Into the Inferno (23 page)

45. DON’T ASK ME WHAT I WAS DOING
IN A MOTEL ROOM WITH STEPHANIE RIGGS

Wracked with guilt for not being with my daughters, I thought about fleeing before she came out of the bathroom. I was stretched out on the bed, hands clasped behind my head, doing deep-breathing exercises, while the smartest, most attractive woman I’d ever met was taking her clothes off behind the bathroom door in a sleazy North Bend motel room.

Outside, it was nearly as dark as my heart.

My girls and Morgan had left a note. Although I’d given her the keys and told Morgan she could use my truck for whatever came up, I was surprised when she took me up on it. They’d gone to a movie I’d seen with them already, one they knew I didn’t care to sit through again.

After we decided to go to the store to pick up groceries for supper, Stephanie, instead of turning left off Ballarat and heading toward the QFC, had turned west on North Bend Way, swinging into the parking lot at the Sunset Motel. When the motor stopped, she gave me a long look.

“What?” I said.

Without a word, she went into the office, got a key, and proceeded to a room off the second-floor balcony. Suspecting I was soon to become the recipient of what my army buddies used to call a mercy fuck, I followed with the aimless hankering of a stray dog trailing a garbage truck. Not that Stephanie was anything like a garbage truck, even if I was exactly like the stray dog.

It might have been my imagination, but I thought she’d been looking at me differently all day. It was even possible we’d had a few tender moments of the kind you get with someone you’re beginning to fall in love with.

Despite my reputation as a womanizer, I was always confused when it came to women. I never knew what they were thinking, not unless they told me, and most of the time even then I didn’t
really
know.

As I followed her up the open stairs and along the walkway, she turned back and ambushed me with a kiss. Right out there for the birds to see, and the three Hispanic kids kicking a soccer ball against the wall of a nearby garage door. Ridiculous and dewy-eyed as it sounds, it was the kind of kiss you always want to be your first with a woman, the kind you never get except once in a blue moon, when one of you is just a tad drunk or a lot exhausted and you know the relationship is not going to extend past the exchange of phone numbers.

We weren’t drunk, but we both knew the relationship had two days, three at the most, and that must have added spice to it.

Stephanie resumed her ardor as soon as we were in the room, her body small and slender and taut in my hands, her arms twined around my neck, her lithe stomach pressed against mine, as she stood on tiptoes clinging to me. Every part of her body felt hot against my cool skin. She kissed the tips of two fingers and pressed them to my nose, then turned and disappeared into the bathroom.

I closed the door with my foot and reached out and flicked on a dim light. The drapes were already closed. The room had a queen-size bed, a vanity, one chair, and a cheesy painting of a moose in a swamp.

I lay on the bed without a thought in my head except . . .

Mercy fuck.

I was about to get one.

Joel McCain once told me my crimes against women were a control issue, that I needed to be in control of every little aspect of every relationship. I only half wondered how he knew that about me. He hadn’t endeared himself to me by calling my relationships with women crimes. I’d bridled at the thought. Hell, I was still friends with all of my ex-girlfriends.

But he was right about control. As a child I’d had zero control over my life or even the hours in my day. At Six Points every waking minute was accounted for, booked in advance by the church, by my father, by William P. Markham, and by the Lord Jesus Christ. If you were a kid, there was no time for riding a bike or flying a kite or painting by numbers. Nobody played cards or read fiction. These activities were all blueprints offered up by the devil to take your mind off God’s work. Since birth I’d had the principles of austerity and compliance pounded into my brain. Okay. So I had control issues.

I suppose I must have been a control freak with Lorie as well, though specific examples escape me. Lord. Maybe I had driven her away! Maybe her parents were right about me. Maybe I’d turned my ex-wife into a lesbian.

Now I was in a motel with Stephanie Riggs.

And she was in control.

And you know what?

I kind of liked it.

My life had been taken out of my hands, my days orchestrated by our panicky quest to track down the origins of the syndrome. If she wanted to come out of the bathroom and make love, fine. If she wanted to come out and tell me to scram, that was fine, too. At this point I refused to let anything bother me.

When I heard the shower running, I knew I was in for a wait.

The funeral had been hell. Sitting between Karrie and Ben Arden’s wife, Cherie, I could only wonder why I hadn’t believed Stan Beebe’s story back when there’d been a chance to save him.

The world had mobilized to save my butt, but without lifting a finger I’d let Stan drown in a sea of desperation.

The visit to Joel McCain’s house and the bizarre interactions between the chemists from Canyon View had been puzzling at best. Achara’s quiet conference with me and desperate anger at Donovan had been even more puzzling. Thinking to catch her alone, I’d been on the lookout for her all day, but it hadn’t happened.

Back to the station after the accident, I was standing outside in the sunshine dialing various media outlets on a cell phone when the black Suburban pulled into the gravel lot across the street from the firehouse, Donovan and Carpenter peering out the open driver’s window like an old married couple out for a Sunday afternoon drive, the issues between them seemingly resolved.

Side by side, they walked across the street just as Stephanie came out of the station. After eavesdropping on my phone conversation for a moment, Donovan said, “You’re not calling a television station, are you?”

Placing my palm over the phone, I said, “Yes. Why?”

“That’s crazy. You should stop!”

“I’m—”

“Trust me on this. I was in Chattanooga, where the news guys came in like a herd of elephants and raised so much dust things never got right again. The investigation ground to a halt! I’m telling you. We’ve got a couple of days to move like lightning. Don’t gum up the works.”

I told the folks at the TV station I would call back. Maybe Donovan had a point. He’d been through this before; I hadn’t. I had a strong inclination to hold a press conference, but maybe he was right.

Donovan interrupted my thoughts. “I’m planning to run down some leads here in the valley. I want to look over the accident site from last winter. I also want to interview McCain’s friends. And Feldbaum’s. Maybe yours, too. Sometimes you can get something verbally that you can’t dig up with test tubes and science.”

“I told you before. It’s got something to do with Jane’s California Propulsion, Inc. It has to.”

“I know. I know. And we think there might be something to that. I’ve already done a quick read-through of my lists from three years ago, and I can’t find their name. I’m going to have Achara work on that this afternoon. She’ll check out the various components to rocket fuel and see what the health implications are. She’ll also make some calls about Jane’s. We have a few contacts in the industry, so we might be able to learn something.”

“Thanks.”

“Don’t mention it. We want you well, pal.”

“Thanks.”

He winked. I glanced at Achara to see what her take on this was, but she didn’t seem to be paying attention.

“If you’re still thinking about calling the media,” Donovan said, “don’t. I’m telling you. They show up, they’ll turn this into a circus. You want to give a hundred interviews a day? That’s what the chief in Chattanooga was doing. And they didn’t get one pertinent piece of information from the public. Not one.”

Stephanie came out of the station in time to hear this. “You’re
not
going to call the media?” she asked.

“I was. Donovan’s got another take on it.”

“I think you should.”

“What do you think, Achara?” I asked.

She turned to me. “It’s your call. I’m not going to vote on a thing like that.” Everybody waited for my decision, Stephanie, Donovan, Carpenter, Ian Hjorth, who’d also come outside and joined our group.

“I’m going to talk,” I said.

Stephanie patted my shoulder. “Good. Somebody out there might know something.”

Shaking his head with a conviction that almost changed my mind, Donovan said, “It’s your call. But first give us a twenty-four-hour period without interference.”

“I don’t think so. Tomorrow’s day six.”

“You don’t know that for certain.”

“Tell you what, Scott. When you contract this, you take a chance on which day you’re on.”

“You’re right. Sorry. Forget I even said that. Jesus. I don’t know what I was thinking.”

I set up a press conference for ten o’clock the next morning outside the fire station.

Soon after my decision, Achara took her briefcase and notes and walked the two blocks to the North Bend branch of the King County Library; she said she was looking for a place to spread out her notes and work. Donovan climbed into his Suburban and drove off without telling us where he was headed.

Stephanie and I dropped the girls off with Morgan at my house, exchanging tearful kisses with both. Morgan, who’d been all but unreachable for almost two days, was suddenly eager to baby-sit.

The most frustrating task that afternoon was locating firefighters from the Chattanooga Fire Department willing to speak candidly. Already one firefighter was being sued by one of the litigants for speaking out in public, and just about everyone and their mother had been subpoenaed to the trial.

Once again, I found myself in a long, rambling conversation with Charlie Drago, who now filled me in on the LPG disaster that happened two weeks after Southeast Travelers, the explosion he’d forgotten to tell me about during our first conversations. The fact that he’d forgotten to mention it the first time around spoke volumes about his mental acuity.

He also said there’d been a fire in his garage shortly after he began looking into the syndrome, blamed it on powerful unnamed forces, said he’d been followed by men in black for weeks, that his phone had been tapped, that they might be listening to us that very minute. The more we spoke, the more I realized Charlie was a full-blown paranoiac.

“You gotta listen to me,” Drago said. “Whatever anybody tells you about that LPG incident, it was
not
an accident. It was a
trap
. You know who responded? The same group of guys went to Travelers. It was only luck it didn’t kill more than the six of them and the two civilians. You wipe out half a battalion and you suddenly no longer have anyone who cares about Southeast Travelers. Specifically, you wipe out the guys who responded to Southeast, and you got no one left to come down with this syndrome and start suing. That was the plan all along.”

“Carl Steding told me the same thing. That it was a trap. Or at least that’s what he hinted.”

“Trouble is, we’re practically the only two people in town who think that.”

“Wasn’t the LPG incident ruled accidental?”

“Sure it was. That’s what they wanted.”

“That’s what
who
wanted?”

“The people who lit up my garage.”

“And who were they?”

“Whoever stands to lose their pants over Southeast Travelers. It could be any one of thirty corporations. Or their investors. Thousands of investors. In fact, investors are usually the worst. I should know. I was an investor once.”

Toward evening a battalion chief from Chattanooga named Frost called in response to messages I’d left. He told me I could cheerfully disregard anything Charlie told me, that Charlie had been spouting nonsense about Southeast Travelers for so long, nobody listened to him anymore. When I mentioned Charlie’s garage fire and his thoughts on the LPG truck accident, Chief Frost said, “Charlie started it hisself, left a sack of hot ashes from his woodstove too close to a wall. And that LPG truck driver? He reached over to change the radio station, got a bee in his briefs, whatever. Nobody but Charlie and some asshole works over at the paper ever thought there was anything odd about it.

“The tank itself must have ruptured with the crash, which would have weakened the double-wall construction. Burned real hot. We went in like we’re taught, hard and aggressive, two teams on two hose lines, each spray pattern protecting the team behind it, but the tank blew before we got it cooled. The explosion was unbelievable. Hey. Out of those eight guys, six died, which was a miracle in itself, because they all should have been blown to Kingdom Come. One escaped with minor burns, and one had to retire. Helluva deal. We also lost the truck driver and a news photographer who happened to be in the way. I didn’t get there myself until minutes later, but I saw it from a distance and believe me, I thought twice about turning around and heading on outa there. You ain’t lived until you’ve seen an LPG tank go up. It hadn’t been mostly empty, we would have lost a lot more people. Damn lucky.”

“The same shift had the LPG fire as went to Southeast Travelers?”

“Yeah.”

“The guy at the paper seemed to think that was significant.”

“I don’t know why.”

I spoke to several more fire officers who either had been at the tanker fire in Chattanooga or were intimate with the details. Unfortunately, the details shed little light on our problems in North Bend. Even though Drago told me at one time he had a complete list of the companies involved in the Southeast Travelers fire, he couldn’t confirm or deny JCP, Inc., had been involved. So far, neither could anybody else.

We fielded several calls from people in the upper Snoqualmie Valley asking to confirm Scott Donovan was working with us, so we knew he was making the rounds.

At five-thirty people began disappearing to go home and have dinner with their families. By six-thirty there were only three of us left, myself, Stephanie, and Cherie, God bless her. She’d been with us all day.