Love Thy Neighbor

by Mark Gilleo

  Chapter 39

  The writing down the side of the car and Laskey’s official uniform, both financed by the fine taxpayers of Nelson County, allowed him to pass through the first barricade near D.C. Police Headquarters on Indiana Ave. Tire-shredders guarded the inner sanctum of the parking lot and without a pass code Laskey made the easy decision to follow the small access road around to the back of the building. He pulled his car in behind a set of Jersey walls and grabbed the plastic evidence bag off the front seat. He got out of the car and stared at the sea of security that engulfed the nation’s capital from Capitol Hill to Union Station. He was suddenly thankful for the relative peace of Nelson County.

  The guard behind the bulletproof glass spoke as Laskey approached the one-man booth. “How can I help you today?”

  “My name is Mike Laskey and I’m the sheriff of Nelson County, Virginia. I’m here to see Detective Earl Wallace.”

  “What’s in the bag?”

  “Evidence.”

  “Anything potentially hazardous?”

  Laskey knew the truth was only going to be the beginning of trouble. “No, they are seeds.”

  “Sign in on the bottom line, Sheriff.”

  Laskey pulled the clipboard through the security crack at the bottom of the window and signed in with the pen that dangled on a small chain.

  “Up the stairs to the second floor. Detective Wallace is on the north side of the building.”

  Laskey looked up at the sun to determine which direction was north.

  “There are signs in the building that will tell you where to go,” the officer added. “Turn left at the top of the stairs. Or take the elevator and go right.”

  “Do I look that I old?”

  “Just trying to be helpful. I give the same response to everyone.”

  Laskey climbed the concrete stairs to the second floor and turned left. An officer in a crisp suit shoved a hand-cuffed perp in gang-banger clothes head first through a pair of swinging doors. Laskey followed in the wake of vulgarities that the suspect unleashed on the officer. The gang-banger continued to yell about human rights abuse as he was thrown into an empty wooden chair.

  The female officer behind a desk on the second floor looked at Sheriff Laskey in his best outfit. His brown uniform was ironed. His shield gleamed. His gray hair was combed to perfection.

  “I’m looking for Detective Wallace.”

  “Does he know you’re coming?”

  “I called him this morning.”

  The woman behind the desk stood and looked out across the room. The floor buzzed with activity. Desks filled the center of the room and a dozen officers in street clothes typed on their computers and talked on their phones.

  “He’s in the corner on the far left,” the female officer said pointing in the direction of a large man in rumpled clothes.

  “The guy with the red tie?”

  “That’s him.”

  “Thanks.”

  Detective Wallace, a twenty-four year veteran with the rank of Sergeant, sensed Sheriff Laskey approaching and ended the phone conversation he was having.

  “You must be Sheriff Laskey.”

  “And you must be Sergeant Wallace.”

  The two law enforcement officers with fifty-plus years of experience exchanged handshakes.

  “Have a seat.”

  “I would prefer to stand. Been sitting for three hours.”

  “Fair enough. You want something? Coffee, tea?”

  “No thanks. Got somewhere we can talk?”

  Detective Wallace looked around at the offices that lined the north end of the floor. “Follow me.”

  Wallace shut the door as Laskey walked into the office with a glass interior wall. Laskey set the evidence bag on the table and Wallace looked down.

  “So these are the little things that have been keeping you up all night?”

  “Yes they are.”

  “What are they?”

  “That’s just it; I have no idea.”

  “But they kept you up all night?” Detective Wallace asked in his on-the-job tone usually reserved for guilty faces on the street.

  “I have good instincts. Hunches really. Not to mention there was a dead body on the farm where I got these. And there were a lot of them.”

  “Ah, yes. The dead body. Got one of them myself here to deal with. Though I may be making progress. You said you found a Koran at the house of your deceased.”

  “That’s right. Fancy looking book.”

  “Well, I got in touch with my dead guy’s p.o. and he told me, off the record, that my dead guy had converted to Islam in prison. They’ve got an imam behind bars in Petersburg and he has quite the following, evidently.”

  “Was your dead guy a blond, California surfer type?”

  “He has brown hair now. Dyed. And he certainly doesn’t look like a healthy golden boy anymore. But with blond hair, I guess he could be mistaken for a surfer. Why do you ask?”

  “I poked around a little and some people in town saw my dead guy with someone who looked like a surfer.”

  “Probably the same.”

  Both men nodded and their eyes dropped to the bag of seeds on the table.

  Wallace grabbed the bag and held it to the light in his thick black hands. “Let me make a few calls.”

  Jerry was chasing an odd-colored ladybug around his desk when Detective Wallace and Sheriff Laskey entered the office to the Merrifield Gardening Center.

  Handshakes and credential flashing ensued before Detective Wallace pulled the bag of beans from his pocket.

  Jerry glanced at the beans in the bag through the magnification of his thick glasses. “You are the second person to bring those in this week.”

  “So you know what they are?”

  “You ever heard of ricin?

  Wallace dropped the bag on the table.

  “Well, not exactly ricin, but the raw material for it. Those are castor beans. Which is really a misnomer. They are actually seeds.”

  “Castor beans?”

  “Same bean that makes castor oil. It’s used in a million different applications. Body lotion. Lubrication.”

  “My mother use to give my brother and me castor oil for upset stomachs when we were kids,” Sheriff Laskey added.

  “I thought ricin would kill you?” Detective Wallace asked.

  “Parts of the beans will kill you deader than a door nail,” Jerry answered. “The oil won’t.”

  “I don’t follow.”

  “Well, if you process castor beans properly and extract the oil, the leftover mash can be processed into a poison. Ricin. Deadly stuff.”

  “How much does it take to kill a person?”

  Jerry recalled what he read in the book days earlier. “Less than five microns.”

  The plant and insect expert could see by his guests’ reactions that they had no idea what a micron was.

  “Five microns would be a fraction of the size of a grain of salt. Something along the lines of a small piece of dust.”

  “You’ve never seen the dust in my house,” Detective Wallace said.

  “No, and I think I’m thankful for that.”

  Sheriff Laskey tried to put things into perspective. “How many people do you reckon we could take out with this small bag here?”

  “I don’t know. Dozens I guess, once it gets processed. But you would need a whole lot more to make a weapon of mass destruction, or at least a weapon of mass hysteria.”

  Wallace felt the hair on his neck stand-up, like an animal’s reaction to an impending earthquake. He knew what was coming.

  “How much more?”

  “Thousands of plants.”

  Sheriff Laskey added his own hysteria to the equation. “How about a field of plants. Twenty or thirty acres. A plant every few feet.”

  Jerry’s head drooped a little in fear. His mind tried to calculate a reasonable number. “That could be millions of beans. But the scary part is this. Those beans remain deadly for years. If someone
were growing them, say on a farm as you suggest, they could reap more than one harvest.”

  Wallace turned white, for a black guy, and Laskey nodded his head slowly in a moment of shared understanding.

  “Tell me you got the name of the person who came in earlier in the week?”

  “His name was Clark. He had three beans with him. Said he got them on a farm in central Virginia. Also said he was friends with an FBI agent and that he would take it up with him or her.”

  “You didn’t bother getting a last name?”

  “Not really. This kid was white suburbia.”

  “Terrorists are recruiting all nationalities and ethnicities these days.”

  Jerry looked at Detective Wallace. “If you were a terrorist and you had deadly material on your hands, would you take it to someone and ask them to identify it? Wouldn’t you think he would know what he had? Why raise suspicion?”

  “You got me there.”

  Sheriff Laskey got the investigation back on track. “Do you have security cameras in the parking lot? Maybe we can go through the tapes and you could identify the person who paid you a visit earlier. This Clark character.”

  “We have surveillance cameras, but I’m not sure they will help. We keep them on a twenty-four hour loop. Had a problem with some vandals a few years back, and a couple of Japanese Red Maples went missing around the same time. Those Red Maples can be expensive.”

  “I’m sure they are,” Detective Wallace said.

  “If the tapes are on a twenty-four hour feed, our kid is probably not going to be making an appearance,” Laskey said. “So all we have to go on is that this kid’s name is Clark.”

  “Sorry. That’s all I can tell you, other than that he is harmless.”

  “Just the same.”

  “And if he were up to no good, he probably wouldn’t be using his real name.”

  “Thanks for the deductive reasoning.”

  “Let me know if I can help.”

  “Will do.”

  In the parking lot Detective Wallace looked over the top of his car at Sheriff Laskey before entering the vehicle.

  “How many seeds did you find out there on the farm?”

  “The ground was littered with them. There were hundreds. Thousands. I don’t know. But most of the plants I saw were stripped bare. No telling how many were there before the plants were stripped.”

  “I think we need some answers and we need them yesterday.”

  “I was hoping between the dead guy you pulled out of the river, and the dead guy I pulled out of the tree, we would be able to figure it out.”

  “Maybe, but before the end of the day I’m going to need to run this one up the flag pole. The FBI is going to get involved, Homeland Security, you name it.”

  “Sounds like a recipe for disaster. Get a bunch of people pissing on each other, overstepping boundaries, drawing lines in the sand. A thousand chefs with a thousand hands staring down at a single pot.”

  “How do you know so much about bureaucracy?”

  “We got politics in small towns. And besides, this Administration has been parading their incompetence for the world to see for a few years now. I may live in the country, but I’m not stupid or isolated … unless I want to be.”

  “You have any ideas on how to find this kid?”

  “Just one. There’s a chance he may have stopped at a gas station in Nelson, filled up, and asked for directions. If he paid with a debit or credit card, I can get the name with a single call.”

  “Then make the call. If we can find this kid, maybe we can drag him to a meeting with the Feds.”

  Debbie Ingel answered the phone at her desk in the Nelson County sheriff’s office.

  Sheriff Laskey didn’t let her get through her standard greeting. “Deb, this is Mike.”

  “Yes, Sheriff.”

  “I need you to call down to The Pig and Whistle. Talk to the Daltons. Tell them I need the credit card and debit card receipts from everyone who bought gas or a donut for the last two weeks. Start yesterday and work backwards. The first name on the receipt should be Clark. That should help narrow it down.”

  “It may take a while.”

  “I don’t have a while. I need it within the hour. Tell Mrs. Dalton to skip making sandwiches today. The world will survive without her ham on wheat.”

  “Will do.”

  Sheriff Nelson looked over at Detective Wallace who had pulled the bag from his pocket again and placed them on the roof of the car.

  “What ya’ thinkin’ about?”

  “How something so small and so innocent looking could kill a man.”

  “One bean doesn’t worry me.”

  Debbie Ingel called back twenty minutes later.

  “You might want to apologize to the Daltons. Apparently our request screwed up their lunchtime business.”

  “They’ll get over it. I’ll look the other way the next time they are caught sellin’ beer to underage kids.”

  “You still need the information?”

  “Sure do.”

  “Well, you hit the nail on the head. There was a Clark Hayden who purchased gas with a Bank of America debit card at The Pig and Whistle. Purchased it yesterday morning, right before you went out to the Price farm. You couldn’t have missed him by much more than an hour or two.”

  “I need you to run him through DMV.”

  “Already did. His current address is listed as 202 Dorchester Lane in Arlington, Virginia.”

  “Let me get a pen.”

  Laskey searched his pockets with his free hand. Wallace threw his detective notebook, pencil stuffed into the wire binding, onto Laskey’s lap. The sheriff scribbled on the first open page he could find and showed it to Detective Wallace.

  The detective nodded as he hit the gas pedal.

  Chapter 40

  Are you Clark Hayden?” Detective Wallace asked through the closed storm door.

  “Who’s asking?” Clark replied. He was wearing jeans that were tattered on the fringe of the legs, wool socks, and a striped sweater that made him look like Charlie Brown. His mother was at his aunt’s and he wasn’t due to pick her up until the next morning. He had the house to himself for the day, and in the evening was planning on Lisa coming over for sex, under the auspice of watching a DVD.

  “D.C. Police,” Wallace answered, flashing his badge. The heat from the house created condensation on the glass in the storm window and Clark squinted to see the details of the badge. He sighed heavily and opened the door. “Come in.”

  Wallace extended his hand, and Sheriff Laskey removed his hat.

  “Detective Earl Wallace. D.C. Metropolitan Police. This is Sheriff Laskey, Nelson County, Virginia.”

  Clark shook hands and looked each officer in the eye as his pucker meter inched up. “Have a seat,” Clark offered, gesturing towards the sofa with large cushions. He pulled the old wicker rocking chair to face the sofa, the well-worn coffee table between him and his guests.

  “You know why we are here?”

  “I could guess, but I’d just rather you tell me. I have been doing a lot of speculating recently. I’m all guessed out.”

  Detective Wallace looked at the young man in front of him. Twenty-five years old. Six foot. One hundred and eighty pounds. Solid build. Looks athletic, except for the overly geeky glasses with the black frames. “Rumor has it that you have some beans in your possession that could kill a few people.”

  Clark swallowed hard. “That wasn’t the question I was expecting. You working with the FBI?”

  “No,” Detective Wallace said. He looked at Sheriff Laskey and the men nodded to each other. The sheriff pulled the bag of ricin seeds from the pocket of his winter jacket. “Jerry at Merrifield Garden Center told us you came in with a few of these.”

  “I did. But I didn’t tell him my last name, so how did you find me? It was only yesterday.”

  “You trying to hide something?”

  “Not at all. But people usually don’t go around drop
ping their last name. Unless it’s Trump or Hilton and you’re going to get a reservation at a restaurant. Unfortunately ‘Hayden’ doesn’t come with any perks.”

  Sheriff Laskey smiled. “No, I guess not.”

  “So … how did you find me? Not that I’m entirely sad to see you.”

  “Investigative techniques,” Wallace added. “Believe it or not the badge is real and I’m an actual detective.”

  “Fair enough.” Clark was silent for a moment and his armpits started to perspire. The black detective was sitting directly across from Clark, piercing eyes measuring his every movement. Every twitch. The white sheriff was doing the country version of the same. Clark stared back for a few seconds, his eyes bouncing from one guest to the other. “I found the beans on a farm in Nelson County. But given that the sheriff here is the law in Nelson County, I figure you already know that.”

  “You pay attention,” Sheriff Laskey said. “But we don’t call the sheriff ‘the law’ anymore. Except on Western Movie Day.”

  Wallace laughed out loud and Clark relaxed a little. If these guys were ball-busters they were waiting to bring out the testicle hammer. Clark got the feeling that the men were like him, just looking for answers. Besides, from what he knew, most cops handcuffed first and asked questions later.

  “Did you grow them?” the sheriff asked.

  “The seeds?”

  “Are we talking about anything else that grows?” Wallace added.

  “Hell, no. I didn’t even know what they were until Jerry the-plant-guy told me.”

  Laskey looked at Wallace. Chalk one up to old Jerry’s intuition.

  “What brought you to the farm?” Wallace asked.

  Clark squirmed and the proverbial cat reached out and grabbed his tongue. And it was a full-grown tiger that hadn’t eaten in a month.

  “That’s not so easy to explain.”

  “Give it your best shot.”

  “Ok. But I’m warning you up front it may sound a little kooky.”

  “We have been warned,” Wallace answered.

  Clark delved into the story of his mother calling the CIA, the visit from the FBI about terrorists across the street, his Pakistani neighbors disappearing, the explosion at his neighbor’s house, his dead neighbor, the calls from a stolen phone in Pakistan owned by a low-level diplomat.