The Killdeer Connection

by Tom Swyers

  Now David recognized the visitor. He had been in the court gallery during the detention hearing yesterday. “Let’s talk out on the driveway, then,” David said. David turned his head toward the living room and raised his voice. “Honey, I’ll be out in the driveway talking to a salesman if you want me.”

  “All right, David,” she said over the television-show audio. “Are you okay?” She must have asked that same question fifty times since he’d come home.

  “I’m fine.”

  “Okay,” she replied as another siren sounded from the television set.

  “Let’s go talk over by the garage,” David said, stepping down onto the front stoop as he pulled the front door closed behind him. He raised his hand and gestured that the man should go first. David followed a few steps behind, slightly comforted by the fact that the man’s hands remained visible, dangling by his sides as he walked.

  “Mr. Thompson, you have a lovely home. Very nice indeed,” he said over his shoulder.

  “Ah, thank you.”

  They crossed the driveway to the front of the twin-bay, two-car garage. The man turned around and faced David with an anxious expression on his round, ruddy face.

  “I’ll get right to the point, Mr. Thompson. I need those killdeer counts. I assume Mr. Salar told you about me and our arrangement before he passed on?”

  Automatically, David took a step back. The last thing he wanted to hear about was the damn killdeer. The bird had brought him nothing but trouble. David scrutinized the man. He didn’t know if this guy had been part of his pistol-whipping, or was part of a terrorist ring or what. But he wasn’t going to take any more chances.

  Christy had forgotten to close one of the garage’s bay doors after he’d raked oak leaves off the lawn that morning. David spotted one of his aluminum baseball bats leaning against the wall. He stepped in, picked it up, and faced the man. “I’m sorry, but I have no idea who you are or what your relationship might have been with Harold Salar. He didn’t pass on; he was killed.”

  His companion nearly sputtered. “Mr. Thompson, I can assure you I mean you no harm. I thought for sure Harold must have told you about me. He said he would.”

  “It seems Harold didn’t tell me a lot of things. Keep your hands where I can see them.”

  “I suppose then he must have intended to tell you but didn’t get around to it.”

  This explanation made sense to David. Harold had changed his will one month before his death. In his letter to David, Harold said he’d sensed his life was in jeopardy. Safferson, Carson, and Albertson were all killed within the week after Harold’s death. Since Harold was the first to go, he’d had no warning.

  Perhaps Harold had wrestled with the idea that his life was really in danger. The mind can play tricks on you when you’re alone. David had learned that lesson all too well while he was in jail. Maybe Harold wondered if he was just being paranoid. He’d stated that he was writing the letter “just in case.” Maybe he wasn’t convinced of it; maybe he waffled about telling David about the Killdeer Society. Perhaps in the midst of whoever had attacked him, Harold had panicked and tried to signal David about the Killdeer Society before it was too late.

  Just then, a neighbor’s car drove slowly down the road, and the driver waved to them. David waved back as if there was nothing going on. Just two neighbors shooting the breeze in the driveway, another lazy weekend in suburbia.

  “If you want to talk, turn around and put your hands against the garage door so I can pat you down,” David said.

  “That’s ridiculous—”

  “My life has come to define that word. If you want to talk, do as I say. Otherwise, walk—better yet, run.” David looked up and down the street. The only cars he could see parked along it or in the driveways belonged to people who lived there. “How did you get here, anyway? Did you fly in on a killdeer, maybe a giant mutant one?”

  “You can’t be serious. My driver dropped me off and went to the convenience store to get some coffee. I didn’t want the limousine parked outside of your house. I’m sure you understand.”

  “You were there in the court gallery yesterday, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, you must have some idea of what I’ve been through, then.”

  “I guess so.”

  “Well, then, cut me some slack!”

  “All right, all right, I’ll let you pat me down.” The man turned around and put his hands against the closed garage door.

  “Spread your legs. Look straight ahead.” David approached him cautiously and patted each leg up and down. “Okay, you’re good. You can turn around now. Do I know you?”

  “No, we’ve never met before, if that’s what you mean.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “I’d rather not say—”

  “You come and ring my doorbell, say you want to talk, but you don’t want to tell me your name?”

  “All right, my name is Roland Yates. I just figured Harold would have told you about us, and you’d understand.”

  “Well, he didn’t! And I don’t understand. What do you mean by us, anyway?”

  “Mr. Thompson, I represent a group of investors who rely on the killdeer counts.”

  “Are you a bird lover or something?”

  “Come on, you know what I’m talking about.”

  “I’m afraid I don’t.”

  “The Killdeer Society counts killdeers. Salar gave us the weekly numbers every month. We deposited a set sum in an offshore account for the data. It’s automatically divided into shares and deposited into the accounts of Killdeer Society members monthly to pay for their services.”

  “What do they do with the money?”

  “I know Harold used his money to help fund several environmental organizations, and so did the others. I imagine some use the money for living expenses. A lot of them are out of work or disabled. It’s not important to us what they use the money for, so long as we get the counts.”

  “Except you’re not counting killdeers, are you?”

  “Of course not. No.”

  In his letter to David, Harold had said to always follow the killdeer, but he didn’t elaborate. David had had a lot of time in jail to mull it over. Perhaps Harold didn’t want it written anywhere, even in the letter to David, that killdeer was code for the oil-tank cars. It could have been that Harold was looking for the right opportunity to talk with David about it, but an opening had never presented itself in Harold’s mind.

  Harold knew he was being followed and feared his life was in danger. He said that in his letter. Maybe, when he first encountered his killers at the field, he knew what might be coming, and had desperately tried to figure out a way to tell David about the killdeer connection. He’d died with his hand over his belt buckle, his indicator as a baseball coach that he was going to flash a signal. The signal was on the baseball field in the arrangement of the balls: 1 designated the pitcher; 2, the catcher; 6, the shortstop; and 7, the left fielder. Then there was the baseball scorebook, opened to the page of the last game the team had played that summer, where the numbers 1 and 2 were written in pencil followed by a line that fell clear off the bottom of the page. They all added up to the 1267 on the oil-tank-car placard. Harold had tried desperately to signal David about the connection before the killer had pounded his head against the wall.

  “You’re counting oil-train tanker cars, aren’t you?” David asked.

  It was all starting to make sense now. The crushed stone along the railroad tracks and the flat, desolate surroundings offered the perfect habitat for the killdeer anyplace in the United States, especially during the summer. It was the perfect cover story if someone asked what the Killdeer Society members were doing hanging around railroad tracks.

  The high killdeer counts year-round in North Dakota were the giveaway that the Killdeer Society wasn’t counting birds. David couldn’t quite figure out why they were tracking tank cars, but Yates knew and was revealing clues as he tried to get the killdeer cou
nts from David.

  “I’d rather not say anything more about the counts. It was part of our agreement not to discuss the meaning of killdeers. We both wanted it that way.”

  “What agreement? Is there a written contract somewhere?”

  “Heavens, no. Nothing in writing—no paper trail. If certain people found out, well, you know, it would put people at risk.”

  “Put them at risk? It’s been downright deadly for some, and it landed me in jail. I think the cat may be out of the bag on this secret.”

  “For all I know, you’re wired. I’ve probably said too much already. They all knew the risks. They were supposed to be replaced if something happened to them.”

  “You said you represent a group of investors, isn’t that right?”

  “Maybe.”

  “You did. Why do they want to know the oil-train counts?”

  “I think maybe I need to go now.”

  “You’re not going anywhere. I think the females represent loaded tank cars on their way to delivery points across the country. And then the males represent empty tank cars on their way back to be reloaded. Is that how it works, Yates? Or is it something else?”

  “All I want is the killdeer counts for November that are due on Monday, December First, and I want the ones from October that were due on November First. It’s part of the deal. You, as executor, are supposed to make good on Harold’s contracts.”

  “Yeah, well, assuming it’s enforceable, being unwritten and all. You know, the one thing I can’t figure out is why you need this information so badly. I mean, you risked showing your face to come to my house.”

  But the answer hit David as he spoke. He’d read in the morning newspaper that the price for West Texas Intermediate Crude had plummeted more than 10 percent on Friday, from $73.47 down to close at $65.99 per barrel. This was a huge move for one day, a true Black Friday in the oil-trading pits. The price of oil had stabilized at around $73 per barrel since the Helmsley Oil conference in mid-November, and had even popped with the news of the oil-train explosions when traders had become concerned that there would be supply interruptions.

  But the foreign-oil interests represented by the Organization for the Petroleum Exporting Countries, otherwise known as OPEC, announced at its annual conference on Thanksgiving that there would be no production cuts. OPEC was continuing to flood the world with oil to drive the price down and to put the North Dakota Bakken producers out of business. There was no end in sight. Oil prices were in a free-fall. There had been no explosions in ten days, so the price of oil had resumed its relentless downtrend since breaking its triple bottom—what Harold had described as the killdeer bottom.

  The price of oil had dropped some 40 percent since the June peak. Looking at Yates wringing his hands in front of him, David put two and two together: OPEC and the volatility in the price of oil had forced him to David’s doorstep.

  “Just speaking hypothetically,” David said, “aren’t the oil-train counts available someplace?”

  Yates let out a big sigh. “Hypothetically, the railroad companies don’t release that information for security reasons.”

  But David didn’t buy it. In his mind, the rail companies kept the information under wraps because they didn’t want people to know how many bomb trains rolled by their homes.

  “Now I know what’s going on,” David said. “Your investors are trading oil. They are using the killdeer counts—the oil-tanker-car counts—to make their bets. By counting tank cars, you or Harold figured out how to price oil by measuring demand on the rails. Without the killdeer counts, you and your investors are trading in the dark. Isn’t that right?”

  Yates looked at David with the eyes of a man who wanted to say something but couldn’t. David knew he was close, maybe too close to figuring it all out. But he still wanted to know the details.

  “How do they keep track of the train counts? They don’t sit outside all the time counting them, right? They must use remote cameras or something?”

  “I’m not saying anything more!”

  David decided to change course. “Yates, I’ll need some contact information from you.”

  “I really don’t want to get involved.”

  “You were involved before you showed up at my door. Now, how can I reach you?”

  “I don’t want to have to testify in court.”

  “Hey, I can’t help you there. Though it might not matter much to you, my life is on the line. Anyway, you might not have to show your face in court if you cooperate with me. Besides, I’ll need an address to send you the killdeer counts.”

  “You’d do that?”

  “Well, there’s nothing illegal about collecting this information, right? I mean, train watching is a hobby for a lot of people. It seems legit if they don’t trespass.”

  David’s gesture may have seemed generous, but it was in his own best interest to send Yates the killdeer counts. If Yates was desperate, his backers were desperate. David didn’t want to find out the extent of their desperation if he told Yates and his people to shove off. At best, he needed an ally at this point. If not allies, then he at least needed to neutralize them as a threat. Handing over the counts would do that for now.

  “Yes, you’re right. There’s nothing illegal about collecting the information.”

  “So, I’ll check Harold’s Gmail inbox and try to send you what I can find. Just to confirm you are who you say you are, what e-mail address did Harold send his earlier counts from?”

  “Ah, ColonelKilldeer@gmail.com.”

  “That’s right. You make the payments like you always have done in the past. I’ll try and figure this all out on my end, and get you the counts.”

  Yates dug into his pocket, pulled out his wallet, and located a business card. It carried only his name, address, and phone number. “Here’s where you can contact me.”

  The latch on the front door jiggled. Both men looked toward the sound. Out popped Annie’s head. David hid the baseball bat behind one leg.

  “Hey, David, is everything okay out here?”

  “Yeah, honey, Mr. Yates here wanted to talk to me about investments. I’ve been listening to what he has to say.”

  “Are you almost done?”

  “Yes, we’re pretty much done for now.” Yates nodded in agreement. “I’ll be there in a second.”

  “Okay,” Annie said, standing her ground. She was waiting for David to finish.

  David whispered, “I suggest we shake hands and part company. You can walk down the street and call your driver to pick you up.”

  “All right,” Yates said, extending his hand. They shook and David went inside. He shut the door behind him and locked it.

  When Annie went back to watching television with Christy, David headed down the stairs to his basement office, picked up the phone, and dialed.

  “Hello, Mr. Thompson,” Julius Moore said on the other end.

  “Sorry to bother you on a Saturday, Julius, but I need to talk with you.”

  “It’s okay. What’s on your mind?”

  “Do you know anyone at Baxter and Chadwick? You know, the big downtown Albany law firm?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “Do you know if your face has found its way onto the TV news or into the newspaper because of the train explosions and my arrest?”

  “As far as I know, there’s been no picture of me in the media. What’s this all about?”

  “What are you doing on Monday morning?”

  “Nothing at this point.”

  “Good. Meet me outside the offices of Baxter and Chadwick at ten fifty a.m. Keep a few hours free. Okay?”

  “I guess so. What’s going on?”

  “I’m not sure exactly, but I’m going to try to help out with your investigation. I’ll know more by Monday. Will I see you then?”

  “Okay, I’ll be there.”

  “Good. Thanks, Julius. Thank you for giving me a chance. I’ll try not to let you down.”

  THIRTY-SIX

&n
bsp; David spotted Julius Moore standing on the street corner outside the law office on Monday, blowing into his clasped hands to keep warm. He wore a black-cashmere topcoat and looked out of place wearing sunglasses. The gray skies were dropping flurries like confetti on the bare ground. It was the first snow of the season.

  David had come straight from Patrick’s Barbershop; his hair had become unwieldy. He hadn’t had it cut since October, and he wanted to look lawyerly for the deposition. He was carrying his briefcase and wearing his best navy-blue suit from Men’s Warehouse and a red-silk tie. He had bought the tie off a street vendor in New York City thirty years ago. It looked good enough to him, though the label had fallen off. He’d left his coat in the car. He didn’t need one. Nerves and adrenalin had warmed him to the point of overheating. The snowflakes melted as soon as they touched him.

  “Good morning, Julius. Thank you for meeting me.”

  “Okay, Mr. Thompson, what are we doing here?”

  “We’re going to a deposition.”

  “Really? Who’s being deposed?”

  “Donovan Kincaid, president and CEO of Helmsley Oil. The company produces and distributes Bakken crude. I’ve got a personal-injury case against them.”

  “Okay, I’m not sure I understand the connection. Do you expect me to walk in there and announce that I’m from the FBI?”

  “No, don’t tell them you’re from the FBI. At least, not at the outset. I’ll just say you’re an associate of mine.”

  “What is that supposed to mean?” Moore asked. A vein on his neck inflated.

  “Relax, Julius. This kind of game can’t be new to you,” David said.

  “I don’t usually get my assignments from some . . . .”

  “Some what, Julius?”

  “Never mind.”

  “You want to catch the guys behind the explosions, right?”

  “Of course.”

  “You’ve got to be a wolf, Julius,” David said, like he had just gotten off the paddy wagon from Rikers Island. “You’ve got to loosen up.”

  “Just tell me what it means to be your associate.”