Death in the Pines (21 page)

Something swooped overhead in a jerky flight pattern: the thaw had woken one hibernating bat. He'd be a hungry bat if he didn't head south. No insects were available for him this early in the year. I heard the gurgle of water and realized the snow melt was going on beneath the crusted surface. The cold snap had passed and the night was nearly balmy. How would
I have felt if Sylvia had accepted my invitation to spend the night? What games would the two of us have played?

Then something large moved down the slope to the right, at the edge of the forest, lumbering away fast in a loping stride. I couldn't make out any detail, but it wasn't human. I called, “Good night, Grandfather,” and closed the door.

I poured a glass of red wine and picked up my cell phone. Laid down on the bed with a spiral-bound pad and a pen at the ready, propped myself up on two pillows, and called 411. I asked for the number of Frank Lauser, Newark, New Jersey. No such listing. None for any F. Lausers. They did have Lauser's Electronic Repair, a Michael Lauser, and a Teresa Lauser, but that was it. No Frank Lauser in the whole area code, for that matter.

I drank half my wine quickly, enjoying the taste, the spreading warmth. There had been times, not many, when John Lincoln and I got stinking drunk. It was bad for him, and he knew it. He was the kind of alcoholic who could stay sober for eleven months, then go on a week-long bender. The drink had killed him, along with painkillers and stimulants, the things he used to mask the damage his profession had done to his body and soul, to rouse himself to extra effort. I set my half-empty glass on the floor, wondering if I'd burned out completely.

I hadn't worked since John died, but my efforts on behalf of Jeremiah Smith reminded me how much I'd loved the game, being the hunter, occasionally the hunted. But I was spinning my wheels. Who had shot at us? Who'd stuck a flare into Jeremiah's truck? Who'd driven the car that had smacked him into eternity, who had tied Jerry to the tree, and why had it all been done?

I favored Bill Grinder as a suspect, but I couldn't quite make him fit, nor Darryl. Mr. Frank Lauser, reputedly of New
Jersey, was probably the “Frank” who Benson had breakfast with and, I was increasingly sure, the guy with the stun gun in the forest. I tried it on different ways: Maybe two Subarus out that night, and Lauser was some innocent. Maybe Jeremiah had been hit by a drunk. Maybe some fan of
E. coli
had decided to get back at Jerry for his insulting the bugs in his stories.

But Darryl had trashed Jeremiah's trailer and had taken something from it. And I didn't see any clear picture emerging from my mentally jigsawing the case.

So I called another number, a secure unlisted line belonging to Sam Calloway of Denver, an old friend of John Lincoln's who had set up our Atlanta office with its own computer network and who had, just as a favor to John, hacked for us a startling volume of information from a dozen absolutely secure sites. He'd once been a cryptographer for the NSA, back when code breaking was a matter of people using machines instead of vice versa.

I didn't know how friendly Sam would be to me. John was the one who had tracked down Sam's son and had kidnapped him from a cult, before I became his partner. There had, I gathered from John's stories, been some unpleasantness. The cult leader had targeted John for assassination, but Sam had casually wiped out the organization's credit worthiness and had frozen the assets of four men who had profited from the cult's activities. John had visited the men and had explained that if they ever wanted access to their money again, perhaps a détente would be in order.

The actual cult leader died “tragically” a few days later, having fallen overboard from the group's yacht on a moonless night. The organization regrouped as a bona fide religion. It's still around, but now it makes its money from self-help CDs
and books. “Violence,” John had told me, “is the resort of weak minds. Go first for the wallet.”

I wondered to what extent Jeremiah's death was involved with somebody's wallet.

Sam answered the phone as he always had: “Yah?” I imagined his bulk occupying its customary space with three or four computer screens spread around him. He was a wealthy man, and he loved his work. He had told John and me that his company earned over twenty million a year just from selling and placing ads on porn sites.

“Oakley here, Sam.”

“Great to hear your voice! How are you? Where are you? I lost you after the funeral.”

“Moved to Vermont. I'm taking a kind of sabbatical.”

“You got me at a busy time, son. My server in Denmark has crashed, and I'm redirecting its traffic to a new one in Berlin.” I heard the rattle of a keyboard. “Go ahead, though, I can talk.”

“I need a favor. I'm looking for information on a Frank Lauser who I'm increasingly thinking was the man who tied a guy to a tree and tortured him with a stun-gun. And he's into something with another suspect in the killing of a friend of mine. I'm pretty sure about the guy and the tree, but the only link to Lauser is that he rented a car similar to one the torturer drove off in.” I decided not to get into the breakfast with Benson.

“You got Internet access?”

“I don't have electricity.”

“Weird. Or scary. Or maybe nice, depending. Wait a second.”

More rat-a-tat of the keyboard, and then Sam said, “I think that's it. Let me switch machines. OK, give me the dope on your guy.”

I told him that he had a New Jersey PO box but had been pulled over on the highway heading to Burlington, Vermont.

“OK. I got your guy's credit report, medical records, DMV information, some Social Security and tax stuff. He doesn't have a website of his own. His e-mail's through his cable company, meaning he's got a cable modem. Heavy use, I see. Maybe he downloads a lot of dirty movies. Hmm … no, his IP address isn't registered with any of the heavy porn sites.”

“What solid info can you give me?”

“The guy is fifty-three years old, divorced … sheesh, four times, currently unmarried. Huh. Next time you see him, call him Dr. Lauser—PhD in organic chemistry. He lives in an apartment that rents for just short of four thousand a month.”

“In Newark?”

“In Manhattan.” He gave me an address on Seventy-Fifth Street. “He's got a PO box in Newark, too, the one you mentioned. Let's see. Uses his credit cards to the tune of six, seven grand a month, pays off the whole balance every month.”

“Where does he work?”

“He seems to be living off investment income, some consulting work. Three times last year, one stint for seventy-five grand, one for fifty, one for one fifty-five, two different companies: Genotypes Consolidated and Alston Genetic Services. Wait a second. OK, Genotypes is out of Bonn, Germany, but they have offices and facilities in Cambridge, Mass. Alston's a US company, registered in Delaware. But Delaware companies make me suspicious. Most of the Fortune 500 are chartered there—easy incorporation rules. Alston doesn't seem to have any offices there, just a PO box. It's a shell company for something. OK, the stock is wholly owned by Matterhorn Research Inc., which is headquartered in the Bahamas. They're covering their tracks. Some American corporation will own all the stock
in Matterhorn. Let me see, let me see … got it. Matterhorn is owned and controlled by a Vermont company, my friend. Benson Forestry Products. They paid Dr. Lauser seventy-five thousand last year for consulting services.”

“How about the Bonn company? Any link?”

“Harder to tell. Germany's harder. Give me a day?”

“No, don't waste the time. This is enough to go on.”

“Got lots more if you need it. He has seven fillings in his teeth, and his last colonoscopy was negative, but he's got a blood pressure problem and his cholesterol's worse than mine. He's on a beta-blocker. Maybe that's why he's divorced, that stuff can give a man erectile dysfunction.”

“Do me a favor and never check me out.”

“Oh, son, somebody's probably checked you out thousands of times. This is the information age. Hang on a sec. OK, with this Benson Forestry, the CEO is Caleb Benson, the vice president and secretary-treasurer is Eva Benson. Caleb owns forty-three percent of the stock, the rest is in the hands of other relatives—at least they're all named Benson—but Eva's the only other Benson official in Vermont. Hmm. She doesn't own any stock that I can see, though. Company reported a loss last year, which was picked up by D&B. They're liquid about a quarter of a million, in four banks, three in the US. They've been on a downhill slide for three out of the last four years, in fact. Trees not selling for much up there?”

“I haven't kept track. What can you give me on Benson?”

“You are a busy man. OK, let me see. Benson personally was doing OK until two years back. His salary was four hundred thousand a year, plus bonuses that just about doubled that. The corporation was paying dividends up to four years ago. Bad year, then a so-so one, then two bad ones in a row. Last year was the worst, a substantial posted loss, no dividends.
Caleb took a salary cut and … but wait, he put Eva on the payroll. So Caleb netted about two hundred and thirty grand, and Eva just about the same. I'll bet they have some pissed-off relatives.”

“What does the company actually do?”

“Timber, it says here, and they hold about twelve thousand acres in Vermont and New Hampshire as assets. They don't have a website.”

“A bad year, but they hired Lauser to be a consultant to the tune of seventy-five thousand?”

“Twice.”

“Can you find any connection between Benson's holdings and Native American tribes?”

“What? Wait, let me scan. No, nothing. But I'll check one of the services with a cross-search. ‘Benson Forest Products,' ‘Native American.' Guess I should throw in ‘Indian' as a search term too.”

“And Abenaki.” I spelled it for him.

I heard Sam typing again, and he hummed a snatch of “Moonlight in Vermont.”

“Stop it,” I said. “You'll give me an earworm.”

“Nice song. I like the Ella Fitzgerald-Louis Armstrong version. Son of a bitch, I got a hit. Two years ago next month one of the Benson crews was bulldozing a skidder trail—whatever the hell that is—through the woods. They unearthed some human bones. Turned out to be eight-hundred-year-old bones, from an Abenaki burial site. Vermont made them stop work. OK, follow it up … says here the Abenaki are raising money to relocate the bones to a burial site up north, or else they want to buy the land from Benson and rebury the bodies there. No resolution, they may still be negotiating.”

A connection at last. “OK,” I said. “Can you find anything on what Benson's genetics company is doing?”

“OK. This is becoming one big favor, Oakley.”

“I'll pay for your time.”

“Don't insult me. Hmm. Sorry, but I don't think I can help you. The company never issued any press releases, never did anything other than file tax returns. They don't have a listed phone number. You can't prove by this they're even in the genetics business. What the hell, it's the last great unregulated frontier. Any schmuck can set up a lab to do gene splicing for a ten thousand dollar investment. No shortage of amateur experts out there. Sometimes an entrepreneur will hit it lucky and sell something to a big corporation for mucho dinero. Monsanto bought the terminator technology from someone else.”

“Guy in his basement?”

“Little bigger, but not much. Could've been a lone experimenter. Genetics experiments can be done by high school kids. You know, if you make food or chemicals or toys, the FDA or the FTC or some other agency will check to make sure your product isn't dangerous. But mess with the genetic code and nobody gives a damn, though it's potentially as destructive as making an atom bomb in your garage. If a gene jumps into the wild, it can change the ecosystem, the whole environment. Monsanto's engineered cotton and corn produces its own pesticide. What if flowering plants got that gene? What would happen to the bees? Mark my words, we're looking at the asbestos of the twenty-first century. One day we'll wake up and realize how dangerous genetic engineering is, and then we'll have to spend billions of dollars cleaning up.”

I thought of something else. “Sam, one more thing. Can you pull medical records on Caleb and Eva Benson?”

“It'll take a minute.” He started to hum again, stopped himself, and I listened to him breathe. Then he said, “Sorry, nothing. Either they're extraordinarily healthy, or else they pay cash for services. Or maybe they use phony names. Nobody ever checks, particularly if you pay up front for services, in cash.” I heard more typing. “Just for fun, let me try criminal records. Nothing on Eva. Know her maiden name?”

“No.”

“Richardson. Eva Marie Richardson. Born in Vermont, graduated from the University of Vermont, BS in business, went on for an MBA. Good grades. Uh-oh, naughty. One arrest for public drunkenness and lewdness.”

“Lewdness?” I asked.

“Might have told a cop to perform an act of fornication upon himself. Might have been a reduced charge from prostitution. No media coverage. Happened in Albany, New York.”

“Four hours away. Was she convicted?”

“No. Charges dismissed. Either it was a bad bust, or she had enough money for a good lawyer.”

“How about Caleb?”

“Civil suit against him by the family of an ex-wife. Violation of her civil rights. Damn, it says they alleged that he killed her or had her killed. Hunting accident on his own land near the Canadian border. Hit in the head by a twelve-gauge slug. Never found the shooter or the gun, so when they tried to sue it went nowhere. But in the initial filing, the wife's family brought out stuff about Benson once setting somebody's car on fire. In his younger days he beat up some people pretty badly in barroom brawls. His witnesses say he's basically a good guy with a lousy temper. He took anger-management classes, yada yada. The suit was dismissed. With no smoking gun, there was no way to tie him to the death.”