by Jon McGoran
The outbreak in Dunston was not part of the plan; that was the result of a failure in containment. Rupp had told me the same thing, but I kept quiet when Sorenson mentioned that, because I wasn’t sure how much of that failure of containment was because of me.
Rupp’s plan was to release the spores into the environment on the wings of the Monarch butterflies. There would be a few cases right off the bat, but not many. Rupp’s rhizomycosis was like anthrax; it was deadly, but it was not contagious, not from person to person. It could only be contracted by exposure in the environment. Unlike anthrax, however, it could readily grow and spread in the environment, on wet leaves or garbage or other welcoming environments. It would take a while, but the spores from the butterflies would grow and spread in the environment, and after a year or two the cases would start to mount. By then it would be everywhere, and the world would come knocking, happy to accept slightly elevated liver enzyme levels and willing to pay any price for another chance at Rupp’s wonder drug.
Levkov was bad news, but Rupp wasn’t some absentminded professor going along for the ride. Rupp conceived of the entire plan, endangering hundreds of millions of innocent people. And while Levkov did the actual dirty work—imprisoning migrant workers, testing the pathogen on them to make sure it was lethal, and then incinerating them in staged meth lab fires—it was Rupp who came up with that testing regimen.
“It was a sick plan, but brilliant,” Sorenson concluded. “It could have killed millions, and made billions. And it almost worked.”
“What about Rothe? Do you see him as being in on it?”
“Rothe? Who’s that?”
“The developer. He had some elaborate deal set up to buy all the land, to build a housing development on the land Rupp and Levkov were using.”
“You mean the Redtail Properties guy? I don’t think so. What do you think?”
“I don’t think so either. He was an unwitting accomplice. They gave him a great price on the land, but part of the deal was he had to start construction right away. Rupp figured by the time the rhizomycosis became an issue, Redtail would have bulldozed and built over any evidence.”
“Clever. And now the poor bastard is stuck owning a massive hazardous waste site.”
“What about Bricker? The lawyer?”
“I can’t say too much about that, because technically you’re still a person of interest. I don’t think she had any idea what Rupp and Levkov were up to, but let’s say she was probably a little less innocent, and it ended a little worse for her. Still, she was more of a loose end than conspirator.”
* * *
After Sorenson shared his information, he asked me to go over the whole thing one more time. As a cop, I knew there was a legitimate benefit to repeating a story, but it was a long story, and I had been through it several times.
“I don’t know how much more of this I got in me,” I told him.
“All right. One last question, though.” He gave me a steely look. “Where are those apples?”
“I have no idea. Like I said, the shed was empty when I went back to test them. When I started to suspect there was something up with the apples, I asked Rupp about it. The trees disappeared right after that.”
Sorenson grunted, eyeing me suspiciously for a moment. “A lot of money could be made with those apples,” he said. “Drug cartels, pharmaceutical companies, they’d love to get their hands on them, and on the technology Rupp used to produce them. So would we.”
I shrugged.
“You have any ideas, you let us know.” He leaned in closer. “We might not be able to pay as much as the drug companies, but there’d definitely be a big reward. And it would be the right thing to do.”
I nodded, and he seemed to let it go.
“I have a last question, too,” I told him. “How did you guys get wind of this?”
“Levkov’s been on our radar for some time. He was a major league asshole and we’d been looking for him, as have a half a dozen agencies around the world. When your friend Tennison ran a search on him, it got our attention, and we came looking. We had a file on Rupp, too, but we never expected anything like this.”
I smiled. Danny might have told me to leave it alone, but he still did the search for me.
“All right,” Sorenson said, standing up. “We’ll pick this up later.” He put a set of car keys on the table. “We’re impounding your truck out there, but here’s a loaner, parked out back, courtesy of the Federal government. We’ll be sending someone over to your house to get the car out of your garage. I don’t know if they’ll give you a loaner for that. Go home and get some rest. Don’t talk about any of this to anyone. Oh,” he added as an afterthought, “and you can’t leave town.”
I smiled and nodded. “Yeah, I know the drill.”
“No, I mean you can’t leave town. Quarantine, a five-mile radius. If you try to leave, you’ll be shot.”
76
When I woke up the sky was light again, which totally confused me until I realized it was the next day. Moose had made coffee and, thankfully, had done laundry. After a quick shower, we were ready to go.
Getting to the hospital wasn’t easy. The feds had set up a massive detour around the scene of the fire. A trio of black helicopters hovered over the field like dragonflies, motionless in the air. I used them as reference points as I navigated the back roads and eventually made my way to the hospital.
When we got there, the woman at the intake desk gave us Nola’s new room number. But once again, it was empty.
“I’ll go ask the nurse where she is,” Moose said. I had already spotted Nola in the solarium at the end of the hall, but I let him go looking anyway.
She was sitting in a wheelchair, paler and thinner, gazing out the window. She turned and saw me and she started to stand, but I got there before she could. I wrapped my arms around her and squeezed. There was a frailty to her, but holding her tight, I could still feel the strength at her core. I held her close for a while, and then she pulled back and ran her fingers over the knot where Pruitt had hit me. “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine. You look great.”
“Yeah, right.”
She was wearing a hospital gown under a robe, and I slipped my hand into the robe, around to the back.
She let out a little gasp as my hand found the gap and the warm skin underneath it.
“You’re bad,” she said, pulling my hand up to her face.
“I’m trying to be,” I told her.
“They treated the others,” she said solemnly. “They’re doing better, all of them.”
“Good.”
Her eyes welled up, and she squeezed my hand hard. “They told me what you did. I wouldn’t have made it if it wasn’t for you.”
“Well, you wouldn’t have been sick if it wasn’t—”
She silenced me with a finger on my lips and said, “Thanks.”
I knew I was supposed to say “You’re welcome,” but it didn’t feel right. So I was relieved that Moose found us then. He gave Nola a long, teary-eyed embrace.
For the next half hour, I filled them in on some of what I knew. I told Nola about Cooney’s little shrine to her, about the calls from his phone. She nodded quietly, and in her wet eyes I could see relief and fear and sorrow for Cooney’s sad, lonely life. Moose seemed a little angry, and relieved Cooney was dead. I was with him on that, but we gave Nola a moment.
“But wait a second,” Moose said. “If those calls weren’t about trying to get her to sell, what about the text? Why did he torch Nola’s crops?”
“That wasn’t Cooney. I think that was Rupp’s people. Nola told Rupp she was getting pressured to sell when we brought him the corn that had been contaminated by his GMO corn. They used the hang-ups and the harassment as a cover to destroy Nola’s tainted corn, erase their evidence. Then they harvested their own.”
Nola’s eyes welled up again at that, all her hard work, and how they destroyed it. I squeezed her hand, and after a minute I continued, tell
ing them about my interrogation with Sorenson, and everything I’d learned about Rupp’s plan, including the things I told Sorenson I wouldn’t tell anybody.
By the time I was finished, Nola was visibly drained. We wheeled her back to her room, and Moose gave her a peck on the cheek. I helped her into bed, and I copped another feel when I did it.
As we got back in the loaner car, my phone went off. It was Sorenson.
“You were right about Squires,” he said. “Contusion on the side of his head was inconsistent with the injuries from the fall. Coroner said he figured the kid had bumped his head on the railing or something, but you were right; the blood in it had traces of opiates, but nothing compared to the blood in his system. Looked like they hit him with a rifle butt. Good call.”
He’d probably been consuming juice from those apples for a little while, so it was no surprise there were traces in his system.
“What was that?” Moose asked, staring at my face as I put away my phone.
“Squirrel,” I said with a sad sigh. “I asked them to look into it. He was murdered.”
Moose nodded like he already knew. Then he looked out the window and wiped his eyes.
* * *
When we got back to the house, Moose got out of the car, but I kept the engine running. I told him I had another stop to make.
The heart of town looked the same, but no one was walking on the street, and only a few cars were parked on the side of the road. The quiet didn’t seem ominous like it did before; the town seemed tired, like it was resting. As I pulled open the door to Branson’s, I wondered if this was the kind of catastrophe that could kill a town entirely, turn it into a ghost town, like Centralia with its underground fires.
The few people inside were mostly sitting by themselves, grim-faced, reading the newspaper. At some point, I’d have to read about it, too, learn the official story.
Two old guys were at the bar, but there was no sign of Bert Squires behind it. As I was turning to leave, one of the old guys reached over the bar for a bottle and I realized it was him.
He looked withered and old, his hand shaking as he filled his double shot glass. When I sat on the stool next to him, he turned and looked at me with hollow, red-rimmed eyes. He didn’t say a word, but he reached over and grabbed another glass and poured me one, too.
We drank them down, and he refilled the glasses. Then he sighed and reached down the bar, refilling the other guy’s glass as well.
“Thanks, Bert,” the other guy rasped.
“So I guess you’re stuck here for a while,” Squires said. “What with the quarantine and everything.”
“Yeah, I guess so,” I told him. “But the place is kind of growing on me. Who knows, maybe I’ll learn to love it as much as Frank did.”
Bert laughed—a short, boozy cackle that couldn’t sustain itself. “Are you kidding me? Frank hated it out here.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Frank Menlow? Frank was a great guy, but he was a city boy, through and through. He missed the city, he missed his friends. He missed you.”
I hadn’t really thought about it, but it never quite made sense to me that Frank wanted to be out here. “Then why did he want to come out here?”
Bert swallowed his shot and shrugged. “Because of your mom. She loved it out here, and the thing that mattered most to Frank was making your mom happy.”
He smiled and shook his head, thinking about it.
I blinked a few times, thinking about what he had said. Then I shook my head to clear it.
“Look, I don’t know if this helps or not,” I told him, “but I figured you’d want to know. Carl wasn’t an overdose. He was murdered.”
Bert turned and looked at me, trembling, with a look in his eyes like anger and sorrow had somehow combined into fear. “But they said he had enough drugs in him, he would’ve been dead even without the fall.”
“They murdered him, Bert. They hit him over the head, and they put that stuff in him. Then they tossed him off the bridge. He never took any drugs, not intentionally.”
He stared at me. “How do you know?”
“I know, Bert. Believe me. He saw something they didn’t want him to see, and they murdered him.”
“You sure?”
I nodded.
He stared at me for another second. Then I guess he decided he did believe me. “Who did it?”
“They’re dead,” I told him.
“Are you sure?”
“Yeah, Bert. I killed them.”
His eyes got redder, and he put his hand on my arm. “Thanks, Doyle,” he said. “Frank was right about you.”
He gave my arm a firm squeeze as he stood up. Then he turned and hurried out of the bar.
* * *
It may have been the whiskey, or it could have been everything else, but by the time I got home I was ready to go back to bed. I figured it would be another twenty hours before I was ready to get up again. But when I pulled into the driveway, the Michelin man was sitting on my porch. For a moment, I thought one of the feds in the hazmat suits who had been chasing me finally caught up with me. But as I got out of the car, I saw it was actually Danny Tennison.
“Nice outfit,” I said as I climbed the steps. “Very slimming.”
He laughed. “Well, apparently, this town of yours has cooties. I had to go through decontamination before they let me leave the first time. Very thorough decontamination. I don’t ever want to go through that again.” He leaned forward and whispered loudly. “And some of us still have to go to work.”
“You want some time off, I can tell you how to get it.”
“That’s okay. I said I was getting along better with the wife; I don’t want to jeopardize that by actually being around her all the time.”
“So that’s your secret.”
He smiled. “You’re looking a little better. You get some rest?”
“A little. Another couple hundred hours and maybe I’ll be caught up.”
“Stan Bowers sends his regards. Wanted you to know he won’t be pressing charges for impersonating a federal officer. You got anything to say about that?”
I had to say something, but I didn’t want to incriminate myself. “Good?”
“You’re goddamn right, good.” Danny laughed, shaking his head. “Your buddy Pruitt’s on unpaid leave, pending the outcome of an investigation into the way he handled your arrest.”
I snorted. “Okay.”
He craned his neck to see the lump on the side of my head. “Got you pretty good, didn’t he?”
“If he’d gotten there a couple minutes earlier, my girlfriend would be dead.”
“But he didn’t, did he?”
“What are you getting at?”
“The Berks County D.A. wants me to ask if you’re planning on pressing charges.”
“Hadn’t thought about that.” I sighed. “The guy can be a pretty big asshole.”
He nodded. “Yes, that does seem to be the case.”
“And he was way out of line.”
“Not the first cop to cross a line, though, is he?”
“No, but still, something needs to happen.”
“Well, I think the D.A. wants this to go away. And he wants to know what it would take for you to let it.”
I thought for a moment. Then it hit me. “Anger management training,” I said. “Mandatory anger management training.”
Danny laughed. We both did. “You’re a real prick, you know that?”
“If I was a prick, I’d enroll in it alongside him, just so I could exercise my right to drop out.” I smiled. “See? I am getting better.”
He laughed again. “Well, thank God for that.”
77
When I got inside, I started up the stairs, but looking down the hallway, I saw the mess of papers I had left on the floor in Frank’s office. I smiled, thinking about all Frank’s files and folders, everything exactly in its place. I thought about how, if I died, it would take a forensic accou
ntant weeks to find the documents Frank had neatly filed away. And I’d never bought a house, or life insurance. I barely filed taxes.
I didn’t want to find any more surprises, but leaving the room a mess felt disrespectful. So, before I went to bed, I started piling everything back into the boxes. As I did, one of the envelopes came open, and a sheaf of photos slid out across the floor. The ones on top were fairly recent, pictures of my mom on the front porch or in the garden, wearing the lilac print cardigan she always wore. Underneath were older photos of her when she was younger. Seeing them was sad, but they made me smile.
It struck me that I had never really appreciated how beautiful she was. I remembered some of the photos: the two of us on a roller coaster, at the top of a lighthouse.
They were happy photos, and I needed that. Frank was in some of them, staged shots of the three of us smiling awkwardly: Williamsburg, the Franklin Institute, a Phillies game. The rest were of my mom and me, playing, laughing, snuggling, just walking down the street.
There was one photo in particular that caught my eye, one that I remembered. The two of us laughing, eating ice-cream cones in front of Bredenbeck’s ice-cream parlor, in Chestnut Hill. She’s about to wipe my chin with a napkin. I’m about twelve years old, giving her this look, like I’m too old for her to be wiping my chin, and she’s giving me this look like, no you’re not. As I stared at the photo, I felt myself smiling, too, a bittersweet smile, along with the faces in the picture. Then I noticed Frank, reflected in the window behind us.
He was young, and I could see him laughing along with us as he took the picture.
I looked back at all the other photos of my mother and me, and I realized they were all taken by Frank. The only reason he wasn’t in them was that he was the one taking them.
I spent the rest of the afternoon going through those boxes, looking through hundreds of pictures. In most of them, my mom is looking right at me, and I could see how much she loved me. But in many, she’s looking right into the camera, and in those, I could see how much she loved Frank, too.
