Dead Land

by Sara Paretsky

  “This time he showed up when Lydia was—doing what she was doing. He blew up at the men, he hit one hard enough that there was blood all over his face. The other men left and this Coop charged into the house, even though I was yelling at him to stop, that he was trespassing! Of course, I went in after. Ty, Mr. Zamir, he was at work.”

  When she stopped again, I said gently, “Was he assaulting Lydia?”

  “She was in his arms, he was patting her hair, but she was in his arms naked, and that horrible dog was with him.”

  She paused, then added defiantly, “I went to get our gun. I shot him.”

  “You did?” My voice came out in a startled squeak. “How badly did you hurt him?”

  “I missed, but the bullet grazed the dog, its shoulder, and then Lydia was screaming at me that I was a monster, how could she live with a monster, she wanted Coop’s help. She wouldn’t go to a doctor, but she wanted this crazy man who broke someone’s nose and came into her room when she was—was—”

  She stopped, spittle covering the sides of her mouth. She was panting in little bursts. No wonder the dog had shown hackle at the sound of her voice.

  “She left a few days later.”

  “With Coop?”

  “No. He came around, wanting to see her, and she was gone. She hadn’t told him. I didn’t tell him. He said he wanted me to pay his damned dog’s veterinary bill. I told him he had a hell of a nerve, trying to rape my daughter and wanting me to pay his bills.”

  The clouds had thickened, and the wind was rising, bending the line of trees in front of us.

  “What’s his name, besides Coop?” I asked.

  “I never heard,” she muttered.

  “Do you know anything about him?” I couldn’t keep a despairing keening out of my voice. “Anything that would help me find him?”

  “He was an environmental fanatic. When he found out Ty—Mr. Zamir—worked for Sea-2-Sea he almost hit him.”

  “Where does he come from?”

  She stood for a long time, kneading the back of the bench, trying to regain her self-control. She finally said, in a quiet voice, “He went to K-State, I think. At least, he wore a Wildcats cap and T-shirt. There’s a big rivalry between K-State and the Lawrence campus, the Jayhawks—you wouldn’t wear Wildcats gear around here unless you liked getting people stirred up.”

  38

  Yanking Each Other’s Chains

  The storm broke when we got on the highway, great sheets of water that bubbled across the road like a creek. I had the air-conditioning on and the wipers running full bore, but Bear was whimpering in fear. I opened a window for him and let the wave of water flood the passenger seat, splashing onto me.

  Lightning streaked all around the horizon, making me feel that I was in a glass paperweight shaken by a giant hand. A siren sounded, tornado warning. I know you’re supposed to stop, get out of your car, lie flat in a ditch, but I wanted to get as far from Debbie Zamir as I could.

  By the time we crept into town and made it to our motel, the sirens had stopped. The rain was still falling, but the wind had eased and the lightning had ended. Bear and I were two sodden lumps as we climbed to our second-floor room. There were two towels, one for each of us.

  I sat on the floor next to him, and he laid his heavy head on my knees. “She shot you, huh?” I ran my fingers through his shoulders, but the wound was three years old. I couldn’t feel the scar. “She is a scary person, isn’t she? A good match for your boy, Coop—rockets that shoot off in random directions at unpredictable times. Poor Tyler, Poor Lydia. Poor Bear.”

  I was hungry, but too weary to hunt for food. I gave Bear a double ration of his dinner, but settled for a bag of peanuts from a vending machine for myself.

  In the morning, I took some extra towels from the housekeeper and tried to dry out the Mustang, but the rain had soaked into the floor mats and the upholstery. The car would need a decontamination cleaning when I got back to Chicago. For now, I’d drive with the windows open unless it started to rain again—in which case, Bear would have to tough it out.

  I picked up fruit, kefir, and a goat cheese sandwich at the local co-op grocery, stopped again at the Decadent Hippo for espresso, and headed west. Just like a pioneer, at least, just like a pioneer with an eight-cylinder, 460-horsepower engine on a paved four-lane highway.

  The Kansas State campus was about two hours west of Lawrence. If Coop had been a student there, as Lydia’s mother guessed, it would have been twenty or thirty years ago. Student records from that era probably hadn’t been digitized, but someone might still be working there who remembered him. He was the kind of person people keep talking about, even years after they’ve gone.

  Superficial research on the Kansas State curriculum showed they were the state’s land-grant school, with significant programs in conservation, ecology, and land stewardship. Just the place for someone who attacked anyone using carcinogenic pesticides.

  The drive on a weekday morning was easy; we pulled into Manhattan, Kansas, home of the K-State Wildcats—as a million or two signs announced—midmorning. I found a parking space not too far from the campus and set out with Bear. Last night’s storm had left muggy clinging weather in its wake; I couldn’t leave him in the car.

  I spent several hours hiking the campus, talking to people in administration and to departmental secretaries. I finally encountered an older woman in the Conservation Rangers program who remembered him.

  “It had to be twenty, twenty-five years ago, so I don’t remember the details that clearly. He wasn’t a full-time student—I think he registered for some courses, or maybe he audited, but the department chair at the time made him leave because he disrupted the lab sessions. He had a chip on his shoulder the size of an old-growth oak.”

  She called two of her friends who worked in the ecology and environmental programs; Coop’s temper was legendary, and all three women had stories to tell.

  Unfortunately, none of them knew his last name, or where he’d come from. The first woman thought he’d been local. “He knew a lot about land and farming, even when he was eighteen years old, so I assumed he grew up in the country.”

  “But don’t you think his family couldn’t afford to own land?” one of her friends said. “I always thought the chip on his shoulder came from feeling the other kids looked down on him.”

  “He volunteered at the Tallgrass Prairie,” the third woman said. “Back then, I mean. I don’t think he’s been there for years.”

  They explained that the Tallgrass Prairie was a protected nature preserve, a small remnant of the prairie that used to cover the entire Midwest.

  “Yes,” the second woman chimed in. “They had to ask him to leave—he was always arguing over how they wanted to do things, as if he knew more than anyone else how a prairie should be managed. I think he was arrested for protesting that new Sea-2-Sea feedlot—remember that, about six, seven years ago?”

  “Are you sure? That was way out by Montezuma,” my informant from Conservation said.

  She showed me a map of the state. Montezuma, a town of 150 or so, was off toward the southwest corner of the state. We looked up the Montezuma protest. It had been seven years ago. The Wichita paper had a small graph on it—the protestors had thrown green dye on the first cattle herd as it was released into the lot. I used the computer in the office to log in to LexisNexis, but it didn’t show any arrests for the relevant time period.

  “Is it possible he lives out there?” I asked. Looking at the map I felt overwhelmed. The landscape was huge—if Coop’s family farmed, or he lived on a farm, finding them in that vastness would make plucking needles from haystacks look simple.

  “It’s possible,” the second woman said, her voice dubious. “But it’s ranching country, not planting country. Not enough rain there.”

  The third woman said, “You know what you might do is go talk to Franklin Alsop. He was one of the Tallgrass Meet-Up organizers. If it’s like you say, that this Coop was hanging around Lyd
ia Zamir when she went back home, then chances are he was hanging out at the concert, too.”

  I agreed it was a good suggestion, but said I hadn’t been able to track down any of the organizers.

  “That’s why you came to us.” The Conservation secretary smiled. She went to the computer and tapped a few keys. “Yes, Franklin is out by Black Wolf. That shooting, that did him a lot of damage. He lost his trust in people, even his wife. She left him at the end of the second year. If you can get him to talk to you, it could be a help for him. If he thinks he can save Lydia, it may make him less—oh, maybe despairing is the word I’m looking for.”

  They showed me Black Wolf on the wall map, about a hundred miles to the west, on beyond the town of Salina. Salina was near the farm where mass murderer Arthur Morton had grown up, and where his mother still lived. I could stop to see if she could explain how Devlin & Wickham came to be her son’s lawyers and then move on to Black Wolf.

  I thanked the three women, who were cheery in their assurances that they’d been glad to help. Bear and I retrieved the Mustang and headed for the open road. Driving in Kansas was liberating after a lifetime of Chicago traffic. I don’t often get to push my muscle car to her limits, but we sailed along the Interstate at ninety and reached the Salina town limit in under an hour.

  I drove around for a bit, orienting myself. I found the Saline County Courthouse, where Arthur Morton had been tried, and the jail where he’d died in agony from an overdose of nicotine patches.

  After letting Bear stretch his legs, I went to the police station. In Chicago, I can afford to cajole, fight, or ignore Sergeant Pizzello and her clan: the police are stretched too thin to bother about PIs on the fringe of their turf. In small towns, though, the law would be on me like flies on a dead fish if I talked to locals without official knowledge.

  Whether you’re in Chicago or Salina, there’s a sameness to stations and protocol. The Salina building was new, the veneered wood counter still unscratched, but the notices on the walls, the bustle of the officers passing in the hallway, and the woman behind the counter all seemed the same—including the woman’s smile, which was both welcoming and assessing.

  I explained myself—investigator from Chicago, here to find and talk to Kelly Kay Morton. The desk officer took my credential into the back. After a few moments she returned to escort me to the chief’s office.

  That was an extreme departure from Chicago protocol, where I dealt with detectives and watch commanders but never division heads, let alone the chief super.

  Elroy Corbitt was a big man, with a gut that showed even in the boonies the cops don’t get enough exercise. “What does a big-city investigator think she needs to do in Salina that we can’t do ourselves?”

  “Not a thing, chief,” I said, my voice amiable. “This is a courtesy call to let you know I’m here hoping to talk to Arthur Morton’s mother.”

  “She’s been through a hell of a lot, Chicago. Not sure talking to her is a great idea.”

  “Other people went through a hell of a lot, too, chief.”

  “And that’s water over the dam. Boy’s dead, let him rest in peace.”

  I damped down the spurt of anger that pious wish often raises in me. “You know that big law firm that came in to represent him all of a sudden?”

  “From Chicago, weren’t they?” The chief spoke slowly. “They send you down here to try to collect from his ma? Blood from a turnip, that would be. She works at Origins bakery, hell of a pie maker, but it don’t leave much over when she’s paid the rent and whatnot.”

  “Oh, whoever hired them to represent Arthur Morton paid their bills. They tell me someone from Sea-2-Sea’s board had pity on the widow and orphan.” I couldn’t quite keep the sarcasm out of my voice, and Corbitt’s expression hardened.

  I added quickly, before he threw me out, “I want to talk to Ms. Morton about her son’s death. People in Chicago are starting to raise questions about whether it was really suicide.” Okay, one person in Chicago, me. “I want to ask about her son’s state of mind, those kinds of things.”

  “Murder, suicide, accident, hard to prove any of it after all this time, but if that’s how you want to waste your time, I don’t have any objection.” He leaned across the desk to hand me back my ID.

  As I headed to the office door, he tossed a squib at me. “When Vesna told me a Chicago investigator was here, I was sure you’d come looking for Lydia Zamir.”

  I turned and smiled. “I am looking for her, chief, but I’m having trouble getting traction for my search. Are you trying to tell me she’s here?”

  “Nope. But we had a bunch of reporters show up the last couple of days, thinking her boyfriend had come here to kill Kelly Kay. We’ve been keeping up extra patrols outside her home, just so you know.”

  “Lydia Zamir’s boyfriend was murdered four years ago,” I said. “Unless Ms. Morton thinks she’s haunted by a spectral presence, I’d say she was safe from him.”

  “I don’t mean the dead one. I mean the current one, the guy with the violent temper. We got a BOLO on him from your very own Chicago police force. Vesna!” he shouted.

  The woman from the front counter came trotting. “Yes, chief?”

  “This Chicago lady is leaving, but on her way out, pull up that BOLO we got about the Zamir gal’s violent boyfriend, will you?”

  “Does he have a name, this violent boy?” I asked.

  The chief eyed me narrowly. “I thought you would know it, since the fuss started out up there, and you’ve been involved in this business from the get-go.”

  It took a strong effort to keep my expression neutral, but I felt dizzy, the way you do when the air is knocked out of you. The chief had known who I was when I walked in the door, and he waited until the last minute to sucker-punch me. I hadn’t told anyone I was coming down here, except Bernie and Mr. Contreras. Mr. Contreras might have talked about it with the neighbors, but he wouldn’t think to call the Salina police.

  I suddenly remembered urging him to tell Donna Lutas what I was doing. That was how the word spread: she ferried it to her boss, and he’d let Salina’s officers of the law know pretty darned fast.

  “I like the hayseed act,” I said. “Does it get the big-city lawyers to drop their guard around you?”

  I waited a beat, then added, “Did Clarence Gorbeck phone personally? Or was it one of the women on his staff—Lutas or Samundar?”

  Corbitt nodded slightly, as if to concede a point, but he didn’t answer my question, just repeated his command about the BOLO to Vesna.

  “You go to Origins, try the blueberry pie. Kelly Kay puts something in it that makes it sing. She’s won the Saline County pie contest three years running with it.”

  “That’s quite an endorsement; thanks for your thoughtfulness, chief.”

  I followed Vesna to the front desk and read the BOLO on Coop, which basically said he was on the run from two Chicago murders and while not known to be armed was certainly dangerous. They listed him only as Coop, so no one had yet come up with his full name.

  “They don’t include a last name,” I commented. “Is he someone people around here know?”

  Vesna shook her head. “I don’t think so; none of the guys on patrol heard of him.”

  “Zamir’s mother thinks he was stalking her daughter—which makes him a predator, not a lover.”

  Quoting Debbie Zamir made my mouth feel like chalk. Actually, all the people who’d come around the Zamirs in the wake of the shooting had sounded sickening. Compared with the women donning Indian costumes and singing “Savage” next to the railway tracks, Coop looked like the prince of stability.

  I didn’t volunteer my personal knowledge of Coop. I felt on fragile ground here, not knowing what Devlin & Wickham might have told the local law about me, or Lydia, or the investigation.

  A couple of patrol officers who’d been getting something from a vending machine in the corner came over to look at the monitor with us.

  “We wondered if he
might be holing up on the old Morton place. It’s out near Salemsborg, you know.” He tapped on a large-scale map of the county, a spot south of Salina. “No one’s taken down any of the buildings—don’t know if Sea-2-Sea think they can convert the barn or house to bunks for a crew—but it didn’t look like anyone had been in there for quite a while.”

  I stared at the map. Chief Corbitt spoke behind me. “About ten miles straight down Burma Road, case you were thinking of checking it out. You know this guy Coop the BOLO’s asking for?”

  “I’ve seen him two or three times, but I don’t know if Coop is his first name or his last. It could be short for Cooperstown. His high school voted him most likely to make the majors.”

  “He’s a ballplayer?” the second patrol officer asked.

  “She’s yanking your chain, Gerber,” the chief said. “To repay me for pulling on hers.”

  I smiled and thanked them all for their help and left the station, making sure to keep my head up, hips loose, stride easy: I don’t care what people say about me.

  39

  Bye, Bye, Ms. American Pie

  I collected Bear and walked into the heart of the town. My phone directed me to the bakery on Sixth Street, near Walnut. One window showcased a traditional four-tier wedding cake, nestled in gold bunting, the other held trays of cookies and miniature cakes and pies. Beyond those I could see a lunchtime crowd of fifteen or twenty—besides Kelly Kay Morton’s award-winning pies, the bakery also sold sandwiches and soup. It was almost one now, and this was where a lot of Salina apparently came for lunch.

  I was hungry myself. I left Bear in the shade of a nearby awning and went inside to order lunch: cheddar on Origins-baked rye, lemonade, a cup of water for the dog, and a slice of blueberry pie.