‘So’s mine. Olivia was lucky.’
Rollie sat down and leaned back in his chair. ‘Thank you for bringing Tanya here. I appreciate it.’
‘Of course.’
‘You look like hell,’ Rollie said.
‘Other than a splitting headache, I’m fine.’
‘You want some Advil?’
‘Actually, that would be great.’
Rollie dug inside the top drawer of his desk and found an old plastic bottle that looked as if it had been used and re-used dozens of times. He unscrewed the top and poured three red tablets into his hand. The pills looked fresher than the container in which he stored them. He passed them to Chris, who swallowed them down.
‘Tanya thinks Kirk Watson was trying to abduct her,’ Chris warned him.
Rollie’s chest swelled with a long, fierce breath. ‘Kirk.’
‘You know him?’
‘I’ve known him for years. Actually, I defended him when he killed his father.’
‘Kirk killed his father?’ Chris asked.
‘About seven years ago. He beat him to death with a hammer and then cut up the body.’
‘Jesus.’
‘Yeah. Kirk’s dad beat the crap out of the younger boy, Lenny, whenever he could. With the evidence of abuse, I got the whole thing handled with a juvie sentence.’
‘I’m surprised Kirk would harm Tanya after you got him a slap on the wrist for murder.’
‘Kirk thought he should have walked.’
‘Tanya says the police around here won’t touch him,’ Chris said. ‘Is that true?’
‘Yeah, Kirk always seems to have an alibi when things happen. Or witnesses get cold feet and decide not to testify. It’s ugly.’
‘Do you still represent him?’
‘Hell, no. Not anymore. Even ambulance chasers like me have some standards. I’m not in it for the money. Good thing, because I don’t make much. A lot less since the Mondamin lawsuit.’
‘Oh?’
‘People in Barron think I’m a traitor. They didn’t like me representing the families in St. Croix. Fortunately, there are still enough people who want to dump their spouses or who get DUIs doing 105 miles an hour on Highway 7 to keep me in business. I’m about the only game in town, and my rates are cheap.’
‘Did you grow up around here?’
Rollie took another bite of his hamburger. ‘In other words, why would I be practicing law in a town of five thousand people if I’m not a native? Yeah, I still live on the family farm a few miles south of town. It’s all weeds now. My mom was pretty upset when I chose law over farming, but I could read the writing on the wall. Farming was a dead end. Plus, these hands weren’t meant for manual labor.’
‘It’s just you and Tanya?’
Hearing his daughter’s name made Rollie smile. ‘Yeah, it’s her and me. I met her mother when I was in law school at Billy Mitchell in the Cities. It was one of those relationships that should have fizzled after a couple months, but she got pregnant, and we got married. It didn’t take her long to figure out that she hated small towns, hated being a mother, and hated me, not necessarily in that order. Tanya was only two, and I wanted custody. Sarah didn’t put up a fight.’
‘Are you still in contact with her?’
‘I don’t have a clue where she is, and that’s fine. Tanya does okay with me as a Dad and Mom rolled into one.’
Chris wondered if that was true. He thought about Olivia growing up without him for the last three years. Rollie Swenson didn’t have any trouble reading his mind.
‘What’s the deal with you and Hannah?’ Rollie asked. ‘If you don’t mind a personal question.’
‘Hannah’s roots are here. When her mom died, she wanted to come back and make a difference.’
‘She’s done that. There aren’t many people in this region without an opinion about your ex-wife. They love her or hate her.’
‘What about you?’ Chris asked.
‘Me?’ Rollie took another French fry and chewed it bite by bite. ‘I wish I had her passion. Somehow she held onto her idealism about this part of the world, and I lost mine a long time ago.’
‘You took the case against Mondamin,’ Chris pointed out. ‘That’s pretty idealistic.’
Rollie smiled. ‘Hannah was relentless. She had Glenn Magnus and the other parents who had lost kids sitting here in my office. I told them the suit was a loser, but she said they didn’t care about money. They wanted discovery. They wanted to get past summary judgment and tear open the company’s records and start interviewing their scientists. She was pretty sure that we’d find plenty of dirt once we started looking.’
‘What kind of dirt?’
‘Environmental violations. Questionable science. Bad actors. There was one scientist in particular they had suspicions about, a whack job named Vernon Clay who lived near St. Croix. He disappeared, and we tried to find him. No luck.’
‘The whole thing sounds like an uphill climb from a litigation standpoint.’
‘Well, I was hoping we could prompt a settlement offer to make us go away,’ Rollie admitted. ‘Florian was in negotiations to sell the company, and I figured he didn’t want bad publicity to screw the deal. But he’s a hard-ass. I got out-lawyered and out-resourced. The Bible may say different, but most of the time, when David goes up against Goliath, David gets his ass kicked.’
‘Causation is almost impossible to prove in these cases. That’s not your fault.’
Rollie shrugged. ‘In my line of work, I don’t have too many opportunities to be on the side of the good guys. I really wanted to come through for those people, but I let them down.’
The younger attorney finished his burger and dumped the empty foam container into a wastebasket under his desk. He sucked up his Coke through a straw, until there was nothing left but an empty slurp, and then he threw the cup away, too. He sat silently in his office chair and studied Chris with a thoughtful expression.
‘So,’ Rollie said finally. ‘Now that we know each other, should we talk about why you’re really here, Chris?’
‘Okay, sure. I’d like some information about the night Ashlynn Steele was killed.’
Rollie rolled around the mouse on his desk, and the twenty-four-inch flat-screen monitor for his computer awakened. He typed in a password to reaccess his files. Chris counted at least fourteen keystrokes.
‘That’s a pretty long password,’ Chris commented.
‘Yeah, I learned about security during the Mondamin litigation.’
‘How so?’
‘My office was broken into twice. I could never prove it, but I think Florian hired somebody to see what data we’d uncovered.’
Rollie accessed his recent documents and sent two files to a printer in the open closet behind him. He grabbed the sheets and handed them to Chris. ‘Those are copies of our statements to the police. Mine and Tanya’s.’
‘Thank you.’
‘I’m sure you’ll get them from the sheriff soon enough, but this way, you don’t have to wait.’
‘I have some more questions for Tanya, too, if you don’t mind.’
Rollie eyed him across the desk. ‘Here’s my problem, Chris. This is the point where our legal interests don’t coincide. I’m sure you understand. I’m fond of Olivia, but my only concern in this case is the welfare of my daughter. As a lawyer, I know what you have to do. I don’t blame you for it, but I won’t let you make Tanya into a suspect.’
‘Tanya may know things that will help me prove that Olivia wasn’t involved in Ashlynn’s death.’
The other attorney didn’t hide his surprise. ‘You’re planning to argue that Olivia is innocent? You’re not using emotional distress?’
‘I’m not arguing anything yet.’
‘Maybe so, but that makes me even more nervous about letting you talk to Tanya.’
‘Tanya can help me corroborate Olivia’s story. She already told me that she talked to Olivia after she got home. Olivia told her that she left Ashlyn
n in the ghost town. Alive. That’s important.’
Rollie frowned. ‘You interrogated Tanya?’
Chris knew he’d made a mistake. He tried to backtrack, but it was already too late. ‘I asked her a couple questions. I told her she didn’t have to tell me anything.’
‘Don’t play dumb with me, Chris. Did you ask Tanya whether she went back to the ghost town that night?’
‘Yes, I did,’ he admitted.
‘In other words, you tried to get her to incriminate herself.’
Chris said nothing, and Rollie stood up. His demeanor made it clear that the meeting was over. ‘You have our statements,’ he announced. ‘For now, that’s all you get. Let me be clear about something else, too, Chris.’
‘What’s that?’
‘If you want to talk to Tanya again,’ Rollie told him, ‘you talk to me first.’
10
The guards at Mondamin Research didn’t want to let Chris inside the gate. It took ten minutes of phone calls back and forth to the administration building before they confirmed that he had an appointment with Florian Steele. One of the guards, whose tattoo suggested that he was a retired Marine, climbed into the passenger seat of Chris’s Lexus without being asked.
‘I’ll show you where to park,’ he told Chris, pointing at a road leading around the rear of the facility.
The main building was approximately two football fields in length. It was clean and pristine, as if the white paint were touched up daily. There were no windows along the walls of the building, but he could see extensive environmental duct work on the roof. As he drove, he saw that the larger section of the campus was connected to a smaller administrative building by a glass-enclosed walkway. He could see two employees in white coats walking behind the glass.
When he reached the opposite side of the smaller building, which overlooked the river, he saw a small parking area. The guard gestured.
‘Park there.’
Chris spotted several empty visitor parking places near the front door. At the far end of the first row of cars, he also saw a bright orange Mustang convertible. He didn’t think there were two vehicles like that in Barron, Minnesota. This was Ashlynn’s car.
He ignored the guard’s instructions and drove past the building entrance. He stopped in an empty parking spot forty yards down, immediately next to the Mustang. The man next to him protested.
‘Not here!’ he instructed Chris. ‘Back up!’
Chris turned off the Lexus and hopped out. ‘You going to shoot me?’ he asked.
While the guard climbed out of his car, Chris made a careful examination of the exterior of the Mustang. He wasn’t sure what he expected to find. The flat tire that had stranded Ashlynn in the ghost town hadn’t been replaced; he assumed the vehicle had been towed here. He bent and studied the tire and didn’t see any obvious damage. It was most likely a puncture wound deep in the tread. The rest of the chassis was in perfect condition, without dents or scratches. If there had been dirt or dust on the frame, the rain had washed it away.
‘Let’s go, Mr. Hawk,’ the guard warned him in a growling voice.
Chris paid no attention. He tried to drown out the low machinery hum from the buildings, the murmur of the river fifty yards away, and the guard’s voice. Instead, he put himself inside Ashlynn’s mind that night. She was sitting in the Mustang, near midnight, stranded in a town full of dead buildings. She’d driven this car. This was the last place she’d been before she died. He cupped his hands and peered through the windows at the white leather seats inside. The interior was immaculate, not a scrap of paper, no coffee mug in the cup holder, no pen shoved into the visor. He assumed that anything inside had been bagged and tagged by the police. Or maybe Ashlynn simply kept a clean car. It was impeccable, except for the remnants of powder where the police had dusted for fingerprints and messy splotches of dried mud on the driver’s seat and on the floor mat from the recent rains.
There was nothing to see. Even so, something about the Mustang bothered him.
‘I didn’t invite you here so you could conduct a search of my daughter’s car, Chris,’ Florian Steele snapped.
Chris looked up from the Mustang’s windows. Florian stood on the sidewalk in front of the building, ten feet away. His arms were folded across his chest. The guard began to apologize, but Florian waved him to silence.
‘Shall we go inside?’ Florian asked. ‘Or do you want to poke around the trunk and the glove compartment, too?’
‘That’s not necessary,’ Chris said.
Florian gestured toward the glass entrance to the building, and they walked side-by-side in silence. At the main doors, Florian swiped a magnetic card, and the doors slid aside to let them enter. They passed into a vestibule, and inside was another door that operated on the basis of a biometric fingerprint ID pad. Florian placed his right index finger on the pad, and the next door opened, leading them into the company lobby. He pointed at the receptionist’s desk.
‘You’ll need to register, have your picture taken, and get your fingerprint digitized. Then we’ll issue you a personalized visitor’s pass.’
‘Do you need a urine sample, too?’ Chris asked.
Florian didn’t smile.
He followed instructions and was rewarded with a white magnetic card that he clipped to his belt. Florian pointed at a floor-to-ceiling revolving door that required them to pass individually. The CEO went first, and then Chris followed, using the ID card and his fingerprint to gain access. On the other side of the door, he found himself in a windowless corridor, as bone white as the exterior of the facility. It smelled of disinfectant, and white noise hummed through hidden speakers.
‘You’re serious about security,’ Chris said.
Florian shrugged as he led them down the corridor. ‘We have to be. It’s partly for intellectual property protection, although most of those threats are more sophisticated. Electronic hacking. Moles. Attempts to bribe and blackmail employees. The physical dangers to the facility are primarily from environmental extremists.’
‘Are fringe groups like that a serious threat?’ Chris asked.
‘Absolutely,’ Florian replied. ‘Many are violent and fanatical. They’re anarchists. If they could blow up or disable our facility, they would. We’ve had two incidents in the past ten years where individuals were caught with wire-cutters and explosive materials outside the fence.’
Florian led Chris into his sprawling office, which had a wall of windows overlooking the Spirit River. It was a modern, elegant space that could have fit into any of the upscale downtown towers in Minneapolis. His desk was glass, with no drawers. He had high-definition videoconference equipment on one wall. His artwork was sterile and modern, mostly nonrepresentational bronze designs. The only traditional painting in the office was an oil rendering of Julia and Ashlynn. His wife’s arm was slung around Ashlynn’s shoulder in a firm, protective grip.
Florian didn’t sit behind his desk, but rather took a chair at a round glass conference table near the windows. Chris sat opposite him, where he could see the flow of the water meandering south from the dam. Florian rubbed the balding surface of his skull. He tugged at his shirt sleeves, balancing the amount of white fabric visible under his suit coat. He looked impatient for the interview to begin and end.
‘You’ve done well, Florian,’ Chris said.
‘You always had a better business mind than most lawyers.’
Florian shrugged. ‘Your own legal practice seems very successful.’
‘It is, but I don’t really create anything. I just do deals.’
‘Back in law school, you were more concerned with social justice. I’m surprised you became another hired gun paid by the hour.’
Chris recalled his debates with Florian in the editorial offices of the law review. Even then, Florian had been particularly skilled at finding pressure points and applying his thumb. He hadn’t lost his touch. ‘I had a family to support,’ Chris replied. ‘I still do a lot of pro bono work.’
>
‘Good for you, but I always thought pro bono work was a worthless sop to ease the conscience of rich lawyers.’
Zing.
‘If you really want to help people,’ Florian went on, ‘start a business. Create jobs. That’s my philosophy.’
‘How many people do you employ here?’ Chris asked.
‘More than two hundred and fifty. We’re one of the largest employers in the region.’
‘To be honest, Florian, I’m not entirely sure what you do at Mondamin. No one seems to know, or they won’t talk about it.’
‘It’s not a secret. We’re one of the leading research facilities in the country on applications of biotechnology and nanotechnology to the agricultural industry.’
‘What does that mean in practical terms?’
‘It means we use the most sophisticated technological tools available to feed the world.’
‘That sounds noble.’
‘Our research is a major factor in the development of corn and soybean crops with dramatically improved yield. We develop seeds that embody a genetic resistance to various insects and fungi, in order to reduce the application of toxic pesticides. We do research that minimizes water usage, reduces the spread of disease, and improves the potential of agricultural alternatives to fossil fuels.’
‘So why does Mondamin attract so much controversy?’ Chris asked.
‘Because we represent change, and change is scary,’ Florian said. He might as well have been speaking to an investor group or giving an interview to the Wall Street Journal. ‘People hear about genetically modified organisms and nanosilvers, and some of them respond with irrational fears. They think making modifications to plant DNA is something unnatural, when in fact humans have been genetically modifying crops for millennia. It’s merely that our process is new and efficient.’
‘Five children died of leukemia in a town of a few hundred people,’ Chris pointed out. ‘St. Croix is barely ten miles from here. You can understand their suspicions.’
Florian folded his hands neatly on the table. He didn’t take the bait or grow agitated. ‘I have the deepest sympathy for the parents who lost their children. I’ve lost a child myself now, so I know the pain it causes. You want to lash out. You want to punish someone. When disease strikes in a small town, people assume there must be a tangible cause. They don’t want to believe it’s just bad luck.’
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