Fractures: A Detectives Seagate and Miner Mystery

by Mike Markel

  She bowed her head slightly in acknowledgment. “Almost twenty-four years,” she said.

  “I’m a little surprised you’re in the office now,” I said.

  She tilted her head. “Why is that?”

  “Well,” I said slowly, trying to give myself a chance to choose my words carefully, “you’ve just learned that the company president … , your colleague for a quarter-century …”

  “Has died?” Cheryl Garrity said, raising her eyebrows.

  “Yes.” I nodded. “Has died.”

  “Where would you expect me to be?”

  “I wouldn’t have been surprised to learn you were at home now. Or with Florence Rossman.”

  Cheryl Garrity looked out over her half-glasses and nodded slightly, as if to concede my comment was not ridiculous. “As the Director of Operations—pending any changes announced by Florence—I am responsible for the business of Rossman Mining, and there is an enormous amount of business that must be attended to at this moment.”

  “Yes,” I said. “I understand that.” I tapped my chin with my index finger. “Are you expecting Ms. Rossman to make any changes?”

  “Yes,” Cheryl Garrity said. “When the founding president of a large, successful corporation departs, I think it’s only prudent to expect changes.”

  “Do you expect those changes right away?”

  “I was simply saying that the owner of Rossman Mining is now Florence Rossman.”

  “I see.”

  “How may I help you?” She reached for a yellow legal pad from a stack in the middle of the table. She held a pen, ready to start taking notes. I noticed there was a glass window built into the table in front of her. There probably was a computer or something under the glass.

  “Let me begin by asking you what you’ve already heard about Mr. Rossman’s death.”

  “Florence phoned me, soon after you informed her this morning, and told me what she knew at the time: that Lee’s body was recovered this morning outside a bar downtown, and that you believe he was murdered.” She paused. “Is that still your belief?”

  “Yes, it is.” I shifted in my chair. “We don’t have a formal forensics report yet, and the autopsy hasn’t been done, but, yes, that is what we told Ms. Rossman.”

  Cheryl Garrity didn’t speak. Apparently, that was the prompt for me to answer her question about how she could help us. “Do you have any thoughts on who might have wanted to harm Mr. Rossman?”

  “I do not know of anyone who would have wanted to harm Lee.”

  “I understand how, with his death being so recent, it must be difficult to talk about anyone who might’ve wanted to hurt him,” I said. “But this was a man sixty-five years old, a man who’d made many millions of dollars in a very competitive industry, an industry a lot of people don’t like. He had to have made some enemies along the way.”

  Cheryl Garrity lowered her head to look through the glass window in the table. She reached under the table, and the lights around the perimeter of the room dimmed to half-strength and a white projection screen began to descend from the ceiling.

  In a moment, the Rossman Mining web page appeared on the screen. The cursor slid to a row of links at the top of the page, so quickly I couldn’t tell what she was clicking. A page titled Rossman Foundation appeared. The page was full of images of Lee Rossman smiling and shaking hands with various local bigwigs. There were pictures of Lee at groundbreaking ceremonies, Lee at dedications, Lee in front of a podium, addressing students in classrooms and adults in conference centers and auditoriums.

  Cheryl Garrity spoke. “Lee Rossman was in negotiations with Central Montana State University to endow a professorship of petroleum engineering, which would have cost more than two-million dollars. In the last eight years, since we’ve been in Montana, he has donated more than one-and-a-half million dollars to other initiatives at the university—and not only in engineering. He was the largest donor to the new Arts and Humanities campaign. Ten ongoing four-year scholarships to Rossman Scholars, as they’re called. In Rawlings, he supported job-training, the Ronald McDonald House, the Rawlings Regional Medical Center, the shelter for victims of domestic violence, Meals on Wheels. Little League, Pop Warner. Call the president of the university, call Mayor Rafferty. Call anyone who’s deeply involved in the affairs of this city. I would be very surprised if they did not tell you the exact same thing: that Lee Rossman was the most generous and civic-minded resident of Rawlings, Montana.”

  Ryan spoke. “Tell us about his relationship with the environmental community.”

  She looked at him, her eyes briefly showing her annoyance. “You’re referring to Nathan Kress. Rivers United.”

  Ryan nodded.

  “Lee met with Mr. Kress on numerous occasions. I was present at some of those meetings. Obviously, Lee Rossman and Nathan Kress simply saw the issues differently. Lee believed—and of course I and everyone else at Rossman and everybody in the oil and gas industry still believe—that shale oil and gas represent our nation’s best opportunity to free itself from dependence on foreign energy sources, because our nation is the Saudi Arabia of shale oil and gas.” She glided through this little speech, like she had delivered it many times before. “That there have been no credible reports of significant environmental damage—or potential damage—from the extraction of shale oil and gas. And that the mining of shale oil and gas represents a significant source of secure, high-paying jobs for skilled laborers, now and for decades to come.”

  “And Mr. Kress?” Ryan looked at her directly. “What does he believe?”

  “The opposite.” She held up a finger and tilted her head slightly. “Excuse me. That’s not completely accurate. Mr. Kress does not dispute that we are the Saudi Arabia of shale oil and gas. But he does dispute every other item I listed.”

  “But these differences between the two men, they’re policy differences, correct?” Ryan said. “You don’t believe that the dispute ever became personal, do you?”

  “Not at all.” Cheryl Garrity shook her head as if the idea was out of the question. “Lee and Nathan Kress did not socialize, at least as far as I know, but I believe they saw themselves as opponents, not enemies.”

  “Anyone else?” I said.

  Cheryl Garrity turned to me. “Excuse me?”

  “Anyone else in the environmental community we should be talking to?”

  “The question of who you should be talking to, I leave that to you. But I know there was one other person from that community who Lee in particular did not care for.”

  “Who was that?”

  “Lauren Wilcox. She’s a professor—of ecology, I believe that’s her title—at CMSU.”

  “Can you tell us what it was about her that Mr. Rossman didn’t care for?”

  “Lee believed that she didn’t play by the rules.”

  “The rules?”

  “Lee and I and everyone else in the oil business, for a hundred years in this country, have acted according to the principle that both sides of the shale oil and gas debate are interested in the public good. We are all, in effect, patriots. We never question our opponent’s motives. We believe in working hard, following the law, treating everyone fairly. I’m not saying we all love each other. But we would never cross the line by using illegitimate tactics to further our position.”

  “Illegitimate tactics?” I said.

  “Intimidation, innuendo.” Cheryl Garrity held my gaze. “Eco-terrorism.”

  “Are you saying Lauren Wilcox is associated with eco-terrorism?”

  “I’m not saying that. I’m merely presenting examples of illegitimate tactics.” She glanced at Ryan to be sure he was taking notes. “Let me just say this: Her name is spelled L-A-U-R-E-N W-I-L-C-O-X.”

  I glanced at Ryan. He looked up from his skinny notebook on the conference table. He looked at me, then at Cheryl Garrity, and nodded. “Got it.” He smiled. “Lauren Wilcox.”

  “Ms. Garrity,” I said, “what can you tell us about Mr. Rossman’s wif
e and son?”

  “Florence is Lee’s second wife. His first wife, Helen, died of ovarian cancer about ten years ago. She was in her fifties. She was the mother of their son, Bill. He’s a student here at CMSU, as well as a Rossman employee. Sometimes he puts in only a few hours, sometimes he works full-time. Lee was grooming him to take over the business.”

  “How did Mr. Rossman meet Florence?”

  “Lee met her while he was on a business trip about three years ago. They fell in love almost immediately and married within a couple of months. She was from St. Louis, had never been to Rawlings—or Montana, for that matter—as far as I know. But you met her this morning. She is a beautiful woman, very poised, quite charming. Lee relied on her as a representative of the company to the community.”

  “How has that gone?”

  “The community is quite taken with her. Lee was an oilman, and while that served him very well within the industry, Florence has been the driving force behind his outreach and philanthropic activities.”

  “Any problems with that marriage?”

  “I have no reason to think so.”

  “Any problems between Florence and the stepson, Bill?”

  “I can’t really say. I have no personal experience as a stepmother, but from watching them together on occasion I think these things take time. I’m not part of their social circle and therefore I can’t give you much useful information, but my estimation is that while Bill isn’t close to Florence, I don’t believe that is a reflection of anything she has done. His mother died when he was about thirteen, which is a very vulnerable age. To this day, I’m not sure he has fully gotten over her death. But Bill has always understood how much his father loved Florence, and, to his credit, he never tried to stand in the way of their marriage. Given the awkward ages of the three of them, I think Bill has handled the situation admirably.”

  “You mean that Florence is much younger than Mr. Rossman was?”

  “She is closer in age to Bill than she was to Lee.”

  I nodded. “Ms. Garrity, I’m going to ask you to forgive me in advance for this next question. I have to ask it—”

  “I was home last night. I usually do some shopping Sunday afternoons. I returned home around five pm, but I was in the rest of the night. And no, there is nobody to corroborate that. I live alone at the Madison Condominiums. I believe they have CCTV in the lobby but not in the elevators or the garage.”

  I reached into my bag and pulled out a card. “Again, Ms. Garrity, my condolences.” I walked over to her and handed her the card. “Please get in touch if you have any information you think might help us in our investigation.”

  As I turned to leave, I heard the hum of the screen disappearing back into the ceiling.

  Chapter 7

  “Interesting woman,” I said as we got into the elevator.

  Ryan pressed P. “You mean how she hears her boss has been killed? Her boss of more than twenty years? And she looks less upset than the receptionist?”

  “Yeah, that’s what I mean.” The elevator hummed and swayed a little as we headed down. “Does she go to comfort her employees? Does she rush to be with Florence Rossman or Bill Rossman?”

  “Apparently not.”

  “That’s right. She stays in the office because there’s a lot of work to do. With the boss dead and all, she has a lot of appointments to re-schedule.”

  “So she’s interesting because she’s a bot?” Ryan held the elevator door, and we started walking toward the Charger.

  “I don’t know what that means,” I said. “She’s interesting because she’s so weird she doesn’t realize how weird she is. Therefore, she doesn’t even pretend to act like a human.”

  “Which could work in our favor,” Ryan said. “Maybe it means she won’t lie to us.”

  “That would be refreshing.” I paused. “What did you get from her we should follow up?”

  Ryan thought for a moment. “She’s resentful. Lee’s wife dies, he goes off and marries a young, attractive woman.”

  “In other words, not Cheryl.”

  “Then Lee makes the young wife co-owner of the company.”

  “In other words, not Cheryl.” I eased the Charger out of the garage and started heading back toward headquarters. The sun low in the sky, I fished the sunglasses out of my big leather bag.

  “She said Nathan Kress is on the wrong side of the fracking question but he’s not a bad guy.”

  “So we shouldn’t look at him?” I said.

  “But she said L-A-U-R-E-N Wilcox is an eco-terrorist.”

  “Yeah, what do you make of that? You run across her name when you were reading about the company?”

  “No, I didn’t,” Ryan said.

  “It doesn’t fit with the crime.” I shook my head. “If Lauren Wilcox is an eco-terrorist—whatever the hell that means—I could maybe see her wanting to eliminate Lee Rossman. I could even see her stabbing him. But why is his fly down? No way he’d agree to meet her in an alley, even if she offered to suck him off.”

  “I’d like to see a picture of Lauren Wilcox before I conclude Lee Rossman wouldn’t want to meet her in an alley.”

  “Good point.” I nodded. “He could’ve been a horn dog, or he could’ve been so screwy he got his rocks off fucking a woman who hated him.”

  “But you don’t buy it,” Ryan said.

  “No, I don’t. And I don’t see her killing him somewhere else and dumping him in the alley. If it’s a political hit, she wants people to know why he had to die. So she wouldn’t pull his fly down. She wants everyone to know he died because he’s a polluter, not because he likes blowjobs.”

  I pulled the cruiser into the lot behind headquarters. Ryan slid his ID through the reader at the rear entrance, and we made our way to the detectives’ bullpen. I put my stuff down next to my desk. “I’m gonna go check in with the chief. You figure out what you can about Nathan Kress and Lauren Wilcox.”

  Ryan nodded and I headed out to the chief’s office. He okayed my plan for following up with the environmental guy and the ecology professor. He asked if I’d heard from Harold or Robin about forensics or the autopsy. “It just doesn’t sound like Lee Rossman …” The chief shook his head.

  “You mean, in the alley with his fly down?”

  “That’s not him,” he said.

  I shrugged my shoulders, my way of saying I didn’t know Rossman, which was more polite than asking the chief how he could possibly know the guy didn’t spend a lot of evenings in the alley with his fly down. I see it as a sign of my personal growth that I no longer feel the need to tell everyone everything I think.

  “Well,” I said, “I’ll get with Robin and Harold as soon as they’ve got something.” I thanked the chief and headed back to the detectives’ bullpen.

  Ryan looked up from his screen when he heard me. “The chief okay with what we’re doing?”

  “Yeah.” I sat down in my chair. “He seems really hung up about Rossman being in the alley.”

  “Did you explain your theory on how all men are pigs?”

  “No, twerp, I think he’s aware of my thoughts on the subject.”

  Ryan smiled. “Rossman wouldn’t be the first upstanding citizen who gets caught with his pants down.”

  “Anyway, you learn anything?” I pointed to his computer.

  “Nathan Kress was easy enough to track down. He founded Rivers United six years ago. It’s a general-purpose environmental advocacy group, with an emphasis on water pollution. Since the oil and gas boom, he’s become higher profile, but from the look of his site he’s still pretty small scale. He’s an attorney, so he knows how to try to stop projects he doesn’t like.”

  “He didn’t stop the fracking, though, did he?” I said.

  “He certainly did not stop the fracking.”

  “And Lauren Wilcox?”

  “She’s a professor, officially in the Biology Department. Came here four years ago from University of Texas, where she was also a professor. Published fo
ur books and lots of articles on the politics of environmentalism. She runs this student ecology group on campus.”

  “See anything on her blowing up oil rigs?”

  Ryan shook his head. “Apparently she chose not to put that on her CV.”

  “So why the hell was Cheryl Garrity calling her an eco-terrorist?”

  “We might want to ask her that,” Ryan said.

  “Give me Nathan Kress’s phone. You try Lauren Wilcox,” I said. He slid a piece of paper across his desk to me.

  A minute later, he said, “She’s not in the office, and the cell went to voicemail. I left messages at both numbers.” He put the phone back in its cradle. “Get through to Mr. Kress?”

  “He’d love to talk with us,” I said, standing and walking toward the coat rack.

  “Please, Karen.” Ryan followed me. “Nobody would love to talk with us.”

  We headed out toward 230 Sentinel, a mixed residential and commercial street just west of downtown. Back in the 1930s and 1940s, when the neighborhood used to be upper-class, people built three-story stone and brick houses with broad columns that didn’t support anything heavy, ornate shutters that didn’t shut, and other useless features that passed for class out here on the prairie. The houses were impressively large, with their five or six bedrooms, but what really dazzled was the indoor bathroom. Today, the bathroom situation, plus the fact that if you’re over five-eleven you hit your damn head every time you clomp down the stairs, made the houses less practical for actually living in. So the places became offices for small businesspeople, like architects, accountants, graphic designers, and others who lived upstairs and eventually learned to keep their heads down as they moved from room to room.

  In the middle of the scrubby front lawn at 230 Sentinel, the oak sign with the words “Rivers United” burned into it looked like a junior-high woodworking project. I parked out front and displayed the Official Police Business sign. Ryan and I walked up to the wooden gate in the picket fence. The fence was missing so many slats it looked like a grinning hockey player. The hardware on the gate was painted over so often the parts didn’t move. I could have pushed the whole fence and gate over with the heel of my palm.