Dark Justice (55 page)

Maureen hesitated only a moment before taking it. “No,” she said quietly. “It can’t hurt to try.”

Ben closed his eyes. Maybe there was some hope for this planet after all.

B
EN HAD BEEN HAVING SUCH
a splendid day he almost hated to do anything more. Better to split a bottle of champagne with Loving and savor the moment. His last three meetings were get-togethers he’d been looking forward to for a good long while. The next meeting was one he’d give a great deal to be able to skip altogether. But there was no avoiding it.

He found her in a park not far from the hotel where they’d both been staying. She was sitting on one end of a seesaw, her chin in her hands, her feet in the dirt.

She did not look up as he approached. “Mind if I join you?” He straddled the opposite end of the seesaw, bouncing Christina a foot or two into the air. “How are you?”

She shrugged, just barely.

“Nice weather, don’t you think? It was a little smoky in town after the fire, but that seems to have passed.”

He leaned back on the seesaw, propelling her even higher into the air, thinking that might compel a response. It didn’t.

“Al’s been caught,” Ben said. “He’ll stand trial for arson, maybe attempted murder. I was thinking I might represent him. I mean, we know he did it, but given the circumstances—” He started again. “They’ve also got Slade’s hoods, including the one who ran down Doc, but Slade himself disappeared shortly after he was airlifted out of the forest. Half the state and federal law enforcement community is looking for him, but so far, no luck. I hope they’ll catch him—but I have my doubts. He’s a pretty slippery creep, used to taking care of himself.”

He sighed. Her silence was cutting, rending the air between them like the swath of a scythe.

“I’m just so relieved,” Ben said, continuing his babbling soliloquy. “I was so worried—so afraid that maybe, just maybe Zak was the murderer. Maybe he’d been a killer all along and it was my fault he was released the first time so he could kill again. I can’t tell you what a weight this lifts off my shoulders.”

Christina still didn’t look up, didn’t answer.

“Christina, I’m so sorry about what happened. I couldn’t think of any other way to compel Sheriff Allen to talk. I knew he liked you. And I knew he had a conscience. I just had to figure out a way to tap into it, to give him the excuse I thought he wanted, deep inside, to confess.”

He drummed his fingers on the iron handle. God, he wished she would talk. Yell or scream or shout or something.

“I thought about telling you beforehand, but if I did, that would make you an accomplice to the trick. It didn’t have anything to do with trusting you. I just didn’t think I could put you in the position of having to manipulate a man about whom you cared.”

“I know that,” Christina whispered. “I knew it then. I was just—stunned, I guess. The thought of going to jail again—”

“I know,” Ben said. “I promise I’ll never do anything like that again.”

Christina shook her head. “Preventing Zak from being convicted of a murder he didn’t commit is a lot more important than my temporary discomfort.”

“Yes, but it was more than just playing on your terror of jail. It was taking advantage of your personal relationship. Using you to expose the man you’d—you’d become close to.”

Christina let out a soft, empty laugh. “Ben, you are so utterly … clueless.” She smiled, but it was not a happy smile. “I liked Doug fine, but I was never serious. I was just—” She bit down on her lower lip. “Never mind. Just never mind. Let’s leave.”

“No,” Ben said, “I want to say something. A few days ago, Maureen told me I was being selfish—about you. I didn’t understand what she was saying, but I think now maybe I do. I expect so much of you. I expect you to drop everything and come running every time I get the impulse to take some case. I become immersed in the case, so you have to, too. I don’t have a social life, so you can’t either. Who knows—if I hadn’t gotten in the way, you might’ve remarried, had some children. A life of your own.”

“Ben—”

“Let me finish. I’ve sucked up your whole life for years now. And it isn’t fair to you. I don’t want to hold you back, Christina. You’ve got to live your own life, and I don’t want to get in the way.”

“Ben, will you just shut up for a minute and listen?” She kicked back with her legs and lowered herself to the ground. “I don’t know what that woman has been telling you, but let me give you the straight scoop. I’m in charge of my own life. I had to learn at an early age to take care of myself, and I’ve been doing it ever since. Not to disillusion you, but you haven’t forced me to do anything. I’m the one who’s been making all the choices, all along. I decided to become a legal assistant, then later to go to law school, because it’s what
I
wanted to do. I decided I didn’t want to be another corporate law firm zombie, so I hitched my wagon to you, because I thought the work you were doing was more important than helping corporations screw one another back at the law firm. But make no mistake about it, Ben—you didn’t make me do anything. It was my decision the whole way.”

“Oh.” Ben felt breathless just from listening to that illuminating spiel.

“And I’ll tell you something else.” She jumped off the seesaw, flinging Ben downward. She walked to the other side of the seesaw. “I don’t regret a minute of the time we’ve spent together. Not one minute.”

She headed back toward her end of the seesaw, then stopped. “Except maybe that business with the creep who kept cutting off women’s heads and hands. I could’ve lived without that. But the rest of it—”

She turned and, smiling, gave him a firm thumbs-up.

“I
FOUND IT! I REALLY DID
!
I found it
!”

Deirdre burst into Ben’s hotel room just as he was packing. She was breathless with excitement, barely able to communicate.

“Found what?”

“The tree! The one I’ve been looking for all this time!”

Ben’s lips parted. “You mean—the world’s largest cedar tree?”

“Yes! I’m almost certain of it. It’s huge—over a hundred and seventy feet tall and twenty feet in circumference. And over seven hundred years old. Older than the Declaration of Independence. Hell, older than Columbus. This tree was huge when Henry the Eighth took his first wife. It was old by the time Lincoln was writing the Emancipation Proclamation!”

“Can you show me?”

“Can I? Come on!”

Ben rushed downstairs, following in Deirdre’s wake. He wondered if all dendrochronologists were this excitable. Certainly at the moment, she was not the traditional image of the cool, logical scientist. More like a high school senior who’d just been asked to the prom.

Ben climbed into the back of the Jeep, squeezing in next to Maureen. “So,” he said, “is she excited?”

Maureen winked. “I think you could say she’s excited.”

Deirdre slid into the drivers seat and pushed the Jeep into first gear. “You have to understand,” she said as she zoomed down Main Street, taking the quickest route out of town and into the forest, “these trees have individuality. They’re like people—friends—and each one of them is different.”

“So this one is like your great-great-grandfather?” Ben asked.

Deirdre laughed. “More like my great great great great great great great great great grandfather. But he’s magnificent. I’ve never found anything like this before. Not in my entire career.”

“How did you locate it?”

“I’ve been searching systematically since I arrived. Several campers had made reports of huge old-growth trees, but their directions were never very precise. I had to do a lot of wandering around, following hunches, analyzing the growth patterns. It’s taken months.” Her grin spread from ear to ear. “But I
found
it! Last night, long past midnight, I found it. I could barely sleep! It’s huge—bigger than the recordholder in Forks.”

They continued driving, taking the northbound path into the forest, then moving onto a northwest trail, plunging deep into the dense foliage, past the site of the murder, even past the site of the recent fire. Deirdre was taking them all the way, deep inside the forest.

Ben had to wonder once more at the marvelous and beautiful diversity of the ancient forest. There was so much life here, he thought. So much variety. Even a city boy like himself could share in Deirdre’s excitement.

Finally, when they were considerably deeper in than Ben had been before, Deirdre stopped the Jeep. “This is as far as we can go on wheels,” she explained. “From here on out, we walk.”

Except with Deirdre in the lead, it was more like a run. Ben did his best to keep up, tripping over bramble, letting branches sweep across his face. They yelled for Deirdre to stop, slow down, but she wasn’t listening. She was unrestrained, uncontrollable. She was going to meet a new old friend and there was no holding her back.

Until at last they arrived.

“No,” Deirdre said, almost under her breath.

Ben was well behind her. He kept running, huffing and puffing, holding the stitch in his side, till he finally arrived at the point where Deirdre had frozen in her tracks.

“No,” he echoed, when he saw what she saw.

“Oh, God,” Maureen said, pulling up behind them. “Oh, please God, no.”

The tree was gone. That tree and all its companion trees—gone.

The clear-cutters had moved in, just that morning, from all appearances. But they had been busy As usual, they started work with the largest and therefore most profitable trees, then moved outward in concentric circles, taking all the rest. There were four tree cutters working the area, systematically using their huge mechanical arms to grip and slice one enormous trunk after another.

In the space of a few hours, more than two hundred trees had been leveled.

“
No!
” Deirdre screamed. She ran forward, weaving between the cutting machines and fallen branches. Like a pigeon homing in on an old companion, she led them directly to the spot.

The tree was now nothing but a stump, flattened, less than a foot off the ground.

“My God!” Deirdre cried. Her face was wet with tears. “He’s been here since before Columbus.” There was a catch in her throat, like something was being ripped out of her insides. “Before
Columbus
!”

Ben didn’t know what to say. There were no words to express what he was feeling, much less anything that would be of any comfort to Deirdre. Instead, he simply stared at the flattened remains of that once-great cedar, and the remains of all the other immense cedars surrounding it, on and on, around and around, as far as he could see—the remnants of hundreds of lives that had survived for hundreds upon hundreds of years, only to be destroyed in a single morning.

I
WOULD LIKE TO EXPRESS
my appreciation to the dozens of forest rangers, loggers, scientists, and environmentalists who were willing to talk to me or my wife as I researched and wrote this book. I’d particularly like to thank Brita Cantrell, state director of The Nature Conservancy, for her assistance regarding the environmental issues discussed, as well as insightful suggestions stemming from her lifetime experience with the outdoors; and Daman Cantrell, of the Tulsa Public Defender’s office, for his assistance with various issues of criminal law.

As always, I must thank my friend and editor Joe Blades, surely one of the finest editors and human beings in all of publishing, for his support and guidance. I also want to thank Arlene Joplin, of the Oklahoma City U.S. Attorney’s office, for reading the manuscript before publication and giving me her always invaluable comments. And I must thank my wife, not only for her usual work as collaborator and editor, but also for her considerable research efforts that made this book possible.

The environmental facts, statistics, and information presented in this book are true, all taken from unbiased sources. All the actions depicted in the conflict between loggers and environmentalists are based on true events occurring during the last fifteen years. I’m sure there are and will continue to be a variety of opinions about how we should deal with our exponentially growing ecological crisis, but about these facts there is no question:

Before Europeans arrived, almost fifty percent of this country was covered by virgin forests. As recently as 1850, more than forty percent still was. Today, less than one percent is. And the trees are still being cut—even in our national forests.

—William Bernhardt

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

copyright © 1999 by William Bernhardt

cover design by Jason Gabbert

978-1-4532-7718-8

This 2012 edition distributed by MysteriousPress.com/Open Road Integrated Media

180 Varick Street

New York, NY 10014

www.openroadmedia.com