Chapter Thirty-Three · Evelyn
Chapter Thirty-Three
EVELYN
Cutter Reeves came up Grace Walsh’s front steps at twenty past three in the morning and Evelyn Chase was already at the door.
“He’s alive,” Cutter said, before he was all the way onto the porch. “That’s the first thing and I’m saying it first because he told me to.”
Evelyn’s hand went flat on the door frame.
“Say the rest.”
“Through and through, upper left chest, above the lung. Good pulse, he was talking, he never stopped talking, and the paramedic out of Fincastle told me to tell you that if you were his daddy he’d say you’re going to be all right.
” Cutter had blood on both forearms and up the front of his coat and had not noticed or had not cared.
“Get your coat. I’m driving you down and he made me promise I’d tell you in the car so you didn’t have to hear it standing up in a lawyer’s dining room, and I done it on the porch instead because I couldn’t wait, and he’ll have to take that up with me. ”
Evelyn got her coat.
She did not cry in the car. She did that later, in a hospital bathroom at five in the morning, alone, for about ninety seconds, and then washed her face and went back out.
He was asleep when they let her in and he had a tube in his arm and about four days of grey stubble and he looked, for the first time since February, his actual age.
She sat down and took his right hand and put her forehead down on the edge of the bed.
“You got Prine,” Diesel said, without opening his eyes.
“Oh my God.”
“Deputy told me on the gravel.” His hand closed on hers. “Come here.”
“I am here.”
“Come closer. I ain’t allowed to sit up.”
Evelyn Chase got out of the chair and put her arms around a man with a hole in him as carefully as she had ever done anything, and stayed there.
“You said hold,” she said, into his neck.
“You heard that.”
“I heard it on an open line in Grace’s dining room with a sheriff’s dispatcher in my other ear.” Her voice was going. “You had two seconds and one word, and it wasn’t go, and it wasn’t my name.”
“No.”
“Why.”
“Because if I’d said either one of them, eleven men would’ve crossed that gravel,” Diesel said, “and one of them’s a boy with a phone, and there’s a fella from Hagerstown with a gun and a felony record and nine years to lose, and every one of us would’ve been in a different story by daylight.”
Evelyn pulled back enough to look at him.
“That’s the first time,” she said, “that you have ever explained a decision to me while you were still inside it.”
“Yeah, well.” He got his fingers around hers. “I’m on a lot of medicine.”
The rest of it happened faster than she would ever be able to explain to anybody.
Danielle Ford went to her chief at eight o’clock Monday morning and did not have to make the argument she had prepared.
She had a man in the Botetourt County jail who had been arrested at the scene of a shooting.
She had eleven cellular telephone recordings from four angles plus a phone that had recorded the entire event from the gravel where its owner dropped it.
She had a signed civilian instruction sheet dated the day before with sixteen names on it, which turned a motorcycle club standing in a yard into a documented recording detail.
She had a call reference number logged at nine forty-four the previous evening.
She had a shop manager with twelve years of institutional knowledge and a notebook out of a coffee can.
She had a mechanic’s lien with a sworn description of twenty-four concealed assemblies.
She had a shop drawing with an approval block and a plate number in carpenter’s pencil on the back.
She had eleven scale tickets in Renata Sowder’s handwriting.
And she had a seventy-six-year-old fabricator in Daleville who was going to be the most likeable witness any jury in the Western District of Virginia had seen in a decade.
Her chief listened for fifty minutes and then said, “Whose file is this?”
“Mine,” Danielle Ford said. “Since April.”
Wendell Prine came out of his house at two forty in the morning with every light on and stood in the middle of a rural route in Buchanan, Virginia, in a work shirt and no coat, and was standing there when the deputy came around the bend.
The vehicle at the bottom of his drive was gone by then and nobody ever established what it had been.
Evelyn met him in June, in a hallway outside a conference room. He was shorter than she expected, had enormous forearms, and shook her hand with a grip that made her eyes water.
“You’re the lady found the leg,” he said.
“I found the opinion.”
“They said it was drunk.” Wendell Prine said it flatly, standing in a federal hallway twelve years later. “In a paper. To a judge. And my wife’s people read it.”
“I know.”
“Twelve years I ain’t been able to say one word about that to a soul that could do anything.” He let go of her hand. “Then a lady I never met went and read it.”
Aldridge lasted six days.
Grace explained it to Evelyn over the phone from a parking deck in Roanoke, and Evelyn wrote it down because she had learned to write everything down.
“He’s not charged with anything he can’t survive and he knows it, and he has one asset: he can identify who brought a man down from Maryland.” Grace’s voice was flat with exhaustion. “And one problem, which is that whoever that was will say they never heard of him. So he came in first.”
“Who was it?”
“A regional operations director at Renner Freight named Boyd Sumner, who has worked for Alton Renner for twenty-two years, and who has never in his life done one thing that man did not tell him to do.”
“That’s still not Renner.”
“No,” Grace said. “Prine is Renner. Sumner is the reason the grand jury believes Prine.”
Marcus Teal was not in the room when the indictment was voted.
He had been reassigned in March to a task force in Richmond, a lateral move with better parking, and had gone without telling anybody outside a very short list.
Grace told Evelyn about it in the parking lot of the courthouse in Roanoke.
“He’ll be all right. Nineteen years and a pension and a wife who has now had the affair explained to her.
” Grace shaded her eyes. “But he won’t work another case like this, and the two people in that building who told an underwriter about a sealed investigation are still in it, and Ms. Ford knows who at least one of them is and cannot prove it. ”
“That’s not finished.”
“No,” Grace said. “That’s not finished, and I want you to hold onto that, because in about six months somebody is going to tell you this was a clean ending.”
The indictment came down on a Thursday in April.
Twenty-two counts. Alton Renner, Boyd Sumner, Cardinal Cold Chain LLC, Warrenton Cold Holdings LLC, and four other individuals.
Conspiracy, continuing criminal enterprise, and eleven substantive counts tied to loads Evelyn Chase had traced across two years of fuel receipts on a pool table in a clubhouse in a hollow.
The nineteen carriers were not indicted.
Danielle Ford put that in the second paragraph of the press release herself, and the sentence she used was: These companies and their drivers were the instruments of this conspiracy and not its participants, and several of them are among the reasons it was uncovered.
Setzer of Wytheville framed it.
Piedmont’s BMC-35 cancellation notice was withdrawn on the twenty-ninth of the month, one day before the authority would have gone inactive, and Evelyn was in the yard office when the email came in and watched Renata Sowder read it twice, put her glasses on her head, and go out to the shop bay to tell everybody in person rather than send it around.
Diesel came home in nine days and was back at the yard in nineteen against every piece of medical advice he received, on the condition, which Evelyn negotiated in writing on a legal pad and made him sign in front of Grace, that he would not lift, drive, or argue with Cutter Reeves for six weeks.
He violated the third one in ninety minutes.
The first night he was home she did not sleep, and neither did he, and around two in the morning she gave up and turned over and found him already looking at her.
“Don’t,” she said.
“I ain’t said anything.”
“You were about to say you’re fine.”
“I was about to say I can’t lift my left arm above here.” He got it about halfway up and stopped. “And that it’s about to be a problem for me, because you’re eight inches away and I’ve been in a room with a television bolted to the wall for nine days.”
Evelyn got up on one elbow.
“You have a hole in you.”
“Through and through. Above the lung.” He said it the way he said equipment specifications. “And I’ve been laying in that bed thinking about you for nine days and about four of them were the good kind.”
“If you tear something open at two in the morning I’m the one driving you back down this mountain to a nurse who already thinks I don’t feed you.”
“That’s fair.”
“It’s not a no,” Evelyn said. “It’s a set of terms.”
Everything in him stopped.
“Say them.”
“You don’t move.” She put her hand flat on his chest, well clear of the dressing, and pushed him back into the pillow, and felt what that did to him.
“Not your shoulder, not your arm, not any part of you above the ribs. You lie there and you let me, and the second something hurts you say so out loud instead of doing the thing where you decide about it by yourself.”
“Evelyn.”
“Say it back.”
“I say so out loud,” Diesel said, and his voice had gone.
She took her time.
She had not planned to and found that she wanted to, because he could not reach for her or turn her over or do one single thing about any of it, and there was a version of that which would have been about winning and this was not it. He had spent nine days being handled by strangers.
He said her name twice. The second time it came apart in the middle.
Afterward, arranged along his right side where there was nothing to hurt, with his hand moving slow in her hair, he said, “Told you.”
“Told me what.”
“Said so out loud. Twice.” She could hear him grinning. “Didn’t hurt one bit.”