by Mike Markel
“And Ron Eberly said that you were able to deal with the end of your affair with Lee, but that when Lee married Florence, you responded very badly.”
Her head jerked up. “That is preposterous.” She paused a moment. “God gave me many blessings. I am reasonably intelligent. I am highly disciplined. And I am extremely loyal. But look at me, Detective. I am a very plain woman. I am aware of that. I do not pretend otherwise. A man like Lee Rossman … does it strike you as reasonable that a woman like myself could expect to keep a man like Lee Rossman? When there are women who look like Florence? So many, many women who look like Florence? Please give me some credit. I have long since come to peace with what I might expect to receive in this life.”
“Ms. Garrity, about something else you mentioned the other day. It’s about Lauren Wilcox, the professor.”
Cheryl Garrity was breathing a little heavily. “What would you like to say?”
“You mentioned that she is an eco-terrorist. You spelled out her name. We wrote it down.”
“Yes, I remember.”
“We did considerable research and—I have to be honest with you—we didn’t find any evidence at all that she is an eco-terrorist. Can you help us with that? Why did you use that word?”
“I used that word because that is exactly what she is. She attacked Rossman Mining.”
“What do you mean?” I heard my phone ring from inside my leather bag. I reached in and turned it off.
“She hacked our data system. She breached our security.”
“How do you know it was her?”
“The attack came from her account at Central Montana State University.”
“Did she try to sabotage your system?”
“She did not try to post anything offensive on it, if that is what you mean. However, she did attempt to install programs—I don’t remember what my IT people called them—that would enable her to monitor our activities. And she combed through our e-mail system.”
“Do you know if she found what she was looking for?”
“I don’t know what she was looking for. We have nothing to hide, of course. All our operations are completely aboveboard and legal.”
“Have you eliminated the threat? Removed the software?”
“We believe we have—but that’s a question that cannot be answered definitively. We might learn, sometime in the future, that we have not completely eliminated the threat.”
“Are you going to take legal action against her?”
“We are considering it. I mean, we were until … until this week. Now I don’t know what Florence will decide to do. I certainly know what I will recommend, should she ask me.”
“What is that?”
“I would come at Lauren Wilcox with everything I have. If the world knew what kind of person she is, she would be totally discredited.”
“Which would help the oil industry.”
“It would help the United States, Detective.” Her voice was clipped. “Have you read anything she has written?”
“Some.”
“Did you read the essay she wrote about her hero?”
“I don’t believe I did.”
“Her hero is Ho Chi Minh.” She wiped at her eyes with her thumb and forefinger. “Do you know who I’m referring to?”
I recognized the name but couldn’t place it. I turned to Ryan.
“From the Vietnam War?” he said.
“That’s right.” She nodded to Ryan, then turned back to me. “He was the leader of North Vietnam. He was a brutal dictator, a mass murderer. He said you can kill ten of our men for every man of yours we kill, and in the end you will tire of it and we will win. Lauren Wilcox sees the struggle against the oil industry as a revolutionary struggle. The oil industry is the colonial power, with endless riches and influence. And the environmental community—her corner of the environmental community, at least—are the freedom fighters.” She paused, and the tears started again. “Ho Chi Minh cut down tens of thousands of American men. One of them was my father. In 1968. And yet she views him as a hero. She’s not only irrational, she’s a traitor.” The tears were flowing freely down her face now. “And that is what I know about Lauren Wilcox.”
I looked at Ryan, who nodded slightly. We stood up. “Thank you very much for your time, Ms. Garrity. Hope you feel better.”
She didn’t not respond, and Ryan and I let ourselves out.
Chapter 25
We sat in the Charger in the garage beneath Cheryl Garrity’s extremely nice condo. “You believe her?” I said to Ryan.
“Absolutely.”
“That she loved Bill Rossman like a son?”
“Absolutely.”
“So she didn’t have anything to do with attacking him.”
“Don’t waste our time, Karen.”
“That she was okay when Lee Rossman dropped her and married Florence?”
“Absolutely.”
“Why?”
“Because her explanation was completely rational, and she is a rational person.”
“You mean the bit about how she knows she’s a plain woman who couldn’t keep a man like Lee Rossman?”
“That’s the explanation I’m referring to.”
“Which makes Ron Eberly a liar when he said Cheryl Garrity went batshit.”
“The guy who said the thing he was proudest of in his life was that he never let Lee down—while he’s sleeping with Lee’s wife?”
“What’s Eberly’s motivation for lying to us about Cheryl?” I said.
“Three possibilities. One, he wants to portray everyone as powerless to exert any control over the emotions of love—”
“Why would he do that?”
“So he could pretend that his affair with Florence is a grand passion and he’s therefore exempt from the bourgeois rules of sexual fidelity.”
“I heard some sounds coming out of your mouth. Did you just say something?”
“So it wasn’t his fault for nailing Florence.”
“And the second possibility?”
“To deflect attention away from himself.”
And the third?”
“Some people are just liars. They don’t need a motivation.”
“Okay, you believe Cheryl about Lauren Wilcox hacking the company’s computers?”
“Absolutely. It’s just the sort of thing Lauren Wilcox would do.”
“The Lauren Wilcox out at the river? Showing the kids the crap in the water?”
“The Lauren Wilcox with a federal warrant,” Ryan said.
“It’s illegal. You see her as risking everything to snoop around on the company’s system?”
“If you’ve never gotten caught, you begin to think you won’t get caught. Nobody’s smart enough to catch you. Besides, she’s not blowing anything up. Nobody’s going to be injured.”
“What did you think about the Ho Chi Minh quotation?”
“I’m familiar with the quotation, although I wasn’t aware that Lauren Wilcox had used it in her writing. But yes, it’s totally plausible that Lauren Wilcox would see herself as a guerilla fighter battling a colonial empire. It helps her feel justified in breaking laws.”
“Because the laws are there to protect the colonial empire,” I said.
“That’s right.”
“And her father dying in Vietnam?”
“Absolutely. I did the math. Totally plausible.”
“I was a little surprised you didn’t mention an older brother dying in Vietnam.”
“I wanted to, but, like I said, I did the math.”
“All right, then. Who attacked Bill Rossman?”
“Why do I have to do everything? I just explained to you why Cheryl Garrity was telling the truth. Why don’t you figure out who attacked Bill Rossman?”
My phone rang. I pulled it out of my big leather bag. It was Larry Klein, our prosecutor. I put it on Speaker.
“Hey, Larry, what’s up?”
“The chief ran your question past me. About whether
we should let the FBI grab up Wilcox on the old federal warrants.”
“Yeah, what do you think?”
“I wouldn’t do it that way. I’d use whatever time the FBI has given you to work on her for the Bill Rossman case. That one might be attempted murder, whereas the federal warrants are mostly property damage.”
“Even with the logger getting hurt?”
“Yeah, it would be impossible to show intent. Bottom line, we’re in a better position if we treat the incidents separately. Make the Bill Rossman case—if you can make it. If we bundle the cases and the feds screw it up or decide not to prosecute it or whatever, we could be left with nothing.”
“Is Chief Murtaugh on board with this?”
“I already talked to him. He agrees.”
“Just so you know, we don’t think Lauren Wilcox had anything to do with attacking Bill Rossman, but maybe she hacked the Rossman Mining servers.”
“Interesting. That sounds a little more her speed. What I’m saying is, use your time to collect as much evidence as you can before the FBI comes calling.”
“Okay, Larry, thanks a lot.” I ended the call and saw that I had a message from ten minutes before. It was headquarters. “That call? When we were in Cheryl’s living room? One of the admins: Bill Rossman’s phone records are on our desks.”
I headed out of the garage, handed the attendant his ticket and showed him my shield, then drove us back to headquarters.
We hustled back to the detectives’ bullpen. “What are you seeing?” I said to Ryan, who was looking at his own copy of the phone records.
“Same thing you’re seeing: what the heck is Bill Rossman talking to Nathan Kress about?”
I sank into my chair and studied the printout. A total of five calls between the two of them, the latest one from Nathan Kress to Bill Rossman around seven in the morning yesterday—the day the kid was attacked. “This making any sense to you?”
“Not yet,” Ryan said. “I see five calls. The shortest, nine seconds; the longest, almost six minutes.”
I picked up my phone and dialed the chief’s office. “Margaret, the chief in?” She said yes. “Could you ask him to meet us in the incident room? We’re heading over there now.” She said she’d ask him.
When he got there, Ryan and I were sitting on office chairs, looking at the board. “Hey,” the chief said. “What’ve you got?” He sat on the edge of a desk.
I stood up and walked over to the board. “Two things we want to tell you. See if you can figure them out. Ryan and I are just spinning our wheels.”
“Go ahead.”
I pointed to the photo of Cheryl Garrity. “We interviewed her this morning. She knows all about Bill Rossman being attacked. That makes sense.”
“Florence told her,” the chief said.
“So we ask her about her comment, from Monday, that Lauren Wilcox is an eco-terrorist, which we now know is true.”
The chief nodded, like that was worth talking about.
“She tells us Lauren Wilcox hacked the Rossman Mining IT system, planted some kind of program to spy on them.”
“She knows this how?”
“Her IT people traced it to her account at the university.”
The chief looked skeptical. He turned to Ryan. “Isn’t it possible that the hacker just made it look like it came from the university?”
Ryan said, “I wouldn’t be surprised. We could ask Jorge about that.”
“Plus,” the chief said, “there’s got to be hundreds of computers on campus an outsider could use to launch an attack from.”
“Sure,” Ryan said. “A student is checking her email, forgets to log off, walks away.”
“What Cheryl Garrity seemed to be really pissed about was that Lauren Wilcox published some stuff about how cool Ho Chi Minh was.”
The chief looked puzzled. “Ho Chi Minh? North Vietnam?”
“Seems Cheryl’s father died in Vietnam.”
The chief scratched at his cheek. “Cheryl Garrity might be looking for someone to blame her father’s death on, and Lauren Wilcox might fit.”
“Is there any crime that’s been committed? I mean, the hacking?”
The chief shook his head. “Not until someone reports it.”
“There’s nothing we can do to see if it happened?”
“If you can tie it to the Lee Rossman murder or the attack on Bill Rossman—and show that the Bill Rossman attack was in our jurisdiction—then I can present it to Larry, and he’ll get us a warrant to search the Rossman IT system. But I need probable cause. All we’ve got now is an employee saying her system was compromised.”
The chief was right. We didn’t know there was any hacking, and if there was, we didn’t know who did it. What did we know? We knew diddly.
“All right: one other thing.” I walked over to the photo of Nathan Kress, the president of Rivers United. “This guy’s talked to Bill Rossman five times in the last week. Most recently, he phoned Bill Rossman at seven am yesterday, the day the kid was attacked.”
“What do we know about Kress?”
“He’s the well-behaved environmental guy in town. The one Lauren Wilcox thinks is too soft.”
“He the one who had the sick kid you said Lee Rossman paid the medical bills for?”
“Yeah, that’s him. He has a good alibi for killing Lee Rossman. We didn’t think he had any connection to the Bill Rossman attack.” I paused. “So we’re not seeing what Kress and Bill Rossman were talking about. You see something Ryan and I are missing?”
He sat there on the edge of the desk, giving it some thought. “No,” he said. “I’m not seeing anything.” He paused. “I think I’d have another go at him. Squeeze him a little harder.”
“Thanks, Chief.”
He nodded and left. We went back to the bullpen, got our coats, and headed over to Nathan Kress’ house, downtown. Knocked on the door. A middle-aged woman wearing a thick hand-knit sweater opened up.
“Good morning, ma’am. Detectives Seagate and Miner to see Nathan Kress. Is he in?”
“Yes, he is,” she said. “Come in.”
We waited in the entryway while his wife went upstairs to get him. I left my coat on in the chilly house.
“Detectives,” Nathan Kress said, halfway down the stairs. “You have something to tell me about Lee Rossman?”
“Good morning, Mr. Kress,” I said. “You have a minute to speak with us?”
“Of course,” he said, leading us to the sitting room where we had interviewed him the other day. He gestured for us to sit.
“Thank you,” I said. “No, sorry. Nothing to report about Lee Rossman. We want to talk to you about his son.”
“Bill Rossman?” He looked confused. “What about him?”
“Could you tell us what your relationship with Bill Rossman is?”
“I’m not sure I’d call it a relationship. I met him through Lee, of course. Lee had me and my wife and our son out to their house several times … Have you ever been to their house? Overlooking the reservoir?” He smiled.
I didn’t. “Yes, we have.”
“It’s spectacular, isn’t it?” He was still smiling.
I said nothing and showed nothing. Finally, his smile faded.
“This was a couple of years ago. As I said, we talked. Bill is a very intelligent boy. Well, he must be a man, now.”
“What did you talk about?”
“Well, any number of things. He’s interested in the oil business—of course—but he’s also quite knowledgeable about my side of the equation—”
“I’m sorry, I didn’t ask the question clearly enough. What did you talk about yesterday morning, at 6:57 am for six minutes?” I turned to Ryan, who was pulling the phone log out of his suit jacket pocket. “Would you like me to list the other calls between you and Bill Rossman?”
He shifted in his chair. “No, no. That won’t be necessary. Yes, we have spoken on the phone a few times recently—”
“Yes, you have.” I loo
ked at him hard. “And I’m asking—for the last time—what did you talk about?”
“I don’t understand what is going on. We talk about any number of things. Environmental things. Life out in Marshall … I’ve never worked on an oil rig …”
I stood and walked over to Nathan Kress, lowering myself onto my knees. I leaned in to look closely at his face. “You keep this house about forty goddamn degrees, and yet you seem to be sweating, Mr. Kress. Right above your upper lip. Are you okay?”
“Yes,” he said, pulling back. “I’m just a little confused about why you’re grilling me about a perfectly innocent friendship I’ve developed with Lee Rossman’s son. You’re scaring me, is all.” His finger came up to his face and he wiped away the sweat. “What’s going on?”
“What did you speak with Bill Rossman about yesterday morning, at 6:57, for six minutes?”
“I … I don’t remember specifically. About mining, I think.”
“At 6:57 in the morning?”
“He must have been getting ready to begin a shift. That’s when he called me.”
Ryan said, “You called him.”
“Yes, you’re right.” He smiled. “I was returning his call from the day before.”
“Do you know where Bill Rossman is, right now?”
Nathan Kress furrowed his brows. “No, I don’t. I imagine he’s at the rig. Working.”
“No, Mr. Kress,” I said. “Bill Rossman is in the ICU at Rawlings Regional.”
The color drained from Kress’ face. “Oh, my God. What happened?”
I just looked at him. “He was attacked. Beaten, very badly. The doctors had to remove his spleen. And someone poured fracking wastewater down his throat.”
Nathan Kress let out a cry of pain and slumped forward in his chair. He began to weep, out of control.
His wife rushed into the room. “What is happening in here?” she said.
I turned to her and waved her off. Ryan stood, walked over to her, and told her he was okay. He led her out of the room.
I leaned in, a foot away from his head. “The police tell us Bill Rossman was attacked right after you spoke with him at 6:57 for six minutes. Now, can you tell me what you were talking about?”
“Is he going to be all right?”