by Tom Bouman
The defense lawyer’s name was Pirro. He looked about fifty, and the spikes in his gray hair were out of place above his sagging eyes.
“Officer Farrell, I want to be crystal clear. You do not work for, or with, the Binghamton Police Department, do you?”
“Asked and answered on direct,” said Assistant DA Knobel.
“No,” I said anyway.
“And vice—drugs, prostitution—is not your specific area of law enforcement, is it?” said the defense lawyer.
“Asked and answered,” said Knobel.
“What I mean is,” said Pirro, “you’re not an expert in that particular area.”
“I see a little of everything out my way.”
“That’s a no?” he continued. “Officer Farrell, tell the court: What were the precise circumstances in which you first met Mr. Kostis?”
I waited a beat. “I was searching for a missing woman.”
“Yes, we understand that. We got that. What I want to know is, while you were out at the bars and so on, how did you actually meet Mr. Kostis? What were you doing?”
“I was sitting at the bar at the Georgian. I saw someone of Kostis’s description—”
“And where did you get that description?”
“His, his record—”
“Judge?” Pirro said.
“I understand.”
I did not, but Pirro moved on. “So you saw someone you thought could be Mr. Kostis, then what?”
“I went outside, out back, and Kostis started a conversation.”
“Kostis started it, are you sure?”
“Pretty sure.”
“Had you been drinking?”
Knobel objected with no real conviction, and was overruled.
“Yes,” I said.
“How much?”
“A few beers.”
“How many is a few?”
“I don’t know.”
“How many bars had you been to before the Georgian?”
“Just two.”
“And after you met Mr. Kostis out back, didn’t you smoke any marijuana with him?”
I waited too long, thought of the girl locked in the room, and said, “No.”
“Liar,” Kostis said, drawing a sharp look from the judge.
Pirro changed direction. “Are you married, Officer Farrell?”
This was another question I had to think about. “My wife died a few years back.”
“I’m sorry for your loss. So you’re not married now?”
“Objection, relevance,” said Knobel.
“Your Honor, it goes not only to Officer Farrell’s perception of the encounter, but to credibility, to why he was in a prostitution and drug market not in his jurisdiction, out drinking on the town—”
“Objection!”
Judge Mondello raised a hand and sighed. “I hear you, Ms. Knobel.”
“Your Honor, just because there’s no jury here to prejudice shouldn’t give Mr. Pirro the right to root around in Officer Farrell’s private life, for information with no probative—”
“Overruled, but feel free to renew if need be. Mr. Pirro?”
The defense lawyer restated his question.
“No, I’m not married.”
“And you weren’t seeing anyone romantically, sexually, at the time of this incident?”
“Objection.”
“Overruled, Ms. Knobel,” said the judge. “Mr. Pirro, we get the thrust. Let’s wrap it up.”
“Your Honor, Mr. Kostis’s freedom is on the line here.” The judge raised his eyebrows, and Pirro raised his hands. “That’s my last question, then.”
I thought about it, about Shelly and her family, and I thought about the girl. “Not at the time.”
“No further questions,” the lawyer said. Everyone in the courtroom seemed to settle into a dull relief, all except Kostis, who tried and failed to pin a death stare on me.
Sleight and I trotted down a set of concrete steps to the cool blue day outside.
“Kostis probably told Pirro about the grass. He had to bring it up,” Sleight said. “But he wasn’t going to nail you to the wall, not over a lost cause like that.”
“What’s with the fuckin judge?”
Sleight smiled. “Believe it or not, he was with us. So was Pirro, or at least he understood his position. We just needed your cross to be good enough to shut down an appeal before Kostis can even make one. If the judge had sustained any of our objections, there’s a chance of error on the record. Mondello wants Kostis to go to prison and stay there. No chance of error, nothing to reverse, no appeal. You did fine.”
“Oh, yeah?” I had committed perjury, and we both knew it. As to the weed, it was my word against Dizzy’s, airtight. But I had a new concern: if somehow Kostis found out I’d lied about the thing with Shelly Bray, it could be a cat’s paw to a colorable appeal. But nobody knows, I told myself. Nobody knows who would want Dizzy out of prison anyway, and Shelly won’t talk.
“We got kidnapping, predatory sexual assault, compelling prostitution, the gun, the whole boat.”
It was hard for me to shout hooray. I thought of the girl, and it got easier. Something puzzled me. “No drug charges?”
“Nah. Conspiracy for Max and his mother, possession with intent, but not for Chase or Kostis. We couldn’t make it out. Guess where they all said the chain ended?”
“Charles Michael Heffernan.”
“And why not? He’s dead; let him deal with it.” Sleight swabbed the top of his head with a folded paper napkin. “And who killed him? Let’s say a couple nameless black guys from downstate. It’s a shame, though. They all pin it on Heffernan, naturally we go to Miss Jelinski to talk it over, and all of a sudden she’s supposed to know something. The poor kid doesn’t know jack, she’s just the only one around to take the heat. Someone up the ladder freaked, and it’s just blind dumb luck she’s not dead in the woods up there.
“There’s something you should know,” the old cop said. “I’m not sure what it means. Late in the game, after we’d gone to trial, Kostis floated info to, I don’t know, reduce his sentence, probably. Info on the guy, the fugitive up north. He didn’t have what we needed and we told him to fuck along down the line, but it sounded like he could talk about a murder or two.”
“Penny,” I said, my heart beginning to race. “It has to be.”
“Penny’s nobody, begging pardon. She’s just trouble, or was. These murders sounded more like hits.”
A FALL MORNING parked in the shadow of a church. Then came the distant rumble I’d been waiting to hear. Faint light spread out over the road, resolved into headlights, the engines buzzed closer, and then, wham, a convoy of four tankers passed by, all unaware. I clocked them at twenty-one miles over the limit and swung out from behind the church. It didn’t take me long to catch up, and the drivers pulled over, one by one. I parked at a diagonal in front of the first truck, gathered licenses and registrations, and began writing tickets.
Toward the end of the summer, SRI had hired Grace Services to clear a well pad up to Swales’s land north of Maiden’s Grove Lake, fenced it off, and sent in the thermos bottles, in with water and out with waste, as the wells got fracked. In the beginning I’d welcomed the operators, if only because the process of tearing out acres of trees and leveling the land might have turned up Penny Pellings’s body. It hadn’t. With the well being fracked, tanker trucks hauling water and waste were passing through the township at a furious rate. On winding, bumpy dirt roads with low overhanging branches, the trucks slowed to a crawl. But out on larger routes like 189, they bombed it, potholes be damned. Over the past two years I’d been to a couple grisly accidents where passenger cars got in the way of these guys. Early on I’d had a report from a little old lady who lived on a state route, on a straightaway just beyond a curve. The truck drivers tended to shift just as they passed her house, and the engine vibrations got so bad that one of her front windows shattered. Sure, they’ve got to get where they’re going fast. It’
s business, and if that’s the way they wanted to play it, fine. But I was going to take a bite where I could.
As I was finishing the third of four, my radio murmured, catching the odd weak signal. Then, loud, the Wild Thyme first responders were toned out with a long high note, followed by two staccato lows. The dispatcher was, as ever, hard to decipher, but I heard, “Man down,” “Maiden’s Grove Lake, north shore,” and “SRI well pad.” I struggled out of my truck, flung all of the IDs and registrations through the frontmost truck driver’s window, and pulled out.
As dawn broke I turned up the hill onto the access road cut by the gas operator, in this case SRI, Southwest Resources International.
I pulled right up to the well pad’s closed gate, fully expecting the sentry to rush out and let me through. His silhouette stood out plain in the guard station. I hit the horn. Beyond me, around the bend amid a haze of the rig’s artificial yellow and orange lights, blue and red blinked through the trees. I leaned on the horn. The sentry stuck his head out of the window and, with an impatient wave of his hand, beckoned me over. This was irritating but I figured I didn’t yet know what was going on, so what the hell. I kept the truck running. The young man wore blue coveralls and a yellow helmet that seemed unnecessary to his particular job. On the side of his neck he had a tattoo of what looked like three wolves running, and he was unshaven. He held a finger up before I could speak, ear pressed to a two-way radio.
“Open the gate,” I said. “Hang up and open the goddamn gate.”
The sentry looked up at me in surprise. “Who are you?”
“Officer Henry Farrell. Wild Thyme. That’s this township, did you know? What’s going on here?”
“Officer. There’s nothing you can do now. We’re good.”
“You’re good? Open the gate.”
“Hold on.” He slid the window shut and, after a brief exchange on his radio, emerged from the guardhouse to unlock the gate and swing it open.
At the well pad, another worker waved me over to where a Fitzmorris ambulance had parked, its lights still rotating, at the end of a line of trailers. All around, generators groaned, though the rig itself was quiet. A dirty apron of railroad ties surrounded the derrick, making a level surface half the size of a football field. A loose line of men stood at some remove.
“Hey,” I said, approaching the man in the ambulance driver’s seat. Damon was his name, I recalled; he’d grown a mustache for a touch of authority. “What is this, what happened?”
“One of the Grace Services guys. Someone found him in the reserve pit and dragged him out before I got here.” He pointed to a murky pond extending from the edge of the rig, a place on the far side where it met the woods. “Don’t know if maybe he fell or what.”
“Julie here?”
“Yessir.” Damon gestured toward the rig.
She was deep in conversation with an older man in blue coveralls, a man like a great big bag of beer. I walked over and joined them. Julie introduced me to the other fellow, who turned out to be the safety officer, Ahern. He carried a clipboard.
“What’s the story?” I asked.
Ahern looked uncomfortable. “You understand, this was a Grace guy, not ours. Tate, he pulled the poor son of a bitch out.” He nodded toward a young roughneck talking with an older man, off to the side.
“What was Grace up here for?”
“Routine inspection.” Ahern waved a hand in the direction of the woods. This set off bells. I made a note to go out and look as soon as I had time. “It was busy; I don’t know that anybody saw anything. Once our tool pusher’s done with Tate, you can talk to him.” Ahern ambled off.
Julie raised an eyebrow at me. “I heard something else.”
She led me back to the ambulance, steered me around a puddle of foul liquid and used food, and opened the rear door. Taking up the entire compartment with a blanket around his shoulders, an oxygen mask on, and a bandage wrapped around his head, was Sage Buckles.
He raised his eyes to me. “I got nothing to say,” he said, muffled through the plastic mask.
I closed the ambulance door and turned to Julie.
“He was attacked,” she said. “He almost died. Arguably, he did die for a minute. He got clocked on the head, and if you look, you can see the beginnings of bruising around his neck. A few of the workers out there saw it and chased the guy into the woods. Another one gave the victim CPR, got him breathing again.” She pointed to the man identified as Tate.
“Okay. Don’t let Buckles go anywhere.”
I approached the group of roughnecks. Tate was a pleasant, long-haired kid who seemed slightly wildered by the morning’s events. Shaking my hand, he introduced himself as Potato. I took him for a worm, a low man working his way up. “Just a few questions,” I said.
Early in the morning Tate had been on the platform, uncoupling drill segments as they were pulled out of the well. From there, the thirty-foot pipes were swung up and slid onto a steel rack. One of them had failed to catch on the rack and took a bounce onto the ground behind, where a reserve pond from an earlier well stood between the rig and the woods. Tate had gone around to mark the pipe’s location, and there saw a man kneeling by the water’s edge. This was strange in itself, but when Tate saw an extra pair of legs splayed out behind, he ran toward the pond, calling for help. When the kneeling figure stood, he revealed a man lying facedown beneath him, head and shoulders below the pond’s surface. The man ran and disappeared into the woods. A few roughnecks gave chase but turned up nothing.
“I pulled the dude out,” said Tate, “gave him CPR, mouth-to-mouth, and he starts to cough up.”
“You see his face? The other guy.”
“Nah.”
“Could he have been one of you?”
“No, sir. He wasn’t dressed for it. He was skinny, had on some busted camo and boots, that’s about all I saw. He was quick enough, but something was up with him. Not exactly a limp. Like his body was twisted?”
I took the names of every other man who claimed to have seen something, and returned to the ambulance. Buckles had forced his way out and was moving toward his car and the gate, sweeping Damon and Julie out of his way with tree-branch arms. He was shirtless and his hair gleamed like a puddle in asphalt.
“Oh, no, you don’t,” I told him. “We need to talk.”
Buckles was barely able to speak. “I need to get home,” he croaked.
“That’s exactly where you can’t go.” He smelled like diesel. I gave him the name of a nearby motel and told him to park in the back. “When you get out of the hospital, the township’ll put you up for a couple days.” Buckles started to move again. I put a hand on his chest. “You’re going to tell me what happened, and why.”
“I’m the victim here.” He stepped back into the unit.
I couldn’t hold him or arrest him, and he knew it. The best I could hope was that he’d see the use of laying low for a while. The ambulance disappeared beyond the edge of the pad.
I radioed down to Fitzmorris—the hilltop helped—and the dispatcher promised to send someone. Tate directed me to the exact spot where the assailant had disappeared into the woods. Beyond the saplings there was a steep slope that formed one bank of the reserve pond. I slid down it, noting the commotion on the ground and in the brush where the workers had gone in.
I listened with the other animals, folded in shade. Daylight and the grind of industry from above faded as I moved. It wasn’t many steps before I found an oozing patch of earth the size of a picnic blanket. Whatever was bubbling up there was orange, and I’d never seen its like. I stood looking at the place too long, then continued on, picking up the scar in the soil, again, bright orange, grass washed flat and coated further down the hill.
For decades the stream that flowed south out of Maiden’s Grove had pooled in a hillside flat that had been arranged by beavers into their kind of place. It was smaller than your usual swamp, but it had made up for that in location. Since it was not near any roads, the town
ship never felt the need to drain it, and I had always been fond of these particular beavers. The place had changed. The water was ringed with an orange sludge, an orange ring speckled with dead insects. And in the pond’s outlet, several beavers were balled together and dead. I took pictures of the pond and followed the stream back up the slope.
Voices approached from the well pad above. Ahern and a younger roughneck lowered themselves into the woods. Ahern carried a metal pipe with him.
“This what a safety officer does?” I said.
“We didn’t know it was you,” he said. Ahern stood on the blighted place as if to hide it. He introduced me to his companion by the nickname Chickenwing.
“What’s that?” I said, pointing to the ground at Ahern’s feet.
He shrugged.
“You been having any problems up at the site, anything I ought to know about?”
“Other than the Grace boy? No.”
“I haven’t been clear on what he was doing up here, anyway. The pad was all cleared and done, you’ve been working these wells awhile now.”
“Ask them that. It’s nothing we did. Tell you what else,” Ahern said, pointing at his feet, “we’re not alone up here. Chicken can show you. Be good for the policeman, boy. Show him the place.”
The worker beckoned me back into the woods. I stood still a moment, pointed to the ground below Ahern, and told him, “I’ll be back again.”
I followed the worker as he pushed through saplings around the pad. We came to a gap in the trees and a shale scree, which we crossed, sending rocks clacking into the valley below us. Where the mountain rose just above the well pad, Chickenwing, whose real name was Lonny, stopped at a stone fire ring. Surrounding that ring was another ring, but different: white stone spheres half buried in the earth.
“You go on back,” I told him. “I’ll stay up here awhile.”
“Ahern told me bring you out to the gate.”