Death Takes a Gander

by Goff, Christine

Nate picked a pencil up off his desk and bounced the eraser on the desk blotter. “I have no reason to request another sample. Hunches don’t count.” He set down the pencil. “I’ll let you know if I come up with anything more concrete.”

  “What about the samples we took from the geese?”

  “There’s no way to link them to an Agriventures cornfield.”

  He was right. And the same would be true of the samples she and Lark had taken at the Barr Lake Hunt Club. What they needed was a sample taken directly from the cornfield. Was that what Ian had been after on the night he died?

  “Did you talk to Ian about any of this?”

  Nate didn’t answer immediately. “I told him to leave it alone, just like I’m telling you.”

  Angela pushed up out of her chair and headed towards the door. “Thanks for your time.”

  She knew what she had to do.

  “I’m warning you, Angela. It’s dangerous.”

  She thought of Eric and the phone call to Velof, and stopped midway to the door. Nate was Tauer’s alibi. “What time did you meet John Frakus and Donald Tauer in Elk Lake?”

  “Why?” His eyes narrowed. “If you’re thinking Tauer pushed Eric Linenger into the water, think again.”

  “What time?”

  He stared her down, then answered. “Five forty. I was late, but he and Frakus were waiting.”

  She would check his answer against the accident report and the estimated amount of time Eric was in the water. It would be close. “Thanks.”

  She thought of another question as she hit the door. “Besides the fine, are there any other repercussions if Agriventures is caught growing GE corn?”

  From what Nate had just told her, there didn’t seem to be enough at stake to warrant Tauer’s murdering anyone. With no laws in place monitoring GE crops, the penalties for noncompliance were practically nil. Exposure due to the deaths of a few migratory birds amounted to a slap on the wrist.

  Nate cupped his hands behind his head and leaned back in his chair. “Sure, there are a number of possibilities. Criminal charges could be brought against the principals, though I doubt it. More than likely, boycotts against Agriventures, Inc. within the organic industry would dry up the markets. Tauer would be forced into bankruptcy.”

  “What you’re saying is, anyone connected to the company stands to lose.”

  “Yeah, and on the flipside, any rival stands to gain.” He leaned forward again. “I need to get back to work.”

  “Thanks for the information, Nate.”

  “It was good to see you, Peeps.”

  She wished she could say the same.

  With her back to him, she didn’t see him get out of his chair, but suddenly his hand gripped the door above her head, preventing her exit. He smiled down at her, but his eyes remained cold. “Now that you know IES is on top of it, I’m trusting you to back off.”

  He was telling her to drop the investigation. Had he asked the same thing of Ian?

  “It’s out of my hands,” she replied. There was more truth in the statement than he realized. She tugged on the door, but Nate held it in place, bending down until she could smell the pine scent of his aftershave and the residue of Ivory soap on his skin.

  “Don’t be stupid, Angela.”

  Was it the couched warning or his proximity that was making her tremble?

  Angela tugged on the door again, only this time he let it go. She stumbled, and he broke her fall, hard arms circling her waist. Her heart fluttered. A remnant of old love? It felt more like fear.

  Clear of the building, Angela sprinted for her car, a slap-in-the-face reminder of her current position. Along with losing the case, investigating on her own time meant she lost the accoutrements of the job—the use of her truck, the uniform, the duty belt. The one exception was her gun, and that she kept locked in the glove compartment.

  Sitting behind the wheel, she stared out at the farm fields stretching east to the Kansas state line. Most of them were planted seasonally in sugar beets or wheat. How many of them were genetically engineered? Or did anyone—even the USDA—know?

  Despite her discomfort, the conversation with Nate had borne fruit. She had come away with a motive for Ian’s murder, Eric’s accident, and her own near brush with death. Whoever had perpetrated the crimes wanted to cover up the fact that Agriventures, Inc. had planted their fields in GE corn.

  Of the possible suspects, Donald Tauer led the pack. He had the most to lose, and he had been in Elk Lake over the weekend. Had he arrived on the ice early and discovered the geese? If so, it made sense he would scatter the lead sinkers on the ice, figuring any further investigation would be halted and the geese would be treated for lead poisoning. It was his permit Frakus had used to instigate the carnage. Plus, he could easily have been Ian’s mystery date or caught Ian trying to sample his cornfield. Now that Coot had admitted to helping himself to the goose meat, all the pieces dropped into place.

  Of course, Radigan had been at the lake too. But Ian wasn’t investigating the shot, or was he? She needed to check his notes. Frakus and Ducharme were ruled out when she connected the poisonings at Elk Park to Barr Lake. Which left Nate. What if her first instincts were correct? What if he and Tauer were friends, and the IES story was merely a coverup? Had Ian suspected Nate of rubber-stamping commodities?

  The thought gave her a chill, and she cranked the heat up a notch. If that were the case, why would Nate give her so much information on the GE crop situation? Unless…

  What if Nate had orchestrated Ian’s death? Could he be trying to set her up too? The case hinged on the corn in Agriventures’s field. Before she started accusing anyone, she needed proof that the corn had poisoned the geese. Nate knew her well enough to know she wouldn’t drop the investigation, especially if the order came through him. Was he banking on her tenacity?

  First things first, whispered Ian’s voice.

  Angela laid out a plan. First she’d check Ian’s notes and do her research. Then she’d gather the evidence. By then, she ought to have narrowed it down to one of the three suspects.

  An hour later, she parked her car in front of the regional U.S. Fish and Wildlife offices in Denver. Avoiding Kramner, she picked her way through the maze of partitions and slipped into her cubicle near the back of the room. The space looked neglected, in the same sagging way a house did when no one lived there. An avalanche of memos spilled from her inbox onto the desk. A stack of manila folders begged to be filed. Two pictures were thumb-tacked into the wall—one a photograph of her parents in Italy, the other a computer printout of Samson, the elk, prior to his demise in Rocky Mountain National Park.

  The desk chair canted slightly to the left, which she compensated for by curling her leg up under her bottom. Hunkering down, she booted up the computer and requested information on Agriventures, Inc.

  Donald Tauer, CEO, owned fifty-one percent of the company. The other forty-nine percent was publicly traded. According to the prospectus, Agriventures, though new to the organic market, commanded a large slice of the nation’s organic sales. Based on the quarterly report, millions of dollars had been invested over the past five years, implementing organic farming techniques across vast holdings. Assets outweighed the debts, and Agriventures appeared to be on the verge of paying dividends to its stockholders for the first time.

  So why risk it all by planting GE corn?

  She typed in Donald Tauer’s name and it came up connected with a number of local and regional festivals like the Elk Park Ice Fishing Jamboree. A family man, an outdoorsman, his driving line was “we focus on raising food that’s safe for you and your families to eat.”

  By now, her foot was asleep, so she eased it out from under her, tamping its dead weight on the floor.

  Out of curiosity, she typed in “Radigan Enterprises” and pulled up some interesting stuff. Radigan’s company had diversified in the seventies, gobbling up a hodgepodge of pharmaceutical companies, defense contractors, book publishing businesses, and ba
nking cooperatives. The principal shareholder, Charles Embry Radigan, III, better known as Chuck, specialized in making money. The self-made billionaire—chairman of the Radigan Enterprises board of directors, active member of the National Rifle Association, and regional director of Ducks Unlimited—lived in a four-million-dollar mansion in Cherry Hills Farms. None of it reason enough to hang him.

  “Glad to see you’re working.”

  Angela looked up to find Kramner standing in the doorway to her cubicle. She clicked on the screen saver. “Research.”

  Without preamble, he said, “Bernie Crandall called this morning.”

  “And? Did he have the results of the fingerprint testing on the sinker containers?”

  “They pulled a partial.”

  Angela sat up straighter in the chair, causing it to shift and nearly dump her onto the floor. It took her a moment to balance. “Whose?”

  “They think it belongs to a kid.”

  “As in little kid?”

  Kramner bumped his glasses higher on his nose. “It’s hard to say. They checked with Operation Kidprint and came up empty-handed, but it looks like the lead on the ice was a prank.”

  She wasn’t buying that assessment.

  Coincidence—the remarkable happening of similar events by chance. Hadn’t that been Kramner’s definition? There were far too many coincidences in this case for her to accept the randomness of the events.

  “Thank you, sir.”

  After Kramner left, her cell phone rang.

  “Dimato.”

  “Angela, it’s Lark. Covyduck just called.”

  More good news?

  “You were right about the corn.”

  CHAPTER 19

  Angela Lark asked to call an emergency meeting of the EPOCH members, then hung up the phone and hurried to Ian’s office. Locating the notebook on waterfowl, she opened it to the first page. The more current notes—at least as far as she could tell from where they’d been positioned on Ian’s desk—were near the front. Halfway down the first page, she found what she was looking for.

  Waterfowl. Corn product. Meeting changed to six-thirty.

  That was an hour before dispatch had notified her that Ian wanted backup. A little more than two hours before she’d found him dead. He must have realized he was walking into a trap at Barr Lake. More important, it proved she was on the right track, that it was the corn, not the shot alternative, that had caused the die-off.

  Her next stop was dispatch. The dispatch center, located in the Denver City and County Building off Colfax Avenue, had taken Ian’s emergency call.

  Angela stopped in the doorway and took in the scene. There were five stations, each occupied by a dispatcher. Each station housed several different monitors. From what she could see, one monitor displayed the address and personal information of the caller, one showed the location of the various emergency response teams, and another maintained a list of the calls being handled. When the phone rang, someone would answer and assess the emergency. Calls were triaged, and often a dispatcher handled two or more calls at time.

  One young man with a waist-length ponytail sat with his back to the door, working a possible heart attack. He held a flip card with assessment questions open in one hand and was trying hard to calm down the caller.

  “Please, ma’am, I need you to remain calm. Is your mother breathing?”

  “Yes.” The caller’s voice sounded high-pitched and stressed.

  “Is she sitting up?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s good.” The dispatcher kept his voice soothing and even. “Emergency personnel are on the scene. Can you go to the door?”

  “I don’t want to leave her.”

  “I need you to open the door.”

  Angela watched the tape spin. All calls were recorded, and recordings were archived by date. The other dispatchers were also on calls, so Angela waited. Finally, the dispatcher convinced the woman whose mother was having a heart attack to open the door.

  “Hey there,” he said, swiveling his chair around. “What can I do for you?”

  Angela showed her credentials. “One of the dispatchers here relayed a message to me from my partner on the night he died.”

  The young man’s face turned grim. “That would be me. My name’s Taylor. I was sorry to hear the outcome. He didn’t sound like he was in trouble.”

  “If I could just listen to the dispatch tape… ”

  The young man frowned. “Do you have authorization?”

  “I’m a law enforcement officer. All I want to do is listen.”

  “Sure, why not? Hey, guys,” he hollered to his coworkers, “I’m going on break.” He led Angela to a back room and started down a row of bookshelves crammed with small metal canisters. “That was New Year’s Eve, wasn’t it?”

  “That’s right.”

  He found the tape and threaded it onto a reel-to-reel player. “You have any idea what time the call was made?”

  She told him, and he cued up the tape.

  Hearing Ian’s voice brought a lump to her throat. The dispatcher had been right. Ian was hard to hear and the message sounded garbled. She could hear the swan in the background and what sounded like someone else’s voice.

  “Do you hear that? There’s another person there. Can you focus in on that voice?”

  “You mean like isolate the track? Bring down the other stuff, and bring up the voice?”

  “Yes.”

  “No.”

  “Can you turn it up, then?”

  The young man complied, and Angela tried using her brain as a filter.

  Run, man, run.

  “I think he said ‘run,’” Taylor said.

  “Play it again.” Angela’s blood turned cold at the sound of the voice. This time, it wasn’t just the command, it was the voice she recognized. Donald Tauer’s voice. It almost sounded like a warning.

  “Hold on to this tape,” she ordered. She jotted down its number and Taylor’s name, then headed back to her car. She wondered why no one had ever mentioned the second voice on the tape. Surely Kramner had heard it. If not, she intended to play him a copy.

  The day shift was over by the time she left dispatch, and Kramner was already gone. She tried catching him on his cell phone, but he didn’t pick up. Even if he had, as hard as he was working to refute the case, she doubted he’d place much stock in the tape without additional evidence.

  That’s where the EPOCH members came in.

  It took her an hour and a half to drive to Elk Park. By the time she arrived, the bird club members were convened around the table in Lark’s kitchen—Harry, Dorothy, Cecilia, Gertie, Andrew, Opal, and Lark.

  “Good, let’s get started,” Andrew said, dipping his hand into a bag of corn tortilla chips. “What’s so all-fired important that you pulled us away from supper?”

  “I need your help.” She told them about the toxicology reports on the geese and the guests at the Drummond. “I had Covyduck run the sample back through. It turns out the corn we found in the goose’s gizzard has been genetically engineered.”

  Gertie’s mouth dropped open. Andrew set his corn chip back in the bag.

  “What’s it being engineered for?” Harry asked.

  “We don’t know—pharmaceuticals, pesticide resistance. All the lab can tell us at this point is that the genetic manipulation increased the levels of plant toxins, producing a poison that caused the geese to get sick.”

  A moment of silence followed her pronouncement, then the EPOCH members erupted with questions.

  “Does that mean Ducharme’s geese ate the same corn?” Gertie asked.

  “Most likely,” Lark said. “I did some calling around this morning and discovered he’d contracted with Organics Unlimited for twenty-five geese.”

  “How bad is the poison?” Cecilia asked.

  “Bad,” Dorothy said. “It’s killed fifty birds.”

  “You know what I mean, Dot. It’s also worked its way clear of the system of the other
s. What I’d like to hear about is long-term effects.”

  Angela scanned the lab report. “It doesn’t mention those here.”

  “Do we know who’s responsible?” asked Opal.

  The question hung in the air. All eyes turned to Angela.

  “My money’s on Agriventures,” she said.

  “Oh my,” Cecilia said. “Are you saying that nice young man, Donald Tauer, is responsible for all of this?”

  “I think it’s possible he’s responsible for everything—the geese die-off, the banquet guest poisoning, Ian’s death, Eric’s accident.”

  “He’s not looking quite so nice anymore,” Dorothy said.

  “Do you have any proof?” Harry asked.

  Angela looked around the table. “That’s why I asked for this meeting. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has samples from the wetlands at the Barr Lake Hunt Club. If there’s corn vegetation present, I can have the lab run a genetics test to compare the results with the samples from the goose necropsy and from the blood work of the patients. That should prove the corn is what caused the poisonings.”

  “What about the homeless guys?” Gertie asked.

  “They ate the sick geese from the lake, so they fall in the same group. The problem is, the only real way to prove the corn is being grown by Agriventures is to collect samples from one of their fields.” Angela took a sip of hot tea and let the hot water bathe her throat.

  “So collect them,” Andrew said. “Isn’t that your job?”

  “I’m off the case, remember?” She pushed back her thick curls with both hands and pinned the hair in place behind her ears. “Besides, not even IES can go in.”

  “Acronym?” Gertie said.

  “Investigative and Enforcement Services, they’re attached to the USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, APHIS.”

  Harry reached for the corn chip bag. “Why not?”

  “They don’t have probable cause, and they’re bound by due process.”

  “Meaning what?” Gertie asked.

  “IES would have to file a request for samples, and be denied multiple times, before they can force Tauer into letting them collect specimens. If they handle it any other way, it becomes inadmissible in court.”