Ecstasy (36 page)

So I waltzed into the Center Gabriel food court and ordered myself a falafel pita, only to be told my “drug money” wasn’t
welcome there. Then I went over to the Thai take-out stand, whose owners apparently don’t keep up on the news.

“You know, Bernier,” Ochoa said once we got outside, “everybody in the newsroom knows you didn’t do that shit.”

“Yeah, well, tell that to King David.” I tried a forkful of my pad Thai, which improved my mood. “So, okay,” I said, “what’s
going on?”

“First off,” Ochoa said, “I got an update on Bauer’s condition just now, and it doesn’t look good.”

“You think he’s not going to make it?”

“The odds are pretty lousy. And even if he does… the poor kid got really fucked up. One of his legs was so badly crushed they
may have to amputate it.”

Suddenly, my food didn’t look so appealing. “Holy
shit.
That’s… Jesus Christ. But how…if somebody just ran into him…”

Ochoa shook his head, mouth set tight. “Whoever did it didn’t just hit him. According to his injuries and the tire tracks
at the scene, after he got knocked down, the driver backed up and ran over him again.”

“How come that wasn’t in your story?”

“Give me a break, Alex. I just got the info this morning.”

“And does all that, you know, convince the cops that there’s more to this than just your regular drunk-driving accident?”

“Not necessarily. I mean, in a normal situation, why would anybody think that?”

“So then what are—”

“Conventional wisdom seems to be that after Bauer got hit, the driver pulled over; but since he was so loaded, he backed up
to see what the hell happened and ran the kid down. Then he panicked, took off, and ditched the car.”

“God, I just
knew
I should’ve warned him.”

“What?”

“Ever since we were talking about how he was probably the target for the fourth pill, I’ve been trying to get in touch with
him, to tell him to be careful. But he wouldn’t return my calls, and now…I kind of feel responsible.”

“Jesus, Alex. You didn’t run him over with the damn car.”

“Yeah, but maybe if I’d said something…”

Ochoa reached over and gave my shoulder a little shake. “Come on,
chica,
don’t go there. First off, it’s not your fault. And second, Alan Bauer’s no baby. He’s a jock with twice your body weight,
and from what you said, he’s not stupid. If he and his friends really did something to piss someone off, and then three of
them get dead, don’t you think the guy’s gonna be way on his guard in the first place?”

“I guess.”

“Believe it.”

“So what’s next? In the investigation, I mean.”

“Chief Stilwell’s holding a press conference this afternoon.”

“Oh. Thrilling.”

“Yeah, well, I gotta go anyway. Five bucks says all he’s gonna do is make an appeal for information—‘Please come forward,
it’ll be easier on you that way,’ the usual.”

“Poor guy.”

“Stilwell?”

“Yeah.”

“He’s a cop,” Ochoa said. “They live for this stuff.”

“No, they don’t,” I said. “Trust me. And Bauer …he’s another one of Stilwell’s daughter’s friends. Not a particularly close
one, I don’t think, but how much trauma can the poor kid take?”

“I could say the same thing about you.”

“Excuse me?”

“Come on, Alex. You’ve been through the wringer yourself these past couple of weeks.”

“Yeah, well, it’s nothing compared to what’s happened to some other people. Melissa, for one.”

“I know, but I’m just…I’m kind of worried about you, okay?”

“Um…okay.”

“Look, I know we haven’t always been best buddies, but you don’t deserve this crap. So anything you need me to do, I’m going
to do,
comprendes?
I know there’s only so much Cody can stick his nose into without getting up shit’s creek, but me …I’m not bogged down with
a lot of scruples, okay? I’ll do whatever needs to be done.”

“And then you’ll write about it, and eventually you’ll get a job at a much better paper than this one.”

He flashed his very white teeth. “You say that,” he said, “like it’s a bad thing.”

A
s it turned out, Ochoa’s lack of scruples began to pay off almost immediately.

He started by going to every bank in town trying to deposit a money order he’d had made out to Mohawk Associates. Most places
told him that they couldn’t help him without an account number and showed him the door. But at (of all places) the Ethical
Vanguard Credit Union, the teller apparently gazed deeply into his big brown eyes and said she wished she could help him,
but she wasn’t allowed to give out any information about an account holder.

One memorable evening later—I asked Ochoa to spare me the details—she’d changed her tune. Not only did we have confirmation
that the bank did indeed have such an account, we had a printout of all the deposits made and checks written since it had
been established three years ago.

The bottom line was that there was a lot of activity three years earlier, when the consulting fee from Deep Lake was deposited—and
was almost immediately disbursed in varying amounts of cash. Then a full year went by with no action on the account, until
cash deposits started to come in, all of them under the federal reporting threshold of ten thousand bucks. The figures seemed
familiar, and sure enough when Ochoa and I compared them to the copy we’d made of the lists from the Melting Rock office,
they matched up. All the entries that had M.A. next to them corresponded to checks made out for the same amount, while those
without the two letters matched with cash withdrawals.

But here was the weird thing: The other list, the one that had Axel’s and Sturdivant’s initials on it, didn’t jibe with checks
or withdrawals; they corresponded with
deposits.

“Son of a gun,” Ochoa was saying. “Does this mean that Axel wasn’t getting payoffs, he was actually making payments?”

“That’s what it looks like,” I said. “But what the hell for?”

“Think about it. He and Sturdivant are both on the list. What else do they have in common?”

“They were both drug dealers.”

“Exactly. So I’m thinking…”

“Wait. I get it. Not only is the account laundering some of the excess cash that the festival isn’t reporting, it’s also collecting
protection money, right?”

“Smart girl.”

“The drug dealers pay up, and the town fathers make sure they get to do business without the cops breathing down their necks.
Everybody’s happy—the dealers, the customers, the people who run Melting Rock. The town makes its nut, and folks like Mrs.
Hamill rake in the bucks personally too.”

“Nice little racket,” Ochoa said, “until you get caught.”

“So maybe the four kids—Tom and Billy and Shaun and Alan—they found out about it somehow. Maybe they tried to make a little
money off it, or just tried to get themselves some free dope or something, and…”

“And to keep their little money-making operation going, somebody killed them.”

“But wait a minute. I think I understand all the financial ins and outs, but how do we get from Deep Lake to Melting Rock?”

“Good question,” he said. “And I think maybe I have an answer.”

“I’m all ears.”

“Okay, look at it this way. Three years ago, the powers that be at Deep Lake help set up this shell corporation so they can
pay the protesters to leave them alone. Now, obviously, this is a pretty small town, and a lot of those hippie types overlap.
The payments get made, but the account is still sitting there. So when the Melting Rock guys need to wash their cash, why
bother to start from scratch? Why not just use Mohawk Associates? It worked for them once, why not try it again?”

“I guess that makes sense, but… what the hell do we do now?”

“We break the story.”

“How can we? We still don’t have—”

“We don’t have a lot of choice.”

“Why not?”

“Something else Chrissy told me.”

“Who the hell is Chrissy?”

“The bank teller. She called me up this morning all upset. Apparently, she found out that the cops had also asked for a copy
of the same account information.”

“Which means they’ve got evidence of the payoffs, so…”

“They’re probably going to make an arrest any second. If we want to break the story, it’s now or never. Did your buddy Cody
really not mention this?”

“Hey, don’t look at me like that, okay? God knows I haven’t been holding out on you or anything. It’s just…ever since I got
busted, Cody and I have been kind of out of touch.”

“I thought he was supposed to be a stand-up guy. Don’t tell me he’s—”

“It’s not him; it’s me. I’ve sort of been keeping him at arm’s length lately. And don’t bother asking me why, because I’m
not sure myself, okay?”

“Hey, it’s none of my business.”

“I’m glad you realize that.”

“So what do you say? Do we break this or what?”

“What do you want, my blessing?”

“For lack of a better word…yeah.”

“But how are you going to back it up, attributionwise? Are you finally going to interview Trike Ford?”

“Tried,” he said. “No go. He pretty much played dumb, then told me asking questions like that could get a guy’s ass kicked.”

“When was this?”

“Couple days ago.”

“Jesus, Ochoa, why didn’t you tell me?”

“Figured you had enough to worry about.”

“Come on, you saw what happened to Melissa. These aren’t the kind of people you want to screw around with.”

“I can take care of myself,” he said. “Besides, I’ve got Madison watching my back.”

“But if he’s denying it, which of course he would, who are you attributing this stuff to?”

“I’ve got sources of my own in the police department, you know. Between that and all the paperwork—the payoff lists, the account
info, the stuff you found from the Melting Rock lawsuits—it ought to be enough to satisfy Bill and Marilyn.”

“Not to mention the lawyers.”

“ ‘According to documentation provided to the
Monitor
by anonymous sources…,’ ” he said with a grin. “Don’t you just
love
it?”

O
CHOA’S PAGE
-
ONE STORY
ran the next day. And from what I hear, its appearance pissed off not only Gordon—who was apoplectic to learn that he’d missed
a big chunk of the Mohawk Associates story—but local law-enforcement officials, who were forced to move on the arrests several
days earlier than they’d planned. But sure enough, the following morning’s paper featured the banner head
ARRESTS MADE IN MELTING ROCK PAYOLA
—which, if nothing else, satisfied Bill’s long-held yearning to use the latter word in a headline.

The most prominent occupant of the paddy wagon was, of course, Rosemary Hamill. Probably out of spite at the
Monitor,
the county sheriff had tipped off Nine News to the arrests—meaning that viewers of their six o’clock broadcast were treated
to the sight of her, gigantic hat askew, swearing up and down that she “hadn’t broken any tax laws.”

The arrest of Trike Ford was less comical. The Nine News cameras captured him unleashing a torrent of bleeped-out words at
the officers as he was taken in handcuffs from the family trailer, with both his infant daughter and Jo wailing on the rickety
front porch.

Mrs. Hamill, predictably, hired a lawyer and started fighting the case tooth and nail. Trike, on the other hand, immediately
offered to turn in each and every one of his coconspirators—up to and including the two burly Melting Rock security guys who
had assaulted Melissa.

A casual observer, therefore, might have assumed that the whole sorry mess was coming to an end. It wasn’t.

Because, you see, two things were conspicuously absent from Trike’s confession: He didn’t admit to framing me, and he swore
up and down that the Mohawk Associates scam didn’t have anything to do with any of the murders—not of the boys, and not of
Axel Robinette.

That he’d lie to avoid a murder rap might seem entirely predictable; the problem was, there was nothing to prove otherwise.
In fact, according to Ochoa’s cop sources, Alan Bauer swore he’d never even heard about the scam; the female members of the
Jaspersburg Eight backed him up, saying that as far as they knew, Tom, Shaun, and Billy hadn’t known about it, either.

So…were they lying? Were they just mistaken? Or was there something else going on, something nobody even suspected?

And, at the risk of sounding excessively narcissistic… what about me?

That was the question I posed to Ochoa, who’d come over to my place to consume vast quantities of pizza to celebrate his big
scoop. Melissa, who’d just gotten back from Toronto, had eaten half a slice and pleaded exhaustion; Ochoa and I had camped
out in the living room, consuming the rest of the pie and trying to figure out how to keep me out of jail.

“Okay,” I said, “here’s the bottom line. Raise your hand if you have any idea how I go about finding out who put goddamn Sturdivant
up to this.”

“Well,” Ochoa said, “the way I see it, there are three possibilities. Either he did it by himself in the hopes of staying
out of jail, or somebody paid him to do it, or somebody forced him.”

“Forced him how?”

“Damned if I know.”

“Thanks a lot.”

“Well, what does Cody have to say about it?”

“I told you, things are kind of weird on the Cody front lately.”

“Let me guess. You’re acting like a typical female.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“You’re pushing him away, then getting pissed at him for not being there.”

“Jesus, Ochoa, that ex of yours sure did a number on you.”

“And I let her. But don’t change the subject.”

“Okay, fine, I…I’m totally humiliated about this whole thing. I got busted, cuffed, indicted, the whole nine yards. And I
guess… maybe the only thing that’ll let me walk upright in the sunlight ever again is to get my own damn self out of it.”

“That’s perverse.”

“Yeah, well, so am I.”