Authors: Sarah Andrews

Dead Dry (8 page)

BOOK: Dead Dry

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AS I STALKED DOWN THE SIDEWALK, I HEARD MICHELE say from somewhere behind me, “I suppose you thought my questioning a bit callous,” she said.

“Yes.” I didn’t slow down.

“I’m sorry. It has to be done. I’ve been through a special training. We learn to repeat a question three different ways, just to make sure.” Her voice came from closer behind me. She was catching up.

I slowed down a little. “I suppose.”

“And Julia’s a friend of yours. Not to put too fine a point on it, when you’re busy hugging people, you don’t watch for their reactions to information.”

I stopped and waited until she caught up with me.

She said, “It’s a good system. We’re taught to be polite and considerate, so that the subject gains confidence in us, and that way if they have something on their chest, well then, they’ll spill it.”

“You mean like maybe a confession to murder. You want to know why I was in such a hurry to get out of there?
Because I wanted you out of there. It wasn’t fair to put her through that much pressure. Because I know Julia. I’ve known her for twenty-two years. I know her well enough to know that she shoots her mouth off, but that’s
all
she does. I have never,
ever
seen her get physical. Never!”

“Well, then, just for the record, your friend passed the test.”

“The test,” I hissed. “What am I doing, helping you administer sainthood tests to friends who have already walked through hell?”

Michele’s tone remained as even as ever. “I mean I don’t think she knew anything about Dr. McWain’s murder before we arrived.”

I stood there on the sidewalk on Tremont Street watching pigeons peck at bits of junk food that had been dropped by passing humans. “I could have told you that. Remember, I spoke to her earlier to make sure she’d be there. I would have noticed.” I felt like a Judas, even though I hadn’t actually gotten Julia into trouble. I hoped.

Michele said, “Anyway, in the future, I’d sure like it if you let me do the questioning.”

“Fine. I’ll dial this Gilda creature. But you talk to her.”

“Thank you.”

I started walking again. “Find out whether we can even
find
her before we go running all the way down there.”

Michele stopped to dig her cell phone out of the small shoulder bag she was carrying. “As long as we’re putting things on the record, why are you really coming with me?”

I stopped in the middle of the sidewalk. “Okay, fine!” I shouted. “I had to … get out of there. And get you out of there before you tore my friend apart!”

“Just as long as we’re clear on that. I’m glad of your company. We’re both public employees, just doing our job.”

I said, “Maybe I can match the clays we found on Afton’s boots. It’s probably from the dooryard of that ranch, don’t you think?”

“You’re the expert on that.”

Why was I deferring to her? I read off the phone number Julia had written on the margin of the map, and Michele punched it into her cell phone. I leaned close so I could hear. After just a few rings, a connection was made, and a soft female voice came out of the tiny speaker. Background noise—some honking country and western music—poured out around it.

“Hello,” Michele said. “Is this Gilda? Hi, my name is Michele Aldrich, and I have a message for you regarding Dr. McWain. I’ll be passing through Castle Rock in a little while. Could I stop off and give it to you?”

Ooo,
I thought.
Smooth as a baby’s butt.

The voice on the cell phone was too soft to make out, but Michele was apparently asked to provide more information. “I’m sorry, you’re brea—ing u—,” she replied, making herself sound like a bad connection. “Ca—you—peat that?”

The voice on the phone grew louder. “Who did you say you were?”

“Mi—Al—rich,” she replied. “I’m just in fr——alt La——ity. Where can I fi—you?”

I made a mental note not to mess with Michele Aldrich, not ever.

The voice on the phone shouted, “Meet me in Sedalia. Do you know where that is?”

Michele glanced at me. I nodded. “Sure.”

“There’s a place there. The Sedalia Grill.”

I mouthed, You can’t miss it.

Michele said, “I’ll be there in …”

I flashed fingers at her; both hands four times, then my right hand alone once.

Michele said, “ … in forty-five minutes. How will I know you?”

“That won’t be a problem, just get here,” she said, and ended the connection.

Michele glanced at me. “She said ‘here.’ That means she’s already at the meeting place.”

“Maybe that’s where she plugs in her phone to recharge it,” I said dryly and swept a hand to one side to indicate that she should lead the way to her car.

DURING MOST OF THE DRIVE, I STARED STRAIGHT ahead at the traffic, which was already bunching up in the Friday afternoon scramble for cooler elevations. We were driving along the edge of the plains third of Colorado that I’d pointed out to Trevor Reed during our flight from Salt Lake City, about ten or fifteen miles from where the plains meet the mountainous third of Colorado. The air was clear and the view was gorgeous. Great billowing clouds were lining up for the afternoon’s thunderstorms, a view I can never get tired of—as long as I’m not just down a narrow gully from where the clouds squeeze out their water. Flash floods and gully-washers are exciting but no fun.

As the traffic continued to thicken, I began to wonder if we’d get back to Denver in time for my dinner date with Fritz. I didn’t want to have to phone him and delay. That wouldn’t show him how I felt about him, however that was.

I was so preoccupied with Fritz that I momentarily lost track of where we were. As we passed the turnoffs for Highlands Ranch, I sucked in my breath.

“What is it?” Michele asked.

“It’s grown even bigger!” I said.

“What has?”

“This housing development.” I gazed in horrified fascination out across the sea of houses. They were huge houses painted pale shades of gray and packed impossibly close together. The development flowed away from the highway over the rolling plains toward the majestic peaks of Colorado’s Front Range, which, with the lingering drought and summer’s heat, were naked of snow. I rummaged through my file of mental images, trying to decide what it all looked
like. The only match that came to mind was an ice floe riding coldly over a frigid sea.
Wrong,
said my brain.
It’s almost one hundred degrees out there, remember? And why do they call it Highlands Ranch when it’s down here on the lowlands?

Michele said, “More things man does with his machines, huh?”

“Huh. I wonder where they get enough water to flush all those toilets. Hell, even if this drought were to end tomorrow, this ecosystem couldn’t sustain this many people.”

“What’s the population out here, anyway?”

“Damned if I know. Metro Denver crested a million a while ago. And everyone wants to live here. Good-bye grazing land. Good-bye winter wheat. The land’s worth more as house lots, I guess.”

“Somehow I don’t think you really believe that.”

“No. I am the opposite of a cynic.”

“What do you mean?”

“‘A cynic,’ according to Oscar Wilde, ‘is someone who knows the price of everything but the value of nothing.’ This land has a high price—too high to graze cattle on it now—but I look at something like this, and it has little value for me.”

“But at what price?” she said, cheerfully twisting my words.

I was trying to understand that myself. I was forty and single and childless, owned no home, barely owned a truck. In fact the bank owned more of that truck than I did. Was I taking my values too far? Was there a home on a nice piece of land with the right man and a bundle of joy waiting out there for me somewhere? And why, if I wanted all that so much, had I not found it yet?

Michele broke into my thoughts. “You’re getting awfully quiet again.”

“My thoughts cost more than a penny,” I muttered. I glared at the housing development. Down among those
streets lay not happiness, but capitulation. I could never be happy in a place like that, and I knew it. Shaking these thoughts out of my head, I said, “I was just wondering where the resources for this housing development came from.”

“Resources? What do you mean?”

“All the lumber and the gypsum for the Sheetrock, the latex for the paint. And the water. Where do they get their water? It takes a lot of water to fill all those pipes.”

Michele shrugged. “From a reservoir?”

“Maybe. But where did the water come from that filled the reservoir?”

“Rain?”

“This part of Colorado gets maybe fourteen inches of rain per year. There are two sources of drinking water: precipitation and ground water. Either way, it’s a reservoir. A surface-water reservoir is easy to understand; it fills a lake. A ground-water reservoir is more subtle.”

“I’ve heard of underground rivers,” Michele said, “but not underground lakes.”

“Neither term is accurate. Ground water resides in the tiny spaces between the grains of sand in sandstone, or in fractures in crystalline rocks like granite. Or in partially dissolved limestones it can be in small caverns.”

“How does it get to the well? Through the underground river?”

“You drill the well right into the reservoir rock,” I said. “Ground water does move, but the term ‘underground river’ is a misperception. It moves very slowly and flows through the whole layer of rock.” I smiled. “Denver has a true underground river called the Roberts Tunnel. It’s twenty-three miles long. Denver ran short of water years ago. It now gets its water from a network of reservoirs on the western side of the Continental Divide that flow through the tunnel.”

“What do the people on the W side drink?” Michele asked.

I waved a hand westward to indicate the far side of the
Front Range of the Rockies. “Well, Denver doesn’t take it all, but you’re right, what Denver diverts to the eastern slope doesn’t make it into the Pacific Ocean. The Colorado River starts just the other side of the divide and runs westward down through Utah, Arizona, and the corners of Nevada and California.”

“But don’t people downstream need that water?” Michele asked.

“Sure. People … raccoons, fish, bacteria, birds …”

“I did study ecology in school,” Michele said, a little defensively.

“It’s tough thinking these things through,” I said. “It’s not like we’re aliens who just landed here to exploit the planet. We do manipulate our environment more than a raccoon or a fish does, but we’re part of the ecosystem, too. We know how to treat the water so that the bacteria don’t give us diarrhea, and we know how to dispose of our wastes in ways that don’t foul the water. So more of us live to grow up than used to—in countries with poor sanitation, infant mortality skyrockets, and it’s usually intestinal disease that gets them. But in places like this, we not only live to grow up, we live to grow old.”

“Which is a good thing.”

“Yes,” I said, “and we’ve learned how to build machines that can move earth resources all over the place, bringing the gypsum for all the Sheetrock walls in all those houses in over the mountains and bringing the two-by-fours in from Oregon and the nails in from Michigan, or from wherever the iron mines send their raw resources to have them formed into nails … maybe somewhere in China now, for all I know.”

“So our population keeps increasing, which is a bad thing.”

Probably not a Mormon,
I decided. “Yeah, and we’ve developed medicines that can kill bacteria even if we do screw up and drink fouled water, and we can keep people alive who have all sorts of diseases that used to kill them,
which is good, but it means that there are more and more of us, which I agree is a bad thing, because we are using up resources, living long enough to think up new ways of polluting, and crowding out other species.”

Michele said, “But we have effective means of birth control now.”

Definitely not a Mormon
. “Yes, we have birth control. But we also have huge appetites for comfort, which is only natural, so we build these huge houses, and we move in from Cincinnati where they have lawns, so we plant lawns here, too, and we have bigger closets now to hold all the clothes that were made for pennies over in China and we have to wash them all, and … well, getting back to that tunnel, all that uses a lot of water.”

Michele said, “I’m glad I’m a homicide detective. There, things are black and white. Killing is bad. Figuring out who killed the dead person and putting them in jail is good. End of discussion.”

I said, “But what if Afton McWain deserved to be killed?”

“Did he?”

“I don’t think so, but you’ve already had a taste of how royally he could piss people off.”

BOOK: Dead Dry

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