The Lethal Helix

by Don Donaldson

  A few minutes later, she was pleased to see that at least the toilet flushed. She washed her hands and dried them on the roughest towels she’d ever felt. After a quick check of her appearance, she headed back to the car.

  At five thirty-five, she pulled up at a driveway flanked on each side by a small stand of pine trees. On the right, a sign affixed to a yellow brick wall read MIDLAND DAIRY. Right out in the open . . . as though they had nothing to hide.

  As Holly slowly entered the drive, her eyes darted about, trying to take in everything: parking area with a lot of pickups to her left; beside that, a milk transport backed up to a two-story yellow metal building; beyond that, three big metal barns with bars on the side like a prison. There were some things past the barns, but, except for a tall smokestack way in the back, it was all too far away to make out.

  On the right, next to the origin of a side road that dipped into a valley, a small sign with an arrow pointed the way to VEHICLE STORAGE. Forty yards beyond the side road, she saw a one-story yellow brick building with another parking lot in front. Drawing closer, she read OFFICE PARKING on a sign at the lot entrance. She left the Honda in the lot and walked to the building it served.

  Inside, she found an office staff of three women working at utilitarian metal desks in a large room with no carpeting to absorb the keyboard clatter of their computers. Surmising that the floor was vinyl because cow manure would be much harder to get out of carpeting, Holly approached the nearest desk, which was occupied by a young woman with olive skin and a broad, flat nose . . . probably not from a family that ate lutefisk.

  “Hi,” Holly said. “Would it be possible to see Mr. Lamotte?”

  Without asking what Holly wanted, the girl said, “I’ll check.” She made a call, then pointed to a doorway behind her. “Through there, second office on the right.”

  Holly found Don Lamotte at his desk, which was also metal and no better than those she’d already seen. He motioned her into a chair. “I must be doing something right to rate a visit from such an attractive woman,” he said.

  Lamotte was a thin fellow wearing gold wire-rimmed glasses with egg-shaped lenses. His hairline began on the crown of his head, but he had a nice smile and was rather appealing in a favorite-math-teacher kind of way.

  Behind him, much of the wall was taken up by a huge aerial view of the dairy, with each building identified on little white rectangles. Under that hung a half-dozen pictures of Holstein cows: the milking hall of fame.

  Holly decided to get right to it. “Mr. Lamotte, How do you know Palmer Garnette?”

  Without a hint of concern on his face, he said, “Palmer is . . . was our company lawyer. Why do you ask?”

  “Because he was involved in the theft of some property from me through the use of fraudulent documents.”

  “I’m sorry, did you tell me your name?”

  “Holly Fisher.”

  No reaction.

  “If you’re trying to find Mr. Garnette, I’m afraid you’re going to be disappointed,” Lamotte said. “He was killed last week in a traffic accident.”

  “Were you aware that he was involved with a traveling clinic that went from city to city enlisting women as egg donors in a research project supposedly funded by the government?”

  “This is the first I’ve heard of that. But then, I didn’t know the man well. Only spoke to him a few times a year. And that was usually by phone.”

  “Then how did you know he was dead even before the police had located his family?”

  “What makes you think I knew that early?”

  “Before any of his relatives were informed, I called you pretending to be a telephone operator with a collect call from him. And you became angry, asked me if the call was a joke. So you obviously knew he was dead.”

  His face flushing, Lamotte shot to his feet. “This discussion is over. Please leave.”

  He followed her into the main office and watched her all the way to her car. He was still there as she pulled from the lot. She wished now that she’d explored the property before confronting him. Now, with him aware of her presence, she’d lost that opportunity.

  In the aerial view of the dairy in Lamotte’s office, Holly had seen a road in the rear that ran out of the picture. Curious about its termination, she made a left at the highway and followed the chain-link fence that surrounded the property until it turned and ran along a poorly maintained intersecting road barely wide enough for two cars. Eventually, this took her to a rear gate secured with a big padlock.

  After finding no road that would allow her to explore the back property line and wanting another look at the place, Holly retraced her route. With daylight now fading, she passed the dairy’s main entrance as the vehicles of employees who had just punched out for the day poured onto the highway.

  Lamotte’s reaction to her questions left no doubt in her mind that there was a connection between the dairy and the traveling clinic. But what was it? And how do you investigate something like this? Deciding that there was nothing further she could do here, she made a tight U-turn opposite the dairy’s eastern fence line and joined the procession of workers heading toward town.

  A few minutes later, three cars ahead of her, a pickup truck from the dairy flicked on its right turn signal and pulled into the crowded gravel parking lot of a tavern called the Lucy II, which looked as if it had been assembled from parts of other buildings. Some aluminum siding, a little stucco, a couple of porthole windows, a Victorian cupola serving as a second-floor porch. It was a structural Frankenstein.

  Maybe that’s what happened to Lucy I, Holly thought. Villagers with torches and a sense of architectural outrage burned it down. On impulse, she followed the truck into the parking lot, where she hurriedly got out and locked her car so the two men from the pickup wouldn’t get inside before she did and disappear into the crowd.

  The noise and the music didn’t stop when Holly walked in, but she definitely felt like a stranger in a strange land. The place was a totally male bastion. The only other female was a life-sized poster of a blonde in a slinky black dress holding a bottle of beer. Most of the back wall was occupied by a Green Bay Packers football schedule. A lot of the noise was coming from a bank of pinball machines against the left wall. Through a doorway decorated with tinsel, the more athletic of the brethren were stalking the balls on a pool table.

  At the bar to her right, every stool was full, as were most of the tables. From the way it appeared, it must be a state law that every male will don his baseball cap upon arising and wear it indoors and out until such time as he returns to bed.

  While one of the men from the dairy claimed an empty table, the other ordered at the bar. At this point, there was no way of knowing who was in on what was going on and who might be out of the loop. Figuring that she had to start somewhere, Holly walked over to the man at the table, a young guy with chapped skin and sandy hair.

  “Hi, I’m Holly Fisher,” she said, extending her hand.

  “Curtis Larson,” he replied shaking her hand. “And that’s Gene Whitten.” He gestured at his dark-haired friend, who was returning with two beers. Gene put the beers down and Holly shook his hand too.

  “Mind if I join you?” Holly asked.

  “Heck no,” Curtis replied.

  “I sure wouldn’t mind,” Gene added. “Can I get you something?”

  “I’m okay, thanks. You two work at the dairy, don’t you?”

  “Yeah, I’m a milker,” Curtis said. “And Gene takes care of the herd. You see, it’s an intelligence thing. Your higher-IQ employees don’t have to walk in manure.”

  “No,” Gene said. “They just spread it in bars after work.”

  OUT IN THE parking lot, a man crept up to the side of Holly’s car and slipped a Slim Jim between the window and the frame. In just a few seconds, he had the door open.


  “HOW DID YOU know we worked at the dairy?” Gene asked.

  Holly certainly wasn’t going to tell these guys why she’d come to Midland. Instead, she tried a truncated version of the truth. “I saw you come out at quitting time. Have you worked there long?”

  “Quite a while,” Gene said.

  “Since before the new people took over,” Curtis said.

  “When was that . . . the change-over?” Holly asked.

  “Little over two years ago,” Curtis said.

  “Why did the previous owners sell?”

  Curtis shrugged. “Can’t really say. Maybe they got tired of the hassle.”

  “Who owns it now?”

  “I heard that Don Lamotte, he’s the manager, has a piece of it. Beyond that, I think it’s a conglomerate based in Milwaukee.”

  “Has anything changed from the way it used to be run?” Holly was pursuing no plan in her questioning, but was just gathering information, hoping to stumble onto something pertinent.

  “They replaced all the cows,” Gene said.

  “Why? Are the new ones better in some way? Do they give more milk?”

  “The overall yield is less,” Curtis said. “Some of the new animals are as good as the previous ones, but a lot aren’t. About a third of the old herd were such good producers we’d milk them three times a day instead of just twice, so we used to milk practically around the clock. Now, we only milk from early in the morning until six p.m., which has cost some of my friends their jobs. And I’m not too happy about that.”

  “Just talk right into the mike,” Gene said, holding his closed hand in front of Curtis. “I’ll see that Don gets a complete transcript of your views.”

  “If the new owners are willing to accept a drop in yield, there has to be an upside,” Holly said. “Are the new animals more efficient at turning their food into milk?”

  Gene took a sip of his beer and said, “I don’t have any figures to back this up, but it doesn’t seem to me like they’re eating less than the others.”

  “Could be it’s easier to get them settled,” Curtis said.

  “Settled?” Holly repeated.

  “That means to get pregnant. The goal in a dairy operation is for each cow to produce one calf a year, because if they’re not kept pregnant, they’ll eventually dry up.”

  “So the herd produces a lot of calves,” Holly said.

  “That’s another way the dairy makes money,” Gene said. “Selling the calves.”

  “Or they send them somewhere to grow up, then bring them back to replace old cows or augment the herd,” Curtis added.

  “If they’re female,” Holly observed.

  “Males aren’t worth much to anybody,” Curtis said.

  After her recent experience with Grant, Holly had a ready response to that, but didn’t feel this was the place to express it.

  OUTSIDE, IN THE rear of the parking lot, as far into the deepening shadows as he could get his car, the man who’d broken into Holly’s Honda spoke into his radio. “Number two, this is number one. Come in.”

  “Number two here.”

  “How are you doing? We can’t expect the weather to stay this favorable all night. It could change at any moment.”

  “If it holds for another fifteen minutes, we’ll be fine.”

  “SO THERE ARE never a lot of calves around,” Holly said.

  “You have to wean them fast and get rid of them,” Curtis said. “’Cause they just get in the way.”

  “I’ll say this for the new owners, they do that a lot faster than the old ones,” Gene said. “Before they took over, earliest I ever heard of a calf being weaned was three weeks. But three days after a birth cycle, like clockwork, the transport truck takes ’em away. Tomorrow at five in the afternoon, that ol’ truck’ll be at the back gate.”

  “Birth cycle?”

  “Normally, you let a cow dry up two months before calving. You can’t have the whole herd dry that long, so the cows are divided into groups and the calving is staggered. All cows these days are artificially inseminated, which not only ensures that the calves will be good producers, but allows the time of conception to be controlled. Then when the calves of a group are due, the vets inject the cows with a hormone to induce delivery and the whole group can be dealt with at the same time. Usually that’s all done at night so it doesn’t interfere with the other work. They got it planned so every two weeks there’s a cycle.”

  “How many cows are in the herd?”

  “Seventeen hundred.”

  “That’s a lot of animals.”

  “Don’t I know it.”

  “Can you think of anything else unusual that’s happened since the new owners took over?”

  “Couple months ago had a guy die,” Gene said.

  “Oh, yeah, Chester Sorenson,” Curtis added. “That was really weird.”

  “He was found floating in Rucker’s pond,” Gene said. “Nobody knows what happened. That’s his brother, Buddy, over there in the green cap, at the bar.”

  Holly looked that way and saw a young guy staring at his beer.

  “He’s taking it pretty hard,” Curtis said. “They were real close.”

  “What did Sorenson do at the dairy?”

  “He was a milker,” Curtis said. “One day he just walked off the job without telling anybody anything. Next afternoon, Virgil Rucker found him dead.”

  “Was there an investigation?”

  “I expect so. But nothing ever came of it. Least, I never saw anything in the paper. Some say it was a suicide, but you don’t want to say that around Buddy.”

  “Not that this ranks with Chester’s death,” Gene said. “But I just thought of something else. The new cows don’t have any personality. You work with a group of animals a while, you usually get to know them individually. That’s not true with these animals. About the time I think I’ve come to know one, I realize it’s not the one I thought it was.”

  “And with his social life, that’s a real loss,” Curtis said.

  “I guess you can tell Curtis is probably the cleverest milker the world has ever seen.”

  Out of questions, Holly suddenly felt hungry. Behind Curtis there was a blackboard with the dinner special listed. “How’s the food here?”

  “Actually, not too bad,” Gene replied. “If you want something, you have to order at the bar. I’d recommend the creamed chicken.”

  IN THE PARKING lot, number two still hadn’t arrived.

  TWENTY MINUTES LATER, having learned that Gene’s food recommendations were not trustworthy, Holly got in the Honda and closed the door. Still thinking of the lumps in the mashed potatoes and the metallic taste of the gravy, she reached for the seat belt. But as she pulled it across her chest, it came loose from its attachment on the floor.

  Great.

  Having a grand time in Wisconsin. Wish you were here.

  After such a lousy meal, the prospect of returning to her spartan quarters at the Green and White were bleak indeed. She’d gone about a quarter of a mile when she noticed lights coming up fast behind her, some kind of truck maybe.

  Her mind turned to her conversation with Gene and Curtis. About the only thing of much interest was the guy, Sorenson, who’d died. And maybe the fact the new owners had replaced all the cows. What was that all about? Especially since they weren’t better milk producers.

  For the first time since she’d left the Lucy II, the road was devoid of traffic, save for the truck behind her. Taking advantage of the opportunity to pass, it now picked up speed.

  As the distance between them closed, Holly saw in the mirror that the truck was equipped with a huge angled blade, like those used to move dirt or snow. Trying to make it easier on its driver, Holly edged the Honda toward the right shoulder.

&n
bsp; With its engine laboring hard, the truck swung out into the left lane, wider, she thought, than was really necessary. Suddenly, it swerved sharply so the big blade was heading right for her. Holly’s mind screamed for her to respond, but there was nowhere to go . . . no way to evade it . . .

  At the moment of impact, the blade began to rise, lifting the tires on Holly’s car off the pavement. Bulling its way into her, the truck kept coming. Under the force of the onslaught, the Honda went over onto its side and kept rolling . . . tires in the air . . . then down the fifteen-foot embankment, still rolling.

  14

  “OTTO, ANY IDEA what happened to that guy who worked at Bruxton?” Artie Harris asked. “What was his name?” He looked at Richard Heflin’s sister, Jessie.

  “Henry Pennell,” she said.

  “Yeah, that’s it.”

  Otto Christianson, the county sheriff, shook his head. “Car just sitting in the middle of the road, lights on, engine running. Somebody abducted him is my guess.”

  “You think he’s dead?” Artie asked.

  “If it’d been a woman, I’d say it’s almost a certainty. But a man . . .” Otto thought a moment, then said, “Could be he’ll show up somewhere, but I haven’t been able to find any reason why he’d want to disappear. So I can’t be too optimistic about the outcome.”

  In addition to enforcing county laws, Otto’s office bore responsibility for making sure the citizens of Midland, the county’s only town with more than three stoplights, observed its ordinances. He’d grown up in Midland and served as sheriff for three decades. When he was a young man, his big ears and wide chin had made him homely by most standards, but having reached his sixties, he had settled into his face so its excesses were no longer noticeable. He’d never been the brightest cop in the world, and now that he was getting old and fat he didn’t even have agility working for him. But he was as widely liked as ever and still possessed the most important quality for a cop: a dogged inability to put a crime out of his mind until it was solved.