I did, and he said it was, although he said even after laying outside for what his gun guy guessed was, get this, at minimum a month, the pistol is an older weapon and he didn‘t think it was regularly used.

Brillo says if we can send him Allen‘s belongings, he‘ll probably be able to find some skin or hair and run the DNA on the skull and nail it for sure. We should do that, but I already know. The body in the woods is Rick Allen, it was misidentified as Gammons because the physical report in Gammons‘s personnel file was actually Allen‘s physical report, and vice versa.

Who switched them?

Allen. She patted the air. Wait. I‘m not making you guess, I‘m going to tell you straight out. I think Rick Allen came to the Suulutaq Mine as a spy, first for True North Investments, who are rumored to be in the market for a hostile takeover of GHRI, and second for John King.

He worked with Haynes, she said so. He was on and off the rigs, in and out of the office, he collated and filed reports. He had unlimited access to confidential data. It‘s why he was so valuable to True North and to John King, and why they paid him so very well.

I think he milked True North and John King for every dime he could. She took a deep breath. And I think he aided and abetted Dewayne Gammons in his attempted suicide. I think he meant to take advantage of their physical similarity. I think he meant to take advantage of Gammons‘s depressive state. I think he switched the physical reports in their files.

She sat back, with an air that invited, nay, expected applause. You think Allen was setting Gammons up to take his place, Jim said.

Yes.

Why? Although he had a pretty good idea.

Either something happened to make him afraid he was about to get caught, or he‘d saved enough money to, I don‘t know, go to Aruba.

And that would be fine if it made any sense. If he meant Gammons‘s body to be identified as his own, why drive Gammons‘s truck out there, and leave it, leading us to the natural assumption that it was in fact Gammons?

Something went wrong. From what Lyda Blue and Randy Randolph and Gammons‘s boss say, Dewayne Gammons was naturally on the brink of offing himself five or six times before breakfast every morning. The doc at the hospital says chronic depression a lot of times only gets worse the older you get. So Allen conceives of his master plan and zeroes in on Gammons as a likely victim. Randy hears them talking about death. Allen‘s probably encouraging Gammons, egging him on. A good con man is first and foremost a good psychologist. One day Gammons decides he‘s ready and asks his good buddy Allen to see him off at the end of their next shift. She paused and their eyes met. They both broke down in a guilty snicker over her unintentional double entendre. Kate pulled herself together. One thing we haven‘t done yet is find out where Gammons parked his truck in town. Maybe somebody saw both men get in it and drive off. At any rate, they drive out there and head into the woods.