Blood Land by R. S. Guthrie Page A

Attorney came to defraud one of her own constituency.”
    Jorgensen set her pen down and looked up at Pruett, her eyes dark and unaffected. “Slander is a serious offense, particularly for an officer of the law,” she said. A crack in her voice betrayed what Pruett had suspected. She was hiding something .
    “You had to know what was going on. You would have advised Will about the potential for income from mineral rights on certain parcels, yet the will itself says nothing. It doesn’t address a thing. You expect me to believe Will McIntyre wouldn’t have made provisions for Ty? You also had to know it was only a matter of time before Ty found out. You might as well have loaded the goddamn gun yourself, Beulah.”
    There was a silence. Jorgensen was obviously choosing her response, going over in her mind what the sheriff knew and how much was just fishing. In the end, she must have decided Pruett had dug up the documents.
    “After the will was read, Rory met with me in private. Not unusual, since I represented his father. He retained my services, that’s all. Totally legal.”
    “And because you were his attorney, unless you had direct knowledge…”
    “Unless I had direct knowledge of any legal malfeasance, not only was I under no obligation to report my client, I was under a code of ethics not to .”
    “So you’re saying what? That you screwed up and never told Ty’s grandfather about the rights underground?”
    “You know I can’t discuss any more of this with you,” she said. “I am a lawyer and my clients have a lawful expectation of my silence.”
    “At the very least, this is a goddamn conflict of interest,” Pruett said. “You are the prosecutor. And you represent the father of the accused—a potentially intended victim .”
    “This is none of your concern, Sheriff.”
    “My wife died because of all this, you fucking bitch.”
    Jorgensen looked up, pointing the pen at him. “You watch yourself, Sheriff. You fucking watch what you say to me. And get the hell out of my office.”
    Pruett stood and stared at her. He’d never considered Jorgensen anything other than a stalwart when it came to her profession. He had respected her. Now he felt as if he were tugging at the fray on a ball of twine. There was more here. A lot more. That much he’d swear to.
    He turned and left, returned to the County Clerk.
    “Gerty,” Pruett said.
    “Yeah, hon?”
    “A man wanted to dig up some dirt on a person, this day and age. Where would he start?”
    To Pruett the computer on his desk was useful only in blocking him from view. A privacy shield, little more. He barely emailed.
    “Honey, you have come to the right place.”
     

    Gerty Lundergaard knew the Internet. She showed Pruett where, for less than fifty bucks, he could more or less put together a timeline of a person’s life. For a few hundred, he could pull Beulah Jorgensen’s bank records.
    What he found was not so much shocking as it was depressing. Pruett loved Wind River and his hold on the belief that his town was immune to the debasement, greed, and outright cheating that had captured much of the country had once been strong. The discovery that Beulah Jorgensen had made several substantially-sized deposits since the time that Will McIntyre died was just too damned coincidental, and it severed his belief in that small town immunity forever.
     

    The Town Attorney’s office was really only three attorneys: Beulah Jorgensen, Miles Stanton, and Shelly Delgado. Pruett had no way of being certain how deep the conspiracy went, but he doubted the other two attorneys were involved. The chances of carrying out a crime diminished exponentially as one added members to the operation. It also lowered the take.
    Pruett called Shelly Delgado. Shelly was a divorcee with two children. Stanton was married with three children and a mortgage. Pruett just didn’t see motive in either of them, but Shelly Delgado lived small, and her ex, Joe Delgado, was an oil