“Then I guess that’s how I’ll die. Without telling you a thing.”
I shrug. “You don’t have to. We know you work for the company behind our former town. We know they also run the mining operation, which is actually an illegal prison camp. Right now we have two goals. Shut down the mine, and get your employer out of our lives—permanently. Neither has anything to do with your continued survival. We just don’t like to kill people if we don’t need to.”
I start to walk away, Dalton falling in beside me. Then I turn back to Rutherford. “If you hadn’t fucked up and killed an innocent hiker, we’d never have known what was going on.” I salute him. “Thank you for your service.”
“Innocent hiker?” He spits the words before gasps. “Is that what that woman told you? He was spying on us. I saw him on the ridge. Unlike you, I know how to deal with threats.”
I glance meaningfully toward Muriel. “No, you just don’t mind killing anyone whocouldbe a threat. Maybe that’s why the company hired you, but I suspect it was just an unexpected bonus… that turned into a major liability. We’ll be back in a while to collect Muriel and give her a proper burial. You can make your own choice.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
When we return, Rutherford is delirious with pain, but what finally convinces him to open up is the morphine we give him for that pain. Sometimes there really is an advantage to never needing to worry about how you obtain a confession. At least not when the guy is a murdering scumbag.
I’m sure it’s not entirely the morphine either. It’s the giddy relief of having his pain disappear, and the exhaustion of running on adrenaline for hours, racked by agony while lying helpless in a forest as night falls.
It’s also the fact that we already knew the connection between Rockton and the mining camp. No point in holding out… especially when you’re flying high on opiates.
Turns out, to Rutherford, Rockton is just a name, the backstory of his current job. That could be his employers giving him the bare minimum of what he needed to know, but it also seems he just didn’t care. It was a job. Specifics weren’t important.
His primary position had been with the mining operation, escorting new convicts in and old ones out… some of themleaving and others buried in shallow graves. Shot. Strangled. Poisoned. Whatever worked best under the circumstances. His skills were flexible.
His main contact at the camp isn’t Rogers. It’s the older guard we’ve seen from the start, an army vet turned mercenary. He poses as a guard while also keeping a watch on Rogers and helping Rutherford.
How did Rutherford hire Muriel? Pure chance. On his trips to the camp, he was also expected to conduct surveillance of Haven’s Rock. He spotted Muriel, who really had been out knitting and reading before her shift. He took some photos and later identified her through facial recognition. His employers instructed him to stage an accidental meeting and test her viability as a spy—her financial situation suggested money might be the way to her heart.
While the purpose of his latest visit was a prisoner exchange—and to execute Hansen—he’d lingered because of the Blake incident. When Rutherford is under the influence of morphine, he candidly admits he didn’t have any solid evidence that Blake was a spy. He only knew that Blakemighthave been a threat. So he killed him. He’d always planned to kill Gretchen, too—no loose ends left untied. She’d just made it so damned difficult and then we got involved and everything went sideways.
He hadn’t been ordered to kill Blake and Gretchen. That was his initiative. If you consult the higher-ups, they start weighing in with their opinions. Things are just easier handled quietly and efficiently.
Rutherford talks openly, any vestige of a conscience melted by the morphine, and after he’s given us everything he knows, we kill him.
No, we don’t kill him. That’s the solution for guys like Rutherford. It’s efficient but also shortsighted. We have enough toknow who to hand him over to, and now he’ll be our ticket to a much-needed conversation with his employers.
Three days later, we’re in Whitehorse. Gretchen and Rutherford left the day after we took Rutherford into custody. Was it awkward, putting her on a plane with her husband’s killer? We certainly didn’t tell her that’s who he was, but I still felt the discomfort of having her make that trip with him. She was safe—Rutherford was sedated and Émilie sent along a guard. It still felt cruel, but Gretchen wanted to leave, and Rutherford needed to, so they disappeared into Émilie’s care.
Émilie will treat Gretchen well. She is a victim, after all. A new widow who has been traumatized for nothing she or her husband did. Gretchen understands that we didn’t do anything either, and that helps.
A few days after they left, Émilie asked us to come to Whitehorse for a video conference. Phil needs to join us and has come along with Isabel.
Émilie meets us at the airport. Then it’s off to a rented house, with an hour to settle in. When it’s time for our meeting, we leave Rory with Isabel and follow Émilie into the living room, where Phil waits. The big-screen TV is hooked up to the video chat, and Émilie makes the call.
I don’t know the person who appears. Our original liaison with Rockton’s governing body had been Phil. He’d been a pain in the ass. Condescending, officious, and fussy, in a way that always had me imagining a middle-aged management type. His replacement had been so much worse. While Phil had been patronizing, he’d been coolly efficient and businesslike. Tamarahad delighted in delivering bad news, and after the final fiasco, I suspect she got her own early-retirement package.
Those old meetings had always been audio-only, and it’s clear that this new liaison is uncomfortable being on-screen. He’s in his thirties, dressed in a three-piece suit, his face sheened with sweat that I don’t think comes from the lighting. He sits at a table, facing us, and while the others could be videoconferenced in, I get the sense they’re actually seated at the other side of that table. The liaison has his finger on the mute button, hitting it when others speak and then relaying their words.
Dalton and I are there because this affects us most of all. For now, though, we only listen. Like the board members, Dalton and I stay off-screen, and Émilie doesn’t say we’re there. It’s just her and Phil.
Émilie has already told them what we figured out and what she’s learned. They’ve come to this meeting with all that information in hand.
Of course they start by denying everything. Not that we’re wrong about our facts—Émilie provided the data to back us up. We’ve just misinterpreted.
“Naturally the corporation is curious about Haven’s Rock,” the liaison says, “and yes, they’d love to woo Eric and Casey away, but if they’re doing well, the corporation is happy for them.”
“Curiosity means sending spies,” Émilie says. “Possibly even trying to sneak in a resident for insider information. It does not mean setting up a prison-labor camp a few miles away.”
“That was a coincidence.”
She snorts. “It was luck. The luck of finding a man who had discovered gold nearby and was willing to sell his claim.”
