Winterkill - C. J. Box [112]
“Just give me facts, Nate, not analysis,” Joe barked. “We don’t need psychobabble. We don’t have a lot of time, and I’m not sure I’ve decided how to play this yet.”
Nate refilled Joe’s cup and fitted it into the holder. As the cab finally began to warm up, he unzipped his parka.
“Melinda Strickland is the daughter of a senator from Oregon. She’s a trust-fund kid,” Nate said. “Her dad greased the skids for her to enter the federal government after she’d bounced around the Pacific Northwest and through various agencies in Washington, D.C. Apparently, she spent a few years in various institutions as well. Drug and alcohol problems. But the rumor is she’s a card-carrying paranoid.”
Joe shot a glance at Nate that he hoped reminded him to stick to facts.
“Even though she probably makes a good impression on some people at first, she’s a classic loose cannon, not capable of working with people. In a nutshell, she’s consistently treated her colleagues and co-workers like pieces of shit, saying things about them, playing one off of the other, and just general nastiness. She was involved in a bunch of lawsuits when she worked for the Department of Agriculture because of things she said and did to people. Her idea of management is to make subordinates cry. Oh, and she’s a pathological liar.”
Joe glanced over at Nate and could see that under his parka he was wearing his shoulder holster.
“Once she got into the Forest Service, she started bouncing all around the country. She left a mess everywhere she went. She’s the type that creates chaos out of order. No one knows what deep-seated problems make her the way she is, but the way the Forest Service handled it is how they generally handle things in the big government agencies.”
“Transferring her so she’s somebody else’s problem?” Joe asked. He knew how the game was played.
“Exactly,” Nate said. He spoke in a low, rhythmic cadence and rarely raised his voice. “She was in Oregon, Montana, New Mexico, Nevada, South Dakota, Idaho twice, and then somewhere in Colorado. You know how it works—we all do. Longtime federal employees—especially if they’re middle-aged women and they like to threaten lawsuits and they’re daughters of senators—just don’t get fired very easily. Her big bosses are political appointees who know that if they can bury the problem for a while, the next administration will have to deal with it. Meanwhile, local communities are subjected to her and her ways.”
“Specifically?” Joe asked.
“Well, in Nevada she became convinced that a couple of the local ranchers with grazing leases were out to kill her dog. So she had them followed twenty-four hours a day by Forest Service rangers. This was in a town of three hundred people, where there were, like, two places to eat. And everywhere these ranchers went, two uniformed Feds went with them. Finally, one of the ranchers got drunk and forced a shoot-out. Both ranchers went down, and one Fed.”
Joe shook his head sadly, and instantly regretted it as a throbbing pain burned into the back of his skull.
“Finally,” Nate said, “The Forest Service ran out of places to hide her, and they were going to bring her up on harassment charges—finally hold her accountable for something—because she called a Latino contractor a “fat spic” in front of witnesses. Then her daddy stepped in and they figured out this new job for her. They made it up just for her—a position with a nice title but no staff or budget. It was a perfect place to stick her where she couldn’t do any damage. My contacts said that even that was a mistake, because when the administration changed, she convinced somebody to shuffle the budget and get her some funding. All of a sudden she’s got a travel budget, and in her mind a star was finally born. By the time the agency figured out what she’d done in a vacuum, that Elle what’s-her-name had latched onto her to do a profile and their hands were tied.