22. Grant
TWENTY-TWO
GRANT
I pick Jessika up at six.
She's ready at the door with a travel mug and a look of determined calm that I recognize now as her working face, the face she puts on when she's managing something difficult by deciding she's larger than it.
We drive north in the early light.
For the first thirty miles we talk about strategy, what we know about Holcomb's property, about the contamination documents, about what Morgan would know that we don't. The legal pad is in her bag. The manila envelope from Ruth Ellory is in mine.
Then the conversation shifts, the way conversations do on long drives, into something less structured.
Jessika is quiet.
We drive for a while in the particular companionable quiet of a car in the early morning on a highway with little traffic. She drinks her coffee and I drink mine and the trees on either side are going gold and bare with October.
"Morgan helped expose something," I say, eventually. "We know that. Holcomb's property, the contamination. But I've been thinking about the scope of it."
"What do you mean?"
"The county doesn't have significant resources for illegal industrial disposal. Someone would need to be bringing in material from outside. Which means business relationships. Which means Holcomb isn't operating alone."
She turns to look at me. "You think he's part of a larger operation."
"Morgan said when he called me: people in the county. Plural."
She's quiet for a moment.
"Collins," she says.
"He's interested in my movements. He's been—" I choose the word carefully, "—managing my situation in ways that benefit me, but he's also keeping an eye on me. He knows things about Holcomb that he should have reported and hasn't."
"He's not a villain," she says carefully. "But he's not entirely clean either."
"That's usually how it works," I say. "Not masterminds. Just people who know things and make calculated decisions about what to do with the knowing."
She thinks. "So Morgan found the contamination. He was building a report. Someone, Holcomb, or someone connected to him, found out Morgan was building the report."
"And they did what people with resources do when someone without resources threatens to expose them," I say. "They destabilized him. Got him using again. Made him unreliable, made him paranoid, made him unsympathetic."
"And when that didn't stop him?—"
"He ran." I pause. "Which is what intelligent people do when they understand that the danger is real and they don't have anyone to protect them."
She looks out the window.
"But he has someone now," she says quietly.
I keep my eyes on the road.
"Yeah," I say. "He does."
The Whitmore County line is marked by a green sign I've passed maybe six times in my life. The trees north of it are different, more pine, and the light through them is cooler.
About forty miles in, I take a county road east. Then another north.
The GPS on my phone is working but I know these turns anyway, muscle memory from the few times I came up here with Morgan years ago, when he was two years clean and optimistic and had started talking about doing environmental consulting, when this camp belonged to a friend of his who'd let us use it for a few days in summer.
The three pines.
They're right where I remember, three massive white pines at a gap in the tree line on the left side of the county road, with a dirt two-track going in behind them. The camp is about a quarter mile down the two-track.
I stop the truck before I turn in.
"Last chance to think about this differently," I say.
"Drive," Jessika says.
I drive.
The camp is a single building, not quite a cabin, more like a very well-insulated shed with plumbing rigged off a well and a wood stove and two rooms. As we pull up, there's smoke from the stovepipe.
Someone's here.
We get out.
The door opens before we reach it.
Morgan stands in the doorway.
He's thinner than I've seen him in years, and older, the specific aging of hard time and fear, with a beard he didn't have and clothes that have seen too many days without washing. He looks at me first, and then at Jessika, and he makes a sound that is not quite a word.
"Hey," I say. Because what else.
Jessika crosses the remaining distance and wraps her arms around her brother.
He holds on.
He holds on like she is the only solid thing for a long way in every direction.
Which, I think, is probably not too far from accurate.
I stand by the truck and look at the pines and give them the moment.