Authors: David Vinjamuri
“But then the three of them started having problems getting along,” Chloe interjected. “And we lost some donors and there were a lot of issues about how we were going to be able to afford to keep renting this site and feeding everyone. And finally we had a meeting and Roxanne gave this big speech and she asked for a vote and she won. Then Josh and Amy left and maybe ten or twenty others followed. Heather went with them.”
“You were friends with Heather?” I asked Chloe.
“Yes, the three of us were pretty close. She was special. Quiet but really sweet. I don’t think I ever saw her angry. And she did her share, worked really hard. Everyone liked her.” Adam looked up at Chloe and I realized that there was something they weren’t telling me. I had the strong feeling that I’d get nothing if I pressed, so I moved on.
“Do you know where she went?”
“Amy and Josh went back North to work on some project on natural gas fracking in Pennsylvania. But Heather wanted to stay in the state. Peggy was going to the CC Farm—it’s a pretty well known commune about an hour from here. Heather and a few others went with her. CC has buildings, running water and electricity, so it’s not quite the same thing as our situation here...”
Chloe and Adam went on for a little while longer, but I didn’t learn anything else helpful. I was unhappy ending the conversation with the sense that they were holding out on me, but I didn’t have a good lever to open them up, and I knew where I had to go next anyway. I’d done what I came to do, and I knew why Heather was not on the bus. I knew where she’d gone. Now it was just a matter of tracking her down at the CC Farm.
I stopped to say goodbye to Roxanne before I left the camp. I wondered how long the Reclaim folks were going to hold out at the campsite. In the heat of the day, it was easy to forget how soon the cold would come. West Virginia weather would be milder than where I grew up in New York, but mountains are never forgiving in winter. Roxanne would be fine of course, but I wondered about the rest of them.
5
It’s not easy to follow someone unnoticed on deserted country roads, so I spotted the big Dodge Ram pickup with the blacked-out extended cab behind me four miles before he made his move. The pickup was idling on the side of the road less than a mile from the Reclaim camp, and it pulled onto the pavement spraying gravel from its rear tires. It stayed a quarter of a mile back as I wound through the ridges and hollers of rural West Virginia, even when I varied my speed.
I was still several miles outside of Hamlin when the big Ram started to reel me in. I was relieved. Getting tailed was the first piece of luck I’d had since arriving in West Virginia. While I knew where Heather had gone, something was missing. Some of the stories I’d been told didn’t hang together. Nobody had lied to my face, but I had the sense I was getting a very incomplete picture of events at the camp and the mine. The pickup tailing me told me my instincts were correct.
The Dodge was saving me some trouble by making a move. West Virginia doesn’t require front license plates and the big pickup didn’t have one. I needed to get a peek at the back end of the truck to identify the owner. Overtaking me wasn’t what the Ram’s driver had in mind, though. He pulled out as if he was going to pass and then, just as he nosed beyond the edge of my rear bumper, the pickup’s driver attempted a PIT maneuver. If you’ve ever watched one of those high-speed chases that happen with disconcerting regularity in southern California, you’ll know what I’m talking about. The police cruiser turns into one of the rear wheels of the fugitive’s car, nudging it off-axis; the car spins, maybe stalls and the chase is over.
The secret of the PIT maneuver is that it’s not a disabling move. All it does is put you into a spin. There are better techniques to disable a car but the police won’t use them because they don’t want anyone getting hurt. I learned to drive—really learned to drive—on a decommissioned runway in North Carolina. Safety wasn’t the biggest concern in that particular course.
So when the big Dodge moved in to PIT me, I made a quick decision. I had a split second in which I could have pulled away from him. There was no way the Ram could have kept up with my GTO if I started running. But I saw an opportunity and followed my instincts. With a glance ahead to ensure that there was no oncoming traffic, I gritted my teeth, kept my line and tried not to think about the inevitable body damage to my midnight-black GTO. As the Dodge plowed into my left rear quarter panel and the GTO started to spin in a counterclockwise circle, I gradually turned the front wheels into the spin. As the nose of my car swapped ends with the tail, the Ram passed me on the left. I gained control of the GTO just as it finished a full 360-degree spin and, like the Red Baron completing an Immelmann turn, I found myself behind the big pickup in full control of my vehicle. Then it was my turn.
I got a good look at the Dodge’s West Virginia license plate and committed it to memory. Then I downshifted to third gear and hit the accelerator, pushing the GTO forward past the pickup’s bumper on my right side. I used the same PIT maneuver to nudge the Dodge into a spin. As soon as the Ram started to turn, though, I hit my brakes and hovered just far enough behind the pickup to avoid getting hit. When the Ram completed 240 degrees of spin and was perpendicular to my car, I mashed the throttle. My GTO is the kind of garage project that a lot of teenage boys from small towns fool around with in their spare time; the only difference is that when I was doing the modifying, I had access to the knowledge and tool shop of some very specialized mechanics and armorers. Along with a few other mods, my GTO puts out over 400hp and has a reinforced front bumper.
I t-boned the big pickup, arresting its centripetal momentum. I got a pretty good look at the driver, a bearded fellow who overflowed his side of the cab, and a brief glimpse at an average-sized male passenger with a pasty white face in a hoodie who had his mouth wide open and his eyes closed. Then I pulled my wheel to the right and the Dodge started spinning again, sliding off the side of the road. There was no guardrail, only a dirt apron without a lip or drop-off and some scrub brush after the pavement ended, so I was pretty sure I wasn’t going to kill anyone, although you never can tell. I was tempted for a moment to stop and question my attackers. But there was a good chance guns might be drawn and I’ve learned the hard way that things can get out of hand very quickly if you let them. I hoped I’d be able to find the men in the Ram with their license plate number and confront them on my own terms. I was determined to find Heather and get her home without leaving a trail of destruction in my wake.
That was the theory, anyway.
* * *
My cell phone rang nearly as soon as I got back into Hamlin. I saw as I answered that I had five missed calls. My youngest sister Ginny had been trying to reach me all morning.
“You left without saying goodbye!”
I’d opened the door of my GTO to get out but sat down again instead. I left the door open.
“You and Amelia didn’t really give me a chance.”
“I’m sorry, Mikey. She’s just so infuriating sometimes. She still thinks I’m six years old.”
“I assume she’s mad I left?”
“Livid. Jamie told us you were off somewhere for some other emergency and Amelia blew up all over again.”
“I’m sorry I missed that.”
“Yeah, right. Why didn’t you call yesterday?”
“I was driving the whole day.”
“Where are you?”
“In West Virginia.”
“West Virginia?”
“Did you hear about those protestors who were beaten at a mine the other night?”
“It was on the news.”
“Well, the daughter of a friend was with that group. She’s diabetic, and now she’s disappeared. I’m trying to find her.”
“Oh...that sounds serious.”
“Maybe, but I hope not. How’s Mom?”
“I don’t know. They still have her on a lot of medication. She’s barely conscious and we’re having trouble reaching the neurologist. He does his rounds at six a.m. or something like that and we keep missing him.”
“That’s frustrating.”
“I think that’s what’s getting to Amelia. We don’t know if Mom can recover, if she’ll be able to talk and walk, anything. Doctor McGee says she’s had ministrokes over the past few days. He said we won’t know how this will turn out until she stabilizes.”
“My cell phone doesn’t work half the places I’ve gone around here, but could you keep me up to date? I want to know what’s going on.”
“I can do that. I love you, Mikey,” Ginny said as she hung up.
I sat there in my car with the heat gradually increasing inside the cabin. It was eighty-two degrees outside but it felt at least twenty degrees warmer inside the GTO. It was just starting to hit me that my mother was going to die. Soon or perhaps later, but sometime. And when she did I was going to have to live through losing a parent. Again.
6
“An hour ago, a second protestor died. That makes this a double homicide and the worst incident this county has seen in a decade. I have a list of names here, including the two homicide victims,” Sheriff Jim Casto said, handing me a thin sheet of paper that looked as if it had come from a manual typewriter rather than a printer.
“None of those folks are the girl you’re looking for. She’s also not on the list of witnesses we interviewed at the scene. I mean the ones who didn’t leave in an ambulance. That was a pretty small group, though.” Casto handed me another list with just seven names on it. The Sheriff for Lincoln County, West Virginia was a heavyset man in his early sixties whose beard was three shades grayer than the hair on his head. He spoke slowly and had the kind of deep voice naturally made for opera or the radio.
I thought I’d have to produce the governor’s letter to get any help in the Sheriff’s office. Instead, merely mentioning my name in the county courthouse set off a flurry of activity. The Sheriff bounced out of his office to the front desk in under a minute, treating me like a visiting dignitary for the better part of an hour.
“This seems like a bad way to discourage protesters,” I said, scanning the lists and committing those names I hadn’t already seen to memory. “Two days ago the mine was just dealing with a group of small-time activists. Now they’ve got the whole national press corps.”
“That’s right. Half my deputies are tied up running crowd control. It doesn’t make a lick of sense. Those kids weren’t gonna shut down the Hobart mine. We arrested a bunch of them in July when they managed to get on a few excavators and articulated trucks. They interrupted mine operations for a day. Hobart decided to play hardball and a few dozen spent time in the county lockup. They’ve repeated the stunt since then but each time they try, the mine gets rid of them quicker. They haven’t even attracted a television crew in months. But Wednesday night changed things. It’s stirred up the controversy over the mine and along with the press, there are protestors from half a dozen new groups at the site.”
“So why the attack?” I asked.
“I’d guess that a few miners got upset with these kids and decided to scare them, and things got out of hand. Management at the mine isn’t afraid to use intimidation, but they’d never pull a stunt like this.”
“I talked to a couple of the miners last night who were convinced that nobody from Hobart did this. I think they were telling the truth.”
“I’m surprised you got miners to say anything,” Casto smiled, “but if you and a few friends planned to scare some activists and things got out of hand, you’d probably keep quiet too, wouldn’t’cha?”
“Secrets like that don’t keep for long. This wasn’t a simple beating. There was a fake detour and a road block. They had to know where the bus was going and when it was leaving for the plan to work. Whatever the reason, it wasn’t just a few miners blowing off steam. Plus there were at least twenty people involved and like I said—secrets like that don’t keep.” If a mine town was anything like a cement town, the conspiracy wouldn’t have survived the night.
“Those are good points. My deputies said some of the same things, but I’m glad to hear them from an outside expert. I had the FBI in my office this morning threatening to take this case over. Which I’d’a welcomed but they didn’t do it. It’s a grade-A mess. That’s why I was glad when the Governor told me I was getting some help.”
“Pardon me?” I said, caught off-guard.
“Help. That’s what you’re here for, isn’t it?”
“I’m trying to find Heather Hernandez. It turns out she left Reclaim in September. So she doesn’t have anything to do with what happened the other night.”
“Well, according to my deputies, you’ve already met with Ms. Chalmers, the Reclaim leader, and you just said you’ve spoken with some miners. It seems to me you’ve already done as much investigating as we have.”
“Sheriff, I’m an outsider. I can’t imagine that I’ll be able to get more information than your detectives.”
Casto stood up slowly, betraying some arthritis in his hip. I noticed he didn’t wear a gun on his belt. He walked around the desk and leaned back against it, crossed his arms with his left elbow resting on his right hand, and propped his chin up on his fist. He regarded me for a moment with hazel eyes. Then he tipped his head forward and spoke so softly that I had to lean in to hear him.
“I don’t think you appreciate the situation here, Mr. Herne. I’m the third sheriff here since February. The man who served Lincoln County for twenty years pled guilty to federal charges of voter fraud. He’s going to be sentenced for up to five years in federal jail in a few weeks. The second sheriff was never even sworn in; he was a lawyer who turned out to have a conflict of interest before he could assume the office. I’m the Pastor of the largest church in Hamlin. I have no background in law enforcement, but I was the only man in town that anyone trusted. They’ll pick my successor next Tuesday on Election Day, and I’ll be out of this office by yearend. My deputies—those who’ve stayed—are experienced, but given the lack of confidence that folks around here have in this office, a case that involves one of the biggest corporations operating in the state is about the worst thing that could have happened. With the media attention on these murders, I have to lead this investigation myself. I want to wrap it up before the new sheriff takes over to give him a chance to clean up the reputation of this department. You’re the only person within a hundred miles who doesn’t have a dog in this hunt.”