Kzine Issue 12

by Mike Driver

  “Hey,” Suarez said, “if you got anything left to puke up, the men’s room is—-“

  “I’m fine!” He did his best to regain control, but—- Why did Leo want me on-site? I should be handling the administrative end, not— not looking at things like this! “Why are they checking the burgers? Poison?”

  “Do you see wounds on any of your people? So yeah, probably something they ate.” Suarez shook her head. “But even if it was poison, rigor mortis don’t usually hit in under two hours … and Jesus, if he just wanted them out of the way, Ambien would have worked fine. This is some unbelievable shit.”

  “I suppose—“ Whitcomb’s heart sank as the private elevator a few yards away opened and GreenLife CEO Leo Falk strode out, barking instructions into his Bluetooth.

  “What do you know?” Leo glared at Suarez, barely glancing at the bodies or Whitcomb. It seemed incongruous that he looked the same as always, $1,000 suit, $300 tie, permanent tan, immaculate salt-and-pepper hair. “Who killed Bayles, detective?”

  “Probably the guy who tried running out of here with his heart.” Suarez pointed her finger at the body by the stairs. “Apparently none of the security cameras up here showed anything, but we’re running his ID through the computers. We may not turn up anything. Lone-wolf terrorists are notoriously—”

  “Detective,” Leo said, “you cannot imagine how serious a situation this is.” Whitcomb recognized the we’re-in-trouble-together tone— a sure sign the iron fist was waiting inside the velvet glove. “I invited Bayles here for a discussion of his position on federal agricultural policy. His death on our property is both a tragedy and a major public-relations disaster— the sooner you can close the book on this, the better.”

  “It don’t look too difficult.” Suarez inclined her head toward the corpse. “Even without any video, it’s pretty obvious—”

  “Then you should be ready to make an announcement by 9 a.m. tomorrow morning, correct?”

  “It’s 6:30, p.m. Mr. Falk, I can’t guarantee—”

  “I’ve already talked to Walter— Police Commissioner Barone—about coordinating our messaging,” Leo said, his tone mildly reproving. “I speak for both of us when I say it would be better if this case were closed before a media frenzy develops. As the investigator on the case, Walter expects you to present the statement. You can call him for confirmation.” He glanced at the killer’s corpse as one of the forensic experts took blood samples or skin samples or something else disgusting, turned back. Suarez’ poker-face hadn’t changed. “As you yourself noted, detective, it would appear to be an open-and-shut case.”

  “Press conference at nine.” Suarez shrugged. “Got it.”

  “Whit.” Leo turned his grey eyes Whitcomb’s way. “How did this man get through security? How did he get around the cameras?”

  “I—” Whitcomb forced a smile, wondering if he was about to become a sacrificial lamb. “I haven’t had a chance to find out—”

  “In the interest of assisting Detective Suarez and making the situation clear to the public, I want a full internal report ready for the press conference. I also want you to assist Suarez, make sure she has any information from our side that she needs, is that clear?”

  “But Lena Morton is our police liaison,” Whitcomb replied, “and I’m leaving for the Bahamas tomorrow morning at 7.”

  “No. You’re not.”

  “Ah.” Sherilynn is going to kill me. “Of course. Whatever you need, sir.”

  The elevator door closed on Leo a second later. Suarez eyed Whitcomb.

  “He’s under a lot of stress, detective,” Whitcomb said. “Not just this, the freak drought this year has hit us particularly hard, his right-hand man drowned in a flash flood six months ago—”

  “He didn’t seem that stressed.” She knelt down by the killer’s corpse as one of the forensic people extracted the paper from the dried blood. Whitcomb wondered how the man could touch it without screaming. “If that paper was this guy’s manifesto of crazy, we may never learn what the fuck he was about. Not that we have to, to pin it on him.” She looked up at Whitcomb. “Six men dead in this hall, blood everywhere, and your boss didn’t bat an eye.”

  “Leo never loses control.” Whitcomb eyed Suarez as she ripped a piece of Nicorette out of its sealed container. “Surely you can’t imagine he’s involved.“

  “Got no reason to think so at this point,” she said, stepping into the elevator with Whitcomb. After the hall, the clean, bloodless walls felt like a slap. “And I ain’t foolish enough to ‘imagine’ anything about the CEO of GreenLife in this city.

  “Okay… you got your work to do, I guess I’d better go see what Mrs. Senator has to say. Where can I find you again if I need something?”

  “Do you think you will?” He’d been half-hoping that if they could wrap it up by midnight, Leo would let him leave with Sherilynn in the morning. “Like he said, open-and-shut.”

  “Open and shut means no questions hanging. That means we got to explain how your guards died, how that guy hacked the cameras, why he cut out Bayles’ heart, and what the popcorn means.”

  “Muffled the screams?”

  “Oh, yeah, popcorn’s the first thing I’d think of for that.” The elevator disgorged them into the marble-floored lobby. Suarez glanced at her watch. “I wanna know what you find about how he got in here, and— assuming it’s poison— how he got those meals to your goon squad. And I’m gonna see what happens once we run the fingerprints through the system. Maybe if he is in there, we can wrap it up even sooner than your boss wants, then you and your boyfriend can get your tropical vacation.”

  Despite the dig, Whitcomb relaxed a little as she strode away. She obviously understood the kind of clout GreenLife wielded, so nothing should happen to upset Leo. So as long as I can show I’m not at fault, I don’t think there’ll be any blowback from this. At least, nothing that won’t wear off by the time I’m ready to move up the ladder again.

  It occurred to him that thinking about his career after the horror upstairs was a little … crass. But come on, it’s bad enough I had to look at that— at that— He closed his eyes and breathed deeply for a couple of minutes. If I get fired as well, it’s not like it would help the senator, is it?

  9:30 p.m.

  “So this is your office?” Standing in the doorway, Suarez studied Whitcomb’s walnut desk, the window view, the bank of computers and the security monitors under the Picasso sketch. “It’s almost the size of the squadroom.”

  “Success brings rewards, what can I say?’

  “You can say what you found out.” She crossed over and took the seat next to him, swilling coffee from a Starbucks venti-sized cup. “Remember, we get this done fast, maybe you can still jet off to the Bahamas with your boytoy.”

  “Her name is Sherilynn. As in Sherilynn Summers— the lingerie model?” He tapped the video monitors. “Nobody can tell me yet why none of the killings showed up on camera, but I have footage from the lobby. A guy came in with a burger delivery, said it was from the senator’s staff, had the pass. You’ll have to check the photo to confirm it’s the same guy we found upstairs—I couldn’t make out the face in the corridor under all that blood.” His stomach surged, but fortunately he hadn’t eaten anything since the boardroom. “You learn anything from Mrs. Bayles?“

  “Yeah, I did.” She leaned in, confidentially. “That Bayles was pushing a bill that would kill off ethanol subsidies. The program that pays GreenLife to grow corn for biofuels. $365 million yanked out from under Falk’s nose.”

  Whitcomb stared blankly. “That’s what you got? Leo or I could have told you that— it’s what Bayles was here to discuss.”

  “And then Bayles dies here in your building—”

  “You have got to be kidding.” Whitcomb wondered if she could really be that dense. “It’s only icing on the cake for GreenLife— we make 10 times that in a bad year.”

  “10 percent of your profits ain’t chicken feed. And those subsidies w
ere why you moved into corn, right?”

  “We certainly stepped up the corn acreage, but corn’s been the heart of our business since the seventies.” Something rattled the window; Whitcomb jumped, then realized it had started to hail. “Those meals the guards were eating? Corn syrup in the cokes, burgers of corn-fed beef, corn in the burger buns, cornstarch in the bags— with or without the subsidies, corn is top dog in American agriculture. Leo would have no reason to kill Bayles over the bill.”

  “Probably not … but down the food chain? Vice-president in charge of ethanol or whatever, he ain’t gonna get his ass bounced out of here if this bill passes?”

  “Suarez.” Yes, she really is that thick. Guess I’d better explain. “If anyone at GreenLife wanted Bayles out of the way, he’d have been caught with a suitcase of blow and a couple of hookers— preferably male and underage. Not ripping out his— nothing violent.

  “So, detective, what about the psycho who actually did the deed? The one we found with Bayles’ heart in his hands?”

  “Fingerprints came back positive,” Suarez said. “Adam Fuller, some kind of eco-terrorist—”

  “I remember him, I think.” Whitcomb stared out at the hail, trying to place the name. “Not personally, of course, but… yes, that’s it. He started doing damage to our farm equipment out in Nebraska after his brother died in a threshing accident. Claimed we’d sacrificed him to pagan gods or something like that.”

  “Well, you do have a god on your corporate logo, right?”

  “Cocaltiecuh? Just a stylized representation.” Whitcomb noted the blank expression on her face. “The Aztec corn goddess. Surely you know your own heritage?”

  “My heritage?” Her poker face disappeared. “You think I’m a fucking Mestizo?”

  “A what?”

  “Part Indian. And my parents came here from Cuba, you dumbass.”

  “Sorry, sorry.” I must be really rattled if I’m treading on someone’s ethnicity. “But it was just a marketing gimmick, about how the company was going to respect corn, honor America’s native heritage or something like that. Standard seventies bullshit, but it played well.”

  “And then the guy who took the company public died, stabbed through the heart in a mugging, right?” Suarez said. “And you took over your chief competitor, Agrovan, after the weird death of their chairman. Fuller’s website lists them both as sacrifices.”

  “And some people still think Procter and Gamble give money to the Church of Satan, so?” What’s with her? Fuller wraps it up perfectly. “Snopes debunked it completely.”

  He restarted the video. Suarez studied it as the man stepped into the elevator, then the screen switched to images from the boardroom floor. The guards stood around, apparently unharmed. “I suppose if Fuller’s obsessed with this goddess, that could explain him shoving the popcorn down Bayles’ throat,” she said. “Some kind of symbol. But to wrap everything up good, I need to explain the video. And nobody can tell me what killed the guards either. Segretti says the lab found some sort of cornstarch-based polymer up in their bloodstream, made their bodies turn stiff, stop breathing… Nobody’s ever seen anything like it before.”

  “Fuller was a brilliant organic chemist before he went off the rails.” Whitcomb got up and stretched. If he wrote the statement, called Lena to deliver it and cleared it with Falk, he and Sherilynn could make the mile-high club tomorrow. “We’ve got motive, we’ve got the perp—”

  “The ‘perp?’” She gave a small laugh. “Whitcomb, you gotta stop watching so many cop shows—” Her phone buzzed. She pulled it out, read a text frowned. “Name Brandon Jameson mean anything to you?”

  “He’s GreenLife’s COO.” Whitcomb frowned. “If he has anything insightful, he should be emailing me instead—“

  “He’s got something.” Suarez’ eyes narrowed as she flipped through whatever he’d sent. “Maybe he didn’t think you’d like it.”

  Whitcomb held out his hand. After a second, she handed the phone over. The screen showed a PDF; reading it, Whitcomb realized it was a collected series of emails to Fuller, alerting him to the meeting between Leo and Bayles. “So Fuller had an accomplice?”

  “Looks like. If this checks out, this ain’t gonna get closed at 9 a.m., not without catching whoever emailed him.”

  “I’ve got to talk to Brandon.” Whitcomb handed back the phone, seized his Droid from the desktop and called Jameson. “Brandon? What the hell is this?” He saw Suarez mouthing at him and switched to speakerphone.

  “Damning stuff isn’t it?” Jameson’s aged, dignified voice said.

  “Damning?” Whitcomb repeated. “All it shows is—”

  “I recommended to the detective that one of her computer people take a look at the account. Leo’s name isn’t on it, but it’s traceable to his computer. One of our IT people already brought it to my attention.”

  “Wait,” Suarez said. “All that stuff in the emails about how Bayles was going to immunize GreenLife against liability for agricultural accidents, more people were gonna die just like Fuller’s brother— why would Falk send shit like that? It was guaranteed to push Fuller over the edge.”

  “Because Bayles’ vote on the ethanol bill was already bought and paid for by one of our competitors,” Jameson said. “He couldn’t refuse to meet Leo, but he wouldn’t have budged. With him gone, however, the bill will almost certainly fail.”

  “Brandon.” Whitcomb felt a trap door opening under him. “Why are you—“

  “I don’t have a choice, Whit.” His voice was calm, matter-of-fact, perfectly professional. “Any hint we covered up a senator’s murder will finish GreenLife in Washington, to say nothing of our individual standing as accessories after the fact.”

  “Hold on a second.” Suarez got up, calling someone on her own phone as she walked away. She hung up, came back. “Those are some—interesting—files, but I got an IT chick coming over. Just to make sure there’s no mistake.”

  “Have her ask the staff downstairs for Skolowitz,” Jameson said. “He has the goods. Whit, I fear a storm is coming. Do consider which side you want to be on when it breaks.” He hung up an instant later.

  “Wow,” Suarez said as Whit set the phone down. “Swim with the sharks much?”

  “He’s not a shark, just overly ambitious. A holdover from one of our 1980s mergers.” What if Falk does go down? If I can position myself properly… I have to position myself properly! “Very talented but not a team player, everyone figured his career plateaued a few years back. After Dean’s death in that flash flood, though, Brandon was the only choice for the COO job.”

  “And if Falk goes to jail?”

  “Leo has the rest of the board in his pocket, he’s CEO as long as he wants to be.” The possibilities opening up had Whitcomb’s heart beating faster, as did the risk. “If your IT person confirms these emails, however, Brandon has a shot at the top spot.”

  “What if she can’t confirm it 100 percent?” Suarez scrutinized the file as if looking for a smoking gun. “Not beyond a reasonable doubt?”

  Whitcomb mulled that for a second. “The board issues a statement about innocent until proven guilty, Leo stays in charge through the trial. Even if he doesn’t, he’ll see Jameson gets downsized first. For completely unrelated reasons, of course.”

  “And you?”

  “Good question.” He tried to read her face, but it told him nothing. “Once your ‘IT chick’ gets here, it’ll be too late to contain this.”

  “It’s already too late, unless you think Jameson’s gonna keep his mouth shut.” Suarez scowled at her phone.. “Besides, even if Barone has me ass-raped for investigating his golfing buddy, I gotta follow up. Some things you let slide … murder ain’t one of them.”

  “Then I suppose—” For the first time since he’d been at GreenLife, Whitcomb realized he didn’t know which way to jump. “Is there any way we can get conclusive proof? Something the board can’t ignore.”

  “Well I ain’t seeing anything…�
�� Suarez fell silent, reading further. “Then again, what do you make of this?”

  “Let me see…” It was one of the last emails, so absurd it took several seconds to register. He reread it, and it still sounded insane. “It’s just more bull to push Fuller over the edge. The idea Leo would have set up an actual temple to Cocaltiecuh is ridiculous!”

  “But look at the response.“ Suarez blunt finger jabbed at the screen. “Fuller says he went to see it. Thanks his contact for revealing the truth about Falk’s use of corporate property. Says he got the address in a phone call.” Whitcomb read where she pointed. “It wouldn’t have to be a real temple. A few hangings, some cheap statues, fake blood. And Fuller said he went last night, Falk might not have had time to take it down.”

  Judas. It’s not just that I don’t know which way to jump.There is no safe way to jump. “Suarez… now that I’m thinking about it, there’s this one place that might be perfect.”

  10:15 p.m.

  “I am insane,” Whitcomb murmured as Suarez drove up to the featureless, windowless front entrance of the GreenLife warehouse. During the drive, he’d begun to worry he’d jumped the wrong way. “Totally effing insane.”

  “Man up, Whitcomb. Use a real swear word. Besides, you picked it.”

  “It’s just that it’s never made sense.” He gestured at the hulking building as Suarez parked her car. “It’s been on the company books as an asset since we incorporated, but in that entire time it’s been unused, empty, doing nothing but add to our ad valorem tax burden.”