Let the Guilty Pay Read online

2

  I spent the holiday weekend with Jorge and his family. I was no longer upset with him, and the deer’s screams had faded and been replaced by the laughter of Jorge’s children.

  But as we parked among the rest of the welders, I realized my ill feelings toward Jillian hadn’t diminished. I was anxious after more than forty-eight hours of radio silence, so I scanned the groggy faces. I found Paul. Not Jillian.

  Paul stuck out his hand for a morning handshake, revealing the hint of a red tattoo that ended at his wrist. “Hey Big Nasty, how was your holiday?”

  I smiled. My nickname from high school was Beck, and that had sufficed until my foray into pipelining. Though it started after an evening I came to regret, the new nickname also described my scraggly beard and brutish, undisciplined strength.

  “Not bad.” I checked over Paul’s shoulder and tried to see if Jillian was sitting in his pickup. “Spent the weekend in Borger with Jorge.”

  “Gotcha. I stayed around here, too. That drive is too damn far for two days.”

  I nodded, though distance hadn’t kept me from traveling from my temporary Texas Panhandle home to Hinterbach. I’d been there once this year. That was enough to last a couple more decades.

  I was about to ask why Paul hadn’t stopped by Jorge’s, but it was nearly seven a.m. No more time for small talk. “Where’s Jillian?”

  “I don’t know. She didn’t show up at my trailer this morning, and she’s not answering my calls. Guess she got too tore up last night to make the drive.”

  Jorge tapped me on the shoulder and handed over the clipboard with the daily Job Safety Analysis, which detailed the potential hazards awaiting us that morning. For the bosses, the JSA was a way of covering their asses if anyone got hurt. For us, it was an attendance sheet, proof we showed up and deserved our ten hours of pay.

  I wanted to ask more questions about Jillian, but the site superintendent began speaking as Paul was signing, signaling the start of another day.

  I was thankful when Zak announced break time. The heat had already climbed into the nineties, and I was helping a group of labor hands haul equipment. The bosses had warned us it would be hotter than usual.

  Zak must’ve been reading my mind. “Could one of you grab me a bottle of water?”

  Though it seemed obvious, not everyone heeded the constant warnings to stay hydrated. On my first job in late July, I’d seen two other pipeliners pass out, one of whom fell face-first into the side of his pickup while trying to reach the sweet relief of his truck’s AC. That was one of the times I’d asked myself, out loud, what the hell I was doing out on a pipeline.

  But I remained eager to please. I nodded and started walking toward Jorge’s truck before Zak grabbed my arm. “Not you, Big Nasty. I need you to go get me a sky hook. We’re going to need it in a few minutes.”

  “Yessir.”

  I’d never heard of a sky hook. Thankfully, I spotted Jorge leaving one of the job site’s three portable toilets and heading toward his truck. “I need to find a sky hook for Zak.”

  “Oh shit,” he shouted into the wind. “You better go get it.”

  My head swiveled out of reflex more than anything. I didn’t know what a sky hook looked like, and I wasn’t going to spot one in the next three seconds.

  “Do you know where one is?”

  Jorge shook his head as he kept walking.

  “What do they look like?”

  “Dude, just think about it while you’re looking. You’ll figure it out.”

  While it was fun hanging out with Jorge for ten hours a day, at moments like these I wanted to tell him to shut up and help me find the damn thing. But that was literally my job, not his. And thanks to the man who pronounced his name “George” or “Hoar-Hay” depending on his audience, I was gainfully employed and had avoided begging my parents for money.

  “Fine,” I huffed. “I’ll be back in a minute.”

  Jorge checked his invisible watch. “Better hurry.”

  I hustled to an area where shared equipment was either stacked on pallets or laying on the dead prairie. There were chain clamps, which secured two ends of pipe while welders tacked them. Flames from the six weed burners—long torches attached via rubber hoses to grill-sized bottles of propane—would then warm those ends before being fused. There were several other pieces of equipment I’d become familiar with through on-the-job training. Nothing resembled a hook.

  I searched my brain for other places a sky hook could be hiding. I remembered Jillian pulling out her cheap grinder the previous week. Perhaps this elusive sky hook was in a similar hiding spot.

  Testing that theory meant hiking to the other end of Site One—the official designation for our job site, located on the outskirts of Fritch, about forty-five minutes northeast of Amarillo. Sweat rolled down my arms and soaked the wrists of my leather gloves. I took them off and stuffed them into my back pocket as I approached the lay-down yard.

  I was staring at the spot where I’d caught Jillian—I still had no idea why she would sabotage the work—when Paul sidled up to me. “What are you looking for?”

  “A sky hook.” I turned to face him. “I have no idea what that is. Have you seen one? Or can you at least tell me what I’m looking for?”

  “I’m pretty sure someone set one down over there.” He pointed at the other end of the yard, near the area for equipment designated for Site Three. “It just looks like a big ol’ hook. Let me know when you find it. I’ll give you something for my character to say in your next book.”

  I thanked Paul without telling him there was no next book. Not that he would know or care. Before finding myself in this new vocation, my adult life had been about words. Long words, short words, ten-cent words, words fancier than Whataburger ketchup. But after two unpublished true crime manuscripts and one unsold work of fiction, I no longer thought of myself as a writer.

  I neared the edge of the area and searched the ground. No hooks. There was a pig launcher we’d completed two days earlier, and that seemed promising.

  On one end was an open piece of rust-brown pipe that extended nearly twenty feet. On the other was a blue door concealing the hole into which a giant tampon—that’s how Jorge had described a pig to me—would be pushed for periodic cleaning of the pipes that crawled underneath the High Plains.

  Someone had probably left a sky hook inside the launcher. I leaned down a few feet and peered into the open end. I didn’t see anything, but it got pitch black about two feet inside the pipe. I needed to open the gate and let light shine through.

  My nose detected a foul odor as I walked to the other end. A skunk? No. One of the hundreds of prairie dogs that littered Site One had crawled inside and died.

  It was a solid hypothesis, though I hadn’t considered how a prairie dog might get into the launcher. The enormous pipe—twenty-six inches in diameter on the open side, which would later tie into the existing pipeline, and thirty inches across on the gate side—wasn’t laying directly on the ground. It was propped up on three-foot square columns built out of railroad ties. A rodent would need a hell of a reason to make that climb, and under normal circumstances there would be no prize waiting for it.

  But that realization didn’t hit me until long after I opened the gate and saw Jillian’s misshapen head. I could only assume it was Jillian because her face was severely discolored and lumpy. Half of her dirty blonde hair was nearly black from dried blood and matted against a temple that had been caved in. That’s all the detail I could absorb before turning away and gagging.

  I looked toward the rest of the crew. Nobody had seen me, so I jogged until my left foot found itself ankle-deep in a prairie dog hole. After standing and replacing my white hardhat, I decided to walk, though part of me felt I was disrespecting Jillian by taking the extra time. My thoughts were broken by the sound of a dozen welding machines firing up, a chorus of combustion engines fighting to be heard. The crew was resuming work, though Jorge and Zak were talking as I approached.

  T
hey started laughing when they saw me coming. Jorge leaned toward me. “Did you find that sky hook, buddy?”

  “What?” I struggled to find the right words. “No, I didn’t, but—”

  “Did you look everywhere?” Zak asked. “I told you I need that thing right now.”

  We contracted our huddle as a large yellow digging machine, known as a track hoe, rumbled by. “I know,” I said. “I’m sorry, but—”

  “Dude, we’re fucking with you,” Jorge said. “There’s no such thing as a sky hook. We wanted to watch you lose your shit trying to find one. It’s like an initiation. You should put it in your next book.”

  “Yeah, maybe,” I said. “But right now, I need you two to come with me.”

  “Dude, I told you, we’re messing around, there is no—”

  Jorge finally shut up when I started walking back toward the yard. He grabbed my arm. “Bro, we’ve got to get back to work. What’s going on?”

  “I was looking for the sky hook and—”

  “For the last time, there is no such thing as a sky hook.” Jorge’s eyes flashed in a rare moment of frustration.

  “Okay, I get it. But you and Zak need to come see this.”

  “See what?”

  I needed to say the words: Jillian is dead, and I found her body. But I wasn’t ready, so I pointed toward the launcher.

  “Jillian,” I whispered.

  Jorge yelled at Zak and sprinted across the yard when it sunk in. Zak asked me what was going on, and I finally articulated the words “hot girl” and “dead.” He took off after Jorge. I walked behind them, in no hurry to return to her corpse, but knowing I should.

  Jorge had a growing beer gut but remained nearly as athletic as the intramural softball star he’d once been. I’d never seen him out of breath. I’d never seen him throw up either, but his five-nine frame nearly folded in half as he vomited fermented sugar and scrambled eggs. Zak skidded to a stop beside Jorge and had a less visceral reaction. He took off his sunglasses and put his hands on his narrow hips. He stared at Jillian for what seemed like half an hour, though it was probably about ten seconds. He eventually dropped his head, his freshly shaven chin trying to burrow into his sunken chest.

  I stood farther back, the wider view revealing details I’d missed earlier. Jillian’s bellybutton faced up, her bloated, blue-gray arms squeezed tightly to inflated sides. Her hands were lying flat, palms against the steel. She was in street clothes, a tight-fitting tank and jeans struggling against her torso and legs, her toes pointing to the left.

  But my eyes were drawn to the thin, deep gash in her neck. An inch or two more, and whatever made the cut would’ve severed her head. That and the crushed right half of her skull were more than enough to have killed her, but her head bore one more disfigurement—a one-foot screwdriver sticking out of her right eye, also pointing to the left.

  I fixated on the yellow-and-black handle and struggled to breathe. How had I missed it the first time? The shock and the smell, I suppose. But with this new perspective and time to process the image, a terror from deep inside reached up and squeezed my throat shut.

  I’d seen this before.

  3

  The Fritch Police Department arrived first. The middle-aged chief rummaged through the back of his Explorer before emerging with a roll of crime scene tape. He summoned his officer, and the pair created a perimeter. They clearly hadn’t done it in a while, if ever, which said more about the quiet bedroom community of about 2,000 than their effectiveness as policemen.

  “Well, I’m going to Dairy Queen,” Paul said. “Y’all want anything?”

  Jorge reached for his stomach. I shook my head.

  “How can you be hungry right now?” I asked.

  “Hey, I didn’t see her. Besides, we’re not getting any more work done today.”

  He was right. And in their haste to secure the crime scene, the chief and a wide-eyed officer—a pair who likely comprised the entire on-duty contingent of the FPD—hadn’t told any of us to stay.

  Zak called out to Paul and the others walking away. “Just be back before too long.”

  They left just in time. A Hutchinson County Sheriff’s Office truck and a Texas Department of Public Safety SUV arrived next. The sheriff’s deputy, who’d turned on the lights but not the siren, drove straight to the crime scene tape. The less-hurried DPS officer angled his vehicle across the road leading out of Site One, symbolically locking the rest of us in. Our superintendent, Captain Redbeard, approached the SUV and spoke to the driver. He returned a minute later and gathered everyone as a second state trooper drove past.

  “Listen up,” Redbeard said. “We’re done for today. Everyone goes home with ten, and we’ll report to Site Two tomorrow morning. I’ll have more information by then, and we’ll figure out where to go from there. Jorge, you and Beck stay behind for a minute.”

  We watched the rest of the group disband. They remained respectful and solemn as they walked to their trucks, but their masks fell away quickly. They’d been given more than half a day off with pay, including their usual two hours of overtime.

  Jorge checked his phone while we waited. “Everyone’s going to the bar. You coming this time?”

  I didn’t want to have this conversation again, but I had no excuse to avoid it. “I don’t think so.”

  “Look, I know you’re still kind of new to this, but the guys are starting to think that you think you’re too good for them.”

  I’d explained to Jorge at least a dozen times that I was not interested in getting drunk and hitting on barflies. Jillian had never gone out with them, either. “Even if I liked going to the bars around here, I sure as hell wouldn’t be going today.”

  “See, that’s where we’re different,” Jorge said. “All I want to do is drink until I forget about it.”

  We heard bootsteps and turned around. A DPS officer was walking beside Zak, who motioned for Jorge and me to join them on their way to Redbeard.

  “Sergeant, this is Jorge and his helper, Beck,” Redbeard said. “Beck found her, then called Jorge and Zak over.”

  The sergeant took off his beige cowboy hat and shook our hands.

  “Gentlemen, I know you probably want to get out of here after what you saw, but I have to get your statements before we can let you go.” The sergeant pulled a notebook from the breast pocket of his khaki uniform. “I’m sure you understand.”

  He asked to speak with me first, so we stepped a few yards away from Jorge and Zak. Redbeard had already left in his pickup to fetch a cold thirty-pack at the nearest convenience store.

  “I take it Beck is your last name?” the sergeant asked.

  “Yes. My full name is Bartholomew John Beck.”

  He chuckled. “Well, that’s a new one. I’ll need you to give me that first name one letter at a time.”

  “I get that a lot.” I spelled it slowly, then raced through my worst morning in twenty years.

  My black sedan was parked along the curb next to Jorge’s house. There was a slight disconnect when I thought about the bachelor I met in college now paying a mortgage. He had talked me into making my liver work overtime on the weekends during my final years at a North Texas state school. I was still trying to write the next In Cold Blood and thought earning a bachelor’s in English lit and an Iowa Writers’ Workshop MFA would bolster my credibility. I never made it to Iowa City.

  Jorge didn’t share my academic ambition. He was attending a two-year technical school nearby but hung out with the university students. He got to know campus intimately by doing the walk of shame, though he rarely felt the shame. How we met was a matter of debate, but we spent the better part of my junior and senior years tearing up that college town.

  Despite his responsibilities, vestiges of the party boy I once knew remained. In the fifteen minutes it took to get to his house, Jorge took three calls from other welders asking why he wasn’t at the bar yet. He pulled up next to my car and didn’t bother to park. He needed to make a clean getaway
before his wife got home.

  I told him I was going inside to nap on the couch, which was now doubling as my bed—a massive improvement over my previous accommodations in Jorge’s travel trailer. I wanted to tell him what was on my mind, but I also didn’t want to burden him.

  He could put it together if he’d bothered to read my first true crime bestseller. Jorge was a loyal patron and had paid for a copy of all four books I’d written—he and my parents were just about the only people to buy the last one about a love triangle gone wrong in Lubbock—though I knew he hadn’t cracked any of them open.

  Earlier that year, he’d asked me when the next one was coming out. I hadn’t had any bites in more than two years, and my agent no longer took my calls. Jorge had much better career news. Texas and Oklahoma were in the middle of an oil and natural gas boom, and companies couldn’t hire enough welders. He said he could help me get out of my financial hole—and the general funk caused by a writer’s isolation, combined with the lack of a social life—and offered me a job as his helper. I’d said for years that I trusted Jorge with my life. And even though I wasn’t proficient with them, I’d grown up around power tools thanks to my father. The prospects seemed brighter than writing another manuscript that wouldn’t sell.

  Jorge sped off, and I walked to the back of my car. I always kept some paperbacks in the trunk to sell for cash, and I still had about sixty dollars in my wallet from sales at the job site.

  I dug down to the bottom of a cardboard box and pulled out my first book, Cold Summer: The true story of a murder that rocked the Texas Hill Country. On the cover was an Associated Press photo doctored to appear black-and-white except for a red tool shed—a wood structure built to look like a miniature barn—to the right of a dilapidated doublewide trailer.

  I flipped to the third chapter, the one where I described the crime scene. I skimmed the pages until I found the relevant paragraph.

  Det. Roland’s eyes scanned Summer Foster’s body. They started at the feet, which were both pointed to the left, toward the shed that held Butch Heller’s tools. The veteran lawman’s eyes drifted up her calves until they met at her knees, which were covered by her thin, flowery dress. She was laying on her side, like she was merely sleeping one off after a long Fourth of July celebration. But as Det. Roland’s eyes got to her face, the images caused his stomach to turn. The right side of her head had been bashed in—crime scene investigators would later find a short, two-pound sledgehammer covered in blood spatter—and a screwdriver was sticking out of her right eye, pointing toward the shed from which it had been removed.