Sheriff Martin was covered in soot and smelled of smoke when he stopped by the Forum office three days after the blaze had started. The fire was still burning, he told Tom, but it had spread to remote areas where no structures were threatened and where it could be allowed to burn itself out.
“I’m thinking mebbe it’s time for me to retire, Tom,” he said. “I’m getting way too old for this shit.”
“Have you got any idea what caused the fire, Sheriff?”
“It was a meth lab explosion,” Martin said. “It’s hard to believe the DeRichters could of come to that. But the evidence is overwhelming. And we’ve been in a drought for five years. So that’s why the fire spread so fast and burnt everything.”
“You were close to Dick DeRichter, weren’t you?”
“Well, I was,” he said. “I knew him for almost forty years. But the Dick I knew pretty much faded away ten, fifteen years ago. I believe it was the son, Albert DeRichter, that got the family mixed up in illicit drugs. Dick never would of done anything like that.”
“That sounds right,” Tom said. As the only living witness to Dick DeRichter’s final act, he knew without question that the sheriff was correct.
“Yep,” Martin said sadly. “But if you write it like that, you have to say it’s just my feeling, knowing the family as I did. I’ve got no real evidence. But Albert was something of a bully. Worse than that, he was a so-cee-o-pathic personality. And I could see he wasn’t treating his father right.”
“Did Albert DeRichter try to bully you?”
“Well, I’ll admit he might of tried a few times. But I’m pretty ornery myself.”
Tom nodded.
“You see, Tom, this has always been rough country. Only tough men, men like Dick DeRichter, can survive here for long.”
“Men like DeRichter and like you, sheriff?”
“Why, that’s exactly right, Tom! I’m glad you see that. In fact, I’ve been impressed by your toughness, too.”
“Is that right?”
“We know each other pretty well by now, don’t we Tom? Know a lot about each other. In a small community, the newspaper and law enforcement have got to work closely together. You and me, we’ve got no need to say anymore what’s on the record and what’s off when we talk.”
“I’d say that’s right, sheriff.”
“Yes, indeed,” Martin said. “For example, I understand you’ve been in some tough scrapes, met up with at least one rough hombre, and you come out smelling like a rose.”
“I imagine you have quite a number of open cases, unsolved crimes, like the Ray Walker disappearance and the death of Mark Brubaker, where you never do know for sure what happened.”
“In the Brubaker case, I believe we do know. I’m hoping we can put that one in our closed case file. We know Brubaker was mixed up with the DeRichter operation. We found boxes of meth in his rig. He was the DeRichter’s courier. Seems plain that somehow he got himself crosswise with Albert DeRichter and he was executed. He was prolly stealing from them. I’m figuring it was the kid, Randy Wagner, who was the tough guy of the operation, as best as I can tell, who killed him. He had a police record, a bunch of disorderlies, a few drug busts, and an assault or two.”
Tom nodded, a sense of relief washing over him at being exonerated by the sheriff. With Martin off his case, the only solid piece of evidence linking him to the Brubaker death was now lost in the ashes of the DeRichter homestead. Even assuming he knew about the fire poker, the sheriff wasn’t planning to look for it, and even if someone else were to find it, it would raise no suspicions because it would be found among Dick DeRichter’s many vintage barbecue tools. Any burned blood on it would look like it came from a steak. Possibly, after a few months, Tom himself would go to the site of the fire to look for it; he would perhaps take the fire poker home and keep it, not as a trophy or memento, but as a talisman whose power to hurt him was gone.
“What about Walker?”
“That one’s not so easy to figure. Because I’ll tell you what, from everything I know, Ray Walker really was a good man. But I sure as heck wouldn’t be surprised if Albert DeRichter had something to do with it, considering their blood tie and all.”
“I think that’s probably right, too,” Tom said.
“I expect that we’ll only ever know what happened to Ray if he turns up alive one day to tell us about it, or if we find his body.”
“There are things we know, and things we think we know and things we don’t know,” Tom muttered, repeating the sheriff’s wisdom as if it had become a personal aphorism.
“That’s right, Tom. And sometimes we don’t know which is which, because we don’t always know what we don’t know. And sometimes it really is best, and not just for the people directly involved, but for the public interest, to look the other way.”
“Can I quote you on that sheriff?”
Martin put his fist to his chin and made a show of thinking through his answer.
“Well you can,” he said carefully. “But, of course, I’ll have to arrest you if you do.”
The newsman and the lawman had reached their understanding. They could easily destroy each other, but neither was of a mind to do any such thing. It was as if the fire on North Mountain had been so cleansing that no further action by either of them was warranted.
In a period of a few weeks Angie had lost the father who lovingly raised her, her newly discovered biological father, whom she had imagined would be her salvation, her new husband, and custody of her baby – but it was losing easy access to unlimited quantities of high quality meth that hurt most, or most urgently. To Tom, Angie’s pain – her pounding head, unquenchable thirst, nausea, and twitchy limbs – was palpable, almost contagious, as he and Sarah drove her to a detox center in Grand Junction.
“Mommy,” she cried. “I really, really, really can’t do this.”
“I know, baby,” Sarah said.
“I just want to be dead.
“This is the worst of it,” Tom said. “We’ll be there in an hour and there will be help for you.”
“I don’t care,” she cried. “I can’t wait that long. Please, just shoot me now!”
Out of the fog of her catatonia in the days after the fire, Angie revealed enough for Tom and Sarah to fill in the last few gaps in their understanding of what had happened to Ray. Despite Sarah’s denials, Ray had not been blind to Angie’s deepening addiction. Craig had prevailed upon Angie, over Ray’s objections, to take advantage of everything she stood to gain from her relationship to the DeRichters, not least the business opportunity for them to join Albert’s lucrative criminal enterprise. As stepfather and fiancé fought over Angie – which for Ray was a losing proposition – Craig was callow enough to boast about his new job, working with his father-in-law in the meth trade. That revelation gave Ray the leverage he needed to threaten Albert with exposure if he didn’t cut ties to Angie.
Ray may have been overconfident that standing up to Albert to save Angie would work as well as it had twenty years before, when the Meth King was engaged in a different crime, of child abuse masquerading as polygamy, and Ray had saved Sarah. Or Ray may have seen no alternative other than to try.
Though a half-DeRichter, Ray had for decades stubbornly refused to toe the DeRichter family line, and so he was finally dealt with.
Final Toll of North Mountain Blaze May Never Be Known
Fire Was Ignited by Meth Lab Explosion
By Tom Austin
Slickrock County Sheriff Trace Martin said this week that last week’s fire on North Mountain was caused by the explosion of a meth lab. The blaze burned so hot and the devastation is so complete that it may never be possible to determine how many people died there.
At least five individuals are believed to have perished in the fire: Dick DeRichter, 81; his son Albert DeRichter, 45; the recently married Craig Pellison, 21; Randy Wagner, 25; and Melody Anderson, 22; all of Radium. The fire burned so hot that it will certainly be impossible to identify human remains amid the ashes, the sheriff said.
“The victims were as good as cremated,” Martin said. “Someone might find a tooth if they looked long enough.”
The tally would have been much higher, the sheriff added, if the UK Ranch Resort had not been closed for the off-season. But no other persons are reported missing.
Martin said that the nature of the meth operation housed at the resort remains under investigation. But early indications are that it was a large volume operation that supplied methamphetamine to a large regional market.
“It is almost impossible to believe that the DeRichter family would sink so low as to operate a meth lab,” Martin said. He himself has been sheriff for almost forty years, he added, and has vivid memories of the family at the height of its wealth and prestige. The sheriff expressed his opinion, emphasizing it was only speculation, that the elder DeRichter was not at the center of the operation, but that it was headed by his son, Albert DeRichter.
The tragedy has plunged the community of Radium into a state of shock and mourning. Every one of the victims had deep roots here. Dick DeRichter was the region’s most prominent citizen, discoverer of the famous Whispering Jim uranium mine and founder of the Uranium King Mining Co., which was the region’s biggest employer for a generation. DeRichter had recently announced plans to reopen the Whispering Jim with Albert.
One of the victims, Craig Pellison, was married just three weeks ago to Angie Walker, the daughter of Ray Walker, the Radium auto mechanic who disappeared without a trace four days prior to his daughter’s wedding. The Pellisons’ son, Tyler Pellison, is two months old.
Wagner and Anderson were both employed by the DeRichters. Each is survived by parents and siblings in Radium. There are two surviving DeRichter brothers, Frank and Richard, both married, who live in Denver. Dick DeRichter’s wife, Betty DeRichter, preceded him in death by five years.
Sheriff Martin said his office is investigating a related homicide, the apparent murder of long-distance trucker Mark Brubaker, whose body was found last week at his remote East Bryant Mesa home. There is strong evidence that Brubaker, 34, was working with the DeRichter methamphetamine operation, the sheriff said, and that his death may have come at the hands of one of the deceased on North Mountain.
A schedule of memorial services appears on page 5. Obituaries of each of the victims start on page 6.