town?
That’s where they’re taken, because the rollers are so big.”
Joe thought about the photos he had seen in the window of Wildwater Photography.
“She wasn’t inexperienced,” Joe said. “She’d been on that stretch of the river many times.”
“But why would Don kill his wife?” Tassell asked.
“She discovered something about him,” Joe said. “And he was planning to dump her.”
Trey turned in his seat, hanging an arm over the back of it, narrowing his eyes at Joe. “How well did you know her, anyway?”
“Well enough,” Joe said.
“I thought you were going to say ‘not well enough.’ ”
Pope grinned.
Joe glared at him, and Pope looked away.
At the statehouse, Joe showed them how the piece of siding on the back of the house could be removed. They watched as he took it off and peeled back a layer of pink insulation, revealing a line of copper tubing and a metal screwtop fitting that had been soldered onto the tube.
“This line connects directly from the well in the basement to the drinking water outlet on the refrigerator inside,” Joe said. “It was the surest way they could drug Will.
They couldn’t put it in his food, because he ate out a lot and rarely cooked, except for that last night. But if they could connect it to his drinking water”—Joe fingered the valve where a bottle of liquefied narcotic could be connected by a fitting with a dispensing valve on it—“they knew it would get him.” He showed them how the valve could be adjusted to dispense a quantity of the drug into the line. It was still set at onequarter open, enough to affect Joe but not disable him.
“Christ,” Tassell said, looking over the mechanism.
“The first night I was in the house I heard somebody out here,” Joe said. “I heard a clunking sound, probably after they hooked up the bottle and fumbled with putting the siding back up. But I didn’t figure this out until yesterday. Once I knew it was drugs, things started to make sense.”
“So they didn’t actually murder him,” Trey said. “They created a scenario where he would either get fired, get arrested, or do himself in.”
“Right,” Joe said. “He was under a lot of strain after his wife left, and that’s when they installed it. And they also knew that after she left he’d be in worse shape, and more vulnerable. Ennis knew Will was going to veto Beargrass Village, and the only way the project could go forward was if Will was gone and discredited. Will couldn’t figure out what was happening to him—you can read it in his journals. The drugs just made things worse to the point that he couldn’t see another way out of it.” Joe had made the decision not to tell them what he knew about Stella’s part in it.
He didn’t see the point, now that she was gone and Will’s death had been ruled a suicide.
“But we don’t know who rigged this up,” Pope said. “You’re speculating here.”
“I am,” Joe said. “But who besides Don Ennis had the means to do something like this? Who gained from Will going off the deep end?”
“You’ve got a point,” Trey said.
“Another thing,” Joe said. “Susan Jensen told me that Will’s cremation was paid for by some anonymous person.
She thought it was someone who liked Will, or the family.
I’ll bet if we check the crematorium we’ll find out the check came from Ennis, or Beargrass Village, or one of his other companies.”
“Why would he do that?” Pope asked.
“In case someone wanted to dig up the body and do an autopsy later,” Joe said. “To prevent the discovery of drugs in Will’s system.”
Tassell rubbed his face with his hands and moaned.
“Let me show you something else,” Joe said, leading them around the house to the driveway.
Joe explained that he had located the transmitter in Will’s pickup the previous afternoon, before he went to the party at the Ennises’. After searching the wheel wells, bumpers, and motor, he found it mounted under the dashboard within a spider’s web of wiring. Will’s line about They know where I’m going and they track my movements made him think of the truck.
“They knew were he went, what he said, what he told people over his radio,” Joe said. “Since game wardens spend more time in their vehicles than they do anywhere else, it was like tapping his office.”
Trey nodded, leaning into the cab to look under the dashboard. “If we check the frequency on that transmitter and match it to a receiver, we’ve found who was listening in.”
“I’d guess the receiver is in a room at Beargrass,” Joe said. “That’s how they knew what decision he was going to make on Beargrass Village. They listened to him talk to biologists and others about the migration problems a fence would cause.”
“So that’s why they torched your truck,” Tassell said, still with a pained expression on his face. It was as if Joe’s discoveries were causing him escalating physical pain. “It was easier to do that than run the risk of getting caught putting another transmitter in your vehicle. They knew you’d just take Will’s truck instead, and you did.”
Joe stood back and let the men hash out theories and make connections. Trey bought what Joe had shown
