Dead Dry

by Sarah Andrews

  Out of the corner of my eye, I looked out the sliding doors to the sun deck. Fritz was sitting there with his coffee, watching me.

  I took three deep breaths and let each out slowly. Then I walked back out onto that sun deck and said, “Fritz, I know it’s a risk, but I’ve got to go back down there.”

  Fritz nodded. “Risk I understand. Let’s go.”

  THIRTY-ONE

  WE MET UP WITH MICHELE ON THE BANKS OF JARRE Creek. She was in the middle of a confab with a sheriff’s deputy, a big guy bristling with badge, walkie-talkie, and Sam Browne belt, and he was holding a metal clipboard. “Oh, here you are,” she said. “Ernie, this is Em Hansen, the woman who got run off the road yesterday. Em, this is Deputy Ernie Mayhew of the Douglas County Sheriff’s Department.”

  Deputy Ernie turned and shoved a meaty hand my way to be shaken. “I wasn’t expecting to see you here today,” he said. “We all thought you’d be sleeping it off.”

  “I’ll catch up on my snoozing later,” I said and introduced Fritz all around. “I’ve brought Fritz for two reasons: First, I don’t think he’d have let me come alone. And second, he knows things we’ll find useful. For instance, it was his idea to check the tower records to find out if anyone had flown from here to Salt Lake City a week ago.”

  Michele gave Fritz a look of appraisal. I scrutinized his return gaze: Did he find her attractive? Feeling my eyes on him, Fritz put his hands on his hips and scanned the river bottom.

  Deputy Ernie said, “What’s that got to do with trying to find the driver of that vehicle?” He smacked a printout on his clipboard with the backs of his fingers. It was an electronic photograph of Gilda’s ill-fated electric cart, all bashed to hell.

  I said, “There’s no doubt that this is connected to Afton McWain’s murder, is there?”

  “That has not been determined,” said Deputy Ernie. “I’ll admit it’s highly unusual that two people living together should meet with accidents within days of each other, ’cept for two things: They weren’t the same kinda accident, and we don’t yet have a second body.” He jerked his head toward the creek bottom, where people in reflective vests were moving along with probes, poking newly deposited sandbars and prying under tangles of cottonwood branches that had fetched up among the willows. “The Douglas County Search and Rescue Team will find her if she’s there.”

  “Where was the cart found?” I asked.

  Deputy Ernie pointed toward a bend in the creek a quarter mile upstream. “About there, by that rock. It fetched up against it, kinda.”

  “Any idea how far upstream of that it went in?”

  He stared at me blankly. “Not sure at all.”

  “Shouldn’t we go look? There might be skid marks or something on the bank.”

  “Not sure why we’d need to,” he said. He was beginning to sound annoyed.

  “Because she might be upstream of the cart,” I said. “She could snag on something and the cart could keep on rolling. Damned thing would probably float in all of that, but she’d go down like a sandbag.”

  Deputy Ernie’s face grew an unpleasant tint of red.

  Michele said calmly, “You just got here, Em. How do you know they haven’t already worked that part of the scene?”

  My eyes still locked on Deputy Ernie’s, I said, “Sorry,” but didn’t mean it.

  Fritz put a hand on my shoulder. He let it drop solidly in place, so I could anchor to it.

  Deputy Ernie unclipped his walkie-talkie. “Seven? Come in.”

  “Seven,” said a crackly voice.

  “See if you can break a few loose to search up-crick from where that cart was, okay, Buck-o?”

  “Check. How far, you think?”

  “Just go to the spot we found it and start working upward.”

  “Ten-four on that.”

  “Number one over.”

  “Seven over and out.”

  Deputy Ernie returned his walkie-talkie to its clip and adjusted his aviator sunglasses.

  Michele tipped her head toward me back behind his line of vision and rolled her eyes as if to say, Try a little diplomacy next time, hotshot.

  I strolled over to a more private vantage point and went into a squat. It made my knees sting where the cuts were, but that was somehow reassuring. I picked at the bandages on my left hand with my right and ruminated on the fate of the woman who had invaded the privacy of my home.

  Fritz had apparently decided that I could have at least that long a tether, but Michele did not. “As of half an hour ago, we have a lead on Attabury,” she said as she strolled over toward me. “His tail number was spotted on a little airstrip south of Gallup. He borrowed a car from the guy who runs the FBO there. The FBI are on it.”

  “Good. The guy give a positive ID on Attabury?”

  “No. Actually, it didn’t sound like him at all.”

  “Damn. So you mean whoever flew the plane there borrowed a car.”

  Michele said, “Upton’s got nothing to say. Johnson says his lawyer says to show due cause why he should be involved in any of this. Entwhistle says he’s told us everything he knows, which is nothing. I explained to all three of them ten different ways that we’ve all noticed that McWain’s lawsuit was in the way of their money-making scheme, but each and every one of them has pointed out that lawsuits are matters for the courts. Do they think I don’t notice that they’re all reading from the same script?”

  I commiserated for a moment, then told her my concerns about Julia.

  “Oh, I ran a check on her,” Michele said. “She’s at her house.”

  “When did you do this?”

  She gave me one of those, What, are you nuts? looks. “Yesterday evening. I requested that the Denver Police have someone drive by her house. They reported your rental car parked in her driveway. When you mentioned this morning that you hadn’t heard from her, I had them ring the doorbell. She’s there. Something about a sick kid. Up vomiting all night or something.”

  “Oh.”

  “Yeah, oh.” My concern for Julia turned instantly into irritation. I knew what it was like to be concerned about a sick kid—Sloane Renee’s first fever had put both me and Faye in fits—but did that mean she couldn’t give me a call to let me know she’d made it home?

  I forced myself to focus on more present concerns. I said, “So you still like Attabury for Afton’s murder, even though he’s somewhere else when I get run off the road and this happens?” I pointed toward the creek.

  “He’s all I’ve got. He flew McWain to Salt Lake but claimed he’d never left home. When I hit him with the tower records and eyewitnesses at Million Air, he skedaddles. I have yet to crack anyone else’s alibi. With your tumble yesterday and now Gilda’s cart in the drink I’ve got the locals working overtime, but beyond Attabury, we’ve got a great big zero. So tell me what I’ve missed.”

  “The precise connections to the other four suspects.”

  “Three suspects. Who do you have in mind beyond Upton, Johnson, and Entwhistle?”

  I waved a hand toward the creek bed.

  Michele said, “Gilda?”

  “Being dead doesn’t mean she didn’t do it,” I said. “If she’s dead. She sure as hell knew her so-called husband was dead before you told her.”

  Michele threw up her hands in frustration. “Who says Gilda didn’t find her own way into the creek?”

  “Plenty. She’d been gone or missing for two days before the storm hit, and that just four days after her so-called husband was murdered and one day after filing a court action to inherit the ranch. What would she be hiding from? Or whom? Coincidences of that magnitude simply don’t exist. Turn it over to the feds, Michele.”

  “Okay, fine, I’ll just go back to Utah with my tail between my legs. Might as well put in for a transfer to meter reading.”

  I pitied her. Her shoulders sagged. Her face was pinched with strain. I had to suppose that she’d had very little sleep in the week since Afton McWain’s corpse was found. She had been battl
ing for respect and assistance with two different county law enforcement jurisdictions—her own and Douglas County’s—as well as digging for information through several federal agencies. And she was under thirty, female, and working alone. It can’t have been a holiday.

  I crouched down, picked up a stick, and began to scratch lines in the wet gravel on the stream bank. “We’ve just got to sort this out. We’ve got Afton’s corpse in Utah,” I said, drawing an arrow over to the west, “and now probably Gilda’s here in Colorado.” I drew an X for Afton but an open circle for Gilda. “He had everything to lose by dying, but she had everything to gain by staying alive. An odd couple. His death was her gain, or her loss if she had any real feeling for him, or if her claim was bogus. And then here’s our Greek chorus of folks who hated Afton—the butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker, so to speak …” I set pebbles along the line. “Attabury, Entwhistle, Upton, Johnson, and let’s not forget the politicians. How about Senator White? Let’s give her a big ol’ chert pebble.” I picked up a smooth one and plopped it into place, then paused a moment, remembering the pebble found in Afton’s pocket. Something about that went tink in the back of my head, some connection that wanted to be made, but I couldn’t quite work it into consciousness. I stared fixedly at the arrangement of pebbles and lines, wondering what the picture was trying to tell me. “No, this pebble is Afton. I’ll make this twig the senator.” I placed her down below the line, making a shallow triangle.

  “Why Senator White?” Michele asked.

  “I don’t know. But where there’s greed, there’s always some connection to politics.”

  “The politics of greed. But didn’t she make a big fuss about what a great guy McWain was?”

  “That would be the politics of looking publicly aggrieved, and the politics of not really addressing the issues.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “People like Senator White have known right along that there’s not enough water here to support development. It’s her job to know these things, and even if she hadn’t the wit to ask, people like Afton McWain beat a path to her office door to tell her. And we know he did. So let’s look at the diagram.” I began to scratch more lines in the dirt. “Here we have four men who are working together to develop land for housing. A developer, that’s our deal guy; a banker, that’s our money guy; a lawyer, he’s the tricky one; and let’s not forget our landowner. And of course there are all sorts of smaller players who also depend on this development to keep their local economy growing and therefore pink and happy.” I picked up a handful of smaller pieces of gravel and sprinkled it across the diagram. “And along comes Afton McWain, trying to tell them their game is over.”

  Michele said, “Fine, so we have a group of people who don’t want McWain giving testimony.” She pointed at Attabury’s pebble. “And this one looks like he got rid of the spoiler. Now what? Tell me why I shouldn’t be on the next flight for New Mexico so I can be in on the collar.”

  The pebble. The chert pebble. It was almost there … almost … pebble … evidence … bingo! “The geological data!” I said.

  “What?”

  “In Afton’s office. There was something there that was worth stealing. What?”

  “That’s your department.”

  “Whoever killed him saw him as an impediment to pushing the Wildcat Mountain development through.”

  “He was the expert witness. And?”

  I picked up the bit of chert and warmed it in my hand. “This pebble is Afton, still alive. He knew that every last well was about to go dry. He knew that the water was irreplaceable in a human time frame.” I dropped the stick right into the middle of the diagram. It went splat in the wet sand. “He made those cross-sections and those isopach maps. He knew how very little water there was under Johnson’s ranch. It was dry, dead dry. They couldn’t let the investors know that! So you’re right, it wasn’t organized crime.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Because they’re the investors,” I said.

  Michele picked up a smaller stick and showed how she could pry at the bigger stick. “But why kill Gilda? Perhaps she started demanding a bigger share, so they killed her too.”

  “But without her, they have no claim to the property. You see? That’s the remaining snag. Was she actually trying to keep the land? Could she bar the easement?”

  Michele shrugged her shoulders. “So then, maybe someone got mad at her and lost control. Her murder was accidental. So they throw her cart in the creek. Or she just blew it and fell in. Or she was distraught over McWain’s death and committed suicide.”

  I shook my head. “Ticks don’t commit suicide. They just hang on to their hosts and suck. But still, all of this seems so … cold. It’s hard for me to believe that people would get this wound up over money. But what’s harder for me to understand is how they can maintain the cover-up.”

  Michele said, “I’ve got Trevor Reed looking into that.”

  At the mention of Reed’s name, Fritz walked over to join us. He said, “You’ve been talking to Trevor Reed about this case?”

  Michele blinked. “Yes. Why?”

  Fritz said, “Well, he’s just … I’m surprised, is all.”

  The look of innocence on Michele’s face was one for the ages. “I had him checked out. He’s got a spotless reputation for honesty. And he agrees with me that it’s always about money. Or sex. And here we have both. And besides, he says it was the Chinese mafia, not the Italians, or the Russians, or whomever else.”

  “May I make a suggestion?” Fritz asked.

  “Sure.”

  “You two keep looking at the killer as the aggressor. Perhaps you have it backwards.”

  I frowned with concentration. “What do you mean?”

  Fritz crouched down and started to realign the stones and sticks. “In The Art of War, Sun Tzu says, ‘Wild beasts, when held at bay, fight desperately.’ McWain was holding the others at bay.”

  Michele blinked. “So you’re saying we’re dealing with wild beasts?”

  Fritz nodded. “We can suppose that these people haven’t thought through their motivations, or they wouldn’t be so foolish as to take such a risk. But try thinking of them as warriors. They fight the way they train, and when they start to lose, their thinking can become quite primitive, a basic ‘us versus them’ mentality. When their established ways of doing things start breaking down, their reactions become like the reflexes of a predator when it feels it is in danger.”

  “‘Established ways of doing things’?” Michele said.

  I turned to her. “He means what people are used to. The systems we live by. This community is used to building a certain kind of house, and each person has tailored his or her livelihood around supplying that infrastructure or living within it. If you tell the wolf it can’t eat caribou anymore you’re going to have an argument on your hands.”

  Michele said, “This is getting off the point. One murder has been committed, and perhaps two. My job is to bring a murderer to justice.”

  I said, “You’re looking at it as a crime, but Fritz is right, the killer or killers may be looking at it as a war. Wars are almost always fought over resources. A shortage of resources brings the stresses that lead to war. You talk about greed, but Fritz is right, this community is looking at deprivation, something taken away rather than something to be gained. We’re talking about the human animal, whose sense of ‘not enough’ is tripped the moment things go level. We don’t consider an economy healthy unless it’s growing. Hell, we don’t know what to do with ourselves unless we’re growing something—food, wealth, a family. We don’t know how to go backward. We only know how to go forward. Afton should have figured out how to make sustainable living look and feel high-tech and modern.”

  Michele stared down at the progress of the searchers along the creek bed. “You’re sure not gonna see me driving around a territory like this in a glorified golf cart any day soon. It didn’t work for Gilda.” She snorted and
walked off toward her car.

  I turned to Fritz and shrugged. “So McWain fired the first shot,” I said. “So how do we figure out who shot back?”

  Fritz smiled cryptically. “A guy named Strozzi once said, ‘When the predator fights back, he doesn’t tell you where his weakness is.’”

  BY NOON, THE SEARCH AND RESCUE PEOPLE WERE BEGINNING to wilt with the heat. They had searched a mile downstream and half a mile up, and someone had taken a dog through the whole creek bottom from the place in the narrows where the flood had washed away the bridge and road clear down past the Sedalia Grill. They figured they had looked under every branch and had poked every fresh sandbar that might conceivably conceal a body. They advised the Douglas County Sheriff’s Department that it was time to call off the search.

  I flipped open my cell phone and called Tim Osner. “Hey, Tim, do you ever play with fluvial geomorphy on a crime scene?”

  “You mean how rivers carve their channels?” he said. “Yeah, we get into that. If someone’s dumped a body off a bridge, for instance, we throw a pig carcass with a radio tracking collar in from the presumed spot of entry and see where it comes to rest.”

  I suppressed the urge to ask if they had a luau afterward. I described the problem.

  He said, “I can take off early today. I could be there inside of two hours, set up my software, do some figuring. You say they’ve already used dogs? We could go to plan B, figure it’s a murder cover-up, and start looking for the grave site.”

  “You mean she was killed first and then the cart was thrown in?”

  “Why not?”

  “Tim, you’re a genius! Bring air photographs of the area,” I said. “The most recent you can get your hands on. You clever, clever man.”

  WITHIN THE HOUR, FRITZ AND I WERE IN THE AIR with a camera. Fritz had not designed his plane with air photo reconnaissance in mind. It has two propellers, but one’s fore and the other is aft, so you can’t shoot good pictures through the windshield, and it’s low-wing, so it’s hard to shoot to the sides as well, but Fritz knew how to stand it on one wing and somehow manage to keep it from falling out of the sky. Michele had loaned me a digital camera, so the only problem was knowing that the exposure was going to lag half a second behind each time I tripped the shutter.