“Bastard.”
“Yes, he was. My uncle gave the best years of his professional life to this company and in the end, Corwin tossed him like trash. Threatened to sue him if he didn’t sign a waiver protecting Corwin Energies from legal action. My uncle had no choice — he needed every penny for treatment.”
“I guess the two of you were close.”
Ellerton nodded. “My parents divorced when I was two and my mother couldn’t hold a job to save her life. So I spent all my time at Uncle Butch and Aunt Margaret’s house. When I was in high school, my mom followed a boyfriend out to San Diego, and I heard from her about twice a year after that. My uncle paid for me to get my associate’s degree and helped me land this job. That was about a year before he got sick.
“After he died, all I could think about were the things he said he wanted to do when he retired. He wanted to visit Paris and London, and he wanted to go back to Hawaii, where he and my aunt had their honeymoon. He used to talk about that all the time.”
“So you’re seeking vengeance,” she said.
“No, not vengeance. My uncle wouldn’t want that. Even when he was sick, he didn’t want to get even with Corwin. He wasn’t an angry person.”
“Then why are you doing this?”
Ellerton looked straight at her, and the conviction in his eyes left no room for doubt.
“Because people need to know about things like this. Not everyone in the nuke industry is as corrupt as Leo Corwin, but a few are. Things get hidden all the time, get exaggerated, minimized, forgotten about, altered, spun. In some businesses, there’s room for that. If someone lies to the government about how much bread they bake or how many dresses they knit, no one’s any the worse. Society won’t collapse if a guy paints a house the wrong color or the mailman delivers the Sears catalog to the wrong box. But with nuclear power, there’s just no room for the kind of fraudulence that often comes from privatization and profiteering. Look at what’s happening out there right now. People are going to die, and that won’t be the end of it. I wouldn’t be surprised if we found out later on that today’s accident could be traced back to something Leo Corwin did, some cost-cutting thing or whatever.”
“So you want the world to know.”
Ellerton nodded, his eyes red-rimmed with anger.
Marla went to the entrance to the cask repository, raised her phone, and began clicking away. Then she launched the keyboard. Just as she was about to begin typing, she looked back to Ellerton.
“We’ll be past the point of no return once I send this.”
“Send it,” he said.
She smiled, then wrote out what she considered the best blog entry of the day and uploaded it. There was a flutter in her stomach as she considered the impact it would have. It reminded her of being in New Orleans to report on Hurricane Katrina, standing on the beach just a few hours before the clouds began gathering. She’d felt the same kind of anticipation then, the same sense of impending doom.
“Done,” she said.
“Good.”
“Is there more?”
Ellerton laughed.
“Ms. Hollis, we’re just getting started.”
17
Reaching the location given by the Silver Lake PD, Emilio recognized the car at once, in spite of the fact that the grand old oak tree had squished it like Play-Doh instead of metal and polycarbonate. Despite the damage, the faded CLINTON ’96 sticker on the front bumper was clearly visible. Emilio had seen it around town hundreds of times and always made a point of waving to the driver.
“Oh, shit,” he said softly, his voice wobbling, “that’s Mr. Kerrick.”
The EMT in the passenger seat — a young kid named Brody that Emilio had worked with a few times before — looked through the rain-blurred windshield and echoed the same sentiment, although for a different reason. The sight of a car smashed under at least six tons of hardwood never failed to astonish.
Kerrick had been his instructor for American History I and II, freshman and sophomore year. Neither of Emilio’s parents were native to the United States, so he was determined to learn as much as he could as a first-generation resident. One of his past teachers, a hammered old hag named Ms. Williams, was a descendant of one of the passengers on the Mayflower and thought anyone of lesser pedigree didn’t deserve to breathe American air. She found Emilio particularly irritating for some reason he never understood and enjoyed humiliating him. Kerrick, however, viewed the young man in precisely the opposite light. To him, Emilio’s immigrant parents were symbolic of exactly the kind of society the forefathers envisioned, and his liking for the boy spurred Emilio’s abiding affection for America’s colorful story.
Emilio brought the ambulance to an abrupt halt and jumped out with Brody close behind, leaving the engine running. His hazmat suit made crumply sounds as he jogged over in awkward, almost leaping strides.
There were four cops on the scene, also in hazmat gear. Sawhorses and flares had been set out. One of the officers even held a lighted baton, ready in case someone motored by. Snapped power lines hung from bent telephone poles like loose strands of hair, one of them spitting sparks from the severed end. The rain continued, coating the street with leaves, small branches, and radioactive toxins.
Kerrick’s car, a 1998 Honda Civic, had once been candy apple red, but over the years the sun had faded it badly. The hood had been particularly cooked and was pitted with bubbles, some of which had split open to reveal rusty scabs beneath.
Emilio didn’t need to be a forensic analyst to figure out what had happened. Kerrick had lost control and skidded — or hydroplaned, more likely — off the road. The tree, suffering in the heavy storm and perhaps weakened by interior rot due to its advanced age, had toppled over at the impact, taking a few power lines with it. The leafy canopy had fallen onto the pavement, but the trunk, which had to be at least a foot and a half in diameter at the base, had landed on the car lengthwise. No match for the combined force of weight and gravity, the Honda’s body had bowed inward, and all six windows had exploded.
Emilio hustled up to the officer in charge.
“Hey, Lisa,” he said loudly through the mask, tapping her on the shoulder. He had known Lisa Schultz for years and had tremendous respect for her abilities as a law-enforcement official. Her tough-as-nails demeanor precluded her from exhibiting much in the way of warmth, so their friendship had remained completely professional.
“Oh, good,” she said, taking him by the arm, “follow me.”
Schultz took him and Brody around to the driver’s side and opened the rear door while explaining that the front one was bent inward and would not budge. Grabbing the inside of the window frame, Schultz dragged it away in a series of jerks, glass crunching and metal screeching with each pull. Emilio stood by in a state of mild shock. He had not been able to see Kerrick’s body before — it was a truncated mass almost unrecognizable as a human form, the face compressed almost to the point of unrecognizability. There was blood everywhere, soaking his polo shirt so thoroughly that it was impossible to discern its original color.
“We need to get the body out of here,” Schultz said. Her tone wasn’t merely businesslike but also conveyed a touch of annoyance. “We can’t just leave it, even though we’ve got much greater priorities to deal with right n—”
They both jumped when Kerrick groaned and flexed his left hand, which was draped loosely over the bottom of the deformed steering wheel.
“Oh, shit!” Schultz screamed behind her mask, arms flailing wildly. She grabbed Emilio, trying to keep her balance, but went down anyway, landing on her backside like a novice ice-skater.