Death in the Pines

by Thom Hartmann

  Something interesting. I climbed back uphill, then backtracked to my Jeep.

  Back in Northfield I visited City Hall and found the town clerk’s office. A soft-spoken middle-aged woman with a June Cleaver look told me it was indeed possible to discover who owned any given parcel of land within the jurisdiction. She took me into a room with a battered library table occupying most of the floor space and pulled out a set of plat maps that she thought would show the area I described. As far as I could tell from distances and the landmark of a brook that had to be the one I had discovered, the land made up one parcel of something more than four hundred acres. It was owned by Benson Forestry Products Inc.

  I went back to the Jeep and called the number for This Week. The guy with the ponytail answered, and I identified myself and asked for Gina.

  “Oh, right, the gumshoe,” the man said in an exceptionally maladroit Bogart impression. In his normal voice, he said, “Hang on.”

  Gina took half a minute to pick up, and then she said, “Hello, Tyler. Or should I call you the Casanova of Northfield?”

  “I’d say that was an overstatement.”

  She laughed. “Wanda’s an old friend. She’s written for the paper now and again, and I’d like her to do more of that. She’s busy being a mom and waitress, though.” She laughed. “And news does get around. How did it feel having two wild women in your cabin at the same time?”

  I had to grin. “Honest to God, I don’t see why you even bother to publish a newspaper. By the time it hits the streets everyone knows everyone else’s business anyway.”

  “Well, there’s only a half-million people in the state, lots of us are related to each other, and most of the others are friends. Look, we’re a week from the next deadline, but that doesn’t mean I have time to chat about this and that. What’s on your mind?”

  “I need somebody to tell me about genetic engineering.”

  “Don’t know anything about it except what I’ve read in the papers. It’s either going to feed the world or end life as we know it, or maybe both. Ask Jerry, he’s the one who wrote all the stories. But be aware that he’s very anti-big business. I think he’s sore because he didn’t get a job.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “While he was still working on his dissertation. He interviewed in New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, but he hadn’t finished that PhD and nobody wanted to hire him.”

  “He told me he was going to finish his degree soon.”

  “Maybe. He had a setback when his major professor at UVM died a while back. They thought it was some bizarre seizure, but it turned out he poisoned himself somehow, picked some toxic mushrooms or something. People do that all the time here—couple of times a year, anyway. Get some wild mushroom book and go out in the woods and try to make a gourmet meal out of something deadlier than blowfish.”

  “I hadn’t heard. Anyway, Jerry’s touchy with me. I need someone else to bring me up to speed.”

  “Let me think. There’s Nigel Jameson. Retired UVM professor. Jerry used him as a source in some of his stories. British guy, old but sharp as a pin. I can find his number. Hey, would there be a story in this?”

  “Not if you leave crime to the dailies.”

  “We could make an exception. Jameson’s asked that we not give out his number. Let me call him and then call you back.”

  “That’ll do, thanks.”

  She called back in less than five minutes. “OK, twenty minutes from now, his place. Pick me up?”

  “I’m on the road now.”

  “How close?”

  “Not long.”

  “Meet you on Main Street in front of the building. Do you know where Jerry is?”

  “Haven’t spoken to him since yesterday. Is he missing?”

  “I wouldn’t call it that, but he missed a deadline and I had to throw something else into the space. He’s not answering his phone.”

  I didn’t have any response to that. “See you soon,” I said.

  A few minutes later I picked her up and she directed me to a house that looked as though it had been plucked from The Arabian Nights and plunked down in Vermont. It was a yellow Gothic on a hilltop just a little south of town, all steep rooflines and nine-foot-all diamond-pane windows. I stopped in the drive and we walked across a flagstone courtyard. Jameson met us at the door, a man with the rumpled, tweedy look of the absent-minded professor. His thinning white hair had been carefully arranged on the pink dome of his scalp. His face was dominated by a potato nose and framed by oversized ears. He had the droopy brown eyes of a basset hound. I gathered he was in his seventies, but he stood perfectly erect and gave me a firm handshake. Then he kissed Gina on the cheek.

  “Come in, come in,” he said. “Gina, it’s perfectly wonderful to see you again. And this young man is a detective, is he?”

  “Well, I have been, sir,” I said. “My name’s Oakley Tyler.”

  “Oh, heavens, don’t call me ‘sir.’ Not until they knight me. And that may happen one day, should my work come to the attention of Her Majesty.” He chuckled at his own mild joke.

  He saw us into a cluttered parlor. The walls themselves, hung with oil paintings, bore elaborate murals, clouds and angels on the ceiling. He had set out a teapot and three cups. “Now,” he said, passing each of us a cup of tea and offering a small plate of ginger snaps, “you wish to know something about genetic engineering. I’m not really an expert on that, though I try to keep up with current research as reported in the journals. But I will do my best to help you. What, in particular, do you want to know?”

  “I want to know about the possibility of genetically modifying pine trees,” I told him.

  “Possibility? What can I say? Not only is such engineering possible, my dear young man, it has been done. Many companies are working to improve forestry products. Pine is one of the primary raw materials for construction and paper. It is one of the fastest-growing softwoods as well. Oh, my, yes, the pine can certainly lend itself to genetic engineering. It isn’t particularly difficult. A lab could be set up in a space no larger than my kitchen. The complexity of genetic engineering lies in the organisms in question, not in the equipment. It isn’t a task on par with splitting the atom.”

  “Why would someone genetically engineer the trees, though? What would they hope to do?”

  “Heavens, any number of possibilities. The Southern Pine Beetle is a major problem in pulpwood production. Perhaps someone would try to engineer pines that do not attract these creatures. Or it could be that someone would want to make pines mature in less time than it takes them naturally. That would have applications in, oh, reforesting an area hit by a bad wildfire, for example.”

  I handed him a small sprig of pine, the one I’d picked up at Darryl’s. “Could you tell anything from that?”

  He took it. “It’s a dead pine twig.” He broke one of the brown needles and sniffed it. “It still has some flowing resin in it, so it hasn’t been dead for more than a month or two. I think this particular pine may have died from a fungal infection, something that’s called rust. It’s a common problem for pines. The tree is infected, the fungus spreads, the needles turn brown, and the tree dies.”

  “Could this be from a genetically engineered pine?”

  “That’s possible. Did the tree die before this branch was cut?”

  “I think so. I saw another tree about the same size, dead but standing, and it looked the same.”

  He shrugged. “Well, if it’s part of a breeding experiment, it’s a failure. When you try to produce a new variety of plant, whether by hybridizing, mutagenesis, or genetic modification, one goal—perhaps the primary goal—is the survivability of the product.”

  “A lot of trees like this were dead.”

  “A larger failed experiment, then. But of course a hundred other things could have killed it besides faulty genes: the wrong soil chemistry, herbicides, insects, drought—or excessive moisture. Climate extremes at the wrong point in the growing cycle. Have y
ou ever gardened?”

  “Not seriously.”

  “If you had, you’d know there are dozens of things that can kill a plant. You say there were many of these trees?”

  “Maybe a hundred or more.”

  He frowned. “Scattered in the forest, or all together?”

  “At least one large stand of them. I found a few stragglers in the woods among hardwoods. I was wondering if they might have died because of genetic modification, and if they had, whether the faulty gene might have jumped into the wild.”

  “Hmm. How big were the trees?”

  I held my hand out. “No more than this tall, and none were more than two inches in diameter at the base.”

  “Then it’s probably impossible that any faulty gene has escaped. Pines don’t reproduce until they’re from six to eight years old. The size you describe means these were probably no more than three. Did any of them have cones?”

  “Not that I saw.”

  “Then you can rule out gene-jumping.”

  Jameson had laid the twig down, and Gina picked it up. I said, “Dr. Jameson, could you imagine any reason why someone might commit a crime to cover up a failed genetic-engineering experiment, if that’s what this was?”

  He patted down his white hair. “There are legal penalties for releasing genetically modified organisms into the environment without proper permits. I’d say the economic impact would be greater. If a company fails at an experiment, especially if that failure involves a violation of the law, the company loses the confidence of shareholders.”

  “Could that be serious enough to lead someone to torture or kill a man?”

  “Who can say?” He sighed. “Mr. Tyler, the history of science is littered with the corpses of innovators. Marie Curie discovered radium, and the discovery cost that young woman her life. Galileo published his discoveries, and that cost him his freedom. However, crime is hardly a norm in scientific inquiry.”

  “What if a company were trying to design a better pine tree but screwed it up and created one that self-destructs after a couple of years?”

  “A failure, but hardly dangerous. Any organism that destroys itself before reaching sexual maturity represents no threat to the environment. It takes itself out of the equation.”

  I finished my cup of tea, thinking hard. Say these were the trees Darryl had been burning—destroying the evidence of a failed experiment. Jeremiah might have come across the stand of dead trees and learned or guessed what had happened. He’d investigated as much as he could, maybe helped along by his grandson’s newspaper stories and expertise.

  So say Benson had tried and failed to create some super-pine. The effort flopped, and to protect his company, Benson was having the evidence burned. But Jeremiah had raised questions, had appeared on Benson’s radar, and somehow Benson had decided to have him killed—or Frank Lauser had taken it on himself. Henry II, according to his own story, once irritably growled, “Will no one rid me of this meddlesome priest?” and some of his knights, taking that for an order, had ridden down to Canterbury and had stabbed an unarmed Thomas à Becket to death as he celebrated Mass in the cathedral. I could see Benson having Jerry tortured, or Lauser doing it, to learn how much Jeremiah might have told him.

  But Dr. Jameson had just about convinced me that there was no need, no motive. I said, “I’m trying to see if the crime could be tied in with these dead trees.”

  Jameson smiled. “My dear fellow, you are the detective. Such questions are rather beyond my field.”

  I said slowly, “I believe it must have something to do with ‘interfering.’”

  He raised his white eyebrows high. “Oh?”

  “Interfering with one form of life in a way that puts other life at risk.”

  “You may have a point,” Jameson said. “In 1998 a company engineered a bacterium, Klebsiella planticola, so it would eat cellulose and excrete alcohol. That’s a common soil bacterium, so common that virtually every plant species ever tested has shown up with it on their roots. The notion was to use the bacteria to decompose plant residue left in the field after harvest. Burning produces pollution. So a bug that ate the cellulose seemed a good bet: pile up the corn stalks or whatever, pack them in drums, toss in some Klebsiella, and in a few weeks you’d have sludge and alcohol. The sludge would contain the micronutrients and minerals and could be spread on the fields as fertilizer. In theory, the bacteria would die off as the process was completed, so it would self-destruct. But at the last minute, a smart young man at a college in Oregon asked, ‘What would happen if the Klebsiella were still alive in the sludge?”

  “And?”

  “And this bright young man experimented, and sure enough, sufficient Klebsiella remained active that plants fertilized with it were poisoned in a stew of alcohol from their own dissolving roots. Had that bacterium escaped into the wild, there are some who say it could have destroyed all plant life on Earth.” He shuddered. “But a bacterium is a long way from a pine tree.”

  “Or a mushroom?”

  He frowned. “Mushrooms?”

  “I noticed three of them in the home of the man I believe was murdered. It’s a long shot, but could this all be about mushrooms and not pines?”

  “I don’t know about murder, but mushrooms could contribute to the death of the pines. You see, pines are one of only three species of trees that require fungi to live. A fungus grows around the roots of pines, surrounding them, creating an intricate weblike network in the soil. This fungus—called mycorrhizae—actually sends tendrils into the roots of the tree, and it transports minerals, nutrients, and water directly into the roots. In exchange, the tree shares with the fungus some of the sugars it produces. It’s a symbiotic relationship. Without mycorrhizae, pines die or else do very poorly. Forestry companies sell mycorrhizae and nematodes that support the growth of trees.”

  “Are there bad ones?” I asked.

  He looked up into the far corner of the ceiling, where cherubs gazed back at us. “Indeed there are, bad at least for pines. The single largest living organism on Earth is a parasitic fungus out west, in Oregon, I believe, or perhaps Washington State. It’s called Armillaria, and weighs hundreds of thousands of tons, may be eight thousand years old, and covers nearly ten square kilometers.”

  “What if the fungus, not the trees, had been genetically altered?”

  “That could be problematic. If you created mycorrhizae that transported twice the usual nutrients and water into a pine tree, theoretically the tree would grow faster. But in nature nothing is ever free—there is always a trade-off. Enhance one quality and lose another. A change will always have unintended consequences. Always. For example, in addition to providing nutrients, mycorrhizae also protect the pine from other fungi that can attack the roots and cause them to rot. A pumped-up mycorrhiza might just lose that protective ability. And it could spread rapidly.”

  “How?”

  “The mushrooms you mention. No doubt you have seen what are called fairy rings, circles of mushrooms, after heavy rains?”

  “Yes.”

  “Actually the mushrooms are merely the visible reproductive system of a much larger organism that occupies the whole space within the circle, but underground, there’s a network of tendrils intertwined with and interpenetrating the pine tree roots. The mushrooms produce spores, the spores spread on the wind, which is the main way the fungus reproduces. If the mycorrhizae were genetically engineered and faulty, its DNA could spread to other colonies of the same fungus, and its genetic code could replace that of the natural organism. In the most extreme case, it could destroy every pine tree in the world.”

  22

  After dropping off Gina, I drove to Burlington trying to piece it all together. Benson had the scientific background, but so did the guy with the stun gun, the consultant Dr. Lauser. I tried it this way and that. Benson had tinkered with engineering a fungus, it went bad, and Jeremiah had stumbled across evidence that Benson’s company had broken the law, or worse, that it had released
something into the wild that threatened to kill off an economically important tree. On Benson’s orders, someone had blown up Jeremiah’s truck, had shot at him, and then had killed the old man. Maybe Lauser’s consulting retainers included little chores like torturing Jerry to find out if his grandfather had tipped him off about the whole sorry business.

  It was like trying to assemble a jigsaw puzzle that had been soaked in ink, with some pieces missing and some nothing more than soggy black pulp. I got to the Five Spice Café a little early. It was an Asian fusion place with a great wine list. As I sat and waited for Benson to show up, I people watched and made up guesses about who people were, deep down inside, and what they were talking about over lunch.

  One thirty came and went; I’d moved from people-watching to a copy of the Burlington Free Press that a young man at the table next to mine offered me when he finished eating and got up to leave. I ordered at two, and at two thirty I paid the check and headed home. An hour later I drove up the old logging road—by now it was more like the bed of a mountain stream, running with meltwater—and saw a forest green Land Rover parked just out of sight of the main road, a newer, top-of-the-line model. I got out and glanced through the window and saw mail on the front seat, a scattering of letters addressed to Benson Forestry Products Inc. I didn’t know if Benson was waiting at the cabin to talk to me, sighting in on me through a telescope mounted atop a high-powered rifle, or setting fire to my home.

  I left my car and threaded my way through the edge of the forest, on the same side where I’d first met Sylvia. I circled up the hill until I came within sight of the clearing. Nothing looked out of order. The thin wisp of smoke from the chimney was about what I would expect of a fire that hadn’t been stoked in hours.