Cold Winter Rain (2 page)

CHAPTER TWO

Sunday January 22

The grinder on the programmable coffee maker in the galley switched on at six twenty-five a.m.  It sounded like a blender filled with rocks.  After a few seconds, the smell of freshly-brewed coffee filled the cabin.

I pulled on sweats and made a glass of sugar-free Tang from the dwindling supply I’d bought when Kraft discontinued it.  I drank the glass off in one go, then poured a cup of coffee and went up on deck.

The sun wasn’t up, but the incandescent bulbs strapped to the top of every other catwalk support pole around the marina made enough light to see by.  The air was damp and cold, heavy with the smells of diesel fuel and stale salt water and fish, and in the quiet morning, I could hear water lapping rhythmically against pilings and the resting hulls of boats.

I sipped the coffee and wondered what had happened to Kris Kramer.  She didn’t look to be the kind of kid who’d just run away from her family.  But then, that description probably fit lots of runaways.

I’d probably find her.  I just hoped she was still alive when I did.

I finished the coffee, went below deck, and swapped the sweats for a pair of tights, running shorts, and a black hoodie.  I carried my shoes out on deck and laced them by the fresh pink light of false dawn.

I stepped onto the catwalk, walked out of the marina to the bay road, and started to run.

I ran slowly, shuffling along at about a nine-minute pace.

My neighbors along the canal were stirring, a couple of fishing boats, a forty-foot Bertram and a smaller Hatteras convertible already backing out of their slips, navigation lights glowing red and green, diesel engines growling and snorting in the cool morning air.  Preparing for their long early runs to offshore fishing grounds, coordinates already programmed into GPS-guided navigation systems, men moved purposefully along the decks.  At my feet, damp patches of asphalt remained from yesterday’s rain.

I jogged three miles out to the highway, my condensing breaths following me like watery spirits, then turned back, walking the last half mile before the marina.

Back on the
Anna Grace,
I put a blueberry bagel in the toaster oven and showered and shaved while it heated.

Out of the head, I dressed in a hurry.  My heaviest khakis, a burgundy plaid flannel shirt, beige cotton sweater, suede hiking boots.

I cut the bagel and smeared cream cheese on one side, put the pieces back together and wrapped the bagel in a paper towel.  I heated milk in the microwave, poured a measure into a thermos with two aspartame tablets, and filled the thermos with coffee.

I opened the locker beside my bunk and pulled out the Bianchi shoulder rig, the Glock 36 heavy in the holster.  I strapped on the rig, threw a couple of changes of clothing and some underwear into a soft carryon, and slipped my Mac Air and its charger into the backpack where I stowed my flight gear.

I checked email on my iPhone.  Nothing but spam.  The phone clicked into its hard case and the package clipped onto my belt.

I threw on a lined navy parka, locked the door of the cabin and stepped off the boat and onto the dock.  One thing about living on a boat.  One step and you’re away from home.

There were few travelers on the beach road.  I gazed at the Lounge as it went by in the driver’s window of the Toyota.  The place would still be there when I got back.  I had a feeling it might be a while.

Out of habit, or inertia, or sentiment, or stubbornness or, maybe, stupidity, I’d held onto the Toyota Camry I’d been driving the day Anna and David were killed.

I’d had the old rice burner re-painted in the original beige and had a rebuilt engine, flywheel and clutch installed at two hundred eighty thousand miles.

The original flywheel had acquired chipped teeth after about a hundred fifty-thousand miles.  Every ten starts or so, I’d have to open the door, put my left foot on the ground and rock the car before the starter pinion would engage.

I’d driven it the last fifty thousand miles with a blown head gasket and a rear main seal that leaked oil like a dripping faucet.

The odometer on the Toyota read 339053 as I turned north onto Highway 59 for Jack Edwards airport.

Automobiles are all pretty much the same unless you believe the Madison Avenue hype.  They have running gear and four wheels, they have seats bolted to an integral body and frame, some glass and curved metal and paint and carpet and plastic, or leather if you pay more, to make them look like something besides machines.  Oddly, they are, along with aircraft and, perhaps, toasters, one of the few technologies that have come down to the twenty-first century virtually unchanged, except for cosmetics and fluff and some federally-mandated safety gear, since nineteen fifty-five.

And automobiles, whether German or Japanese or U.S. or Swedish, all go fast enough to kill you.  Even with a seat belt.

Of course, if all else failed, there was the air bag -- the law of unintended consequences.  What was the government’s air bag score so far?  Ten dead kids and three petite women for every fat, stupid insurance salesman saved? 

At the airport I opened the security gate with my card key and parked outside my little metal T-hangar.  I untied my airplane and waited while the attendant pulled it out of the hangar with a tow cart.  I stepped onto the wing, opened the canopy, and swung in the duffel that held my flight gear.  I pulled out the rudder lock and reached behind the seat for a paper towel and the fuel drain, climbed down and began the preflight.

I climbed the two steps up into the cockpit of the Albatros, ratcheting the built-in step back into its receptacle as I went, strapped in, and ran through the start checklist.

When I was done flipping switches, I started up the Sapphire unit and listened to it whine up to idle speed.  Twenty seconds later, I pushed the engine start button and moved the throttle to the start position.

The little Ivchenko AI-25TL turbofan engine came to life with a low moan.  At stable engine idle, the Sapphire starter unit cut off.  Its engine whistling now, the plane was almost ready to fly.

I closed and latched the plexiglass canopy and watched the gauges in front of me while the operating temps climbed into green.  I called Mobile Departure for my IFR clearance, taxied out to the hold-short line for runway two-four, and called out my intentions on one-two-two point eight.

The rising sun illuminated the eastern sky in pink and orange.  Looking over my left shoulder to check to see if some lazy or stupid pilot was bumbling down final without calling out his position, I eased onto the runway, lined up, and moved the throttle smoothly to the stop.

The jet paused for a moment while the engine’s hot section swallowed the slug of kerosene and air.  Then the heavy turbine wheels spooled up, and the seatback shoved me in the back and kept shoving.

In three seconds, we were airborne.

I keyed the mike and called Mobile approach on one-one-eight point five.  “Approach, Experimental November Seven Five Eight Mike Sierra off Gulf Shores for Birmingham, IFR, through two thousand for five thousand.”

“Eight Mike Sierra, approach, radar contact, turn right heading zero-one-zero, climb and maintain seven thousand.”

Thirty minutes later I was being vectored to the ILS for runway five in Birmingham.  I lowered the gear and flaps and held a hundred knots on final.  A few raindrops splattered on the windshield.

I kept the localizer and glideslope centered, mostly out of habit, since the runway appeared in and out of the mist, and below fifteen hundred feet the mist cleared.

The tires chirp-chirped onto the runway, and I taxied to the FBO and shut down.  They had a rental agency Ford Taurus -- synonymous for rental car -- waiting for me.

I drove the Taurus, the wipers sweeping every few seconds, out Airport Road past Forest Hill Cemetery and the chop shops and auto detailers, juked over to Second Avenue North, crossed under the Red Mountain Expressway and into downtown.

CHAPTER THREE

The Tutwiler Hotel occupied a renovated former apartment building a block from the Jefferson County courthouse.

Clad in red brick in understated Beaux-Arts style, the seven-story building, according to a plaque near the front door, was listed in the National Register of Historic Places. The lobby was trimmed in brass, mahogany, and white marble with black veins.  Working fireplaces heated some of the rooms in winter.

Kramer called me on my cell phone while I was checking in.  “Slate.  Are you in town?”

“Yes,” I said.

“
Where?”

“
The Tutwiler.”

“
I’m at my office.  You’re just down the street.  I’ll be there in five minutes.  Meet me in the dining room.”

“
I haven’t checked in yet,” I said, but he was gone.

I booked the room for a week, sent my bags ahead, and walked down to the dining room.  I refused a menu and told the maitre d’ I was waiting for someone.

Kramer walked into the dining room through the outside entrance two minutes after I’d entered.  He was in a charcoal plaid suit with a yellow tie, and he was carrying a black document case.

“
Coffee,” Kramer said to the waiter before he sat down.

Kramer looked around.  Only a couple of other morning diners remained in the dining room, and they were seated under another window fifty feet away.

The waiter brought coffee for Kramer and retreated.

“
You’re probably going to speak to the Birmingham police, campus cops.  I’ll give you the FBI agents’ names, too.  Cops do what cops do.  They want to do this the traditional way.  The cop way.  Interview friends, try to figure out a boyfriend angle or a family feud.  But my daughter’s disappearance is not about her.”

“
Then what is it about?”

“
Kris didn’t have the kinds of problems in her life that lead to a runaway or an angry boyfriend.  She didn’t hang out in bars or do any of the other stupid things that get girls, get young women her age in trouble.”

Kramer leaned forward, intense but in control.  “I think it’s related to a legal matter I’ve been on.”

“I see.  What sort of legal matter?”

Kramer took a slug of coffee.  He was not a big guy -- I had him by an inch of height and probably twenty pounds -- but in his hard, calloused hands the china cup looked as delicate as a thimble.

“I’m not able, sitting here right now, to tell you as much as you probably need to know.”

“
Privilege?”

“
Yes.  And even more.”

“
What do you mean?”

“
Having this information could be dangerous.”

“
Danger is an occupational hazard.”

Kramer nodded slightly and looked around.  Fifty feet away, the waiter was putting out silverware for the lunch buffet.

“This goes back a long way, Slate.  All the way back to when I was in the AG’s office.”

“
I knew you were in Montgomery for some time.”

“
You were a clerk when I was there.”

I was a little surprised but didn’t show it.  Yesterday Kramer had made no indication that he remembered me.

“Yeah, I remember you,” he said, and for a second I thought I’d spoken the thought aloud.

“
You worked hard and kept your mouth shut.  Most non-lawyers and too many lawyers think talking is the only skill a lawyer needs.  There’s an aphorism:  ‘An empty vessel makes the most noise.’  When I asked around, your name came up.  I figured you still remembered that it’s easier to learn something with your mouth shut.” 

Some people might not agree, but I nodded.

Kramer pointed to the document case.  “There are some things I can show you and some I can’t.  These are my copies of documents from the oil lease cases I worked on when I was with the office of the Attorney General.  They’re old and most of the information is public anyway.  I could tell you what you need to know, but we’d be here all day, and I’ve got other people to see.  It’s faster if you read, and you need the background.  There’s a memo to the file and an index.  The index is new.  But start with the memo.”

“
Sounds good.  But what’s this got to do with your daughter’s disappearance?”

“
My daughter – Kris did the index for me during her Christmas break.”

“
Kris was working for you?”

Kramer threw down the rest of his coffee.  “Just some clerical stuff during vacations, sometimes on weekends.  But she’s smart.  Learned a lot.  Knew a lot.”

“Do you think she’s been kidnapped?”

Kramer was silent.  Then:  “That’s a reasonable assumption, don’t you think?”

“But there’s been no contact, no demands.  Right?”

“
That’s correct.”

“
And it’s been -- what -- three days now.  I’m sure you know that’s a long time to go by without a ransom demand.”

“
These are not ordinary kidnappers.”

Kramer stood.  “Got somewhere to be.  Meeting my wife and son at church.  Read the file.  You’re involved because, if I’m right and Kris’s disappearance stems from my work, I can’t share all my work with every goddamned three-letter agency with a 202 area code.  I don’t remember giving you copies of the memo and index.  They might be subject to the work product privilege, probably not the attorney-client.  Hell.  You’re a lawyer, anyway.  Finish reviewing the documents today and tonight.  You need to meet my wife and my son Paul at my house in the morning.  Try to make it around seven-thirty.”

And he was gone.

In my hotel room I sat in a burgundy fabric armchair near the window overlooking a parking lot, opened the document case, and pulled out the memorandum.

The memo began with the standard SUBJECT/TO/FROM/DATE heading.  Written three months earlier, the memorandum was addressed to the Minerals Investigation file and to “DRK” – Don Kramer.  No pride of authorship had driven this document; the “FROM” line was blank.  The memo began with an introduction and background including a quotation from an obscure journal of geology:

Citronelle Oil Field, Mobile County, Alabama

Everett Eaves

AAPG Special Volumes

Volume M 24: North American Oil and Gas Fields, Pages 259 - 275 (1976)

The Citronelle field was discovered in 1955 by the Zack Brooks Drilling Company No. 1 Donovan, SW 1/4, NW 1/4, Sec. 25, T2N, R3W, Mobile County, Alabama. The well produced from the lower Glen Rose Formation at a depth of 10,879 ft (3,315.9 m). During the next 10 years, 434 productive wells were drilled. The productive limits completely enveloped the town of Citronelle, 32 mi (51.5 km) north of Mobile, Alabama. Forty-acre spacing, low gas-oil ratio, and rapid bottomhole-pressure drop, necessitating pumping of all wells, resulted in slow and spasmodic development. Unitization of 139 wells for waterflood was initiated in 1961, and a saltwater-injection program proved successful. Later, fresh water from the Wilcox Formation was used for injection fluids. By May 1966 all wells were unitized, and on December 31, 1973, the field had produced over 107 million bbl of oil.

The memorandum continued with an overview of the oil and gas business in Alabama:

The discovery of the Citronelle field in what is called the Glen Rose Formation focused attention on the potential for oil and gas development in southwest Alabama.  Today, the extent of the oil reservoir off the coast of Alabama, due south of Citronelle, is well known. One-fourth of U.S. oil production now flows out of the Gulf of Mexico. In the late 1970s, large deposits of natural gas were discovered underneath the sea floor off the Alabama Gulf Coast.  Alabama ranks ninth out of the fifty states in natural gas production and tenth in proven reserves.  The retail value of the petroleum produced onshore and off exceeds $1.2 billion dollars annually.  Alabama receives almost $300 million annually in the form of lease bonuses, royalties, trust-fund investment income, and severance taxes.

Moreover, the Gulf of Mexico is perhaps the only part of the continental United States where new substantial petroleum deposits could remain to be discovered.  As late as 1999, British Petroleum drilled a discovery well 25,770 feet deep 155 statute miles due south of the Mississippi coastline in what geologists call the Mississippi Canyon and found the largest petroleum field in the Gulf.  Petroleum geologists estimate that this field (originally named Crazy Horse but now for the sake of political correctness called the Thunder Horse oil field), contains one to three billion barrels of oil.

I didn’t know the details about the discovery well or the Citronelle field, but to say the least, BP had become a household name, and during the summer of 2010, the
nom du jour
on cable TV and Facebook and in the Twitterverse.

Some substantial but unknown portion of that three billion barrels had flowed into the Gulf of Mexico from a broken pipe at the bottom of the sea below BP’s collapsed Deepwater Horizon drilling rig.

A few brown spots of it had ended up on the beach sand below my bar.

I had spent too much time at the Alabama Gulf Coast not to understand the back story for the file Kramer had left with me.  At night the platforms out in the Gulf resembled large fishing boats at anchor.

But I was curious about the missing attribution for the author.  One thing I knew:  Kramer was not the author.  I knew the man to be a thorough lawyer who would have demanded and appreciated the kind of work that someone had put into the introduction, but as a lawyer, Kramer was no scholar.

As a lawyer, Kramer was a killer.  Figuratively speaking.

I skimmed the remainder of the memorandum and returned it to its place in the document case.  Kris Kramer’s index was next.  I laid the index on the table and called room service to order a sandwich and a pot of coffee.

Reviewing these files reminded me of law practice.  I couldn’t help thinking I should be recording my time, noting “Review file” in the billing software.  I’d have plenty to record this afternoon.  I had a lot to learn, and I settled in to read.

By three I had reviewed half the documents and had made a few notes on a legal pad someone had left in the document case, perhaps for me, but more likely because lawyers leave legal pads everywhere.

First, these documents related only tangentially, if at all, to the oil lease cases Kramer had prosecuted twenty years earlier.  Those cases were securities swindles where some crooks from New Orleans sold partnerships on properties in Texas and Oklahoma that had never existed.  Assessments, legal opinions, all the pieces of paper had been in place, but the deals were wholly fraudulent.

The documents in Kramer’s document case instead related to an ongoing, present-day legal matter.

Kramer and the Woolf firm were investigating information they had learned from two independent sources about underreporting, or under-recording, of gas and oil pump volumes by small independent production companies operating in several sites in Alabama, all south of Birmingham.

Gas and oil leases were priced based on volume, and underreporting these volumes and thereby shortchanging landowners on lease revenues had generated lawsuits since someone thought to drill a well where oil seeped out of the ground.

Recording production volume remained to this day in the hands of the production companies, not the landowners, and the temptation to cheat proved difficult to resist.

The file looked interesting enough from a plaintiff’s lawyer’s perspective; more than one potential class action suggested itself, though the size of the alleged losses would not rival the Bernie Madoff scandal.

Such cases were grist-of-the-mill civil litigation.  Similar lawsuits were probably pending in every state with working oil and gas wells, and I could see little that should make anyone desperate enough to kidnap the daughter of a lawyer.

And why had Kramer told me these files related to the work he’d done a generation ago?

But then I reached a subsection of the file containing information a little outside the workaday findings of a law firm preparing to represent a client in a business dispute.  One dark brown folder, the type with a ribbon that could be tied for security, was marked Confidential  --
Qui Tam
.

Inside the folder were the usual files marked Drafts, Notes, Research, as well as a thin tan envelope marked Client Information.  The envelope was sealed, and, redundantly, bore the legend SEALED in heavy black marker.

So I opened the envelope with my lockblade knife.

Inside were eleven pages of handwritten notes on yellow legal paper.  Nothing else.  The notes began with a name and address:  Michael Godchaux, 123 Royal Street, New Orleans, Louisiana.  A cell phone number and email address followed.