Absolute Rage (28 page)

Karp was distracted at the next chapter, an account of the worst labor violence in U.S. history, by a change in the motion of the plane. It was banking counterclockwise and seemed to be descending.

Hendricks was in the aisle, leaning over him. “How's that report?”

“It's fascinating. It reads like fiction. Is it on the level?”

“Like what?”

“Oh, here where it says fourteen revenue agents have gone missing in the county since 1900. Fourteen?”

“That's only the federals. We lost some state boys, too, over the years. They don't much like lawmen poking into them hollers up there. Plus, you got to consider that the county is stuck full of mines like a Swiss cheese, and you got boys up there with unlimited access to blasting compound. Stick a couple of bodies down a shaft and dump sixty tons of rock on top of 'em. What're you gonna do? Start digging with a pick and shovel? We know they run meth, they run pot, some corn liquor, too, but not as much as they used to. It's a bad situation. If you want to know the truth, the law wrote off Robbens County a while back.”

“What changed your minds?”

“Oh, you know, new governor, new broom. You need to put your seat belt on now.” Hendricks sat in the seat opposite and affixed his own. Karp looked out the window. They were flying at what he estimated to be fifteen hundred feet, over ground that resembled green corrugated cardboard.

“Are we landing?”

“No, but we'll be heading over Robbens any minute now. At this altitude we sometimes have to use evasive maneuvers.”

“Evasive from what?”

“Ground fire,” replied Hendricks blandly. “We have state markings. A lot of folks down there don't like official kinds of airplanes flying over them.” He looked at Karp innocently. “Unless it makes you nervous. I could tell the pilot to get upstairs again.”

“Not at all. I think everyone should be subjected to antiaircraft fire at least once.”

Hendricks nodded, his face neutral. He pointed out the window. “Okay, you can see mining from here. We're still over Mingo. That's Mateawan down there. You heard of that, haven't you?”

“Yes. That's a coal mine?” It was a smudge of black and ocher the size of a town, intermittently veiled by greasy smoke, threaded by railways.

“Yeah, a Peabody operation, I think. In a bit, we should be coming up on . . . yeah, look there, see that big flat area?”

Karp did. It was a huge, perfectly flat oval, looking unlikely amid the rippled hills, as if God had dropped a soccer field for giants on top of the mountains.

“What is it?”

“It used to be a mountain called Thatcher. They chopped it flat and dumped the spoil in the hollers all around it, and smoothed it out and planted it with grass.”

“They can do that?”

“Oh, that's a prize exhibit of reclamation. They fixed that one. Just wait, we're coming up on something real interesting.”

Karp thought the interesting thing might be a controlled flight into terrain. A mountain was looming in front of them, whose top looked to be higher than the altitude of the plane. He stared at the approaching green wall; out of the corner of his eye he saw that Hendricks was watching him. A little mountain-state aviation initiation, then, he thought, and made himself yawn. When he could count individual trees on the mountainside and distinguish the very one upon which the King Air was about to impale itself, the aircraft twitched its wing up and zoomed through a break in the mountain wall. Karp thought he could see squirrels running for cover as the towering forest flew past.

“This is Conway Gap, and that's Majestic Number One,” said Hendricks.

It looked like something had taken a huge bite out of the rear half of the mountain, leaving an orange and black earth pit that looked large enough to swallow New York City. Orange creeks ran off the sore and disappeared into the surrounding timberland.

“That's what they look like when you don't clean 'em up, and Majestic don't.”

“Don't they have to?”

“Oh, it's the law all right, but try and make them. There's court cases been going on for ten years on this pit alone. See, what they do is dump the spoil from the hole down into the hollers. They bury everything, homes, farms, graveyards, whole little towns. Of course, the people've moved out before then. The mining ruins the water first, tears up the water tables and kills the creeks. And that's what you got left. You all have your coal, though. This here's downtown McCullensburg.”

The plane dropped even lower and sped over a group of low buildings and a green square with a golden-domed courthouse in it.

“Not much to it at this speed,” said Hendricks. “On the other hand, there ain't much to it on the ground neither.” The plane circled the town twice, while the trooper pointed out the hills and highways, scars of coal patches, and the coffee stream of the Guyandotte River.

“We're passing over the murder house there.”

Karp pressed his face against the glass and looked down with interest. A yard, a roof, a red truck in the driveway. Marlene's maybe. Then it was gone.

“One more beauty spot and then we'll put the pedal down and get us home,” said Hendricks. The plane rose, rising with the curve of the mountain he had identified as Hampden. The top of the mountain was gone, leaving a great mustard-and-black scab upon which yellow trucks and bulldozers rolled. It looked like a sandbox occupied by a child unusually well supplied with Tonka toys. In the center was what appeared to be a white, rectangular, five-story office building.

“Majestic Number Two. There's the dragline,” said Hendricks, answering Karp's unspoken question about what a five-story office building was doing in the middle of a mine. “They use a Bucyrus 2570, maybe the largest shovel in the world, although I hear they got one even bigger out in Wyoming.”

“That thing
moves?”

“Oh, yeah. It never stops, day and night. Every scoop is near four hundred tons. Those trucks down there? Cat 797s. Over six hundred tons fully loaded.”

“I'm impressed,” said Karp. “Every little boy's dream.”

“Uh-huh. The reason I'm showing you this is to give you some idea. You want to bury a body around here, you don't have to go out at night with a spade and a lantern.”

A few minutes later the plane heaved and rolled onto its side, climbing. Karp's belly lurched and he grabbed the seat arms.

“What was that?”

“Oh, Rudy probably saw a flash. He's real nervous when he flies over weed.”

“Marijuana?”

“Yeah. It's getting as big as coal around here. We go down and chop it back some from time to time, but there're lots of hollers and not enough of us.”

The plane climbed rapidly. Hendricks loosened his seat belt. He grinned. “Wild and wonderful. We'll be down in twenty, twenty-five minutes.”

As they were. The trip to the capitol was swift, in a convoy of two state police vehicles. Karp and Hendricks rode in the back of one of them, with the captain pointing out the features of what looked to Karp like a nice little city on the banks of a not-too-clean river. The capitol itself was the usual massive gray-stone, gilded-domed structure. The governor was meeting them in his office there, instead of the one at the governor's mansion, in the interests of privacy, Hendricks explained.

“In case I piss on the rug.”

“We're careful folks hereabouts.”

“I might, though. I never met a governor before. The excitement . . .”

Hendricks laughed and opened a walnut-paneled door.

They were ushered in immediately. The office was modern and not impressively large, much like its occupant. Roy Orne was a small man with excellent barbering and a peppy manner. A young woman, trim in a fawn suit, her blond hair in a neat bun, was introduced as “my aide” Cheryl Oggert. Shakes all around, seats, offer of coffee, soft drinks, declined, the usual banter. Governor Orne asked how was the flight; Karp commented on the abundance of mountains. Laughs.

Time to turn serious: Orne asked if Karp had read the binders. What did he think?

“I think you got the wrong man. I think the people down there botched the investigation.”

“Incompetence, do you think, or malevolence?” asked the governor.

“Hard to tell. Could be either. Based on the other binder, I would tend to bet on the latter. Otherwise it was a
really
dumb investigation. In any case their suspect is a joke.”

“What does your wife think?”

Karp was taken aback. The governor had certainly done his homework. “Well, clearly, she believes her client is innocent,” Karp said carefully. “As to malevolence, there seems to be plenty to spare. An attempt was made on her life the other day.”

The governor looked grave, and a glance flicked between him and Hendricks. “Well. That's awful. Was she hurt?”

“No. Marlene is hard to hurt. Experts have tried. Of course, she'll be out of there once I get there, provided you want me. Speaking of which, why do you?”

“How's that?”

“Why do you want a prosecutor from out of state? It seems a bit extreme. I'm sure you've got plenty of fine lawyers in West Virginia.”

“Well, yes, we do,” said Orne. “But I'm kind of busy just now.” The others chuckled, Karp allowed a smile. Orne continued, “Here's the thing, Mr. Karp. I've heard a lot about you from Saul. I don't think there's a prosecutor in the state that has your experience, hell,
half
your experience. State's attorney tends to be a young fellow's profession. We've got a man up in Wheeling's been there twelve years, and I doubt he sees three murder trials a year, and those're bar fights and domestics. We don't have any people skilled in unraveling a conspiracy.”

“You think it's a conspiracy?”

“Well, let's see: a union reformer gets killed along with half his family in the most corrupt, antiunion county in the state. What're the chances it was a wandering drifter, like in that book,
In Cold Blood?
I'd say slim to none. Okay, that's one reason. Another is, if I assign a local, people are going to look at his political connections, either to me, or to my many fine enemies, or to Big Coal, or whatever. You on the other hand don't know one end of West Virginia from the other. That's an advantage. Also, Saul assures me that you don't play political games.”

“Yes. People have said I have the political skills of a three-year-old.”

The governor laughed. “That's good. We want the truth here, and let the bricks fly.”

“Sounds good,” said Karp. “Another reason might be that, if I crash and burn, I'm a stranger, and it doesn't cost you anything to dump me.”

A tiny silence here. Then the governor chuckled. “Well, yeah, I guess that passed through my mind. And as long as we're being brutally frank, I'm also doing it to keep control of this mess, assuming that it might very well lead to some pretty powerful political factors in the state. I don't want the feds to have an excuse to come in here and piss all over another Democratic governor. This is a decent state, with solid liberal instincts, and it's tied to a nasty, regressive bunch of industries—coal, chemicals, power plants. It makes for a funny kind of politics, but just about everyone's now agreed that the old kind of Robbens County behavior just don't cut it anymore, and I mean to clean it up, and I need a pro to do it. Well, Mr. Karp, will you?”

“Sure,” said Karp, surprising himself with the ease with which he committed himself. “Resources . . . ?”

“Whatever you need. If you want to hire people, there's money for that. Captain Hendricks will be part of your team, in charge of any detective and forensic work. You'll have priority at the state lab, of course, and a budget that should be adequate. Cheryl here will be your contact with my office and will go down there with you to handle the on-scene public relations. I assume you'll appreciate the help in that area.”

“Saul must have ratted about my winning ways with the press.”

“Well, no offense, but I think we're going to get a lot of publicity on this case, and I think the viewers would rather see her face on the screen than yours. When can you start?”

“How about the beginning of next week?”

“That's fine,” said Orne. “Wade and Cheryl will form up an advance team and have everything ready for you when you get down there.”

Orne rose, extended his hand. “Welcome aboard, Mr. Karp. We expect great things from you.”

Karp looked into the governor's dark eyes; sincerity flooded from them, which made him feel good for a moment, until he reflected that Orne was a politician and that sincerity was easy to fake.

*  *  *

Lucy drove the refurbished Land Cruiser off the car ferry and onto the streets of Bridgeport, Connecticut, feeling quite uncharacteristically pleased with herself. She had fixed the car, obtained the plates, finished her various chores, whipped her brothers into finishing theirs, and escaped without either mechanical breakdown or dog-based emergency intervening. She had made one final executive-level decision just before leaving, and she was somewhat concerned that she had not called her mother to clear it, but Billy had agreed and she felt confident that she had done the right thing.

Zak the navigator, a street map unfolded across his lap, said, “Right in three blocks.”

From the backseat came the tweedle of a Game Boy. Giancarlo was spread out with pillows like a pasha on a divan, his preferred mode of automobile travel. One of the nice things about traveling with the boys was that there was never any quarrel about who would get the shotgun seat. Giancarlo did not covet it, nor would Zak ride anywhere else.

The executive decision was about the dog Jeb. Jeb was a bonehead and varminty as all hell, which meant that he was suspicious of everything that moved, besides which, he was an escape artist of some talent. Billy had tried to break him of the habit of lunging at every stranger, with some success, but clearly Jeb would never make a personal guard dog good enough to sell as such under the Wingfield Farm label. The decision was to turn him into a yard dog. He would spend his professional career pacing behind a high fence hoping that some really stupid person would try to climb over it at night. Not a trivial decision either, because it meant that he would lose over half his value.