Page 152 of South of Nowhere

She slipped the copy of the territorial order and the card into an inside pocket of her jacket.

The man turned and walked back toward the parking lot, his gait nearly, though not quite, a waddle.

Looking from Shaw to Mary Dove, she said, “After the snowmelt flooding’s gone, the drought’ll be back. I’ll loseallthe water. And that’ll be it.”

“Annie…” Shaw began.

“You two go on,” she said. “I think I’d like to be alone.”

67.

An hour later, Shaw and Debi Starr were behind the shabby River View Motel, just outside Fort Pleasant, with TC McGuire, all wearing crime scene booties and latex gloves.

This was where Waylon Foley, Alisette Lark and the two fake corporals had stayed—their base of operation.

The three were walking back and forth. Shaw and Starr were searching visually, with McGuire manning the metal detector. The hunt was difficult; the scruffy field—soaking wet but still drought-yellow—was home to hundreds of items: beer and soda cans, broken toys, auto parts, melting cardboard containers, a huge belt buckle that seemed fairly new and had been found—tellingly—beside three large used condoms and bagged trash, much of it around aNo Dumpingsign.

Lark’s map had indicated where she recalled Foley had been standing when he broke and tossed away his phone. But the big man presumably had a good pitching arm and they were having no luck spotting it.

The woman’s concern about Bear breaking the phone was, as Shaw had suggested, not a problem. The gesture, apparently atechnique in a popular show on TV, might have rendered the screen useless but it had no effect on the guts: the circuits and chips. Provided, of course, Foley had not wiped all the data first.

Kicking at a clump of muddy weeds, below which were more muddy weeds, Debi Starr said slowly, “Had another thought. The hoopla about the town selling water rights to the company? Ick.” She was looking down at more condoms. “What do you think about this: Some anti-bottled water group is behind it. They want to drive the company out of business. There were plenty of protesters against them too, just like the anti-frackers. Maybe they assume that Olechu Springs is getting the water from the river, but they don’t know it’s tapping into the aquifer.”

Interesting idea.

He asked her, “Does the Never Summer flow near the bottling company?”

“I don’t know. You have a map?”

Shaw reached into his backpack and removed his tablet. Pulling off the latex gloves, he called up a map of Fort Pleasant and the surrounding area.

“That’s the water company. There.” She tapped the screen. “And the Never Summer…” She traced the blue line as it meandered past several restaurants, a school and the county government buildings. But it wasn’t close to Olechu Springs bottling. No, protesters would likely not think the water came from the river—certainly they would not risk murder on the unlikely possibility they would disrupt the evil corporation.

“Kaput, I’d say. My theory.”

Shaw was then frowning, staring at the screen. With two fingers he zoomed out.

“Debi! Hey. I found it!” McGuire was holding the body of a flip phone in a gloved hand.

“All right!” she said, smiling.

Shaw continued to study the map then looked up.

Starr offered, “Now, we have to talk our way into the county lab without the sheriff knowing about it.”

McGuire had joined them. “Why’s that?”

She said, “Barrett’s good, no argument there. But we need to move fast. He’ll think he needs to run the op through the system. He won’t like it that we cut him out, but as long as we get results he’ll live with it. Especially if we let him take some of the credit.”

Officer Starr was not only a talented investigator but she was a pretty decent practitioner in the art of interagency politics, which was often trickier than solving crimes.

Did podcasts deal with that topic?

Shaw asked, “Where’s the technical services operation?”

“On Delroy Street,” Starr said. “Not far.” She then asked McGuire: “How long will it take to get inside the phone?”

Slipping the discoveries into a plastic bag, he replied, “Depends—if he used the default password, about ten seconds. If he made up one, it’ll take longer. With six or eight random digits, it could be a hundred thousand years. Give or take.”

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