Summerkill

by Maryann Weber

  “How about Kyle?”

  “The last word was he’s on hold until they can build him up enough for surgery.”

  “What did they find?”

  “The shot shattered one of the middle vertebra, and severed the spinal cord there. That isn’t repairable. The surgery will be to clean up some lesser damage.”

  “It would be a lot simpler if that shot had killed him.”

  “A lot cheaper, too. It still might kill him—his condition sounds somewhere near the lower end of critical. On balance, I’d rather it all worked out through the system.”

  Would I? Assuming typical operation, the system figured to make a pretty good hash of things. “You’re just getting back from Riverton?” I asked.

  “God, no. I’ve been at the office, trying to set the framework up right before the meddlers descend. I recorded my account; I’ll want yours in the morning, and Calvin’s, if he’s up to it. Maggie Byrnes, the senior ADA, is taking over for the district attorney’s office.”

  “How did you bring that off?”

  “With his financial interest in Hudson Heights, Phil obviously has to recuse himself. As soon as he responds to Maggie’s message on his answering machine she’ll point that out. She’s authorized me to send a couple of the guys to fetch our two backpacks as soon as it gets light. We’ll see how the samples read out in lab tests. And we’ll go for a court order to have more taken—legally, this time.”

  “Stipulate that the sampling should be deeper, and make sure they cover the quarry pond area. Won’t Thurman’s acknowledgment be enough, for starters?”

  “It wants beefing up. There are a few areas we can corroborate independently, I think. He’s saying everything’s finished: he falsified the Hudson Heights EIS, he was involved in murdering two people, he sees no need for a lawyer and doesn’t want one. He insisted on dictating and signing a statement.”

  “That doesn’t tie it?”

  “An impulsive confession made during a time of trauma, without benefit of legal representation? We processed him rigorously, by the book, but even a mediocre lawyer can mount a respectable challenge. Maybe get it thrown out altogether, at least minimize the implications for other people. Provided Thurman agrees to pipe down. His daughter has special needs—I expect he’s pretty vulnerable moneywise.”

  “You think he did all that for money?”

  “I think he did it for a mix of reasons, Val, one of which had to do with money. I also think he’s a man of some conscience.”

  “Maybe too much for his own good.”

  “I’d have said not quite enough.”

  “Not nearly enough, the way you’re thinking. What I meant was he felt too guilty about the toxic dump under the plateau, about concealing it, to realize what a good job he’d done. He kept expecting Skip or me to notice something.”

  “Yet he probably had little, if any, feeling for the danger a man like Ryan Jessup posed. Nor does he seem to find it especially wrong to have murdered him. And you know, if they’d low-profiled the whole thing instead of trying to get cute and put you out of the picture, too, there’s a good chance it would’ve worked. No one was going to care much when Ryan turned up missing—hell, nobody cared much when he turned up dead. I’d have had a serious shortage of things to look at.” He patted my knee. “And no knowledgeable person to help me look.”

  “Without the Garden Center blowup and our Monday night retrospective, Mariah wouldn’t have found Ryan’s murder worth more than three minutes of speculation,” I said glumly. “I wonder whose idea it was to tie me in. Kyle’s, probably.”

  “So Thurman claims. He says he wanted you off the scene badly enough he convinced himself you couldn’t actually be convicted of a murder you hadn’t committed. As I said, not quite enough conscience. Or would it be a weakness for the expedient?”

  “At least he doesn’t warp that into a virtue. Mariah had never been anything but good to Kyle and his son. He had no goddamn call to dismiss her as patronizing.”

  “I was afraid you were going to charge him at that point. Look, I’m not about to defend Kyle’s good character. You’ve got to credit the man with tenacity, though. He was in this thing for as long a ride as there’d be. Our only hope out there was to play on whatever conscience Thurman might possess and help him decide to end it. You seemed to pick up on that.”

  I did a quick mental review. Baxter had kept hammering away at the futility of their tough-it-out posture, the unworthiness of their mission. As much as I’d had a tactic, it was to make Thurman feel guilty, as I damn well thought he should. His companion I figured to be a lost cause in that department. “We were trying to get him to shoot Kyle?” I asked, frowning.

  “No, Val, we were trying to persuade him not to shoot one of us. Sitting there, I’d grabbed hold of a decent-sized rock I hoped to do some damage with if Kyle’s attention got diverted. I didn’t peg Thurman to be that decisive.”

  “I think taking part in what happened to Mariah bothered him a lot. They genuinely were friends. Maybe not best buddies, but friends. Did he indicate anybody else besides Kyle was involved?”

  “Thurman concedes—well, you heard him—that the cover-up of the toxic dumps was Clete’s directive. He insists both murders were strictly his and Kyle’s doing. I think he genuinely believes that.”

  “Do you?”

  “In terms of the actual killings, yeah. And in the case of Mariah, there was so little time between the realization she was a threat and the reaction, it’s likely they worked totally on their own. But a lot of planning went into Ryan’s murder. My guess is they had some help there, though it’s very possible Thurman didn’t know about it. Whatever Kyle might know, we should assume he won’t be telling.”

  “So there’s a good chance nobody else will turn out to be guilty of anything?”

  “Oh, I wouldn’t say that. Clete will be facing some tough questions—let’s see how he answers them. Did he know about the Ryan problem from the get-go or figure it out after the murder? He definitely figured it out at some point.”

  “He must’ve. Look at all the pressure to keep things away from Hudson Heights and get you off the case. The Etlingers could have generated some of that, probably did, but I’ll bet Clete was directing the action. How much of his dramatics were for show—like maybe the Red Barn bit? I found it hard to tell, especially with Kyle volunteering to be my chief interpreter.”

  “There may turn out to be good enough evidence to link him to the murders in some capacity, I just don’t know yet. We will have solid grounds to indict him for falsifying that EIS statement, which means jail time is not out of the question. And we might get Matt on lesser charges, if we want to pursue it. He was certainly aware of the toxic dump cover-up.”

  “That hardly qualifies him as a major player.”

  “Matt got stuck in a mess he didn’t make. Like most of our cast of characters, probably. And Val, you can’t nail people for what they merely suspect. Kate’s the most vulnerable of the lot. She’d be my number one choice as a co-conspirator. Yours too, isn’t she? We can actively go after her. Would you like that?”

  I’d been thinking yes, but that’s not what came out of my mouth. “They’ll have enough problems.”

  “I imagine so. Family notoriety aside, if the discovery of the dumpsite under the plateau has the effect everybody predicts, Hudson Heights is dead in the water. Clete will go bust and his investors will take a bath.”

  “And the Garden Center hasn’t a prayer of survival without Clete to shore up the financing.”

  “Poor Willem?”

  “Poor, hell! He’s finally getting sprung to move his tail in the right direction. It’s past time to find out what he can do with that.”

  “If I have my way, there’s one district attorney who’s going to find out what private practice is like. Recusing himself is just the necessary first step. This man should not be in public office.”

  “Go for it.” I sighed. “While we’re on the subject of
intentions … I’ve been mulling it over—what Thurman said about the sort of panic flight that happens when a site gets branded toxic. A place like Hudson Heights, it’s not like it’s possible to put things back the way they were before the contamination. Maybe Thurman’s right. Maybe whatever problems they’ve got aren’t ever going to be hazardous to anybody’s health. Or to the environment, as long as everything gets drained down into the quarry pond, which is nowhere near an aquifer. We ought to find out what’s actually in that cave, get a handle on the current and projected effects. I may say something to that effect, if anybody with a microphone asks my opinion.”

  Baxter shook his head, but he was smiling. “Simplification’s not way up there on your list of life goals, is it? Hell, you’ll have a forum—use it. Just don’t get too bent out of shape if nobody listens.” Grimacing, he tried a minor position shift. “Even if the water turns out to be pure enough to drink, I doubt I’ll want to jump into the quarry pond again any time soon.”

  “That’s a welcome sign of maturity.”

  “I was afraid you wouldn’t do it. The expression on your face …”

  “All that shooting may have given me a little motivation.”

  “I’d have given you a big push. I did mean it, Val, about intending to know you for a long time.” He looked a little tentative. “At least I’d like to.”

  “I guess we can see how things go,” I stumbled, caught off guard. Lord knows what my considered answer would have been.

  “Let’s do that,” he said, smiling.

  And then, because now I did know who I’d been waiting up for, I leaned over and kissed him.

  He liked that well enough to shore up our positions, bum shoulder or no. And then after a few nice minutes: “Damn! I stopped at the drugstore yesterday, but they’re still in my car, which is still at the station.”

  Detecting about as much relief as regret in that statement, and harboring major doubts as to my own physical capabilities just then, I elected not to mention that I’d stopped at a drugstore, too, on the way back from Pittsfield. “You can fetch them tomorrow,” I said.

  “That’s today already,” he reminded me.

  “Whatever. We both ought to get some rest. Can you cuddle decently with that shoulder of yours?”

  “We’ll manage just fine.”

  And so we did.