Antler Dust (The Allison Coil Mystery Series Book 1)

by Mark Stevens

  Ellenberg shifted on her side. Her naked breast grazed his chest and she sighed. In his book, which was a thin one, it had been a gangling, awkward half hour of tumbling. But it had also been satisfying.

  Ellenberg had come to his room with a bottle of red wine. They sat on the bed cross-legged, facing each other. She poured and told him it was time to pack up and leave Glenwood Springs. And then one toast ended with a kiss, more like a tap on the lips, nothing deep, and that was that. She was a kindred spirit. He admired her spunk. The kiss made him think it was possible to wriggle free from his old snakeskin and put on a new layer.

  She pushed him over on his back. They hugged and explored each other’s mouths, her long brown hair creating a private pup tent. She smelled of Ivory soap behind her ears. With the wine, the kisses carried a perpetual tingle. She did not object to a hand on her slender rear and he had slipped worked his way up underneath her red-checked, flannel shirt. She buried a wet tongue in his ear, jammed her pelvis down on his and offered a throaty growl of approval before she stood by the side of the bed and stripped casually, displaying a bit of pride in her lean body, boyish hips and cone-shaped, high-set breasts.

  Standing naked, she unlaced his shoes and pulled down his pants and underwear in one swoop, stopping to give his erection a red-wine smack of its own. She helped him off with his shirt and made him feel that being able to make love with him was the grand prize in a long-odds contest. She straddled his knees and licked him. He kneeled on the floor and tried his unskilled best to return the favor for a few minutes between her spread legs. She spun around on top of him and lowered herself down. She pumped slowly, her hair tickling his face to the rhythm. He tried to hold back for a minute, but couldn’t. He bucked her wildly from below as she grabbed his chest, looking for a handhold.

  “Eye yie yie,” she said when he was done. Her hair had stuck to her warm cheeks. “Now that we’ve got the ice broken ...” She let the thought dangle.

  She rolled off and snuggled down alongside him, a hand returning to cup his crotch and give it a pat. Was this a deal, he wondered, that Ellenberg would want to take public? Perhaps she did a lot of the guys. Perhaps this had been a thank-you screw, a kind of sympathy fuck to put a cap on the protest.

  “Dean?” She thought he was dozing. Actually, he was picturing the bloodhound leading troops to their motel. “You know it’s not over,” she said. “Your work with us, I mean.”

  “It’s not?” he said. How do you hide a look of surprise? It wasn’t easy.

  “We don’t worry a whole lot about titles, but everyone would like to see you come on board and keep doing what you do, plus a lot more. You won’t believe the projects we have in mind. The spring bear hunt, the new aquarium in Denver. We’re getting information about nasty experiments with rats at the university.”

  “Rats?”

  “There’s so much to do. Besides, you can’t crawl back in a hole. Not now.”

  “What would I do exactly?”

  “We tend to let the roles evolve. It’s more natural than making up a job title and job description and then wedging people into them. You start hanging around, we’ll find stuff for you to do. Don’t worry.”

  “Manager of stuff.”

  “Now there’s a spiffy title.”

  She rolled back over on top of him for a hug. Her skin was warm. He ran his hands down her back as she buried her nose in his neck. Relax, he told himself. Enjoy it.

  ****

  “She’s very curious. Enough for a whole cat house.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Nosy. Lots of questions. Wondering about Rocky.”

  Grumley shifted in the squeaky swivel chair behind his desk. Alvin looked nervous, perhaps half unsure why he was telling his boss any of this. Boyles sat on the couch, running his fingernails over the tip of a pocketknife.

  “Wondering what?” said Grumley.

  “When he’s going to turn up, stuff like that. She thinks the cops need to talk to your other buddies, the ones besides Applegate.”

  “And why not him?”

  “I suppose she figures they’ve already grilled him, I don’t know.”

  “You told her who was who?”

  “I told her it was none of her damn business, that she oughta let the cops do their thing.” Alvin looked proud of what he’d said, like it was a difficult message to send.

  Jesus, Allison Coil was a pain. First with his own damn wife, right there in his own house, then questioning Boyles. And now this.

  “Thought you’d like to know whenever your name is being mentioned behind your back,” said Alvin. “Especially in connection with—”

  “With what? I’ve talked to the cops and I don’t care if you’re working for the fucking cops or you are a fucking cop yourself, it doesn’t have much to do with me.”

  Alvin studied his mucky boots. Boyles stopped fiddling with the knife.

  “I suppose Miss Coil has theories about the death of the jerk in the elk suit?” said Grumley.

  “No,” said Alvin.

  “But I do,” said Boyles.

  “Care to fill us in?” said Grumley.

  “It was an animal hugger that pulled the trigger—had to be. No real hunter would’ve mistaken a 120-pound man wrapped in a brown cape for the real McCoy. So they staged the whole thing and tried to hang it on the hunters. They even had a plan for destroying the gun. It’s a fucking ruse.”

  “I like it,” said Alvin.

  “Best one I’ve heard,” said Grumley.

  “Cops said they talked to all the protester types, too, but let’s be serious, okay?” said Boyles. “What would the chances be—that on that day they would have run up against a hunter with the IQ of a brick? They had to do it themselves, trust me on that one.”

  “So they killed a human being to prove a point about killing animals. Makes sense to me,” said Grumley. “Allison Coil comes snooping around again, holler, okay?”

  “Will do,” he said.

  Alvin muttered something about mucking a stall and headed off.

  “Some people can’t leave well enough alone,” said Grumley. “Sure seems that way,” said Boyles, standing up and sliding his knife into a sheath on his belt. “What’s next?”

  “I don’t know,” said Grumley. “I got a business to run. I need these headaches?”

  Boyles knew better than to answer. “So what is Miss Allison doing?” “Trying to get the authorities curious.”

  “So what do we do?”

  “Keep close tabs on her—and Trudy.”

  “And what are we looking for?” said Boyles.

  “See if she’s just fucking around or trying to fuck us.”

  Nine

  A firm midwinter breeze bore down as Allison walked to her lawyer’s office. The wind gained strength from the empty, cold caverns of a city on a weekend.

  The office was near the top of Denver’s tallest building. She rode the elevator admiring the sheer trust involved in letting cables and pulleys and motors and switches boost you hundreds of feet in the sky. Were there any parts in this machinery that could freeze up? Would she freeze up? Could she pull the trigger and sue the bastards? Were they really bastards? Weren’t people doing their jobs? Doing their best? And now she would be given money in exchange. In exchange for what, exactly? In exchange for surviving? Really?

  Ambivalence was the word of the day. Her guts and heart were filled with unadulterated ambivalence, garnished with a few drips of creeping dread. Mostly, she wanted out of the elevating steel cube and the skyscraper. Perhaps at the top of the tower she could hop on a zip line back to a place where her blue jeans would be on a horse, not in a lawyer’s leather office chair.

  The reception area featured a staggering view of the mountains, from Mount Evans to the west and north to the Wyoming border. Pollution? The wind today made it someone else’s problem. A too-pleasant receptionist asked her if she needed coffee or water and Allison half expected to be asked to leave her beat-up cowgirl
boots at the entryway and off the polished floor. No request surfaced.

  “Allison.”

  Even on a Saturday, Paul Reitano was all business in his button-down collar and silk tie.

  “You guys have moved up in the world. Literally.”

  They shook hands.

  “Corporate merger. We picked up a few accounting firms, clean ones not tainted by the accounting scandal meltdowns. Well, charged.” He smiled. “But not tainted. It makes for pleasant surroundings, anyway. And right now we’re running six days a week, no casual Fridays, no casual Saturdays either.”

  He was sixty-ish and soft-spoken. He came across like a kindly professor who could scorn a set of bad grades with a look of deep dismay, one that carried weight. He had piercing blue eyes, puffy bits of unkempt white hair and the weathered skin of a lifelong skier.

  Reitano led her down halls lined with contemporary art to his small office.

  “Thanks for making the trip down. They’ve had a test-run trial in New York. It was a real trial, but it’s used as a means for determining who pays what amount. It’s like dividing the check at a restaurant: determining who ate more, drank more and therefore who gets to pay more. The two major parties were the airline and the airplane manufacturer. The airline tried to find something mechanical that went wrong. And they failed.”

  She listened as if it had just happened, as if she was still dripping and crouching awkwardly on a rock near the water in the harbor. The water continued to chop and churn. There were bits of stuff everywhere—jackets and magazines, suitcases and those under-sized airline pillows. And there were people, struggling and flopping around in the water, not seeming real at all, more like actors in a bad movie. Shock coated their pain, bewilderment covered their agony. Some were making it to shore. Some didn’t move at all. And one or two peered down into the black water, floating lifelessly.

  Reitano talked about deicing and how long an airplane is airworthy, once it has been hosed down, until the glycol solution loses its battle with the elements. He mentioned that they could have opted for a second kind of solution that was an anti-icing agent as opposed to a deicing one. He talked about how the pilot asked the co-pilot to check the wings thirty minutes after they had been through the deicing station and the co-pilot, according to the tapes they pulled from the wreckage, came back with the all-clear. Only deicing solution on an airplane wing has an “effective window” of twenty-five minutes, no more.

  She remembered someone in uniform coming down the aisle, peering out the windows a few rows back. Everybody watched him study the wing. The “everybody” included a few people who were in their last few minutes of life, the co-pilot among them. He could have seen something, even made it up. Why not squirt your windshield one more time when it’s being splattered with rain and snow and crud? Why not put the jet through for another swab of pink goo, to hit it again before takeoff? It had been twenty-four minutes, said Reitano, when the jet was given clearance to head for Denver. But what good was thinking of Denver when you might not make it off the runway?

  “Your injuries were major. But, in the end, you recovered your life. The settlement they are offering is nine hundred thousand dollars. I could go into the strange ways an actuarial table can change, how emotional distress factors in ...?”

  “That’s an offer?”

  “No trial. Terms to remain confidential. There’s a group of survivors and the families of others who think the suit has gone far enough,” said Reitano, “who don’t want to take it another step. They are the ones involved in the mock trials. It looks like the airline and its insurance companies will be asked to compensate victims moderately, as these things go. But there’s another group that wants the government to pay their share, too.”

  “The government?”

  “It’s a delicate balance: regulating the industry and running it. If the airline doesn’t follow the recommended safety standards set by the glycol manufacturer, the government wants to be able to say that it’s none of their business, that it’s a cut-and-dried decision on the part of the airline and its pilots. Twenty-four minutes? That must be okay. They think their air traffic controllers should have no monitoring function, no oversight. It’s not that hard a thing to track the time and the weather. But the tapes recovered from the airline conversation with the tower show there wasn’t a lick of concern from the tower about how long your jet had been parked and waiting. To put it another way, the government thinks that if they post sixty-five on the highway and you go sixty-six, it might not be their fault if the asphalt is poor quality, maybe a stretch of bad road popped your tire and you wound up in the ditch.”

  Reitano paused and spun gently in his chair.

  “We want to keep pressing this lawsuit. There are only eight of us left. It’s a bit of a risk, not taking what they are offering at this, uh, juncture.”

  “Nine hundred thousand?”

  “Less my fees and taxes.”

  Allison couldn’t imagine what it would be like to be responsible for, or think responsibly about, a pot of money that size. Or maybe larger. Was it possible to grasp this as having any connection to swimming in the sound when she should have been flying?

  “But is it greedy to seek more?”

  “It’s not greedy. It’s a risk. Lawyers in my end of the business have a saying we borrowed from investment bankers: Pigs get fed, hogs get slaughtered. You’re looking to get fed, trust me, no more.”

  “But wasn’t the government doing its best, or trying to?”

  Reitano leaned up on his desk, coupled his hands together so the middle knuckles interlocked neatly.

  “On that basis, so were the pilots. So was the glycol manufacturer. But the government is another thing we can challenge.”

  “How much more could we ... win?” It was a difficult word to use.

  “Hard to say. And there’s more to it than financial value. It’s a matter of proving a point, cleaning it up for others. Someone once said that the government is both a dangerous servant and a fearful master. The government is us. It’s all of us. Watching and monitoring. Providing checks—and balances. It’s little people pointing out problems and being rewarded for their suffering. Suing your government doesn’t mean you hate them. It means you respect your fellow citizens. It means you want to make the world a better place.”

  “More than nine hundred thousand dollars? That’s hard to grasp.”

  His demeanor was too steady to be troubling, his reasoning too solid. She pictured the deicer trying to work beyond its limits, as if it had a brain to know how important it was to keep the wings from freezing.

  “I’ll take your lead on this,” she told him.

  “The principle is with us, on our side. Remember, it’s not the individual people we’re going after. It’s the system, the way they do things.”

  “Do I have to decide now?”

  “No. We have a few weeks to notify the airline if we’ll settle at this stage. You want to think about it; I understand.”

  “I like the idea of having it over with, that’s all. Tying up all the loose ends.”

  “The money is tempting,” said Reitano. “Don’t think I don’t realize that.”

  The whole conversation, its premise, was far removed from her world on the Flat Tops. Or maybe it was the steel and glass setting that gave the discussion an unreal quality. How could you make such a decision? On what basis? What was nine hundred thousand dollars worth?

  After staring off for a moment, Allison stood up. Reitano also began to get up but politely sat back down as Allison did.

  “I’ve got a favor to ask.”

  “Shoot,” he said.

  “Different matter,” said Allison. “Isn’t there a state system that keeps track of debts? Posts them?”

  “The UCC. Uniform Commercial Code. It’s a registry in the secretary of state’s office. Invaluable.”

  “Can you show me how to access it? And, if you’re online, I was wondering if I might spend on hour or so
on the Internet? There’s a big spender in Texas. I want to see how many cattle come with his big hat.”

  Reitano smiled. “We have a spare office,” he said. “Right this way.”

  ****

  Allison flopped on her unmade hotel bed, a half acre of cushion. It was so large she had barely messed one corner of it. She wished Slater could come help her tangle the rest of the sheets. After she got back from her meeting with Reitano that afternoon, she made a phone call to Slater.

  “Why in the world would these men talk with me?” she said. She studied the list in her hand. Bobby Alvin had called back with the names she had asked about: Sal Marcovicci, Frank Cassell and Darrell Lockwood, known as “Locks.”

  She tucked the telephone between her tired head and the pillow. “Because you want to know,” said Slater. “If you think not being a cop is a disadvantage, you’re wrong.”

  “They don’t have to talk to me.”

  “Of course not. When people talk to cops, though, their lips might be flapping but they don’t always say very much. Or they make it up. Like Applegate.”

  “What did he have to say?”

  “Sandstrom gave an update at a summit meeting today. Applegate said he gave the rifle the old heave-ho off a cliff, after hiking back up through three feet of snow. I don’t think so. If any of those guys can give us an idea of what Applegate was up to, it would shed serious light.”

  “Sounds like you’re dubious.”

  “Ask any of ’em if they know where Applegate’s rifle might be and find out if they saw Applegate anywhere the day that guy Ray Stern went down. I’m not dubious. I am trying to imagine it all, trying to get pictures in my head that make sense. And I want you to be careful because if they do know something, they might not appreciate having to lie constantly about what they know. And they might get a little edgy, do something stupid.”

  “Really?”

  “Sure. This could be an intricate cover-up. Be careful.”

  “Gee, I feel like a deputy, but don’t you have to come down here and officially deputize me?”