha raised an eyebrow. “What kind of organization is it?”
Russell pursed his lips and considered his answer. Finally, he said, “A disorganized organization. For a long time, PORE was just Danny and a few of his college friends wandering around, passing out flyers about reducing, reusing, and recycling. The irony of wasting paper on those flyers, which just ended up in the trash bins all over town, seemed to escape them. But once the drilling started up in earnest, Danny gained a focus. He’s got a core of, oh, I’d say, twenty, protesters who were showing up at the courthouse fairly regularly to heckle the suits, until Big Sky got the county council to tell Danny his permit applications were faulty. That’s when th
ey moved down to the public park near the municipal lot. Danny’s folks have also chained themselves to a derrick here or there on occasion. Nothing violent, though. Until today. Danny’s no dummy, though. He reached out to some of the local fishermen, who are unhappy about what all the fracking’s supposedly done to the fish. They teamed up and got a petition going. They’ve been going to all the county council meetings, too. It’s not going to do them any good, though. Most of the commissioners own local businesses, which have seen a huge boom from the suits. The only hotel in town is booked solid through 2014. Folks are renting out their spare rooms. It’s like the Olympics are in town or something.”
Russell clamped his mouth shut all of the sudden, like he realized he’d been rambling. He looked up at the metal clock on the wall. “Well, you got some time to kill. Want to pay Danny Trees a visit?”
* * * * * * * * * *
Russell brought his Crown Vic to a stop in front of an old Victorian mansion on the edge of town. The house had once been gorgeous, but its grandeur was faded. Paint peeled down from the outside walls in long, limp curls. Several ornate, hand-turned wooden spindles on the curved porch were either broken or missing entirely. And where Sasha imagined starched white lace curtains had once hung, grungy woven blankets now served as window dressing.
“This is it,” Russell said, killing the engine. “The McAllister mansion. Now home to Danny Trees and PORE’s headquarters. This place is on the National Registry of Historic Places.”
As they stepped out of the car, Russell holstered his service weapon and radio. Sasha stared up at the blighted house.
“It’s a shame.”
“It is, and it isn’t,” Russell answered, as they picked their way across the cracked walkway, dotted with weeds. “It’s a big, expensive house. To restore and maintain it would cost more than anyone around here is willing to pay. Danny may not be keeping up appearances, but he pays the taxes and hasn’t let the place crumble to the ground just yet. He says it would be wasteful not to use the house, given how many trees were massacred—his word—to create it.” He shrugged and pointed over his shoulder to a house directly across the street. “It’s better than what happened to the old Wilson place.”
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