Redheads

by Jonathan Moore

  They drove in her car.

  Chris told her he’d gotten several messages from his private investigator, who would be landing in Houston in a few hours. On his walk, Chris had stopped in the lobby of the Hotel Galvez and had reserved a block of rooms for them for their meeting. She nodded.

  They parked in the mostly empty lot and walked to the store. Workers in blue vests ran floor-buffing machines through the harshly lit, empty aisles.

  “You grow up in Texas?” Chris asked.

  “Near Austin. I went to U.T. and then did my doctorate at M.I.T. It was just an accident I came back. AMD recruited me while I was still in grad school.”

  “What do you do?”

  “I design embedded security circuits for microprocessors. I work for AMD but right now I’m on loan to the NSA.”

  “Codes and stuff?”

  “Yeah. Sort of.”

  They walked to the toiletries aisle. She put shampoo and a toothbrush into her cart, then a razor. She went alone to the clothing section and picked a few simple outfits, some shoes. She thought a moment about the larger picture of what she was doing, then decided not to waste her time. She supposed the bottom line was that she trusted Chris Wilcox. If he’d wanted to hurt her, he could have done it while she was asleep in his motel room. He’d told her his story and she’d believed it.

  And he was the only person in Galveston with a coherent plan.

  It never occurred to her to let him go back to his life while she went back to hers. Their lives had intersected, however randomly, and now he was inviting her to join his private revenge club. Allison wouldn’t have blinked.

  She spent less than ten minutes picking things out, then came back to the front of the store and walked until she found Chris in the magazine section. He folded that morning’s paper and put it under his arm along with a world map rolled in a plastic tube. He also had dry erase markers and a little plastic tub of colored pushpins.

  “For the meeting today?”

  “Yeah.”

  He followed her to the register.

  They couldn’t check in to the rooms at the Hotel Galvez until noon, so they went back to Chris’s motel. She took a long shower and washed her hair. Her Sig Sauer was on the toilet tank, within arm’s reach of the shower. She had a feeling that for the rest of her life, she would know exactly how far it was from reach. She stepped out of the shower and toweled off, wondering how many years would pass before she stopped discovering the daily consequences of Allison’s death. Chris might be able to educate her on that.

  She dressed in new denim shorts and a tank top, then yanked the tags off her sandals and put them on. She came out with a towel around her hair and tucked the pistol back into her purse.

  Chris was sitting on his bed with his laptop computer open.

  “Thanks,” she said.

  “Not a problem. Your phone rang, though.” He nodded at her phone, plugged into its charger on the floor near the air conditioner. “I didn’t answer it.”

  She flipped through the menu to see missed calls, expecting to see the number of her parents’ international cell phone, or Ben, or Dave Chan. Instead it was a number she didn’t recognize.

  “Galveston’s area code is 409, right?”

  “I think so.”

  “Then this must be the cops, finally.”

  She redialed the number and put the phone on speaker. She held a finger to her lips and looked at Chris. He nodded. Someone picked up on the third ring.

  “This is Timothy Spaulding.”

  “Julissa Clayborn. Someone at this number called me.”

  “Julissa—thanks for calling back. I’m the district attorney for Galveston County and I called you with regard to the investigation of your sister’s death.”

  “Killing.”

  “Sorry. I hope I didn’t call too early.”

  “I was up.”

  “Good.”

  They could hear papers being moved on a desk, then the unmistakable sound of someone sipping hot coffee.

  “I was hoping you’d come in for an initial meeting to give us background information. I know it’s a hard time, but the detective said you were in town.”

  “I’ve been in town since the day she was found. No one wanted to talk to me.”

  “Believe me, that was an oversight. We apologize. You can imagine we’re a bit overwhelmed.”

  “I can imagine. Look, where should I meet you, and when?”

  “How about this afternoon?”

  “I can’t, I’m busy,” she said. “How about tomorrow morning?”

  “That works.”

  “Where?”

  He gave her the address of his office in the new courthouse annex.

  “All right, Mr. Spaulding. I’ll see you then.”

  She hung up and tossed the phone into her purse.

  “Why not meet him today?” Chris asked.

  “First things first. Your meeting sounds more likely to get somewhere.”

  He half-smiled and stood from the bed, closing his laptop. “I hope so.”

  Chapter Nine

  Just before seven in the morning, and prior to the shift change at the industrial shipyard, Seawolf Park Road on Pelican Island was quiet. Aaron Westfield was parked in a rented Crown Victoria on the grass shoulder near the gate to the submarine park. He checked himself in the mirror on the underside of the sun visor. His nose was swollen and slightly crooked, but his sunglasses hid the bruising around his eyes. He was wearing a black suit with a pressed white shirt and a cheap red tie. He carried a Navy-issue sidearm on a shoulder holster that would be visible if he slid back his jacket’s lapel. He unlocked the glove compartment, put his wallet inside, and picked up the FBI badge in its leather folding case. The badge was a moderately priced fake, but most people had never seen a real one anyway. The Crown Victoria was a more expensive prop, at ninety dollars a day, but his ’81 van would have given him away faster than the badge’s shortcomings.

  He started the car and drove back along the two-lane road that ran through the mesquite brush. Gated roadways led off to the industrial docks and offshore rig repair yards that lay out of sight on the other side of several hundred yards of blighted scrubland.

  He passed a series of painted wooden signs with colored pennants stapled around the sides: Pelican Island Bait & Tackle. Live Shrimp. Cold Beer. Ice.

  Westfield could see white oil tanks and crane towers. The superstructure of an offshore oil rig rose over the low trees. He approached a guardhouse in the middle of the Newpark Marine Fabricators entrance drive. Farther down the drive, a sign prohibited smoking, and beyond that, another sign advised that hard hats were required. Westfield had a hard hat on the passenger seat.

  He held his badge out to the guard when he stopped next to the booth. Not a Hollywood flip-and-close: he held the badge out long enough for the guard to lean out the window and actually read his name.

  “Yes sir?”

  “I was hoping to see Mr. Broussard, get him to let me talk to the shift that’s just coming off. They’re not in trouble or anything.”

  “There a problem?”

  “Just helping a local investigation. Some of the guys welding that rig might’ve had a good view four nights ago.”

  “This about the woman got killed?”

  “You know anything about that?”

  “What I read in the paper.”

  “Any of the guys say anything?”

  “No. But I don’t mix with the crew much.” He pointed at the Wackenhut security badge on his shirt. “I’m not like a regular employee here, you know?”

  Westfield nodded. “You know where I can find Broussard?”

  “You hurry, you might catch him in the office. He’s usually in the yard at the start of each shift. I can hear him on the radio.”

  “Where’s the office at?”

  The guard took a printed map from a cubby hole in the booth and leaned out the window.

  “It’s in a portable building, you kno
w like a trailer? Here, next to the tank farm.”

  “What’s Broussard look like?”

  “Big guy. Hard to miss.”

  “Thanks.”

  He put on the hard hat and started down the drive towards the repair yard.

  The shift was changing when he parked on the bed of crushed oyster shells fronting the channel between Pelican and Galveston islands. He could see men moving along the catwalks on the rig towards elevators supported by scaffolding—the night shift crew coming down. The drilling rig was at least twenty stories high, not counting the derrick that rose from the side of the platform. A helicopter pad leaned off the rig like a book on the edge of a high table. Sparks from a cutting torch cascaded through the massive steel support columns and fell onto one of the giant pontoons that held the entire structure afloat. Westfield stepped out of the rental car and walked to the dock.

  A giant man in a sweaty T-shirt and suspenders was waiting for the elevator at the base of the scaffolding. He saw Westfield coming and turned, needing to take three steps instead of simply pivoting.

  “You the fella from OSHA or the new EPA guy?”

  “FBI, actually.” He held out his badge, but Broussard didn’t even look at it.

  “Whatever it is, we didn’t do it.” He burst out laughing, then held out his hand and shook Westfield’s. “Cliff Broussard. Whatcha want?”

  “I was wondering if I could borrow your office ten minutes, talk to the night-shift guys. That’s them coming down?”

  “Sure. That’s them. What for?”

  “You hear about Allison Clayborn?”

  “Girl in Galveston, got killed last week.” Broussard now looked serious. “Look, we do background checks on every employee. No drugs, no jail time, no bad credit checks. And I keep all their time sheets myself. So I’d know if someone was skipping out nights—”

  “I’m not looking for a suspect. I’m looking for witnesses.”

  “Witnesses?”

  Westfield pointed across the channel at the renovated warehouse on the other side.

  “Allison lived right over there. Third floor. Anyone working on the rig at night could look across the channel and see through her window.”

  Broussard looked across the channel for a moment and then back at Westfield.

  “That’s gotta be three hundred yards.”

  “It’s worth a shot.”

  Broussard shrugged. “Take enough shots, you’ll hit something.”

  “That’s the idea.”

  Broussard took a handheld radio off his belt clip. “Del, you copy?”

  “I read you.”

  “Have crew three go to the mess hall. I need you guys about half an hour. Then ya’ll can go home.” Then he looked at Westfield. “There’s ten of them on the crew. We get a lot of turnover, but this crew’s been steady the last month, so they was all up there that night. We’ll go up and meet ’em. It’s better than my office if you wanna talk to everyone at once, plus it’s got the view.”

  They stepped into the cage of the elevator and rode along the scaffolding that rose parallel to one of the rig’s four main support columns. Westfield had stepped aboard his fair share of colossal naval warships, but he wasn’t sure he’d ever seen anything afloat as large or as strange as this rig.

  “What’s the yard doing to it?”

  “Just reinforcing some of the welds. Took some hurricane damage.”

  “The crew’s mostly welders?”

  “Night crew’s all welders. Daylight, we work other trades.”

  Westfield hadn’t come here with an overdose of hope, and now he was even less optimistic. If every man was wearing a hooded welding mask with a narrow, smoked-glass lens, he doubted any of them saw a thing. Even if a man lifted his mask for a few moments, or took a break, Westfield knew welders had poor night vision. He used to tell his junior officers if they had a choice between a welder and someone else to stand a night watch, choose someone else.

  The elevator came to a stop and Broussard pushed the cage door to the side. They stepped onto a catwalk that ran underneath the rig’s main platform. Orange spray paint marked areas on the support columns which required re-welding. They followed the catwalk to a ladder and climbed up to the main deck. As far as Westfield could tell, they were standing underneath the heart of the drilling rig. A derrick climbed skyward from a nest of pipes and machinery. Broussard led them out from beneath the pipes along a pathway painted onto the steel deck. They came to a structure that looked like a house trailer. Broussard opened the door and let Westfield go inside first.

  The nightshift men were sitting around two long tables on one end of the crew cafeteria. Westfield didn’t take off his sunglasses when he stepped into the room because he didn’t want to explain his black eyes. The nose was bad enough. He looked at the crew. Ten tired men in sweat-stained work clothes looking at a man in a suit and wondering when they could go home. He pulled the badge from his jacket pocket, letting them all see his side arm in the process, and held it up.

  “I’m Special Agent Sanderson with the FBI, assisting local police investigate the killing of Allison Clayborn.”

  The men stirred and looked at each other, then back at him. Now they were looking at him warily, whereas before they’d just looked tired. He waited a moment and then went on.

  “Her apartment’s just across the channel from this rig. I could see her windows on the elevator coming up here, and I could see them from the catwalk where I got out. It looked to me like a lot of the workspaces up here have a fair view of the apartment. It happened Friday night, five days ago. Any of you men see anything strange that night?”

  Nine of the men turned and looked at the tenth. The tenth man was tall and thin. He wore steeltoed work boots, coveralls, and a denim shirt with the sleeves ripped off. A green cross was tattooed on his right biceps and was fading away into his tan. He had wispy hair that reached his shoulders. He carried the look of a man who might have cancer but kept smoking anyway.

  “You saw something?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Any of you other men?”

  They shook their heads or looked at the tables where they sat. Westfield turned to Broussard, who was just inside the doorway, shifting his weight from one foot to another and wiping sweat from his brow with a wadded paper towel.

  “Can I take this man and speak to him in private awhile?”

  “Go right ahead. You need any these others?”

  “No, they can all go.”

  “All right. Ya’ll heard him. Hutch, you tell this man whatever he needs to hear and show him whatever he needs to see. Then you bring him down when ya’ll are done.”

  Hutch nodded.

  “Don’t leave him alone up here and don’t let him take off his hard hat. Last thing we need is a missing FBI guy on this job site. You think OSHA and the EPA are pains in your ass.”

  The other nine men on the crew left the room and Broussard stepped out and closed the door. Westfield sat down across the table from the man and shook his hand.

  “David Sanderson,” Westfield said.

  “Jimmy Hutchinson. Crew mostly calls me Hutch.”

  “You know what night I’m talking about?”

  “Yeah. Fourth of July. We worked that night same as any other night. But I didn’t see her that night.”

  “You saw her other nights?”

  “Sure. You see her, you notice her, you know?”

  “You knew her?”

  “Not exactly. Not her name or nothing like that. We recognized each other, is all.”

  “Explain.”

  Jimmy Hutchinson had been fidgeting with a crumpled box of cigarettes. A plastic lighter was wedged between the cellophane wrapper and the cardboard box.

  “Mind if I smoke?”

  “Signs everywhere say you can’t.”

  “Let’s go outside. I’ll show you where I was working.”

  Westfield followed the man back out onto the main platform. They followed another painte
d pathway through the machinery until they reached a stairway that led up to the helicopter landing pad. Hutchinson spoke over his shoulder.

  “I was welding a new cargo boom up here. You know, so they can unload a chopper and swing stuff to the main deck without having to carry it down the stairs? Anyway, this is where I was that night.”

  They climbed the staircase and walked across the painted markers for the helicopter. Red lights on small white posts protruded from the deck around the landing circle. They went to the far side of the deck and leaned against the bright yellow railing. They were twenty stories above the greenish-brown channel water. Tug boats churned up mud as they pushed a barge around a corner into a berth. Across the water was the warehouse where Allison had lived.

  Hutchinson pointed, not to Allison’s apartment, but to another old brick building on Strand Street.

  “I live over there. I been at Newpark since they bought out Todd’s Shipyard, and I was at Todd’s for fifteen years before that. Been a welder and industrial diver. Got my harbor pilot’s license but the money here’s better. I bought a condo over there a couple years ago, right after my divorce. Neighbors on either side seen my work clothes and figured I was trouble.” He lit a cigarette and breathed out smoke. “Fuck ’em, though, right?”

  “Let’s talk about Allison Clayborn.”

  “I started seeing her around Strand Street and Warf Street right after I moved there. Sometimes on Seawolf Park Road on Pelican Island. She’d jog in the mornings, see? I put in for daytime shifts in the winter time, so it must have been winter. Sometimes I get up early and walk to work—it’s only a couple miles—and I’d see her jogging. Beautiful girl. I’d wave, she’d wave back.”

  “Ever talk to her?”

  “Later we talked a few times. You know Sampson & Son’s?”

  “Seafood place, right behind her condo.”

  “Yeah, right there.” Hutchinson pointed across the channel and they could see the low concrete building. Fresh red paint advertised shrimp, crabs and fish. Direct from the boat to you, the sign said.

  “I go in there sometimes in the morning. These days, for me, that’s like dinner time. I might pick up half a pound of shrimp and some gumbo crabs. Some oysters. Stuff like that. I’d run into her sometimes. She’d be in her jogging clothes still, probably shopping for dinner. They’re only open in the morning, so if you want to go there, you go in the morning.”