by Nick Pirog
Wheeler and I reluctantly hopped back into the Range Rover and followed the cars for three-quarters of a mile to the sign that read “Contaminated Grounds. Stay in Your Car.”
I would have been surprised if they drove past the sign. At least a couple people in the cars ahead would have known how dangerous the area still was, even two decades after the spill.
Directly across from where the cars were parked was the abandoned school bus, lifeless amongst the surprisingly thick foliage.
For the second time, Wheeler and I exited the car and for the second time, Dolf ran the scanner over our bodies. Satisfied that we hadn’t added any recording devices during the three-minute excursion, he gave the thumbs-up.
Four doors opened and David Ramsey, Chief Eccleston, Greg Mallory, and Mayor Paula Van Dixon stepped out.
Greg Mallory, the dairy farmer, was the only one who I hadn’t seen before. He was sixtyish, with shaggy gray hair and a trim goatee. His skin was leathery, a consequence of so many hours under the sun.
The eight of us arranged ourselves in a loose circle on the cracked asphalt, the faded lines of the road hardly visible. Clockwise, it was Greg Mallory, then Mayor Van Dixon, then Dolf, then David Ramsey, then Snake, then Chief Eccleston, then Wheeler, then myself.
It was a tense atmosphere, everyone exchanging quick glances, but perhaps the most strained of all glances came when Wheeler locked eyes with Greg Mallory. The look on the old farmer’s face was pained. It reminded me of when the nerve in my tooth was exposed and I took a drink of cold water.
Wheeler was a raw nerve for Greg Mallory.
“I thought you guys were bringing margaritas,” I said, attempting to break the ice.
I failed.
My four friends knew I held their fate in my hands, and there wasn’t enough Maalox in the world to quell that type of indigestion.
“A twenty-year cover-up,” I said. “I gotta hand it to you, to keep a secret that long in a small town where everybody knows what type of toothpaste you use, well, that’s something you ought to be proud of.”
For the briefest of moments, I could see a couple of them, most noticeably, Greg Mallory, give a nod in acknowledgement. He must have expected their house of cards to come tumbling down long ago.
I decided he was the most likely candidate to break down in tears and confess on his knees in the middle of the street.
Time would tell.
No one said anything for several tense moments. I had no intention of being the first one to talk. I would let them squirm in silence until morning if need be.
“You called this meeting,” Eccleston said, finally. “What exactly do you want?
“I want you guys to tell me how it all went down. I have my theory, but I want to hear it from you guys. From the players.”
“And if we do?” asked Mallory.
I shrugged.
For a long minute, no one said anything.
“Fine, you guys don’t want to talk. Then I’ll talk.” I took a breath. “So, this is how I think it all went down. It starts with Lord Vader over there,” I pointed at Ramsey, “and his constituents discovering recombinant Bovine Growth Hormone in the early nineties. Several companies were working on their own product, and he knew whoever was first to market stood to cash in. Ramsey wanted to begin testing but he wanted to do it somewhere there wasn’t a whole lot of dairy farming. He chose Tarrin because of its proximity; it was near enough to keep a close eye on, but not too close as to be in Lunhill’s backyard. Plus, there was only one dairy.
“Ramsey sold Mr. Mallory over there on the idea that by using rBGH, what he was calling Recom 6, Mallory would get twenty percent higher yields from his cows. I don’t doubt that he got some under-the-table funds as well.”
I glanced in Mallory’s direction. His hands were in his pockets and he fidgeted back and forth.
“At first, everything went smoothly,” I said. “The Recom 6 was administered, and quicker than anyone would have imagined, the cows started producing vastly higher yields of milk.” This was all according to the data that was recorded in the documents. It showed how much of the hormone was administered, then compared the yields of the seventeen cows being treated with Recom 6 to the group of control cows who were not. “But after just a few weeks, several of the cows developed mastitis, their udders growing swollen, red, and infected. Mastitis isn’t all that uncommon and Mallory called the local vet, Tom Lanningham, to come take a look.”
I unconsciously gave Wheeler a quick glance. I could see the pain in her face at the mention of her father. I desperately wanted to reach out and grab her hand, to pull her into a tight embrace, but now wasn’t the time.
I looked directly at Mallory and said, “Did you tell Dr. Lanningham what you’d been giving the cows? About the Recom 6?”
“Not at first,” he said.
“Shut up!” Eccleston shouted, glaring at the farmer. “We decided we weren’t gonna say anything.”
“Piss off, Leonard,” Mallory spat. “I’ll talk if I want to talk.” He looked at the ground, then back at me. “I didn’t tell him at first, but it was too suspicious, seven cows getting mastitis all at once. Finally, I came clean, told him about the hormone treatment.”
“What did he say?” Wheeler interrupted.
“He was furious. He told me how irresponsible I was. That I was threatening the lives of my cows for a few extra dollars.”
Wheeler nodded, appeased for the time being at her dad’s response.
“But he didn’t understand,” Mallory continued. “Only a farmer would understand. The margins are so small. If you don’t have a perfect year, if everything doesn’t go right as rain, you’re lucky to break even. Sure, I love them cows, love ‘em to death, but twenty percent higher yields, that keeps the banks away, keeps food on the table, and might even pay for one of my damn kids to go to college.” His voice started to break near the end.
“What did my father do?” Wheeler asked.
Everyone present knew Dr. Lanningham was Wheeler’s father, but the word somehow seemed underlined as it left her mouth.
Greg Mallory once again had his hands in his pockets.
“Greg!?” Wheeler shouted.
“He treated them with antibiotics and made up a salve. And he talked to them, you know, like how he did.” Mallory’s eyes were beginning to moisten.
Eccleston barked, “Get ahold of yourself, Greg! For God’s sake!” He spit on the ground. “And quit talking. You’re only gonna make things worse.”
“Worse!?” Mallory bellowed, wiping his eyes. “Things couldn’t get no worse.”
“When did the first cow die?” Wheeler asked.
Mallory kicked at the dirt and a small plume was whipped away by the light wind. “The day after your daddy came, I woke up to go check on the cows. Three of them were dead.” He let out a long exhale. “Then the next day, three more died. Then it seemed like one or two died every day for the next week.”
“Fifteen in all?” I asked.
He nodded.
“Out of the seventeen who were being treated with Recom 6?”
Again, he nodded.
“So what did you do? Did you call Ramsey?”
“Sure as shit. I called him the day the first few cows’ udders started to swell. He told me to just keep on with it, that it was one of the side effects and it would clear up.”
I glanced at Ramsey, waiting for him to react, but he stood resolute—a statue.
“When did you stop giving them the injections?” I asked.
“Oh, I stopped when Dr. Lanningham came to check on the first seven. He didn’t even give me a choice. I showed him the vials, and he up and took ‘em.”
Wheeler fought down a smile in my periphery.
“How did you guys keep it a secret? Fifteen dead cows in a small town. Surely, it would have gotten out.”
“I made Tom promise he wouldn’t tell. There was a good chance I might end up losing my farm if it got out.” He turned to Whe
eler and said, “Your daddy was a noble man. One of the best. I’m just sorry I got him mixed up in it.”
She said, “Yeah, well, it was his decision to take money from Lunhill for twenty years.”
I said, “Just like every single one of you.”
The Mayor, Eccleston, and Mallory all traded glances.
“Money,” I said. “That’s how a couple bad decisions became a two-decade-long cover-up.”
I watched closely to see how the four would react. Ramsey again did nothing. Mallory gulped. The Mayor glanced at Ramsey. Eccleston snorted and spit on the ground.
“Let me guess,” I said. “After Ramsey found out about the fifteen dead cows, he rode in with his piggy bank and started throwing money around. Said that if you could somehow keep a lid on their Recom 6 testing, he would pay you a nice little chunk each and every month for the rest of your lives. That’s ten thousand a month for Mallory and ten thousand a month for Tom Lanningham. Meanwhile, Ramsey’s scientists have discovered what was wrong with Recom 6—why it was killing the cows—and for the most part, now have a safe product. Ramsey didn’t want to have to go back to the drawing board, to do all the rigorous testing the FDA requires, so he instructed the scientists to fudge the testing data.”
I pointed at Mayor Van Dixon. It had taken me awhile to realize she was up to her big broach in the cover-up. I hadn’t thought much about why David Ramsey would speak at her election luncheon. I just assumed she’d paid him to come speak. She mentioned they were friends, but it wasn’t until I had my Philly PD contact, Bolger, dig into her past, that I realized they were once colleagues.
I said to her, “You worked at Lunhill for seven years, then you took a job at the FDA. When Ramsey realized the problems with Recom 6, he bribed you to input the falsified data into the FDA records. You did, Recom 6 got the green light, and Lunhill was first to market four months later.”
Mayor Van Dixon wrinkled her nose at the mention of her involvement but said nothing.
I glared at her. “A year later, you leave the FDA in St. Louis and coincidentally enough, you end up in Tarrin. Two years later, with the aid of Lunhill’s checkbook, you win the Mayoral race. You stay mayor for the next eighteen years keeping a close eye on the town and making sure Lunhill’s dirty little secret stays buried. And of course, you get a nice little bonus check each month as well.”
I turned toward Ramsey and said, “You knew how much was riding on this all staying a secret, so you didn’t stop there. You had the Mayor in your pocket, but you also wanted boots on the ground. So you plucked a police officer from St. Louis that you’d crossed paths with, and with the help of Mayor Van Dixon, you installed him as the Tarrin Chief of Police.”
I whipped my head around and stared at Eccleston. The picture I’d found of him and David Ramsey from 1992 came from Bolger. While working for the St. Louis Police Department, Eccleston had padded his income as a part-time security advisor for the Ramsey Foundation, a non-profit started by David Ramsey’s wife, Jeanette. Turned out that Eccleston had attended high school with Jeanette Ramsey in the early seventies. The picture came from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. It was a picture of Eccleston standing with Ramsey while Ramsey’s wife cut a ribbon at a playground.
Eccleston spit on the ground, not two feet from where I stood, but remained quiet.
“How much were you paying out?” I asked Ramsey. “To these three and Tom Lanningham?”
“Odell too,” Mallory said.
“I told you to shut the fuck up!” Eccleston yelled, picking up a rock and throwing it at Mallory. It missed by a foot, but sent Mallory diving to the ground.
Wheeler and I traded glances. She mouthed, “Odell?”
As Mallory pushed himself up, I asked, “Odell? The Save-More owner? He was on the take?”
Mallory nodded. “Before the cows got sick, I convinced Odell to sell the milk at the Save-More. He did, but a bunch of people ended up getting sick. A little boy almost died. Odell blamed it on the refrigerators—that the milk must have gone bad without his knowing—but we all knew it was from the milk I sold him.”
My brain was whirring, trying to synthesize the new information. I made a few adjustments to my theory.
I said “If that would have gotten out, that not only did Recom 6 kill nearly every cow treated with it at the dairy, but that the milk illegally made its way into the hands of consumers and made them sick—” I was laughing. “Wow, I can’t even contemplate the fallout. It would have been devastating.”
I turned to David Ramsey and said, “No wonder you had them all murdered.”
“Murder?” Mallory gasped. “What is he talking about, David?”
I raised my eyebrows. “You didn’t know?”
“David?” the Mayor barked. “What the hell is he talking about?”
For the first time, Ramsey reacted. His brow furrowed for the briefest moment before quickly snapping back taut.
I said, “The Save-More murders.”
The Mayor and Mallory traded glances. Eccleston leaned his head back slightly.
I said, “Lowry Barnes didn’t go into the Save-More to kill his manager because he was fired. He went in there to kill Neil Felding.”
“Neil Felding?” barked Mallory. “Why?”
“Because three weeks before the Save-More murders, Neil was combing through the computers at Lunhill when he stumbled across the pictures and documents that I’m sure Chief Eccleston has shared with you.” I explained further, “You see, Neil was working on a second iteration of Terminator seeds, which were first studied in 1994, just about the time all those cows were dying. Someone involved with the Recom 6 testing buried the pictures of the dead cows and the falsified data in a Terminator seed research folder.”
Finally, finding his voice, David Ramsey said, “All those pictures and documents could easily have been faked.”
He was right. Alone, the pictures and documents wouldn’t be enough to convict anyone in court. The pictures proved nothing except that a bunch of cows died. They didn’t prove how they died or when they died. And the only person in any of the pictures was Tom Lanningham, the town vet, who could have been tending to the cows for any number of reasons. As for the documents, though I was certain they were real, they could easily have been faked.
Luckily, the burden of proof in the court of public opinion was significantly lower than a court of law, and Lunhill would have been crucified. Which, of course, was why Lord Vader was here and not sipping scotch with the Emperor.
“You might be right,” I said. “But you and I both know the pictures and documents are real and if they ever got out, they would cause a shit storm that would bankrupt Lunhill.”
No one said anything for a pause, and I resumed my narrative.
“That very day Felding discovered the Recom 6 folder, he approached Ramsey about the pictures and documents, which upset him greatly as they involved the very town where he lived most of his life. There was a small dust-up in the cafeteria and Neil resigned from Lunhill.”
“Like all employees of Lunhill,” I continued. “Neil signed his life away on a series of non-disclosures when he was first hired, and if he wanted to avoid litigation, he would stay quiet about what he uncovered. But what you might not know is that Felding was promised an extra fifty thousand dollars a month in perpetuity if he remained silent. And so he did. Or at least planned to.”
Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed Eccleston wrinkle his nose at the mention of $50,000. Apparently, he wasn’t receiving nearly the same amount.
I glanced toward Ramsey, “But Lord Vader didn’t trust that Neil wouldn’t blow the whistle on Lunhill’s almost two-decades-old secret. And he knew if it got out that Lunhill had falsified data sent to the FDA, there was nothing to stop the public from thinking they’d falsified data for every single one of their products from Spectrum-H to all their Frankenseeds.”
“So Ramsey puts his two goons,” I nodded at Dolf and Snake, “in charge of making their little prob
lem go away.”
Dolf’s lips crawled up into a smirk.
“They could just murder Neil on his own, but coming so close to his resignation from Lunhill, it might look suspicious. And making a death look like an accident in this technological age isn’t quite as easy as it might look on television. So our friends from Blackwater—that’s right, the Blackwater—stumble on some timely information: an ex-felon had recently been fired from his job at the local Tarrin grocery store. And if there is one place in a small town where everyone is bound to go at some point, it’s the grocery store.
“They approach Lowry Barnes and give him two hundred and fifty thousand dollars to kill Neil Felding and make it look like he was there retaliating against the manager who fired him two weeks earlier.”
I glanced at both the Mayor and Mallory. “And if you’re curious how I know the exact amount Lowry Barnes was paid, it’s because just last week Lowry Barnes’ widow showed me the money. I saw it with my own eyes.” I didn’t find it necessary to explain that the money was actually in the form of a $50,000 truck, $20,000 in cash, and two $90,000 college trust funds.
The Mayor looked as though she might puke.
Mallory did puke, leaning forward, letting loose a small hiccup of whatever he last ate. He wiped his mouth with the bottom of his flannel and I continued, “Lowry waited to get word from one of the Blackwater goons that Neil was headed toward the Save-More, then he followed Neil in, made a couple statements for the surveillance cameras about how he shouldn’t have been fired, then shot all six of them.” I counted on my fingers, “Odell McBride, Peggy Bertina, Will Dennel, Tom Lanningham, Neil Felding, and Victoria Page.”
It happened when I was counting. Seeing each of the victims’ faces. It was one thing for two members of the cover-up, Tom Lanningham and Neil Felding, to both be at the Save-More. But minutes earlier, I’d learned Odell was part of the conspiracy as well. For all three of them to be there at the same time…
I smiled.
Wheeler cut her eyes at me.
