But the fence could only detect an object’s size and location, not whether its attitude had changed . . . or for instance, whether it had stopped “tumbling.” For this reason, the recent stabilization of the alleged weather satellite had escaped detection as it floated, on schedule, through the fence’s sensor array.
On the second orbit after achieving optimal attitude, the satellite received a radio transmission causing an aluminum panel on its side to retract into the hull. If someone with a strong enough telescope had been paying attention, they might have noticed the missing panel, or wondered about the open compartment. And if that someone had good timing and a keen eye, they might have even seen a perfect sphere, the size of a volleyball, springing forth from the opening and floating off on its own trajectory – the satellite and its former contents diverging in slow motion as both objects hurtled through space.
If that lucky someone had decided to check up on the satellite a mere five minutes later, they wouldn’t have observed the second object at all, it would have been miles from its origin, speeding at twenty-three times the speed of sound on a de-orbiting course – a course that would send it on a fiery trip through the earth’s atmosphere and ultimately to the planet below.
CHAPTER 1
Red Wing, Minnesota. Monday, August 5, 2013.
“You’re going to have to tell me more about your ‘big discovery,’ Rodney, if you’re hoping I can help you,” I said to the man perched on the edge of my office side chair.
“Yeah . . . well . . . this has gotta be confidential, you know.” He looked from side to side as if someone were stalking him. “Lawyer-client privilege stuff.”
The man sitting across from me was Rodney Holton, a local farmer known more for his flimflammery than his agricultural acumen. Mine was probably the last lawyer’s office in Red Wing that Rodney hadn’t stiffed.
“Okay,” I said, tipping my swiveling, tilting, ultra-comfortable lawyer’s high-backed chair into a recline and locking my fingers over my abdominals. “Shoot.”
“Um . . .” Rodney reached into a front pocket of his worn OshKosh overalls and produced a crumpled dollar bill. Without making an effort to tidy the dollar in any way, Rodney reached across and dropped it on my desktop, along with a dusting from last year’s hay crop. “This is just to make it official,” he said, nodding at the bill.
I raised my eyebrows at Rodney.
“That’d get you about twelve seconds at my usual rate,” I said. “Got anything bigger in there?” I indicated his pocket with a crooked finger.
“No,” he said, seeming surprised that I hadn’t caught his drift. “It’s just . . . like . . . a formality . . . so nobody can claim you aren’t my lawyer.”
Rodney had no idea that, as a point of law, the dollar was neither necessary, nor in and of itself, sufficient, to establish a confidential relationship between us. That required a combination of expectation and intent.
I leaned forward and flattened the wrinkled dollar on my desk blotter, taking time to repair each dog-eared corner. If I agreed to listen to Rodney, and maybe to help him with his concerns, it was unlikely I would be paid for my trouble. Then again, how often does a client pop into a lawyer’s office with a “big discovery?” He had captured my interest.
After fixing the bill to my satisfaction, I folded it in half and tucked it in a shirt pocket.
“You just hired yourself a lawyer,” I said. “You’ve got your confidentiality. But all I’m agreeing to do at this point is hear you out. I can’t guarantee I can be of any help until I know more. Understand?”
“Yeah.”
“Good,” I said. “Then let’s hear all about it, starting at the beginning if you don’t mind.”
Rodney slid back in the chair, his hands gripping the armrests. He cracked his neck to both sides before beginning his tale.
“It was yesterday afternoon,” he said. “Sunday . . . and I was out on the John Deere checking my fields, you know . . . and all of a sudden I hear this sound. It was a kinda weird sound, you know?”
“Not really. Can you be more specific?” I had heard a lot of weird sounds in my day.
Rodney thought for a moment.
“It was kinda like whoosh-thud . . . tumble, tumble, tumble,” he said.
He could have stuck with “weird” if that was the best he could do.
“Go on,” I said.
“So I stood up and looked toward the sound.” He raised a hand to his brow and craned his neck, as though searching the horizon. “And something was knocking down my corn, like a big animal or something . . . not like a deer, more clumsy than that . . . maybe like a bear.” He looked to me for understanding.
“A bear,” I said, nodding.
It wasn’t a total impossibility that Rodney had encountered a bear in Ottawa County. There had been two or three confirmed sightings of black bear in the area over the past ten years. But his hypothesis wasn’t particularly likely either. I don’t remember anyone saying the other bears made a whoosh-thud, tumble sound. Then again, many interpretations are possible in the mind of an eyewitness . . . or in this case, ear-witness.
“This thing, whatever it was, knocked down maybe thirty or forty feet of head-high corn stalks, in a straight line,” he continued. “I saw the last ones go down.” He clapped one flattened hand downward onto the other. “Then all was quiet,” he said, passing a benediction over the serenity in my office.
He checked to make sure I was tracking. I gave him two thumbs up.
“Anyway,” he went on, “this thing’s trail was pretty obvious in the corn. But not knowing what in the heck it was, I was a little . . . you know . . . reluctant to investigate.”
Yeah. He was afraid it was a bear.
“But I found a good size wrench in a fender box and decided to take a chance.” He made a hammering motion as he wielded the imaginary wrench. “So I got off the tractor and slipped into the corn field, nice and quiet like.”
Rodney’s story-telling momentum was gaining steam as he worked his way along. This was probably a first rendition of the “big discovery” story. He would no doubt smooth out earlier scenes on future iterations.
I stroked my chin as if contemplating the implications of Rodney’s tale thus far. In truth, he hadn’t said much of consequence yet, at least as far as I was concerned.
“So was it a bear?” I asked, hoping to hasten the denouement.
“I’m just getting to that,” Rodney said, a touch of irritation in his voice. He’d paid me my buck, now I had darned well better listen.
“So my sleeves are rolled up and the corn leaves are cutting at me on all sides . . .”
Corn leaves have a sawlike edge that can induce lacerations similar to paper cuts, only longer and in greater quantity. The greatest danger is to the eyes.
“And I’m getting’ closer and closer to the end of the broken corn,” he went on, “and still no sign of the beast . . . or worse . . . that might have flattened my crop.
“So I’m getting more and more nervous, watchin’ all around.” He demonstrated “watching” by looking side to side. “And then . . . I was at the end of the trail, and I still didn’t see nothing – no bear, no cougar, no nothing that might have caused this unexpected devastation.”
Losing a few corn plants in a field of thousands can hardly be considered devastation. But one can allow Rodney a modicum of poetic license.
“So I stand up straight and look around,” he said, “my wrench hand at the ready. But there’s no sign of man nor beast. So I pull off my cap and scratch my head, figuring there has to be something here somewhere.” Rodney reached for his cap, then realizing he had placed it on my desk, aborted the gesture by smoothing the back of his hair.
“So I stoop down and start pawing through the grass with my gloves.” He leaned forward and pawed. Then he looked up at me. “I was wearing buckskins, of course.”
“Of course,” I said. “Would this be easier for you if you stood?” Sitting appeared to be
cramping Rodney’s style.
“No thanks,” he said, righting himself in his chair. “I’m good.”
“Let’s see now. Where was I?” He gave me a dirty look for interrupting his flow.
“You were wearing gloves,” I said.
“Yeah. So I paw through the grass and then . . . just when I’m about to give up, the back of my hand hits something big and solid in the grass.” Rodney kicked the desk pedestal with his boot.
“Holy crap, Rodney,” I said, just about tipping my lawyer chair over backward. “Take it easy on the furniture.”
“Sorry,” he said, appearing to barely notice me.
“. . . and I’m thinking this must be it. This is the thing that’s killing my corn. It seemed too small for a bear, but maybe a wolverine, and them things can tear your arm right off . . . so I just watch for a few minutes . . . waitin’ to see what it does.”
Rodney’s eyes grew large with apprehension.
I didn’t recall there ever being a wolverine sighting in Ottawa County. Nevertheless, I nodded along. I did have the buck in my pocket after all.
“Wolverine,” I said dubiously.
“I said ‘maybe a wolverine,’” Rodney corrected.
“Right.”
“Anyway, I decided to give the thing a kick with my boot.” He made an odd jerking movement somewhere below my line of sight that I assumed was a kick. I was thankful it missed my desk this time around.
“And voilà,” he said. “There it was.”
Apparently it was audience participation time.
“And what was it?” I asked obediently.
“Are you ready for this?” His eyes were wide and his showman’s hands extended.
“Never been more ready,” I said.
“It was a meteor!” Rodney waited for my amazed reaction.
I wasn’t as compliant this time. Part of my job as a lawyer is to question unsubstantiated conclusions – especially unlikely unsubstantiated conclusions.
“How do you know it was a meteor?” I asked, thinking the wolverine hypothesis might have been more plausible.
“Ahh,” he said, raising one finger in the air. “I knew you’d ask that.”
No one would mistake Rodney for a rocket scientist, but he could anticipate obvious questions well enough.
“Ahh,” I echoed, duplicating the raised finger gesture, while trying not to be disrespectful.
“First off, it looks like a meteor,” he said. “It’s mostly round, like a ball, and sorta burnt and crispy on the outside. It’s about yea big.” He formed a ten or twelve inch ball with his hands. “A fiery meteor would look just like that.”
I raised one eyebrow and tilted my head to indicate I would allow for that possibility.
“And when somethin’ like that falls dead outta the sky,” Rodney continued, “I figured there were only three possibilities for what this thing was.
“Number one: it could be something that fell off an airplane, or maybe out of an airplane. But if it came off an airplane, this thing is probably worthless . . . unless I could convince the airline that it had somehow injured me when it landed. You know? Even though it didn’t really.”
I could see why Rodney required confidentiality.
“I would advise against that,” I said, matter-of-factly. Rodney made a head gesture that I interpreted as “potayto potahto.”
“Or number two . . .” he went on “. . . this thing could be some sort of space junk that just dropped out of orbit. But I figured if it belonged to some government, they probably wouldn’t pay to get it back. Once I told ‘em I had it, they’d probably just come and take it. Whatta you think? Can they do that?”
A request for legal advice.
The question Rodney had posed was one that many clients had posited during initial visits to my office. Oddly enough, the question was normally asked once some violator had already done what the client was asking if they could do. One would think the answer in such case was obvious, but I responded to Rodney’s query anyway.
“Of course a government could take your ‘meteor’ if it wanted to,” I said. “The real question is what, if anything, could you do about it?” This sort of response is one reason people coined the phrase “damn lawyers.”
“What could I do?” he asked.
“Probably nothing without investing a ton of money in a lengthy lawsuit with no guarantee of success.”
The lesson I had just given Rodney contains a sad truth that applies to the American legal system in general. We have all sorts of legal rights, and almost no practical remedies. In fact, as a lawyer, the very most I could ever hope to accomplish for any client would be to get them what they were entitled to in the first place – minus a reasonable fee, of course. And folks wonder why so many lawyers are depressed.
“That’s what I figured,” Rodney said. “So it’s probably not space junk.”
“Wait a minute,” I said. “You determined what this object was based on whether you could make money off it?”
“Well, yeah.” He said it like I was crazy to think otherwise. “If I don’t know for sure what it is, why not have it be something that’ll make me rich. Which brings me to option number three: it’s a meteor.”
“I can’t wait to hear this,” I said.
“Weren’t you watchin’ CNN when that huge meteor hit Russia? They had some experts on there who said that baby was worth maybe $22,000 an ounce. Mine’s only ten pounds, but that’s still over three and a half million bucks. Not exactly chump change.”
I didn’t think many people shared Rodney’s optimistic approach to identifying mysterious objects. Then again, who knows?
“I can see how you’ve reasoned this out,” I said, “but let me ask, if I may, what you’ll say when people want to have an assayer take a look at your ‘meteor’?”
“A what?” Rodney didn’t like the sound of the word.
“An assayer,” I said. “A professional who certifies the authenticity of rocks and gems . . . and in this case, meteors. Don’t you think your buyers will want a certificate or something?”
“Oh,” Rodney said, relieved. “If that’s all . . . I can make certificates, and they’ll look darn official, too.”
This fellow was a fine example of American ingenuity.
“Don’t do that,” I said. “It’s illegal.”
I got the potayto potahto look again.
“Have you researched this meteor thing at all,” I asked, “other than a few months ago on CNN?”
“Sure.” Rodney settled in his chair. “I went to the library and the lady there helped out. And I can use Google, too, you know. I ain’t no idiot.”
There was no point discussing a new issue at this juncture.
“In your academic pursuit of positive identification of the ‘meteor,’ did you come across anything at all that might tend to contradict your meteor theory?” I asked.
“Well,” he said. “To be completely honest, there were a couple things that sorta bugged me.”
“For instance?” I said.
“For instance,” he said, “meteor strikes are pretty rare. People don’t find meteors every day. But heck, they gotta hit somewhere, right?”
Ever the optimist.
“And I thought a meteor would be hotter than blazes,” Rodney continued. “But it turns out that small ones, like mine, actually slow down enough to cool off before they hit. Who’d of thought, eh?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Not me.”
“But the biggest thing . . . the biggest problem . . . is that meteors have craters and mine doesn’t have a crater. But if that’s the only issue, I’m sure I can find a way around that.”
Rodney simply did not comprehend the scientific method. Or perhaps, he just liked the “Rodney method” better.
“Is that the end of your story?” I asked, after waiting for more.
“Yeah,” he said. “But I still got a couple questions.” He pointed toward the folded bill in my pocket to remind me I
was on retainer.
“Why not,” I said. “Fire away.”
“Whatta you know about meteors and radiation?” he asked. “I mean, do you think my meteor might be radioactive or something?”
“Honestly, Rodney,” I said, “that’s not my area of expertise. I’m sorry.”
“That’s okay. I’ll just make sure to wear gloves and keep the thing someplace where I’m . . . whatta they call it . . . shielded from radiation.”
“I strongly advise you to get competent counsel on that issue,” I said. “Strongly!”
“Okay,” Rodney said, discounting my advice. “Just one last question then. Do you happen to have a relationship with an assayer who’s sort of . . . you know . . .” Rodney leaned forward and whispered, “in your pocket, so to speak?”
“No,” I said, standing. “If that’s it then, would you like to pay the bill now or should I mail it to you?” I was pretty sure I knew the answer.
“Just send that out to the farm. I’ll put a check in the mail when I ship my next load of beef.”
“You do have beef, right?”
Rodney stood up and made a face, pretending to be offended. But he recovered quickly.
“Best Herefords this side of the Pecos,” he said, hooking two thumbs in his belt. “Best meteor, too.”
Okay,” I said. “I’ll drop that bill in the mail.”
We shook hands, and he left.
CHAPTER 2
Ames, Iowa. Six weeks before the discovery at Rodney Holton’s farm.
Kent Evans shoved his laptop away from him, sending stacks of papers scattering.
“Damn it!” he said out loud as he pushed his chair away from the desk.
9 More Killer Thrillers Page 76