Crimes of Design by Peter H. Green

Author:Peter H. Green [Green, Peter H.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Mystery
Publisher: L&L Dreamspell
Published: 2012-05-02T00:00:00+00:00

TWENTY-FIVE

A crack of thunder jolted Patrick awake. Then he remembered—he was home.

“Aw, fuck.”

His knee hurt, his car was wrecked and he had to endure a tedious review of the permit process at the Corps of Engineers. Then he had to face the office—the pumping station design, billing problems, Don’s office intrigues, Olson’s interference with the Cow Pie Creek Levee district and the U.S. Attorney’s murder investigation. He stumbled out of bed, fumbled through shaving and dressing and tumbled into the old Chevy.

Off the polished stone corridor on the fourth floor of the R.A.Y. federal building, he entered a doorway and fought his way back through a maze of three-foot aisles that threaded among chest-high cubicles. After two wrong turns, with some help from the denizens of this maze, he found the hydrology section. Several people sat in a space carved from two cubicles in curved-back wooden armchairs at a three by six oak conference table.

Brooke was working at her computer in an adjacent cube, the work counter behind her piled high with reports. Above on a modular shelf glittered the gold-lettered spines of old engineering texts and the brighter jackets of more recent books about floods. Beneath it sat several cardboard boxes full of bound volumes. The counter by her right arm held a phone with tangled cables behind it, a stack of memos, a china mug full of pencils and felt-tipped pens and a tall paper cup half full of coffee, a Grande. How could she get anything done in this cluttered rabbit warren?

Acknowledging Patrick’s arrival, Brooke spun her chair around to face the meeting space, scooted it across the aisle to the table and sat next to Wally Olds, the potamologist—this had something to do with the hippopotamus, a river horse, Patrick figured. Why couldn’t they just call him a river expert? She introduced three others he hadn’t met at previous meetings in the colonel’s office.

“Hi, Wally. You look tired.”

“This flood duty is starting to get to me.” The lids drooped on Wally’s deep-circled eyes. “We worked twenty-two hours this weekend on the flood fight. We sandbagged Portage des Sioux, and on Sunday afternoon we lost it, completely under.”

“Man, that’s tough.” Almost every able-bodied person, whether a field representative or a desk jockey, was assigned to the flood fight. Many who were not assigned volunteered anyway. The Corps’s problems certainly weren’t in its people, at least not the vast majority.

Wally brightened. “Hey, did you hear the one about the man they tried to rescue?”

“No. Tell me.”

“There was this preacher who had a nice house and he was convinced the floods would never reach him. The Corps boat came to him three days in a row. Each time, he refused to be rescued, assuring them the Lord would take care of him.

“By the third day, the water had covered his second-floor and he was on the roof. This time the team boss from the Corps came. ‘You must save yourself now, sir.’ He said, ‘No, the good Lord will provide.

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