by Neil Mcmahon
So was the mining equipment—picks and shovels, a couple of gold pans, a chemical kit, and a collection of smaller items like hammers and a compass. There were also half a dozen books on the subject. Most of the stuff was brand-new, as if he’d gotten a list somewhere, walked into a store, and bought everything on it. There was an element both laughable and pathetic about it, like with a kid who decides he’s going to take up a hobby and acquires all the gear, then quickly loses interest.
But it strengthened my guess as to the actual reason Kirk had wanted this place. He’d never intended to prospect or even spend any time here to speak of. The mining tools and building materials were for show—an excuse to come here and a red herring for the ranch hands. They probably shook their heads at his ignorant belief that he was going to find gold—but never suspected what he was really up to. The Canadian border was within another two miles—just a waist-high barbed-wire fence across those empty fields. The contraband could easily have been brought here or even thrown over the fence for him to pick up.
I also didn’t have much doubt by now that I’d been wrong in thinking Wesley Balcomb wouldn’t be involved in something so crude. His horse-raising business was just as much of a sham as the gold panning.
The pieces were fitting together better by the hour.
When I’d talked to Reuben last night—Christ, was it only last night?—he’d told me the story behind the sale. Balcomb had already looked at several other pieces of property around the state, without making any offers. But he’d quickly gotten serious with Reuben and agreed to the asking price.
Reuben was dubious. As a matter of course, he’d checked Balcomb’s financial history and learned that it was shaky. Because of that and Balcomb’s inexperience, Reuben figured the venture was doomed to foreclosure. But Balcomb came up with a down payment of more than three million dollars, which must have been the last of the money he’d been able to squeeze out of Laurie’s trust, plus financing for the remainder. Reuben was surprised that any bank would give him that kind of loan—and more surprised when Balcomb not only kept up with the payments, but started throwing a ton more money into building projects.
“Everybody but the government understands that if you’re already up to your ass in debt and you keep spending way more than you bring in, you’re bound to crash,” was how Reuben had put it.
He did some more clandestine checking through his banking connections, but all he could find out was that Balcomb’s money was coming from numbered offshore accounts. His puzzlement turned to suspicion about the legitimacy of the income’s source. But Balcomb had cashed him out and now owned the ranch, so at least officially, Reuben no longer had any dog in the fight. He let the matter go.
But now I knew that the money was coming from an ultrarich Belgian “investor”—a connection that Balcomb wanted kept secret.
For a man like DeBruyne to acquire, say, heroin in Pakistan or Afghanistan and transport it across Russia would be easy. Alaska was a short hop from Siberia, and its northern regions and the Canadian Arctic were so wild they made this area look like Disneyland. The tricky part would be getting the stuff into the continental United States. For the kind of money we were talking about, the quantities would have to be fairly large and the runs frequent. Strangers around here often would quickly attract attention, and would also face the vulnerability and complications of transporting the stuff a long way to its final destination. Kirk had a legitimate ticket to travel in and out of this area and an influential family name as an added buffer. He could get the contraband to the ranch quickly and safely, and Balcomb could put it on a private jet.
That was why he’d agreed so readily to Reuben’s terms. The Pettyjohn place was a perfect glossy cover—nobody would dream that a wealthy, upper-crust gentleman rancher might be involved in such a thing—and Kirk was the perfect mule, already dabbling in crime and easily persuaded to go deeper.
The timing bolstered my guesswork. Soon after Balcomb’s arrival on the scene, Kirk’s supposed interest in gold panning here had flared up. Soon after that, he’d gotten flush. And Balcomb’s much bigger money train had come rolling in, with the bonus of stroking his ego through living on a grand estate like a feudal lord ruling over his serfs.
There were plenty of gaps in the framework, but the only piece that really didn’t fit was those murdered horses. What Madbird had suggested was still the only thing that made sense. But with Kirk’s smooth setup in place, why the need for it? I had to think they’d been brought across the border under the eyes of the authorities—otherwise, using them for concealment wouldn’t have made sense—and that meant extra risk and expense, plus the trouble of getting the contraband into them.
Not to mention the horror of getting it back out.
I spent a few more minutes poking around through Kirk’s stuff. There wasn’t much to see—nothing to suggest that he’d done more than occasionally pass through. The dates on the food cans were all about two years old. Then I noticed a folded sheet of paper sticking out slightly from one of the books. I was surprised that he’d ever opened them. It was a paperback titled Consumer Guide to Precious Metals And Gems. The sheet had numbers scrawled on it. I slipped the book inside my shirt. I doubted that people who might check on Kirk would notice that it was gone, and if they did, all they’d know was that somebody else had been here.
I hiked back up to the rim of the coulee, out of its shelter and into the cold raw wind, and stood there for half a minute, looking down at this little pocket of land that embodied Kirk’s easy-money, wise-guy dream.
My hand had killed him, but that dream had pushed my hand.
FORTY-EIGHT
When I got into the pickup truck, Laurie gave me a kiss that was generous and sweet with brandy.
“Let’s get away from here,” I said. “Then we’ll find a place to spend the night.”
“You promised me your full attention, remember?”
“I remember, believe me.” I started the engine and pulled out of the weeds onto the road. For another half minute, I hesitated, reluctant to trespass on her affectionate mood. But this was too important to put off.
“Laurie, did you ever think your husband might be involved in some kind of illegal operation?” I said.
I could feel her shrug, nestled against me.
“He’s committed crimes. But you don’t need me to tell you that.”
“I mean smuggling.”
That brought her sitting up straight. “Smuggling?”
“Yeah. Using Kirk’s place to run dope across the border.”
“That’s just crazy.” She looked at me in some combination of amusement and outrage, then moved away and rolled her window down a few inches. A breeze swept into the cab, ruffling her fine hair.
“What about that guy DeBruyne?” I said. “Could he be in the heroin business?”
“Why would a man that rich deal heroin?”
“Maybe that’s how he got that rich.”
The breeze was chilly. She rolled the window back up.
“I told you, I don’t know much about him,” she said.
“You know his first name?”
“Guy something—one of those hyphenated French first names. Guy-Luc, I think.”
“Did you ever meet him?”
“No. Look. Forget about your theories. Wesley is determined to have us both killed. What does it take to get that through your skull?”
“Like I’ve been saying, the only thing that might help—”
“None of this is going to help! It’s just you jerking off.”
I’d already had glimpses of the edge she could get, but this time she flared up white-hot, scorching me with her glare and voice.
“I’ve sat around and waited for you hour after hour, slept in a greasy toolbox, peed on the ground, and now you drag me to this asshole of the earth. I want a hot bath and a bed. I want decent clothes.”
She twisted around and grabbed something out of the cab’s rear seat, then yanked open h
er door and flung it out onto the roadside. The truck’s interior light flicked on, and I just had time to see that the something was Hannah’s bag.
I hit the brakes hard, got out, found the bag, and brushed it off carefully.
When I got back to the truck, Laurie was hunched over with her face in her hands.
“I can’t believe I did that,” she whispered. “It was terrible. But there’s so much going on inside me, I feel like I’m going to explode.”
I set the bag on the rear seat and started driving again.
“I don’t blame you for being pissed at me,” I said. “But that’s an insult to my friends. Who were incredibly good to you.”
She inhaled slowly and deeply, like she was trying to calm herself.
“I told you I tried to leave Wesley once before,” she said. “That’s why I recognized John Doe. I know he’s gone but—” She shook her head, still in her hands. “It keeps coming back in my mind.”
It cooled me down some to remember her terror of John Doe. I stroked her hair until she raised her face to me.
“Will you tell me about it now?” I said.
She nodded, then took a drink from the brandy bottle and passed it to me. There wasn’t a whole lot left.
“It started the way a lot of sad things do,” she said. “Naive young woman in love with an older man. Sinclair Teague, a local polo star.” She shook her head ruefully. “But he’d screw anything that would stay still long enough, and one night I went to his house and found him with some slut. I screamed and broke things. He threw me out. I drove to our country club to drown my silly sorrows.
“Wesley was there. I hardly knew him. He’d sort of drifted into our social circle, nobody seemed quite sure how. He didn’t come from our kind of people, and there were rumors that he had shady dealings. But he was smart and charming, and he saw how upset I was, and he bought me drinks and let me cry on his shoulder.”
I’d encountered that story, too, back when I’d been working on the newspaper—have-nots and poseurs who circled the rich like sharks, striking when they smelled blood. Most of the time the motive was money, but often enough there was a craving for power, the satisfaction of dominating social superiors. That could make things particularly vicious.
“I went home, alone,” Laurie said. “Then later that night—someone set fire to Sinclair’s stables.”
“Jesus,” I said. That was a variation I hadn’t heard before. “Were there horses inside?”
“Whoever did it let them out first, thank God. It was still horrible.” She breathed in deeply again. “There were people who thought it was me.”
I listened, numb with astonishment, as she talked on. Her enraged lover, Teague, had gone to the police with the story of their fight. Laurie was known to be hot-tempered, and he suggested that she had set the fire to get back at him for cheating. It didn’t help that she’d been drinking and that no one had seen her after she left the bar. But that was all there was, a vague cloud of suspicion. It was essentially unthinkable that a young gentlewoman in a wealthy Virginia enclave could do something like that, and family and friends were supportive.
So was Wesley Balcomb. He came to see her immediately after news of the fire broke and checked on her every few days, making it clear that his shoulder was available to lean on again—and even hinting that he had connections who could work behind the scenes if she ran into trouble.
That trouble wasn’t long in coming. About two weeks later, the woman Teague had been dallying with, a barroom pickup from a nearby town, called Laurie. She’d worked up her nerve enough in the interim to threaten blackmail. She claimed that when Teague had gone running to fight the fire, she’d looked out a window and seen Laurie driving away. Her price for silence was a hundred thousand dollars.
Laurie was distraught. She had no way to prove her innocence. At the very least, her reputation would be tarnished forever. She had no one to turn to, either—her lover was an enemy now and she couldn’t bear dragging her family into a nightmare of police, lawyers, and media.
She was putting together the money when Balcomb stopped by—a sympathetic, powerful figure who knew how to handle situations like this. She confided in him. He assured her that he would take care of it. She agreed, insisting that she didn’t want anyone hurt, just scared into backing off.
Laurie never heard from the woman again. It seemed that she left the area abruptly.
Now Laurie both owed Balcomb and had reason to fear him. He traded on that to insinuate himself firmly into her life, and soon started talking marriage.
“I guess I’d known he must want something in return, but I never dreamed it would be that,” she said. “I put him off as long as I could. But he’s very good at playing on people’s weaknesses, and I was a mess.”
All had gone smoothly enough at first. Balcomb’s charm burgeoned with his newfound stature, along with the family purse strings being cut loose. Their lavish lifestyle stood in for love. But now she started to learn that her husband was a lousy businessman. He ignored sound advice, made disastrous decisions, and refused to back down. The worse things got, the more stubborn and arrogant he became, until her angry family and trustees cut him off. He treated Laurie more and more coldly, almost to the point of menace.
Then the real ugliness started. The remains of a woman were discovered in a nearby river and identified as those of the would-be blackmailer. The police learned that just before her disappearance, she had done some barroom boasting about getting a large chunk of cash just for making a phone call.
The raw truth hit Laurie fast. Balcomb had set the whole thing up in order to gain control over her and her fortune. He’d seen his chance when he’d found her drinking that night, gotten someone to light the fire, bribed the woman to make the threat—and then removed it.
“I thought my heart was going to stop,” Laurie said. Her voice had dropped to where I was having trouble hearing her over the engine’s noise. “All I could think was, he’d promised he wouldn’t hurt her but then he’d had her killed. Except really, it was me that had her killed.”
She’d been alone in their house when she realized this. She’d thrown some things into a suitcase and left, to try to cope with these new demons. The only thing she was sure of was that she was done with him. At first she drove aimlessly, but then she turned west toward Kentucky and a place called Avondale Farm, a renowned thoroughbred center where she’d gone to riding camp as a girl—following an instinct to go where she’d once been safe and happy. She got a room at a nearby bed-and-breakfast and spent the next day wandering around Avondale, trying to lose herself in the beauty of the place and its graceful animals.
But she had thoughtlessly paid for her lodging and meals with credit cards.
Late that afternoon, while she was walking in a secluded area of the grounds, she heard a rustling behind her. Before she could turn, a stunning blow between her shoulder blades sent her stumbling through a gap in a hedge. A second blow knocked her flat on her face. The force felt electric rather than just blunt, maybe coming from a Taser. A knee pressed into her back, a forearm clamped around her throat, and she felt a sting in her arm. After a few seconds she couldn’t move, although she stayed dimly conscious and she could still feel. She had probably been injected with something like Valium or Versed. A man carried her to the trunk of a car. He was wearing a golf shirt and pleated slacks, like he’d just come off the links. His face was as bland and ordinary as a concrete sidewalk.
John Doe.
He drove for a length of time she couldn’t estimate, then opened the trunk again. The surroundings were silent and she could see treetops overhead. He pushed up her blouse, took out a small vial of clear liquid, and spilled a few drops onto her right breast. They burned like red-hot iron. He watched for a couple of minutes while she silently screamed and struggled feebly to move. Then he did the same to her other breast.
After that he set the vial in front of her face and left her alone for some time. She waited in te
rror, certain that he’d continue the torture and leave her dead in this forsaken spot.
But he closed the trunk’s lid, drove back to where he’d found her, and left her lying hidden behind the hedge. Before much longer, she was able to move again. She managed to get to her inn. Next morning she went back to the husband who’d had this done to her and swore she’d never leave him again.
Laurie uncapped the brandy bottle and tipped it high, draining it. The glisten in her eyes spilled out onto her cheeks. I pulled off the road into one of the bleak fields and held her, wishing to Christ I’d known that story earlier today when Madbird and I had taken John Doe into the woods.
FORTY-NINE
We drove on south to Great Falls, stopping at a big Safeway emporium to buy a gourmet picnic of fresh sourdough bread, pâté, cheeses, and wine; and then at a liquor store where I replaced the bottle of Knob Creek bourbon I’d given Doug Wills. My pocket was fat with the roll of hundred-dollar bills that Madbird had given me, and I didn’t see any reason to save for the future.
Then we went looking for a room. Great Falls was a fair-size place, with more than twice the population of Helena and plenty of motels. I didn’t want to risk using my ID, but I was sure that a woman like Laurie, flashing fifty thousand dollars worth of jewelry, could float a story about losing her purse but having enough cash to pay for the night. The first place she tried, a new-looking Best Western on the Tenth Avenue strip, was happy to oblige. She registered under a phony name and let me in through a back entrance.
She ran a bath while I poured drinks, sauvignon blanc for her, whiskey on the rocks for me. When I took the wine to her, she was just stepping into the steaming tub. She knelt slowly, holding the sides, then sat back and slid forward up to her neck, with a little “oof.” She accepted the glass with a radiant smile. I lingered for another moment. There was something very special about watching a lovely woman luxuriate in a bathtub. I hadn’t done it in a long time. It was worth the wait.