Dead Dry

by Sarah Andrews

  “Are you an optimist?”

  “No, I’m more of a pessimist. When I worked in oil and gas, I specialized in maximizing the production of known reserves. I was always pissing management off by showing that there was less oil in place than they had hoped.”

  Mr. Reed laughed. “I could use someone like you on my assessments staff.”

  “Well, Mr. Reed, I—”

  “You can call me Trevor.”

  Fritz raised an eyebrow. He had his back to the client, but I saw it.

  “That goes for you, too, Fritz,” Trevor said, as if he had seen.

  Fritz nodded, but I noted that his back had gone especially straight. I wondered what was up. I’d been having trouble calling the passenger Mister; the guy had to be at least five years my junior.

  A short while later, we entered the landing pattern for Jefferson County Airport, which is in the suburbs just northwest of Denver. As we approached, the granite peaks gave way to the plains. Reed was watching. “I see fins of rock along the foothills,” he said. “Are those igneous, metamorphic, or sedimentary?”

  “Those are the edges of layers of sedimentary rock that got bent up when the granites pushed up. See those red ones? That’s the famous Flatirons behind the city of Boulder. Lyons Sandstone. The ones closest to the mountains are Fountain Formation. Remember I told you about aprons of rubble fanning off the mountains? The Fountain Formation was one of those aprons, three hundred million years ago.”

  “Amazing.” He shook his head.

  Fritz brought the plane in for one of his silky smooth landings and taxied to the terminal. We stepped out into wilting heat. Denver was even hotter than Salt Lake City.

  Reed had a car waiting to whisk him away. “So, Fritz,” he began, as Fritz handed his client’s leather-bound luggage over to the driver, “you have the keys to the condo and you have my cell phone number if you need to reach me. I’ll be ready to head back about noon tomorrow. Earlier if I can get away sooner.” His smile became a wry grimace. “Avoid the thunderstorms.” He turned to me. “Although I enjoyed the dissertation on the Rockies, Ms … .” He stared at me, trying to get my attention.

  I was staring into space. It had not occurred to me that I would be spending the night in Denver. This caused certain problems, such as where I was going to sleep, and I hadn’t brought a change of clothes. I glanced down at Faye’s uniform. For that matter, I hadn’t even brought something to wear into Denver. What was I thinking? Had I been thinking?

  Fritz said, “I’m sorry, Mr. Reed, but I forgot to introduce you. This is Ms. Hansen.”

  I snapped my brain into focus. “You can call me Em,” I said awkwardly. “Short for Emily.” I thought of giving him my hand to shake, but for some reason, the uniform I was wearing stopped me.

  He gave me a nod. To Fritz, he said, “Tomorrow at noon, then.”

  Fritz said, “Yes, Mr. Reed.”

  “Trevor.”

  “T—uh … yes, I’ll be here.”

  Reed studied Fritz in detail for a moment, then sat down into his car. The driver closed the door for him, climbed into the driver’s seat, and the low black car slithered away.

  Fritz stayed where he was, watching it go.

  “Can I ask?” I inquired.

  He turned to me and blinked. “Ask what?”

  “Why you can’t call him Trevor? Or Trev? Or how about T-revor rex?”

  Fritz’s face went cloudy. “No, I’m not subservient, if that’s what you’re asking. I’m the pilot in command of that aircraft. That guy may be paying the bills, but he’s not calling the shots. If the weather gets truly bad or he shows up with ten pals and I only have seats for six, I need absolute control over fly or no fly. It’s just easier if the relationship stays one hundred percent professional.”

  I looked down at my shirt front again. “I was wondering if it had something to do with wearing a uniform.”

  Fritz got a faraway look in his eye. He raised one shoulder a notch and then let it drop. “Well … I may have left the navy, but I suppose it hasn’t entirely left me. I’ve always flown planes where I’m calling the shots, but maybe you’re right, once we’re on the tarmac, it’s easier if the chain of command is clear.” He shook his head, stared at the mountains a moment, and then snagged his own satchel out of the baggage compartment. “Didn’t you bring anything?” he inquired.

  I stared at the tarmac. “I was so busy swapping shots with Faye, I forgot.”

  Fritz tousled my hair and led the way to the terminal. “Don’t worry,” he said. “I can loan you one of my T-shirts to sleep in.” He chuckled. “And unless you’re going to find yourself a hotel room, you’re welcome to model it in T-revor rex’s place in Denver. He’ll be staying up in the foothills somewhere after a late meeting. Okay?”

  “Sure.” I took a deep breath and followed him, wondering what I’d gotten myself into this time.

  FIVE

  AS PLANNED, I MET MICHELE ALDRICH IN THE LOBBY of the Brown Palace Hotel. It’s a splendid place with an anachronistic air, and I never tire of finding excuses to hang out in its lobby. You can order high tea there, and maids in black uniforms and white aprons will bring out multi-tiered platters studded with cakes and petits fours, or, later on, you can listen to a man in a tuxedo play a grand piano while you have a drink. I was indulging myself in an early gin and tonic, getting up the Dutch courage to tell Julia McWain what I needed to tell her, when Michele arrived.

  Michele’s eyes danced as she took in the many balconies and stained-glass ceiling above us. “Nice place,” she said, summing it up in two words. Then she looked me over, top to bottom. “What’s with the pilot’s uniform?”

  I couldn’t help stiffening. Michele had changed from her early morning slacks and blouse into a summer frock, a pale celadon green that set off her ginger hair. It brought out her freckles, and if anything, she looked even younger. I felt absurd in Faye’s blue slacks and epaulets next to Michele’s curvaceous sleekness, and for the first time in I don’t know how long, I wished I knew how to dress like that. “It’s a long story,” I said. I knocked back the last of my G and T and stood up. “Julia McWain’s office is just across Seventeenth Street from here,” I said. “Follow me.”

  The Brown Palace sits at the intersection of Seventeenth and Broadway, at the eastern end of Denver’s business downtown. It was built at the end of the nineteenth century, and Denver had grown up all around it, adding chunks of building every other decade, following the nation’s various booms and busts. Now, glass-clad skyscrapers completely surrounded the old brownstone hotel and a small handful of other structures from bygone eras, including the Navarre (a former house of ill repute that used to connect to the Brown Palace via a handy tunnel that ran underneath Tremont Street) and Duffy’s Bar, which lay beyond Seventeenth Street to the south. Duffy had been offered big bucks throughout the 1980s to sell out to make way for another high-rise, but he’d refused, much to the delight of his clientele, who helped razz the developers by raising steins of the infamous green beer to the surrounding construction mess each St. Patrick’s Day.

  As I passed the entrance to Duffy’s on my way to the door that accesses the offices upstairs, I reminisced on the high points of my friendship with Julia McWain, sitting on adjoining barstools and swapping Celtic jokes until our tongues were the color of a leprechaun’s britches. I counted Julia a friend because I had known her forever, professionally speaking. As I said, we had gone to the same college at the same time. We had fetched up in Denver working in the oil business at the same time. But from there, she had taken a path that had differed from mine, marrying and having children. Afton had been a real leg-up for her in the profession. When I repeatedly found myself out of work with the ups and downs of the oil and gas industry, she had managed to inch forward, and she had been able to hang in there while I had wandered off into forensic work and public-sector employment.

  The rabbit warren of offices upstairs from Duffy’s is ironically known, among the dieh
ard petroleum geologists who inhabit them, as Duffy’s Petroleum Tower, in honor of its low-rise stature and unpretentious air. The offices are accessed via a small elevator that rises from a vestibule right off the sidewalk next door to the entrance to the bar. Michele and I got in, and I punched the button for the third floor. When we got out, we moved down a narrow corridor past a row of small offices that looked like they hadn’t been upgraded since the 1950s, which is perhaps when the building was erected. Each office is heralded by only a plain door with a funky old name plate overhead sticking out perpendicular to the wall. To a trove of geologists who preferred to thumb their noses at the physical trappings of progress, this was heaven.

  The door to McWain Geological Consultants was the second to the last on the right. I peeked in the door to see if Julia was there.

  She was seated behind an old battered oak partner desk, tapping at a computer keyboard. The computer’s two monstrous screens, cordless keyboard, and processor were the only things in view that weren’t old enough to vote, and Julia blended in with the rest, decked out as she was in a comfortable old skirt and a turtleneck sweater. Now shot with gray, her hair was still fashioned the way she had worn it when I first met her in college, and even then the style had looked like a holdover from high school. A soft light streamed in the city-grimed window, surrounding her with an atmosphere of serenity. I hated to bring it to an end.

  I leaned up against the door jamb and said, “Hey there.”

  Julia jumped up and came around the desk to give me a hug. “Emmy! What fun! Hey, what’s the difference between Mick Jagger and a Scottish shepherd?”

  “You got me,” I told her, returning the force of her hug.

  “Mick Jagger says, ‘Hey, you! Get offa my cloud!’ and a Scottish shepherd says, ‘Hey, McCleod! Get offa my ewe!’”

  “Eeeww …”

  “Thank you. Thank you. A man goes into a bar, and—”

  I put out a hand to stop her. “Sorry, Julia, this really isn’t the moment.” I glanced at Michele.

  She blinked. “What’s with the pilot’s uniform?”

  “Long story.”

  “Does it involve a man?”

  “Yes.”

  “Knew I could count on you. What brings you to Denver? And who’s your friend?”

  I said, “This is Michele Aldrich. She’s a detective with the Salt Lake County Sheriff’s Department. We have some bad news.”

  Julia’s eyes went sharply alert. “News? What news?”

  “Your husband is dead.”

  Julia cocked her head to one side, her expression a sudden tangle of emotions. “I don’t have a husband,” she said. “What the hell is this, some kind of a joke?”

  My mouth dropped open. “You mean you and Afton …”

  Julia had backed away from the hug, planting her hands on her hips in fists. “Didn’t you hear? Mr. Wonderful took off two years ago! Divorced me. Dumped me and the kids. Split the sheets. Gone. Sayonara. Kaput!” She sliced the air with one hand. She’s a tall woman, and the gesture was more than a little intimidating.

  “I didn’t know.” I shifted uncomfortably. This was not what I had expected, not at all.

  “Yeah, well, now you do. So what’s this shit about he’s dead?” She was beginning to tremble.

  I shook my head with regret. “Well, he is. We found him this morning. He was—”

  Michele put a hand on my arm to stop me. “I’d like to take it from here if I could, Em.” She turned to Julia and showed her a face that was placid and patient. “Had Mr. McWain moved away from Denver, ma’am?”

  Julia fixed a look on Michele that would freeze water. “Ma’am? Suddenly I’m ma’am? What kind of—”

  “I’m sorry,” said Michele. “We’ve come a long way to talk to you. Clearly this is a shock to you, but it’s true. Em here spotted an identifying mark on the … remains that we understand was a positive ID.”

  Julia looked from her to me and back again. She smiled warily, offered a chuckle. “Oh, I get it, this is a joke about Afton, right? So what’s the gag, has he been showing off his ass again?”

  I stared at the floor, remembering what that joke had looked like lying on the quarry floor. “Not exactly, Julia.”

  Her face darkened. “Or did someone finally do me a favor and shoot the bastard?”

  I couldn’t let her talk this way in front of Michele. “You don’t mean that, Julia.”

  Julia whimpered, “Dead? Afton isn’t dead, Em, he’s just ducking me! What kind of a game is this? Tell me that, Em. Tell me this is a joke. Please!”

  I said, “Julia, he’s dead. Very, very dead. He won’t be troubling you anymore.”

  Julia began to cry, a piteous hiccupping sob. “But the children …”

  This was a better way for Julia to be talking in front of the witness. Helping her build on this sympathetic ground, I asked, “How old are they now, Julia?”

  “Samantha’s … um … ten, and Timothy’s … he’s … um … eight.”

  Michele asked, “When was the last time you saw Mr. McWain?”

  Julia stopped crying abruptly and fixed a tear-rimmed glare on her. “Why? Who needs to know?”

  Michele said, “To find out who killed him, I have to establish certain things. Why he was in Utah, for instance, and how long he’d been there.” She gave a tiny, encouraging smile. “You understand.”

  “It would help the investigation. Anything you could tell us,” I added.

  Julia sat down and averted her gaze. Finally she looked at me. “This really happened?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Afton is really, truly dead.”

  She took several long, ragged breaths. “The last time I heard from him was two weeks ago today. He was supposed to take the kids for the weekend, but he bailed on them. The last time I saw him was two weeks before that, when he actually showed up for a custody date. I have no idea why he was in Utah. I had no idea he was there. In fact, I have not been privy to his movements, or his motivations, or diddly squat, for quite a long time. Do you get the picture?”

  Michele said, “Then you expected him today to take the children for the weekend? He had them every other week?”

  Julia leaned back in her chair. She folded one arm across her stomach and used the other hand to cover her eyes. “I’ve quit making plans around him. If he shows up, fine, if …” Her shoulders heaved violently, twice. “Though I suppose what you’re telling me is he won’t be showing up again. Ever.”

  I said, “No, he won’t.”

  Michele pursued her point. “So you hadn’t heard from him in the past few days.”

  Julia dropped the hand from her eyes and glared at Michele. “Are you deaf?”

  Unfazed, Michele moved on to her next question. “Where had Mr. McWain been living?”

  “It’s Doctor McWain—he had a Ph.D., for crap’s sake—and he had been living … near Sedalia.”

  I turned to Michele. “That’s about an hour’s drive south of here.”

  Julia said, “He moved down to the ranch a couple years ago.”

  I said, “The ranch?”

  Julia let out a mirthless laugh. “Yeah, the ranch. My, my, Emmy, you have been out of touch. He—we—bought a nice little spread down there three years back. The idea was to move down there and raise the kids off the grid. Hah. It wasn’t long before he started staying down there—said he was working on the ranch house, trying to make it ‘green,’ he said—but somehow it was never ‘the right moment’ to take the kids there. Said it was ‘hazardous’ for us to show up. I let myself believe it was because of the construction. After three or four months of that, seeing him only when he condescended to stop by the house, I decided to drive down there myself and see what the fascination was.” She stared at the floor awhile. “Well, you can just guess what I found.”

  Michele said, “Another woman?”

  “He called her ‘Nature Girl.’ Shee-it. Nature doesn’t come with ninety-dollar haircuts.”

  I gave
up on trying to keep Julia from incriminating herself. I had not seen her go off like this in perhaps a decade, but I remembered a tirade or two in college that were doozies. I said, “Someone finally turned his head? I thought he was smarter than that.” Seeing the insensitivity in my remark, I quickly added, “Besides, Julia, he had you.”

  “He had me, all right! Lock, stock, barrel, and two kids, he had me. That and this consulting firm. That’s what I got out of the deal: the McWain name, for what it’s worth.”

  “But you kept the house?”

  “I … had to give him something on that, too, even though he managed to take the whole ranch. He had the books so cooked, this business looked like a Fortune 500 corporation, and the ranch was a liability. He was supposed to pay some child support. I don’t know … .”

  I said, “But all those overriding royalties he had from his oil strikes here in the D-J Basin, what of those?”

  She gave me a rueful smile. “He managed to get those appraised at the bottom of the price swing.”

  “Are those assets part of this business?” Michele asked.

  Julia turned her eyes on the detective. “Oh, no, no, no … he made those strikes back in the late seventies and early eighties, back when he was a hotshot working for Davis Oil.” She turned her head away. “Back before Saint Julia the Idiot took a shine to the map of North America in the Cretaceous.”

  Trying to be kind, I said, “It was a nice map, Julia.”

  “Sure, he was a stud. So I managed to rationalize all that stuff about his first wife, who got cashiered out with a pittance. I told myself that we were soul mates, that it took another geologist to truly understand him.”

  “Maybe it did.”

  She hung her head. “God, I’ve gotten bitter in my old age.”

  I said, “We’re not that old, are we?”

  “I feel old.”

  Michele cleared her throat. “Can you tell me how to find the ranch? And this, um, ah, third wife? What did you say her name was?”

  Julia rolled her head like her neck hurt. “I don’t think he even bothers to marry them anymore. Her name is Gilda something. The ranch is down past Sedalia, near Wildcat Mountain.”