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  She stood there, waiting for absolution. He remembered that about her, the expectation that she could be forgiven almost anything if she gushed a pre-emptive apology. Now that there was nothing between them he wasn’t inclined to make it as easy as he once had.

  “Why did you cancel?” he asked quietly.

  “I had to,” she looked relieved, as if she’d been expecting an angry tirade. “We got some very bad news about one of the agents in the office. Do you know Greg McIvor?”

  “I know who he is.”

  “I worked with him –” her voice faltered, “sorry, they found him dead, just yesterday. Out at the new golf course. We only found out this morning.”

  Frank pulled out one of his ratty kitchen chairs and guided her into it, then sat down himself.

  “I’m sorry, Frank. I was so busy calling around and talking to people that I don’t think it really hit me until now.”

  “It’s like that sometimes,” he said, for something to say. “Is there anything I can get you?”

  “No, Frank, I’ll be okay. I shouldn’t be like this in front of a client—”

  Frank could remember when she thought of him as more than a ‘client’ but he let it go.

  “You must have been close,” he said instead.

  “A long time ago, not now. We went out for a couple of years, right after high school, so there was a time when I really cared about him. I even had a fantasy about getting engaged. Then he just dumped me, went after one of my best friends. Turned out he’d been screwing her for weeks. Then, years later, we’re in the same business and we bump into each other all the time. There was a long time when I really hated him, and then once or twice a week I’d see him at open houses or something and realize I didn’t hate him anymore, that we were just stupid kids and we’d made mistakes. His mistake was dumping me and my mistake was ever caring about him in the first place. But it hit me hard anyway. The son of a bitch was a big part of my life from when I was young and we thought we had the world by the ass and now he’s just – gone. That whole chunk of my life is gone with him and it’s like it never happened.”

  Not quite, Frank thought. He could see that, although she’d never mentioned McIvor to him when they’d been seeing each other. She started to say something but he held up a hand.

  “Don’t say you’re sorry again. Something like that would upset anybody.”

  “It was just a shock, that’s all. It’s still a shock. I mean, he was only a year older than I am and I know that he didn’t take care of himself but it doesn’t make any sense. And his dad was the one who found him, can you imagine?”

  Frank didn’t try. He’d found over the years that an imagination wasn’t always a good thing.

  “What happened?” he asked, reminding himself not to sound like a cop. “Did he have a heart condition or something?”

  “Not that I know of, just ‘natural causes’ is all I heard, if there’s anything natural about just dropping dead.”

  Suddenly her eyes widened and she covered her mouth with her hand.

  “What?”

  “Maybe that’s why he called me. Maybe he wasn’t feeling well.”

  “Did he tell you that?”

  “No, but I was surprised. He had a house showing scheduled and said he couldn’t do it, wanted me to cover for him. I never even asked him why.”

  He could see her eyes misting up again. Guilt, the ‘what ifs’. He’d experienced them himself, too often.

  “How did he sound on the phone?”

  “He sounded – fine, I guess. Nothing different.”

  “There you go. Sometimes things like this just happen.”

  “People don’t just drop dead.”

  “Angie,” he said gently, “sometimes they do.”

  31

  Karl Jamieson’s intended retrospective on Judge Landers and Chief Harrison had been overtaken by events. While Greg McIvor had nowhere near the stature of the two men, his father did. That put the Landers/Harrison piece on the back burner while Karl scrambled to assemble a somewhat inflated tribute.

  He and Greg had never gotten along very well but the McIvors’ real estate business was a major source of advertising revenue for the paper. The old man was the real power there, and he was very much alive. While he‘d been virtually catatonic at the funeral and the reception afterward Karl knew that would change. Kenneth McIvor was somewhere in his late fifties or early sixties but he was hard as flint. The consensus was that he’d be back in the office within a week.

  Karl had no reason to doubt it, so in addition to a florid obituary he’d made a point of being very visible at the service itself and at the reception afterwards. Greg had always handled the advertising for the company, but his father was the one who signed the checks. His attendance at the service had robbed Karl of the time he needed to put the finishing touches on the Landers/Harrison article. It was a good piece and he wanted to get it out there before it lost whatever currency it had.

  His little epiphany about using his own personal impressions of Harrison and Landers in a courtroom had elevated the piece into something a cut above his usual standard. He’d elevated himself as well, by association. It was one of the very few things Karl had written in the last few years in which he’d invested anything of himself. The inference in the article was that he knew both men much better than he actually had, and most of the people who would have been inclined to challenge him on that were either dead or just didn’t care enough to go to the trouble.

  It went all to hell with one phone call.

  “I don’t think,” Cunningham told him, “that putting this out right now would be a good idea.”

  Karl’s own innate caution had betrayed him. Deep down he knew that absolutely no one in Strothwood gave a shit about what he himself thought, so to give the article more weight and to enhance his own stature he’d solicited quotes from some of Strothwood’s so-called leading citizens, people who unlike Karl had actually had meaningful contact with Landers and Harrison.

  Like it or not Cunningham had woven himself into a lot of local history. Leaving him out of a tribute piece to Harrison and Landers would have been perceived as an insult. Including him wasn’t much better. It left Karl open to the kind of micromanagement he’d come to expect from the man who directly or indirectly controlled close to half of the Ledger’s advertising revenue. Unlike most people in Strothwood Cunningham actually read everything in the Ledger, or at least everything that could possibly affect his standing with the electorate. After being forced into a couple of embarrassing retractions Karl had learned the hard way that with any story involving Cunningham, however peripherally, it was a lot easier to just show him the draft copy first. It saved a lot of hassles later on.

  Karl thought he had covered himself, gone out of his way to present Cunningham as a distinguished figure in his own right, someone whose own stature was on a par with Landers and Harrison. Like any politician Cunningham liked favorable publicity, courted it, and it was out of character for him to do what he was doing now.

  “Is there something in particular that bothers you?” Karl asked, careful to keep the frustration out of his voice.

  “The article’s fine, Karl,” Cunningham told him. “It’s just that the timing isn’t good, not after what happened with Greg McIvor.”

  Karl was about to protest when he realized what Cunningham was getting at. The article on Landers and Harrison clocked in at close to 1,500 words, probably the longest piece Karl had ever written for the Ledger. Throw in a couple of pictures of the two men and the article would dominate the entire edition.

  Greg McIvor had died in the same week that Karl had scheduled the Landers/Harrison article to come out. Coverage of McIvor’s death had prevented Karl from putting the finishing touches on the article, so he’d bumped it until the next edition. Cunningham thought that was too soon and even Karl could understand why. Karl had done his best with the McIvor obituary, but there just wasn’t that much Karl could say about h
im, however hard he tried to pad the piece without being too obvious about it. Greg McIvor hadn’t accomplished nearly as much in his short life as Landers or Harrison had. He hadn’t had time.

  Not that it would have mattered to Kenneth McIvor. All McIvor would care about was that, coming so soon after the death of his son, his loss would have been upstaged by the tribute to Landers and Harrison.

  Karl had spent a lot of time on the retrospective, thought briefly of trying to salvage it by somehow incorporating Greg’s loss into the piece with Landers and Harrison. He’d dismissed that idea as soon as it came to him. The irony was that it would have worked quite well if it had been McIvor senior. The trouble was that Karl couldn’t think of any meaningful connection between Greg and the other two men, even though in a place like Strothwood the standard six degrees of separation could easily be downsized to less than three. The differences in age and achievement were just too pronounced.

  It was frustrating but he decided to put the piece away, at least for the foreseeable future. He could always dust it off later on. Landers and Harrison would still be dead a few weeks from now and the Ledger would still have the support of its two major advertisers. In a left-handed way Ed Cunningham had just saved his butt.

  Karl just couldn’t understand why.

  32

  “You know how Cunningham is,” Wagner said. “He just wants the opioid thing to go away.”

  “Little late for that,” Frank told him.

  “No shit, but the quieter he can keep things around here the better.”

  “Little late for that, too.”

  “Yeah, a little late for a lot of things. Trouble is that Kenneth McIvor can’t get his head around the fact that his son might be just one more statistic. The McIvors are too important to be statistics. Greg was young, got the world by the ass, and then bang, it’s over. You spend your whole life as a McIvor and everything goes your way, hard to think shit like that can happen.”

  “So what do you think?”

  “They don’t pay me to think,” Wagner shrugged. “They pay me to pronounce people and then cut them up. I told them what I saw. Standard garden variety OD. Fentanyl or something like it. Bluish nails, papillary miosis – at least you know what I’m talking about. I could see Brent’s eyes glaze over when I told him. Only question he asked was how much the lab would cost.”

  “They won’t send it to the lab,” Frank said.

  “No, they won’t. The last thing Cunningham wants is confirmation. If he keeps things unofficial he can go on pretending this kind of shit doesn’t exist, even if every first responder in the state knows better. McIvor just wants the whole thing swept under the rug.”

  “Let me guess.” Frank said. “McIvor owns Cunningham.”

  “Every which way. Word is that Cunningham’s thinking of making a last-gasp fantasy run for Congress and you need money to do that. Anyway, all McIvor wants is no mention of drugs at all.”

  “No way you’re gonna do that.”

  “Not a chance. I made my report, what they do with it is up to them. It’ll get deep-sixed, but that won’t change anything. McIvor wants to tell everybody his kid got hit by lightning or got hit by a meteorite, if it saves his pride, so what? McIvor is just enough of a hard-nosed sonofabitch that maybe all he’s looking for is a whitewash.”

  Frank had seen Greg McIvor around, didn’t have much more time for him than he did for McIvor senior. On the face of it the old man was your standard pillar of the community, but his business practices sometimes hovered in the grey zone. Greg probably wouldn’t have amounted to jack shit without his old man’s business to fall back on. As far as drugs were concerned, though, from what little Frank knew of him McIvor didn’t fit the profile, didn’t dress that way, didn’t act that way, whatever ‘that way’ was. When Frank had been out working in the big bad world he’d seen a lot of high-functioning addicts of various stripes, and on at least one occasion he’d probably worked for one. That line of thought led him toward his own drinking habits so he shut it down.

  Wagner had gone quiet too. As hard-nosed as he was, it looked like maybe he was reaching his limit. Frank could see the wheels turning. How much to say, how much to leave out, what it would cost him.

  “I want there to be something else, you know?” Wagner shrugged, “But I’ve been everywhere in the human body, hundreds of times, and you know what? I’ve never found it, never found anything to make me believe that it isn’t just a switch going off and then there’s nothing.”

  Wagner looked embarrassed. Both of them fell into a silence that seemed to stretch out. Finally Wagner broke it.

  “Don’t do what I did, Frank.”

  “Which is what, exactly?”

  “Don’t get sucked in. Life’s too fucking short and this place isn’t worth it. When I came here, I gave it two years tops. My marriage had blown up, mostly because I was working all the time, Autopsies While -U -Wait, the whole nine yards. I was just tired of the fucking grind. All I wanted to do was get some peace and quiet someplace. Not a lot to ask for, right? I figured come here, slow down, get myself back together. I guess I had some kind of small town fantasy going on. You know, everybody knows everybody else, nobody locks their doors at night, all that crap.”

  Frank didn’t say anything, but it was reminiscent of the way he’d been thinking when the opportunity came and he’d bailed out of Pittsburgh.

  “What I found out,” Wagner said, “is that it’s bullshit. Maybe it’s like that for the people who’ve always lived here. But if you’re from away somewhere, it’s like some half-assed club that you’re not allowed to join. And after a while I realized I didn’t really give a shit about it after all. I mean, what the fuck can you talk to these people about anyway – putting up drywall? They got nothing else, Frank, and you know it. High school was the high point of their fucking lives. There isn’t a goddamn thing that happens here that matters anywhere else.”

  For the acerbic Wagner it was the equivalent of a meltdown.

  “Maybe you’re the one who should be getting out,” Frank said, once he’d recovered from the tirade.

  “Yeah, “Wagner said. “Maybe I should.”

  Frank just gaped.

  “Don’t look so fucking shocked, Frank. You must have noticed.”

  Frank felt a twinge of guilt. The last few months had been so turbulent that he’d gotten absorbed in his own problems, hadn’t spent much time thinking about anybody else. Not Billy Dancer, and apparently not Jeff Wagner either.

  “Oh yeah, that’s right,” Wagner grinned, “I forgot. It’s Frank Stallings’ world. The rest of us just live in it.”

  “Sorry, Jeff.”

  “No problem, you self-centered asshole,” Wagner smiled. “You’ve had a lot of shit going on. You remember when you came here?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You were a fucking mess. A burnout case if I ever saw one.”

  Frank didn’t take offence. It was true.

  “Well, I think that’s where I am now,” Wagner said. “I’m slipping, Frank. Don’t know what it is but I just don’t care as much. Not the way I used to.” It was a hell of an admission from a man who’d always had a supreme and well-placed confidence in his own abilities. “Only thing I can think of is that I’ve gone native. These people don’t give a shit about anything and I think it’s rubbed off on me. I feel like I’m missing things. ”

  It was the first time Frank had heard Wagner talk this way. Or maybe, Frank thought, it’s the first time I’ve been listening.

  “Too late for me to go anywhere, Frank,” Wagner shook his head. “Not for you. I know technically you were born here so that makes you a local boy, at least up to a point. But you went away somewhere real and you functioned there for what, twenty years, and then you came back and now you’re different from them. You know that, I know that, and they sure as hell know that. Damn, man, they’ve been treating you like shit. Don’t want to see you go but you’ve got to get out of here. You are getting
out of here, right?”

  “I’m selling the house, aren’t I? I’m going.”

  ”Good,” Wagner growled. “You’d fucking well better be.”

  33

  Vince had followed the Audi out of town, no idea where it was headed. All of these people, he thought, had made things very easy for him. Whittaker was no different. Vince doubted if there was another late model Audi within fifty miles.

  For all that Whittaker wasn’t much of a driver. There were a couple of times that Vince thought he might just drive off the road and kill himself without any help. Where’s a cop when you need one, he thought, smiling to himself. Vince had watched him walk out of the office and he’d seemed okay then, but the way the big German sedan was meandering down the road it looked like he’d been drinking. Maybe he had the bar open in the front seat.

  He’d been following him for about fifteen minutes, not easy to do in broad daylight on a twisty two lane country road. The saving grace was that there were other cars going in the same direction and he’d been able to tuck in a couple of cars back, not that Whittaker would have any idea who he was or why he was there. There was a sudden ripple of brake and signal lights up ahead, starting with the car in front of the Audi, and Vince realized things were about to get a little trickier. He looked in his own rear view mirror, saw the SUV behind him indicating the same thing. Why not, he shrugged, and followed the rest of them into a sharp left hand turn onto an even narrower road.

  The turn stacked all the cars closer together for a moment until they straightened out and the train of vehicles stretched out again. There were still two intervening cars between Vince and the Audi, and when he saw a sign for a campground and a picnic area he finally realized he had inadvertently joined the weekend pilgrimage to cottage country.

  The road got worse, badly graded dirt and gravel with trees looming over it on either side. In another five minutes he crested a hill, could see a glimmer of water ahead, and then started down a steady incline that appeared to end in some kind of public beach and parking area. He looked back at the road just in time. The car ahead had braked, its turn signal blinking, and the cars ahead of it were breaking away right and left to side roads. He caught a brief glimpse of the Audi, its right flank exposed as it made a right hand turn onto a dirt road. One other car followed it and the other car, the one directly in front of Vince, laboriously completed its own turn to the left.