by Mike Markel
I climbed the concrete steps, crossed a creaky wooden porch, and rang the bell next to the smaller plaque screwed into the siding of the house announcing the name of the organization.
I heard footsteps approaching from inside the house. “Nathan Kress?” I said to the man who opened the door.
He was about fifty, with collar-length grey curly hair and a walrus moustache. He was a little below average height, with slender shoulders and the start of a pot belly. He wore a navy down vest over a plaid wool shirt and wrinkled chinos.
“Glad to meet you.” He extended his hand first to me and then to Ryan after I introduced us. “Come in.”
When we got inside, I understood the down vest. The temperature inside was pretty much the same as outside. I don’t know if this guy objected to heat on philosophical grounds or he was broke, but the whole atmosphere screamed not-for-profit. He ushered us into what was originally a front parlor, filled with dark, heavy, mismatched Victorian furniture over a threadbare Persian carpet. Stained old black-and-white prints of birds and fish and other critters covered the walls.
“This is about Lee,” he said after we all sat. He looked like he’d been crying.
“Yes, Mr. Kress.” I nodded my head sympathetically. “I take it you’ve heard.”
“It’s been all over the Internet, all the places the environmental community hangs out.”
“At this point, we’re trying to understand whether the crime was personal or related to Mr. Rossman’s business.”
“My guess is it was business.” Nathan Kress shifted his position in his overstuffed wing chair, stirring up the dust motes floating in a shaft of light coming in from a window behind him.
“Why is that?”
“You’d never met him?”
“No, never did,” I said.
“Lee was quite a character. Big, outgoing, friendly.”
“Even to you?”
Nathan Kress waved away my implication. “Lee didn’t care what side you were on. If you were civil to him, he was friendly. We weren’t friends, but we could talk. He knew who I was. Always greeted me by name, gave me a big slap on the back.”
“Maybe he was being diplomatic?”
“Let me tell you a short story.” He leaned forward in his chair. “Four years ago, my younger son, Arnie, was quite ill. He was in the hospital over three weeks. The bill was one hundred eighty-seven thousand dollars and change. Our insurance paid twenty. Couple of weeks later, we learned that the bill had been taken care of. We asked who paid it. They said he preferred to remain anonymous.” Nathan Kress put up his hands in a sign of confusion. “Nobody I know has that kind of cash. I asked Lee if it was him. He squeezed my shoulder and said, ‘Don’t know what you’re talking about. But glad your son’s doing better.’ It was Lee Rossman.”
“That’s quite something,” I said.
“Lee was what was good and bad about the West. The good was what I mentioned. He came from a world where your neighbors lived too far away to see, but everyone had to rely on each other because the land and the weather were unforgiving—and there wasn’t a government to step in and fix things. That’s why he paid for my son’s medical bills. I didn’t have the money; he did. To Lee, it was as simple as that.”
“And the bad?” I said.
“The bad was that he had no sense of the interdependence of people and the environment. To Lee, there was oil and gas down there, and we needed it. So he figured out how to get it out and sell it.”
“As simple as that?”
“I don’t want to make him out to be a cartoon character. He understood that there were environmental dangers—especially when you have to send pressurized water and sand and chemicals down a mile or two and break up the shale to get the oil and gas. Lee was an extremely intelligent man, and I don’t think there was anything about the geology of fracking that he didn’t know. If he had his way, he’d have lived out there at the rigs.”
“But …?”
“But to him the environmental dangers were simply technical problems to be solved. If methane was escaping from the well heads and polluting the atmosphere, that was just another problem he needed to solve. If radioactive waste water from his rigs was leeching into the Yellowstone River upstream from the water-treatment facility—which didn’t test for radioactivity and couldn’t remove it anyway—well, just another technical problem.”
“Aren’t they technical problems? What’s wrong with seeing them that way?”
“Nothing.” He nodded his head and smiled. The smile said he’d heard the question often enough, not that the question was stupid. “You want to identify and fix the problems. But if you lack the humility to understand that some of the problems you’ve caused are going to lead to other, bigger problems that you didn’t anticipate—and that you might not be able to solve—if you lack the imagination to understand that, well, you shouldn’t be in the business of injecting millions of gallons of carcinogens into the Earth. The environment is a delicately balanced, interconnected ecosystem. It’s not a toilet.”
I turned to Ryan, to see if he wanted to ask something.
“Mr. Kress,” Ryan said, “you mentioned Lee Rossman helped with your son’s medical bills. Can you tell us how you know that?”
“A couple of weeks after Arnie came home from the hospital, I got a call from Florence Rossman. She asked how he was doing. We talked a few minutes. I told her how much it meant to me and my wife that Lee had done that. I asked her to tell him that, and she said she would.”
Ryan nodded. “Do you know Lauren Wilcox, at the university?”
“Yes.” His eyes brightened. “Of course.”
“Can you tell us a little about her relationship with Lee Rossman?”
“I’m not sure I’d call it a relationship.” He shifted in his chair. “She sees him—not just him, everyone in the extractive industries—as the enemy.”
“Do you think she might have wanted to hurt him?”
“Oh, gosh, no.” Nathan Kress half-laughed. “I meant only that she has no social relationship with Lee or Florence. They don’t talk. To Lauren, Lee Rossman was not a person but a political opponent. Her focus is on helping students understand how to take effective political action against the oil industry—something, by the way, I wish I knew how to do a little more effectively.”
Ryan said, “Would you describe her as an eco-terrorist?”
Nathan Kress’s head jerked back in surprise and he laughed. “That’s ridiculous. She’s a scholar, a teacher. She organizes, she writes petitions, she testifies at state and federal hearings. An eco-terrorist? I’m going to be sure to mention that to her. She’ll get a chuckle out of that.” His expression became cloudy. “Did someone actually use that term in describing Lauren?”
I spoke. “Yes, someone did.”
Surprisingly, Nathan Kress did not ask us who said it. He simply shook his head in disappointment. I wouldn’t have told him.
“Mr. Kress.” Ryan was looking down at his notebook. “In your September newsletter, you mentioned a rancher named Mark Middleton. Do you think he might have wanted to hurt Lee Rossman?”
Ryan was the kind of detective who did his research but didn’t flaunt it. If he had a reason, he’d bring it up in an interview. I turned to Nathan Kress, wondering what he would say.
“That was a feature article about how a lot of landowners have been victimized by the leasing contracts. But no, I don’t think Mark Middleton—or any other unhappy landowner, for that matter—would have hurt Lee.”
“What was Mr. Middleton’s grievance, specifically?” Ryan said.
Nathan Kress sighed. “His grievance was that he had methane infiltration into his water well, and he thought that Rossman Mining’s solution was inadequate.”
“Mr. Middleton didn’t argue breach of contract by the company, did he?”
“No, he admits he signed the contract and that the company followed through on supplying him with potable water after the infiltration. He
argued that the contract was weighted in favor of the company.”
“The company that wrote the contract?” Ryan said.
Nathan Kress exhaled slowly and held up his hands in a gesture of exasperation. “Problem with the landowners is they don’t know what they don’t know. They don’t bring the contract to an attorney first. They just look you in the eye and shake your hand. Then they say, ‘Where do I sign?’”
“That kind of publicity can’t be good for the company, right?”
“That’s right. And I know Lee was furious when he found out some of his landmen were misleading the landowners. He read them the riot act.”
“Did that fix the problem?”
“The way an exterminator fixes a cockroach problem.”
“As in, pretty much, for a while?” Ryan said.
Nathan Kress smiled.
“Mr. Kress,” I said. “I have to ask you a question. I hope you understand. Can you tell us where you were last night?”
He shook his head sadly. “We had a fundraiser here last night. For Rivers United. Unfortunately, not a very big turnout. Sixteen people. Three thousand dollars.”
I stood up. “Thank you for your time, Mr. Kress.”
“Would you let me know if there’s anything I can do?” he said.
“You bet.” But looking at him, in his dark, cold house, I couldn’t imagine there’d be much he could do to help us. Or himself, or his family, or the polluted rivers of Montana.
Chapter 8
Back in the cruiser, I got a call. It was Lauren Wilcox. “Yes, Dr. Wilcox,” I said. Ryan had taught me that almost all the full-time professors at Central Montana State University had a PhD. “Thanks for getting back to us.” I hit Speaker.
“How can I help you?” she said.
“We want to talk with you a few minutes about Lee Rossman.” Ryan touched my arm. I looked at him.
He put up his palm, shook his head, and mouthed the words, “Not now.” I raised an eyebrow. He kept shaking his head.
“Would you be available tomorrow morning?” I said. Ryan nodded.
“I teach a seminar tomorrow afternoon …”
“We’ll just need a few minutes. Promise.”
“Can you stop by early?” she said.
“Eight-fifteen sound good?”
“That would be fine,” she said. “Room 319 in the Sciences Building? On University?”
“See you then.” I ended the call and glanced at my watch. A quarter to four. I turned to Ryan.
“Remember Nathan Kress said she’s written four books?”
“I do remember that,” I said. “You plan to read four books before the end of the shift?”
“Would you mind heading back to headquarters?” He smiled. “I’m going to need an hour.”
I drove us there. Once we made it to our desks, Ryan hung his suit jacket over the back of his chair and started hitting some keys. I walked into the break room and grabbed a beat-up donut half and a cup of murky coffee.
When I got back, Ryan was tapping his bottom lip with his finger, which he did when he was concentrating. He started writing in his skinny notebook. When he got in a zone like this, I didn’t interrupt him. Half the time, he picked up on something that turned out to be important.
There wasn’t any point in me offering to help him with the reading. It would have taken him five minutes to explain to me how to find the junk he was reading, and another fifteen to tell me how to understand it. No, the best thing for me to do was just stay out of the way. I was doing my part by finishing the donut.
A couple of minutes later, Ryan put down his pen, expelled a long breath, and looked up at me.
“She mention being an eco-terrorist?” I said.
“Not in so many words.” He smiled. “But there’s some interesting—”
Then it hit me. I held up my finger. “Wait a second.” I opened up the contact list on my computer. I squinted at the list of names and dialed a number on my phone. I looked at my watch again as it went to voicemail. It would be 6:15 in D.C. “Hey, Allen. Karen Seagate in Rawlings, Montana. I got a long shot for you. There’s this professor here in town: Lauren Wilcox.” I spelled the name. “You guys keep a database on domestic terrorists? Not al Qaida types. Eco-terrorists. Could go back as early as the 1990s. Give me a call, would you?” I left a couple of numbers and hung up.
Ryan looked at me and nodded. “Very nice.”
“Still got a half-dozen brain cells,” I said. Off the Jack Daniel’s more than a year now, with just a couple of blurry days here and there, I’d found I was in fact starting to think a little better. I’d never be as sharp as Ryan, but at least I wasn’t slowing him down as much as I used to.
“I think the feds really cranked up the terror lists after 9/11—” he said.
“So if she was into any nasty shit after 2001, she might be in a database.”
“Assuming she was Lauren Wilcox at the time.”
“Most of today’s terrorists are such pussies.” I shook my head. “They’re willing to blow things up, but they don’t want to get caught.”
“Yeah.” Ryan put on a solemn expression. “That’s the problem with terrorists: They’re such pussies.”
“So, anyway, you said you got something interesting on Lauren Wilcox?”
“Yeah, I’m going to read a little more of her stuff tonight, but the bottom line is, she’s a situation ethicist.”
I looked at him and held my gaze. Since he’s been my partner for a couple of years, he understands why I stare at him when he uses college words.
“It’s a Christian moral theory from the 1960s. You know Paul Tillich?”
My mouth went slack and I blinked a couple times.
“It says that love is the ultimate law. So you can violate other moral principles if doing so best serves love.”
I blinked a few more times.
“A corrupt version of it is that the ends justify the means.” He looked at me and smiled. “Comment?”
“I’m speechless.”
“Actually, no.” He gave me his big grin. “If you say ‘I’m speechless,’ the only thing we know for sure is that you’re not.”
“You realize it’s been a long day, right?”
“You can do this, Karen. Lauren Wilcox believes that the ends justify the means.”
I sighed and closed my eyes. “So if a company pollutes, it’s okay to do some bad shit to them.”
“That’s right,” he said. “One more step.”
“I don’t like you, Ryan.”
“That’s a feeling, not a step.”
I paused a second. “And it’s okay to play dirty because you can do more good by not getting caught.”
He tilted his head, smiled, and put up his palms to show me I got it.
“I still don’t like you.”
He laughed. “The price I’ll have to pay.”
“So what you’re saying is, she’s a pussy.”
“‘Situation ethicist’ will sound better when we bring the chief up to speed.”
“I’m gonna head home,” I said. “Need to stop at the liquor store first—”
He looked concerned. “You know you’re not going to do that, Karen.”
“Yes, I am. Because of you,” I said, walking toward the coatrack in the corner of the detectives’ bullpen. “Own it.”
I didn’t stop at the liquor store, of course. I headed home, ate dinner, and went to my eight o’clock AA meeting. When the chief re-hired me more than a year ago, he made me attend for ninety days. Now I was still going, almost every day. I’d never bought into the mumbo-jumbo about a higher power, but seeing some of my fellow losers there every day seemed to help. Made me feel I wasn’t the biggest fuck-up in town. A lot of them drank themselves single, like I did, but since I’d never literally killed anyone from my drinking, I was among the less toxic of the drunks.
Back at home, I sat down at the computer and tried to smarten up about Lauren Wilcox. I couldn’t understand any of
the academic stuff she’d written, with all the footnotes and the references to dead scientists and philosophers. But after slogging through the opening pages of her books on Amazon and reading some of her op-ed pieces, I concluded that Ryan was, as usual, right. She never copped to any shit she might have done, her being such a pussy, but she did make it clear how chaining yourself to a tree was usually a waste of time, and pouring sand in the gas tank of the Caterpillar was amateur hour.
Unfortunately, she didn’t get into whether it would be okay to kill a guy for doing stuff you didn’t like.
I decided to pack it in for the day. I got into bed and tried to watch some TV, but I drifted off during the stupid singing and dancing contests. Ten o’clock news came on, and the chirpy twenty-five-year-old Barbie with the super-white teeth put on a frowny face as she ran through the career of Lee Rossman. There were lots of photos of him in tuxedos, and Florence in ball gowns, hanging with the mayor, then the file footage of the oil rigs bobbing up and down out in the Bakken. Barbie pointed out that fracking was controversial because it creates jobs but some people think it can cause pollution, which was what passes for an in-depth, balanced analysis of an important public-policy issue on the crappy local station. But since the station’s motto is “We’re there for you!” maybe it was me looking for the right thing in the wrong place.
I turned the TV off and drifted into a dreamless sleep. A few weeks ago I’d stopped taking the over-the-counter sleeping pills I’d been using forever. I was glad to be done with the morning grogginess, but I did miss how the fog floated in and put me out, most nights, in ten minutes.
Then I became aware of the sounds. At first there was a thump, then some tiny, tentative squeaks. I couldn’t make out what they were, except that they were solid surfaces rubbing against each other. Because I can dream anytime, even before I’m really out, I assumed the sounds were part of a dream.
I noticed how the sounds started to get louder, although idiot that I am it never occurred to me that they were getting closer. I just assumed the dream was starting to form into a story. And then they formed into a pattern, and over the next few seconds I remember thinking maybe it wasn’t a dream.