Dead Dry (21 page)

Authors: Sarah Andrews

BOOK: Dead Dry

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Mary Ann stared out the window for quite a while longer before she said, “I can’t believe Henry knew this and didn’t tell me.”

Rita Mae said, “Put it out of your mind, dear. He was desperately ill. A man can’t bear to let his wife down.”

Helga patted her wrist. “And he may not have known quite everything, dear. But you’re not alone now. Alone, we are kittens. Together, we are like a pride of lions.”

Mary Ann closed her eyes, dislodging a tear. “Doesn’t Dr. McWain offer any hope?”

Helga cleared her throat. When she spoke again, her voice had gone husky. “He made some suggestions. He believed in a policy of collecting rainwater for personal use,
but that, sadly, is against the law. All surface waters in the state of Colorado are already owned and apportioned.”

“Then we should invite him over for dinner and get acquainted,” Mary Ann declared, popping her eyes open and stiffening her lips.

Helga said, “I’m afraid that’s not possible, dear.”

“Why not? He was pleased to come once, so he’ll come again, I’m sure of it!”

Helga closed her eyes. “I’m sorry to tell you that he’s been murdered.”

RAY SAT AT THE TABLE IN HIS HOUSE, LISTENING TO the sounds of evening through windows left open in the hope of a breeze. Physically, he was alone, as he had been in all the years since his wife had died, but in his heart he reached out to the company of a great many people. He stared at a framed photograph of himself as a boy, posed in the house he had lived in then, with his parents and all of his sisters. In his mind, he assembled the support offered by his sponsor and all of the people who attended Al-Anon meetings with him. To this list he added his mother, who smiled brightly in the photograph, all of her children right there in front of her, healthy, happy, safe. Sitting next to her was his father, the first taints of the illness that would take this man from them already carved at his face. He lived on by the strong example he had set. And to his mental gathering Ray added Em Hansen, about as strong a woman as he had ever met.
Or maybe just hard-headed,
Ray decided angrily.
Hard-headed and uncompromising.

Ray squeezed his eyes shut and bowed his head in frustration.
There it goes again, my frustration coloring my judgment. Because she doesn’t share my beliefs, I decide that she’s wrong.

A car passed in the street. A dog barked. From somewhere down the block, a child shrieked.

I need to write a Tenth Step,
Ray told himself.
Acknowledge where I’m going wrong. How tough can that be?
He flipped open
The Twelve Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous,
and read aloud: “Step Ten: Continued to take personal inventory, and when we were wrong, promptly admitted it.”

What did I do wrong?
he asked himself in frustration. All his hard, painful work of two years in the Program seemed to vanish like sand washing out from under his feet, swept away by the flood of his emotions. Ray stared down at the book that lay on the table in front of him. He set it aside and laid a sheet of paper in its place. On that clean white plane he evoked God as he understood Him. A kind and loving God. An all-powerful God. A God capable of hard choices.

Ray’s heart raced with anxiety and confusion.
Heavenly Father, you never make mistakes. You are divine. I am human, and full of error. Please, let me know Your will for me.

The page shone brighter.

Ray wrote:
I judged Em Hansen harshly. I decided that she was a bad person, someone who is fornicating, having sex outside of marriage. I didn’t ask for the facts. I got angry without even knowing the truth.

Ray sat up straight and read his words over a few times. One side of his brain cheered him, telling him how good he was being. The other side of his brain growled like a chained dog.
It doesn’t take a genius to read that picture,
the dog snarled.
She’s lying to you. She’s sleeping with that guy, plain and simple. She’s just another fornicating gentile, deviling God’s plan for her, making it tougher for the rest of us. Serves her right if she gets in trouble trying to be a detective, when she’s really just a geologist.

Ray tightened his grip on his pencil, trying to focus on the next thing he was supposed to do. Follow the Steps, as the Program and his sponsor had taught him. His sponsor was a good man, a devout Mormon with a Temple Recommend. It wasn’t his fault his wife had turned to drink.

Ray felt the room start to tilt.
I must hang on to my wits,
Ray told himself.
I’m judging again! And where does judgment take me? Straight to hell.

He drove the pencil tip into the paper, writing as if he were trying to inscribe the words in stone:
When people don’t do things my way, I feel insecure.

Ray closed his eyes and stared at the ghostly afterimage of the page.

Moments ticked past.

He opened his eyes and wrote:
When Em follows her will, not mine, it hurts my self-esteem, and I get angry so I don’t have to feel that hurt. My anger is so strong that it feels like the Will of God to me, but it is not.

Ray dropped the pencil, snapped his hands together, and said the only Twelve-Step prayer he could think of: “God, help me not be angry at Em Hansen. She is a sick woman.”

As the words slithered out, he knew they were not right. Like a drowning man, he grabbed for another life ring, another prayer: “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference!”

The words rang against the naked walls of the room. The four naked walls. The walls that he had uncovered when his wife died. He had taken down her pictures—not just the photographs of her, and of himself and her together, smiling, looking fit and prosperous in God’s light—but also the other, more decorative pictures she had hung on the walls to make their house a home. Their home, this house that should have had her in it, and the children that had somehow never come to them.

His aloneness crowded in on him again, aloneness that followed him everywhere like a wolf, gaunt and hungry, dining on every shred of happiness that came his way.

Ray yanked his wallet out of his back pocket and dug through it feverishly, prizing up the tiny school photographs
of his nieces and nephews that he kept there. Their little faces smiled out at him, needing him, loving him. He lined their photographs up on the tabletop and brought nearer the big, framed photograph of his boyhood family. He peered in at himself as a ten-year-old and found a face intent with seriousness mixed with pride and terror, for he was the only son with so many to look after if—when—his father died. And now, as a forty-two-year-old man, Ray arranged all the photographs around his confessional sheet of paper, pulling together all the strength he could muster, adding the mental image of his sponsor.

The phone rang. He answered it. The welcome voice of his sponsor filled the line. “How’s it going, Ray?”

“Terrible,” Ray said, no longer surprised that this man somehow always knew when to call.

“Sounds like progress. I always thought you got through the first round of this program too easily.” He chuckled affectionately. “You mowed through the Steps first time like an Eagle Scout collecting merit badges.”

“Thanks.”

The jocular tone in the sponsor’s voice vanished, replaced by concern. “Oh, sorry … you’re down to one-word answers. You’re truly upset.”

“You know me well.”

“So, what have you written so far?”

Ray read the words to his sponsor.

The sponsor reflected back. “Security. Self-esteem. A powerful mixture. We all need them. What else?”

“I fell into self-pity.”

“Because …”

Ray’s voice escaped him. Em had put her finger right on it. She was terrifyingly smart. He opened his mouth several times but could not push out even a single word. Finally, on the fourth try, he whispered, “I miss my wife.”

“Yes.”

Ray’s voice cracked as he said, “Now
you’re
using single words.”

“How did she die, Ray?”

“Car crash.”

“Who was driving?”

The room went cold.

The sponsor whispered, “Who was driving, Ray?”

“I was.” The words drew out of him like a knife so sharp it cuts its scabbard.

“Was it your fault?”

“They … the officers that came to the scene … say it wasn’t. The other driver was drunk. They say he came out of a side street doing sixty. I never saw him.”

“Well, then.”

“But I told Em …” Ray’s face felt cold again, then his neck, then his chest, even in the heat of summer. It was as if his life was bleeding out of him, just as life had left his precious, innocent, beautiful wife in a steady, uncontrollable ooze.

“What did you tell Em?” the sponsor asked, when the silence had grown too long.

Ray yanked himself back from the image of his wife’s face turning gray even as she looked up into his eyes, a farewell lifting from her face without words. “I told her that … I wasn’t involved. Not there. I tell people she was alone.” A great sob broke loose from Ray’s chest, and in a voice as tiny and frightened as a child’s, he said, “She may as well have been. I have my whole family lying for me!”

“What’s Step One, Ray?”

“I admit—powerless—” Ray shifted the phone’s handset from his ear to his forehead and rapped it sharply against his skull. His face writhed, turned dark red with holding his breath in an effort to stanch the images. Pain shot through him like an arrow, bringing in its wake the whole chaotic night it happened—the sirens of approaching police, the hot ride to the hospital in the cruiser, trailing the ambulance, the looks of terror and heartbreak on the faces of everyone in his family, the blur that filled the days that followed. The void, the emptiness.

Then Em … Emily Bradstreet Hansen, the first face strong enough to dredge his heart and mind up from the past and into the present. A woman so much the same as him and yet so different—a match yet not a match, enough conundrum to last a lifetime. A woman he had almost killed in his pursuit of her. A woman who forgave him and offered him her rebellious friendship even after all of that.

“Ray?” His sponsor’s voice was a tiny bee in the earpiece.

Ray returned the phone to his ear and let his breath out in a long, ragged stream. “I’m here.”

NINETEEN

WEDNESDAY I WAS AT MY DESK AT THE UGS EXAMINING some Utah marbles—iron concretions from the Navajo Sandstone, which geologist Marjorie Chan noted in the journal
Nature
are remarkably similar to the “blueberries” found by the Mars rover Opportunity—when Fritz phoned.

“Want to come for a spin after work?” he asked.

“Uh … well …”

“Come on, I’ll take you across the Bonneville Salt Flats a hundred feet off the deck. A little low-level zooming always improves the blood flow.”

“I’m kind of busy tonight,” I said, though I wasn’t. I stared at the marble in my hand. Was I losing the ones in my head?

“Okay,” he said. He sounded doubtful. “Maybe a hike this Saturday?”

I wanted to ask,
Are you sure you’ll be available Saturday? What if you sleep in with whoever answered the phone at your house Saturday night?
My heart contracted around that thought, telling me that the problem was there,
not in my head. How could I tell him that I no longer wanted to be his pal, when I wanted to be so much more? But if I kept saying no, I wouldn’t see him at all, and that was unacceptable, too. “Call me as the week progresses,” I mumbled.

“Sure,” he said, his voice flat.

I remembered the touch of his hand against my back as we returned from dinner that Friday in Denver. Had that feeling flowed only one way?

Fritz didn’t say anything for several moments. Then, with concern in his voice, he asked, “Did they figure out who killed your friend?”

“No,” I said, glad to have something I could talk about that wasn’t about us. “We don’t even know how he got here from Colorado. He didn’t come on the airlines and ditto, public bus. It’s kind of difficult to track a hitchhiker, unless maybe he rode a truck like …” I stopped abruptly, wanting to kick myself for speaking so freely. I had very nearly spilled essential information.

Fritz said, “Maybe he hitched a ride on a private plane, like you did.”

The idea hit me like a brick. “Fritz, you might have something there. If someone was going to do that, where would he have to go from Sedalia, Colorado, to get a flight to Salt Lake City?”

“You mean, where was the nearest airport?”

“Yeah.”

“Give me a minute.” I could hear rustling as he unfolded an air chart. “Where is Sedalia, exactly?”

“It’s south of Denver, about three or four miles northwest of Castle Rock, which is the biggest town between metro Denver and metro Colorado Springs.”

“Okay, got it. There’s an airport there in Castle Rock. No, wait, there isn’t. Well, there are several private airstrips around there, and then there’s Centennial, which is halfway to Denver, and then Colorado Springs International. Let’s see …” Now I heard him tapping computer
keys. “Centennial is fully IFR, and of course C Springs has the juice …”

“You’re saying which airport you’d keep a plane at.”

“Exactly.”

“How would the police find out if someone had flown a passenger from there to here?”

“They’d subpoena the FAA for information about flight plans or go for the tower records. All those guys who track aircraft keep records of one kind or another. The towers keep tapes. Even if they left from, say, Colorado Springs and landed in Provo, there’d be a record of one type or another. And, as you’ll recall from your own pilot training, the flight plan would list the passengers though not by name.”

“Right,” I said. “But it would list the pilot’s name.”

“Yes, it would list both the pilot and the aircraft. But there’s an easier method for finding out who was aboard.”

“What’s that?” I asked, my excitement rising.

“If they landed at Salt Lake International, they’d tie down at one of the FBOs out here, and we pay plenty of attention to who comes and goes. It’s a security requirement. All doors and gates are kept locked and we have people who’ll stop anyone who tries to get out on the ramp without a clearance. We keep records of the tail numbers, and when someone buys gas and pays for the tie-down, we’ve got their credit card receipt. And even if your pilot doesn’t buy gas or stop long enough to tie down, he might own the aircraft. You can go online to look up aircraft ownership.”

“How do I do that?”

“The FAA site has a cross-reference. You can look up by owner’s name, or by tail number.”

I was so excited that I jumped to my feet. “Thanks, Fritz. You’re brilliant. Gotta go.”

“Wait! What’s the hurry?”

“I think you just turned the key. Really, I’ve got to report this right away.”

“Well, call me. There’s something I’d like to talk—”

“Sure,” I said, but I already had my hand on the button, cutting off the connection, and my eyes were scanning my desktop for Michele’s card. I found it and dialed.

When she picked up the line, I said, “Bet you dollars to doughnuts Hugo Attabury is a pilot. That means he might have a plane. Hell, a small-time tycoon like him—”

Michele was laughing at me again. “A what?”

“He’s got ‘hustler’ written all over him.”

“So wait, what’s this got to do with … ohhh, you think he flew McWain over here and bashed his head in and threw him in the quarry and flew home.”

“Could have been, huh?”

“It’s a long shot.”

“But easy to check out. First you’d get on with the FAA to find out if he owns a plane. Wait, I’ll do that myself.” I turned to the computer on my desk and brought up the FAA Web site. A few keystrokes later, I was into the aircraft registry. As I typed in HUGO ATTABURY, I said, “He doesn’t have to own it, he could rent one, and there you’d just go to the FAA anyway because the flight plan would be in his name. Just search backward from Friday—wait!” The site spat back my answer.

“What did you find?”

“Here it is: Beechcraft B55. Our boy flies a nice, fast little twin.”

“What’s a … oh, you mean two engines?”

“Exactly. A B55 is a Baron. It’ll cruise at, say 180 knots. That’s over 200 miles per hour. Even against a headwind coming over the mountains, he could leave Thursday afternoon, be here from Centennial in two hours, do his dirty work, and be back in Colorado in time for a nightcap. If he landed at Salt Lake International, he’d probably have parked at Million Air; that’s the FBO that receives most of the transient general aviation aircraft. They have guys out on the line who gas the planes, and they see the pilots and passengers, too. They are responsible for security just like on the commercial side of the airport. You can’t come and
go through there without being clicked through locked doors and gates by a guard. They’d have a log you could subpoena, and there are people at the desk who are trained to make personable contact with everyone who comes through there. Their job is to remember individuals, not like the cattle processing that goes on at the commercial aviation side. People think that general aviation is a security sieve, but an FBO will be able to tell you not only names but also what each passenger looks like, and how he took his coffee.”

“So he wouldn’t even have to kill McWain here. He could kill him in Colorado and fly him here dead.”

“He’d have killed him here. The boys on the ramp would notice if someone offloaded a bloody corpse. Besides, a man who owns his own Baron would bring the meat in on the hoof. The last thing he’d do is dispose of a nice plane like that just because he got a little blood in the cargo bay.”

“And he killed him why?”

“Ah … because the stiff knew he didn’t have any water for that big subdivision he has planned with Bart Johnson. They couldn’t let him live; he was going to keep them from overstepping their ecological footprint.”

“Overstep their footprint. I like that.”

“Don’t snicker at me. Get on the horn and subpoena those tower records.”

“Will do, cap’n,” she said, her sardonic laugh growing thicker.

“What’s so damned funny?”

“You just called your old colleague a stiff. In your mind, he’s changed from a human being to a piece in a puzzle. You’re in this for the excitement. As I said, Em, you’re hooked.”

“Have it your way, Michele.”

“You—” I heard a buzzer sound on her end of the line. “Hold a sec.” When she came back on the line, she said, “Who’s this Trevor Reed, and why is he calling me? He says he knows you.”

“Investment banker. Didn’t I tell you? I asked him to run down the Wildcat Estates development for us. Inside information.”

“Oh. Okay, then meet me at his office downtown in about fifteen minutes.”

“I’m on my way.”

“And, Em? Thanks.”

TREVOR REED LOUNGED BACK IN HIS CUSHY LEATHER swivel chair, examining me with the interest of a tailor examining his work. His office was huge and lined with exotic hardwoods, and his chair was imposingly large, too. It all but swallowed him, and exaggerated his youth.

Having eyed me to his satisfaction, he settled on a longer look at Michele. He obviously liked what he saw. “Thanks for running over so quickly,” he said. “I don’t have all that much to report, but I thought I should get it to you right away.”

“Fire when ready,” said Michele. She sat in one of the capacious side chairs, pen poised over a tablet.

“I have this: The Wildcat Estates project is in trouble. Their investors have been very unhappy with them because they have not come through with the promised requisites for the project.”

“Are we talking about the water?” I asked. “Or lack thereof?”

Reed momentarily looked blank. “No, my sources mentioned an easement.”

“What kind of easement?” Michele asked, narrowing her eyes in concentration.

Reed shifted in his chair. He fiddled with a pen. The corners of his mouth flickered into a smile. I realized that he was nervous in the way men get when they meet a woman they find particularly attractive.

I settled back to watch.

Reed leaned forward, putting his elbows on his desk.
“The county plan requires that a development of that size have two routes of egress,” he began. “Bart Johnson’s ranch is sufficiently large to make the project go—fiscally speaking—but it lacks a second way out. This is required in case of needing to move emergency equipment in, things like that. The problem is that his ranch is sort of pie-shaped, with just the narrow point connecting up to the one road. He needs to connect to another road on the far side of the hill, but he would have to cross the neighboring ranch, belonging to your murdered man, McWain. McWain wouldn’t give him an easement. To make things even more contentious, it seems that McWain purchased his ranch from Johnson’s brother. Another way of saying this is that Johnson’s brother sold it to McWain
instead
of Johnson.”

Michele said, “No easement, no development. No development, no cash flow.”

“Not only no cash flowing in, but lots of invested money going away. And Entwhistle’s bank could go under.”

“And you were able to find this out from your contacts.”

“Easily. A lot of investors are quite angry with the promoters of this project.”

Michele gave him a beaming smile as a reward. Reed actually blushed.

She tapped her pen on her tablet. “Anything else?”

The pleasurable embarrassment dissolved from Trevor Reed’s face. “Just this: I am aware of who these angry investors are. They are not the sort of people I’ll do business with.”

“What kind of people are they?” Michele inquired.

“The last time they wanted something from a rancher who hesitated about cooperating, they landed an unmarked helicopter on her spread and shot all her horses.”

I DROVE OVER TO THE SALT LAKE CITY POLICE DEPARTMENT. I needed to talk to a male friend, and Ray was going to have to do.

Ray startled when he saw me, his hands jolting outward as if to get his balance. He brought them in again as quickly, trying to cover his reaction. “Em,” he said. “What’s up?”

“Got a moment?”

He looked right and left. “Sure …”

“Maybe we could walk around the block?”

“Let’s walk to the north and east a ways, where at least there’s some shade.”

I nodded, and we set out. When we were a block and a half from the police station, I said, “I need your advice.”

“Here comes trouble.”

“I’m sorry, Ray, but I don’t know who else to ask.”

“All right, shoot.”

Now I didn’t know what to say. What was troubling me was gray and nebulous, like a cloud. “This case I’m assigned to,” I began.

“The corpse in the quarry?”

“Yeah.”

“You can ask to be removed from the case. Any time.”