Silence again on the other end—and our end too until this Collins came in. He was a handsome young black man, wearing an expensive suit and looking as if he had been pulled away from something more important. He was FBI from Denver, Crowe informed us. “Because, you know, this is interstate. Probably Investigator Collins is the best person to answer your questions. I mean, instead of you making a lot of assumptions.”
I smiled inside. We had him. Russell Crowe was ours. Sneed was out of legal trouble. Meanwhile Collins looked around in dismay as if to say answer whose questions why? But Russell offered him a Sprite, and Collins, ever-so-slightly gracious, proceeded wholesale to get the Sorgensen story over with.
What was different with Sorgensen, he said, was the drugs. The variety, he said. I saw him glance at Aretha. She nodded.
Collins said, “Most guys deal coke, or weed, or meth—you know, they specialize, they have basically a vertical network. You bust someone at the right place on the totem pole, you can bring the whole thing down.”
He checked on Aretha: still nodding.
“But Sorgensen was like a black market pharmacy. He could sell you morphine, oxy-contin, amphetamines, animal tranquilizers, growth hormones, Prozac, Viagra, I forget the name of some crap they inject bulls with, you name it. And he seemed to have no chain, no one above or below him. Local law enforcement would bust a user, like …”
“Like Jesse,” Aretha helped out.
Collins seemed unclear who that was. The dead girl, Aretha told him. He smiled.
“Yes. Like Jesse. Local would bust a user and get nothing, no story, no ups. None of his users knew a thing except to see this Sorgensen about taking a float down the river. He would say his guides were all out and did you want him to go inside and call this retired guy he knew. Your Sheriff Chubbuck, smart man that he was—” and here the acting interim cleared his throat, found a tissue, began to wipe Sprite circles off Chubbuck’s desk—”was determined to bring the whole thing down, so rather than scare Sorgensen into inactivity, he backed off.”
Collins looked at Aretha and provided a footnote: “We weren’t in this yet. It was a local matter.”
“I see.”
“We come in when crimes cross borders.”
“Oh.” She smiled. “I see. Sure.”
“The sheriff here just let it ride for a while, keeping his eyes open. That was the smart thing to do. Then one day, about a year-and-a-half ago when he still felt decent, he was at a law enforcement conference in Phoenix and heard about a supply of drugs missing from a veterinary clinic with no sign of a break-in and no employees they could clearly suspect. Now the sheriff had something to look into. Turns out the vets from that same clinic were up here at that same time for a week of fishing. Their outfitter? The guy who had access to their wallets, keys, all that?” Investigator Collins raised an eyebrow for Aretha. “Hilarious Sorgensen.”
Crowe’s eyes were skimming Aretha too, neither of those scavengers imagining that she had dressed for the Dog. She wore a white silk top, short-sleeved, tightish, and v-necked. She crossed her legs in pale orange capris and she very faintly clapped a thin leather sandal against a foot tipped with freshly painted, pale orange toenails.
My face was getting hot. I suggested a shortcut: “So Lyndzee Peterson explained how they did it?”
I hardly got a glance from the FBI guy. But I had cut Collins to the chase.
“Yes,” he said. “Sheriff Chubbuck contacted us with part of the picture, and our involvement produced several more of these mysterious, unsolved thefts. But Ms. Peterson filled in the blanks. Sorgensen advertised heavily in medical and veterinary publications. And his business here, the fishing thing …”
He faltered and Russell jumped in. “You know how shuttle drivers have the keys to the guides’ vehicles. You know how clients show up in their pants, with wallets, keys, hotel passcards.” He spoke rapidly, as if he feared Collins would cut him off. “All that stuff ends up in a guide’s vehicle, which sits at a boat ramp all day. Sorgensen knew where everybody was floating every day, knew where they were taking out, knew where the drivers left the keys.”
When Aretha declined to nod or smile for him, Crowe shut up, letting Collins tell us that according to Lyndzee, Sorgensen used the internet and made phone calls around the country, probing, looking for business hours, vacation closures, one or two-man operations. He liked to pick places that had young employees or someone else who might be easy to blame. Sometimes, based on his research, he sent Lyndzee out to go through certain vehicles. He trained her to recognize the kinds of keys that might open clinics and pharmacies and so on. He trained her to swap out hotel passcards for dummies, and sometimes he sent her to raid hotel rooms. She brought the keys back to Sorgensen, he made copies on his own key cutter, and then Lyndzee put everything back the way it was. When Sorgensen thought he had a go, thought everything was right, he sent his girl, immediately, with copied keys, to the location in question—usually a smallish operation in a logistically feasible location. Lyndzee arrived in town, located the clinic, entered, filled suitcases, locked back up, and flew straight home.
“Flew back home with suitcases full of drugs?” I interrupted. “Through airport security?”
“No.” Once more Collins spoke to Aretha instead of me. “She would ship boxes. UPS. FedEx, so on. She would find the clearances and manifests that those people have for shipping controlled substances. She was trained how to fill them out. The boxes came to Sorgensen’s shop, which used to be a dental clinic years ago and remains on the federal list. And because these crimes occurred in an apparently random fashion, in completely unrelated parts of the country, nobody caught on. Unlike a lot of criminals, Sorgensen was a smart man. But, of course … not smart enough.”
Collins had finished. He stood. “Are we good?” he asked Crowe with strained cheer in his voice.
“We’re good. Thanks.”
“If you have any more questions,” Collins told Aretha warmly as he passed her his card, “just let me know.”
The door closed behind him. Aretha studied the card. “Hmm,” she said. “Nice guy. Helpful.”
What Real Love Feels Like
“But what about Gray?”
Acting Interim Sheriff Crowe tossed a magazine across the top of Chubbuck’s desk. The familiar shape and colors spun toward me. It was that month’s National Geographic, addressed to Chubbuck and already dog-eared from circulation. I fluttered the pages. About halfway through, Henderson Gray appeared—pictures of Gray running, pictures of pronghorn on the land that Chubbuck loved, pictures of Gray and family smiling on the new deck, all of this wrapped in lofty talk—by Gray, by poets, by biologists and anthropologists, one by the great Walt Whitman, then more verbiage by Gray—about man and nature, about spiritual quests, the Blackfoot brave and the Tarahumaran warrior, the timeless tests of manhood.
I shoved the magazine back toward Crowe. “Okay,” I said. “Sure. Pride kills. Maybe I’d eat a truck grill too.”
Crowe blinked at me, then nodded. “So anyway,” he told us, “Sorgensen was not going to give up that shuttle business. No way, to no one.”
We understood already, but Crowe went on. “If he said so, he didn’t mean it. Several guides came out and said Sneed told them he was setting up his own shuttle business. They said they would have used him in a heartbeat. He would have crushed the shuttle side of Sorgensen’s business. And that’s why Sorgensen tried to kill Sneed.”
“Wait a minute—” Because here, suddenly, was something I hadn’t processed: tried to kill Sneed?
All along Sneed was the target? Sneed was not the fall guy for Jesse, the girl with a hundred reasons to die? All along I had centered everything on the wrong victim?
I looked at Sneed. He was glassy-eyed, appeared tuned out. “Sorgensen was really after …”
“Yes. He meant to kill Sneed. Jesse was mop up.”
“But—” I was struggling. “Didn’t Jesse get arrested? And offered a deal?”
Aretha said, “Then who shot Jesse?”
Crowe was liking this now, back in the driver’s seat, Aretha needing his attention. He played out the moment and appeared to briefly consider putting his boots back up on the desk. At last he said, as if it were obvious, “Sorgensen shot Jesse.”
“But then who set up Sneed and crawled out of the car?” I was baffled. “Not Sorgensen. Not Lyndzee because she would have tied the knot for Sorgensen, and it would have been a clinch knot—or at least something better than what it was. So who—” And then I had it. My heart surged, choked me. Crowe watched me cough out the name.
“Jesse?”
He nodded.
Aretha: “Jesse?”
“Lyndzee told us she cut a deal with Sorgensen. He told Jesse he had information that would get her father out of prison. But her friend was causing a problem and she had to kill him to get it.”
We were stunned each into our own silence. Aretha’s glare was aimed out the window at big sky country. Sneed mooned up at one of Chubbuck’s big stuffed rainbows, tears filling his eyes. I stared into the past. Did I always have to be so wrong? Always?
It hurt to speak, to think. It hurt to overcome that awful surge of doubt. To believe was such a risk. To know was so impossible. “But she loved him,” I blurted. “I saw it. I was there. I mean, I know it when I see it.”
Crowe gave a jaunty little shrug. “I knew Jesse pretty well, too. I went to high school with her. After her father went in, I’m not sure Jesse had any real stable boyfriends. I’m not sure she was capable of loving somebody. More like she used people who either used her back or got out.”
Now Aretha wrapped her arms around her son. He buried his face against her shoulder. I saw his gut convulse, his fingers curl to fists. When my voice returned, it was hard on Crowe.
“This kid didn’t use her. I was there. He cared for her. And she cared for him.”
“Yeah.” Crowe gave me that shrug again.
“I mean it.”
I stared him down.
“Okay, yeah,” he agreed, and this time he seemed earnest. “He’s a good guy. I saw them around. I never quite saw Jesse like that before. She did look different. She looked happy.”
“She was happy. She was in love.”
Aretha fought for control, her voice shredding. “And still that … that girl still tried to kill him?”
“Jesse’d do anything if she thought it would clear her father. We all knew that. That was her purpose in life, to defend her dad. I don’t think she could help it.” He nodded at Sneed. “She got him drunk on that sweet liquor with some animal tranquilizer in it that Sorgensen gave her, the same stuff that Henderson Gray bought from Sorgenson for those pronghorn. That junk made your son, your buddy, pass out. Sorgensen was already up the mountain in his van, a little further than that pond, waiting. He made Lyndzee hike down and watch for a signal from Jesse, but she walked right past and kept on going, which got her beat up pretty good later. Meanwhile Jesse taped the windows. She lit that little grill and she crawled out.”
“She could fit?”
“It was tight. The ME found scrapes and bruises on her back and hips. So now those are explained.”
Crowe’s lips parted, sticky and dry. They closed again, parted once more, and he lifted an open file from Chubbuck’s desk. He read for a few moments. Then, as if the whole thing had overwhelmed him suddenly, he made a troubled gulp and closed the file.
“Jesse made it out of the car, and then Sorgensen played the card she didn’t know about. He never meant to give her information about her father. He didn’t have any. Galen Ringer killed that guy at the boat ramp. Everybody knows that. Galen Ringer kicked the crap out of plenty of people who looked at him wrong or said the wrong thing. Jesse’s dad was just kinda funny that way.”
Crowe had more trouble swallowing. He looked around Chubbuck’s office, at the lifetime represented. He looked at Sneed and his mother side by side in their chairs, heads down, rocking together.
“So … Jesse crawled out the trunk and right away Sorgensen shot her in the head. He … he … wiped the pistol, your pistol—Jesse took it from you—and threw it in through the trunk. Then he realized without Jesse, without Lyndzee either, he couldn’t get the seat shut … and then the rod, the fly broken off in back of the seat, the knot that got your attention, all that. Just this morning I found the metal pieces of Sneed’s rod in Sorgensen’s burn barrel.”
He shook his head. “That’s about the only thing I’ve done right …”
The acting interim gave his head a woeful shake. But I bit off any sympathy for Russell Crowe. He was no relation to a lot of things, especially not to the kind of young man who ought to graduate to sheriff. But the grim truth was that blame ran wide. All of us were fools and had been fooled. All of us—even Chubbuck—had the crime turned inside-out. And my poor damaged fishing buddy was now turned inside-out and sideways, for life, by Jesse. She had done her best to murder Sneed, who at that moment stood up out of his mother’s arms and told Aretha angrily, emphatically, “Because I never knew what real love feels like!”
No one spoke for a long and awful moment. Outside the window, pickup trucks rolled past, clouds floated in the big blue sky. Aretha had lost it. She was weeping.
Then I said, “No.” I gripped Sneed’s hand. “She loved you. I know she did.”
“But she—”
“I’m sure.”
“Dog—”
“I’m sure, Sneedy. She loved you. I saw it. But it’s just not that easy.”
Powerful Somehow
“Like you said,” Aretha murmured to me after lovemaking a few days later. “It’s just not that easy. Like, the fact that I’m in love with you doesn’t necessarily mean that I should hook up with you, you know, for the long term.”
Her head was in my lap, her eyes closed. A rain-replenished mountain creek scurried and laughed beside us. We were naked on top of my rain coat on top of a scratchy bed of moss and dead pine needles. We had been laughing at ourselves. My back was stuck in pitch against a pine trunk, and my hands flailed to keep the horseflies off my precious, precious sweetheart. Making love outside always seems like a good idea—doesn’t it?—always looks good in movies and sounds good in books. But here’s some advice: stand up if you can, get it done, and get dressed before the insects find you.
“Dog? Did you hear me?”
“Yes.”
“Did I hurt you?”
“Yes.”
“Do you understand?”
“Yes.”
“Really? Ouch! You hit me! What was that for?”
“Horsefly.”
I did understand. For one thing, the Sneed picture became clearer day by day as he went through a series of tests and scans and laboratory analyses. Parts of his brain would not recover. Others might. Still others certainly would come back whole, but there would always be the issue of imbalance and its effect on personality and behavior. Sneed’s rapidly recovering motor skills, the specialists told Aretha, could be difficult to manage and possibly even dangerous without the full faculties of adult judgment and the restraints of accurate social awareness. His memories, they said, were valuable only so far as they came within context, which was often very sketchy. Sneed’s injured brain was still somewhat in flux, to be sure, but they cautioned his mother that very soon the newness of the whole situation would be gone, the young man’s status would be fixed, the doctors and therapists would step back, and Aretha would have to work very, very hard.
Actually, I realized, she was thinking of me. Didn’t I have my own burdens, in my own life? Should I really put aside my problems to help solve hers?
No, she was telling me, I should not. More specifically, as a pro-active measure against undue density, denial, or neediness on my part, she was telling me, kindly, that she would not allow the Dog to hang around.
Okay.
Yeah.
Sure. Makes sense. Dog damn it.
The guide-shuttle idea, anyway, was wildly unrealistic. Sorgensen and Jesse had seen to that. Sneed would never drive again. Nor would he be able to keep things organized. And Aretha had somewhat warmed to the Nevada Territory, but not enough, for sure, to stake a claim.
Instead she tracked down her mother in Renton, a blue-collar suburb of Seattle. In a phone call that I was allowed to overhear because Aretha was gripping my hand as she made it, she told her mother, essentially, You are going to help me with this. Yes, you. Me and your grandbaby will be there in a week. Get ready.
So off we went, west, the three of us in the Cruise Master with a credit card and a week to kill. We fished the Beaverhead, the Big Hole, the Clark Fork, the Clearwater, the Spokane and the Yakima. Sneed was a handful and a delight, like a child with a Swiss cheese adult IQ and a slow left side. Perhaps most remarkable was his fishing, which improved to the extent that he regularly out-fished the Dog and made a lot of noise about it. It helps, apparently, to think less logically, to let your loop fall and your mind wander. Who knew?
The Clinch Knot Page 28