Chapter 13

Thursday, July 18

Thursday’s Management Team meeting was odd because of all the positions that were in flux. While Jimmy had already undertaken the Substance Abuse Rehab job, both Chet and I were still marking time for all the required procedures to be observed, before assuming our own new positions.

After a few uncertain moments, Liz said, “I believe we are met here as equals, save for Chet, who is not a team manager, nor any sort of manager, at the moment, but the customs of hospitality require us to tolerate him. In any event, among the team managers present, I believe I have seniority in grade, so it falls on me to conduct this meeting.”

“Says who?” asked Jimmy.

Liz said, “I have been a team manager for fifty-seven months. Can anyone top that?”

“Yeah,” Jimmy said. “I was clinical director for sixty three months.”

Lydia Grossman said, “I believe you said ‘was,’ Jimmy. According to Burt’s email, your tenure as a team manager is not quite four days old -- rook.”

Terry Sloan joined in. “Yeah, rook, aren’t you supposed to buy us all brownies or something?”

I just flashed my eyebrows at Liz. In the interest of fraternite, I decided to pass on the chance to take potshots at Jimmy. Chet’s expression betrayed no emotions.

Jimmy groused, “If anyone still had questions about why I gave up on managing you clowns, I think we just saw a demonstration.”

Liz asked, “Did anything happen this week worth mentioning?”

I said, “The bakery had a commercial waffle iron donated. Denny says it will have its inaugural run on Monday.” I looked around with my best game face. “Top that,” I challenged.

Liz said, “Beats our new two-color toner cartridge.”

Terry said, “We found an ad for organic, non-GMO tongue depressors, but they’re really pricey.”

Lydia said, “I’m wearing my new push-up bra.”

Buxom Liz looked at the nearly uninterrupted vertical drape of Lydia’s polo shirt, and said, “I think you have it on inside out.”

Jimmy got up and left.

Lydia, looking toward Jimmy’s retreating back, asked, “Was it something we said?”

Emily joined us for supper that evening, but since Friday was a normal work day at her practice, she decided she would go to her own home for the night.

I made spaghetti with meat sauce. After trying various Italian sausages, regular pork sausage, and different proportions of ground pork to ground beef over the years, I finally discovered that I liked the sauce just with ground beef. Whatever.

Emily told us that Judy Kelly would be joining their practice by the end of the month.

“Does she have a specialty?” Greta asked.

“Not as such. She’s more of a generalist, like em, but she was working closely with a doctor who’s a urologist. That’s a service where we’ve been weak. We won’t be able to claim it as a specialty, but it will give our family practice more range.”

She asked me if I’d heard any more about my criminal case.

“Nada,” I said. “As far as I’m concerned, no news is good news. I’m not really worried about them working in the background, developing a case against me, because there’s nothing to develop. It’s not like they can trace the guns to me, or show that Nguyen and I had a falling-out over baseball cards or something. They have everything that there is already, and they aren’t persuaded.

“Unfortunately, however, I won’t be able to quit thinking about it until they figure out who’s behind it.”

“I don’t think any of us will,” she said.

Greta asked me, “What went on in the executive suite today?”

“Not much. I’m still working my way through Jimmy’s File of Tears.”

“He really did that, just stuffed all his correspondence into the file drawers?” Em asked.

I said, “Calling it correspondence suggests that Jimmy communicated with the senders. I saw no evidence of that. Now, maybe he did correspond with some folks, but I didn’t find any file copies of anything. I asked Liz and she said that Jimmy handled his own correspondence. She said the only documents she ever processed for him were reports to the county and the annual budget.”

“Did you ask him?” Greta wanted to know.

“Yep. He said everything’s either in that office or Liz had it, and that I should quit pestering him.”

Emily said, “What is his problem, anyway?”

“I think life just turned out a lot less fun than he was expecting. Or maybe he wasn’t breast-fed long enough.”

Greta said, “Not everyone can be sucking at the teat their entire life, like you, Gary.”

“Oh, I don’t know. It sure looks to me like Deb could’ve filled the bill for him.”

“Oh, that reminds me,” Emily said. “I saw the ad for the mental health team manager job in the Courier Times. I didn’t realize that job started at fifty-five bucks an hour.”

“What?” I shouted. “How much?”

She was chuckling. “Just kidding. It was the kind of joke you’d pull. I couldn’t resist.”

Greta punched me in the shoulder. “You should’ve seen your face.”

“That was a good one,” I told Emily. “You got me, right between the eyes. Remind me again, where do you want your ashes scattered?”

“I’m not afraid of you, big boy. You’ll never go from four tits back to two.:

I made a resigned grimace and said, “Crudely put, but you may be right.”

Then I saw she was unbuttoning her shirt and, turning toward Greta, I found that Greta’s blouse was already off and she was fiddling with her bra...

Turning back to Emily, I said. “I thought you were going home.”

In a nod to Almost Famous, she spread her fingers in front of my face and said, “I am home.”

Friday, July 19

Friday morning, after Emily left for the office, Greta and I were drinking coffee on the back deck. I said, “Do you realize how lucky we are?”

In something of a dreamy voice, she said, “Yes, I do.” Then, more alert, “What do you mean?”

Still looking off at the scenery, I said, “Last month, the thirteenth fell on Thursday. This month, the thirteenth was on a Saturday. We really dodged a bullet.”

She looked over at me. “You ass. You may have dodged a bullet, but I’m not so sure I have.” Then she settled back into her lounger.

“How is it, after a full week with Jimmy as your boss?” I gently queried.

She sighed, a significant expression of emotion for her. “So far, he’s left me alone. He tried to establish a weekly supervisory conference on Thursday mornings, but I knew where that was headed. I told him I’d let him know when I needed supervision, unless he wanted me testifying against him to the EEOC investigator.”

“Are they investigating?”

“Only if there’s a just god, and we know how that’s been working out.”

“So, no smoky looks, no smarmy grins?”

“Only when we’re in the same room. I don’t imagine he’s like that all the time.”

“I’m sure he’ll get better, over time.”

“There’s plenty of room for improvement, but I’m holding my expectations in check.”

After a quiet moment sipping our coffees, she asked the question for which I’d been fishing.

“What’s Chet like, as a boss.”

Carefully, now, I told myself, don’t scare her off. “He seems pretty reasonable, for an ex-military man.”

“What do you mean? Has he gone all spit-and-polish on your ass?”

Don’t get impatient. Let her take the hook. “No, not at all. We seem pretty compatible, generally speaking.”

“Then what’s the problem? You don’t sound enthused.”

A solid tug on the bobber. Get ready. “I’m still a little bent about how he conned me into the job.”

She laughed, with just enough of a derisive note to dissipate any of my potential feelings of regret for what I was about to do. “Yeah, he sure had your number, you sap,” she chuckled.

Gotcha. Now to just keep her from spitting out the hook as I began to reel her in. “Can I help it if my heart is pure and my motives are, uh, also pure?”

“Pure bullshit. If you’d just keep your head down, you wouldn’t get caught up in things.”

I lifted my coffee mug, saluting her. “I have to say, you certainly gave me the example I should have followed.”

“Damn betcha,” she said, then, with less certainty, “What do you mean?”

“I mean, you’re pretty cool and calculating about your work, always detached. I don’t sense any sort of personal commitment to your role as a clinical social worker.”

“Well, duh, most of us learn that in graduate school. Doesn’t mean we’re not personally committed. We’ve talked about this before. I’m just being professional. Are you doubting my commitment to the work, after all these years?”

I sighed. “We haven’t talked about it lately, and I guess I’ve begun to wonder if it hadn’t become just a rote exercise for you.”

She turned her face toward me. “Rote exercise? How can you say that, after I spent half the night, last month, talking Al away from his gun. Or the extra hours helping establish the veterans AA groups?”

Not looking at her, I shrugged, still leaning back in my lounger, “Maybe I’m not being fair, but sometimes ... well, hun, sometimes it just seems like your own self-interests take precedence over the requirements of the work.”

Now she sat upright, turned fully on the lounger to face me, dropped her feet to the deck, and leaned toward me. “What the fuck are you talking about, Gary? I’m as committed to things as you are, you prima donna. Just because you had to be conned into taking on the professional role that best suited--” An ominous pause, then, “Fuck! Fuck you, Gary! County rules say you can’t supervise relatives.”

Very calmly, avoiding eye contact, I said, “Just like you couldn’t supervise me at the state hospital.”

Recognition a-dawning -- oops, metaphors mixed – I mean the hook set and the line taught, Greta said, “Fuck, fuck, fuck! You’ve already talked him into it, haven’t you? Son. Of. A. Bitch! You scum-sucking, toady ass-wipe. How could you do this to your own loving wife?”

Late that afternoon, I said to Emily, “I don’t know why you’re upset. She talked herself into it. I never even mentioned the mental health manager’s job.”

Emily looked over at Greta, who was sulking on the other side of the table, doodling in the condensation on her iced tea glass. Greta said, “He conned me. He talked around it until I had to bring it up.”

“Conned you? Didn’t you laugh at me for being conned into my job not two minutes before? Surely an intelligent woman--”

“Fuck you, Gary.”

I looked at Emily. “I think she’s still upset. And, for the sake of accuracy, I don’t recall Greta mentioning the mental health manager’s job, either, though we did mention a job she had when we worked at the state hospital in--”

“Fuck you, Gary,” Greta reiterated.

Emily said to her, “Still, it does get you out from under that ass-wipe, Jimmy.”

Greta gave her a harsh look. “You, too? Then fuck you, Emily.”

I said, “She sometimes fails to see the silver lining.” Metaphor No. 3, but I think I was the only one who was bothered by it.

Monday, July 22

On Monday, Greta submitted her application for the Mental Health Team Manager’s position. Chet immediately attached a memo describing the alteration in supervision. Word quickly got out, and everyone knew it was a done deal, pending completion of the application period.

Tate called me Monday afternoon. “Boy, you don’t waste any time, do you?”

“What? You mean Greta? How did you find out already?”

“She called Louise this morning. Said what a jerk you’d been.”

“Yeah, I keep hearing that from people, but I’m just not seeing it.”

“Time to get your eyes checked, then.”

“What? Tate? Tate? Are you still there?”

“Yeah, you --”

But I hung up the phone.

He called back. “They traced both of those guns.”

“To who?”

“I think you meant, ‘To whom?’”

“Now, whom’s being a jerk?”

“What? What? Gary, are you still there?” He disconnected. And this guy was our sheriff?

I called him. “Whomse are they?”

“They traced them back to a gun dealer who bought them at a government surplus auction in nineteen seventy-eight. And he was dead not long thereafter. But he died of cancer. He had mostly worked gun shows, so there’s no further record of them.”

“That’s pretty underwhelming.”

“Mostly gun shows in the Pacific Northwest.”

“And that narrows it down to what? Fifteen, twenty million people?”

“We can probably rule out nuns.”

“Now we’re making real progress. Is that from OCI, or are you deducing behind their back?”

He chuckled, but said, “Yeah, I was pretty disappointed, too. Looks like that’s a dead end. We know where they started and where they ended up, but the in-between remains a mystery.”

I was thinking.

He said, “You still there, or are we playing cell tag, again?”

“Have you got time to talk about this, right now.”

“Other than being at the beck and call of the county’s citizenry, I am not otherwise obligated.”

“I’ll call you right back.”

No doubt hearing some excitement in my voice, he said, “Kay,” and we both disconnected.

I walked down to Chet’s office. He looked to be working his way through a stack of job applications.

I said, “Oh, good, you’re not busy.”

He looked up, blinking, as he brought the afternoon into focus. “Not busy?” he questioned. “Have you a death wish?”

“Do you want to keep doing that, or would you rather be trying to figure out a real, live murder mystery?”

“Huh?”

“Your choice,” I urged.

His eyes went back and forth a couple times, between me and the stack of maybe three dozen files. Finally, he pushed the files to the corner of his desk and said, “Don’t make me sorry I’m doing this.”

I held up my finger, in the wait-a-minute gesture, and fished my phone out of my pocket. I punched in Tate’s quick connect code. “Hey, we’re meeting in Chet’s office.” After a couple seconds, I disconnected and said to Chet, “He’ll be here in a few minutes.”

“Who will be here in a few minutes?”

“Oh, sorry. The Sheriff.” I pointed to the files. “Are those applications for our jobs?”

“Yeah.”

“Which ones?”

“Which ones what?”

“Which jobs?

“All of them: mine, yours, Phil’s, Grant’s, Jimmy’s. We’ve spent a fortune in classified-ads the past few weeks but have been promoting from within. What’s more, since Grant and Phil are no longer working here, I know we still have two vacant positions, I just can’t figure out which positions they are.”

“There goes your sharp-as-a-tack status.”

“Anyway, I’m looking at these in the hopes I’ll find someone to fill Greta’s position.”

“The only position we haven’t advertised.”

“Yeah, but the EEOC rules mean we still have to advertise. And we may actually need to, finally.”

“What about the Veterans Services Officer? Have you got someone for that?”

“Yeah. One of the vets with a bachelor’s degree in social work.”

“That job doesn’t have any college requirements. No offense.”

“I have a business degree from the US Military College, smart guy.”

“I thought that was like a substitute for a civilian GED. Offense intended.”

“Just so you know, Gary, I keep a loaded gun in this middle desk drawer.”

“So, who do you have in mind to try to fill your enormous combat boots?”

“Have you met Al Pozniak?”

“Uh-m, wasn’t he the guy with the, uh, gun in his mouth, a few weeks ago?”

“Well, yeah, but he didn’t pull the trigger. You think I’d hire a dead guy?”

“I don’t know. When the tack gets dull, there’s no bringing it back.”

“Greta likes him for the job.”

“Greta’s reality testing has been a little questionable, lately.”

“Why, just because she stays married to you?”

I nodded. “Among other things.”

There were voices in the hall and a few seconds later, Tate ushered in Lindsey Turner. Both Chet and I stood.

Chet said, “Detective, welcome to the nerve center of the Coldwater County Health and Human Services Department.”

I said, “The nerve center’s in Admin Services. This is more like the, uh, I don’t know, the right kidney?”

“What?” Chet demanded.

“You didn’t want me saying ‘sigmoid colon’ in front of the lady, did you?”

Tate said, “When they execute smartasses, they always substitute plain water for the sedative, before they give the suffocation dose.”

“Well, then, a word to the wise, eh, Detective?”

“Gary, you are so full of shit,” she opined.

Chet said, “Let’s sit down and see why the genius arranged this little confab.”

I said, “How about we sit at your table, over there?” Chet had a round, six place table in the corner of his office. I had one in my office, too.

“Sure, why not?” he said.

We moved over there and Chet held Turner’s chair for her, and she thanked him.

Chet said to me, “You have the floor, Gary.”

“Okay,” I started, inauspiciously. I focused on Turner. “The other day, Chet was talking about butterflies and today, Tate was talking about guns, and it suddenly dawned on me that we’d loaded our crime theories with so many assumptions that we’d lost track of the basics, right Chet? Isn’t that what you were implying, Tate?”

Tate said, “Huh?”

Turner looked at Chet and said, “Butterflies?”

Chet said to me, “Do you ever get serious?”

“You’ll know I’m being serious when I have a shotgun barrel in my mouth,” I said, in a dead serious tone.

That actually calmed them down. Me too.

Chet said, “We were talking about chaos theory last week, and the Butterfly Effect.”

Turner said, “Oh. Like in that movie, oh, Thunder Something?”

“A Sound of Thunder,” I said, “with Ed Byrnes and Ben Kingsley.”

“Yeah,” she said, “where they time travel to the prehistoric past and step on that butterfly and it screws everything up in the future.”

Chet said, “That would be an inverse example of the Butterfly Effect, but yes.”

Tate said, “I thought that movie was boring. What’s it got to do with us?”

I said, “Explain it, Chet.”

He gave me an exasperated look, but went ahead. “Chaos theory, as little as I understand it, proposes that things that appear chaotic actually are responding to rules, but you have to know the origin of things to understand how the apparent chaos was created. Or something like that.”

I said, “Thanks, boss. That’s more than adequate for our purposes. What reminded me of it today was when Tate called me to tell me they’d traced the guns to a dealer who bought them from the government in the 1970s. The dealer sold mostly at gun shows in the Pacific Northwest, but died of cancer not long after he bought the guns, leaving no further record of them. And then Tate said we knew where the guns came from and where they ended up, but everything in between was a mystery. That clicked with the chaos theory idea.

“I realized that everything we knew about the first two murders, except for the bullets that killed them and the guns that fired those bullets, is pure conjecture, beginning with which victim was shot first and that it started over mushrooms.

“I thought maybe we should go back to the beginning, and that Chet would bring a fresh point of view, along with an appreciation of the approach. Having you here, Detective, is gravy.”

Tate said, “Once again, you display an unexpected facility with logic.” I scratched my nose with my middle finger.

Chet said, “Let’s start with something basic: motive. If not a fight over mushroom hunting grounds, then what?”

I said, “I want to point out that there has been no evidence that mushrooms or mushroom hunting was involved. Tate and I found one old morel under a chunk of bark near the murder scene. As far as I know, the original theory was based solely on the fact that it was mushroom season and maybe because ethnic Vietnamese seem to represent a disproportionate segment of the Pacific Northwest mushroom-hunting public. But did Nguyen even have a permit, or record of applying for one?

“That’s not to say that people don’t poach mushrooms in the National Forest without a permit, but that points up another illegal forest activity: poaching wild game.”

Turner said, “Wasn’t there some big poaching ring broken, just before I got here?”

The comment was met with silence, until I finally said, “Yes. It involved the brother of our former administrator, the job Chet is stepping into.”

“Why? Was the brother fired?”

“He quit,” I said, “but, though that may play into this, I’d prefer not to break a sequential approach.”

Chet said, “There’s no more evidence of game poaching than there is of mushroom poaching, at least not that we have here.”

But Tate had brought a file folder. Opening it, he said, “This is a copy of everything that OCI has, at least as of Friday. Lindsey, can you check NCIC on that fancy phone? I’ll go through these interview notes.”

She said, “Can I use your computer, Chet? Is it okay if I call you Chet? I’m Lindsey.”

“Sure, no problem, Lindsey. Do you need anything special on the computer?”

“Just access to the net.”

Chet reached over to his desk and snagged the laptop, dragging its connecting cables along. He set it in front of himself, tapped some keys, then slid it in front of Turner, who was on his right, across from me. “That’s the county net,” he said.

Tate said, “There’s a mention here about Nguyen’s arrest about five years ago, but he wasn’t charged with anything. Here’s a case number.” He pointed to some digits on a form, which he gave to Turner.

Meanwhile, I’d called the local headquarters for the Sacagawea National Forest. I handed my phone to Tate. “It’s the District Ranger’s office. Ask them -- “ But he waved me off as he started to speak into the phone.

With the two cops busy, I looked at my watch, then turned to Chet. “I’m going to run over to the bakery, see if they have anything left.”

I grabbed his travel mug from his desk, then headed down the hall to get mine.

Ten minutes later, I was back, carrying a cardboard tray. I set the tray on my chair, then started distributing its contents: coffee for everyone, a supply of single-serving half-and-half and sugar packets, paper plates, plastic knives and spoons, a stick of margarine, and a sliced loaf of placek.

“This is plah-tsek,” I said, “It’s a Polish coffee cake, or maybe a bread. Whatever, it’s delicious like this and even better if you toast it.” Moving the empty box to the floor, I sat down and asked, “What did I miss?”

Tate said, “There’s no record of a mushroom permit for Nguyen.” Commercial permits were a dollar per gallon, between 30 and 120 gallons. No permit was required for personal use, allowing up to a gallon a day, but with sales or trading prohibited.

Turner said, “Nguyen was arrested four years ago, unloading a truck’s contraband cargo. He was a forklift operator at a transshipment warehouse in Oakland. He was a part-time employee at a busy warehouse. He had been assigned a work order to remove loaded palettes from a refrigerated box truck and stack them in a freezer. He claimed innocence as he had no idea it was poached game he was handling.”

I said, “Good, thank you. Back to basics. As things are, it might be better to think of this as an elimination game. I don’t mean that’s what we have to do, per se, but more to put us in a mindset to classify things as either probable, possible, unlikely, or impossible. Right now, for Nguyen, I think ‘mushroom hunting’ has moved from probable to possible, and we’ve placed ‘game poaching’ in the possible box, too.”

Chet asked, “Are you suggesting the rifle belonged to Nguyen?”

“No, not at all. But to take that question a step further, I would say that it is improbable the rifle belonged to Caldwell. When he left here on the bus, all he had was a backpack. And since that backpack and its contents had been in the custody of the Detention Center, I’d say it was also improbable that the pistol was Caldwell’s. That doesn’t rule out him having obtained a gun from an unknown source, but that seems improbable, given what we do know.

Chet, looking perplexed, asked, “Had someone suggested Caldwell as a shooter?”

“No,” I said, “but that is my point in this butterfly hunt. Everyone assumed Caldwell wasn’t a shooter, but without any evidence. So far, we’ve agreed it is improbable, but not impossible that he fired a gun. Some other unsupported assumptions include Nguyen being shot before Caldwell was shot, that Caldwell was shot because he witnessed Nguyen’s shooting, and that Nguyen wasn’t a shooter. All of those may be true. But we’ve already called one assumption into serious question, the reason Nguyen was near Coldwater Junction, and we’ve introduced a plausible competing theory. The point is, we can’t unravel the chaos, which is our murder mystery, until we’re certain of its origins, and those origins are still hidden within a cluster of unsupported assumptions.”

Turner said, “You know, what you’re proposing is just basic detective work, but this case seems to have developed a life of its own, generating accepted theories simply based on circumstances and prejudices. It was mushroom season and Nguyen is Vietnamese, ergo, he must have been mushroom hunting.”

Tate was moving about in his chair, looking toward the floor. Chet looked under the table and asked, “Drop something?”

He said, “No. I was just checking the souls of my shoes for dead butterflies.”

I asked, “Is this the point where you ask people to re-elect you as Sheriff?”

“No,” he said. “That’ll be when I shoot you and I’m made Sheriff-for-life by popular acclaim.”

Chet said, “Can I get in on that action?”

“Boys,” Turner said, “murder mystery, remember? But thank you for the Sound of Thunder reference, Sheriff. Had you found dog shit, it may have cost you my vote.”

“Okay,” I said, “getting back to things, let me propose that Caldwell was probably an innocent bystander, at least in whatever was going on up there. He was an inept con man and an opportunist and I think the instinct for opportunism is what lead to his demise. Mind you, I have no evidence of this, but I think the dog handlers were right. He heard something, ran to investigate, and got shot, likely to keep him from being a witness. Or, knowing him, possibly for a clumsy blackmail attempt against someone holding a gun in their hands. So I’d put both of those motives in the ‘possible’ box and the rest of it in the ‘probable’ box.”

Turner said, “That makes sense.”

Chet asked, “Dog handlers?” So I explained the trail found by the tracking dogs.

I asked Tate, “Do you know if they tested Nguyen’s hands for gunshot residue.”

Tate shrugged, shaking his head and Turner said, “That’s unlikely, unless it was specified by an investigator.”

I asked, looking at Tate, “Ah, don’t we have a copy of the autopsy report?”

He turned red while reaching for the file folder. “Why, yes, Gary. I was just about to suggest I review that,” he said, but in a theatrical voice that acknowledged his oversight.

Chet said, “There goes my vote.” Turner chuckled.

Tate pulled out a page and handed it to Turner. “Here, Madame Butterfly, you’ve likely seen more of these than I have.”

Turner took the page and ran her finger over some of the text. She said, “I don’t see anything about a GSR (gun shot residue) test. But it does mention that his palms were moderately soiled, though his fingernails were notably clean.” She looked up. “Wouldn’t a mushroom hunter have dirty hands and fingernails?”

We all looked to Tate, who had closed his eyes in a tight squint.

“Sheriff?” I said.

He opened his eyes and said, “I’ve never been on a mushroom hunt, though I’ve seen plenty of mushroom hunters, and I was trying to remember what I’ve seen. It’s mostly been at a distance, as I drive by. I can’t say that especially dirty hands come to mind, but I do recall, now and again, seeing people wearing those disposable work gloves, usually women. And I know morels like to grow in old wildfire burns, which can be be charred and sooty.” He shrugged. “Just on the odds, I’d say that the mushroom connection has become less likely.”

I said, “Let’s speculate, for a minute, on other reasons Nguyen may have been up there. No objections, only reasons. I’ll write ‘em down, if Chet will provide a sheet of paper.”

Chet went to his desk and came back with a pad of lined, yellow sheets, standard letter size. He tore out sheets along the perforations and handed them to each of us. I brought my ballpoint from where it was clipped in my shirt pocket.

When I looked up, poised to write, Tate said, “Hiking, fishing, camping.”

Turner said, “Birdwatching, butterfly collecting.” The latter notion brought looks from all of us. She shrugged, with a pretty smile.

Chet said, “Maybe he was lost or hiding from the cops.”

Tate said, “Or meeting an accomplice.” Now everyone looked at Tate, whose smile was more grim than pretty.