Chapter Twenty-Nine

The next morning, we met Sandra Thoreau at the mine. She arrived in the work site trailer from deep down in the terraced layers of the copper mine, wearing a hard hat and yellow reflective suit. She was dirty over every inch of exposed skin, the kind of dirt from which you probably never felt completely clean. She didn’t look happy to see us, and I was conscious of the fact that the mine was going to dock her for every minute she wasn’t on the clock.

She glanced at Norm, who’d come to the mine with us. The three of us sat in flimsy chairs inside the trailer, but Sandra ignored the chair we’d set aside for her and stayed standing. Outside, a constant rumble of machines made the trailer walls rattle, and we heard the shouts of men trying to be heard over the engines.

“What now?” she asked Norm with a weary sigh. “What do they think I did?”

“It’s nothing to worry about,” he told her. “I’ll let you know what to answer and not answer. Just be truthful.”

Sandra shrugged. “Let’s make this fast.”

Darrell nodded at me to lead the questioning. I found that I liked doing my old job again, even if it was just for a little while. “Sandra, you mentioned a couple of times that the mine tried to buy you off to get you to quit.”

“Yeah. So what? I told them to shove it, but if you want proof, I can’t give it to you. They didn’t put any of this in writing. Their offer was cash on the table, take it or leave it.”

“When was this?”

She hesitated. “A few years ago.”

“Five, six, seven?”

“I don’t remember. I know it was summer, because it was hot.”

“Before the lawsuit was filed?”

“Yeah.”

“How did this offer come about?” I asked.

I saw a glimmer of understanding cross her dirty face. She knew why we were here. She rolled the answer around on her tongue for a while before saying anything more.

“A guy called me at home,” she told us. “An out-of-towner. A lawyer. He wanted to talk to me on behalf of the mine. When we met, he said they were willing to pay me a nice chunk of change if I’d voluntarily leave my job and sign some kind of release. He was willing to give me two thousand bucks right then and there. He even showed me the roll of bills.”

“You said no?”

“Two thousand bucks but then I’ve got no job? Yeah, I said no. The recession was hell back then. I didn’t know if I’d ever get another job around here. I was going to hang on to what I had.”

“Who was it, Sandra?” I asked. “Who was the lawyer?”

She wiped her nose with the back of her hand. “If you’re asking me about it, I assume you already know. It was Gordon Brink.”

“You met Brink years before his murder. Here in Black Wolf County.”

“That’s right. Although it wasn’t much of a meeting. I didn’t spend more than half an hour with him before I got up and left. It was just enough time for him to bribe me and me to tell him where to go. Honestly, I wouldn’t have been able to tell you what his name was or what he looked like, not until he came back here last fall.”

“Did you have any other communication with him in the interim? Letters? Phone calls?”

“No.”

Darrell, who was sitting on a rickety card-table chair, put his hands on his knees and leaned forward. “After Brink was killed, why didn’t you tell us that you knew him before the lawsuit? That he’d been here before?”

“You didn’t ask.” She gave us a not-very-sweet smile. “If I’ve learned one thing from Norm during the lawsuit, it’s not to volunteer information unless someone asks me about it.”

“Were you afraid you’d be a suspect in Brink’s murder?”

“I already was, wasn’t I? From day one. You made that pretty clear, Darrell. I didn’t need to give you any more ammunition.”

“Did you kill him?”

“No.”

“Where did you meet Brink?” I asked. “Where were you when he offered you the money?”

“He was staying at the Fair Day resort. I went to his cabin, we talked, and I left.”

“Do you know how long he was in town?”

“I have no idea. I turned down his offer, and that was that.”

“Who else knew about your meeting with him?”

“Back then? Nobody. If anybody else knew, it came from Brink, not me. I didn’t talk about it at the mine. I didn’t want the other women finding out. The last thing I needed was to put the idea in their heads that they could grab a quick payout and quit. I wanted us to stick together. If one of us left, they’d work that much harder to get rid of the rest of us.”

“Do you know if Brink tried to bribe the others?”

“If he did, they didn’t say anything about it to me. But the mine saw me as the ringleader. I was the one they really wanted out.”

“What about Ruby?”

“I have no idea. Maybe. Who knows, she might have taken the cash. I’m sure she’d deny it, but it would explain a lot.”

Darrell glanced at Norm. “Did you know about Brink being in town?”

Norm phrased his answer carefully. “When Sandra came to me about the lawsuit a couple of years later, we discussed the bribe. I had to have a complete history of what the mine had done to try to push Sandra out. I knew they’d offered her money, but not that Brink was the one who’d done it. I didn’t know that until he came back, and Sandra confirmed he was the one. I’m sorry for keeping you in the dark about it last winter, but any information I had about Brink was privileged.”

Sandra pushed up her sleeve and checked her watch. She glanced out one of the small windows toward the dirt road leading down into the bowels of the mine. “Let’s move this along, okay? I’m losing money here. You might as well get to the shit you really want to know about.”

“What do you think we want to know?” Darrell asked.

“Come on, this is about Kip and Racer, right? You think Brink talked to me around the time the two of them got chopped up in Norm’s trailer.”

“That seems pretty likely, doesn’t it? Given the similarities between the crimes.”

“Well, I don’t know what to tell you. I can’t even be sure it was the same summer. But if they got killed after I met Brink, I wouldn’t have given it a second thought back then. Kip and Racer had nothing to do with me or the mine. I had no reason to think there was any connection between them and Brink.”

“What about when you heard how Gordon Brink was killed?” Darrell asked.

Again Sandra glanced at Norm, but he nodded his approval. “Sure, it made me wonder, but I figured Brink was killed by a copycat. When the sheriff said it was Jay, I assumed that was the end of the story.”

“Except now there’s Ajax, too,” Darrell went on. “Was he in the mix on any of this?”

“If he was, I never heard about it.”

Darrell shook his head in frustration. “Sandra, we’ve got four murders, four brutal crimes committed in very similar ways. When Brink was killed, we didn’t find any evidence to link his death to the murders of Kip and Racer. There was nothing to tie the three of them together. But now we find out that Brink was in town once before, which you knew but kept from us. Our next stop is going to be at the Fair Day resort. When we check their records, I think we’re going to find out that Brink was staying at the resort right around the time Kip and Racer got killed. There’s no way that’s a coincidence. All these crimes are connected somehow, and right now, the only connection I’m seeing is you.”

“Well, I didn’t kill them, Darrell. I don’t know who did.”

“Brink came to town to see you. He tried to bribe you. Your lawsuit is at the center of all of this.”

“Maybe. But I’m not the Ursulina.”

“Where were you on Friday night? And on Saturday night?”

“Home with Henry.”

“You’re not exactly known to stay in on weekend nights. Why didn’t you go out?”

“I wasn’t feeling well. Stomach flu.”

“So you have no alibi,” Darrell concluded.

“I guess not.”

“As I recall, your alibi was soft for Brink’s murder, too.”

Norm stood up and put himself between Darrell and Sandra. “I think we’re done for now, Darrell. Sandra has to get back to work, and wild speculation isn’t going to get us anywhere.”

Sandra walked away to the trailer door, but I called after her. “Hey, Sandra? One more thing.”

Norm tried to shut me down, but Sandra waved at him to say it was okay. “What is it?”

“You turned down the bribe and told Brink to shove it. Then what?”

“I left.”

“No, I mean what did Brink say when you turned him down?”

Sandra scratched her cheek with black fingernails as she tried to remember. “He was pissed. Brink was a bully, you know that. He was the kind of guy who was used to getting what he wanted, and he thought he could intimidate me. He told me if I was holding out for more money, there wasn’t going to be any. And he said if I didn’t take the offer and quit the mine, I’d regret it.”