by Nick Pirog
“That’s bullshit,” yelled someone from behind me.
“Please, please,” Ramsey said, putting his hand up. “What Neil was trying to accomplish, and I must admit he was doing so in secret, was to add a gene into the seed that would make it impossible for cross-pollination. But four years ago, Neil convinced me Terminator seeds were just too dangerous and we shut down the project. You have my assurances Sterile Seed Technology will never be used.”
He locked eyes with me. He’d laid everything out in the open. He had nothing to hide.
But then what accounted for the twitch in his forehead?
I asked, “What was the dust-up in the cafeteria between the two of you about?”
“Oh, that,” he said with a smirk. “That was just a little misunderstanding. Neil thought I went back on a raise that I’d promised him a few months prior. He was extremely tightly wound when it came to money. I explained to him that the raise was in company stock, not salary, and that he would see it in his next dividend check.”
“Then why did he resign that same day?” I asked.
“He wanted to work on something new. He’d been thinking about leaving for quite some time. And going back to my office and hashing through his raise confusion, we got to talking about his future. And yes, he resigned.”
“And then he was killed three weeks later?”
“Yes,” Ramsey said. “Tragically.”
I’d heard enough.
Thirty seconds later, I was back in the rain.
Chapter Twenty-Four
The usual puddle in the road leading to the farmhouse blossomed into a small pond as a result of the weekend’s rains. I splashed through, the muddy water seeping into my Asics, then continued down toward County Road 52.
I’d been so sure the reason Neil Felding had been killed was his threatening to blow the whistle on the revamping of Terminator seeds, but after listening to Ramsey at the luncheon the previous day, this didn’t seem plausible.
Was I way off base? Did Lunhill not have anything to do with Neil Felding’s murder? Nothing to do with Mike Zernan’s death? Did I want there to be a cover-up so badly that I was creating one in my mind?
Over the course of my career, for the most part, where I smelled smoke there was fire. But every once in a while, it was just a kid lighting off a smoke bomb in the alley.
I’d been wrong before.
Was I wrong now?
As I ran, I thought about everything I knew about Lunhill. Could Neil have stumbled on something else? A dioxin spill? Proof GMOs were causing illness? That Spectrum-H was causing cancer? Some illicit relationship between Lunhill and the FDA? Some governmental fraud? Something to do with Obama?
Three miles later, I was convinced I wasn’t crazy.
Barns don’t get burned down because of crazy. Police officers don’t get strangled because of crazy. You aren’t told to leave things alone because of crazy.
No.
Neil Felding found something.
Now I just needed to find out what.
Neil Felding's widow lived on a street where the houses were bigger and nicer than any I’d yet seen in Tarrin. Stepping from the car, I walked through a well-manicured front yard and rang the doorbell.
The door opened.
Darcy Felding had a pleasant face, nearly black hair, and brown eyes.
I’m not sure why it hadn’t occurred to me earlier to track down Neil Felding’s widow. I suppose I was trying to limit the collateral damage that my investigation would cause.
That said, I was done playing nice.
I said, “I was wondering if I could have a couple moments of your time.”
“Oh, um, I’m not interested in whatever you’re selling.”
“Actually, my name is Thomas Prescott. I’m a retired homicide detective. I’d like to speak with you about your husband.”
Her breath caught and she said, “Oh, okay. Can you give me a minute?”
I nodded and she closed the door.
Two minutes later, the door opened and she waved me in. “You want to go out back?”
“Sure.”
“I can make up a pitcher of lemonade.” She motioned me to a small sliding glass door. “It will take me a few minutes, maybe you wouldn’t mind finishing up watering my garden.”
“Fair trade,” I said, then slipped through the sliding glass door and stepped into a small back yard. Unlike most of the neighborhoods in Tarrin, the backyard was fenced.
There was a flower garden abutted by a small vegetable garden. A hose lay on the ground, small droplets of water beading around the head of a nozzle. Lying on the ground just in front of the hose was a white spray bottle.
I picked it up.
Spectrum-H weed killer.
I scrunched my eyebrows together. If Darcy was using Spectrum-H in her garden, Neil must have felt the product was safe.
I set the bottle down and picked up the hose. I sprayed for three or four minutes, stopping when I heard Darcy move through the back door. I clicked off the nozzle, then met her near a table with an umbrella and two cushioned chairs.
“Thank you,” she said, handing me a tall glass of lemonade. It had a red purée on top and she said, “Strawberry purée.” She nodded at the garden and said, “I grew the strawberries myself.”
I hesitated, all of Randall’s words rushing into my brain, I don’t spray shit, least of all, those assholes’ poison.
She watched me closely as I picked up the glass and took a long sip.
“So,” Darcy said. “You wanted to speak to me about Neil?”
I set the glass down on the small table with an audible clunk and nodded. I considered offering a quick disclaimer, something along the lines of: I need to warn you, the questions I’m about to ask may upset you, may flip your world upside down. But her brown eyes were steeled. I think part of her had been waiting for someone to come asking questions. Maybe even wanting them to.
“Did you ever question your husband’s murder beyond him being in the wrong place at the wrong time?”
“I did.”
“In what regard?”
“The timing of it all,” she said. “Neil resigning from Lunhill just three weeks before he was killed.”
“And why exactly did he resign?”
“Creative differences,” she said. Then pursing her lips, added, “At least, that’s what it said in the non-disclosure.”
“But that isn’t why he really resigned?”
She shook her head.
I could feel my pulse quicken.
“Did you know what your husband was working on before he resigned?”
She nodded. “Sterile Seed Technology.”
“Did you ever have an ethical problem with anything Neil was working on?”
“You mean like the bottle of Spectrum-H I use on my garden.”
She must have seen me looking at it. But more than that, she was testing me with the lemonade. Waiting to see how I reacted when she said the strawberry purée was from her garden. That’s what she’d been doing the two minutes I waited outside her front door. She was setting up the hose and the bottle.
“Did I pass?” I asked.
“What?”
“Did I pass the strawberry purée test?”
She looked at me for a long second.
I said, “I was a detective for more than a decade.”
Finally, she let out a long exhale. “Yes, you passed.”
“Were you checking to see if I was one of Lunhill’s people?”
She nodded and said, “They never drink.”
“Seriously?”
“Never.”
“Because they know it might make them sick?”
She shrugged and said, “Who knows?”
I asked, “What’s in the bottle?”
“Vinegar.”
I grinned, then asked, “If Neil felt Spectrum-H was poisonous, then why work at Lunhill?”
She turned around and waved her hands at the house.
“Yes, money.”
“How much did he make?”
“A hundred and fifty thousand, give or take.”
“That’s pretty good.”
“Especially when you live in Tarrin.”
“Did Neil commute?”
“About half the time. There are sleeping quarters at the lab. He would stay the night a couple times a week.”
“And what about you? What did you do?”
“I stayed home with the kids.”
“Where are they now?”
“On summer break from school. They’re backpacking through Europe right now.”
“Where do they go to school?”
“One is at NYU. One is at the University of Colorado.”
“Those are both pretty expensive.”
She nodded.
“Do you work?”
“I garden.”
Her husband had been dead for four years. If they were smart with their money, he could have left her a sizable nest egg. Maybe a million, maybe more. Plus whatever life insurance he had.
“How much money do you get from Lunhill?” I asked.
“Fifty grand.”
I was surprised she answered so candidly. “A year?”
She shook her head. “A month.”
I whistled.
She said, “That was part of Neil’s release package.”
“More like hush money.”
She raised her eyebrows.
“What was it?” I asked. “Did he threaten to go public with details about Spectrum-H? That it was dangerous?”
“No.”
“He must have had something on them. Must have threatened to blow the whistle on something.”
She stared at me.
“Come on,” I prodded. “What was it? A dioxin spill? GMOs causing cancer? Fraud?”
She took a sip of lemonade.
“I can protect you,” I said.
“They will sue me for everything I’m worth. Take the house. Take everything.”
I guessed her name was all over the non-disclosures as well. If she broke her silence, they could do exactly what she was talking about.
“These people killed your husband.”
“What do you mean?”
“It wasn’t just strange timing, your husband resigning and dying three weeks later. Lunhill had him killed.”
She looked at me questioningly, but said nothing.
I scooted my seat a couple inches closer to her. “Your husband found something out. Threatened to blow the whistle on Lunhill. They made him sign a bunch of NDAs, but they didn’t trust he would keep his mouth shut. They couldn’t risk killing him outright, even an accident would have looked suspicious so close to his resigning, so they paid Lowry Barnes to do it.”
“That’s absurd.”
“Is it?” I asked. “Where is the only place in a town everyone is bound to go at some point?”
She glanced upward for a moment, then back down.
“The grocery store,” I said for her. “It wouldn’t have been hard for them to find out that an ex-felon had recently been fired from the Save-More and was in desperate need of money. They paid Lowry to kill Neil and make it look like he was going after his ex-manager.”
“But Lowry committed suicide.”
“It could easily have been made to look that way.”
I could see her running the logic over in her head, see it slowly going from impossible, to plausible, to probable.
“There is just one question,” I said. “Was what Neil knew worth killing over?”
She took a long breath, then said, “It would have ruined them.”
We moved inside. Darcy joined me at the kitchen table. “They searched the house,” she said, “a couple weeks after Neil died.”
“Lunhill guys?”
“Yeah, it was actually written into one of the NDAs. If Neil died, they would get to search the house.”
“No shit.”
“So they put me and the kids up in a hotel for a week and went through everything.”
“Did they find anything?”
“They never said. But the money kept coming, so I guess not.”
I looked up at the ceiling, the walls. “You ever check the place for bugs? Wiretaps, I mean?”
She shook her head. Then she leaned forward and whispered, “You think they bugged the place?”
“I wouldn’t doubt it.”
Part of me wondered if someone was listening to our words this very second.
“Why don’t we go to my car?” I offered.
She followed me out the front door and into the Range Rover. Once inside, I could see the manila envelope on her lap.
“Is that it?” I asked.
“Yeah.”
“Why didn’t they find it when they searched the house?”
“It wasn’t in the house. I found it in our safety deposit box at the bank six months later.”
She stared at the envelope for a beat, then handed it to me.
I slowly unclasped the brass fastener and pulled out the contents. There were several documents and a handful of pictures.
After a couple seconds, I said, “Wow.”
I glanced at Darcy.
She shifted in her seat.
I looked back down at the picture in my lap. It was a picture of more than a dozen cows. All on their sides. All dead. Another picture was a close-up of a single cow. It’s udders were swollen and red. A man stood over the cow.
The first thing that popped into my head was dioxin. Brian had said how a bunch of animals died after they sprayed the waste oil at Simon Beach.
There must have been another dioxin spill.
I moved to the documents. It was a bunch of numbers and graphs. I was sure Darcy had studied the documents at length and I asked, “What am I looking at here?”
“Those are the data sheets Lunhill sent to the FDA from the testing of their recombinant Bovine Growth Hormone.”
“Recombinant what?”
“You ever hear of rBGH?”
“Maybe. I think I’ve heard my sister talk about it. Something in milk.”
“It’s a hormone that makes dairy cows produce up to twenty percent more milk.”
I said, “But according to these photos, it also kills them.”
She nodded. “Twenty years ago, Lunhill was testing their recombinant Bovine Growth Hormone, what they were calling Recom 6. They treated seventeen cows with it. Fifteen of them died.”
So it wasn’t dioxin after all.
I looked down at one of the documents. “But it says right here that the only side effect was one cow getting something called mastitis.”
“They fudged the data.”
“They can do that?”
“The FDA only looks at the data the company sends them. They don’t do any outside testing themselves.”
“But that’s ridiculous.”
“Yes it is. But it would be impossible for the FDA to run experiments and tests on all the new products that come out each year. It would take a hundred thousand employees. It’s a government agency, they only have so much in the budget.”
“So they rely on these companies to send them accurate data from their experiments?”
“Yes. They set rigorous guidelines that have to be met over the course of months, sometimes years. And most companies send the real data.”
“But if Lunhill had sent the real data, it never would have passed.”
She smirked. “Exactly.”
“It passed?”
“Twenty years ago.”
“And is it still being used?”
“Lunhill sold the rights a decade ago for something like four hundred million dollars, but it’s still in production.”
I thought about the repercussions of this. If this information leaked, sure it would hurt Lunhill, but it wouldn’t ruin them. They didn’t even produce the hormone anymore.
“If farmers have been usi
ng Recom 6 for the past twenty years, then where are all the dead cows? It would be impossible to cover up. They must have tweaked it and made it safe.”
“Lunhill did,” she said, “before it went to market.”
I took a breath, then said, “I’m not so sure if this went public it would ruin them.”
“You’re looking at it wrong. It isn’t about the cows. It’s about the fudging of the data. If they sent the FDA falsified testing data for Recom 6, what’s to say every product they’ve ever produced hasn’t also been falsified?”
She was right.
Spectrum-H.
Spectrum-H(R) seeds.
All their GMOs.
If this got out, it would ruin them.
“Did Neil tell you about this?” I asked.
“No.”
“So you have no idea how he found this out?”
She glanced down at her lap, then back up at me. Her eyes softened. “He left a note in the safety deposit box. It said not to take the folder out of the box, to leave it there, to only use it in an emergency.”
“Like if they stopped paying?”
“I guess that’s what he meant.” She took a breath. “He said he stumbled on the pictures and documents when he was going back through the Sterile Seed data from when they first started doing research in the early nineties. Evidently, someone buried a folder in the Sterile Seed files. He opened it and saw the pictures and documents.”
“Let me guess, he confronted David Ramsey about it at work and they had a dust-up in the cafeteria?”
“That very day. He was extremely emotional about it.”
I’d had a hard time believing David Ramsey’s version of the dust-up at the luncheon. A shoving match over a raise?
“I can see why,” I said. “He’d been working for the company for twenty years.”
“That was part of it, but I think what upset him most was that it happened here.”
“What do you mean here?”
She grabbed one of the photos and showed it to me. “This dairy farm is in Tarrin.”
My breath caught.
I riffled through the pictures. Something in one of them had caught my eye, but I didn’t think anything of it until now.
I found the picture I was looking for. It was the picture of the single cow, udders grotesquely red and oozing pus. A man was standing over the cow.
