Strong Cold Dead (Caitlin Strong, #8)(51)
46
MONTREAL, QUEBEC
After doing battle with the Hells Angels earned him a Royal Canadian Mounted Police medal, Pierre Beauchamp had been reassigned from his regular duties to an RCMP task force responsible for coordinating antiterrorist efforts with the Mounties’ American counterparts. His heroism in a gunfight that had left all the Angels dead and their marijuana grow house burned to the ground had gotten him laid up for several months with a bullet wound. The medal and his reassignment had preempted his plans to retire, a decision he didn’t regret for one moment.
Until today.
A bulletin reached his desk about a potential terrorist attack 1,700 miles away, in Austin, Texas.
Texas, he mused, thinking of the state for the first time since the real hero of that gunfight against the Hells Angels, five years before, had saved his life.
The second bulletin changed “potential” to “suspected,” while still offering scant details. Those details arrived an hour later, in a third bulletin that came, encrypted, through the most secure communications channel possible. Beauchamp read it three times, growing colder on each occasion. He put his jacket on before he went in to see the task force commander.
*
“I understand the severity of the situation,” Captain Claude Baston told him. “And we’re already in close contact with our counterparts in the United States. What I’m not understanding, Sergeant, is why you need to go there.”
“Because this has happened before, Captain,” Beauchamp said, thinking of what a trapper named Joe Labelle had found when he stumbled into an Inuit village in Nunavut, around eighty-five years before. “And it happened up here.”
47
BALCONES CANYONLANDS, TEXAS
“We getting out?” Caitlin asked from the passenger seat of Cort Wesley’s truck.
A late afternoon thunderstorm had sprung up suddenly from the day’s heat, leaving rain, swept away by the wipers, pooled in the windshield’s corners. Drops dappled the freshly waxed finish on the hood of the truck. A combination of the sun’s return and the hot engine pushed steam up into the air, which drifted off in smokelike clouds.
“I’m still trying to get my arms wrapped around all this,” he said, hands squeezing the steering wheel, even though the truck was parked, its engine cooling.
Caitlin had just told him about the contents of the evidence pouch Doc Whatley was currently storing in his desk drawer. She had immediately recognized the silver Miraculous Medal that Dylan never took off, because it had belonged to his mother and had her initials—MT, for Maura Torres—on the back. The medal had been recovered not far from the body of the construction foreman, splattered with the man’s blood.
“I was already figuring what I’m going to do to those guys who threatened Luke,” Cort Wesley continued. “Don’t know if my arms are big enough to get around this, too.”
“Neither of us thinks for a minute Dylan had anything to do with that construction worker getting murdered.”
“Which means somebody’s trying to set him up. Any guesses as to who?”
“Something’s been bothering me about Ela Nocona from the beginning.”
“Yeah, my boy sure can pick ’em, can’t he?”
“Must take after his father.”
Her quip produced no smile from him. “How long can Doc Whatley keep this under wraps, Ranger?”
“Keep what under wraps, Cort Wesley?” Caitlin said, waiting for her words to sink in before resuming. “Everything comes back to whatever’s going on inside that reservation.”
“Speaking of which…” Cort Wesley began, and then explained what had struck him earlier in the day.
*
What Cort Wesley laid out for her was based on his brief experience working oil rigs, after his father, Boone Masters, had checked into the hospital for the last time.
“The kind of exploratory drilling they do now goes down really deep,” he explained. “The deeper you go, the harder the pressure, underground being similar to under water in that respect. And that requires piping reinforced and layered with steel casing, to ensure it maintains its structural integrity once you start pushing all that water, sand, and drilling mud down. In a nutshell, none of the piping these boys got piled in their trucks conforms to that basic principle.”
“Makes sense.” Caitlin nodded, once he’d finished.
“How’s that, Ranger?”
“I did some checking into Jackson Whole Mineral, the company that secured the drilling rights for this land. They did that in order to sell off parcels to individual bidders, but it turns out there’s only one bidder listed in the Texas Bureau of Land Management records: an outfit called REPCO, out of New York and North Carolina, owned by a man named Cray Rawls, who’s as dirty as the coal ash he’s got a penchant for dumping in rivers.”
“And don’t tell me,” Cort Wesley added, “none of the words beginning with R, E, P, C, or O have anything to do with oil.”
“If they do, it would be a first. The company knows its way around petroleum-based products and all manner of petrochemicals, and chemical products in general, all right, but other than a few limited partnerships, they don’t have any track record with oil whatsoever. Company’s got a pharmaceutical division, a food processing and preservation division, a waste management division, and they ship a whole bunch of stuff I can’t pronounce, with ingredients that would scare the hell out of us, cross-country via freight rail.”