Old Chaos (9781564747136) Page 13

  “And with wrongful death?”

  “Maybe. Definitely with fraud, and certainly with violating the state’s procedures. When that happens, the defense lawyers will call the investigation into question. They’ll claim I did a cover-up to protect Mack’s reputation.”

  “Would you?”

  “No, not even for Mack. I saw what happened to the Gautier family. I see it every time I close my eyes.”

  “And what happened to my family.”

  “Yes.” He held up his hand, thumb and forefinger millimeters apart. “We came that close to losing Sophy. Linda had to yank her free.”

  Beth needed to thank Linda Ramos. Now she said, “But you should be in on it. You know the local scene better than a state officer based in Vancouver or Olympia.”

  “I do. I’ll liaise with them, defer, make myself indispensable. And I intend to investigate the Drinkwater murder myself. It happened at Tyee Lake—an unincorporated piece of the county. Our jurisdiction.”

  “But—” She bit her lip.

  “Since his accomplice probably killed him, we’ll be coming at the culprit from two sides.”

  A long pause ensued. “Yes,” Beth said at last. “Yes, go for it. One condition.”

  His eyebrows snapped together. “What?”

  “I want you to replace Earl as undersheriff—listen to me.” She spoke sharply to forestall his protest.

  He was shaking his head. “Ask Corky Kononen.”

  “I did. He said no.” Corky would retire in three years and did not want the hassle. “Listen,” she repeated. “Mack chose Earl because he recognized another politician when he saw one. You were right to refuse Mack. You don’t want to run for public office.”

  He said wryly, “I’d be unsuccessful running for public office. And I’d hate every minute of it.”

  “I know you would. I don’t understand why, but I know it’s true. I don’t want to groom you to run for sheriff.”

  “Then what’s the point?”

  “When he was ranting at me, Earl said I was no kind of cop. He was right.”

  “You’ll learn.”

  “Yes, if you’ll teach me. I want you to run law enforcement for the county. You don’t have to mess with the uniform branch. Corky’s a good lawman, and he likes and respects you. Run Investigations, as you do now, and stand between me and my own ignorance. That’s all I’m asking. I’ll attend the Chamber of Commerce meetings, deal with the press, meet with the Board.” Any halfway competent woman could do that. “And I’ll back you all the way, Rob.”

  He was rubbing his neck, eyes on the faded pattern of the carpet, cheeks flushed. Beth flashed on the first time she had noticed him, a small, skinny twelve-year-old at the dingy karate school, barefoot and clad in the white pajamas they all wore. Her son, Mike, who was Rob’s age, was much larger. Rob had just thrown Mike over his shoulder. He had worn the same expression then as he did now— not gleeful, not even satisfied, just watchful. When Mike swarmed up from the mat, arms flailing, Rob threw him again.

  Now he sighed and smiled at her. He had a nice smile, rueful and accepting. “Okay. On those terms.”

  Beth reached for her cell phone.

  Maddie was thinking about land. Specifically, she was thinking about the prairie that now lay beneath the rubble of Prune Hill. She and Jack were sitting in a booth at Mona’s awaiting the Hungry Logger breakfast, as they usually did on Sundays, Jack buried in the sports section of the Oregonian.

  In the old days, the Klalos had used the open land for occasional encampment. The fishing had been good, but the soil was not wet enough to support camas, and the hill-cougar might leap down at any time, hungry for flesh. Land moved. That was one reason the idea of owning a piece of it didn’t make sense. Once upon a time, the Burlington Northern had claimed to own the tip of Mount Saint Helens.

  “You’re looking cheerful, Chief Thomas.”

  “An illusion.” She met Karl Tergeson’s hostile gaze. “How are you, Commissioner? Jordis, good to see you.”

  Mrs. Tergeson gave her a timid smile. Like Maddie, the commissioner’s wife was a big woman, but she didn’t know how to dress. She looked like an expensive sofa cushion.

  “Won’t you be late for church?” Maddie said.

  Tergeson explained that the Lutheran service didn’t start until eleven. Maddie already knew that. She just wanted to make him nervous.

  Jack crackled his sports page and looked up at the commissioner, who gave him a belated greeting. People like Karl sometimes ignored Maddie’s husband. Jack didn’t like it. Neither did she. She might have said something to make the commissioner even more nervous, but the waitress brought their meal, and Tergeson and his wife moved on to a table after a few more polite phrases. The waitress was Maddie’s niece, Lena.

  They had a family chat, nice but brief. The restaurant was busy and Lena conscientious. She poured coffee and was turning away when a woman rushed in and jostled her arm. Coffee splashed, staining the woman’s sleeve.

  “Why don’t you watch where you’re going?” the woman shrieked. It was Karl’s and Jordis’s daughter, Inger Swets, the county clerk. Maddie had not immediately recognized her.

  “S-sorry,” Lena stammered.

  Maddie thrust out a handful of paper napkins. She hadn’t recognized Inger, because Inger was dressed like her mother. The outcome was different. Maddie had once heard a guy say Inger was built like a brick shithouse. Still, the suit was dull, and Inger had pulled her glorious gold hair back in a bun.

  Why was Inger in disguise? Ah, church. She was dressed for church. Interesting. Unusual. Lena was still apologizing, and Inger mopping and muttering.

  “Your parents are over there,” Maddie said kindly.

  “Oh.” Inger blinked at her. The taut features eased. She bared her teeth in a smile. “Oh, hi, Maddie. Thanks.”

  Lena scooped up the damp napkins and fled with her coffeepot. Inger was saying polite things about the funeral tomorrow. Maddie answered absently, her mind on the brick shithouse, which made about as much sense as owning land. If you were going to build a privy, surely you’d make it of light, inexpensive materials, so it could be taken down and moved.

  As Inger went off to join her parents, Jack said, “Man, is that woman built!”

  Maddie grinned and tucked into her hash browns.

  They ate with leisurely enjoyment, not talking much because Jack wasn’t a talker. The Tergesons ate and left in a rush. As they left, Hank and Yvonne Auclare came in from ten o’clock Mass. There was another flurry of greetings. If the Bjorks had come, too, it would have been a full turnout of the Board of Commissioners, but Maddie couldn’t imagine Catherine Parrish Bjork eating at Mona’s.

  Meg would always remember Monday as the day the dog came home, even though it was also the day of Michael McCormick’s funeral.

  The dog in question was Towser, Tammy Brandstetter’s Rho-desian ridgeback. Meg was fond of him. Tammy, who lived down the street, had taken time off from her work as a bookkeeper, six weeks at her sister’s in Las Vegas, so she had missed the weather and its ghastly consequences. Meg brought her up to date over coffee while Towser looked the kitchen over. It was his first time inside her house. When he had sniffed everything, he settled down next to the table and thumped his tail on the ancient linoleum. At least he didn’t lift his leg.

  As for Tammy, she looked like a very merry widow. She hadn’t overdone it, which surprised Meg, but her dim hair had been cleverly cut and highlighted, and her face shone with contentment and a hundred-buck makeover. Meg asked about Tammy’s son, Tom, and Tammy asked about Rob’s back, and they got all caught up.

  Then Rob came down in uniform, set to leave for the funeral. There was a flurry of greeting, magnified by Towser’s enthusiastic participation. He was bouncing, the way ridgebacks do, ready to jump on Rob, which would not have done Rob a world of good. Towser weighed upwards of a hundred pounds.

  Tammy said, “Towser, sit!” Very firm, very calm.

 
Towser sat.

  “Hey!” Rob gave her a wide grin. “What happened?”

  “Obedience school.” Tammy blushed. “I had to do something about him.”

  “Well, you done good.”

  Tammy smiled but her mind had drifted sideways. “Do you think I ought to go to the funeral?”

  It was a good question. Her husband, the late commissioner, had died under a cloud, to say the least.

  “Only if you want to,” Rob said cautiously.

  She shuddered. “Well, I don’t. Give Beth my love. I suppose you’re going, Meg?”

  Meg sighed and nodded. She felt something of Tammy’s reluctance, though for other reasons. She was still an outsider. However, she was also the head of a county agency. She knew her censorious subordinate, Marybeth Jackman, would be there, watching for her. And people would be curious about Meg’s relationship with the new undersheriff, too. Better put a good face on it.

  With another sigh she escorted Tammy to the door, gave her a hug and Towser a pat, and then it was time to go. Rob was unnaturally quiet. He had spent an hour with the man the state police had sent in to head the landslide investigation. Rob was not happy about that, and he was grieving for Mack, too, so he had plenty of reason to withdraw into himself, but she didn’t like it when he went some place she couldn’t go.

  ETERNAL REST grant unto him, O Lord,” Father Martinez intoned.

  Obedient, the congregation replied, “And let perpetual light shine upon him.”

  Maddie listened with grave attention, as she always did to ritual, even Boston ritual. One of her grandmothers had been raised as a Catholic.

  Maddie had a weakness for funerals, as long as she wasn’t too close to the dead person. Her favorite funeral had been Hazel Guthrie’s—Rob’s grandmother’s. It had combined the best features of Christian ceremony—Presbyterian, in Hazel’s case—with the pleasures of a political rally, the library system being then under siege. The Celebration of Life part of the service had turned into a Library Testimonial. Five weeks later the levy passed. Maddie had enjoyed speaking up for the library.

  Afterwards, Jack told her he thought Rob resented all the hoopla. Maybe so. Rob was a mystery to her, a very private man. She wasn’t sure she liked him, but she came close to trusting him.

  He sat up front with Corky Kononen and the other honorary pallbearers, who were, no surprise, Karl Tergeson and Hank Auclare. Rob looked strange in brown and tan, shrunken, diminished by the uniform, or maybe just by grief and a sense of failure. Jack said the sheriff had been like a father to Rob, whose real father was long dead, and Rob had not been able to save the sheriff’s life.

  Michael McCormick had been a father in the literal sense, too. His grown children, and their husbands and wives and offspring, heads bowed, filled the first three rows of pews on the left. His elderly brothers and sisters, and Beth’s two sisters, hunched in the front pew on the right.

  Beth sat very still in the wheelchair, which rested beside the center aisle seat near her children. Maddie felt the tug of sympathy. Whatever his faults, Mack had been a devoted and affectionate husband, and Beth had been married to him forty years.

  Maddie let herself rise and kneel and sit, as the ceremony seemed to demand, and gave herself over to surveying the mourners. Half the county had crammed into the tiny church. She saw a cluster of girls, some with nose studs, from the high school. They were there for Beth, and the two gangly boys whose underwear showed above low-slung pants were probably there for the girls. Deputies, in and out of uniform, shouldered well-dressed business people and less well-upholstered teachers and county employees. Maddie spotted her nephew Todd in uniform and Meg McLean with a clump of librarians. A good turn-out, someone was bound to say, but there were strange absences. She craned around but couldn’t find the Bjorks or Matt Akers, the contractor.

  It struck her that the funeral was not the orderly military affair everyone might have expected, with deputies forming an honor guard and a bagpiper tweedling away. Maddie had once seen a funeral for a police officer run over by a drunken driver. Massed motorcycle cops from all over the state had followed the hearse to the graveyard. She wondered why Beth had not wanted that kind of funeral for her husband. Mack probably would have enjoyed the motorcycles, and Maddie would have liked to hear a bagpipe again. The noise was profoundly odd, certainly more interesting than the organ that now wheezed out feeble phrases.

  The priest, stumbling a little in English, had read the epistle and gospel selections. Time for the eulogy. At that point, the eldest brother rose from his pew and told a long, rambling, nearly inaudible story that provoked subdued laughter from the first few rows. Family stuff. Then the children spoke. They were a handsome, articulate bunch, and they said good things, warm and rather surprising, about their father. They thanked the rescuers and asked everyone to pray for their sister’s recovery. Peggy was still in a coma. At last the weedy young man who had helped serve Beth’s dinner stood up—Skip Petrakis, the not quite son-in-law. He looked rumpled, short of sleep.

  He sniffed, cleared his throat, and mumbled something. Voices prompted him to speak up. “S-sorry. I’m not much of a speaker. I am Aristides Petrakis.” He cleared his throat again. “I just wanted you to meet someone.” He stepped forward and took a squirming bundle from one of Beth’s girls.

  “This is my beautiful daughter, Sophia Agnes Petrakis. If her mother could be here—” His voice cracked, and he cleared his throat again. The baby looked up at him and tugged at his wispy beard. “We want to say thank you to Sophia’s grandfather. He saved her life, and lost his own doing it. Thank you, Mack.” Sophy gave a lusty yell, and everyone laughed and burst into tears including Maddie.

  When push came to shove, Maddie reflected, slamming her eyes with a sodden Kleenex, there couldn’t be a better tribute to Mack McCormick. Beside her, Jack sniffed and blew his nose.

  After an interval, Beth’s son John wheeled his mother around to face the congregation. She had been crying, too. Her nose was red, but she spoke with composure, her voice strengthening as the words came. She thanked the rescuers, mentioning Rob and Linda Ramos by name, and she thanked everyone for coming. Then she drew a long, sustaining breath.

  “I just wanted to say I loved Mack.” She paused, and people squirmed in their seats. “We met when we rode the school bus together to Klalo High School almost fifty years ago. I loved him then, and I love him now. He was—” She paused, then said with fierce intensity, “He was a good man. That’s what counts. When my daughter Peggy is better and things have settled down, we’re going to hold an old-fashioned wake for Mack. All of you have stories about him. Save them up.” She gave Mack’s constituents a big smile. “I want to hear every single one of them.”

  Amid shuffling and murmuring, she turned the chair, and her son pulled it back into place. The organ wheezed to life, and the Mass droned on. As Maddie watched the family file up to receive communion, she found she was thinking hard about Sheriff Beth.

  Rob spent the afternoon in his office, ostensibly reorganizing the Investigations staff but mostly staring out his window at the hill above the parking lot. Because Mack had been cremated, there was no burial service. Rob didn’t want one, but the funeral had not brought a sense of closure. The only way to gain release would be to find out who had suppressed the landslide hazard warning. As of yesterday, that investigation was out of Rob’s hands.

  Try as he might, Rob could feel no urgency about Drinkwater’s death, though it was probable the two cases were linked. Rob didn’t care who had killed Fred, but he did care, a lot, about who had suppressed the warning. The irony of his situation did not escape him. He wondered what the state investigator was doing. With his case.

  Outside an east wind shook the branches of the vine maples on the hillside. A cold, dry day.

  Well, it wasn’t his case. He thought of his cousin Charlie. Might as well say it was Charlie’s case.

  Brooding, Rob pushed the files on his desk around, shuffled them, pi
led them in reverse order. He had moved Jake Sorenson and Todd Welch from Corky’s department to Investigations and bumped Linda Ramos up to acting sergeant, acting because she had not yet passed the sergeant’s exam. Thayer Jones, who had passed, had refused the promotion. Thayer was a twenty-year veteran. Like Corky, he wanted to coast to retirement.

  Rob had asked for Corky’s computer nerd, too, but Corky balked at that. Rob could have ordered the move anyway, but he didn’t want to antagonize Corky, who had been surprisingly cooperative over the loss of two good men. That could wait. Jeff Fong had computer savvy.

  Impatient, Rob yanked out the folder marked drinkwater. Jeff would be calling in soon with preliminary results from the autopsy. Maybe Fred had died of chagrin. Rob extracted the crime scene photographs and put on his reading glasses.

  “You’ve got to stop them!”

  Rob’s pulse jumped. “What the hell?” He shoved himself to his feet with a jab of pain.

  Lorenz Swets, three hundred pounds of enraged barge captain, shook off the desk sergeant’s restraining hand and glowered at Rob from the doorway.

  Sergeant Howell was out of breath. “Sorry. He just bulled his way in.”

  Rob waved a hand. “It’s okay. Come in and sit down, Larry. When did you get back?”

  Huffing, red in the face, Larry sat in the visitor’s chair. “This morning. Three weeks on the river, and I come home to this. Shit. Inger’s spitting bullets.” His voice took on a plaintive tone.

  Rob appreciated the anticlimax. Inger was a strapping lass, but her husband weighed twice as much and out-topped her by half a foot. It was a tribute to the strength of her personality that she had him cowed.

  “You’ve got to stop them,” Larry said again, earnest.

  “By them, I guess you mean the state investigators.”

  “They took her computers, mainframe and laptop, and hauled off all kinds of paper records. What are they after? I don’t understand. The hill that slid, it was like a blob of Jell-O on a warm griddle. How can they blame Inger for a fucking landslide? You gotta stop em, Rob.”