Cold Wind (30 page)

“We used to think we were cursed with Class Five, Six, and Seven wind in this state,” he said, “and now we find out we’re
blessed
with it. But for Christ’s sake, we’ve got to get some control. Not everybody wants to look out their window and see those things. In the last few years, we’ve all learned the word ‘viewshed.’ But what I need to be made to understand is why it is we’re putting up all those turbines when right underneath them is all the oil, gas, coal, and uranium we’ll ever need but
we aren’t allowed to get
. If the reasons these windmills are going up is based on wishful thinking and policy and not need, what the hell are we doing?”

Joe shrugged his
I’m-just-a-game-warden
shrug.

“Is that what you want to know?” Rulon asked.

“Partly,” Joe said. “But specifically I was wondering about the Rope the Wind project up in my neck of the woods.”

Rulon sat back in his chair and laced his fingers across his belly, which was much bigger than the last time Joe had seen it. Rulon said, “Now I get it. This is about your father-in-law.”

“Partly,” Joe said.

“He was really chained from the blade of a turbine?”

“Yup. I found the body.”

“Jesus,” Rulon said, reacting as if a chill were coursing through him. “What a way to go. I hope it doesn’t start a trend.”

“Too much work,” Joe said. “Most criminals don’t want to work that hard.”

“Give my regards to your mother-in-law,” Rulon said, raising his eyebrows. “I’d hate to lose one of my biggest contributors on a first-degree murder charge. That kind of thing doesn’t look good. Thank the Lord I’m nearly term-limited out and I won’t have some jackass Republican using that one against me down the road . . . But I digress. From what I understand, it was going to be the biggest single private wind energy project in the State of Wyoming.
One hundred turbines!
But this murder has thrown it off track, maybe. And you think there is more to it than meets the eye?”

“Possibly.”

Rulon cocked his head. “I didn’t think you and your mother-in-law saw eye-to-eye on much. Why are you trying to save her?”

Joe said, “It isn’t about her, although it is. My wife . . .”

“Say no more,” Rulon guffawed. Then: “There isn’t much I can tell you about it. The state hasn’t been involved. It was done purely between the landowner, the power companies, and the Feds. There’s no state land involved, so we’ve been kept out of it.”

“I was afraid of that,” Joe said. “You see, the murder trial starts next Monday.”

Rulon sat back. “That’s a
fast
trial.”

“Judge Hewitt—”

“Hewitt,” Rulon said, cutting Joe off. “I did a few trials before him back when I was a county prosecutor. Once he made me sing. Actually sing a song. But that’s another story for another time. The guy is no-nonsense.”

Joe said, “He drew a Dall sheep permit in Alaska. He wants the trial over before the season ends.”

Rulon chortled.

“So I’ve got less than a week to figure out what’s going on, if anything,” Joe said sourly.

“This sounds like the whole wind energy rush,” Rulon said. “It’s out of control and moving so fast nobody can keep up with it. No one has stopped to look at what’s happened in other countries when they decided to artificially change their energy policy to feel-good crackpot schemes. Jobs have been lost and their economies tanked, and they’ve completely backed off. But not us, by God!”

Rulon practically leaped across the desk. He said, “Wind energy has created some strange bedfellows. The traditional fossil fuel guys hate it, and they’re partnering up with their traditional enemies, the greens. Some landowners love windmills, some hate them—it depends on who’s getting paid. The Feds are going over our heads because it’s new policy and they couldn’t care less if it makes economic sense or if the states are players. And there’s so much damned federal money involved . . . you just know things are going to get screwy.”

“Thank you for your time,” Joe said, standing. “I appreciate the background, but I know you’re busy.”

Rulon assessed Joe through heavy-lidded eyes. He said, “It’s good to see you, Joe. I still think you’re a man I can count on, despite everything.”

“Thank you.”

“You and me, we’re not through,” Rulon said. “I still have two years to go, and I may need to call on you again. I’ll work it out with the new director when he’s hired. Or she’s hired. Will you respond if I ask?”

Joe hesitated, and said, “Sure.”

“As long as it’s within your boundaries,” Rulon said sarcastically. “You ought to get a bumper sticker that says, ‘What Would Dudley Do-Right Do?’ Call it W-W-D-D-R-D. That has a ring to it.”

Joe nodded. “That’s the second time in two days I’ve been called that.”

“Maybe there’s something to it,” Rulon said. “But hell, that’s one reason I like you, Joe.”

Joe shrugged.

“But like I said, I need more yes-men in the future.”

“Sorry.”

“Have a good day, Joe,” Rulon said, “and my best to your lovely family.” He always signed off that way, Joe thought. As if they’d just had a conversation about the weather.

“Yours, too, sir.”

Rulon said, “Tell Coon to cooperate with you or he’ll be hearing from me. And he doesn’t like to hear from me.”

“Thank you, sir,” Joe said.

 

 

FBI Special Agent
Chuck Coon said, “Yeah, we’ve got him. But why should I let you talk to Orin Smith?”

“I told you,” Joe said. “He may be able to shed some light on a case I’m working on. As far as I know, it’s unrelated to why you’ve got him here in the first place.”

They were sitting at a long empty conference table on the third floor of the Federal Center in Cheyenne. To get in, Joe had had to leave his weapons, phone, keys, and metal in a locker at the ground floor security entrance. He couldn’t help but contrast the difference between getting in to see Chuck Coon and his morning meeting with the governor.

“What happened to your face?” Coon asked.

“I tangled with a motivated slacker,” Joe said.

“I didn’t know there were such creatures.”

“Neither did I.”

“When was the last time you saw Nate Romanowski?”

Joe stifled a grin because of the way Coon had slipped that in.

“I haven’t seen him for over a year,” Joe said. “In fact, I wish I knew where he was right now.”

“Don’t tell me
that
,” Coon said. “Jeez, Joe. We’re still after him, you know.”

Joe nodded.

Coon had not lost his boyish features, although his close-cropped brown hair was beginning to sparkle with gray from running the Cheyenne bureau since his predecessor had been kicked up the ladder in the bureaucracy. Coon was incapable of not looking like a federal agent, Joe thought. He wore an ill-fitting sport coat over a white shirt and tie. Coon seemed like the kind of guy who would wear his credentials on a lanyard in the shower and while playing with his kids. In Joe’s own experience and from what he’d heard from other law enforcement throughout the state, Coon was an honorable man doing a professional job. There was no doubt that he served a distant federal master, but in the two years he’d spent as supervisor, he’d built bridges between the myriad conflicting city, county, state, and federal agencies that overlapped confusingly throughout Wyoming. Joe liked him, and when they weren’t butting heads, they discussed their families and Coon’s new interest in archery.

“So why is he in lockup?” Joe asked.

“Ponzi scheme,” Coon said. “I’m surprised you didn’t hear about it. He’s been running a good one for the last two years right here out of Cheyenne. Kind of a high-tech pyramid scheme, where he convinced investors who wanted to shelter their money from taxes to invest in his operation. He claimed he’d figured out a way to buy hard assets like gold and real estate through a legit offshore company. That way, he told them, they could shelter their cash so the government wouldn’t get it and at the same time hedge their wealth against declines in the dollar. It was pretty sophisticated.”

Joe nodded.

“There’s a lot more of these kinds of scams these days,” Coon said. “The rich are running scared. Some of them will do just about anything not to have to pay up to fifty percent of their income in taxes. So when they hear about an outfit like Orin Smith’s, they get reckless when they should know better.”

Joe said, “So he actually paid them dividends?”

“At first,” Coon said. “It was a classic Bernie Madoff-like Ponzi scheme, but with a twist. The first few rich folks who sent him cash to shelter did receive dividend checks based on the increase in the price of gold or whatever. And they told their friends for finder’s fees that Smith kicked back. But as more and more wealthy people sent him money, the dividend checks got smaller for the first investors and nonexistent for the later ones.”

“What was the twist?” Joe asked.

Coon shook his head in a gesture that was part disgust and part admiration. “Unlike Madoff, Smith never even pretended to be aboveboard. He bragged on his website and in his emails that he operated outside the system. That way, he claimed, he and his investors were performing kind of a noble act in defense of free enterprise. He called it a ‘capital strike.’ The people who sent him money knew he wasn’t going to report to the SEC or anybody else. The endgame was that when and if the tax rates ever went back down, the investors would ask him to sell off their assets and return the cash. For Orin Smith, it worked pretty well for a while.”

“So how’d you catch him?” Joe asked. “If no one was willing to turn him in because they would be admitting they’d done something criminal.”

Coon said, “Guess.”

Joe thought for a moment, then said, “A divorce.”

“Bingo. A trophy wife in Montana and her seventy-year-old husband split the sheets. They jointly owned a high-end ski resort where all the members were multi-millionaires, and she wanted half of everything. When she found out he’d invested most of what they had with Smith’s company, she went ballistic and reported it to the Bureau in Montana. It was child’s play for us to trace the IP addresses through all the firewalls right here to Cheyenne. And it didn’t take us long to guess who was responsible, since Orin Smith has been running scams here for years.”

Joe sat back. “I don’t get it,” he said. “This is the same guy who was the head honcho of a legitimate wind energy company worth millions? And he’s been on your radar for a while.”

“So,” Coon said, “you want to meet him?”

“That’s why I’m here.”

“I’m going to sit in. If he says he doesn’t want to talk, that’s it. It’s over. And he may want his lawyer present. If that’s the case, you’ll need to wait. And if your questioning goes anywhere it shouldn’t, I’m going to shut you down. Are we clear?”

Joe winced, but he couldn’t see that he had a choice. “We’re clear.”

Nate Romanowski
pulled his Jeep into an empty space in long-term parking at the Jackson Hole Airport and checked his wristwatch: 10:30 a.m.

The sawtooth profile of the Grand Teton Mountains dominated the western horizon. It was a clear cool day with a bite in the air and there was a light dusting of snow on the top of two of the peaks: Teewinot and the Grand. River cottonwoods and mountain ash shouldering up against the Snake River in the valley were already turning gold. Out on the highway, a pair of bull moose were meandering from the sagebrush flats across the blacktop causing a backup in traffic that he’d simply driven around in the ditch. Since it was the only airport in the country located within a national park, getting there was a visual extravaganza, but he’d seen it all so many times and he had other things on his mind.

He flipped down the visor and looked at himself in the small mirror the way a painter inspects his work to determine if he’s finished or more touch-ups are required. He hardly recognized himself. His hair was black and short-cropped, and his eyes were brown due to a pair of tinted contact lenses. He looked out through a pair of narrow black-framed hipster glasses. He wore a black polo shirt under a chocolate brown jacket (with an obligatory pink ribbon pinned to the lapel), chinos, and lightweight hiking shoes straight out of the box. Nate looked thoroughly Jackson-like, he thought. He’d look right at home on the streets of Jackson, Aspen, Vail, or Sun Valley. Like all the other politicos, hedge fund managers, and Hollywood players with second or third homes in mountain resorts across the West.

After hiding his .500 in a lockbox under the seat and slipping a new wallet into the back of his chinos and a black leather passport case into the breast pocket of his jacket, he topped himself off with an Australian-style brimmed hat and he looked so authentic, he thought, that he fought an urge to punch himself out.

 

 

The ticket agent
behind the counter wore blonde dreadlocks and barely looked up when he said he wanted to go to Chicago on the next flight. She looked at his ID and said, “Mr. Abbey, there is one seat left on United 426 at 1:36 p.m. That will get you back home to Chicago at 7:14 p.m. with a change in Denver.”

“Great,” he said.

“Are you checking any luggage?”

“No. Just this carry-on.”

“And will you be using a credit card today?” she asked.

“Just cash,” he said.

She barely looked up as he handed over eight one-hundred-dollar bills. She gave him forty dollars in change.

The ticket printer hummed and she handed him documents for Phillip Abbey of 2934 West Sunnyside Avenue, Chicago, Illinois.

He strolled toward security and the white-clad TSA officers who seemed as bored with their jobs as the ticket agent. It was a common attitude he’d found in resort towns, he thought: Everybody who actually had to work couldn’t wait to get off their shift and get outside and recreate in their chosen interest, whether it be hiking, mountain-bike riding, skiing, whatever. They were marking time, and their jobs existed solely to fund their time off. They had no emotional investment in the companies that employed them or the community where they lived. The ticket agent had no ambition to move up in the airline industry, and the TSA agents were there because all the post office jobs were filled.