Page 85 of The Killing Plains

Avery lit two cigarettes and handed one to Jace.

“Explain why Lowell would fire you if you could send him to prison with one phone call,” Colly said.

“I couldn’t. He woulda taken me down with him. Not just for embezzlement.”

“Meaning?”

Jace leaned against the car door and exhaled white smoke. “Manslaughter, maybe negligent homicide.”

Colly and Avery stared.

“Youdidkill Denny,” Avery said.

“I ain’t talking about Denny.”

“Who, then?”

Jace tapped his cigarette to dislodge the ashes. “Gimme another one of them coffin nails.”

Colly snatched the pack from Avery and shook out a cigarette. Tucking it behind his ear, Jace stared out across the rain-drenched scrubland. “To understand, you gotta put yourself in Lowell’s shoes,” he said slowly. Lowell’s biggest fear, after his father’s first stroke, had been that the old man would get well and discover the embezzlement before Lowell had time to pay back the money. Bryant would’ve disowned him, maybe even pressed charges. So when Bryant had his second stroke and died, Lowell thought his troubles were over—or at least postponed. Though everything went to Iris, Lowell thought she’d leave him to run the business. But Iris had other plans. A few weeks after the funeral, she called a family meeting. She intended to play a hands-on role in the company moving forward. She asked Lowell for copies of all the business records so she could get up to speed. Lowell panicked. He gave her copies of the dummy books, not the real ones.

Bryant had been a miser. He’d always resisted putting money into development, preferring to keep overhead down and profits high. But Iris turned out to have a shrewd business sense of her own, and she did her homework. Longer blades were the industry standard now, she said. The business couldn’t stay profitable unless they kept up with the times. According to the records Lowell gave her, the company appeared to be sitting on a mountain of capital, and Iris decided to invest a large part of it in upgrades.

“We’re talking a major retooling, millions of dollars,” Jace said. “Problem was, a big chunk of that money wasn’t really there. Lowell was fit to be tied.”

“What’d he do?” Avery demanded.

Jace squinted up at the sky, where a red-tailed hawk circled lazily. “He was in too deep by then. I was, too. I thought we should come clean and hope Iris’s motherly instincts kept her from doing anything too rash. But Lowell wouldn’t hear of it. Too much pride, I reckon. So he started scrambling.”

Lowell had taken out a second mortgage on his house without telling Brenda; sold his hunting cabin, his boat, his ski lodge in Colorado. He ordered Jace to lay off dozens of workers, paring back to a skeleton crew and slashing benefits to the bone. But it wasn’t enough.

“Then one day, Lowell called me into his office,” Jace said. “He looked bad—sweating Scotch, white as a ghost. Told me if I didn’t find a way to cut the cost of Iris’s upgrade by twenty percent, we was both going to prison. I said, ‘How the hell am I supposed to do that?’ But he didn’t want to hear it. Said he didn’t know and he didn’twannaknow—just get it done.” Jace spat out a loose bit of tobacco. “So, I did.”

Colly pursed her lips. “How?”

“Called in some favors, leaned on suppliers that were hungry for our business. But we was still short by a good bit. Then I had my bright idea.” Jace scowled and kicked at the gravel. “When you make turbine blades longer, you gotta use a stronger, more expensive kind of epoxy, see? Which meant we was gonna have to throw out a couple hundred grand worth of the old stuff we had on hand, or sell it at a huge loss—ain’t much market for it nowadays. I figured if I mixed the new stuff with our existing stock—not diluting it much, mind you, just a little—I could make it stretch without really weakening the blades.”

Avery looked pale. “Christ.”

Jace removed the second cigarette from behind his ear and lit it with the butt of the first. “They over-engineer materials for them longer blades to hold up in extreme environments—tundra, openocean, you name it. I figured West Texas weather ain’t near as harsh as them places.”

“A woman died, Jace,” Colly said.

“Yeah, been eating me up—it gimme a damn ulcer.” He jabbed a thumb at his gut. “But how was I supposed to know? I had my guys run months of stress tests on the prototype blades. Everything held up fine. Till we had that crazy winter. Once-in-a-century fluke, they called it. With weather like that, stuff goes haywire.”

“Did Lowell sign off on all this?”

Jace glanced sidelong at Colly. “Damn straight. I wasn’t gonna be left twisting in the wind if things went sideways. But Lowell didn’t really know what he was signing. His marriage was cracking up, and he was drunk most of the time. I’d copy him on everything and try to explain what I was doing, but he’d wave me off.”

Then came the turbine accident. Jace was terrified that the PUC would uncover what he’d done; but by some miracle, they missed it. He’d thought he was out of danger until last March. When Lowell started talking about suing materials manufacturers, Jace was forced to come clean.

“I explained everything, showed Lowell his signature on the purchase orders. He hit the roof, said I tricked him. Told me to clear out my locker and get off the property. That was my reward for saving his ass.”

Avery flicked her cigarette butt into a puddle. “That explains the first fight. What about the second?”

“Huh?”

“Someone said you and Lowell had another fight later, at a job site.”

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