She said, “We . . . we live a communal life here, and have no personal resources, but we could have asked the community to provide her with some means to travel to San Antonio and given her a bit of a cushion until she became self-sustaining.”
“But you didn’t,” said Jamison.
Susan could only shake her head.
Milton said, “We thought it would be a way to make her come . . . home.” He broke down entirely now and rested his forehead on the table, his body quaking. His wife didn’t look at him, but she did pat him gently on the back.
Decker eyed Kelly and said, “We’ll need to check her movements, friends, whether she had a job. Where she was staying and what if any connection she had to Hal Parker.” He stopped and stared over at Susan. “Before, you said that Parker never came to the Colony. But then you said that you had never required his services, which implies that you knew what he did for a living. Did you know Hal Parker, Ms. Ames?”
She glanced at her husband, who was still bent over, weeping quietly.
“I . . . I knew him, yes. Unlike Milton I . . . I have not always been here at the Colony. When I was younger, much younger, I lived in London with my parents. Hal was older than I was, but our families were neighbors, so I would see him a good deal when I was a child. I’ve . . . I know what he does for a living.”
Jamison said, “So did Pamela know him? Might she have gone to him for help when she left here?”
“It’s possible,” said Susan. “I don’t know for sure.”
Jamison frowned. “You didn’t keep in touch with her?”
Susan said defensively, “She didn’t have a cell phone.”
“I find that hard to believe,” said Jamison. “Even if she wasn’t used to having access to one at the Colony, it would be hard to do without one once she had left there.”
Kelly added, “And London’s not that big. Surely you could have gone to see her.”
“I chose not to see her,” snapped Susan. “She had made her choice. She didn’t want to be a part of our world anymore.”
Decker pushed off the wall, came forward, and said offhandedly, “So she might have been staying with Parker. And if someone came there to take him away and she was there, she might have just been in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
Kelly nodded in agreement. “That could be, yes.”
Jamison said, “But, Decker, it’s a one-bedroom house. And we didn’t find any clothing or other things that would indicate that Pamela Ames was living there. And there was no vehicle other than Parker’s.” She gazed up at him, puzzled. “You know all that.”
Decker kept his gaze on Milton. “That’s right, Alex. So now maybe Milton can tell us what his wife doesn’t want us to know.”
All eyes turned to Milton as he slowly sat back against his chair. He rubbed his eyes and would not look at his wife this time.
“Unlike Susan, I did keep in touch with Pammie.”
“And?” said Decker.
“And she was working as a waitress at the big truck stop on the main road coming into town.”
“She told you this?”
“No. I heard it from someone else. A trucker who makes deliveries here. He knew Pammie. He told me she was there. I . . . I went there to see her. But when I saw . . .”
“I’m sorry, but I’m not sure what you’re getting at,” said Jamison. “When you saw what?”
“Well, what she was wearing! What all the waitresses wore in that place. They were barely clothed. And all the men ogling them. It was . . . I just couldn’t believe that my daughter—”
Susan made a clucking sound and glanced at her husband with a scathing look.
Milton swallowed nervously and looked down.
“And you told her what you thought about it?” said Jamison.
He nodded, still looking down. “I . . . I told her I was ashamed of her and never wanted to see her again.”
On that, Milton broke into sobs and couldn’t answer another question.
DECKER LOOKED OUT THE WINDOW of his hotel room onto a street that was bustling with people and traffic. This fracking stuff, he thought, had really transformed parts of North Dakota from a flyover state to one of the world’s great economic booms.
He still didn’t know why Pamela Ames had been at Hal Parker’s. If she’d had a purse it had also been taken. Ditto for her cell phone. The gun that had killed Pamela was nowhere to be found. They had also found no trace of Ames having been in Parker’s truck, so how she had gotten out there was still unknown. Walt Southern would be doing the postmortem, and Decker was hoping something would pop from that.
They had spoken with the truck stop people. Ames had been working there. She had missed her shift that night. They had tried to call her phone, which they confirmed she had, but had gotten no answer. Kelly had tried to trace the phone’s location but gotten nothing. They were also trying to trace where Ames had been living but so far had gotten zip, and the truck stop people hadn’t known that, either. The company didn’t mail out paychecks, they just handed them out at the end of the week, her manager had told them. If she had moved around or lived in abandoned premises as some did here, it might be impossible to pinpoint exactly where she had been on any given day.
Decker checked his watch. He was due to meet Baker at the OK Corral Saloon in thirty minutes. He called Bogart’s personal cell, got the man’s voice mail, and left a message. How and whether Cramer’s death coincided with Pamela Ames’s murder and Hal Parker’s disappearance he didn’t know. And had Parker been abducted? Or had he killed Ames for some reason and then run for it?
He washed up, changed into clean clothes, and headed out.
He met Baker as the big man was walking up to the bar.
“How’s the investigation going?”
“It’s going. How’s the fracking?”
He grinned. “Hot, and I’m not talking temperature wise.”
They went inside, miraculously found an empty table, and ordered two beers on draft.
When the drinks came, they each drained about half their mugs.
“I spoke to Renee again,” said Decker.
“Yeah, she told me. I hope you feel better about things.”
“Look, Stan, you don’t have to worry about whether I feel better or not. If you two are good with it and the kids are taken care of, then that’s great.”
Baker looked surprised but also pleased by this statement. “Thanks, Amos. I still care for Renee and she does for me. Guess it’ll always be that way. We were together a long time and then we got the kids, of course. That’s the glue that really holds a family together regardless. The kids.” Baker paled a bit with this last part. “Um, I mean . . .”
“I know exactly what you mean, Stan,” Decker said, taking a sip of his beer. “So you like it here, you said?”
“Oh, yeah. Some of the younger guys, they think it’s too isolated. Hell, I’ve lived in Alaska. ‘Isolated’ takes on a whole other meaning up there.”
“So tell me about this fracking business,” said Decker.
Baker looked surprised. “Why does that matter to you?”
“I’m investigating a murder. People get killed for lots of reasons, like money and power. The money-and-power thing here is tied to fracking, right?”
“Right. Otherwise, pretty much nobody would be here. So what do you want to know?”
“Basically how it works.”
“There’s oil and gas in the ground. And folks pull it out and sell it for a lot of money.”
“That part I get. Only I understand it wasn’t always that easy to get out of the ground.”
“That’s right. So before I came here I read up on it. I’m not a young punk with no obligations. I needed to make this work, so I wanted to know whether this thing had legs. North Dakota has gone boom and bust before.”
“Understood. Go on.”
“Well, the first bit of oil in North Dakota was discovered in a small town called Tioga back in the early fifti
es. But drilling up here, in the Bakken region, was considered a no-go because the oil was too hard to get out. All the big boys had given it a try over the decades and failed. They just assumed that it would be stuck down there forever. So by the end of the nineties, drilling was done here. Then, it turned out the oil companies were drilling in the wrong direction. Vertical doesn’t work here like it does pretty much everywhere else. You had to drill horizontally after you’ve drilled vertically down far enough to reach the shale region. And you had to do that in combination with fracking, or piping water and mud and chemicals down into the deposits. That’s done both to keep the drill going and to break up the shale. And you send sand down too in order to keep the breaks in the shale from resealing.”
“You mean like stents a surgeon puts in to open up a blocked artery?”
“Exactly. And on the extraction end think of a straw inserted into a cup of water. You pour more liquid and other stuff through the straw and into the water. With no place else to go, the water down below has to come up through the straw. Here, after fracking a deposit, the oil starts to flow to the surface.”
“How far down do you go?”
“About two miles vertically, and then you move sideways, or horizontally in a series of carefully monitored stages. That could be quite a few more miles. All told, you’re talking about twenty thousand feet or more of drilling and piping.”
“Then all these rigs I see around are over deposits of oil and gas?”
“Yeah. You pretty much always find one with the other. It takes anywhere from one to five million gallons of fresh water to frack a single well. And a couple thousand truckloads of sand. Each well from site prep to readiness for production takes about three to six months. But then the well could be productive for twenty, thirty, or forty years. When all the oil and gas have been gotten out, they plug everything, clean up the surface, and the owner who leased the land goes back to using the property.”
“What’s your job in all this?”
“When I first came here I was just a run-of-the-mill oil field hand. I ran pipe and worked drilling rigs with all the youngsters. Then, when they found out I had real experience, they put me in charge of monitoring operations at some of the rigs. I get to sit in a trailer and watch computer screens. I’ll show you sometime if you want.”
“That’ll be great, Stan. I appreciate that.”
Baker smiled.
“What?” asked Decker.
“This is the most I’ve seen and talked to you since you graduated from college and went pro.”
“Right,” said Decker. “So tell me about Caroline Dawson.”
Baker looked embarrassed. “I know, you’re thinking what is a rich, smart, beautiful, young gal doing with a big old lug like me?”
“That wasn’t what I was thinking.”
“You’re a bad liar.”
“So?”
“So I came into this bar one day and there she was. Hell, she was mixing drinks. I thought she was just a bartender earning her daily bread here.”
“Why would she be mixing drinks?”
“Her father owns the bar.”
“I didn’t know that, but I guess it makes sense. But surely, she doesn’t need the money.”
“She likes to get her hands dirty with all the lines of work they’re involved in. She’s done maid service at some of the hotels and apartment buildings, cashiering at some of the stores, even drove a semi. She has her CDL,” added Baker, referring to a commercial driver’s license.
Decker looked impressed. “Okay. That speaks well of her.”
“Anyway, I ordered a beer from her, not even knowing who she was. Of course, all these young, drunk punks were hitting on her all night, but she kept her cool. She seemed interested in me, maybe because I wasn’t hitting on her. And also because I knew some of the punks and told them to back off. She asked questions and I told her a little bit about myself. Showed her pictures of the kids. Then she told me what time her shift ended.”
“Why did she do that? Did she want to meet up with you later?”
“No. And she only told me because I asked. She seemed a little put off by that, like I was hitting on her. But then I told her I just wanted to make sure she got home okay because those punks were not leaving well enough alone. She told me she had her car outside. It’s a sweet ride. A Porsche SUV with these special wide tires and fancy tread. Her father bought it for her birthday. Of course, I only found out about that later.”
“Okay, what happened?”
“I was waiting across the street from the bar when she came out. Just to be sure. Two of the punks who’d been harassing her followed her out. She told them to get lost but they were drunk and wouldn’t listen. It started to get dicey. Them pawing her, and I was afraid it might move on to something really bad. So I ran across and . . . well, persuaded them to leave her alone.”
Decker smiled. “And how exactly did you do that, Stan?”
“Mostly by knocking them out cold. I don’t think they expected that from a guy my age. Anyway, Caroline was really grateful, and . . . and, well, she asked me out. Couldn’t believe it. Never had a gal do that, not even Renee and she’s no shrinking violet. So we see each other from time to time. I’m not in her league, but, well, she makes me feel good about myself, I guess. And she’s fun. I guess everybody deserves to have some fun, right?”
“Absolutely. Have you met her father?”
“No. And we’ve never, I mean we haven’t, you know.”
“Slept together?”
“Right. We’re just friends.”
“Full disclosure, I followed you here that first night. She was hanging all over you.”
“The gal likes to have fun. But I’m in my fifties. Hell, I could be her father.”
“Hasn’t stopped people in the past.”
“Yeah, well.” Baker hunkered down over his drink.
“You both disappeared when I wasn’t looking. Thought you might have, well . . .”
“Nah. Caroline keeps a room over the bar. She went up there. She had a headache, she said. I went home.”
“Okay.”
Decker pulled out a picture of Irene Cramer that Kelly had provided and slid it across. “You know her or ever seen her?”
Baker picked up the photo and studied it. “She the gal that got killed?”
Decker nodded. “Irene Cramer. She taught over at the Brothers’ Colony.”
“Schoolteacher, huh? Who’d want to kill a schoolteacher?”
“She also had a sideline. An escort. Went by the name Mindy.”
“Okay,” exclaimed Baker, sliding the photo back. “I’ve never seen her. And I don’t mess with ‘escorts.’ I’ve got four kids. I don’t want any more by accident. I’d rather just drink my beer and watch movies.”
“Know any young punks that might have seen things differently?”
“Oh, yeah, more than a few.”
Decker slid the photo back across. “Then show this around and see what comes up. Now, what do you know about the Air Force station?”
“I pass by it every day going to and coming from work.”
“I went out there and spoke with the commander of the place. Tight-lipped.”
“Yeah, they take things seriously over there, or so I’ve heard. Lots of security.”
“He told me it was a pretty safe place to work, no accidents. But they had a line of ambulances there, so it didn’t make sense.”
Baker took this in, and his features slowly clouded.
“What is it?” asked Decker, who had noted this.
“Well, some of the guys from there used to come into the bars from time to time. I wore the uniform, so we speak the same language. They’re Air Force and I was Army, but still, I did enough joint ops and training to get along with them.”
“Okay.”
“Well, I was drinking with some of them one night. And one fella, think his name was Ben, said something odd. Stuck with me, see? Memorable what he said.”
Before answering, Baker finished his beer and then looked directly at Decker. “That we were all sitting on a fucking time bomb.”
DECKER AND BAKER each had another beer and split a plate of chili, chips, and jalapeños, and then headed out of the saloon. Neither one had noticed the knot of young men who had been closely watching them at the bar. It was dark now, and the streets were emptier than they had been, not only because of the late hour but also because of the fine rain that had begun falling.
They hadn’t gone more than a block down a side street where Baker had parked his truck, and which was also a shortcut to Decker’s hotel, when Decker slowed.
“What’s up?” said Baker, noting this.
“We have some company. And I don’t think they’re friendly. Look.”
Baker gazed ahead where three young men stood, blocking their path.
Then Decker looked behind them.
Three more men barred the way they had come.
“Buddies of yours?” asked Decker.
As the men came closer on both sides, Baker said quietly, “I recognize a couple. Guys I busted up for going after Caroline that time.”
“Thought it might be that. Guess they’re here for payback.”
“This isn’t your fight, Amos. I can see if they’ll let you pass.”
Decker gave him an incredulous look. “You really think I’m leaving you here to face this alone, Stan?”
Baker grinned. “Well, this won’t be the first fight we’ve been in together.”
“And probably won’t be the last.”
“See any weapons?”
“I think one of them might have a knife.” Decker looked behind him. “And one has a baseball bat.”
“You have your gun?”
“Unfortunately, I left it in my room. Didn’t think I’d need it to have a beer with you. I can flash my creds at them.”
“Hell, those idiots probably can’t even read.”
“Okay.”
“Looks like we’re going to have to do this the old-fashioned way. I’m not thrilled about that because I’m wearing my good clothes and don’t want to mess them up with their blood and stuff.”
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