Off The Grid (12 page)

Chapter 22

Kathryn Tate was a relentless researcher. She’d clerked for a state judge back home in Texas and earned the reputation as someone who always came prepared for the fight. Her judge was a hopeless alcoholic, a fact that she made every effort to conceal. She enjoyed working with the man and he was fair, when he was sober. Fresh out of law school, she was writing his briefs and recommending rulings on his decisions. It was an unhealthy relationship and one that the elder should have known was improper, but for three years, Kathryn was effectively a federal judge without the robe and title.

She worked 70 to 80-hour weeks and rarely saw the outside world in the daylight hours. She had decades of experience to catch up on to keep up with his expanded role, so she would dig, and she was good at it. Lawyers were lazy and typically left the research work to paralegals alone, who were overworked and couldn’t possibly do a decent job of uncovering every necessary fact. This was a detriment to their clients and Kathryn didn’t see why they should suffer.

She had a knack for uncovering a piece of evidence or a witness that hadn’t been properly interviewed. She took pleasure in dropping hints to the prosecution – or in some cases the defense team. She got a kick out of showing them how bad they were at their jobs. She always remained anonymous, but watched the proceedings in each case to see how her efforts were used. In one case she drove five hours to review the paper medical records of a man suing a drug company. With very little effort, she found that a blood sample taken by a free clinic showed he was off the drug in question for months before his mysterious symptoms appeared. When the drug company entered the new evidence, it contradicted what
had already been submitted by the plaintiff to the court. The man’s lies were uncovered and the jury ruled in the drug company’s favor.

Soon after the case was concluded, she was offered a job at the drug company - a personal recommendation from one of the defense lawyers. How they had learned of her help, she didn’t know, but she took the chance to move on from her clerkship and joined the drug company. She became permanent a member of the legal team as a researcher and advisor. After a few years, she started working as an independent consultant to several large companies and moved into management. She hit it big by turning around a large software company. But in all her dealings she never forgot the foundation of her success – research and finding the information that most people ignored.

She had no family to speak of and hadn’t stayed in one area of the country for more than a few years since law school. When James Beckman called, she could tell that he was running out of ideas for MassEnergy and brought her in just to rock the boat. Maybe an outsider’s perspective could get it done, he said. Even though Kathryn was his call, he still questioned her value at every turn. He was also driven, so despite his lack of trust, she understood where he was coming from. He wanted to win too. She’d yet to fail at anything she’d ever done on a professional level and she was giving all she had to MassEnergy.

On the personal side, that was another matter. There had been a few boyfriends here and there. A painter in Dallas, a swim coach in South Carolina – even a truck driver in the Mid-West. They never panned out. The guys were all right, but she could never commit the time and effort it takes to form a real bond. She was always the one to leave. On to a new city and professional challenge.

As she pulled her hair back into a clip and finished applying her makeup, she wondered what exactly she was thinking when she asked Luke to dinner. Yet she didn’t hesitate to put on a scoop neck black dress that showed a little more cleavage than her standard work attire. Nothing wrong with a woman looking nice, she thought.

She had hoped Luke would have made the
Kirkhorn connection on his own. Better to let him figure it out, than have her spoon feed him, but the clock was ticking and they needed to move on it.

She wasn’t going to lose this fight. She was playing every card she had, but she would just play this particular card over a nice meal, in the company of a handsome man.

***

Luke looked up the restaurant online from his workstation. Burrow’s was a posh eatery that bragged of its extensive wine collection and hand-selected seafood and steaks. Jacket required. What was he doing? Dating the boss wasn’t a good idea – even one that looked like Kathryn Tate. Maybe a date wasn’t her intent at all. Besides, he needed to find out what
MassEnergy had to do with Professor Kirkhorn. Lunsford had told him to be whatever MassEnergy wanted him to be, so that was all he was doing. Right?

Luke collected his phone from the guard at the front entrance without incident. He left the office at 5:15 after switching into his running gear for the quick jog to his apartment. He had gotten into the habit of jogging to work in the morning and then home again each night with his work attire in a backpack.

He used the time to collect his thoughts each morning and then wind down each night. In the evenings he usually took a circular route back to his apartment so he could get a few more miles in. Tonight he cut through Mainfair Park to get home as quickly as he could.

Luke grabbed his mail from the lockbox on the first floor of his building. He thumbed through it as he walked up the stairs - water bill, garbage and recycling bill, several pieces of junk mail and a large envelope from Mill Creek. He entered the apartment and opened the envelope. Inside was a charcoal drawing from Tilly on a piece of light green construction paper. The drawing was of him standing next to a motorcycle. The likeness was pretty good and it was obvious that Tilly had spent a considerable amount of time on it. She wrote a note on the back, “See you soon.”

He felt honored to receive the drawing. It was the only such gift he’d ever received. That kid’s a keeper, he thought. He hung it on the refrigerator and snapped a picture of it with his phone. He made the photo his phone’s background image.

After jumping in the shower, he shaved off the day’s worth of scruff and got dressed. New black slacks and a trendy sport coat. He hightailed it to the metro station just in time to catch the train downtown, unsure of what was going to happen over dinner.

Chapter 23

As Luke rode the train he thought of professor Blaine
Kirkhorn. He was in Energy and Mineral Engineering at Stanford, specializing in geology and mining practices. Before moving to academia, he worked for several natural resource companies, advising them on drilling and mining in an effort to have them do the least harm to the environment. He was an ardent environmentalist, which often came into conflict with the chosen profession that hacked its way into the earth and didn’t look back.

Luke took a basic geology class from
Kirkhorn his freshman year and liked the man’s frank manner, but he was not a student favorite. He liked to call on students who he knew didn’t have a good grasp of the subject in question to make an example of them. The Socratic Method, or just learning by embarrassment, he called it. He had a passion for his geology work and expected others to give it the respect it deserved.

When
Kirkhorn advertised a teaching assistant post, Luke was the only student to apply. Kirkhorn was reluctant at first to take on a freshman, especially one who was an athlete, being of the mind that younger students wouldn’t stick around long enough to do him any good. Luke proved him wrong and for three years worked any number of jobs in his laboratory and office. The scope of work was outside of Luke’s major of engineering, but the work was basic and he could fit it in between his soccer practice schedule and other odd jobs. Kirkhorn relied on him to grade papers, keep his appointment calendar, file paperwork and occasionally help out in the laboratory.

Luke would sometimes go weeks at a time without seeing
Kirkhorn, who liked to spend his evenings at home, but would often return to work at 11 p.m. or midnight and work until daybreak. He left detailed notes for Luke to follow so he was rarely left with nothing to do.

Kirkhorn
gave Luke a doorstop as a thank you gift for his nearly four years of service to him. It was some rare rock that apparently meant something to the professor, but much less to Luke. He also presented him with a strong letter of recommendation for any prospective employer, commending his work ethic and academic acumen. The day Kirkhorn gave Luke the letter was the last time the two ever saw each other.

***

Luke arrived at Burrow’s Restaurant first and ordered a beer.

“Domestic or imported, sir?” The waiter looked down his nose at Luke with mild distain. Ordering a beer at this upscale restaurant was obviously frowned upon. 

“Maybe just a bottle of red wine instead. You pick.”

“Very good choice.”

He glanced around at the other tables – not a beer glass to be found. He wasn’t much into fancy restaurants, preferring the company of strangers seated at the counter of a diner or on the curb outside a taco truck. No worries about a wine list at those places. 

The waiter uncorked the bottle and made a point to tell Luke the wine “has to breathe for a few minutes.” Luke was afraid to touch the bottle for fear that the waiter would slap his hand. He wanted a beer.

Kathryn arrived just in time for the glasses to be poured. She always looked good, but until tonight he had only seen her dressed for work. This was a whole new side of her. She looked fantastic and had turned a few heads since walking through the front door.

“Thanks for coming,” she said. “I’ve always wanted to try this place. I walk by it just about every day, but have never stopped in.”

She took a few sips of the wine and fiddled with the glass, glancing around the room, taking in all the tables that were filled with couples like them. Couples who were pawing each other and gulping even more wine. Luke pulled at the cuffs of his shirtsleeves and squirmed in his jacket. He hadn’t touched his wine.

Perhaps sensing that his environment wasn’t the setting she intended, she downed her glass of wine and pushed back her chair.

“You know,” she said. “I’ve just gotten the biggest urge for a greasy hamburger. What do you say we-.“

“Agreed.”

Luke quickly paid for the wine with a smile - happy to be moving on from the pretentious restaurant. There was a burger joint a few doors down that looked promising. They ordered at the counter and got their food in little red baskets lined with wax paper. There was a tall table with stools open by the front window and Luke happily poured them each a glass of an Oregon microbrew. Beers from the Northwest were always better than the stuff he used to get in California.

Luke felt the tension in his shoulders relax as he finished off his first beer. Kathryn wasn’t too far behind him. Before they were done eating they’d polished off two pitchers of beer.

The place was packed, so they had to sit directly next to each other to avoid shouting. Luke didn’t mind, but he was anxious for her to tell him about Professor Kirkhorn.

“OK, so here it is,”
Kathryn said. “When Warren Evans took his deep-well mineral samples during that first Pueblo Bluff dig in 1995 he was one of 26 people on the dig. Since Cornell University was footing the bill for the work, they kept a detailed work record throughout the summer, although they probably didn’t know what he was up to.”

“How did you get Cornell’s records?”

“That’s a minor point,” she said. “The team from Cornell wasn’t the only organization given access to the site that summer. Barbara Meyers wanted to cover all of her bases, so she brought in a natural resource company that was charged with preparing an Environmental Impact Statement that would be used if a developer wanted to move forward with developing the land for a ski resort.

“Natural Path Engineering – or NPE - had five men who stayed in a motor home for two months that summer as they surveyed the land and took samples of their own,” Kathryn said. “Blaine
Kirkhorn was among them.”

“That sounds right,” Luke said. “He used to work for NPE before he accepted a teaching position at Stanford.”

“When Meyers was told a Native American encampment used to be located on the land, she was understandably upset and disappointed, but not at the students or faculty from Cornell,” Kathryn said. “She took issue with the Environmental Impact Statement that NPE had presented her. Nowhere in the hundreds of pages of material was there any mention made of a historically sensitive site or accessible material that would have dated back to that point. In fact the statement basically gave the go-ahead to develop the land with no reservations at all.”

“So NPE missed something.”

“That’s what Meyers thought too, so like any red-blooded American, she sued them. The case was settled out of court the following year, but the original filing of the lawsuit was still on record, which is how I found Kirkhorn’s name attached to the case. As far as I can tell, it was the last job he ever did for NPE.”

They were on their third pitcher of beer and Luke was starting to feel a bit more than a simple buzz.

“OK, but I was just a kid when this all this happened. I’m still not seeing a tie to me.”

“I know, I know. Just listen,” she touched her finger to his lips to get him to stop talking. “I think that
Kirkhorn found something that summer, just like Evans did. It might not have been some world-altering discovery like ARC, but for a man who had worked decades in the minerals business and had done quite well for himself, he sure was in a hurry to get out fast.”

“Or maybe he was tired of living in mobile homes with four other dudes? Maybe he wanted a change of scenery.”

“Maybe. There was only one way to find out. A year and a half ago, I flew down to Palo Alto to see him at the university, but found out he had died of a heart attack just a week earlier. Try as I might, I haven’t been able to find any of the records of his work and research.”

“But you think it has something to do with ARC?”

“I know it’s a loose coincidence, but two brilliant scientists were working in the same exact spot years before one of the greatest discoveries of our lifetime was uncovered. I find it hard to believe that Kirkhorn didn’t know what Evans was doing.”

“But you hit a road block since Professor
Kirkhorn died. He’s not around to tell you what he saw that summer.”

“No, but I know someone who worked with him for his entire college career.”

“You think that I know about an
assumed
discovery that happened when I was in elementary school? I worked for him, true. But he rarely ever shared any of his research with me. I took care of grading papers and stuff like that. I wasn’t his lab partner,” Luke said.

“You got this job on your own and I didn’t seek you out, but when I saw that letter of recommendation
Kirkhorn wrote on your behalf, I thought it might be worth a try to find out what you know.”

“So all the testing I’ve done over the last few weeks, that wasn’t part of the candidate class training?”

“Yes, it was. I couldn’t bring you into our confidence – into the inner workings of the company until I knew you were trustworthy. The tests were different for everyone, but they all included some psychological elements that told us whether or not a candidate is a person who can be trusted.”

“And I passed?” Luke questioned any test that claimed to show such a thing – especially in his case.

“Don’t sound so surprised,” she said, with a smile. “You’re worrying me slightly.”

Luke recovered quickly.

“It just seems like a difficult thing to test for. How can you really tell if someone is being truthful? That’s not a test. Its something you feel. Something you earn over time.”

“Maybe it’s the alcohol talking and my guard is down,” she said. “Maybe tomorrow I’ll regret saying it, but the test you took had very little to do with me wanting you to move to the
Dev Floor. I think you might be able to find the Kirkhorn link, but I also want people on our team who care about what we’re doing. I can see it in your eyes – this is a passion for you too and you want to find those answers.”

“I just don’t think I had enough exposure to his actual work to offer any insight. There were times when he would direct me in his lab, but it was simple stuff like measuring amounts and checking temperatures. I recorded some of the data, but it was only every few months that he would ask for my help. The next day it was like it never happened.”

“How do you mean?”

“Like I said, he usually worked alone in his lab most of the time, but every few months he requested that I help him over a weekend in the lab. Since he was so lenient of my frequent absences from the job, I made sure to help out whenever he needed me. I was just a second set of hands. He didn’t explain what he was working on and he didn’t mention the weekend projects to me until it was time to work another weekend.”

“What about the data you recorded? Where did that go?”

“He had a laptop inside the lab that I used and we filed everything away.”

“Do you remember if it was issued by the university?”

“No it wasn’t. The university used PCs, but this was a Mac.”

“So it was probably his personal computer.”

“I never thought about it much, but yes, it probably was. I thought that it was a computer for the lab only because I only used it there.”

“So what does that tell us?” Kathryn asked.

“It means that whatever experiments he was doing right in front of me, weren’t university sanctioned,” Luke said.

“I agree. So the laptop is the key if we want to find out what exactly he was working on, but I have no idea where it would be.”

“His possessions had to go somewhere after he died. What about his wife, Loretta? She probably still has all of his things.”

“He wasn’t married,” Kathryn said.

“Yes, he was.”

“There is no record of him being married. Even on his death certificate – and yes, I did go as far as to check it,” Kathryn said.

“That doesn’t fit. He wore a wedding ring. I noticed it because he always took it off when he was working in the lab. He even had me send Loretta flowers on their anniversary.”

“I don’t know who you were sending flowers to, but it wasn’t his wife.”

“I guess we should start with her,” Luke said.

“Do you have her number?”

“No, but I’ve got a pretty good idea how to find it in the morning.”

The bartender made the rounds to all the tables and announced it was last call. It was nearly 1:30 a.m. Luke couldn’t believe they’d stayed there so late. They both had had a lot to drink. The downtown streets of Portland were relatively safe at night, but Luke decided the right thing to do was to walk her back to her apartment, given the late hour. She didn’t protest.

She lived in a 15-story complex on SW Salmon Street near Chapman Square. Standing outside in the breeze, her hair blew into her face and she was repeatedly tucking it behind her ear.

“You want to come up for some coffee?” she asked. “Maybe sober up a little before heading home.”

Her eyes told him to take her up on her offer. He knew what going up to her apartment would lead to. They were standing just inches apart. The writing was on the wall, but rejecting her could backfire too.