“You look better than I’d have expected,” Walt lied.
“Looks can be deceiving. I’ve seen the worst of it. It was only the one glass, after all. I’m told my liver will scar and I’ll pay for it later in life. For now, they say I’m recovering, though it doesn’t feel like it.”
“I was wrong to put you in that position. That’s what I came to say.”
“Yes, you were.”
“So… it’s done.”
“Yes, it is.”
“That’s all I had.” Walt turned to leave.
Hillabrand stopped him. “You ignored James Peavy’s warning. Why was that?”
“I don’t know. I guess it egged me on more than discouraged me. It led to the discovery of the sheep pit. I’m trained as an investigator. What can I say?”
“People like Coats… We can’t let five or ten people have that kind of effect on our country. That has nothing to do with democracy. It’s vile and wrong.”
“Where does warning innocent people about contaminated water come into play?” Walt asked.
“I know you don’t believe it, but we had that pretty well under control. If you tested it now, you wouldn’t find a trace of that spill in the aquifer. We were buying time. Trilogy Springs… that was an oversight. A costly oversight. A mistake that cost us dearly. I don’t have any excuses for it.”
“I thought I had you,” Walt admitted. “It never for a minute occurred to me the INL could possibly be the victim.”
“The real victims were the ranchers,” Hillabrand said. “They were willing to stay quiet to benefit their country.”
“They were willing to stay quiet because you paid them to,” Walt said. “And there’s the rub.”
“How’s that?”
“You, and a couple of others in Washington, convinced yourselves that what you were doing was for the good of the country.”
“Yes. And your point?”
Walt hesitated and looked around the sumptuous room with its stunning views.
“What makes you any different than them? The Samakinn? Weren’t they doing the exact same thing?”
Hillabrand began to speak but bit back his words. Then he said, “But we’re the good guys.”
Walt slipped the DVD out of his pocket and placed it down. “Are you so sure? I want you to watch this. I want you to look real closely at the guy with Coats, the guy doing the girl. I’ll expect Sean Lunn to turn himself in to me within twenty-four hours. If he doesn’t, then it’s a manhunt. And I will personally see that this entire story gets into the papers, NDA or no NDA. I’ll take my chances.”
Hillabrand handled the DVD, flipping it over. He looked into Walt’s fierce expression. “Okay,” he said. “I’ll look at it.”
Walt thought about that: a man with enough power to make a suspect simply walk through his office door.
“Coats worked for Lunn,” Walt said. “Lunn hired him to take down Mark Aker and find out what Mark knew. When that went bad, they targeted Mark’s assistant.” Walt pointed to the DVD, as if Hillabrand could see poor Kira Tulivich. “At some point, Coats turned against him, seeing Mark as an asset to his own cause. But don’t you see what that means?”
Hillabrand’s face went red, his neck veins bulging. “No, Sheriff. What does it mean?”
“If Coats worked for Lunn, then he worked for you,” Walt said. “It was your money.”
Hillabrand rolled his eyes trying to dodge the accusation. “If Sean Lunn did as you say, it was without my knowledge. He went rogue. He probably thought he could earn points with me by handling this himself. It happens. I would never condone such methods. Not ever.”
“That may or may not be true,” Walt said. “The courts will sort it out. But given the events, exactly how does that make you the good guys?”
He turned and left Hillabrand in the living room, in the middle of his private panorama, the indicting DVD pinched between his fingers.
71
SHE AGREED TO MEET ON HER TERMS. SHE CHOSE A BENCH on the snow-covered bike path, overlooking a turn in the Big Wood River. Behind them, the traffic on Highway 75 hummed a little loudly for the picturesque setting. They sat shoulder to shoulder, closer than he’d expected. Some mallards came and went on the river below, their wings etching V’s on the darkly moving water.
“Hate me?” he asked.
“This isn’t seventh grade, Walt.”
“For some of us it still is.”
“I… There are things… I visited Kira, and it brought up some stuff.”
“I wasn’t using you and your relationship with Hillabrand. I know what you thought, but it wasn’t true. When you mentioned it, it made some sense, but that wasn’t how it was to begin with.”
“I want us to be able to work together.”
“Of course.” His voice cracked, belying his attempts to keep his feelings out of this. Her words sounded so final.
“Thank you.”
“What about a dinner… sometime?” He added quickly, “If it was seventh grade, it would have been a movie or an ice-cream cone. At least give me some credit.”
“Being your photographer is good. I like the work a lot.”
“Are you seeing someone?”
She watched a great blue heron fly the length of the river until it was nothing but a speck.
“There was someone,” she said. “Before I moved here. Two, nearly three years ago now. It wasn’t good. I ran away by coming here. All it took was talking to Kira to remind me. Which is a long way of saying a cup of coffee, sure. A movie, maybe. But not dinner. Not for a long time. Not with you, not with anyone.”
“A person’s got to move on.”
“Remind me of that after your divorce is final.”
He drew in a breath of sharp, cold air.
“Out of bounds,” she said. “That was awful of me. I’m so sorry. That’s just it, you see? I don’t even know myself.”
“When you get to know you,” he said, “you’ll find you like you a lot.” He added, “I do.”
“Some wounds heal from the outside in and some from the inside out.”
“Who said that?” Walt asked.
“I just did.”
A fly fisherman came around the corner of the river in his waders. He worked the far, snow-covered bank, his casts a thing of beauty.
“Freaks,” Walt said.
“Aren’t we all?” she asked.
“Yeah, I suppose so.”
They talked for a while about the confiscation of her photographs and computer, and how she still had the images from the glider on an SD card in her camera. They weighed the rights of the individual versus the rights of a democracy and argued semantics for a while.
It was the arguing that made Walt feel better. There was comfort in disagreement.
“So none of this ever happened,” she said, after a long bout of silence.
“That’s what I hear.” He added, “Only I didn’t hear it from you.”
She smiled. He warmed up a little.
The fisherman caught something. They heard his cheer well up the ridge where they sat. The fisherman extracted the catch from his net and turned it loose back into the river.
“Catch and release,” Walt said. “I guess now I understand it a little bit better than I did before.”
“Before what?” she asked. Then she gave him a look.
“Exactly,” he said.
Note: The government’s INL experimental nuclear facility has existed in central Idaho under a variety of names for the past fifty years. The atomic submarine engine was developed there, as was the world’s first nuclear-generated electricity. There is a cold fusion experimental lab active today at the facility. Over two dozen reactors have been opened and closed over the years. No civilians know exactly how many reactors remain operational or how the decommissioned reactors rate in terms of safety requirements.
