“I haven’t touched him,” Garvey Ottman said. “I mean, other than to drag him out and put him there. Which I guess, technically, is touching him.”
We were standing at the edge of the reservoir behind the treatment plant in the shadow of the water tower. It was a large man-made pond with a concrete bottom, a kind of gigantic kids’ wading pool. It was fed by streams and nearby rivers; then from here water moved through the treatment plant and, finally, was pumped up into the tower, where simple gravity delivered it to all the homes and businesses of Promise Falls.
Tate Whitehead’s body was resting, faceup, dead eyes open, on the concrete walkway that encircled the reservoir. His clothes were still drenched. According to Ottman, he had only pulled him out of the water about half an hour ago.
“I didn’t try to do nothing like mouth-to-mouth,” Ottman said. “I mean, it was pretty obvious he was dead. If I thought he’d had any life in him, I’d have done something, or at least called an ambulance. Maybe it’s just as well he was dead, ’cause no ambulance was likely to get here anytime soon anyway. But I woulda done it if I had to.”
“It’s okay,” I said. “You’re right. He’s very dead, and likely has been for several hours. Tell me about finding him.”
“Okay, so, I came out here to take some samples. I’ve been ta- king samples at each step of the process to see where the trouble might be, you follow me?”
“Yes.”
“Because if the water in the reservoir is okay, then the contamination, whatever it is, must be further along.”
“I get that.”
“But if it was from farm runoff or that kind of thing, and got into the river upstream of here, I’d find traces in the reservoir.”
“Tate,” I said, nodding my head in the direction of the body.
“Right. So I’m out here, and I see something dark just under the surface, right about there, where the bottom slopes up some, and I get close and I can see it’s a person, and I’m thinking, holy shit. So I run and grab a pole to pull him in a bit, then step in and haul him out.” He pointed to his rubber boots. “I had these on.”
It was good to know Ottman hadn’t ruined a pair of shoes.
“You know what I think?” Ottman asked.
“What do you think?”
“I think he must have come out here to hoist a few, lost his balance, hit his head on the edge when he was falling in, and went unconscious and drowned.”
“Maybe,” I said, kneeling down next to the body. “Help me turn him to the side some.”
He knelt down next to me and we gently rolled Tate Whitehead over a quarter turn, far enough that I could get a look at the back of his head. It was a pulpy, bloody mess. The skull had been cracked open.
“I don’t think it played out the way you just said,” I told Ottman.
“Jesus,” he said. “You see that? How the hell would he hurt his head that bad falling in? You’d have to fall out of a tree headfirst to bust your noggin like that.”
I stood. “Stay here,” I told him.
I began a slow clockwise walk around the edge of the reservoir. Beyond the concrete walkway was a strip of well-maintained lawn, and then trees were beyond that. This was not the forested area we had searched earlier. That had been on the other side of the building, by the parking lot. At the time, I’d been thinking Whitehead would have been close to the booze supply in his Pinto.
I kept my eyes down, scanning the reservoir’s edge as well as the walkway. It took nearly five minutes, and I was about three-quarters of the way around—I should have gone counterclockwise—when I saw what I was expecting I might find.
A few drops of blood.
I got down on my knees for a closer look.
“What is it?” Ottman shouted over to me.
Half a dozen drops within a few inches of the edge. Whitehead’s attacker had probably been hiding in the nearby trees. When Whitehead passed, probably somewhat under the influence and an easy target, his assailant came at him from behind, bashed him in the head, and pushed him into the water in one swift motion. Otherwise, there would have been more blood on the walkway.
I stepped off the concrete walkway and into the nearby grass, scanning the ground. It didn’t take long to find what I was looking for.
A large rock, half again as large as a closed fist. There was what looked to be blood and hair on it.
I did not touch it.
“What’d ya find?” Ottman shouted.
I walked back to where he had remained standing over the body.
“D’ja find something?” he asked.
“So let’s say Tate here went into the reservoir early in his shift. There would have been no one else here throughout the night?”
“That’s right. The place kind of runs itself, with minimal supervision.”
Once Whitehead was dead, his killer, or killers, had hours to do whatever they wanted in the treatment plant.
“What have your samples shown so far?”
Ottman, glancing at the body, said, “Can we talk someplace else? I can’t keep looking at this. I’m feeling queasy.”
I motioned him a few feet away, by the trees.
“The sample,” I said.
“Okay, well, it takes time, but the water here is looking pretty good. Since you’ve been gone, we’ve had the state health authorities here collecting samples of their own. They’re testing the reservoir, they’re testing the water once it’s been treated before it pumps up to the tower, and they’re testing all over town.”
“What have they found?”
“Don’t know yet,” he said. “You can’t do an instant test on E. coli.”
I was starting to think this had nothing to do with E. coli. I was starting to think it had a lot more to do with dead squirrels and painted mannequins and a flaming bus and a Thackeray student in a hoodie, and, worst of all, at least until today, the bombing of the drive-in theater.
Not to mention the murders of Olivia Fisher, Rosemary Gaynor, and now Lorraine Plummer.
While I believed the three women had been murdered by the same person, I didn’t know that they were connected to the other incidents. I didn’t even know, with any certainty, that all those other incidents were connected to one another.
But something told me they were. Something told me that everything that had been going on in Promise Falls the last month—and stretching back three years—was somehow related.
We had a serial killer and a madman on the loose. All wrapped up, it seemed, in one person.
Or not. Maybe we were dealing with a group of people. Some kind of cult. If Mason Helt had been part of this, well, he was dead, and there was still shit happening, so that definitely meant we had been dealing with, at least at some point, more than one person.
Clive Duncomb was dead, too. And Bill Gaynor was in jail awaiting trial. Their names had been linked, one way or another, to events of the last month, but they couldn’t be linked to Lorraine Plummer’s death, or the poisoning of the water supply.
I needed to go back to the beginning. Square one.
Olivia Fisher.
My phone rang. I looked at the readout, saw who it was.
“Wanda,” I said.
“Sorry for not getting back to you sooner,” Wanda Therrieult said. “I don’t suppose I have to explain.”
“You getting help?”
“So far I’ve got three medical examiners coming in. A lot of the bodies will have to be autopsied elsewhere. They’ve become our number one export. So what’s this about a dead female at Thackeray?”
“Yeah, well, that’s all I had at the time when I called. Now I’ve got another possible homicide at the water treatment plant. A man. Neither of them poisonings.”
“Christ, Barry. What the hell is going on? These things connected?”
“The body at the water plant, I’d say, is definitely connected to the poisonings. But the body at Thackeray, that may be related to something else.”
“What?”
“You be the judge.” I didn’t want to tell her I believed Lorraine Plummer was killed by the same person who’d killed Rosemary Gaynor and Olivia Fisher. I didn’t, as they say, want to lead the witness.
“Where do you want me first?” Wanda said.
I told her to head out to Thackeray. The sooner she got there, the sooner Joyce Pilgrim could move on to reviewing the security tapes.
As I put my phone away, I heard, “Hey!”
Garvey Ottman and I turned. Coming out of the water plant door was Randall Finley.
“What the hell is he doing here?” I asked.
“He asked me to give him a call if anything happened,” Ottman said.
“You don’t take orders from him,” I said. “He’s not the mayor. He’s not anything, except a pain in the ass.”
Ottman opened his palms to me, a “What was I supposed to do?” gesture.
Finley was striding quickly toward us, but as soon as he saw Tate’s body, he stopped.
“Goddamn, so there he is,” Finley said. He looked at me. “What have we got here?”
“This is a crime scene, Randy. Get out.”
“Looks like someone bashed his brains in. Jesus, Barry, this looks like it was deliberate. Like it’s a murder!”
“Thank you, Randy,” I said.
“Oh, man, that’s a lunch tosser if I ever saw one.” He took a step closer to the body. “He was a dumb ol’ drunk, but he didn’t deserve that.”
“Randy, step away.”
“I just wanted to see what—”
“Now!” I moved toward him. I was reaching around into my pocket where I kept a pair of plastic wrist cuffs.
The moment he saw them, he said, “Whoa, hold on there! What the hell you think you’re doing?”
“Trying to preserve what’s left of this scene that hasn’t already been trampled on.”
“Okay, okay, I’m going, I’m going.”
“That way,” I said, pointing back to the plant. “Both of you.”
Once we were all inside the building, Finley started poking a finger in my face. “You know what I’d like to know? I’d like to know what the hell kind of progress you’re making here. Looks to me like not much!”
I said to Ottman, “Show me the process. How you treat the water once it comes in from the reservoir.”
“Yeah, I can—”
“Christ in a Chrysler, Barry,” Finley said. “You got a dead guy out there and dead people all over town and you want an engineering lesson?”
To Ottman, I said, “Give me a moment.”
I approached Finley, slipped a friendly, conspiratorial arm around his shoulder, and said, “There’re things I can’t say in front of Garvey that are for your ears only.”
“Oh?” he said, no doubt flattered to finally be brought into the loop.
I led him toward a metal industrial door with a strong handle.
“I’m putting you under arrest.”
“You’re what?”
“Give me your hand.”
“I will not—”
I grabbed his wrist, slipped half of the plastic cuff over it, and cinched it tight.
“You son of a bitch,” he said.
“Stand here, put your hands down there.” When Finley started to resist, I said to him, through gritted teeth, “I am not fucking around here, Randy.”
I put the other half of the cuff through the door handle before slipping it over his other wrist and cinching it as tight as the other one.
“What’s the charge?” Finley asked.
“Being an asshole in a water treatment plant. It’s an environmental statute. Fecal contamination.”
“You’re making a big mistake, Barry. A very big mistake.”
“Not as big as the one you made when you blackmailed my son,” I said, leaning in close to his ear. “I’d rather just take my gun out and shoot you, but the paperwork would be murder. And I have a lot of other things on my plate right now.”
As I walked back in Ottman’s direction, Finley yelled, “I’ll sue your ass off! That’s what I’ll do! You haven’t heard the fucking last of this!”
“You want to show me now?” I asked Ottman.
“Yeah, sure, right this way.”