by Robin Lamont
Frowning with confusion, Jude asked, “What did Tim mean?”
“No freakin’ idea.”
“Did Davidson see you?”
“I don’t think so. It was getting dark and they were too far away.”
“Who was the other?”
“Never saw him before. Maybe that’s who Tim was buggin’ about. It was all I could do to keep him from running over there, which I did not want. And by that time, I thought maybe your friend had dropped acid ’cause he kept repeating some Russian name. Assanov, Dostoyevsky, something like that.”
Jude felt like she was looking at a Rubik’s Cube in motion: along one plane, colors were snapping into a pattern, but when she turned it over to look from another side, there was no sense of order. She took a stab. “Ostrovsky?”
“Yeah, that might have been it.”
CHAPTER 20
Sleep, like the truth in Half Moon, was hard to come by. A few fitful hours were all she could manage. Just before dawn, Jude slipped on a thin hooded sweatshirt, hoping to get onto the Davidson farm before everyone woke. Tim might have been “jacked” as Bobby put it, but the drug dealer admitted that actual hallucinations on heroin were rare. Maybe Tim really had seen Ostrovsky with the farmer. But why would he refer to him as ‘he who walks behind the rows’? Tim had never described him to Jude as evil or abusive, in fact he’d said Ostrovsky seemed detached and clinical to a fault.
She had sketched out a timeline, adding the little that Bobby had told her: Kurt Buck found Heather and Tim on Monday night, when Tim became alarmed at possibly seeing Ostrovsky – or someone he thought was Ostrovsky. He went to work the next day and left at the end of his shift. He later returned to the lab, telling Sylvia he’d left his phone – which probably wasn’t true since he had sent Jude the photographs in the interim. Jude believed he’d come back to the lab for Bailey. It was the last anyone had heard of him, over a week ago.
In the half-light, she saw the outline of Jim Davidson’s house set back from the road. Across the way was an old barn with an attached pen where a dozen cows were standing knee-deep in manure. Nearby, a pickup truck missing a wheel had been left to rust. Something about the place tugged at her, but Jude didn’t stop to analyze it. She drove another two hundred yards where she found a line of beech and cottonwood trees and a barbed wire fence that separated the two farmers’ properties. There was a tractor path on the Buck side running parallel to the fence.
Jude pulled her car onto the shoulder at the tree line and began to follow the path. The horizon was beginning to brighten but footing was difficult because of the rutted tire tracks. More than once, she slipped on a cow patty.
She smelled the apples before she saw the smaller, well-spaced trees. Bobby said that they’d parked in the orchard at the end of the tractor path, and that’s where Tim had seen Ostrovsky. “Don’t know what it is you think you’ll find,” he’d said, “but knock yourself out.”
When the track ended, she stopped and stared out at Davidson’s empty field. It was brown and barren. What was Ostrovsky – if it really was him – doing here? Carefully, she climbed over the wire fencing where it sagged. Rows of something had grown and since been harvested. Picking her way over the furrows, she walked deeper into the cultivated area. It was a cornfield – an ex-cornfield to be exact. Pale, yellowed stalks stuck up from the ground in six-inch spikes and dried corn husks were strewn everywhere. Just a field, no different from the other harvested cornfields that stretched for miles in this part of the world. She wondered if Tim had been hallucinating. Flooded with disappointment, Jude kicked at a worm-eaten cob missed by the combine.
An angry tractor’s growl broke into her frustration. Snapping her head up, she saw someone at the far end of the field driving a tractor purposefully in her direction. For a moment, she thought to meet him and ask if he knew Ostrovsky. But something felt wrong. She didn’t like the way the tractor was driving directly at her and the driver’s head was lowered in anger. A primal instinct kicked in.
Jude turned and began to trot back toward the road. The tractor driver was over fifty yards away and she thought she could easily outpace him. But behind her she could hear the engine gears shift as it ramped up speed. She started to run, yet the sound kept getting closer and closer. How fast can a frickin’ tractor go? she thought as she leapt over the rows. Pretty fast it turned out. Up ahead she could see the road but didn’t think she could get to her car before being overtaken.
Veering to her right, she ran to the wire fence between the properties. She pushed down on the wire to swing her leg over the barrier. One of the barbs dug into her palm. Able to get her right leg over, she let go, trying to balance on one leg and lift her other leg over. But her jeans caught on the fence and she fell backwards. The tractor was still coming toward her as she tugged on the fabric.
Finally, with a rip, her jeans came loose. She could see the man’s face, his features twisted in fury. He was still yelling at her. Jude scrambled onto all fours, got to her feet, and stumbled into the line of trees on Buck’s side.
Once she was safely out of sight, she stopped and caught her breath. Behind her, the man she now believed was Davidson hauled the tractor around and made a beeline toward his house. Through the branches, she watched him stop at the barn, jump off the tractor, and jog into his house – probably to call the cops. Only then did she make a dash for her car.
A short time later, she circled back and risked driving past his house. To her relief, there were no police cars in the driveway. Didn’t mean he hadn’t called them, but if he had, it meant they hadn’t deemed a solo female trespasser an imminent danger to the farmer or to the community. There was a car in the driveway, however – a BMW. It looked brand new, very expensive, and out of place on the run-down property. As she went by, the clouds parted, and the car’s shiny blue finish flashed in the early morning sun. For a moment she cast about for the name of the color … sapphire … marine?
Until something else hit her like a thunderclap. She’d gotten a better look at Davidson’s house. A yellow house. The same house in the photograph Tim had sent – the fixer-upper he had his eye on, or so Jude assumed. But she’d misunderstood. Tim had taken the photo to alert her to something about Davidson and his field.
Holy shit, Tim was trying to document the big thing that would bring Amaethon down. But it wasn’t about the Animal Welfare Act and it wasn’t inside the lab. It was here. What is it, Tim? What were you trying to tell me?
* * *
At the motel, Jude brought out the file that months ago they’d put together on Amaethon, even before Tim came to them. They’d known it was a small company. The big guys – the Pfizers and the GlaxoSmithKlines – had thousands of employees and were very careful to vet those they hired. The Kinship had a much better chance of getting an undercover in place with a startup like Amaethon. Still, its website was thin – the usual drivel about being poised for the future and translating vision into reality. Executive officers were listed as Dillon Byer (CEO) and Stuart Ostrovsky (Chief Scientific Officer), but information on their products was only available “on request.”
Jude turned her attention again to web searches, surprised anew at how little information she could find. Lucas had forwarded the journal article concerning Monsanto’s interest in a take-over bid of Amaethon, but it didn’t tell her anything about what the company actually did.
It took an hour of searching, clicking on links that directed her to other links that sent her to scientific journals to which she didn’t have access or to unintelligible technical articles, until finally, she found a year-old reference in an online blog which itself didn’t appear to be active any longer. It read: Amaethon Industries – a private biotechnology company pioneering the use of recombinant proteins for large-scale production in the pharmaceutical, animal health and industrial protein markets.
Okaaay … what the hell were recombinant p
roteins? Jude dug in again. And with every new piece of information she gathered, more colors in the Rubik’s Cube snapped in line and her horror grew. It wasn’t just Amaethon, there were others. They were part of a growing industry that sought big profits with little thought to environmental impacts or unintended consequences. Jude sat back from her computer, barely breathing. She couldn’t be a hundred percent sure not yet – but if Amaethon was doing what she thought it was, she suspected something had gone horribly wrong. And Tim had found out what it was.
* * *
Dillon Byer was reaching into a lower file drawer in Ostrovsky’s office when out of the corner of his eye, he saw a flash of white on the floor. He whipped around so fast that he banged his knuckles on the upper drawer, believing he’d seen one of Stu’s rats scurrying out of a floor vent. But it was just a white disposable shoe cover that skittered toward him in the draft created when the door opened.
“Oh, sorry,” exclaimed Sylvia. “I thought Dr. Ostrovsky–”
“Don’t you knock?” Byer accused, rubbing his hand.
She flushed. “He doesn’t always hear.”
Byer regained his equilibrium and offered up a conspiratorial grin. “Scientists! What can I do for you, Sylvia?”
She wrinkled her nose, pretending to be charmed. But she didn’t like Byer. It wasn’t only that he tried to look all country-casual. Everything about him seemed calibrated to make people think he was just a plain ole’ Vermont boy. He wore mismatched socks and a creased sport coat, as if his wardrobe was an afterthought. But one time, he left his blazer on a chair and she looked at the label … some fancy Italian name. And his car? Yeah, right. She wasn’t fooled; everyone knew he came from old money in Boston. Old, big money. But what spooked her more was that behind his façade, she sensed something dangerous. A dangerousness that drove a hundred miles an hour, do not pass go, all the way from the home state of desperation. She saw it all the time in the kids waiting on Bobby Gravaux, trying to act like it was all chill, when they knew that if he didn’t show, the bugs under their skin would try to claw their way out. Sylvia didn’t like what she saw in Byer because she saw it in herself.
Nevertheless, an opportunity had presented itself and she thought she could buy herself a little insurance. “I came up to tell him about a couple of the dogs, but I’ll find him later,” she said. Then, as if she’d just thought of it, added, “You know that woman with the animal rights group? She’s still around, asking a lot of questions.”
“Oh, what kind of questions?” asked Byer, lightly brushing the bangs from his forehead.
“I don’t know what’s she saying to other people, but she told me that she thinks something happened to her pal Jeffries, which isn’t even his real name. I guess the cops found his car, but she’s like obsessed with this idea that somebody ran him off the road and maybe killed him, I don’t know.”
Byer made a face. “That’s crazy.”
“Yeah, right? I seriously think this woman is off her rocker.”
“What … why is she talking to you?”
“She saw me at Galvey’s and got right in my face. Supposedly, Jeffries was caught with one of the locals using heroin, and she wanted to know where he got it … like I would know.”
“He was using heroin?”
“It’s what I heard, yeah.”
“Why does she think he was run off the road?”
“Supposedly the girl Jeffries was doing heroin with is the girlfriend of some drug dealer. Maybe the guy found out and came after Jeffries.”
“Wow. Sounds like a drug deal gone bad.”
“I couldn’t tell you. But I do think this woman is not right in the head. She’s like fixated on the drug thing, not to mention obsessed with Jeffries himself. She was even accusing me and my friends of using drugs.”
“I’m sorry. That must have been distressing.”
“It really was. Anyway … I just thought you should know, what with animal rights people trying to shut down labs and all. They can be very aggressive. So, when she started asking about the dogs here and them getting sick, I just turned around and walked away.”
“She was asking about the lab?”
“Like I said, I walked away.”
“That’s good,” Byer assured her. “That’s precisely what you should do. And Sylvia, let me know if she bothers you again.” When the tech turned to depart, Byer stopped her. “Where is this woman staying, anyway?”
“I think she said the Riverside Motel.”
Byer winked. “Got to keep an eye on these crazy animal activists. Never know what they might do.”
When Sylvia left, he brought his sore knuckles up to his mouth and pressed them hard against his teeth.
CHAPTER 21
From across the road it looked like any other Vermont farmhouse – a cedar wood shingle house with a steeply pitched roof. A child’s swing set peeked around the corner from the rear of the house. Nearby was a faded red barn with a few horses grazing in the meadow out back. Only the sign at the bottom of the driveway - Dana Packer DVM, Integrative Veterinary Services – gave away that this was, in fact, a business.
Jude was bone tired. She had spent much of the afternoon tracking down vets in the area, working her way in ever-widening concentric circles around Half Moon. All the while she thought about Tim. He wasn’t working for Monsanto and he hadn’t abandoned his mission, she believed that now. Rather, he had learned something about Amaethon – something more than the all-too-common abuse of animals that might net them a government fine. And if he uncovered what she was beginning to suspect, he would have tried to get back to her, to give her the evidence he found. Isn’t that what she kept pressing him to do? Stop whining about what they’re doing and get proof.
When she first surmised that Tim had taken Bailey, she believed it was because he was sickened by the dog’s suffering and wanted to save him. Tim was a kind, compassionate person; it’s why he took the job in the first place. But now she was beginning to think that he had taken Bailey for her. Because Bailey was the evidence – or part of it. Tim had been trying to please her until the end.
Self-reproach sent waves of nausea through her and all Jude could do was lean her head back until they passed. She made herself sick sometimes. So single-minded in her fight for animals, she left people by the side of the road like so much unwanted baggage. God, why hadn’t she pulled him off right away, or at least when Gordon told her to?
Her phone rang. Probably Gordon again, or Lucas. Where are you? Why aren’t you returning my calls? Come back or you’re out of a job. She glanced at the caller’s number. Didn’t recognize it.
“Hello?”
“Um, is this Gillian?”
Sorry? Jude felt as though she were coming out of a fog. Oh, right. “Yeah, this is she. Who’s this?”
“Pete from True Service Auto Body. You spoke to Charlie the other day? Said you were looking for a blue car we might have done some work on?”
“Yes, thanks.” She was about to stop the guy from going any further since she’d already found out about the work on Bobby’s car.
He was too quick for her. “Well, last week I did a job on a 2018 BMW … an M4. The whole right side was banged up. Think I did a half decent job, if I do say so myself.”
A zinging sound began to reverberate in the back of Jude’s head.
“A BMW?”
“Yeah. I repainted the whole car. Couldn’t match it exactly because the guy didn’t want to wait for the manufacturer’s paint. But it was close. A nice cobalt blue.”
That’s it, thought Jude. The name of the blue that had escaped her. Cobalt blue, a stunning, aggressive color – the BMW in Davidson’s driveway.
“Did you get the name of the owner?”
Pete chuckled. “That’s the thing. It was some kid, so at first, I thought he’d taken his daddy’s car and didn
’t want him to find out about the accident. But he came back to pick it up a few days ago. Paid cash.”
“Cash?”
“Yeah, doesn’t happen a lot.”
“Did he give you a name?”
“Hold on … here it is. John Rivers. He gave me an address in Brattleboro, which I happen to know pretty well. I never heard of the street.”
“He gave you a phony name and address?”
“Can’t swear to it. With the cash and all, it smelled funny, but it’s not my business to grill the kid, know what I’m sayin’?”
“Sure.”
“Wish I could be more help.”
“You’ve been a big help, thanks.”
“Good, hope you nail the a-hole who hit you.”
“I’m working on it.”
Jude hung up, her weariness falling away as adrenaline began to pump through her system. Cobalt blue BMW. Fake name, fake address. Cash. Jesus, why didn’t she get the license plate number when she went by Davidson’s? It might belong to Ostrovsky, although even if he could afford it, he didn’t strike her as a BMW enthusiast. That kind of car was more up his partner’s alley. Dillon Byer and his $50,000 “enduring timepiece.”
She got out of the car and marched up the driveway, praying that this was the one.
The vet’s practice was set up in the old tack room of the barn, presumably so he could keep horses and other large animals overnight. After being assured that Jude was not selling anything, the vet’s assistant told her that Dr. Packer was in back with a patient and that he’d be out shortly. It gave Jude time to look around the small but bright waiting room. One wall was covered in photos of pet owners with their dogs, cats, rabbits, and horses, most of them inscribed, Thank you, Dr. Packer! There was one picture of a young girl, her arm around a three-hundred-pound hog. We love you, Dr. Dana, it said, the word “love” drawn as a big, curlicued heart. Jude decided she liked him already.