The Deadline (19 page)

Before it had started, the day seemed over.

Morgan checked his watch.

Eight-ten.

He had already decided to knock when the latch clacked noisily.  The little bell on the other side of the door tinkled as a pretty, middle-aged woman poked her blond-streaked head out into the hall and looked around as if she were hiding from someone.  The smell of morning coffee wafted out of the office into the sterile hallway.

Inside, some of the women were gathered around a desk, cooing over photographs of someone’s new grandchild.  The fluorescent blue light almost hurt his eyes after sitting in the darkened hall.  A fresh pot was gurgling in a drip coffeemaker on top of some filing cabinets.  Morgan could almost taste it.

“Can I help you?” the tall woman with frosted hair asked him as she propped the door open.  Her face was younger and more friendly than her saucer-sized glasses and high-collared business suit made her look.  Except for her bright red lipstick, she wore little makeup and didn’t seem to miss it.  Her hips were slender, her legs long.  Morgan guessed she was, at best, only a few years older than him, maybe forty-two.  And he felt as if he should know her.

“I just came to look at the card files,” he told her, “but I could sure use a cup of that coffee.”

The clerk smiled and touched his forearm.

“The cups are on the cabinet,” she said warmly.  “You help yourself, then I’ll show you the case cards.”

Morgan poured the strong black coffee into a Styrofoam cup, then emptied two pink packets of sweetener into it and stirred it with a plastic spoon.  It was almost too hot to drink, so he pursed his lips and blew lightly across it, scattering tiny corkscrews of steam.

In the cool, dim vault, the clerk showed Morgan the familiar card files in their dented drawers.  He slid open the drawer labeled “P-Q-R” and ran his fingers along the tops of the frayed, worn cards.

Peters.  Pettit.  Peyton.  Phelps.  Phillips.  Pilcher.

Nothing.

Morgan thumbed through a few more cards, but none were out of place.  Despite his suspicions, it appeared that Malachi Pierce had steered clear of serious legal problems in Perry County.  He closed the drawer and slipped his notebook back in his shirt pocket.  Dead end.  Cross that one off the list.

“No luck?” the friendly clerk asked him.  She’d busied herself with a stack of blue folders while he worked.

“I’m afraid not,” Morgan said.  “Sometimes it just isn’t there.”

“Tell me about it.  We hunt for files around here every day and I swear there are some that just walk off,” she said.  “You look familiar to me.  Have we met?”

“I’m Jeff Morgan,” he said, not sure if he should offer his hand.  “I’m the editor at
The Bullet
.”

The clerk’s lips formed a wet, red O.

“Good Lord,” she said, astonished.  “I heard you were back in town.  You don’t remember me, do you?  That’s okay, I mean, jeez, because I didn’t recognize you right off either.  My goodness, it’s been more than twenty years.  I was a year ahead of you in school, I think.  I worked for your dad the summer before I went to college and I used to see you in the shop.”

Morgan swept away the cobwebs of his memory.

“Cassie ... don’t tell me ... your mother cleaned the hardware store on weekends.  God, I’m so bad with names.  Cassie ... Miller.  Right?”

“Millen.  Well, not anymore since I got married, but that’s close enough,” she said.  “You were Class of Seventy-five, right?”

“Exactly,” Morgan said.  “And you were ...”

“Seventy-three and seventy-four.  God, that was a year.  That was the year we lost the football championship by one point and then lost the basketball championship by one point.  You remember all that?”

Morgan laughed.

“How could I forget?  That was the year I got up the guts for the first time to ask a girl on a date.  She said yes, and I couldn’t believe it.  We had big plans to go to a Jim Croce concert in Rapid City, then the poor guy dies in a plane crash a week before.  I was bummed.  We just never got around to going out after that and it was another year before I felt brave enough to ask somebody else out.  It was an unlucky year all around.”

“Just think how Jim Croce felt.”

They laughed together.  Cassie’s eyes sparkled and, for a moment, Morgan could imagine the fresh-faced teen-ager he’d surely have seen at his father’s cashier counter that summer before his senior year, a lusty summer when almost no female escaped his notice.

Cassie brought him up to date on her life since high school:  Her father had abandoned the family in her senior year, so her mother took cleaning jobs to support the family.  As one of the top ten students in her class, she had been accepted at Stanford, but after her father left, her college plans changed like everything else in her life.  She ended up at the University of Wyoming, majoring in marketing.  She graduated, came back to Winchester, married a small-town Presbyterian preacher and quickly had two children, who were both now in junior high school.  

“So you work here now?” he asked her.

“Sort of.”

“Part-time?”

Cassie smiled demurely.

“No,” she said.  “I’m the clerk of district court.  Duly elected and sworn to uphold the constitution of the State of Wyoming.  And I make the coffee.”

Morgan’s eyes widened.  He knew from the name on the door and in his own paper’s election stories she was now Cassandra Gainsforth.

“
The
clerk?  You’re Cassandra Gainsforth?”

Cassie nodded.

“Twelve years now.  As the clerk, that is.  Fifteen years as Cassandra Gainsforth,” she said, displaying a diamond ring on her left hand that was easily three times the size of the one Morgan gave to Claire.

“Well, Jeez ...” Morgan caught himself before he took the Lord’s name in vain.  “I mean, gosh, I am impressed.  And a little embarrassed.”

“Happens all the time.  Everybody gets nervous around the preacher’s wife.  You should hear the language around here.  I don’t mind.”

“No, I mean, I didn’t recognize you and all.  I’ve been away too long.  Let me congratulate you, belatedly, on the election and the marriage.”

“Hey, don’t sweat it.  It’s a good job, but I’m not a very good campaigner.  Good thing I’m usually running unopposed or I’d be a quivering blob of nerves right now.  I’d be worse than Trey Kerrigan.”

“I saw him the other day.  He didn’t seem too shaken about it.”

Cassie smiled wryly.

“He’s a sly one.  He makes like he’s got no care in the world, but he’s got his little supporters out there clearing the way day and night.  Trey campaigns hard, like he’s a one-legged man in a three-legged race.  Highlander Goldsmith’s a nice guy, but he isn’t gonna know what hit him a week from Tuesday.”

Morgan conjured up an image of his childhood friend, puking his guts out in the locker room before every basketball game, scared to death he’d embarrass himself in front of the hometown crowd.  Then he’d go out and sink almost every shot he attempted.  He couldn’t miss.

Once, Morgan knew Trey Kerrigan as well as anyone.  Now he wasn’t so sure he knew him at all.

“He hasn’t changed much,” Morgan said, leaving it at that.

“Oh, he’s changed a lot,” Cassie said, lowering her voice and glancing out the vault door to see who might be listening.  “Politics is like an oven:  You don’t come out the same as you went in.  Trey’s harder now.  It’s like keeping that job is more important than doing it.”

“He seemed fine when I saw him.  Cocky as ever.”

“He’s a cool customer, I’ll give him that.  But I’m sure Trey’s had his big supporters lobbying with you,” Cassie said.  “He calls them his ‘homeboys.’  You probably didn’t know it, but I’m sure they’ve been working on you.  They’re slick.”

Morgan shrugged.

“Not really.  Other than Trey himself, nobody has said anything.”

Cassie looked surprised.

“No kidding?  You mean Jake Switzer and Ham Tasker haven’t darkened your doorstep to ask for your vote and maybe a little campaign contribution?  They must be slowing down.”

Morgan, who had been blowing his hot coffee to cool it, held his breath for a long, uncomfortable moment.  He hoped he didn’t look as dumbfounded as he was.

“They’re working for Trey?” he asked.

He felt his face turn hot and red.  The walls of the vault seemed to close in on him.  A nervous spurt of adrenaline coursed through his body, making him feel slightly ill.

“Sure.  They run his campaign.  Fancy themselves to be real political movers and shakers, those two,” Cassie said.  “Whoever they haven’t got in their pockets, they squeeze.”

Then she leaned nearer, lowering her voice to a conspiratorial whisper.  “A couple of stuffed shirts, if you ask me.”

In that claustrophobic moment, a piece of the puzzle fell into place.

Gilmartin’s case was a political liability for Trey Kerrigan, perhaps worse.  He’d sent Tasker and Switzer to keep a lid on it, one way or another, and they’d nearly succeeded.  His refusal to open forty-eight-year-old investigative records on Aimee Little Spotted Horse’s murder was all too predictable for a small-town sheriff, but the heavy-handed political pressures on Morgan betrayed something darker and deeper.

“Well, enough about politics,” Cassie said.  “You probably get plenty of that stuff in your job.  Did you find anything interesting in these old card files?”

Morgan shook his head.  “Nothing.”

“Must be looking for some really old case.  These old index cards only go up to 1962.  Ancient history.  Everything else has been entered on the computer.”

“Computer?”

“Yeah, you know, one of those machines with a little TV screen and a keyboard?”

Morgan looked sheepish.

“I mean, there are more records?  Why didn’t you tell me?”

Cassie put her hands on her shapely hips and fixed him in a chastising glare.

“You asked to see the card files, and here they are.  You didn’t ask to see the database.  You only got what you asked for, but you didn’t get what you wanted.  Follow me.”

She led him to a small desk in a corner of the front office where a sleek new IBM computer sat.  She pressed a button and the machine came to life with a colorful whisper.

“This is Alyx.  Two-hundred megahertz Pentium processor, thirty-two megs of RAM, a three-point-two gigabyte hard drive.  One hundred percent pure techno-beefcake.  It does the work of three people, never sleeps and never talks back,” Cassie said proudly.  “If it were a man, I’d marry it.”

“And it contains every court file in Perry County since 1962?”

“They’re all cross-indexed by date, criminal, civil, probate, judges’ names, lawyers’ names, defendant, plaintiff, even verdict.  You name it.  All the basic stuff.”

“Not the bailiff’s favorite ice cream?” Morgan joked.

Cassie rolled her eyes and continued.

“You want to know Perry County’s felony conviction rate?  It’s in here.  Want to know who the toughest judges are?  It’s here.  Want to know how many violent crimes we prosecuted in a given period?   It’s all right here, and lots more.  All the original paperwork is still in hard copy and stored in the vault, but this computer helps us cross-reference and compile statistics.  The governor is big on statistics these days.  I hate politics.”

A form appeared on the tartan-colored screen.

“Go ahead.  Just tell Alyx what you want.  And don’t forget to say please.”

Morgan sat down in front of the terminal.  He scrolled through the blanks and under “Defendant,” he typed “Pierce.”

“Now click on the search button,” Cassie told him.  “Easy as pie, huh?”

A tiny digitized clock ticked off a few seconds, then a couple dozen listings appeared in chronological order on the screen.  Morgan scrolled through them for the name “Malachi,” but most were divorces and other civil cases, all unrelated to Malachi Pierce.

Then his eye caught a familiar name.

Not Malachi.

It was Case No. 76-368J.

In the Matter of
Hosanna
Pierce.

“What’s this?” he asked Cassie, who stood over his shoulder.  She leaned closer to the screen to see the case he’d highlighted with the cursor.

“That’s a juvenile case.  See the “J” in the number?  All I can tell you from this is it’s a juvie case from 1976, and it’s not criminal.  Other than that, it’s a sealed record.”

“Sealed?”

“The juvenile cases are all closed.  Alyx has the case reference and all the usual index items, but it takes a special password to access family court and juvenile files, so the public can’t stumble into them.”

It didn’t matter.  Morgan already knew about this case.  Old Bell told him:  Years ago, Malachi Pierce had gone to court to commit his retarded daughter to the state hospital.  In 1976, Hosanna Pierce would have been nine or ten years old, a hair’s breadth away from spending the rest of her life in a mental institution.

“If I wanted to know who the lawyers were in this particular case, could I get that information?” Morgan asked.

“Not without the secret code,” Cassie replied, leaving no doubt in Morgan’s mind that the password would remain a secret.  “Is that the case you were looking for?”

Morgan shook his head.

“No, but I’m not really sure what I was looking for,” he said.

“Something related to that old murder case?”

Rumors flowed through small towns like electricity through a pure copper wire.  There was no point in trying to keep secrets, which were bartered, sold and occasionally donated in the scandalous commerce of Winchester, Wyoming. 

“No, not related to that.  Something else,” Morgan told her.  “And if you can keep a secret, I’ll tell you what I’m looking for.”

Cassie smiled.  “My job is keeping secrets.”

Speaking softly, Morgan told her about Pierce’s threatening letter, and Hosanna’s frightened outburst when she saw Simeon Fenwick in the cafe.  He explained that it caused him to wonder if Malachi Pierce had ever needed a lawyer, and why.  And he told her what Old Bell had said about Hosanna’s brush with oblivion.  In the end, he said, he was only worried for his and his wife’s safety.

Cassie listened intently.  She seemed troubled by what she heard.

“I don’t recall any cases with Malachi Pierce and, believe me, I’d remember if that scary old man had come through here.  To him, we’re the enemy, the government grandmas who’re going to take away his guns.  Thank the Lord, he pretty much keeps to himself out there on the ranch.  He’s in his own world, you know”  — and she circled her finger around her ear.

“What about Fenwick?”

“I don’t know.  It’s not likely he got involved if there were real fireworks.  He retired shortly after I first got elected, but he was mostly doing civil work, wills and deeds and stuff like that.  He begged for those little court appointments that other lawyers hated.  The judges were only too happy to oblige.  He took on so many guardian cases, they called him ‘Uncle Sim.’  He was a prissy old guy, you know, and I don’t think he had the guts for the criminal cases.”