Дэвид Балдаччи - Walk the Wire

Jamison said, “So did Pamela know him? Might she have gone to him for help when she left here?”

“It’s possible,” said Susan. “I don’t know for sure.”

Jamison frowned. “You didn’t keep in touch with her?”

Susan said defensively, “She didn’t have a cell phone.”

“I find that hard to believe,” said Jamison. “Even if she wasn’t used to having access to one at the Colony, it would be hard to do without one once she had left there.”

Kelly added, “And London’s not that big. Surely you could have gone to see her.”

“I chose not to see her,” snapped Susan. “She had made her choice. She didn’t want to be a part of our world anymore.”

Decker pushed off the wall, came forward, and said offhandedly, “So she might have been staying with Parker. And if someone came there to take him away and she was there, she might have just been in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

Kelly nodded in agreement. “That could be, yes.”

Jamison said, “But, Decker, it’s a one-bedroom house. And we didn’t find any clothing or other things that would indicate that Pamela Ames was living there. And there was no vehicle other than Parker’s.” She gazed up at him, puzzled. “You know all that.”

Decker kept his gaze on Milton. “That’s right, Alex. So now maybe Milton can tell us what his wife doesn’t want us to know.”

All eyes turned to Milton as he slowly sat back against his chair. He rubbed his eyes and would not look at his wife this time.

“Unlike Susan, I did keep in touch with Pammie.”

“And?” said Decker.

“And she was working as a waitress at the big truck stop on the main road coming into town.”

“She told you this?”

“No. I heard it from someone else. A trucker who makes deliveries here. He knew Pammie. He told me she was there. I... I went there to see her. But when I saw...”

“I’m sorry, but I’m not sure what you’re getting at,” said Jamison. “When you saw what?”

“Well, what she was wearing! What all the waitresses wore in that place. They were barely clothed. And all the men ogling them. It was... I just couldn’t believe that my daughter—”

Susan made a clucking sound and glanced at her husband with a scathing look.

Milton swallowed nervously and looked down.

“And you told her what you thought about it?” said Jamison.

He nodded, still looking down. “I... I told her I was ashamed of her and never wanted to see her again.”

On that, Milton broke into sobs and couldn’t answer another question.

Decker looked out the window of his hotel room onto a street that was bustling with people and traffic. This fracking stuff, he thought, had really transformed parts of North Dakota from a flyover state to one of the world’s great economic booms.

He still didn’t know why Pamela Ames had been at Hal Parker’s. If she’d had a purse it had also been taken. Ditto for her cell phone. The gun that had killed Pamela was nowhere to be found. They had also found no trace of Ames having been in Parker’s truck, so how she had gotten out there was still unknown. Walt Southern would be doing the postmortem, and Decker was hoping something would pop from that.

They had spoken with the truck stop people. Ames had been working there. She had missed her shift that night. They had tried to call her phone, which they confirmed she had, but had gotten no answer. Kelly had tried to trace the phone’s location but gotten nothing. They were also trying to trace where Ames had been living but so far had gotten zip, and the truck stop people hadn’t known that, either. The company didn’t mail out paychecks, they just handed them out at the end of the week, her manager had told them. If she had moved around or lived in abandoned premises as some did here, it might be impossible to pinpoint exactly where she had been on any given day.

Decker checked his watch. He was due to meet Baker at the OK Corral Saloon in thirty minutes. He called Bogart’s personal cell, got the man’s voice mail, and left a message. How and whether Cramer’s death coincided with Pamela Ames’s murder and Hal Parker’s disappearance he didn’t know. And had Parker been abducted? Or had he killed Ames for some reason and then run for it?

He washed up, changed into clean clothes, and headed out.

He met Baker as the big man was walking up to the bar.

“How’s the investigation going?”

“It’s going. How’s the fracking?”

He grinned. “Hot, and I’m not talking temperature wise.”

They went inside, miraculously found an empty table, and ordered two beers on draft.

When the drinks came, they each drained about half their mugs.

“I spoke to Renee again,” said Decker.

“Yeah, she told me. I hope you feel better about things.”

“Look, Stan, you don’t have to worry about whether I feel better or not. If you two are good with it and the kids are taken care of, then that’s great.”

Baker looked surprised but also pleased by this statement. “Thanks, Amos. I still care for Renee and she does for me. Guess it’ll always be that way. We were together a long time and then we got the kids, of course. That’s the glue that really holds a family together regardless. The kids.” Baker paled a bit with this last part. “Um, I mean...”

“I know exactly what you mean, Stan,” Decker said, taking a sip of his beer. “So you like it here, you said?”

“Oh, yeah. Some of the younger guys, they think it’s too isolated. Hell, I’ve lived in Alaska. ‘Isolated’ takes on a whole other meaning up there.”

“So tell me about this fracking business,” said Decker.

Baker looked surprised. “Why does that matter to you?”

“I’m investigating a murder. People get killed for lots of reasons, like money and power. The money-and-power thing here is tied to fracking, right?”

“Right. Otherwise, pretty much nobody would be here. So what do you want to know?”

“Basically how it works.”

“There’s oil and gas in the ground. And folks pull it out and sell it for a lot of money.”

“That part I get. Only I understand it wasn’t always that easy to get out of the ground.”

“That’s right. So before I came here I read up on it. I’m not a young punk with no obligations. I needed to make this work, so I wanted to know whether this thing had legs. North Dakota has gone boom and bust before.”

“Understood. Go on.”

“Well, the first bit of oil in North Dakota was discovered in a small town called Tioga back in the early fifties. But drilling up here, in the Bakken region, was considered a no-go because the oil was too hard to get out. All the big boys had given it a try over the decades and failed. They just assumed that it would be stuck down there forever. So by the end of the nineties, drilling was done here. Then, it turned out the oil companies were drilling in the wrong direction. Vertical doesn’t work here like it does pretty much everywhere else. You had to drill horizontally after you’ve drilled vertically down far enough to reach the shale region. And you had to do that in combination with fracking, or piping water and mud and chemicals down into the deposits. That’s done both to keep the drill going and to break up the shale. And you send sand down too in order to keep the breaks in the shale from resealing.”

“You mean like stents a surgeon puts in to open up a blocked artery?”

“Exactly. And on the extraction end think of a straw inserted into a cup of water. You pour more liquid and other stuff through the straw and into the water. With no place else to go, the water down below has to come up through the straw. Here, after fracking a deposit, the oil starts to flow to the surface.”