Neil McMahon - Dead Silver

"What was I supposed to do-physically restrain her? Come on, Gary. She's being naive, sure, but she's been carrying that weight all these years, and now this new jolt. It's got to be killing her."

He still didn't like it, but he nodded curtly. "Put that stuff someplace safe, and for Christ's sake, don't mess with it any more."

"Yes, sir."

He leaned back in his chair, head tilted to the side.

"Well, I guess I'd agree to keep it quiet, at least to start with," he said. "I got my own reasons for that. Most of the people who were involved would piss blood about reopening it. Makes them look bad, and real bad if they're proved wrong. And there's technicalities I don't want to deal with, like the city police ought to be called in. But if something serious turns up, Miss Callister's just going to have to take what comes."

"I'm sure that'll be fine with her," I said.

"She don't have any choice," Gary said patiently. "You better explain that to her."

His big-knuckled fingers started drumming the desktop. I interpreted that as sort of like a cat's tail twitching-something was brewing.

"That case sticks in my craw about as bad as any I ever came across," he said. "I pretty much had to watch from the sidelines. Didn't have any jurisdiction up there in Phosphor County, and those fellas weren't overly cooperative. I don't like to break bad on my esteemed colleagues, but a fact's a fact." His face and voice stayed bland, but if there was anything that pissed Gary off, it was being kept out of the loop.

"How so?"

"Oh, it was one of those situations where there was a bunch of factors involved and they snowballed into a hell of a mess. Dave Rucker was the sheriff back then, getting on toward retiring, and he figured this was his last chance for the limelight. So he tried to handle it himself, and he botched it right from the get-go, and then he stonewalled to cover. Some dirty politics going on, too."

That reminded me that Astrid had been embroiled in some antagonism over the Dead Silver Mine. And Tom Dierdorff had mentioned it at the funeral, and also implied a hidden backstory.

"Can you tell me your opinion, just between us?" I said. "About the Professor?"

Gary grimaced like he was in pain, and I knew it was real. He was ironclad in many ways, entirely willing to manipulate people and even ignore the letter of the law. But he still cared deeply about its spirit, and when he couldn't enforce that, it ripped him up.

"I've never been convinced he was guilty," Gary said.

Coming from him, that was pretty strong. I'd expected a more noncommittal response. But before I could phrase another question, he glanced at his watch.

"I'm afraid I'm going to have to move you along-I got another appointment," he said. "I'll stop by the Callisters' as soon as I can. Not today, I'm swamped-I'll try for tomorrow."

I thanked him and rose to leave.

"Hugh?" he said, as I got to the door. "Is Renee staying in that house alone?" Now he was leaning forward with his forearms on the desk and his gaze intent.

"She has been, yeah."

"I'm not sure that's a good idea," he said. "Why don't you pass that on to her, too."

I walked to my truck feeling newly unsettled.

Renee was out there trolling for trouble, and Gary took seriously the possibility that it might exist.

I drove straight to the Gold Baron Inn, but the funeral reception had broken up and no one on the staff knew where Renee had gone. I swung by her house; she wasn't there, either. Probably she was with her relatives. I knew she had a cell phone, but I hadn't thought to get the number.

I'd cooled down by then, anyway. Gary was talking about a commonsense precaution, not an emergency.

Although it was still unsettling.

I realized that Renee might not be back for some time, and I didn't feel like just hanging around. I decided to follow up on what my lawyer pal Tom Dierdorff had mentioned at the funeral.

Tom wasn't in his office, but his secretary patched me through to his cell phone and he picked up right away.

"I wondered if you might have a minute to chat anytime soon," I said.

"I think maybe this is in the stars, Hugh. Talking to you this morning got my ass in gear to do something I've been putting off. A guy's proposing a development up around Gates of the Mountains. There's opposition; it's going to court. I need to look the site over, and I'd be glad for a pro to bounce my thoughts off."

"You better get a real pro if you want an opinion that's worth anything. But sure, I'd be interested to see it."

He gave me directions, and I headed north on Interstate 15. The terrain rose in a series of long, deceptively steep hills, through rolling open ranch land that gave way to forested mountains. The Missouri lay a few miles to the east, then converged with the highway near Wolf Creek and they ran together toward Great Falls. It was a fine stretch of country, and so far, it was largely unchanged.

I found the gravel road that Tom had described, and after a couple more miles, I spotted his parked pickup truck. There was nothing shiny about this one; it was caked with mud, dinged up and scraped, the bed strewn with fencing tools, rolled barbed wire, and feed. I caught the sweet musty perfume of hay as I walked past.

He was standing on top of a rise fifty yards away, wearing the kind of quilted jacket that a lot of stockmen preferred. This time of year, the wind off the snowfields still carried a pretty good bite. You'd never dream that he was a big-shot attorney; he looked like he was scanning for lost cattle. I hiked on up there to join him.

The hilltop overlooked a meadow that was surrounded by forest and skirted to the north by a creek just starting to shed its skin of ice. A couple of big dozers and a backhoe were parked on the site, with their ridged tracks leading to spur roads they'd cut into the trees. But nothing was moving except the neon orange plastic ribbons on engineers' stakes, fluttering in the afternoon wind.

"Did somebody shut them down?" I said. This weather wasn't anywhere near bad enough to do that.

"An environmental coalition. For openers, the developer started work without all the right permits. When he got that straightened out, they claimed the septic system's inadequate, it'll pollute the water table and filter down to the river."

Which, adjacent to this spot, happened to be one of the finest, most popular trout fishing stretches in the world.

"He's fighting back, of course, and his money's talking loud," Tom said.

"What's the setup?"

"Eighty houses to start with. Medium-high end, average around three hundred K-couple-acre parcels, set apart in the trees. But there's already a bigger operation on the table, a mile back toward the freeway. Apparently our man started feeling guilty about outpricing the average working stiff, so he wants to put in a couple hundred cheaper units, complete with a bar-casino. And plenty of room to expand."

That hit another raw nerve-the prospect of sprawl like I'd seen during my dozen years in California. I'd drive a stretch of highway flanked by fields, and when I drove it again a few months later, shopping centers and housing tracts had appeared. Cities that had been miles apart became one long strip. But the hard-line stance of trying to keep out development altogether was untenable. The population kept growing and people needed homes and jobs.

"I can't tell you anything about the building quality without seeing some foundations or framing," I said. "But the things you mentioned aren't good signs."

The odds were slim that the developer had made an honest mistake in starting work without permits. More often that was an aggressive tactic that worked on a "possession is nine tenths" mentality. He knew that once ground was broken, that created a momentum which was hard to turn around. Regulatory agencies tended to bluster but then back off, at worst imposing slap-on-the-wrist fines which might or might not ever get paid.