I guided Clay through the canyon without saying anything other than where to turn. Dark thoughts were swarming around my soul like flies on a carcass. Aaron isn’t innocent. Aaron may have hurt people. Aaron hid something.
“Veer toward the crest,” I said to Clay.
You start a marriage with two eyes open, you stay in it with one eye closed. This is the standard advice. Yet had I proceeded along with both eyes closed? Was I also wearing earplugs? And a sensory deprivation suit? Did I know my husband at all?
I finally spoke up about a half hour into our hike. “Okay, fine, let’s hear it,” I said. “What sort of cataclysmic thing could you and Aaron be involved in?” I had a thousand questions, but needed to ask him things without telling him things.
“Oil,” replied Clay.
We were hiking across the eastern vista, in the midst of the most spectacular sedimentary erosion I’d ever seen. Everything out here looked like a beautiful forgery of the Grand Canyon. If only I were in a place to enjoy it.
“Oil,” I scoffed.
“The answer to ninety-nine out of a hundred questions.”
“Is money.”
“Is oil,” he insisted.
My rifle was pointed at his back. I know there’s safety protocol to weapons and triggers and where you aim, but I was done being safe. If I accidentally tripped on a pebble and shot him in the spinal cord, so be it. I’d apologize in the eulogy.
“Did your husband ever tell you about the case of Drake v. Llorenzo?”
“No.”
“That family?”
“No.”
“From the town of Chasm? Drake v. Llorenzo? He really never told you?”
“Keep facing forward.”
I was lying. Aaron had told me, but I wasn’t intending to trust Clay yet. I needed to keep my guard up. Both verbally and physically.
“Llorenzo’s family got long-term illnesses from a water supply polluted by fracking,” he said. “Drake Oil’s fracking lines.”
It was a legendary litigious nightmare spanning years. Clay knew every nuance of it and retold the chronology well enough for me to believe he was at least part of Aaron’s legal department, or had been well briefed. The trial controversially ended when the Llorenzo family was exposed for taking bribes from a rival corporation. Another oil company was bribing Llorenzo to fabricate the entire lawsuit. The whole case was exposed as a lie. That was the brilliant Drake defense team at work. That’s what won.
“I don’t see how this is news,” I replied when he finished.
“Ah, okay, good. So you’re up to date,” said Clay. “So what you probably don’t know…what Aaron probably hasn’t told you…is that those bribes never happened.”
“You mean Drake fabricated the bribes?”
“Drake fabricated the family.”
He was no longer the requisite twelve feet ahead of me on the trail. I’d dropped my guard. I’d completely lost focus on our spacing.
Fabricated the family?
“I don’t get it,” I said to him.
“Our legal team found a father of three who was willing to say he was sick.”
“Even though he wasn’t? Sick?” This made no sense. “So Drake invented its own fake case? Against itself?”
He was walking alongside me. My gun was no longer safely defending my personal bubble. He could’ve easily done something to me during this time. He could’ve strangled me, pushed me down, and disarmed me. I’d been completely distracted by his claim.
“It’s a con game,” he said. “We called it a false god. You control your enemy by controlling their hero: you create their hero…then you humiliate their hero.”
“Why?”
“So you can make sure one big case, just one, will lose exactly the way you need it to. And when that case loses, it sets a precedent for all other cases to lose. It sways public opinion. It sways juries. It’s unstoppable.”
“How would you pull that off?”
“Pay everyone. Pay opposing lawyers. Pay the clerks. The cops. Judges. The hardest judge is the first one. But once a few are in, the pressure to conform is enormous. And contagious.” Then he looked over at my face to mention something he knew would jar it. “Like the bonus Aaron got last year. The $145,000.”
He saw me react. I tried to stay unperturbed. But the mention of that $145,000 wasn’t easy to hide.
“Then what does that make us?” I said, half rhetorically. “What does that make you?”
“Drake is a monster. I work for them. So…” Then came an honest, grave, uninflected admission. “I’m a monster. Aaron isn’t.”
He talked a good game. Too good. His spin was so potent I didn’t even care if he was conning me anymore.
“But I’m trying to makes amends,” he added. “I’m here to help him. I was lucky to be recruited on this hunt but not lucky enough to be put in charge of it. So I had to be patient before making a move.”
I decided to take a risk. “Who’s Jed?”
He scrutinized me again. The gears turning in his head.
“You mean Jedediah,” he said. “He’s a retired judge. Drake has leases on his property for some of our fracking sites.”
“So Jed is helping,” I concluded.
“No, Miranda.” He stopped to look me deep in the eye. “Let me make this crystal clear: you can’t trust Jed.”
I didn’t respond. I didn’t tell him to keep moving. I didn’t need to. We had arrived.
We could now see the site where our minivan had crashed. All four wheels were belly-up, facing the sky. The vehicle had been drenched, jostled, twisted ten degrees, carried, scraped, then dumped back on the silt of the same bank several yards downstream.
It definitely looked like a crime scene, though.
“They were at the wreck?” asked Clay, scanning the area in front of us. “They were at the wreck the whole time?”
I kept him in front of me for the final few steps. I wanted to monitor his reactions. I wanted to see if he licked his lips with a thirst for vengeance, or was genuine in wanting to talk to Aaron.
“Here?” he asked again, almost squeaking the word. His incredulity mirrored a growing, nagging, terrifying fear that was welling up within me.
I was about to find out if they made it. If they had an accident. Or worse.
Or if they made it to the SUV, but someone was waiting for them when they got there.