Rori laughed. “The book’s from me.”
Nando laughed. “I was telling Rori that Fidel Castro was a voracious reader. He read all of Márquez’s books, and they were good friends.” He gestured toward her with his right hand. “But she already knew this. I am not so voracious, but I am looking forward to reading this book.”
I pointed toward his left arm. “Any movement in the fingers?”
He cast his eyes down, telling me this was the source of his worry. “No, I still can’t feel them or move them.” He looked up at me and forced a smile. “But it is early times.”
I wanted to ask more questions, but it was clear Nando didn’t want to talk about the havoc the bullet had wreaked on his arm and shoulder. Instead, he asked to be brought up to date on the case. When I finished describing what Claire and I learned earlier that day, he said, “Good detection work, Calvin. You and your daughter are quite a team.” He smiled. “I would like to be a flea on the wall when Detective Rice confronts Maxine Sloat.”
I laughed. “Me, too. I—”
Rori’s phone rang. She looked at the screen. “That’s Kenny. Excuse me.” She stepped out of the room and reentered a few moments later, her face ashen. “Kenny said the request for a transfer’s been denied.” She held her cell up and tapped the speaker button. “He’s still on the line, Cal.”
“Hello, Kenny. This is Cal. What exactly did they tell you?”
“The head of the Security Threat Management Team, a guy named Corey, Phil Corey, came to my room. He said they’d identified the quote-unquote troublemakers in the European Kindred gang.” Laughter. “As if only some of them are bad news. Anyway, he said they put them on notice, that the STM was confident I wouldn’t have any more trouble. I laughed in his face. ‘Even if I still refuse to join the EK?’ I said. ‘Yes, even if you refuse to join,’ he told me.”
“What did you say to that?” Rori asked, her voice quavering.
“I told him he had his head up his bureaucratic ass, that he was out of fucking touch with reality. If I go back in there, they’ll find someone else to finish me off.”
“Did he give you anything in writing, Kenny?” I asked.
“He said that I would get a written response, and that you, Cal, as my attorney, would also get something in writing. But he didn’t leave anything. He said it was a courtesy visit.”
Rori looked at me, her eyes filled with horror. I said, “Listen, Kenny. Do not worry about this. It’s just round one. Once I get their statement, I’ll respond. We’ll get a court order if we have to.”
Rori grabbed my arm with both hands and squeezed hard. “That’s right, sweetheart. Don’t worry. We’ve got your back.”
“Thanks, Grandma,” he answered, his voice thick with emotion. “How’s the investigation going, Cal?”
“It’s going well,” I said. “We know what happened. Now all we have to do is trap the guilty parties.”
“No shit? Who the hell did it?” he shot back.
I wanted to buoy his spirits, but I kicked myself for saying too much. “Not on a prison phone, Kenny. Don’t worry, I’ll update you in person as soon as I can.”
He laughed, a couple of loud, nearly maniacal bursts. “Get the bastards, Cal. I can’t live in this place anymore.”
We signed off the call, the room silent, and the double meaning of Kenny’s last sentence seemed to hang in the air like a reverberation. Finally, Nando looked at Rori and said, “Calvin is the best lawyer in Oregon. If Kenny needs to be transferred before we solve this case, he will find a way.”
I shot Nando a thanks-a-lot look then turned to Rori, whose eyes were spilling over with a mixture of hope and gratitude. I wanted to scream, “There are absolutely no guarantees here. This whole thing’s hanging by a thread,” but I felt like that would crush Rori. Instead, I met her eyes. “Don’t worry. We’re going to beat this.”
* * *
Hello pressure, my old friend.
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Claire was still busy researching when I left the hospital, so I drove over to the library, parked in the front lot, and used my cell phone to knock down some emails and return some calls, mostly from irate clients I’d been neglecting. I’d now missed a full work week back in Dundee, which necessitated moving several meetings and another court appearance. I felt even worse when I thought about my one-day-a-week pro bono practice in Portland. I pictured people in need coming by and reading the sign at my office that read Closed Until Further Notice. What would those people do? I swallowed the guilt and forced the negative thoughts down.
There’s blood in the water, I told myself. Focus on the task at hand.
Claire emerged an hour and a half later. “You’ll never guess who helped me today,” she said as she piled in, toting her briefcase.
I laughed. “Not Marion the Librarian?”
“None other. Ellen Dempsey. What a nice person, and a damn good librarian.”
I waited while Archie greeted Claire like he hadn’t seen her in a week. “I like Ellen, too. She was seriously conflicted over her testimony at Kenny’s trial. She told the truth about seeing him at the convenience store but never believed he was a murderer. Did you tell her who you were?”
“No. I just said I was interested in the genealogy and property history of the Josiah Barton family, most recently from Woodell, Oregon, and of his wife, a Gunderson, whose first name I didn’t know. It would’ve taken me a week to do what Ellen did, Dad. She’s a whiz at research and very professional. Didn’t ask me any personal questions.”
“Did you find anything?”
Claire pulled a notebook from her briefcase and opened it. “Maybe. I looked at the Barton side first. Josiah Barton was the son of Cornelius Barton and Emily Trask. They owned a small RV park on the Chetco River east of Brookings but lost it in bankruptcy. However, Emily’s younger brother, Chad, still lives in Brookings and has several properties—three in town, small houses, and five acres further east on the Chetco. I took a look at the acreage on Google Maps. It’s completely wooded and undeveloped.”
“The brothers might know about it, right?” I said. “Maybe they visited there.”
“It’s possible. But where would they stash the Peterbilt truck and two cars?”
“Good point.”
“On the Gunderson side, their mother Francis was the daughter of Mildred and Harold Gunderson of Port Orford. Her father was a fisherman there. Francis and Josiah married in Port Orford, and both Darnell and Robert were born there. When Francis died of an aneurysm in 1970, Josiah and the boys moved to the house on Coos River Lane in Woodell. It’s the only property Josiah ever owned, but Harold Gunderson’s sister still owns several plots along the coast, including twenty acres just north of Allegany.”
“Allegany? The little town where the Millicoma River forks east and west?” Claire nodded, and I felt a faint tingling along my spine. It wasn’t that far from where we’d found Howard Coleman’s body. “What’s the twenty acres look like?”
“There’s a long dirt road in from the highway to a clearing in the trees with a house, a barn, and some smaller outbuildings. From the satellite image, it didn’t appear that anyone was living there, but I don’t know when the satellite shot was taken.”
“The barn’s big enough to house a logging truck and a couple of cars?”
“I think so.”
“Hmm. That’s damn fine work, Claire.”
She laughed. “You can thank Marion the Librarian. What should we do next?”
I paused for a few moments as I turned off Connecticut Avenue onto Highway 101 and headed south into a stream of heavy traffic. “The easy thing would be to tell Rice, but realistically the odds are slim that the brothers are at the Allegany site, and he might drag his feet. Maybe there’s a way to get in close enough and watch the place for a while.” Claire shot me a skeptical look. “Sa
fely, from a distance with binoculars,” I added hastily.
She considered that for a moment. “The terrain’s mountainous and heavily wooded. We could download a topo map of the area and figure out the best approach.” The traffic slowed to a crawl, commanding my attention. Claire consulted her little screen for a couple of minutes. “There’s a sporting goods store on the way to the beach house. Take the next right, then left on Broadway. It’s down a mile or so on the right.” I glanced at her questioningly. “Binoculars, Dad. We’ll need them.”
“Oh, of course.” I smiled to myself. My daughter was definitely not the type to let the grass grow under her feet.
* * *
That evening the ocean and sky were sharply delineated, and when the sun finally vanished it left two bands of flaming gold separated by a narrow strip of radiant turquoise. I’d cobbled up a meal of leftovers, and afterward we sat out on the deck watching the show, as the turquoise turned violet and bled into the gold, and the seagulls scurried off to wherever they roost.
Claire said, “Just think, Dad—if we would’ve started fishing a little further down the Millicoma, I wouldn’t have stumbled onto Howard Coleman’s body, and we wouldn’t be entangled in this affair at all.” She smiled. It was tinged with resignation. “And I’d be back at Harvard and probably still with Gabriel.”
“Yeah, the whole synchronicity thing’s intriguing,” I responded. “I mean, finding Coleman connected us with Kenny Sanders, and that seemed so, so, non-coincidental, like some deeper intelligence was involved.”
Claire considered this for a while. “Deeper intelligence or just chance? I sort of see how everything’s connected to everything else—butterfly wings causing hurricanes and all—but the question in my mind is whether it’s random, or as you suggest, there’s someone or something guiding it all.”
A soft breeze off the ocean seemed to be carrying nightfall. I paused for a long time before speaking. “Here’s how it looks to me, Claire. It’s not the event itself. Maybe that’s essentially chance. It’s how we react to the event that counts. We could have walked away from the coincidence of my overhearing the conversation that connected Coleman to Kenny, but we didn’t. We built on it, because it spoke to our consciences.”
She paused for an equally long time. “Okay, I think I get what you’re saying—a chance encounter becomes significant when we choose to make it so. So, looking back on it, it appears like synchronicity because of our actions. In other words, we make the synchronicity, not the other way around.”
By this time, the gulls had stopped flying, and it was nearly dark. I chuckled, got up, and stretched. “Yeah, something like that. I don’t have many answers, Claire, but I love the mystery of it all.”
* * *
“This ridgeline looks promising,” I said, pointing to the topo map Claire pulled up on her computer screen after we cleaned up the kitchen. “We could park at this pullout, where the trees would hide the car. It’s maybe four miles from the dirt road into the Allegany property.”
“I don’t know, Dad,” Claire said. “The ridge looks pretty steep. We’d have to do better than twelve hundred feet vertical before it levels out.”
I gave her a stern look. “If we decide to do this, I’m hiking in alone. You’ll stay with Archie in the car.” She started to speak, but I cut her off. “It’s nonnegotiable, Claire.”
She paused as if formulating an argument, then apparently thought better of it. “Okay.” She looked back at the computer image. “Once you’re on the ridge, you’ve got a long hike, maybe three miles, before you get anywhere near the property.”
“That’s no problem.” I squinted at the map. “At that point, it looks like I’d be five hundred feet or so above the clearing and the house.”
Claire clicked out of the topo map onto a satellite image and zoomed in. She pointed with a pen. “You’d be right about here.” The area was a mottled deep green, the lumpy tops of tightly spaced conifers reminding me of heads of broccoli.
I leaned in closer. “Right. There’s a break in the trees a little further on.” I pointed to a buff-colored gap in the broccoli. “I might get a decent view of the house from there.” I looked up at my daughter, raised a hand, and she met it with hers in a high-five.
“It looks doable.”
Chapter Forty
By the time we crossed the Coos River on the Chandler Bridge the next morning, the Coast Range was a purple silhouette against the light of the nearly risen sun. We followed Highway 241 northeast for twenty-five miles, crossed the Millicoma just before Allegany, and took a right on East Fork Road. Our designated pullout was five miles down on the right. I parked the Subaru behind a tight screen of fir trees, so it wasn’t visible from the road. We got out, and I slipped on a day pack that held the Glock, a water bottle, a packet of trail mix, and a brand-new pair of Nikon binoculars with 8X magnification that I’d paid eighty-five bucks for.
“How many bars do you have on your phone?” Claire asked.
I glanced down. “One.”
“Same here. Let’s hope you get some reception up on the ridge. Remember, a text goes through easier than a call most times.”
“Roger that. You’ve got Rice’s number, right?” She nodded. I looked down at Archie, who was anticipating a hike in the woods. “You’re staying back, Big Boy. Take care of her, you hear?” He cocked his head and gave a couple of whimpers in disappointment. “It’ll take me maybe two, two and half hours to get into position. If the brothers are there, I’ll call Rice and stay put to give him eyes on the place. If I can’t get him, I’ll text you and you can call him. Keep your head down, okay?”
Claire looked at me, her face tight with worry. “You, too, Dad. Don’t take any chances, promise?” With that, she kissed me on the cheek.
I set off towards the ridgeline through a forest of old, second growth Douglas firs that were infiltrated with red alder, hemlock, and the occasional bigleaf maple. The going was steep and made even more difficult by a thick understory. If I wasn’t scrabbling hand over hand, I was forced to move laterally to get around patches of ridiculously large sword ferns or dense tangles of salal and salmonberry.
Halfway up the ridge, I encountered a vertical basalt seam that looked like it might run continuously from one end of the ridge to the other—a natural barrier that wasn’t foretold by either the topo map or the satellite image. The seam was at least ten feet high and too smooth to climb. Shit.
I moved along the base of the seam for maybe a mile and a half in intense frustration until I was stopped by a big, bleached out snag that had fallen years earlier. The gnarled root ball rested at the top of the rock wall. Using the branches as hand-and footholds, I worked my way slowly up the steep incline. Bark-free and smooth, the trunk was slippery as an ice rink, and when I finally hopped off at the top, I raised my fist in silent triumph.
Forty minutes later I was at the top of the ridge. I mopped the sweat off my brow with a handkerchief, took a long drink, and checked my phone. One bar. I called Claire and updated her. “So far, so good.”
I made good time along the spine of the ridge and fifty minutes later saw the break in the trees up ahead—a scree field that was maybe a hundred yards across. I ducked into the tree line for better cover and moved cautiously until I got to the edge of the rockslide. From there I could just make out the barn and house across the clearing to the east.
Finding a smooth place next to a large rock, I lay down and removed the binoculars from my pack. I focused in, and a chill ran down my back when the first thing I saw was the cab of a dark, Peterbilt truck parked next to the barn. A second later I saw the Ford Explorer sitting next to the house—a dilapidated two-story house with a covered front porch. I scanned the rest of the area. No white Honda, but it could have been parked on the far side of the barn. A vivid memory of hurtling toward the Umpqua River after being struck by that truck played across my mind.
I bit down a surge of rage.
Finally, I said to myself.
I checked my phone—the single bar was gone. I tried calling Claire anyway. The call didn’t go through. I tried a text—
In place. Can’t call from here. This is it. Waiting to confirm they are home. Stand by.
To my relief, this pinged back within seconds—
Great. Standing by. Careful.
I drank some more water and waited. The air was cool and crisp, the sun warm on my back, and the scene quiet except for the occasional birdcall. Ten minutes into my wait I saw movement down below and scrambled to attention, focused my binoculars, and then chuckled. A big doe and a tiny fawn strolled out from behind the barn and walked through the clearing before disappearing into the trees.
I ate some trail mix and waited.
Just past eight-thirty, I snapped to attention at what sounded like a screen door slamming and focused in on someone coming out of the house. I couldn’t see his face, but he was tall, with long, grayish hair. Both arms, below the sleeves of a white T-shirt, were shaded with tattoos. It had to be the older Barton brother, Darnell.
He sauntered over to the Ford. Oh shit, I thought. He’s leaving. But, to my relief, he opened the trunk, extracted a bag, and walked back into the house. I texted Claire—
Confirm at least Darnell is home. Call Rice and explain situation. Tell him to proceed with caution. I’ll keep him updated from here.
She pinged back immediately that she was on it, and fifteen agonizing minutes later this text came in from Rice—
On our way with five squad cars. Will contact you when we arrive and before deployment. ETA forty-five minutes. You better be right about this, Claxton.
I drank more water, ate more trail mix, and waited. At 9:23, this text came in from Rice—
At daughter’s location. Our plan is to stay hidden and surround farmhouse, then order them out. Stay where you are. Advise if perps exit house prior.
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