Nevada Barr - Blind Descent

Several wells outside the town of Carlsbad were close enough to the highway that she had already seen them. They were past the drilling stage; casings were in place, and the business of draining the petroleum pockets was in progress. Little remained but pipes and tanks built low to the ground and painted a neutral grayish-yellow. As far as Anna could tell, they were unmanned. The Blacktail was still in the process of drilling. A metal tower, much like those Texas was famous for, had been erected in the middle of a pad a hundred feet on a side. Piles of pipe in various sizes were stacked around the outbuildings. One of these was a corrugated aluminum shack that might have been for storage, and the other was a trailer house. A short piece of pipe chocked with rocks served as a front step. A flatbed was parked beside the road to the well, pipe waiting to be unloaded. Two concrete mixing trucks were behind the trailer.

"How close to the park boundary?" Anna asked as Holden drew to a stop beside the trailer. A fog of dust, churned up in their wake, overtook the truck, and they sat a moment waiting for it to clear.

"Pretty close," he said. "But strictly legit. They got a lease. They can sink a line straight down beside the fence if they want to. The Blacktail's not that bad. See that beaky-looking rock sticking out?" He pointed to a wedge of limestone protruding from a slope an eighth of a mile distant. "That's where the boundary line runs. And don't think it's not checked regularly. Carlsbad is a stickler. So are we."

For Holden it was a long speech. Anna'd struck a nerve. Land management agencies with differing goals sharing a border tended to be exceedingly careful of each other. The politicians might wrangle over use issues at a higher level. Those on the ground knew they had to work together.

Moving to more neutral territory, she asked, "What are you checking the Blacktail for?"

"We check all the wells every now and then. By law, they've got to file regular reports on the drilling. How deep. How long. Pipes. Casings. That sort of thing. The Blacktails last report mentioned a loss of returns. When they are drilling, the drill fluids bring up mud and rock cuttings. A loss of return means they're drilling all right, but nothing is coming back. Could mean a lot of things. Could mean they've hit open space. A cavern. The Blacktail is along the same lineament as Big Manhole. There's logic to cave formations." Holden winked at Anna. "Maybe another entrance to Lechuguilla. I like telling George and Oscar that when we find it, we'll sink an elevator and set up a tour concession."

Anna laughed. Holden would oppose the commercialization of Lechuguilla as strongly as any park ranger. Had that not been true, those might have been fighting words, if not to Anna on principle, then to cavers from love of the resource.

A barrel-chested man introducing himself as "just plain Gus" emerged from the trailer to greet them. Gus was covered in filthy dungarees and a coat that looked as if it had survived the Exxon Valdez oil spill. He ushered them into the trailer. To Anna's surprise it was crammed with instruments. Lighting a cigarette, he offered coffee all around; then he and Holden began to talk in a language Anna wasn't conversant in: WOC, whipstock, dry-drilling, thribble, lost circulation, stabbing board. Boredom and cigarette smoke drove her back out of doors.

For once she appreciated the wind. Facing north, she shook her head, letting the cold strip away the nicotine residue. Four men, bundled in layers and hard-hatted, had appeared from somewhere and were occupied unloading pipe from the flatbed. Mouths moved, orders were shouted, but the roar of the forklift engine and the whine of the wind drowned out the words.

Anna walked to the edge of the pad, put the storage shed between herself and the wind, and looked across the wash toward Big Manhole. From here she could see the lineament Holden had mentioned as clear as a line drawn on a map. A shift in subterranean layers created a marked change in vegetation density on the surface. She traced it as far as the bald knob of hill above the cave. Always in a murder there was a reason, however twisted, why the victim had to die. Sometimes there was a reason the victim died where he did. Was Brent killed because he was at Big Manhole, or was it merely an opportune place for a spot of homicide?

"A guy was killed up there, you know."

The voice at her shoulder so closely echoed her thoughts, Anna wasn't startled at the unexpected company. A driller, shapeless in overalls and a down vest, a sweatshirt with the hood up under a bright yellow hard hat, leaned against the shed and cupped his hands to light a cigarette. Two days' stubble covered his jaws, each coarse whisker coated with gray dust.

"Some broad found him," the man went on, words coming out with smoke. "Guy had got his head blowed off."

"No kidding?" Anna said.

A chance to stand out of the wind and impress the girls must have been the highlight of this driller's day. He looked pleased with himself and his situation. Taking another drag, he embellished. "I knew the guy. We all did. Brent somebody or other. He used to come around. A geologist or some damn thing. Worked for Lattimore and Douglas out of Midland, Texas. They own the Blacktail."

Now that her memory had been jogged, Anna remembered Brent had done freelance work for local oil companies. "What did he do?" she asked.

"The dead guy?"

She nodded.

"Oh, he was a rock hound. Looked at the core samples. Stuff like that."

"Ah." Anna would ask Holden.

"Scuttlebutt was they were going to unload him. He got himself in bad odor with somebody." The man laughed, and fine particles of dust sifted down from his beard to settle like powdered sugar on his coat front. "Maybe they 'terminated' him the old-fashioned way."

A bellow bored through the wind to their ears. "Break's over." The man crushed his cigarette under a steel-toed boot. "Good talking with you." He touched the brim of his hard hat.

"Likewise," Anna assured him as he disappeared around the corner of the shed.

Returning to the shelter of the truck, she waited for Holden and turned the murder of Brent Roxbury over in her mind. By the time Holden emerged from the trailer and joined her, she'd kneaded and stretched a few disparate facts into a theory.

Holden Tillman listened with his customary politeness as she outlined it. Half a minute more elapsed while he digested her words and chose his own. "I don't think that's going to fly," he said at last. By the strained edge to his patience, Anna knew he'd not quite forgiven her the attack on Oscar. She understood. She was out of patience with herself. Changing theories every ten minutes smacked of grasping at straws.

"So now you're saying Brent might have been shot because he was working for Lattimore and Douglas? He was shot near here. I'll give you that." His tone was noncommittal.

"I was just thinking aloud." Anna defended herself. "Couldn't Brent have found something out that they didn't want found out and been killed?"

"The Blacktail is legal," Holden told her. "They've got a ten-year lease. They're in a place it's legal to drill. They're drilling for what they say they are. The well could produce upwards of three to five million cubic feet of gas a day. You can like the drilling or not, but they've got every legal right to drill as long as they file the reports and abide by the lease stipulations. What happened to your idea that Brent and Frieda's deaths were connected?"

Anna didn't have an answer for that. Frieda's demise in a rock slide deep in a cave on park lands and Brent's shooting aboveground on BLM land were hard to tie together. Different locales. Different causes of death. Brent was connected to the Blacktail, and the driller's gossip pointed a finger, but Anna had no way of putting Frieda into the picture. Frieda was NPS, from Colorado. As far as Anna knew, she'd neither seen nor heard of the Blacktail or any other gas well. No more had they seen, heard, or cared about a secretary from Mesa Verde on holiday in Carlsbad.