Not that day, though. As I crashed through the underbrush I remember seeing Brent and Misha just that way. He had his hand on her knee. She looked as if she was about to cry. But when she spotted me, her expression transformed in an instant into one of slick hatred.
Are you spying on us, pervert? she spat out.
Leave her alone, Misha, Brent said. And then: She didn’t hear anything.
Only now does it occur to me it was a funny thing to say.
“Sorry,” Misha says. Once again, something has changed—an invisible current, a communication between them I haven’t heard. “God, I can’t imagine what you think of us. You must be dying to go back to Chicago.”
“I’m just glad everyone’s okay. Last night, I thought—” I break off. I can’t understand why I was so scared. Then I realize Brent and Misha are watching me, waiting for me to continue. “I just—I don’t usually get that drunk. It’s not like me. When I woke up and realized I had taken your shoes…”
This, finally, gets a smile out of her. “Oh, thank goodness,” she says. “We must have swapped. I thought I lost them when I went in after Annie.”
“Are you okay?” Brent squints at me. “You want a water or something?”
“No. I’m fine.” But I stand up too quickly and a head rush darkens my vision.
“Actually, I will take the water. Don’t get up,” I say, when he starts to stand. “I can get it.”
In the kitchen, I wash my hands, using up the last of Brent’s hand soap. I count my breaths, listening to the murmur of conversation from the other room. But their words are too muted to make out.
Here, too, everything is clean, pristine, almost unused. Brent has installed a water purifier to the tap, but his sink is perfectly dry and I wonder whether he’s ever run it. Curious, I ease open the refrigerator: the upper two shelves are crammed with pallets of bottled water.
“Leftovers from a corporate picnic last week. You should see all the Sprite I got stacked in my garage.”
I spin around at the sound of his voice, closing the refrigerator door; I hadn’t realized he had followed me into the kitchen. But if he notices my discomfort, he doesn’t appear to.
“If you want ice, it’s in the door,” he offers brightly.
“Just water’s fine,” I say.
He crosses to the cupboard, takes down two glasses, and fills them from the tap. He downs his and watches me carefully as I drink, as if my reaction will bring a final and definitive end to our investigation. The water tastes fine.
Brent’s refrigerator door is cluttered with magnets, and before we leave the kitchen, I notice that one of them bears Aaron Pulaski’s name. He sees me looking at it.
“Local guy,” he says. “Or as local as he can be. He comes from over in Hanover. I did some work on his campaign.” He says it casually enough, but I’m sure I’m not imagining the new tension in the way he’s standing. “I thought he’d do some good for the district. Turns out he’s just as incompetent as the rest of the pack.” He shrugs. “Oh, well. We all make mistakes, right?”
“We sure do,” I say. When he turns his back to me, I slip the magnet into my pocket. Weak spots.
Chapter Sixteen
Monday morning, Joe and I strategize. We’ve got one chance in a thousand that a circuit court will take our slipshod suspicions for evidence, but all we need to do is file the suit—and hope Optimal is frightened into giving us actual evidence.
We can’t get a court appointment until Wednesday afternoon, which gives me a few days to put together a cohesive picture and try to find a prosecutor’s office willing to work the criminal side of the investigation.
Flora and Portland head down to greet the ETL lab techs; they’ve arrived to draw samples from the reservoir and from the filtration plant it feeds to, and I want to be sure no one bothers them while they work. Maybe I’m being paranoid, but given Optimal’s long tentacles, and its grip on Barrens, I can just see some local townies trying to chase them off with pitchforks—or, more likely, .22s.
I put in a message to the county prosecutor’s office where Aaron Pulaski worked until recently, and kill a few hours researching the bioaccumulation of a variety of types of heavy metals, detailing the evidence found in plants and seedlings—at least we know the foliage can’t be paid to keep quiet.
Just before lunch my phone blows up, and a woman with the kind of chirpy voice that immediately suggests a pantsuit introduces herself as Dani Briggs, junior prosecutor. “I got your message,” she says. “But I’m afraid we can’t help out. There was a personnel sweep after Mr. Pulaski left.”
One skill I’ve learned as a lawyer: to make a no into an opportunity. “Why so much turnover?”
She hesitates for just a fraction of a second. “When Mr. Agerwal”—the new county prosecuting attorney, and a board member of the Indiana Prosecuting Attorneys Council—“took the job, he promised to take all the politics out of the justice system.”
“Like what? Bribery? Corruption? That is politics.”
Her laugh is surprising—deep and rich and swallowed just as quickly as it comes. “Maybe. But not our kind of politics.”
“So he purged the old guard.”
“I wouldn’t call it a purge,” she says. “Given all the scrutiny around police departments and prosecuting offices throughout the country, he felt the MCPO needed a clean start.”
This is how lawyers confess: by edging just close enough to the issue that you can take a hop-skip-jump to the truth yourself. “Here’s the thing: I’m looking into a donation to Pulaski’s state congressional campaign by a company he had threatened to go after for labor violations. Does that sound like his kind of politics?”
Another momentary hesitation. Now I understand her silence is code for yes. “I really can’t speak to that,” she says. “What our predecessors do is, unfortunately, kind of a black box.” Maybe she can sense my hesitation over the phone, because she adds, “Let me take your contact info. I’ll talk to Mr. Agerwal when he comes back.”
I put my head down on my desk, against the cool wood, willing the pulse of so many strains of information to finally hit a rhythm that I can latch on to. Will any of this get me closer to understanding what happened to Kaycee? Will any of it get me closer to answering the question that drove me out of Barrens and to Chicago in the first place? I thought if I could prove that Optimal was making people sick, I could cure Barrens of what had poisoned it—and then Barrens would finally let me go.
But now, I’m not so sure.
“Ms. Williams?”
I nearly punch out of my skin: Portland has returned, soundlessly.
“For fuck’s sake. We need to install a bell on you or something.” Then, I notice he has the strangest look on his face.
“You said she was faking it,” he says.
He slides a photo across the desk, and I’m shocked to recognize Kaycee, painted up in school colors. Graduation day.