Blood Silence

by Roger Stelljes

  Mac was jotting down notes and asked, “How long did he run tests?”

  The man thought about it for a bit. “At least a few days.”

  “What’s a few? Two? Three?” Brock pushed, taking notes of her own.

  “I think it was two, ma’am, but I can’t be sure. It was more than one day, I know that much.”

  Mac looked up from his notepad. “Was it before or after what happened at the Buller place?”

  Westrum took off his hardhat and scratched his head. “You know, Mr. McRyan, I think it was before.”

  “Do you know why he was running tests?” Brock asked. “Assuming that’s what he was doing.”

  The man shook his head. “No, ma’am. I don’t even think I talked to him. I just saw him out there, might have waved to him, but he was out there working.”

  “He was in the Bullers’ pasture. Did he ever talk to the Bullers?”

  “The family killed down the road?”

  “Yes.”

  The man shrugged. “I don’t know. He could have, I suppose … but I honestly don’t know.”

  Mac and Brock spent another five minutes following up, and then she tipped her head for them to leave.

  They drove halfway back to the farmhouse, and Mac said, “Stop for a second.”

  Brock pulled to the side of the road.

  Mac jumped out and approached the barbwire fence, carefully slipped through, and walked out in the pasture fifty yards or so to a thin wood stake with a small orange streamer flittering in the wind. The stake was hammered into the ground in the middle of a large, round, bare patch of the pasture. Mac crouched down and lightly picked at the dirt of the bare spot. He was halfway between the farmhouse and the well. He stood up, took out his phone, took pictures of the site, and then walked back to the truck.

  “What did you find?”

  “Maybe the place Murphy was running those tests. It’s just a stake in the ground, but if you look closely, it appears some digging took place. He runs his tests, gets his results, writes his memo, and gives it to someone at Deep Core. The tests show the water is being poisoned by the chemicals used to drill that well and probably the one farther in the distance. The date on that memo is April 14, the same day they went to the doctor, and then five days later, the Bullers are dead.” Mac shook his head and muttered, “Those fuckers.” He turned to Brock. “Leah, I should have thought of this sooner. We have these cover IDs. We need to see what kind of activity is on their credit history around the time of the murders of the Bullers. Were they in the area? Did they fly up here? We know they flew from Bismarck to Minneapolis to DC and then back. Do you have someone who can run that?”

  “I do,” Brock answered and called it in while she drove past the Buller house and turned right on Highway 2, heading west back toward Williston. “I have the chief on it,” she reported.

  “The chief?”

  “Let’s just say he’s coming around on you.”

  “Self-preservation.”

  “That too. He’s over his head and kind of a dick sometimes, but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t want to get it right.”

  “He just doesn’t know how to get there.”

  “Sometimes, no.”

  Mac’s phone rang. It was Bud Subject. This was the call he’d been waiting for the most.

  “Bud, tell me good news.”

  “It took Ed and I awhile, but I’ll be damned, Mac, we found it. R.C. Wilton rented himself a silver Mercedes S550 from Twin Cities Mercedes the day Sterling and Gentry were killed. They returned it the next morning. It’s an exact match to the model Meredith drives, Mac. And guess what, you were right about that and …”

  “The GPS?” Mac asked excitedly. “It was turned on! Tell me, tell me, it was turned on!”

  “Bingo!” Gerdtz bellowed. “Turns out you don’t rent a Mercedes without turning on the GPS, at least not from Twin Cities Mercedes. We’ve got the track on it, Mac. They drove it out to Lake Minnetonka, right to the lake house.”

  Mac closed his eyes, smiled, pumped his fist, and grunted a quiet “yes” through a gritted smile.

  “What?” Brock asked.

  “I just cleared Meredith.” Then he said to Subject, “Ed and Bud, I love you guys! I really do. I can’t thank you two enough.”

  “All in a day’s—or make that night’s—work,” Subject answered.

  “Bullshit!” Gerdtz bellowed in the background. “I expect an open tab at the pub, Mac! And I get to smoke inside.”

  “That’s against the law, Ed.”

  “Aren’t the McRyans the law in St. Paul?”

  “On that night, we will be.”

  “Okay, now get your ass out of there, would you,” Subject ordered. “Your work is done. You’ve got her clear—that was your job, and mission accomplished—get your ass out of there.”

  “My work is almost done,” Mac answered. “There are a couple more things to take care of.”

  Mac hung up as Brock rolled them up to the County Line.

  “Are you going to tell me why we’re here?” Brock asked when she put her Explorer into park right in front of the bar.

  “Just come with me. I’m satisfying a hunch,” Mac ordered as he jumped out of the truck and strode inside and back to the sheriff’s table. He looked under the table and around the pictures hanging near Sam Rawlings’s favorite table, and then he looked up to the light canister in the ceiling. He pushed the table out of the way and pulled over one of the stools and stood on it. Peering inside, he saw it and shook his head, almost in amusement.

  “What?” Brock asked.

  Mac held his finger up to his mouth and climbed back down, went to Brock, and whispered in her ear. “The man I got on the plane with last night saw the whole thing go down outside. He said the Tahoe that hit us timed it perfectly. The only way they could do that is they knew we were coming out. I was thinking they either had eyes inside or …”

  “Ears!”

  “Give the girl a cigar.”

  “How’d you come up with that?” Brock asked in wonderment. “How would you even think to look for that?”

  “I kept trying to think why the sudden urge to take the two of us out last night,” Mac replied. “Only reason is if they knew what we were actually thinking and discussing. Nobody sat near us in the bar, nobody in the bar could have possibly overheard our conversation so the only other answer was …”

  “A wire. Unbelievable,” Brock muttered.

  “Get your camera ready.” Mac recommended.

  He jumped back on the table, pulled a rubber glove on his left hand, and then reached up into the recessed lighting canister and pulled down a thin cord with a small microphone on the end of it.

  Brock snapped several photos and started jotting down notes.

  “How long has that been up there?” Leah asked in a whisper, taking pictures with her phone. “I mean, how would they know you and the sheriff would even be here?”

  Mac thought for a second. “I bet it’s been up there since the Buller murders. I mean, that was the sheriff’s case, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “And he had reservations, right?”

  “He did.”

  “If he got too close …”

  “They would act. But he never got anywhere, despite his reservations.”

  “Until last night, that is,” Mac answered. “We noodled the case for a couple hours right at this table, under this light, and both of us were talking Deep Core and that we needed to pursue Deep Core, and then what happens?”

  “You got too close,” Leah stated.

  “And they had to act.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  “It is far too late in the game to have second thoughts now.”

  Wheeler sat at his desk, anxiously drinking his coffee. There was a little whiskey mixed in as well, a little something to calm his nerves.

  He was on edge, things having spun completely out of control. When the Bullers came into the offices in downtown Williston, c
omplaining of the headaches and the vomiting, he knew it was trouble. It wasn’t the first time he’d seen it.

  Right away, he knew what was causing the Bullers’ issues. It was just like Wyoming.

  He had warned O’Herlihy repeatedly that there would be problems when they increased the use of the diesel fuel among other things. It worked in enhancing the output of the wells, but other oil and drilling companies had done it, and it always led to trouble, particularly with water supplies. The well casings simply couldn’t handle the pressure. But he was told there was little choice—North Dakota had to pay, or they were all finished.

  And it wasn’t just Deep Core that needed the money.

  There was a reason Wheeler went along with this.

  He needed the money.

  There was a lot of land and plans in west Texas he’d yet to pay for, and he needed the money soon. The wells had not to just pay but pay big. The greater the production, the larger the profit, the more his bonus would be, the more his small interest in the company he’d negotiated from O’Herlihy would be worth. He bartered for that. If he was going to be a part of all of this, bring in Clint and Royce to do what he knew they did, the risk had to be worth the reward.

  As he looked at the monitor, if they could get the wells running, produce what they needed and then sell the leases, which was the long-term plan, he could walk away, go back to Texas, and be a rancher. That was what he really wanted. It was why he’d subjected himself to the hellhole that Williston was to him. No man in his right mind could possibly want to stay here, to live in a man camp or hotel and suffer the cold and isolation of this part of the country. It was a place only the locals could love. He wanted out of his long-term hotel room, out of the endless continental breakfasts and sterile dinners. West Texas—the flat land and the warm weather—was what he wanted.

  The reports for the day—for the past several days—since the North Station went online showed the kind of production they had to have. And it wasn’t that they had to produce for years. The reality was that if the wells hit for four to five months, they would be out of the woods. At that point, Wheeler figured he could get out. If not, at least they could start drilling a little more safely.

  He pulled out his cell phone to call his man watching McRyan’s hotel. “Any sighting of him yet?”

  “No,” the man answered. “His truck has not moved.”

  “Do you have a man in the lobby?”

  “I do.”

  “And nothing?” Wheeler asked, checking his watch. It was getting into the midafternoon now.

  “Nothing. It was a late night, lots of stress—he’s probably still sleeping.”

  “Or holing up until nightfall.”

  “Maybe so. He might be looking to sneak out of town after dark. Do you want me to keep on this?”

  “Yes.”

  • • •

  Brock cut the seal, inserted the key, and opened the door to Adam Murphy’s apartment. There was a short hallway the led into the main living space, which was furnished in young-single-male style—a cheap, soft couch, an easy chair, and a coffee table for holding remote controls all arranged to view a fifty-five-inch flat screen situated on a low-cost television stand. To the right, there was the small galley kitchen and then a hallway back to two small bedrooms, one serving as an office.

  “Now, you said this looked like a robbery, correct?”

  “Yes, looked like,” Brock replied, pulling out her case file. “I always had my doubts.” After a few minutes of watching McRyan walk around, she asked, “What do you see?”

  “Nobody heard the murder take place? Nobody heard any shots?”

  “Not a sound.”

  “They used a silencer. They always do,” Mac stated as he walked down the back hallway and into the office. “So the computer was gone?”

  “The company said he had a laptop they issued him. It was gone, although if you’re right, they have it. If he had another one that was his, it was gone as well. We searched the apartment, his car, and his small cubicle with the company here in town.”

  “Did he have a safe deposit box?”

  “Not that we found. No evidence of one.”

  “He was so naive; he didn’t understand what and who he was really dealing with until it was too late,” Mac answered. “If he sensed that kind of danger, he’d have done something like that and given himself an insurance policy.”

  “He was a geologist. Who kills a geologist?”

  “These guys do. They killed two of them. They kill anyone who gets in their way.”

  Mac made his way back to the small room used as an office. There were two file drawers for the desk. One drawer was full of hanging folders with various records regarding insurance, bills, and tax records. The other drawer contained his work history, resumes, and previous work, and there was a large gap in the files. “Just like at the Bullers’, it looks like someone grabbed some folders,” Brock observed.

  “How long did Murphy work for Deep Core?”

  “At least five years, as I recall.”

  “Yet there isn’t one single record, not a piece of paper relating to the company. As if they were looking for any evidence of—”

  “What he found at the Bullers’.”

  “That’s right. Stage it like a robbery, but the watches, the money, the credit cards, jewelry—all of that was for show. What they were after was right here. Computers, files, anything that related to Deep Core were what they were after. It’s the same as what they did at Sterling’s lake house. Killed them, made it look like a crime of passion, framing Meredith, and then they grabbed all the papers about Deep Core out of Sterling’s briefcase and simply took Gentry’s. It’s why they took all of Weatherly’s documents and his computer in DC. It’s why they cleaned out the files at the Buller house. They were cleaning up.”

  “But you have the memo,” Brock replied. “By the way, are you going to tell me where you got that?”

  “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”

  “Try me.”

  “You ever hear of a man named Antonin Rahn?”

  Brock looked at him quizzically. “The oil guy? Isn’t he dead?”

  Mac shook his head. “No. He is very much alive and appears to be very much a different man. He actually owned the land the Bullers lived on. Callie Gentry was his goddaughter and worked for him. She had the memorandum and gave him a copy. Turns out Adam Murphy, after some pressure from Ms. Gentry, developed a conscience and reached out to her and gave her a copy of the memorandum. Rahn gave me a copy.”

  Brock was in shock, shaking her head. “Antonin Rahn. Go figure.”

  Mac walked back into the hallway, looking at the crime scene photos from Brock’s file. Murphy was found lying flat on his back, shot in the forehead. “He comes down the hallway, probably because he heard something. He takes a couple steps, and one of those guys is waiting behind the wall. In fact, he could see Murphy coming down the hallway in that mirror.” Mac pointed to a small mirror hanging on the wall to the right of the coat closet. “He can see Murphy coming down the hall. He takes one step around the corner and pops him before he ever knew what happened. Clean and silent, the kind of thing only someone who’s killed before could do—what only a pro could do.”

  “And it was these two”—Brock held up the DMV photos of Wilton and Hutchinson—“who did Murphy.”

  “I’d bet big on it. They did Weatherly and Kane in DC; I think we can prove that. They did Sterling and Gentry; we can prove that. They tried for Meredith; I can prove that. All these murders are connected. They did the Bullers, and I think they did Murphy.”

  “Find them and …”

  “You close your case. You close your case and the sheriff’s case. We close all the cases.”

  Brock’s phone rang. “It’s the chief.” She answered. “Uh-huh … uh-huh … that sounds right… uh-huh … uh-huh… okay … really? That’s a relief. Yes, we’ll go over there right away. Thanks, Chief.”

  “Wha
t?” Mac asked anxiously. “Tell me.”

  “Two things,” Brock answered, deliberately putting her phone in her coat pocket, keeping him in suspense. “Wilton and Hutchinson flew into Bismarck and then made their way over here to Williston on April 16. There are intermittent credit charges from that day through April 22, which was the day they flew out of Bismarck to Minneapolis and then on to Dallas, and from there, we don’t know.”

  Mac gave her a satisfied grin. “They were here when the Bullers were killed. Tell me they were in the area when Murphy was killed.”

  “In fact, they were. The chief checked that as well. Credit card charges at a local gas station. And one other thing.”

  “What’s that?”

  “There are credit card charges from yesterday—gas station, four blocks from the County Line. The chief sent an officer over to look at the surveillance tape. Guess what they were driving.”

  “A black Tahoe.”

  Brock simply smiled.

  “Man, we’ve got them.”

  “It’s still all circumstantial,” Brock suggested. “We don’t actually have the Tahoe.”

  “It’s not all that circumstantial anymore. All you have to do is break someone at Deep Core, like that Dan Wheeler, the guy who Adam Murphy wrote the memo to, and it’ll all come crashing down. The sheriff and I rattled that guy’s cage yesterday, and we had zip. You now have significantly more. He’ll fold under pressure. All you have to do is apply it.”

  “Speaking of the sheriff,” Brock replied, “that was the other thing the chief told me. Sam is awake.”

  • • •

  O’Herlihy drank from his Scotch as he looked east out the window of his fortieth-story luxury condo, looking down on Houston and, in particular, the late-day emptiness of Minute Maid Ballpark, the home of the Astros. Ironic, he thought, that the ballpark was originally known as Enron Field.

  He walked back to his desk and looked at his computer monitor. The wells in North Dakota, particularly those at the North Station, were roaring today—had been for the last few days. His investment partner, sitting in the chair in front of his desk, was also having a Scotch, cool as a cucumber, looking at the same information on his iPad.