Old Chaos (9781564747136) Page 12

“Who else what?”

  “His girlfriends.”

  “You’re barking up the wrong tree. Look, Fred’s women were decoration. We knew we were.”

  “And didn’t care?” Charlie’s voice came out harsh.

  Kayla gave him a wide, white-toothed grin. “Arm candy. Some men, especially businessmen, like to be seen in public places with expensive women hanging on their arms. It’s a role I enjoy playing once in a while. I figure Fred wrote me off on his taxes. He was a bottom-line kind of guy.” The devilment went out of her expression. “Rob should be looking into the good old bottom line. Fred thought that way. It simplified reality for him and made him boring.”

  “And dangerous,” Meg murmured.

  Kayla leaned back again, exhausted. “And very, very dangerous. The stupid shit.”

  They left shortly after that, both of them depressed, though for different reasons. Meg was aware that she had done a bad job of questioning Kayla. She hoped Charlie wasn’t too disillusioned, but he wasn’t a child. If he was going to be in love with Kayla, he ought to be in love with the real Kayla, not some Florence Nightingale caricature.

  When she had negotiated the tangle of downtown traffic and headed the Accord east on I-84, she said, “You’re brooding, Charlie. What’s on your mind?”

  “I wish I could afford arm candy.”

  Meg laughed. “No, you don’t. She said it was a role. Are you in love with her?”

  “Maybe. In lust, you bet.”

  “Then you ought to think about the missing eye.”

  “She’s a beautiful woman, with or without two eyes, and I didn’t fall for her face.”

  “That’s noble. The disfigurement will change her.”

  “You don’t believe me?”

  Meg zipped around a slow semi and a Winnebago. “Kayla’s physical perfection has been part of her personality her whole life. From what she said, I suspect her mother fed into it. The surgeons will sculpt a new cheekbone for her—”

  “And pop a prosthetic eye into place.”

  “Exactly. And she’ll look much as she always has. Beautiful. But she’ll know she’s no longer perfect. How she deals with that will tell you a lot more about her than you know now. I have confidence in her, but it’s going to change her.” Silence followed.

  “Hey, you just drove past the I-205 exit.”

  “I always wanted to cross the Bridge of the Gods.” Traffic began to thin out.

  Meg glanced at the scenery. There was an outlet mall on the right. To the north, the towers of the old Troutdale aluminum plant rose with the river in the background. For once, it was not raining. The afternoon overcast was pleasant—no glare. She passed three semis of the sort that need half a block to turn on city streets. On the freeway they were no problem.

  “Tell me about my cousin,” Charlie said abruptly.

  “I’m a biased witness.”

  “Okay, counselor, I’ll be more specific. I was in town a year and a half ago, as you know, so I sent Robert an e-mail, just to say hello. I thought I was being polite. He didn’t reply.”

  “The ultimate contemporary insult.” A pickup on mega-wheels roared up behind Meg and passed. “Rob’s attitude toward your family is not positive. He likes to pretend they don’t exist.”

  “Why?”

  “You really don’t know? I guess that’s possible. Ancient history.”

  “Jurassic? Pre-Cambrian? I am a geologist.” Charlie sighed. “If my grandfather did something unspeakable—”

  “Well, I think he did.”

  “Robert’s father, my Uncle Charlie, was killed.”

  “Yes. Rob was eight. He idolized his father, who sounds like a nice man. Rob’s mother died in a car wreck within the year.”

  Charlie whistled. “I didn’t know that. That’s tough.”

  “Yes. Fortunately, Rob was staying with his grandparents, his Guthrie grandparents, and they were able to comfort him a little, in spite of their own loss. He was starting to adjust when your grandfather sued for custody. Rob had never met him.”

  “The old bastard.” Charlie relapsed into silence.

  Meg drove past Rooster Rock and Multnomah Falls. They were now well into the Gorge Scenic Area. “I think Mr. O’Neill reckoned without the strength of community opinion. Robert Guthrie ran the local drug store, complete with soda fountain. Hazel Guthrie, well, she had my job and she was one of the great librarians.” Meg wasn’t kidding. Hazel Guthrie had developed a system remarkable for a rural county in that era and had gone on to institute policies that set a national model. “The Guthries won the court case easily, but to a child the suspense must have been appalling.”

  “I’m surprised Robert didn’t toss me out into the ice storm.”

  Meg laughed. “He’s not an idiot. He likes you well enough, just don’t expect him to embrace your family.”

  “Except for Grandpa, they’re good people, and the old man is safely dead.”

  They had reached Cascade Locks. Conversation languished while Meg found the narrow, very high bridge and drove across it. The view might be spectacular, but she wasn’t about to take her eyes off the center line.

  When they reached the other side and turned upriver, Charlie let out his breath in a long relieved whoosh.

  Meg smiled. “Escaped with your life?”

  “When I’m on a bridge like that I think about earthquakes.” He returned to the subject at hand. “So Robert stayed in Klalo with his mother’s people, and thirty-five years later, he’s still there. Did he even leave to go to college?”

  Meg bristled. “He got a TRS-80 Model I computer for Christmas when he was ten. When he graduated from high school, he ran off to California, found work in the computer industry, and made good money.”

  Charlie whistled.

  “You could do that without a degree in those days. Rob married and they had a daughter, divorced when the girl was six or seven. When his grandfather died, Rob came home and found his grandmother suffering from congestive heart failure. He sold out and came back for good. Sheriff McCormick hired him as a deputy, because Mack wanted to computerize the department. Rob decided he liked the job, so he’s still here, though his grandmother died several years ago. As for college, he has a degree from Cal Poly, but I think he stumbled into it taking night classes.”

  “Hmm. What’s his degree in?”

  Meg glanced at him sideways. “Graphic design.”

  Charlie sat bolt upright. “As in comic books?”

  “He was into website design. That was way back, remember. He came up with routines that are still used. He holds the rights.”

  “No kidding. Why in hell is he working as a cop?”

  “Well, Charlie, why in hell am I a librarian? Why is Kayla a nurse?” She overtook a log truck that was laboring upward in the slow lane. “Why does Beth McCormick teach dyslexic teenagers to read? Do you plan on joining Halliburton in Dubai when you finish your doctorate?” He had told her he was studying hydrology because he thought finding potable water was going to be a major problem worldwide in the coming decades. Finding clean water was a lot less lucrative than finding oil.

  “I get the point.”

  Meg wondered if he did. His generation was the first to grow up in the era of corporate triumphalism. Still, as a veteran of the first Gulf War, he must have an angle on profiteering, and by indirection, on Fred Drinkwater, whose beginning—and end—had to be profit.

  ROB TAPPED THE spreadsheet Jeff had printed for him. “I have the feeling it’s all here, lost in a maze of phony corporate names.” He was lying flat again and let the sheet fall on his stomach. “I need to talk to Beth.”

  Jeff nodded. “Funeral’s tomorrow.”

  Rob shut his eyes. It was Sunday. He wasn’t ready for Mack’s funeral, and would be no more ready tomorrow. Beth had asked him to serve as an honorary pall bearer. At least there was no heavy lifting in prospect. Mack’s body had been cremated. “Where is she?”

  “They released her from the hospit
al. I think she’s at your house. You’re not going to walk there, are you?”

  Rob levered himself up to a sitting position, swung his legs over the side of the hide-a-bed, and stood in one sharp jab of pain. The spreadsheet slid to the floor.

  He had stopped taking the hydrocodone entirely after another bout of hideous dreams. Mack had figured in his nightmares, and the Gautiers, of course. As nightmares went, they were mundane recollection, but that didn’t stop them being hideous.

  Rob showed the sergeant out and made his way upstairs, a grim process. His legs felt weak. He took a long shower, shaved, and was struggling into jeans and a sweatshirt when Meg returned from the grocery store. She bawled him out while she pulled his socks on and tied his sneakers.

  “I have to go see Beth.”

  “And it won’t keep until tomorrow…” She cocked her head, eyes narrowed. “Tomorrow is the funeral with all that that entails.”

  He waited. One of the many good things about Meg was that she was reasonable.

  “All right,” she said. “I’ll go with you.”

  “I need to talk to Beth alone.”

  Again, a considering pause. Rob confided in Meg, more than he should, properly speaking. She had acted on what he’d told her in confidence when she warned Beth about the landslide hazard, so she was capable of breaking faith. On the other hand, she had been right.

  He could see that running through her mind, as it was going through his. Before she could protest, he added, “What I have to say will reflect on Mack. I think Beth will come around to my way of thinking, but I don’t want to embarrass her in front of anyone, not even you.”

  “All right,” she said again. “I’ll walk over with you. While you talk to her, I’ll go upstairs and get your uniform.”

  Rob groaned. He loathed uniforms, but Mack’s funeral called for full dress.

  Meg’s eyes narrowed to fierce slits. “I don’t regret warning her, and I’d do it again.”

  “It’s okay,” he said hastily.

  Her face relaxed, and she smiled up at him. “I do understand where you’re coming from.”

  Regretting that she was so short, he kissed the top of her head.

  She gave him a swat on the seat of his Levis. “That bruise of yours is traveling south. It’s also turning color. Do you realize you’re going to have green cheeks?”

  Beth sat on the living room sofa with her broken leg stretched out on a hassock. She was only marginally less miserable than she had been at the hospital and still very tired, but anger propped her up. The grandchildren had swarmed in and out for an hour after breakfast, which had cheered her a little. Then their mothers had carted them off to church, en masse to Mass, and fury had swept back over her.

  The doorbell rang. She heard Dany trot down the hall to answer. Meg’s voice and Rob’s. Beth went cold. She didn’t want to see Meg. Meg was too sympathetic. Then she heard the women’s voices retreating down the hall, Rob came in, and she remembered the reasons she didn’t want to see him, either.

  Perhaps he sensed that, for he didn’t smile. “Sheriff?”

  Mute, she nodded and watched him make his slow way across the living room. She had talked to him half a dozen times since the landslide, but the last time she had seen him, he’d been holding her hand and saying reassuring things as the EMTs shoved her into the ambulance. Then he had been covered with mud and sweat. Now he wasn’t, but the toll he had paid in the rescue was written in his stiff bearing and on his face.

  He came to a halt near her outstretched foot. “You’ll have to excuse me for standing. I need to talk to you about these investigations.”

  “Plural?”

  “You heard about Fred Drinkwater’s death, didn’t you?”

  “I heard he was dead.” And good riddance.

  “He may have been murdered.”

  “Oh, my!” She sat up straight.

  “Did you know him well?”

  “You mean, did Mack know him well,” she said flatly. She had been thinking about her quarrel with Mack the night before the slide. She had accused her husband of taking a bribe—the too-generous deal Drinkwater had given him on the house. She closed her eyes, because she wasn’t going to cry in front of Rob, not again. “We didn’t know Fred well. He was just another developer. Mack saw more of him than I did, as you might expect.”

  “What about Fred’s personal life?”

  “His women?”

  “Anything.”

  “Well, Kayla, of course. Darla Auclare. And somebody suggested he was playing around with our wonderful county clerk, but that’s probably just a rumor.”

  “Tergeson’s daughter?”

  “Inger Swets.”

  “ ‘No sweat with Swets,’ ” they chorused. Rob grinned.

  Beth felt her neck muscles ease. “That slogan’s like a lot of political language. Catchy but doesn’t mean much. Not that I know anything bad about Inger. Mack thought she did a good job.”

  “She married Larry Swets, didn’t she?” Rob had gone to school with Larry.

  Beth nodded. “The barge captain—gone a lot on the river. No kids. I understand that’s an issue for Karl.” She thought about Fred’s womanizing and shook her head. “A crime of passion seems so unlikely. Fred wasn’t the kind of man who arouses grand passion.”

  “That’s what Meg thinks.”

  “She’s right.”

  “There’s the ex-wife. Were they still together when he came here?”

  “Five or six years ago? He was already divorced.” Impatience coursed through her. “Look into his investors. Matt Akers, the contractor, put money into Fred’s projects. They weren’t partners, but I’m pretty sure Akers invested. Mack said there was California money to begin with, too.”

  “Where did Fred come from?”

  “I don’t know where he was from originally. Before he moved here, I think he worked in the Seattle area. I’m not the one you should be asking, Rob. I wish you’d sit.” It felt as if he were towering over her, though he was an inch or so under six feet.

  He gave her a crooked smile. “I could lie at your feet, Madam Sheriff, but not sit.” He walked over to the mahogany mantel and touched it. “Somebody’s been dusting.”

  “Probably my daughters-in-law. They’re house-proud.” She twisted sideways so she could read his expression.

  He leaned both arms on the back of one of Hazel Guthrie’s tall chairs. “Better? Less ominous?”

  “Somewhat. You said investigations.”

  “Drinkwater’s murder, and a close look at the process that led to approval of Drinkwater’s development.”

  “That will put a strain on the department’s resources.”

  “Minetti wanted to turn the second investigation over to the state.”

  Beth made a face. “What do you want to do?”

  She watched him take a long breath. He walked back and stood in front of her again. “I hate to agree with Earl, but I think it would be best to call in the state right now, today. If we don’t, pressure from the insurance companies, from victims like the Vander-brooks, and from the Gautiers’ survivors, whoever they may be, will force the commissioners to call them in.”

  “And the commissioners are part of the problem.”

  “Exactly.” He smiled at her. “If you ask the state to take over investigation of the missing LHA notice—”

  “The what?”

  He explained.

  “Meg told me about that.” Her mouth felt dry. He was saying she should put distance between herself and the commissioners. “Somebody with courthouse access suppressed the first notice—is that what you think?”

  “I’m not positive, but the state has a record of the WSU survey, the first one. They have no record of the second survey, the one the commissioners accepted, the one Fred’s geologist produced. That being so, the problem has to lie here—at the courthouse. If I do the investigation, I’ll need to look at every document involved, of course, but I’ll also need to look at procedu
res and board minutes. How does a geological survey get to the Records office? Who prepares the presentation when a developer’s plans are on the agenda? And so on.”

  Beth interrupted him. “You could do it, Rob.”

  “I could, but it might not be wise.”

  “Because you’re employed by the county? I see. You’d better tell me what to do. We can call now, can’t we?”

  “The sooner the better.” He hesitated. “Everyone who was in a position to get at those records will come under scrutiny, including me. It’s not going to be pleasant.”

  “Mack—”

  He held up a hand. “I’m sure Mack had nothing to do with it.”

  “Why? Instinct?” Her voice shook.

  Mack was probably in the clear because he was dead before Fred’s murder. Rob didn’t have to say that and didn’t. “The state investigators will look into Mack’s official records and into his personal finances.”

  Beth shivered.

  He was watching her. “The real problem will lie with the commissioners. You’ve been sworn in, haven’t you?”

  She nodded. Karl Tergeson had administered the oath at the hospital the night before with John, Dany, and Beth’s wide-eyed roommate watching. It had felt very strange.

  “Then you have the authority to act. They can’t stop you. Tergeson and Auclare will be under the gun. At the very least, they’ve been careless.”

  Beth’s stomach churned. “What if they were all in on it? The commissioners, the clerks…Mack.”

  Rob met her eyes. “I talked to Maddie Thomas before the landslide, when Charlie told me about the first survey. If the corruption were that widespread, I think she would have picked up on it.” He didn’t say false gushing things about Mack’s incorruptibility. He was assuming Mack’s innocence, not making a big deal about it. That made Beth feel better.

  She said abruptly, “When you said it wouldn’t be wise for you to investigate the approval process, you didn’t mean you were worried about your job, did you?”

  His eyebrows shot up. “No!”

  “Spell it out for me.”

  He stood still, head bent while he thought things over. At last he looked up. “Everybody knows Mack was my mentor, and sooner or later, someone will be charged with this crime.”