Anyone But You Page 16
Any real evidence of his ties to Depew was probably in the grungy gray backpack he carried everywhere he went. She found his clothes in the bottom dresser drawer, and her careful pat-down of his cargo shorts yielded a surprising find—three neatly rolled marijuana cigarettes. “That son of a bitch.” Even if by some miracle he turned out to be clean, he was jeopardizing their legitimacy by bringing drugs into the house.
His laptop and phone were missing, probably in his backpack, and unless he was stupid, password-protected. The closet held their duffel bags—both of them empty—and three sleeping bags, one of which was hers. She hadn’t used it since the night of the SWAT raid, and Marty and Jenn hadn’t needed theirs because they’d lucked into a bed with sheets and a blanket.
If he’d hidden anything in the house, it had to be in another—
Why was his sleeping bag on top if he hadn’t used it at all?
She stripped its casing and unfurled it on the bed, noticing at once a bundle in the bottom. A leather shaving kit for a man who didn’t bother to shave. She unzipped the bag and dumped the contents—several more cigarettes, rolling papers and a plastic bag containing about two ounces of marijuana, probably the same stash the SWAT team had “found” in their kitchen that went missing immediately after the raid. And an Ohio driver’s license with the name Martin Winthrop.
There also was a small cloth bag with a drawstring top. She loosened it and shook out at least a dozen tiny electronic gadgets, each no bigger than a button. Transmitters. So that’s how Depew’s people had known which tires to slash, which windows to break and which cars to pull over.
With a shudder, she realized Marty also knew each time she went to meet Cathryn, though he couldn’t put that together unless he was tracking her too, and there was no reason he’d do that. She’d been to Cathryn’s hotel only twice, once in a rental car and again with the pizza delivery guy.
It was too late to worry about Cathryn now. She needed to neutralize Marty. Kicking him out of the house wasn’t enough. She wanted to kick him in the teeth.
Izzy would know what to do, but the idea rapidly taking shape in her head was well outside the lines. CLEAN activists had a long, deliberate history of playing by the rules, and she couldn’t ask anyone to do something that might result in serious trouble with the law.
She dropped the cigarettes, including the ones in the drawer, inside the plastic bag and set it aside. Then she rolled everything else back inside the sleeping bag and returned it to the closet.
For good measure, she emptied her backpack to make sure she wasn’t carrying around a transmitter, and then tucked the drugs into the outside flap where she could get to them easily. It took her only ten minutes to find the transmitter in her Prius, taped to the bottom of the driver’s seat. Though tempted to pull it out and crush it beneath her heel, she imagined a couple of scenarios where it might come in handy, especially if she could make Depew think she was somewhere else.
With the rally behind them and Nations Oil touting the end of their successful cleanup, Jenn had shifted the volunteer focus toward collecting signatures door-to-door for their petition against the Caliber Pipeline. Beyond that, there was little left to do but continue the sidewalk protests at Nations Oil’s gas stations and write letters to the editor. They’d enjoyed some fine moments during this campaign, like exposing the video of the fish kill and drawing thousands to their rally. Forceful protests, like blocking the highway into the cleanup site, would serve no useful purpose, and might even garner sympathy for the oil company.
Stacie wasn’t surprised to find only a handful of volunteers in the usually busy office. Nor was she surprised that Marty was hanging out in the break room eating chips and playing with his smartphone. His backpack lay on the floor at his feet.
“Hey, Marty. You busy?”
“Not really. You need something?”
“I just realized I have to be in two places at once. I was supposed to meet with one of the county commissioners at one thirty but I got a call from Jeff Johannesson about fifteen minutes ago. He’s a chemistry teacher over at Bainbridge High School. I talked to him at the rally, and he offered to have a look at that other duck I plucked out of the lake the day I went out in the kayak.” She’d found only one duck, the one he supposedly took to his father’s friend at Bemidji State, but he had no way of knowing that. “I must have really screwed up those samples I gave you because Jeff ran some tests for me and he’s pretty sure it’s bitumen.”
“No shit.” Now that she knew who he was, his dopey manner got on her last nerve.
“Yeah, and he wrote up a report for us and saved a few of the feathers that still had oil on them. That’s the last of it though. If we lose those, we’ll never be able to prove what we’ve got. Anyway, he has a break from class at one forty-five, but I can’t be there on account of my meeting.”
Marty shook the last of the chips from a bag into his mouth and mumbled, “I could go if you want me to. Where is it?”
“That would be great. I can drop you off. My meeting shouldn’t last more than twenty minutes and I’ll swing back by and pick you up.” She pushed past him toward the restroom. “I need to pee real quick. Can you let Jenn know where we’re going?”
Stacie listened at the door for him to leave and hastily slipped the bag of marijuana into his backpack, shoving it all the way to the bottom. Then she went back inside and flushed the toilet, exiting the restroom just as he returned.
“She said good luck with your meeting. What’s it about?”
She groaned and rolled her eyes. “We got some complaints about approaching people outside the Target store. I just need to smooth things out so we don’t leave a bad impression.”
To Stacie’s relief, he didn’t seem the least bit suspicious as they drove toward the school. He probably was scheming already about how to compromise this new piece of evidence.
“How do I find this Jeff Johannesson?” he asked.
“Apparently they won’t let just anybody walk into the school, so he told me to meet him outside by the box office at the football field.” When they stopped at a traffic light, she took out her phone. “I’ll text him that you’ll be there instead of me.”
At the school he pulled his lanky frame out of her car and slung his backpack over his shoulder. “You want me to wait here?”
She looked at her watch. “Yeah, give me half an hour.”
When she turned the corner out of sight, she pulled into a parking space and looked up the nonemergency number for the Duluth Police Department, an entirely separate entity from the county sheriff’s office that was apparently working with Depew. Using her second prepaid phone, the one she’d intended to give Cathryn, she placed a call.
“Look, I don’t want to get involved or anything, but I need to tell somebody about this. There’s a guy hanging out at Bainbridge High School by the football field. I think he might be dealing drugs. I saw him out there a couple of days ago meeting up with some kids and now he’s back. That’s all.”
She immediately turned off the phone, wiped it down and stomped it with the heel of her boot until the plastic casing shattered. Piece by piece, she ground the electronic parts into a mangled mess and wrapped them inside a brown paper bag. Then she got out of the car and walked half a block up a hillside street that afforded her a view of where she’d left Marty. Within minutes a patrol car with two officers arrived and confronted him. One of them searched his backpack and produced the bag she’d put there. Once she saw him handcuffed, she started back to her car, dropping the paper bag in a trash can along the way.
* * *
It was after eight o’clock when Stacie walked into the farmhouse. Alex and the Mauneys were watching TV in the living room, but the kitchen was dark and all the dishes stacked neatly in the drainer. The lamp was on in the back bedroom where Jenn was sitting amidst a stack of papers and pounding away on her laptop. A pencil protruded from her curly hair.
“Hey, where have you guys been?” Jenn c
raned her neck to look out toward the kitchen. “Where’s Marty?”
“It’s been a really tough day, sweetie. We need to talk.” Stacie closed the door and leaned against it as she sank to the floor. “I don’t know the best way to say this, so I’m just going to put it out there. Marty Wingate isn’t who he says he is. In fact, that isn’t even his name. It’s Martin Winthrop, and he’s been working for Karl Depew for the last four years.” She related how Brian Murray’s investigator discovered the photos from the rally, and that she’d searched his things and found the transmitters in his sleeping bag. “That’s how those guys always knew where we were. They were tracking our cars.”
Jenn absorbed it, denied it, cried about it and ripped her tissue in a thousand pieces. “Is there any chance at all you’ve made a mistake? I’ve been sleeping with this guy for three months.”
“I saw his driver’s license, Jenn. He’s from Canton, Ohio. And I met with Brian again this afternoon and had his investigator run a trace on him. He served seven years in the army, and that’s probably how he hooked up with Depew. We’ve always known these guys would try to infiltrate us eventually.”
“So he’s the one who tipped them off about where our cars were parked and when we were out driving around.”
“That’s not all he did.” Stacie went on to explain how he’d probably tossed their first set of samples. “But I got some more from Izzy and they’re being analyzed at the Department of Health in St. Paul.”
“Izzy!”
“Don’t worry. I picked them up last night about an hour before you made the drop. And I got word this morning Depew sent another SWAT team to sweep the cabins on that side of the lake.” Left unsaid was who had shared that tidbit.
“That creep. Why did they pick me?”
“Because you were single, straight…and you had access to everything related to our organization.” Including their confidential donor lists. Depew could smear the organization by selling their list and making donors think CLEAN had violated their privacy. Even worse, he could send everyone notices saying their credit card information had been compromised.
“Don’t worry, I never shared my passwords with him, but now I know why he was always messing around with my laptop. I thought he was trying to see if I’d been emailing other guys. He acted that way sometimes…jealous. I wouldn’t have hidden things from him if I felt like he trusted me, but I didn’t think I should have to prove anything.” Her face was swollen and red from crying, but if the twitch in her jaw was any indication, hurt feelings were about to give way to fury. “Part of me wants to kill the son of a bitch in his sleep, but the other part wants him to see it coming so he has time to shit his pants.”
“I don’t think we have to worry about him coming back. He’s in the city jail on suspicion of selling drugs.”
“Oh, my God. What did you do?”
“I can’t tell you, Jenn. It’s for your own good…and mine too, I guess.”
“If you set him up, he’s going to tell the police.”
“I know, but Brian says he was kicked out of the army for drugs, and he’s been arrested twice for possession. With a record like that, he’s going to have a hard time getting anybody to listen. Besides, they were his drugs. I found them here in the house, probably the same bag they found the night of the raid.”
Stacie had been careful to cover her tracks even beyond making sure they couldn’t trace the phone call back to her. She also had temporarily removed the tracking device from her car and left it under a rock in a parking space behind their office building. After seeing Marty arrested, she circled back and picked it up again. To anyone who was watching its signal, she’d never left the building.
“We need to tell the others we found out he was working with Depew, and all of them should search their backpacks and purses for transmitters. Not necessarily to throw them away—just to be aware of them. Depew might still be tracking us, and it might not be a bad idea for him to think this was only about the drugs, and not because we’ve figured out who Marty is.” It gave her special satisfaction to think Depew would burn him over his marijuana habit. “I’d rather we didn’t share any more details than that. There’ll probably be an investigation, and the less people know, the better.”
Jenn sniffed and reached for another tissue. Marty had done a lot of horrible things, but as far as Stacie was concerned, the worst was taking advantage of her best friend. It bothered her a lot that she couldn’t make him pay for that, but she wasn’t going to lose a minute’s sleep about sending him to jail for something he didn’t technically do. Even if he hadn’t gone to the school to sell drugs, they were his. At least now she had both him and his stash out of the farmhouse.
Chapter Thirteen
The truth was inescapable, Cathryn admitted as she shuffled papers around on her dining table. Nations Oil had indeed spilled a lot more than reported, and it appeared the ninety thousand they’d admitted to actually was an intentional discharge into the lake. The answer was in the tanker logs. The tankers rushing in from Sioux Falls had weighed in full at the state line checkpoint on Interstate 90, but empty on the return. Nations Oil owned reservoirs on that route, meaning the trucks had carried full loads of heavy crude to Canosia, where they pumped it into the pipeline. Nations Oil officials were waiting at Lake Bunyan to watch ninety thousand gallons pour into the lake before capping it. Additional tankers from Thunder Bay then collected what was left in the pipeline and trucked it down to Hartford. That’s how they’d convinced the federal agencies they were pumping heavy oil.
Underneath what they’d spilled on purpose were at least 200,000 gallons of what was probably bitumen, which presumably originated on the far western edge of the Provincial Oil Field. It was possible the designation was wrong, but now that she’d seen firsthand the lengths to which her company would go to deceive the regulators, she wouldn’t be surprised to learn it was actually piped into Provincial from the Cold Lake Oil Sands.
Cathryn was no longer sure whose side she was on. The woman she loved had dedicated her life to taking down the oil industry, while she’d defended it every step of the way. Now it was clear Stacie and CLEAN were right about practically everything. Did she really want to be vice president of a company as dishonest and deliberately destructive as Nations Oil?
There was no way Bob Kryzwicki didn’t know about the bitumen spill, which meant Hoss had bought off the EPA. For all she knew, the PHMSA report was fraudulent too.
The worst of it was Depew. Under orders from Hoss and Bryce, he’d treated Stacie and her friends like criminals when all they were doing was exercising their constitutional rights to free speech.
Now Hoss was ready to bring her home and make her a vice president, and the price was higher than simply averting her eyes from their wrongdoing. She’d be a part of their corruption, just as guilty as any of them.
She gathered the documents and thumb drive and placed them in an envelope in her safe. There had to be a way to turn this around, to root out the corruption inside her company and restore the public trust. The question was whether or not she was brave enough to take that on.
Her head pounded with a stress headache. What she wouldn’t give to have Stacie kneading the muscles of her neck and telling her everything would be okay.
After changing clothes, she spread out her mat and lit the lavender candle Stacie had given her last weekend. Her movements were fluid, as though warm, clean oil coursed through her veins to lubricate her joints. For nearly an hour she stretched and posed until her muscles trembled with fatigue. She pulled herself into the lotus position to meditate, and instead of closing her eyes, focused on the tiny flame. It danced from side to side, much as she imagined how she flickered between her choices. A chance for prestige and money on one side, a free conscience on the other.
As she stared at the yellow glow, she momentarily lost all awareness of her body. In this sublime ethereal state, she felt centered, fully at peace. She had to choose her conscience.
* * *
One knock. Then three. That was their signal.
Stacie opened the door and waved Cathryn inside. “Where’s your suitcase?”
“I can’t stay. Our CEO is flying in tonight and we have a seven o’clock breakfast meeting at the North Shore Resort. If I’m gone all night, people will notice.”
She didn’t like the anguish in Cathryn’s voice and had a feeling it was more than just worry about getting back to her hotel before her co-workers discovered she was gone. “Is something wrong?”
“Everything is wrong, Stacie. I don’t know who I can trust anymore.”
Only then did she notice Cathryn was carrying a large manila envelope, which she tucked beside her in the armchair. Something told her to play it cool, to let Cathryn come to her with whatever had her so upset. “You can always trust me. I mean that, no matter what.”
“Even if I have evidence that practically everything you accused my company of doing is true?”
That certainly explained her anguish.
“Not only that, it’s even worse than you thought.”
Stacie listened with stunned amazement as Cathryn walked her through what she’d found in the company’s flow records and tanker logs. “I always knew those guys were crooked but I never dreamed they’d go so far as to dump that much oil on purpose to cover their tracks. That’s just diabolical.”
“After what happened in Wyoming, they—or rather we, as in Nations Oil—can’t afford to get caught pumping bitumen again, especially right now. I don’t even think it’s about the fines. It’s about getting the permit for the Caliber Pipeline through the Senate. The hearings start next week, and all they have to do is keep up the charade a little longer. Hoss says the votes are there, and once it passes, there’s very little chance of it being rescinded, even if all this malfeasance comes out later.”