by Jon McGoran
Part of me was cursing inside, but part of me was glad to be able to say no. “Actually, I can’t, I have to meet someone.…”
“I see … Well, I guess we’ll talk later.”
I was relieved she didn’t press me on my plans. “I can come over now,” I offered, but she said no.
“So he told you what he did?” I asked.
“Yes, he told me. He thinks it’s an important statement, and that it might give the native bees a chance to recover. I told him they’re just going to bring more GMO bees in. But he wouldn’t listen. He’s so misguided, but he really does mean well.”
She didn’t know what had happened. Teddy had called her before he knew he’d killed Pete Westcamp’s bees. “So, there’s some parts of last night I might still need to tell you about.”
“Okay…”
“After you asked me to stop him, I did find him at the industrial park, loading chemicals into a portable tank of some sort. I tried to talk him out of doing whatever he was planning, but he was his usual friendly self, and then one of his friends tased me from behind.”
“Tased?”
“Shot me with a taser.”
“You mean like a stun gun?”
“Kind of like, yeah.”
“Oh, my God! Are you okay?”
“I recovered in time to follow them, and I caught up with them on their way to Edgartown. I got there in time to see Teddy get out of the van with the chemicals. Then he ran around behind the shipyard building. The sky lit up from the fire, and immediately, his friends took off and left him there, and the police showed up right away. Anonymous tip.”
“A tip? Do you think he was set up?”
“Looks like it. Plus, well, he killed the wrong bees.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean those weren’t the evil Stoma Corporation bees that he destroyed. They were Pete Westcamp’s last remaining hives. Pete was getting them off the island, taking them to Chappaquiddick, where he hoped they’d be safe. Teddy killed the last regular honeybees on Martha’s Vineyard.”
* * *
Nola had been upset about the bees.
Moose was angry.
“What a fucking asshat!” he yelled when I told him what Teddy had done. I love Moose. “Stupid fucking idiot. Well, now we’re truly screwed. Well and truly. Even if he’d killed the right bees, it would have given credibility to every bullshit stereotype Archie Pearce and his type say about anyone who protests when some mega corporation tries to make a few billion dollars off the destruction of something they don’t own. But now, in addition, he’s made those goddamned GMO bees all but necessary around here. People who were carrying pitchforks two days ago, ready to run Stoma off the island, they’re going to be lining up for a chance to get GMO bees onto their farms.” He finished with an unintelligible growl.
“Any word from Benjy?”
“No,” he said, suddenly subdued. “Nothing.”
“Nothing from the police either?”
“No. They seem to be busy with other things.” He let out a long sigh, but my sense was he wished he’d taken a deeper breath before it so he could have sighed a little longer. “I don’t know. I need to do another round of data checks, and see if there’s any good news. But there won’t be. Especially not now. Actually, I need to move two of the stations, but it’s a two-man job. Any chance you could give me a hand for an hour?”
“Yeah, I can do that.”
I regretted it as soon as I said yes, but I knew it would be good to do some physical work and not think about Nola or Teddy or any other Renfrews for that matter. I should have known that wouldn’t last. We were driving from Felix Neck down to Trapp’s pond when the subject of Teddy Renfrew came up again.
“So what do you suppose Teddy was thinking?” Moose wondered out loud.
“I don’t know,” I replied. “I don’t know the guy that well. But I’ve known a lot of other douchebags in my time, so I would imagine he was thinking about himself.”
“What do you mean?”
“Whatever it was he thought he was doing, maybe he thought he was making the world a better place, but more likely, he thought he was making the world a better place for him. A place where he was regarded as a hero, a badass, or whatever. Where women like Nola would fall for his shit, or more of them would.”
He laughed. “Seriously. I don’t know what she sees in him.”
My head snapped around so fast it hurt. “You think she sees something in him?”
He laughed again. But stopped when he saw my face. “No, not like that. I don’t think so. I mean the ladies seem to think he’s a good-looking guy, but I don’t see it. And I don’t think Nola does, really, either. But she does take him seriously as someone with something to say.”
“And you don’t?”
“We’re on the same side of a lot of issues, and I did at first, but the more I’ve seen of him, I think he’s a bit of a poseur. To be fair, he’s built a pretty impressive farm operation. He brags about it a bit too much sometimes, but it’s hard to make a living doing that.”
“He’s not.”
“What do you mean?”
“According to his father, the farm’s been losing money since day one. It’s a hobby.”
“Well, I didn’t know about the Thompson connection, and I know his family’s rich, but Teddy specifically told me he doesn’t get any money from his dad.”
I told him about the trust fund from his grandmother.
“Oh.”
“Still take him seriously?”
“Serious pain in the ass.”
I laughed. I love Moose.
* * *
He dropped me off at my car around eleven. My stomach was starting to grumble, but lunch wasn’t too far off and I had a stop I needed to make.
As I drove to Edgartown, I called Jimmy Frank.
“Hey, Doyle. What’s up?” He sounded tired, but he wasn’t angry.
“Hey, Jimmy. Just checking in to see what new surprises have arisen in the last eight hours.”
“Well, your pal Renfrew junior is still a guest of the citizens of this fine island.”
“Really? No one bailed him out?”
“Apparently not. There were some delays with setting bail. His dad was going to send someone down, but by the time they had a number, twenty grand, Dad was incommunicado. Junior’s kind of pissed about it.”
“Huh.” I didn’t know what was going on with Renfrew, but he’d seemed more than a little preoccupied when I left him. “Any new information?”
“Just that he’s even more annoying than I thought. Can’t seem to make up his mind if he’s a badass tough guy and we’ll never break him, or a sniveling wuss who can’t wait for Daddy to come and save him.”
“Can I talk to him?”
“Probably. Why would you want to?”
I didn’t want to tell Jimmy I wanted to find out who was responsible for killing those bees, and it wasn’t just for Pete Westcamp, or anybody else. “Have you ever been tasered?”
Jimmy laughed. “Nope.”
“Well, if you had, you’d want to find out who’d done it to you.”
45
“What are you doing here?” Teddy asked through his cell door when he saw me, his busted lip curled in a swollen sneer. I wanted to say “gloating,” but as much as that was true, I also wanted information.
“What are you doing here?” I countered. “Bail’s been set, right?”
He rolled his eyes and looked at Jimmy, then away from both of us. “They’re running late, that’s all.”
I nodded and he looked back at me, his head at an angle.
“So, did you mean to kill Pete Westcamp’s bees?”
“I’m waiting for my lawyer.”
I shrugged. “Okay with me. I just thought you wouldn’t want people thinking that you’d gone over to the dark side.”
“Of course I didn’t mean to kill Pete’s bees. Pete’s my friend.” I was pretty sure Pete Westcamp fe
lt the same way I did toward Teddy, but I didn’t say anything. “I already told them. That asshole Brecker set it up. They were supposed to be the Stoma Corporation bees.”
“Brecker? Is that his name? That’s the guy who drove away while you were killing the bees?”
He nodded.
“Is that the guy who tased me?”
“I don’t know,” he said, his busted lip widening in a sly smile. “It was dark.” The smile widened. Then he winced and put his hand to his lip. It came away smeared with blood.
I wanted to say something else funny, see if I could make him laugh, but I focused on the matter at hand. “So that’s the guy who set you up, who tricked you into killing your friend’s bees, the last real honeybees on the island. The guy who stranded you and called the police on you?”
His cheeks were turning pink as I spoke. “Yes,” he said, his voice a dry rasp.
I let it sit there for a second.
“So here’s the thing,” I said. “It doesn’t bother me that you’re in here. Frankly, I think you’re an asshole, and it’s nice not having to worry about running into you on the outside. Besides, setup or not, you fucked up big time. But I think this Brecker guy is an asshole of a different magnitude. It bothers me that he’s not in here, too. It bothers me enough that I want to put him here even if it means you get out because of it. Plus, I have no idea what he’s up to, but I doubt very much that putting you in jail and killing some bees is all of it. So why don’t you tell me what you know about Brecker, and we’ll see if we can stop him before he does whatever he’s planning next.”
It turned out, Teddy didn’t know much. Maybe if he had known more he might have thought twice before being totally manipulated.
Brecker had approached him at a sustainable farming conference, knew his name, and said he recognized him from some earlier events, a G20 protest planning meeting, a couple of other places that he wouldn’t have known about unless he’d been there. They bumped into each other at a few other places. Then Brecker told Teddy about a new group, the Environmental Liberation Brigade, and how they wanted Teddy to be a part of their leadership.
He reddened when he told me that, I think realizing how easily he’d been played.
“And when did that happen?” Jimmy asked. “When did you first meet him?”
“A few months ago. Maybe late January.”
“So how did this plan come about?” I asked.
“Brecker had been saying for a while we were going to do something. They said they had information about where the GMO bees were going to be. A small window when all the hives would be at the same place at the same time.”
“They?”
“Yeah, there were two of them. I mean, they always made it sound like there were others as well, other cells. But it was the three of us in our cell.”
“Who was the other guy?”
“Eddie Sholes.”
“Big guy with a kind of pushed-in nose?”
“Yeah, and a busted-up arm.”
I laughed, and Jimmy looked at me questioningly. I shrugged and looked back at Teddy. “So where would we find these guys?”
“I don’t know. All I knew was Brecker’s phone number. And that stopped working the night I … the night I got arrested.”
I turned to Jimmy. “You got a sketch artist on this island?”
“If your perpetrator is a golden-hued sunset or maybe a sand piper, sure. Otherwise, not so much. But I know a guy in New Bedford. Maybe I can get him on Skype with the ant bully here.”
* * *
Annalisa was waiting at a table in the back corner when I walked into the restaurant. She seemed nervous but she smiled when she saw me.
Before I even sat down, the sound came up from the television mounted on the wall, and I turned to see Teddy Renfrew’s mug shot.
“Details continue to emerge regarding last night’s bizarre terror attack in Edgartown, on Martha’s Vineyard,” said Sierra Johnson, the same woman who had interviewed Archie Pearce and Johnny Blue. With all this craziness on the island, Sierra was becoming a star. Annalisa and I shared a look, and she shook her head as the report continued, cutting to a corporate headshot of Darren Renfrew. “Teddy Renfrew, son of Thompson Chemical Company owner and CEO Darren Renfrew, has been charged with arson, destruction of public property, and risking a catastrophe, among other charges, in a bizarre act of vandalism that may have killed the last remaining honeybees on the island of Martha’s Vineyard.”
Cut to security cam footage of Teddy on the dock, grainy but clearly recognizable, spraying the hive boxes, then lighting a match. The picture went white in the sudden glare from the fire. “Security footage from a nearby restaurant documented the crime, in which it now seems the younger Renfrew used an agricultural insecticide called Wipe-Out, manufactured by his father’s company, to kill the bees. In a statement, Teddy Renfrew expressed sorrow at the death of the bees and claimed he had intended to destroy the hives of Stoma Corporation’s controversial genetically engineered Bee-Plus bees, which now appear to be the only honeybees left on the island. Stoma Corporation and Thompson Company have been rivals since the early seventies. There is no comment from Thompson Company about the use of its chemical in the crime, or about speculation that the two Renfrews were working together. A Thompson Company spokesman said the company has launched an internal investigation and is cooperating fully with the authorities.”
46
I continued to stare at the screen, even after the back-to-you-Jim banter and the sneak peak at the weekend weather.
“You okay?” Annalisa said.
I looked back to her and smiled. “I’m fine.”
The waitress came and I ordered coffee and a cheeseburger. Annalisa ordered a salad. After watching the waitress walk away, she leaned forward again. “I’ve been doing some digging,” she said, placing a manila folder on the table. “I used Julie’s ID and accessed some of the Bee-Plus data to see if there was anything that might somehow suggest the gene splices were unstable. I found some very interesting data sheet anomalies.”
“Is that safe?”
She looked at me and shrugged unconvincingly.
“What are data sheets?”
She opened the folder and spread out several sheets of paper, each covered with columns of numbers. “Sheets the lab techs fill out every day. How much nectar has been consumed, water, the weight of the hive, temperature, honey production—a whole range of data points. It’s all entered into the computer, so we can analyze it and track it, look for trends or anomalies.”
“Okay, and what did you find?”
She looked up at me for a second, her eyes fearful. “I didn’t see anything in the data at first. And I still don’t, really, not anything suggesting that the gene splice is unstable, but look at this.” With her fingers she bracketed a series of numbers. “See these numbers?” It was a bunch of columns just like the others.
“Yes, but I don’t know what they mean.”
“They don’t mean anything by themselves. But look at this.” She pulled out another sheet, dated six weeks later, and with her fingers bracketed another set of data. “Do you notice anything?”
Before I could answer, she put the two sheets side by side, so the two data sets were right next to each other.
I looked up at her. “It’s the same data.”
“Exactly,” she said quietly, sitting back in her seat. “Thirteen data points over seven days, identical in every aspect. Ninety-one data points. Six weeks apart.”
“What are the chances—” I started to ask, but she shook her head.
“There are no chances.”
“So it’s faked?”
She stared at me for a second, silent, like she didn’t want to say it out loud. Her eyes swept the room. Then she sat forward again. “Now look at this.” With her finger, she indicated the column all the way to the right, each line showing the letters “LN.”
“LN,” she said, practically whispering. “Lynne Nathan. The
lab assistant I told you about. My friend.” She pointed to the date column on the later set of matching data points. “This is the week she died.”
She stared at me, right in the eyes, her face deadpan but her eyes welling with tears.
“What does that mean?” I asked, whispering.
“I don’t know.” She gave me that stare again, like she was daring me to have a reaction. I didn’t know what reaction to have.
“There’s more.” She put two more sheets in front of me, side by side, and simultaneously bracketed with her fingers a set of data on each page. “Identical data. Two months later, eight weeks apart. Every single data point matches.”
“Seriously?”
“The data is clearly falsified. It’s just a matter of happenstance that I saw it and noticed. The question is: what are they hiding?” Her finger drifted over to the initials column. “See the initials? CO, that’s Claudia Osterman. I don’t know her well, but I worked with her a few times on Samana Cay. This second data set, the fake one, those are the last entries in the records with her initials.” She paused for a moment, chewing the inside of her cheek. “A few months ago, when I said I might be coming to Martha’s Vineyard, she told me she was from Providence, not too far from here. This morning, when I saw this, I looked up her family and I called them. Her mother answered the phone, an older woman. Sounded very pleasant. But when I asked to speak to Claudia, she hung up immediately. Actually, she dropped the phone. Then she hung up.”
“What do you think that means?”
Annalisa shrugged, biting her lip, like she didn’t want to say it.
“Providence, huh?”
She nodded.
“Do you think I should go talk to them?”
“I don’t know what to think. If Stoma is watching them, or watching you, it could be dangerous.”
I laughed. “It’s not like the island is so safe.”
“I know, but if we are onto something here, and they realize where you’re going…”
