Blood Silence (32 page)

“The goal of the offense is to fill those five specific spots on the floor, Mac,” Rawlings explained with a diagram on napkin. “This creates good spacing between all of the players and allows each one to pass to any of the four others on the floor. Every pass and cut has a purpose, and everything is dictated by the defense. Do you understand a little better now?”

“Certainly more than I did before,” Mac replied, “It’s a little like running a power play in hockey.”

“I love it. The triangle is great old-school basketball offense, not simply bombing three pointers.”

Once the burgers were finished, the baskets were cleared away and another round of beers arrived, and they got back to business.

“Sheriff, let’s say, just for the sake of argument, that whatever was happening at the Buller house is not the only place it’s happening. That’s all I’m saying.”

“They were the tip of the iceberg?”

Mac shook his head. “Maybe, although it seems to me that if that were the case, others would have come forward by now.”

“Maybe they were bought off.”

“That’s possible, I suppose.” Mac nodded. “But then why not buy off the Bullers?”

“Maybe they said no. Maybe they thought there was a better deal to be had?”

“No, that’s not it,” Mac answered. “It doesn’t explain the other players in this. We’ve got nine bodies. They’re all connected.”

“How do they all end up linked together?”

Mac sat back and pulled his beer to his lips while a thought formed in his mind—a good thought. He took another hit from his beer, and then he smiled. “Maybe the Bullers talked to Callie Gentry, the land owner, and instead … she calls Sterling … who is a litigator.”

“A lawsuit? Against an oil company?” Rawlings asked, skeptical, shaking his head, dismissive.

“They’re not really an oil company,” Mac answered, holding up his phone. “They’re an exploration and drilling company.”

“Up here that’s a distinction without a difference?” Rawlings replied derisively. “Oil, drilling, gas, trucking, railroads—you litigate against them, you even threaten to litigate against them, and they will bury you in legal fees and paper. They have armies of lawyers and bottomless amounts of money. They’ll make the case so expensive you can’t possibly fight them. Plus, they have most of the politicians in their pocket. The oil and gas industry owns the Industrial Commission; it comprises the governor and two of his lackeys, who get thousands in contributions from all of the companies.” The sheriff laughed. “A lawsuit would get steamrolled.”

“Everyone goes along to get along?”

“For sure around here. I mean, I’m guilty of it, Mac. My family, we have a thousand acres five miles northwest of town, and on the far end, far away from our houses, there are two wells. My dad, and his dad, never sold the mineral rights under our family land. So we’re leasing to a drilling company and getting nice monthly royalty checks, even with the drop in oil prices.” The sheriff sat back, tipped up his cowboy hat, and drank from his beer. “Let me tell you, we have more money now than we’ve ever had in our lives, Mac. My dad shares it with my boy and me, with my brother and sister, and we’re all very secure financially. I mean, I can pretty much retire whenever I want—we’re
that
set. But that’s the tradeoff. A lot of people are making it, and in many ways the community is benefiting from it, and in many ways it’s not.”

“Heck, just the trucks,” Mac blurted.

Rawlings nodded in agreement. “There you go. Just driving around here has become infinitely more dangerous because it’s tanker-truck central. It takes millions of gallons of water to frack just one well, and the only way that water gets there is with trucks. I’ve done the research, Mac. You need in the neighborhood of four hundred trucks to haul water and supplies to an oil well—just one well—and there are hundreds—heck, thousands—of wells around here. That means traffic at all hours of the day, and it’s a dicey proposition on the roads around here,
especially
at night. There have been so many more bad accidents and fatalities than you would have ever imagined possible up here ten years ago. All of that is part of the oil and gas boom, not to mention the crime, drugs, and prostitution. So yeah, some of us have it good, but that’s the bad, and we’re losing that battle, Mac.”

“I’ve met Chief Borland. He’s not up to the task, in my opinion.”

“Before the boom, he’d have been fine. But now, you need someone with a lot more management and people skills, and Dave Borland just doesn’t possess those. I mean, Williston has a population of twenty thousand, and the legal problems of a town ten times that size. Borland and I just don’t have the manpower or resources we need, and I’m not sure we ever will.”

“So you’re screwed?”

“Yup,” Rawlings replied with resignation. “But there is good too. We’ve been able to build this beautiful new community center that has indoor and outdoor pools, basketball courts, workout facilities, community meeting rooms, and more. It’s great. A town of this size in this part of the world could
never
have something like that without all of the tax and corporate revenue generated by the boom. It’s a trade-off.”

“Does the trade-off include murder?”

“No,” Rawlings answered, shaking his head. “We look the other way on a lot of things. A
lot
of things. We have to. The land and the environment will never be the same up here, but a lot of people are getting …”

“Paid.”

“Yup.”

“Like you said, people will do a lot of things, or not do things, or not object to things, if they get paid a lot of money.”

“Yeah, but Mac, there are still lines that can’t be crossed. The Bullers and all the others? That can’t be allowed to stand. We gotta draw a line somewhere.”

“So the Bullers, maybe they didn’t sell out. Maybe they, or Callie Gentry, or Adam Murphy decided to do the right thing.”

“But what’s the right thing?”

“Not go along to get along,” Mac suggested. “The Bullers—or later on, Adam Murphy, and then Callie Gentry, Sterling, Shane Weatherly—all of them figured out what Deep Core was up to.”

“Up to what?” Rawlings pushed. “You keep saying they’re up to something. I mean, it is one thing to say it’s Deep Core—they’re the ones, but what is it they’re up to? What is it that would make them drop nine bodies?”

Mac shrugged. “I don’t know.” He gave it some thought. “Let’s go back to what I said awhile ago,” he took a long swig of his beer. “What’s happening at the Bullers isn’t the only place it’s happening or …” His eyes brightened. “Not the only place it will happen. Deep Core, they’re an oil and gas drilling company. They’re fracking, right?”

“Only way you can get the oil and gas out of the ground around here. It’s the technique that led to the boom.”

“I don’t understand the process well, Sam, but doesn’t fracking involve injecting water, sand, and chemicals into the well?” Mac inquired.

“Yes,” Rawlings replied knowingly. “Like I said, it takes four hundred tanker trucks with water, chemicals, and sand to frack one well. Fracking is basically the process of drilling the well and, once drilled, injecting fluid, water, and chemicals, along with a special kind of sand called frac sand, into the well at a high pressure. There’s a formula for it all. The well goes straight down thousands of feet and then turns horizontal. When the pressure reaches the horizontal part of the well, it is injected into the shale. That injecting of the pressure fractures the shale and allows for the release of the oil and gas in the rock, and that’s what comes back up the well.”

Mac pulled out his phone and did a quick search of the hydraulic fracturing process. “Cripes, the chemicals they use to do this read like a periodic table. Lead, uranium, mercury, radium, hydrochloric acid, diesel, formaldehyde, and here’s one that’s familiar—methane.”

“So?” Rawlings replied.

“So presumably when you drill down, you’re drilling down through the water table. Well water comes from the water table.”

“So?”

The thought was forming in Mac’s brain. He reached into his backpack and took out a map he’d printed of the Williston area. “So there is a lot of pressure in that well, on the cement and steel casing in that well going down, right?”

“Not my area of specialty, but I suppose there is,” Rawlings answered. “Mac, what are you getting at?”

Mac kept his eyes on the map and asked a question, a leading question, pointing at the Bullers’ farm on the map. “And the Bullers’ water came from a well in the ground, right?”

“Yes.”

Mac then moved his index finger just north of Williston, to the area where Deep Core was now drilling, and tapped it with his index finger and looked up at the sheriff.

Rawlings’s eyes suddenly went wide, recognizing where Mac was going, and then he said, “No. Do you think?”

Mac nodded. “Where have they started drilling now?”

“Just north of town.”

“And how many wells do they have up there?”

“I don’t know. A lot. Maybe fifteen, twenty—could be more.”

“And they just started drilling there, right?”

“Within the last couple weeks. Those wells are on state property. They were under some kind of a deadline to get them online by year-end, or the drilling rights covered by the lease would revert back to the state.”

“And how much is all that oil worth to a drilling company like Deep Core?”

“Millions. Many millions,” Rawlings answered. “Who knows, with as many wells as they’re putting online, maybe billions in the long run.”

“And if there were concerns about their drilling, or maybe their drilling method, such that it was damaging groundwater or perhaps the water supply for a town of twenty thousand. Even
that
, my friend, might be enough for people to stop and take notice, to maybe”—Mac’s eyes lit up—“maybe stop a company from drilling. That’s a lot of money that would be lost. Maybe that’s where Sterling comes in. He and Gentry were formulating some sort of lawsuit on that basis, perhaps a class action against an oil drilling company representing a town of twenty thousand who were about to have their water damaged. How about that? Would that be substantial enough for you?”

The sheriff nodded, looking away, and shaking his head. He put his beer to his lips. “Now
that’s
a theory.”

“Indeed it is,” Mac agreed, taking a satisfied beer sip of his own. But the reality of the problem was still there. “Still, it’s only a theory.”

“And a theory we should keep quiet about, at least until we have proof.”

“How do we get proof?” Mac asked.

“I don’t know.”

“You know who might have
had
proof?”

“One of your murder victims.”

Mac pointed to his nose. “That might explain something else, as well.”

“What? Explain what?”

“So when Shane Weatherly was in Washington, DC, he met with an employee of the EPA named Isador Kane.” Mac reached inside his backpack and found another folder with the security camera screenshots of Weatherly and Kane from the East Union Tavern in DC. “This is Weatherly on the right and Kane on the left. They spent a couple hours in this bar, discussing all of these documents. Then they left the bar out the back and were both shot and killed in Kane’s car. And all these documents right here…” Mac pointed.

“Were gone.”

“Yeah.”

Rawlings nodded. “Your proof?”

“Maybe,” Mac answered. “Another occurrence that makes sense now was that Sterling and Gentry both had briefcases with them the night they were killed. Gentry’s briefcase was gone, and Sterling’s was still in his car
but empty
. Adam Murphy’s apartment was ransacked, and his computer and files were gone. The Buller house was ransacked. So what if all these people had proof and—”

“Deep Core did whatever they had to in order to get their hands on it,” Rawlings finished. The sheriff leaned back and folded his arms and then let out a slow whistle. He shook his head. “That’s a hell of a story ya got.”

“I prefer to view it as deductive reasoning,” Mac answered, sipping his beer. “I do love a good conspiracy, though.”

“I imagine a feller like you does. So you said this Weatherly was a geologist, right?”

“Yes, he was.”

“He was murdered in DC, two weeks ago?”

“Yes.”

“And Murphy was killed a couple nights later.”

“Yes, which was then followed by the murders of Sterling and Gentry back down in the Twin Cities at Sterling’s lake house. Can you say cleanup operation? They took out everyone who could hurt them.”

“But why go after your ex-wife, then?”

“I was investigating by then,” Mac answered. “Without being too full of myself, Sam, I do have a track record of getting to the bottom of shit. I was poking around, like I am now. Although to be honest, I hadn’t found a ton at that point. If Meredith was dead, then maybe I stop hunting around and I never make these links on the case. Heck, I wouldn’t have tied this all together if Judge Dixon hadn’t had me take a look at that murder in DC for him.”

“God,” Rawlings muttered. He took a long pull from his beer. “I wish I knew how to go after these people. I just don’t have the resources.” He looked at Mac. “You have some connections,” Rawlings suggested. “A fiancée working in the White House and all, you could pull a string or two.”

Mac smiled and nodded, somewhat satisfied with himself. “Sometimes access to those folks does have certain … advantages, especially when Shane Weatherly was the godchild of Judge Dixon.”

“You don’t say?”

A little after 11:00
P.M.
, after one more round of beers, more case discussion and then a cup of coffee, Mac and Rawlings walked out the front door of the County Line and turned east on the sidewalk.

“So what’s your plan, Mac?”

“It’s late, so I’ll call the Judge early in the morning and see what he thinks. He’s very good at getting the machinery to move in DC.”

“How about out here in North Dakota?”

“We’ll see. That might be a heavier lift, but it all starts by talking, informing, and asking. The man is amazingly persuasive when he wants to be, and everyone in the world seems to owe him favors. He’ll be motivated to help any way he can.”