Antler Dust (The Allison Coil Mystery Series Book 1) (18 page)

“So what do we do?”

“Keep close tabs on her—and Trudy.”

“And what are we looking for?” said Boyles.

“See if she’s just fucking around or trying to fuck us.”

Nine

A firm midwinter breeze bore down as Allison walked to her lawyer’s office. The wind gained strength from the empty, cold caverns of a city on a weekend.

The office was near the top of Denver’s tallest building. She rode the elevator admiring the sheer trust involved in letting cables and pulleys and motors and switches boost you hundreds of feet in the sky. Were there any parts in this machinery that could freeze up? Would she freeze up? Could she pull the trigger and sue the bastards? Were they really bastards? Weren’t people doing their jobs? Doing their best? And now she would be given money in exchange. In exchange for what, exactly? In exchange for surviving? Really?

Ambivalence was the word of the day. Her guts and heart were filled with unadulterated ambivalence, garnished with a few drips of creeping dread. Mostly, she wanted out of the elevating steel cube and the skyscraper. Perhaps at the top of the tower she could hop on a zip line back to a place where her blue jeans would be on a horse, not in a lawyer’s leather office chair.

The reception area featured a staggering view of the mountains, from Mount Evans to the west and north to the Wyoming border. Pollution? The wind today made it someone else’s problem. A too-pleasant receptionist asked her if she needed coffee or water and Allison half expected to be asked to leave her beat-up cowgirl boots at the entryway and off the polished floor. No request surfaced.

“Allison.”

Even on a Saturday, Paul Reitano was all business in his button-down collar and silk tie.

“You guys have moved up in the world. Literally.”

They shook hands.

“Corporate merger. We picked up a few accounting firms, clean ones not tainted by the accounting scandal meltdowns. Well,
charged
.” He smiled. “But not tainted. It makes for pleasant surroundings, anyway. And right now we’re running six days a week, no casual Fridays, no casual Saturdays either.”

He was sixty-ish and soft-spoken. He came across like a kindly professor who could scorn a set of bad grades with a look of deep dismay, one that carried weight. He had piercing blue eyes, puffy bits of unkempt white hair and the weathered skin of a lifelong skier.

Reitano led her down halls lined with contemporary art to his small office.

“Thanks for making the trip down. They’ve had a test-run trial in New York. It was a real trial, but it’s used as a means for determining who pays what amount. It’s like dividing the check at a restaurant: determining who ate more, drank more and therefore who gets to pay more. The two major parties were the airline and the airplane manufacturer. The airline tried to find something mechanical that went wrong. And they failed.”

She listened as if it had just happened, as if she was still dripping and crouching awkwardly on a rock near the water in the harbor. The water continued to chop and churn. There were bits of stuff everywhere—jackets and magazines, suitcases and those under-sized airline pillows. And there were people, struggling and flopping around in the water, not seeming real at all, more like actors in a bad movie. Shock coated their pain, bewilderment covered their agony. Some were making it to shore. Some didn’t move at all. And one or two peered down into the black water, floating lifelessly.

Reitano talked about deicing and how long an airplane is airworthy, once it has been hosed down, until the glycol solution loses its battle with the elements. He mentioned that they could have opted for a second kind of solution that was an anti-icing agent as opposed to a deicing one. He talked about how the pilot asked the co-pilot to check the wings thirty minutes after they had been through the deicing station and the co-pilot, according to the tapes they pulled from the wreckage, came back with the all-clear. Only deicing solution on an airplane wing has an “effective window” of twenty-five minutes, no more.

She remembered someone in uniform coming down the aisle, peering out the windows a few rows back. Everybody watched him study the wing. The “everybody” included a few people who were in their last few minutes of life, the co-pilot among them. He could have seen something, even made it up. Why not squirt your windshield one more time when it’s being splattered with rain and snow and crud? Why not put the jet through for another swab of pink goo, to hit it again before takeoff? It had been twenty-four minutes, said Reitano, when the jet was given clearance to head for Denver. But what good was thinking of Denver when you might not make it off the runway?

“Your injuries were major. But, in the end, you recovered your life. The settlement they are offering is nine hundred thousand dollars. I could go into the strange ways an actuarial table can change, how emotional distress factors in ...?”

“That’s an offer?”

“No trial. Terms to remain confidential. There’s a group of survivors and the families of others who think the suit has gone far enough,” said Reitano, “who don’t want to take it another step. They are the ones involved in the mock trials. It looks like the airline and its insurance companies will be asked to compensate victims moderately, as these things go. But there’s another group that wants the government to pay their share, too.”

“The government?”

“It’s a delicate balance: regulating the industry and running it. If the airline doesn’t follow the recommended safety standards set by the glycol manufacturer, the government wants to be able to say that it’s none of their business, that it’s a cut-and-dried decision on the part of the airline and its pilots. Twenty-four minutes? That must be okay. They think their air traffic controllers should have no monitoring function, no oversight. It’s not that hard a thing to track the time and the weather. But the tapes recovered from the airline conversation with the tower show there wasn’t a lick of concern from the tower about how long your jet had been parked and waiting. To put it another way, the government thinks that if they post sixty-five on the highway and you go sixty-six, it might not be their fault if the asphalt is poor quality, maybe a stretch of bad road popped your tire and you wound up in the ditch.”

Reitano paused and spun gently in his chair.

“We want to keep pressing this lawsuit. There are only eight of us left. It’s a bit of a risk, not taking what they are offering at this, uh, juncture.”

“Nine
hundred
thousand?”

“Less my fees and taxes.”

Allison couldn’t imagine what it would be like to be responsible for, or think responsibly about, a pot of money that size. Or maybe larger. Was it possible to grasp this as having any connection to swimming in the sound when she should have been flying?

“But is it greedy to seek more?”

“It’s not greedy. It’s a risk. Lawyers in my end of the business have a saying we borrowed from investment bankers:
Pigs get fed, hogs get slaughtered.
You’re looking to get fed, trust me, no more.”

“But wasn’t the government doing its best, or trying to?”

Reitano leaned up on his desk, coupled his hands together so the middle knuckles interlocked neatly.

“On that basis, so were the pilots. So was the glycol manufacturer. But the government is another thing we can challenge.”

“How much more could we ... win?” It was a difficult word to use.

“Hard to say. And there’s more to it than financial value. It’s a matter of proving a point, cleaning it up for others. Someone once said that the government is both a dangerous servant and a fearful master. The government is us. It’s all of us. Watching and monitoring. Providing checks—and balances. It’s little people pointing out problems and being rewarded for their suffering. Suing your government doesn’t mean you hate them. It means you respect your fellow citizens. It means you want to make the world a better place.”

“More than nine hundred thousand dollars? That’s hard to grasp.”

His demeanor was too steady to be troubling, his reasoning too solid. She pictured the deicer trying to work beyond its limits, as if it had a brain to know how important it was to keep the wings from freezing.

“I’ll take your lead on this,” she told him.

“The principle is with us, on our side. Remember, it’s not the individual people we’re going after. It’s the system, the way they do things.”

“Do I have to decide now?”

“No. We have a few weeks to notify the airline if we’ll settle at this stage. You want to think about it; I understand.”

“I like the idea of having it over with, that’s all. Tying up all the loose ends.”

“The money is tempting,” said Reitano. “Don’t think I don’t realize that.”

The whole conversation, its premise, was far removed from her world on the Flat Tops. Or maybe it was the steel and glass setting that gave the discussion an unreal quality. How could you make such a decision? On what basis? What was nine hundred thousand dollars
worth
?

After staring off for a moment, Allison stood up. Reitano also began to get up but politely sat back down as Allison did.

“I’ve got a favor to ask.”

“Shoot,” he said.

“Different matter,” said Allison. “Isn’t there a state system that keeps track of debts? Posts them?”

“The UCC. Uniform Commercial Code. It’s a registry in the secretary of state’s office. Invaluable.”

“Can you show me how to access it? And, if you’re online, I was wondering if I might spend on hour or so on the Internet? There’s a big spender in Texas. I want to see how many cattle come with his big hat.”

Reitano smiled. “We have a spare office,” he said. “Right this way.”

****

Allison flopped on her unmade hotel bed, a half acre of cushion. It was so large she had barely messed one corner of it. She wished Slater could come help her tangle the rest of the sheets. After she got back from her meeting with Reitano that afternoon, she made a phone call to Slater.

“Why in the world would these men talk with me?” she said. She studied the list in her hand. Bobby Alvin had called back with the names she had asked about: Sal Marcovicci, Frank Cassell and Darrell Lockwood, known as “Locks.”

She tucked the telephone between her tired head and the pillow. “Because you want to know,” said Slater. “If you think not being a cop is a disadvantage, you’re wrong.”

“They don’t have to talk to me.”

“Of course not. When people talk to cops, though, their lips might be flapping but they don’t always say very much. Or they make it up. Like Applegate.”

“What did he have to say?”

“Sandstrom gave an update at a summit meeting today. Applegate said he gave the rifle the old heave-ho off a cliff, after hiking back up through three feet of snow. I don’t think so. If any of those guys can give us an idea of what Applegate was up to, it would shed serious light.”

“Sounds like you’re dubious.”

“Ask any of ’em if they know where Applegate’s rifle might be and find out if they saw Applegate anywhere the day that guy Ray Stern went down. I’m not dubious. I am trying to imagine it all, trying to get pictures in my head that make sense. And I want you to be careful because if they do know something, they might not appreciate having to lie constantly about what they know. And they might get a little edgy, do something stupid.”

“Really?”

“Sure. This could be an intricate cover-up. Be careful.”

“Gee, I feel like a deputy, but don’t you have to come down here and officially deputize me?”

She would spring for the best bottle of champagne the hotel could muster and maybe tell him about the nine hundred thousand dollars, seed money for their lives together.

“I would if I could,” said Slater. “That official ceremony will have to wait.”

“I still feel nervous—and alone.”

“Nobody’s forcing you to do anything.”

“Could be we’re barking up the wrong tree,” she said, “or even poking around in the wrong forest.”

She wanted Ray Stern’s killer caught more than anyone other than Stern’s mother. She imagined a conversation with Stern’s killer, Sandstrom right there to hear it all. Every delicious word from Stern’s killer, recounting his day of stupidity, would disprove Sandstrom’s assertion that she didn’t know where she had been when she heard the shot. Besides exonerating her memory, finding Stern’s killer would mean they had found the stupidest hunter in the country. It was one thing to mistake a moose for an elk or a doe for a buck, but a human? It was beyond the pale.

“Then come on back,” said Slater. “Sandstrom claims it’s a full-court press. Somebody’s going to feel the pressure and crack. Count on it.”

“So you want me to talk with these guys or not?”

It didn’t seem as if Slater was really interested in absorbing and analyzing information that might be related to the whole snarl of events up on Ripplecreek. Whether or not her information was related, his general attitude was starting to piss her off.

“I think you should leave it to the pros but I also think, from what I know, that it doesn’t matter much what I think.”

“Don’t leave me feeling worried,” said Allison. “Say something to make me think you’d rather be right here.”

There was a slight pause and Allison imagined Slater staring at the ceiling, hoping for inspiration.

“Be careful,” said Slater. “I know you’ll be smart, but be careful too. I’d prefer you head home.”

“That’s not exactly doing the trick,” said Allison.

“I know,” said Slater, “but it’s the best I can do.”

****

Sal Marcovicci lived in an old Victorian that overlooked a small lake on Denver’s west side. Canada geese pecked at the yellow-green grass on the park that rimmed the lake. She had picked up the phone to call Marcovicci as soon as she finished talking to Slater, allowing no time to brood on Slater’s words of caution.

Marcovicci was the closest, so he got the first call. Was this hard—asking questions? No.

Maybe a touch awkward? Definitely. Was she out of her element? For sure. Her head kept up the mantra.