by Rick Treon
Jorge tossed one my way. “You’re welcome.”
I held his olive branch with both hands. I considered Jorge my brother, and I couldn’t lie to him any longer. I was about to start talking when his phone rang.
“Did you get ahold of him?” Jorge asked Zak.
“Nope. You guys hang tight. Jordan and I’ll head your way.”
Jorge tapped the big red receiver and looked out the windshield. “You not talking to me hurts. But I get it, man.”
I opened my mouth, but Veronica spoke first. “It’s not his fault. I told him he couldn’t tell anyone until… that thing happens. Speaking of which, do you want to check on that, Beck?”
It took a moment for her question to register. When it did, I nearly hopped out of my seat. “Right. Yeah, hold on.” I looked back at Veronica. “Do you want to come with me?”
“No, it’s okay. I’ll have Jorge tell me some embarrassing stories about you while I wait.”
It took a bit more muscle than usual to open my door. The Texas Panhandle wind machine was turned up to eleven. We weren’t parked on top of the hill, but it was still howling.
I checked the top right corner of my phone’s screen. No service. I walked up the hill, a labor that only resulted in one bar. I made a mental note to get a better plan now that I was making decent money.
“Hello, Caroline?” I was yelling, cupping the bottom half of the phone into my face to block the wind. We told each other we were breaking up before she finally understood who’d called her.
“Goddammit. You need to stop and let us do our job.”
“I wanted to make sure you’d arrested Paul and ask if you need any help from me.”
I knew by her extended pause that I wouldn’t get the answer I wanted. “We only got our arrest warrant finalized a few minutes ago. We haven’t arrested anybody. Why did you think we’d arrested him?”
I turned toward the road leading up to Site Three, expecting to see his truck bearing down on us. “He didn’t show up to work today. You said you haven’t arrested him?”
“No. Have you tried calling him?”
“Do you think I’d be calling you if we hadn’t?” I tried taking a deep breath to calm myself, but it was difficult in the wind. “Sorry. What should I do if he shows up?”
“Act normal. But call or text me as soon as you can without being noticed.” Though she couldn’t see me, it was like Walker could sense the worry on my face. “Listen, I’m sure we’ll find him before you have to do anything like that. But the sooner I get off the phone with you, the sooner that happens.”
I tried to stop it, but I wasn’t quick enough. The wind hit my face shield just right, flipping it over my head and turning it into a sail. My hardhat flew off and smacked Jordan on the shoulder.
He jumped and turned around. “Man, this is stupid. They need to call a wind-out.”
We were on top of the hill, and the gusts threatened to knock Veronica off her feet. It was getting worse the longer we worked.
“Quit being a baby,” Jorge said, barely audible through his pancake.
“What’s he talking about?” Veronica asked. She was a helper with no welder, so Jordan and I were using her as a helper’s assistant. That wasn’t a real job title, but she didn’t know that, and we didn’t feel like walking up and down the hill.
I shrugged in response. I hadn’t heard of stopping work on account of wind. But if it were a real thing, I wouldn’t mind it, even if we got a short check. My mind was not on work, and I kept looking on the horizon to see if Paul was on his way to tie up loose ends.
“A wind-out,” Washington said. “It’s like a rainout. If it gets too windy, these guys will leave shit trapped in the weld, no matter how much we grind and buff on it.”
“That’s what the wind boards are for,” Zak said. “Pay attention and we’ll be fine.”
The wind boards were four-foot plywood squares with thirty-inch semicircles cut into the bottom. Jordan and I had been holding them onto the pipe to block as much of the wind as possible while Jorge and Zak welded.
“Speaking of these wind boards,” Jordan said, “Ronnie, time for you to bust your wind-board cherry.”
Veronica put her hands on her hips. “The wind is about to blow me away as it is. It’ll carry me ten miles if I’m holding that thing.”
Jordan laughed. “Hey, you’ll have to do it sooner or later. And my arms are getting tired.”
“Somehow I doubt that,” she said.
Jordan stopped smiling and stared at her. “What, because I’m a big black guy, you assume I’m strong and athletic? Racist much?”
The color drained from Veronica’s face as she started powerwalking to Jordan. “Oh my God, Jordan, I am so sorry. I absolutely didn’t mean to imply that bec—”
We howled in laughter as Jordan and I popped new rods into our welders’ gloves.
“You should see the look on your face,” Jordan said. “You talk all kinds of shit out here, so I thought I’d get you back.”
As quickly as it had turned pale, Veronica’s face burned red and she pointed at Jordan. “That’s not fucking funny. Quit laughing.”
Jordan held up his hands. “Okay, okay. I was serious though, come here and hold this thing.”
Veronica took the wind board from Jordan and took up a position behind Zak and him.
The gust hit me hard, but it nearly blew Veronica over. Her board slipped below the pipe, where Jorge was about to finish his half of the weld. We all heard a single spark, but none of us dared to react.
As our boss, Zak should’ve been pissed and stopped the weld so we could cut it out. But as much as had gone wrong, he was probably a short hair away from getting run off the job, too.
He looked at me and nodded over his shoulder. I had the best angle to check on the Site Three inspector, whose job it was to find errors like arc marks. Though this one was normally not a “window watcher”—the term for a welding inspector who sits in his truck all day and monitors the job through his windshield—the wind was enough to keep him in the cab of his pickup.
“He’s still cabbed up,” I said. “No way he saw it.”
Jorge nodded and the welders resumed their work. This would be the third time Jorge had left an arc mark since I started working with him, so I knew the first step in hiding it. I knelt beside Jorge and spun off the wheel I’d been using, replacing it with the tiger pad.
“I am so, so sorry,” Veronica whispered. “Tell him it was my fault. If I get fired, it’s no big deal.”
“That’s not how it works, but I appreciate you saying that,” Jorge said. “What you can do, though, is go get a water bottle, take a drink, then add some of the beer salt in my center console. Make sure you screw the lid back on.”
“What?”
“Go get a water bottle,” Jorge said, his voiced raised a few decibels to counteract the wind, “take a drink, then—”
“I heard you,” Veronica whispered, “but I don’t understand why you want me to do that.”
Jorge peeked over his shoulder to make sure the inspector was still in his truck. “You’ll see. Now hurry up so you can have it ready as soon as we’re done with the weld.”
By the time Veronica reached the truck, Jorge was ready for the tiger pad. He worked light swirls beside the weld, then put a little more pressure on the arc mark. It was a decent blend job, though polishing the rust off near the mark only drew more attention to it. As he dug deep enough into the pipe to take off the extra metal left by the accidental contact, Veronica returned with the bottle. Zak had left the area to preserve plausible deniability.
“Knife,” Jorge said, holding out his hand.
I took mine out of a leather holster on my belt. He flipped open the blade and poked three holes in the bottle’s lid before handing back the knife.
“Spatter pad.”
Jordan and I wrapped a black rectangle of floppy rubber around the weld. Spatter pads are used to keep sparks and beads of misguided metal a
way from sensitive areas like valve ends. We also put them over welds when it rained, keeping the metal from cooling and cracking.
“Watch this,” I whispered to Veronica.
Jorge shook the bottle and squeezed, spraying homemade saline over the area he’d cleaned. Rust formed almost instantly, blending in with the rest of the pipe and virtually erasing all evidence of his work.
“Holy shit,” she said. “That’s like a magic trick.”
Jorge stood and smiled at his new piece of art as Zak approached.
“This is a good stopping point, and it’s almost lunchtime.” He looked at Jorge. “Let’s go tell him we’re done working in this shit.”
They were only over at the inspector’s window for a few seconds before turning to us. Jorge made a sound that resembled an owl’s hoot and gave us the umpire’s signal for a home run. To us, that meant it was time to roll up our extension cords and leads, toss the rest of the crap in the bed of the truck, and get out of Dodge before someone changed their mind.
37
I checked my phone every few minutes on the ride back to the hotel. I was so distracted by the lack of a missed call or text that I hit my shoulder on the door jamb walking into the room.
“A watched pot never boils,” Veronica said.
“Thanks, Confucius.”
She sat on the bed and opened her laptop. “All I’m saying is, they’ll find him. That’s what they do.”
I threw the deadbolt on the door. “So, we just sit and wait and hope a killer doesn’t come after us?”
“If he didn’t show up for work, he’s on the run,” Veronica said.
I nodded, hoping the act of moving my head up and down might help convince my paranoid mind. “So, I told you Walker confirmed that Paul is the person they have the arrest warrant for, right?”
“Yep.” Veronica was typing like she was on a deadline.
“You’re going to file the story before the arrest?” I asked.
“If you’ll let me get it done in time. After the arrest, they’ll put out a news release, and I lose the scoop.”
That was a bad idea. I put my hand in front of her screen. “If you do that, he’ll know who you are.”
“You think he reads the Ledger?” She grabbed my wrist and moved it.
I didn’t like her plan, but short of tossing her computer across the room, I didn’t see a way to stop her. “I’m going to take a shower.”
“Wait.” She lowered her laptop screen but didn’t close it. “Let me go first. The hot water in this place sucks and I don’t want you to use it all.”
“Can you spare the time?”
She considered my question, then picked up her phone. “I’ll set an alarm on my phone for five minutes.”
Veronica darted toward the dresser, grabbed clothes, then marched to the bathroom. When she’d closed the door, my eyes shifted to her computer. It hadn’t gone to sleep yet. I made my move when I heard running water.
Murder on the High Plains
By Veronica Stein [email protected]
BORGER — The Texas Rangers, working in conjunction with other local authorities, were engaged in a manhunt Monday on the High Plains of Texas, searching for the son of a U.S. Congressman they believe killed a woman and hid her bludgeoned body in an oil pipeline near the small town of Fritch.
Paul Schuhmacher, 43, was working as a welder at the job site and his alleged victim, Sylvia Jane Davenport, 28, was there as his welder’s helper.
Schuhmacher, who was convicted of sexual assault in 2004 and served eight years in state prison, met Davenport at a strip club in Oklahoma and brought her onto the job site in the Texas Panhandle.
The rest of her story was in pieces, full of highlighted notes written in all caps. My name didn’t appear in the text. I let out a deep breath and was about to close the computer when I noticed another document open behind her Ledger story.
The shower was still running, so I pulled it to the front.
The Ultimate Alibi: How the man who killed Summer Foster hid in plain sight for twenty years
It can take decades to fully understand the effects of a single action. Few events get that treatment, but those that do are called watershed moments—points in time separating the world that existed before from the reality left in its wake. The term is overused, but for many in the Texas Hill Country, the murder of Summer Foster on July 4, 1999, was one such moment.
But what happens when the new courses of a town, a publisher, an author, and a murderer, were all caused by a lie?
What happens when the world finds out Butch Heller didn’t kill Summer Foster?
I slapped the laptop screen shut. She’d been lying to me. Veronica was working on her story about Summer’s murder. Weren’t journalists supposed to be honest?
“Did you read the whole thing?”
Veronica was standing naked in front of the sink, staring at me underneath wet hair and holding my razor in her hand. The shower was still running. Had she set me up by leaving her laptop open, or was she planning to steal my razor to use for her legs?
“Yeah,” I said. “It’s good. Good scoop. Your bosses should be happy.”
She took two steps toward me. “Cut the bullshit.”
We both turned our heads when the alarm on Veronica’s cellphone went off. She’d set it on the toilet, so she stepped back into the shower to stop the shrill noise and turn off the shower.
“Fine,” I said loudly enough for her to hear. “I thought we had an agreement.”
She walked back out, still naked and dripping. “I don’t make agreements with pieces of shit like you.”
“Excuse me?” Part of my anger gave way to confusion. I had been nothing but nice to Veronica. And I’d given her a great story. All I’d asked in return was for her not to pursue a story that I knew to be inaccurate—which was also a nice thing to do for her, I thought.
“You heard me,” she said. “You’re a piece of shit who doesn’t deserve my trust or respect.”
“Hold on a minute, I think you’ve gotten some bad information. I don’t know who you think I am, or what you think you know about me. But whatever it is, it’s not true.”
Veronica’s mouth smiled softly, but her eyes burned with a different emotion. I couldn’t tell if it was excitement or anger.
She tossed my razor into the sink and stalked toward me.
38
Excerpt from Cold Summer
When police interrogated him the night of his arrest—after he’d spent enough time sobering up in his second home, the city drunk tank—Heller insisted he found Summer already dead in her yard after returning to Hinterbach.
Heller’s lawyer later argued that he was too inebriated to have the coordination needed to hit Summer with any accuracy. Heller’s blood-alcohol level tested at 0.1 percent, and that was after the murder, arrest, and processing at the county jail. The lawyer said no man that drunk could have controlled a woman who was so strong and athletic.
However, District Attorney Gamble called an expert witness to dispute the claim, a doctor who regularly consulted with the San Antonio office of the FBI. Dr. Clyde Talbot told the jury he’d studied video of HPD’s initial interrogation of Heller. After viewing the tape, Dr. Talbot said he was certainly drunk, but not enough to have kept him from functioning well enough to kill Summer Foster—a fact Gamble told the jury in his closing.
Like much of the evidence, it was a case of he-said, he-said. But that didn’t seem to bother the jurors, who offered a guilty verdict after less than two hours of deliberation.
39
Butch Heller
July 4, 1999, 8:37 p.m.
Heller sat in the driver’s seat of his Pontiac, sipping on a bottle of cheap Canadian whiskey. He was still stewing, not yet ready to drive back to Summer’s house and confront her, but too angry and drunk to stay and talk with Candy.
The bottle had come from her cabinet. He didn’t tell Candy why he was upset, and she didn’t ask. Silently dri
nking away their misery, whatever it was, had been their favorite pastime before his sobriety.
Heller nearly dropped the bottle when the passenger door opened. Verna tumbled in and sat cross-legged on the seat.
“Hi Butch,” she said. “Why are you out here?”
Though she was only nine, Heller had never seen such a mature girl. Verna often spoke with the presence and authority of a CEO and had a vocabulary that might make real titans of industry jealous. Despite her outward appearance and profession, Candy was a hell of a mother.
“Well V, I guess I’m embarrassed,” Heller said.
“Embarrassed of what?”
Heller took a long drink. “The woman I love doesn’t love me back.”
“Mom loves you, though.”
“I know. But it’s not the same. You’ll understand—”
“When I’m older,” they said together.
Heller smiled. “I bet you get sick of people saying that to you.”
“You have no idea.”
Heller screwed the lid back onto the bottle. “How’ve you been? You still like school?”
She shifted in her seat. “It’s okay. They’re going to let me read A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court for my Accelerated Reader points this year. It’ll count for the whole year. They’re the suckers, though. I’ll get it done in a month.”
Heller only wished he was as smart as that little girl. “Sounds like a good idea to me.”
They sat in silence for a few more moments, not looking at one another. He was about to walk her back inside when Verna spoke.
“So, you missed the six-month anniversary of Jeannie dying. Mom wasn’t happy with you.”
Heller could feel her eyes on him, but he didn’t meet her gaze. “I know, V. I was too sad to come.”