The Investigator (Letty Davenport, #1) (31)

Letty grinned at her: “A high-functioning sociopath, maybe?”

“I’m trying to be serious, here,” Weather said. “I’m saying that you make very cold judgments about people, about their worth. You don’t cut them any slack for being . . . human.”

Letty had shrugged. “People are what they are. Most people, honestly, don’t interest me. Some do, of course. You’re interesting. Dad’s interesting—a lot of cops are interesting. Virgil Flowers is interesting. Social workers are interesting. Really bad people are interesting, and so are really good people. A guy who gets up, goes to the store, works, comes home and sits on the couch and drinks beer and watches football or reruns . . . not interesting. Some studies are interesting. Logic is interesting. Facts are interesting. Bullshit isn’t, and people who peddle bullshit usually aren’t. Unless they’re criminals.”

“Some people would say bullshit is the grease that gets people through life,” Weather said.

“Other people,” Letty said. “Not me.”

Weather talked to Lucas about the conversation and Lucas snuck back around to Letty and told her, on a nighttime five-mile jog/walk, “I’ve been through all that self-questioning, the shit you’re going through. I used to chase a lot of women . . .”

“I heard about that,” Letty said, wryly. “Including from some of the women.”

“I wondered, to myself, am I some sort of predator? I got to the point where I said, no, I’m not—I like women. That’s all. I like them a lot,” Lucas said. “I’ve killed a number of people and I don’t worry about it. Am I a psycho? A sociopath? I’ve thought about it, but nope. I’ll tell you what I am and what you are—we’re pragmatists. Really harsh pragmatists, to pick up on what Weather told me about your conversation. We see things as they are, we project out consequences of our actions, very pragmatically. We don’t stir in a lot of hope, we don’t turn blind eyes.”

Letty mulled that over as they jogged and said, finally, “I’ll have to work through that, but I think you’re right. I killed two people; Mom said she freaked out, but she thought I had no reaction to it. She was wrong, I did react. I thought about it a lot. There’s no pleasure in it, I didn’t get off on it, even afterwards.”

“But no regrets.”

“That’s right. No regrets,” Letty said. “More than that, though. I stopped thinking about it because what’s the point? Those people are dead. Maybe I stuffed it all in a box at the back of my brain, and put the box in my brain’s attic. Maybe someday I’ll take it back out and look at it and freak out, but . . . not yet.”

“There you go . . . give me fifty yards to the driveway,” Lucas said.

“Dream on. Twenty yards. You’re lucky to get that.”



* * *





Sitting on the bed in the Homewood Suites, Letty whittled down what she knew about the Blackburns, about Dick Grimes, about the theft of the oil. Had Blackburn solved the problem? Grimes, Vermilion Wright had said, knew more about oil than almost anyone; and Grimes himself had said that Wright knew so much about oil that he could virtually feel when something was wrong in the oil fields. But the two men couldn’t figure out how the oil was being stolen.

Blackburn might have. And then somebody had figured out that he knew, and had come to his house and killed him and his wife. What had Blackburn discovered? She’d covered two full pages of the Rhodia tablet with a variety of symbols, squares, cartoon faces, when an idea popped into her head. She called Dick Grimes.

“Are you still at the Blackburns’ house?”

“Yes. They’re almost done inside, Tanner said they’ll be coming to get me.”

Letty: “Vermilion Wright said a lot more oil than your ten or twelve thousand barrels was being stolen. That some company called Lost Land had been hurt and he thought that Chevron had been hit pretty hard. So let’s pretend that you guys stole it . . .”

“What?”

“Stay with me for a minute,” Letty said. “Wright said you guys pump a hundred million barrels a year, more or less. What if some guy came to you and offered to sell you a hundred thousand barrels of crude at a good price. Say . . . twenty-five bucks a barrel, and you knew it had to be stolen. I mean, would you commit a crime, an actual crime, that you could go to jail for, and maybe ruin the company, to boost your oil production by one-tenth of one percent?”

“No, of course not,” Grimes said. “That’d be chicken feed. Too much risk, not enough reward, even if they gave it to us for free. Which they wouldn’t. If they wanted half, so we’d get, mmm, say two and a half million dollars, and then we got taxes and everything else . . . No.”

“I assume Chevron and Exxon and BP wouldn’t be interested . . . what about a company like Lost Land? I don’t know anything about them.”

“They’re smaller than we are, but they still pump eighty million. So no, I don’t think they’d be interested.”

“You see where I’m going with this?” Letty asked.

“Not right off the top of my head,” Grimes admitted.

“Well, I think you guys have been going at it backwards, trying to figure out how the oil is being stolen. I’m thinking, okay, it’s being stolen. Let’s assume that. That it’s not something buried in paperwork or accounting, but physically stolen. Buckets of crude oil. And Boxie Blackburn figured it out.”