Eleven Little Piggies (27 page)

But Winnie dropped Alan and pushed her body quickly in front of Doris. Standing fearlessly under the knife, she said softly into Doris's face, ‘Your children need you.' Her words made Doris pause for one critical second, and in that tiny interval, Ray and I reached her.

So we were on either side of her when her strong raised arms seemed to lose all their power, and she melted, weeping, into our arms. We held her tenderly, as the knife fell out of her hands. We helped her to her car and strapped her in. We held the passenger door open so that her silent needy son could climb in beside her and sit where he needed to sit, close by but not quite touching.

I
t took all winter to get Matt Kester's case into court. Ridiculous amount of red tape, I kept saying – we caught the guy red-handed, what more proof does anybody need?

‘Maybe a credible explanation?' the chief suggested, on a frigid day in late December. He was cranky from listening to the Christmas carols wheezing out of every storefront, and taking it out on me. ‘Motivation that a reasonable person can understand?'

‘You want reasonable murderers now?' We still had a week of fa-la-la to get through, and I was just as sick of it as he was. ‘No whacked-out sociopaths need apply in Rutherford, is that it?'

‘You know what I mean – quit pretending you don't. Get your ass in gear and connect the dots so it makes sense for a jury – how'd he do all this damage and why?'

I had most of the how typed into the case file by then, but building a coherent storyline that explained the why wasn't all that easy.

I thought then, and I'm still convinced, that Matt Kester's basic problem was that he started from a false premise. He thought his place in the family was as secure as his mother said it was, that he was such a star, admired by all, that any little glitches could be waved away. He brushed aside Ethan's jealousy and Henry's stern disapproval, totally discounted Doris's mastery of all the jobs he'd never bothered to learn at all, and believed he could get his father to forget his earlier treachery.

So he thought he only had to clear away a few obstacles – a brother who had been kind to him but wasn't going to change his mind about sand mining, a crony he'd brought along with him from his cocaine-dealing days on the rodeo circuit, who now wanted a bigger cut and thought blackmail would be fun to try. Just get rid of these speed bumps, Matt thought, and his dreams would come true.

He had always felt entitled to the top spot on the team, we learned by talking to some of his old buddies and ex-girlfriends. Wasn't he the handsome one, the brilliant, admired one who could sing and play the guitar and ride anything on four feet – wild bulls, crazy horses, whatever? But for some reason the other males of the family kept putting him back to the end of the line – treating him like Little Brother, the goof-up.

‘All that guff he threw at us about Kesters sticking together, that was just pure hot air,' Ray told me after he'd interviewed Aggie, the talkative cook. ‘Aggie told me Matt was always out for himself first and foremost, and everybody on the place knew it.'

Ray figured out another little piece of the scenario too. Both the pictures of the pickup that Tom Baines took the day Owen was found and Andy's own examination of the scene made it clear there were no fencing supplies in the pickup. But Owen went back to the barn to load them – why didn't he start?

‘He must have seen the doors open on the smokehouse and the walk-in cooler,' Ray said, ‘when he drove in the yard. So he must have bypassed the barn and gone right to the cooler.' And found Matt there, starting to lay a track of lighter fluid from the smokehouse into the cooler. We had found the can and lighter on a shelf behind the meat. ‘That started the fight.'

‘And Maynard must have been there with him, helping,' I said. (We had all gone back to calling him Maynard because ‘that Artie guy we've all known as Maynard' was too cumbersome to live with.)

‘I'm sure that's how it went down,' Ray said. ‘Owen would certainly have confronted his brother, and I believe Owen started dialing nine-one-one to report the attempted arson to police. That's when Matt went and got the shotgun he was carrying in the pickup from River Farm. We know Dispatch got an interrupted phone call from Owen's phone, but we've never found it – Matt must have thrown it in the river.'

All the physical evidence says that Matt pulled the insulated door shut on the cooler to mask the noise and shot Owen. Then Matt cleaned up the cooler while Maynard carried Owen's body to his pickup and took it to the field near the goose hunt. That's what Alan saw that day, and later told his mother. He's a poor sleeper so he often gets up very early and wanders around the farm watching the birds and animals wake up, Doris says.

Ray was indignant about the fact that we could have found some of this earlier if we'd had more staff to put to work on the case. ‘Hell, we hadn't even found all the vehicles on those three farms yet,' he said. ‘Let alone get a real handle on everybody's whereabouts that day. I told you, Jake, we've been totally snowed under with this case from start to finish.'

‘Have to try to get our homicides done in smaller venues from now on,' I said, and he gave me the special Bailey look that approximates a raised middle finger.

Josh Felder turned out to be key to understanding the conflicting motivations in that family's story – he really was a canny nerd, as Kevin had claimed. Though I wasn't exactly blown away when he announced, early on in his first morning of searching, that the piggin string Winnie had found in the loft was called ‘Lyle's Blue Gunslinger'.

‘That's fun to know,' I said, ‘but maybe not essential to the prosecution.'

‘He's just getting started,' Ray said. ‘Give him time.' And by an hour later he had found Matt's prison record, which put a stop to any misgivings I'd had about Josh's searching talents – in fact, I wanted to give him a Master Nerd award on the spot, because it blew the doors open on the whole case.

Matt Kester had done his time in Fulton State Prison, and his sentence coincided with one of Arthur Pritzer's, whom we all briefly went back to calling, ‘the no-good formerly known as Maynard'.

So it was pretty easy to establish that they had known each other there. Matt was still not talking, at that time, about the deal they made. But Josh found Arthur Pritzer's mother, who said Artie told her he was going to Minnesota ‘to hook up with an old buddy from his rodeo days'.

‘I think he meant an old buddy from Fulton Prison days,' Ray said.

I asked Josh, ‘How come you never found any of this criminal record before, though?'

‘I was only searching in Minnesota,' he said. ‘All those records said they were a founding family that never left Minnesota.'

‘That was before. This is now. You didn't look far enough.'

‘You didn't even want to hear all of what I did find,' he said. ‘Don't you remember? You all kept falling asleep.'

‘Because you only read us the dull parts. If you'd put the juicy parts first—'

‘Oh, for the love of God,' Ray said. ‘He's found it now, be grateful.'

The county attorney kept complaining to the chief that we weren't bringing him a coherent narrative. Somewhere he'd read an article that convinced him ‘good stories win cases'.

‘Chief,' I kept saying all winter, ‘we're not fucking novelists, we're cops.'

‘He wants a story,' the chief said. ‘Give him a story.'

Henry finally gave us the plot we needed. ‘Anna Carrie told Matt we were buying the River Farm,' he said. ‘I think Matt and that Maynard guy decided a farm with river frontage would be a perfect place to receive drug shipments.'

‘And they were getting started with that,' I told the chief. ‘We found the corner in the barn down there where they were breaking down product – they cut it with baking soda.'

‘But after Matt got here and heard about all the silica sand offers,' Henry said, ‘I believe he decided he'd rather get his share of that money.'

‘But he said he didn't care,' I said. ‘He said whatever Owen wanted—'

‘Jake, haven't you seen by now that Matt can never do anything straight up? He likes everything to be a little tricky.' He stared morosely into his coffee. ‘Like when he left that first time. If he'd of come to me like a man and said, “I hate farming, I want to get my share now so I can follow the rodeo full time”, I'd have set him up with everything he needed. Hell, he wasn't ever much use around the place anyway. But he enjoyed stealing it from me.' He shook his head mournfully. ‘I don't know. You raise three boys, think you treat them all the same, and one turns out to be a crook. Go figure.'

I took that sad story to the CA, feeling quite proud of myself. He said, ‘OK, I understand that part. What doesn't make sense to me is the extreme resistance of this one couple, Owen and Doris, to the sale. Why would they turn their backs on all that money?'

‘They had the same objections to the sand mining as hundreds of other people in those small towns along the river.'

‘Which are what?'

‘Oh, hell,' I said. ‘You haven't heard any of these arguments? Watched any of the hours of TV about it?'

He was shaking his head.

‘Tell you what,' I said. ‘I'm going to have my man send you a short movie which will explain it much better than I can.'

I turned Josh Felder loose on that task. ‘Make sure it's no longer than an hour,' I said. ‘The Second Coming wouldn't hold the CA's attention any longer than that.'

Josh found me when he had it ready, and asked, ‘You want to take a look before I send it?'

‘Maybe I better,' I said. It was February, the chief was on my back to get this case wrapped up, and I knew we'd never get the CA to sit through a second viewing. So I had Josh set it up at the conference table, and got Ray and Rosie to watch with me.

He opened on an almost-empty scene of a middle-aged man in shirt sleeves reading from a folder. He says, to someone off camera, ‘Sometimes the information about sand mining is so confusing it seems to create its own Wonder World. Listen to this from the Wisconsin codes: “More research is needed to determine concentrations of acrylamides in frac sand wash water when mines are using polyacrylamide polymer flocculation products”.'

‘That's beautiful,' said a voice off camera. ‘What does it mean?'

‘I have absolutely no idea.'

Somewhere out of sight, people laughed. But the man said, ‘There's a great deal of information like that about frac sand mining on the Internet, but you need an advanced degree to understand it. So people often just give up.'

Josh followed that with some rather horrifying footage, in which ordinary people in small towns along the river showed pictures of their hills and bluffs disappearing. Some of them cried.

Then he cut to four people talking about spills out of settling ponds into their pristine creeks and rivers, about hundreds of dead fish: ‘You can call it an incident if you want to,' one lady shouted at a company official at a meeting, ‘but hundreds of fish are dead in my creek and to me that's not an incident, that's a tragedy.'

The worst for me was a video featuring half-a-dozen people in the village of Maiden Rock, Wisconsin, talking about the ways in which their beloved community was being rendered unlivable. They talked about huge trucks running twenty-four/seven, wrecking the roads, spreading dust – ‘and this is silica dust: you breathe it and your lungs are full of tiny pieces of glass.'

‘We used to have a bed and breakfast in this town,' one of them said, ‘but it failed because who wants to pay for a bed where nobody gets a rest from the noise?'

‘It all happened so fast,' they said, ‘nobody knew what to do. Pretty soon they were just there, ripping up the earth.'

‘It's not just us we're worried about,' one woman said (she was blonde and handsome, like Doris), ‘but what have we done to our children? This place we love so much – will there be anything left for them?'

The whole segment took less than forty-five minutes and when it ended, the three of us were almost too horrified to talk, but we agreed that yes, this video ought to do it. I took it to the CA and told him, ‘If you need more than this, Doris Kester will be glad to explain.'

We had a heavy snow that afternoon, so I did a lot of shoveling before dinner. Ben and I had a very short playtime that night, and I was soon snoring loudly in my sack.

Somewhere in the pre-dawn hours the prehistoric lizard in the depth of my brain got fully rested, I guess, and began to amuse itself with a replay of the evening's games – but with a twist, of course. I was tweaking Ben's pink toes, crying happily, ‘This little piggy went to market,' as we wiggled and chuckled our way through the digits. But when I got to the end of the counting game, oh, woe! There was one more toe there, that hadn't gone to market, or come home, or made roast beef – hadn't done squat, this toe. Was just an eleventh toe sticking out there, an extra pink toe I had never seen before.

In the dream, I looked into Ben's face, which had been smiling as usual, but now looked worried. He explained – in the magical way of dreams, my pre-verbal son was somehow able to explain to me – that too much frac sand washing solution had seeped into his aquifer and now babies were being born with extra feet, hands, heads – ‘I was really lucky not to get one of those,' Ben said thoughtfully, ‘because you might not love me if I had two heads.'

Trudy woke me when I began hugging my pillow and protesting that I would always love it no matter what.

I sat up and said, ‘What? I didn't hear the phone.'

‘It didn't ring. You were dreaming.'

‘Oh. Did I wake you? Sorry.'