Till the Cows Come Home (25 page)

Chapter Thirty-Seven

As soon as I hung up, I saw lights in my driveway. Queenie was going nuts, so I leaned forward carefully to see out the window. It was Pam. I knocked on the glass before she went up to the house.

She came into the office, where she shut the door and leaned against it, hugging a briefcase to her chest. “I see you managed to get out of the hospital.”

I shrugged a shoulder.

“How are you feeling?”

“Just took some painkillers, so I’m better than ten minutes ago. A little high, but less miserable.”

“Good.”

“How was your meeting with Sonny?”

“What? Oh. Okay.” She was sweating, and her eyes were bloodshot.

“God, Pam, you look like hell. You need to go to the doctor.”

“No. No, I don’t think so.”

I shook my head. “Whatever. So you have some ideas for me?”

“About your milk?”

“Yeah. About whether it could be poisoning people.”

She dropped her briefcase, put her hands to her face, and burst into tears.

I raised my eyebrows, wondering what I’d said. “Pam?”

She pounded on the door behind her. “Goddamnit, Stella, why couldn’t you just be dumb? You were
supposed
to be dumb.”

I stared at her.

“That farm in Dublin was a secret. Wayne was ordered to watch his back, make sure he was never followed.”

“Dublin?” I froze. “But I didn’t say anything about Dublin.”

She shook her head. Tears poured down her face. “You didn’t have to.”

“You mean—”

“Yes! Yes, dammit, I know about your milk. I know about the plant. I know how it’s poisoning the neighborhood!”

I gaped at her. She picked up her briefcase, slammed it onto my desk, and thrust her hand into it. She pulled out a thick stack of papers. And threw them at me.

“Here! It’s all here! God forgive me, it’s all here.”

She staggered back against the office door and slid down to the floor, hugging her knees to her chest. I watched her for a moment before forcing my eyes to the mess of papers scattered over the desktop, the floor, and me.

Numb, I picked one up. Then another. And another. Typed on the pages were equations, symbols, and vocabulary that were foreign to me. Lots of stuff about proteins, DNA, and other scientific garble. All this was mixed in with words I did recognize, like silage, grain, and corn.

I glanced at Pam. She was still crying, rocking and banging her head rhythmically against the door.

I picked up another page. More of the same, although there was something else I recognized. My name.

I scrabbled through the papers, looking for anything more that made sense. I began to see other familiar things. Jude’s name, the dates he’d filled my silo and my granary. Good God, I was lucky if
I
kept track of those things.

The next page I picked up was even odder than what I’d already seen. The entire page was filled with a block of letters, reading “GCTAGGCTACGTAGGCTAC…” and so on. No breaks, no other characters, no punctuation.

Something clicked in my brain and I remembered reading articles about artificial insemination and gene pools. I recognized the babble on the paper.

“This DNA sequence,” I said.

Pam turned glazed eyes to me.

“It’s the genetics of Jude’s corn, isn’t it?” My stomach twisted, and I knew what I’d thought before was the truth. “My milk really is poisoning all those people. Somehow Jude’s grain is making the milk toxic.”

Pam’s eyes filled again.

I stared her down. “Tell me.”

She focused on something beyond my shoulder. My aerial photograph, probably. Ironically. She cleared her throat. “I engineered a seed. A seed that would grow corn with a poison in its core.”

“But Marianne buys GM seeds meant to resist drought. She told me so herself, just the other day.”

“Marianne has no idea. She thinks she’s using a legitimate test seed. The clincher was when she was told it had only a fifty-fifty chance of working. She was counting on failure.”

“And how was it you knew to approach her?”

Pam sat up, life beginning to return to her eyes. “Come on, Stella. The entire farming community knows Marianne hates the farming life. It’s not exactly a secret. She’ll do anything to sabotage Jude’s crops. And it was perfect since Jude’s crops almost exclusively feed your herd.”

I swallowed, trying to breathe.
My herd
.

Queenie began barking outside, and I craned my neck to see what was going on. Before anything came into view she was quiet again. I turned back to Pam. “And it’s making people sick how, exactly?”

“I’ve added a gene to the corn’s DNA that’s engineered to express potent aflatoxin.”

I shook my head. “But that would make my cows sick, too.”

She pushed herself up from the floor and stepped toward me. “No. I made sure it wouldn’t. The fungal gene is programmed in such a way it’s dormant until eaten by the cows. A protein from one of the natural bacteria in the cow’s first stomach generates an inactive gene. Digestive acids are nasty, you know. They wreak havoc on DNA molecules. Anyway, once that gene gets to the udder, the oxytocin—a milk producing hormone—switches on the aflatoxin gene. It’s out of the cow’s digestive system by that time. And the level of oxytocin is highest during milking—meaning it’s being immediately expelled from the cow. It’s amazing, really.”

Amazing.

“I didn’t want people getting sick from other secretions, either,” she said. “Otherwise you’d probably be dead from all the manure you shovel around every day. The aflatoxin gene was targeted to the mammary tissue in the udder so it would be in the milk but not in the cow’s other discharge. It took a little doing, but from what I can see, I got it right.”

I breathed through my mouth. “So that’s why you weren’t pasteurizing the milk.”

She nodded. “Would’ve killed the aflatoxin along with all the other bacteria. Separating the cream from the milk was enough. No one knew the difference.”

I studied my hands, gripping the edge of my desk. “But Pam,
why?”

She laughed harshly. “
Why
? You want to know
why
?” She laughed some more. “The money I’m going to make, it’s…it’s astounding.”

Money. Money to save her dad. Her dad’s farm.
Her
farm.

“But Pam, people
died
.”

Expressions warred on her face, and her eyes began to water again. “No one was supposed to die,” she whispered.

“So what went wrong?”

“I…I hadn’t taken into account the ones who were already sick.”

I looked at the ceiling, the cabinet, anything but her. “So where’s the money coming from, Pam?”

She lowered her eyes.

“Pam.
Where
?”

She rounded on me. “Where do you think, Stella? Who’s had an iron grip on my life for the past seven years? Who has enough money to save us all—every farmer—if he wanted to?”

My mouth dropped open. “
Sonny
?”

She closed her eyes.

“But
why
?”

She put her hands over her face briefly, then dropped them. “You know what they say. You can never have enough money.”

I stared at her. “Sonny has enough.”

“Tell him that.” She wrapped her arms around herself and walked to the window to look out. “He knew all about my work at Penn, being my sponsor. You know he paid for every minute of my schooling? He considered it his right to follow my progress through every report and exam. He might as well have taken the courses himself.”

She turned toward me, and I waited, paralyzed by shock.

“So he came to me. Said he wanted me to create a GM crop that would make a community sick. Assured me he didn’t want something lethal. Just something he could control.”

“But—”

“Then, when all the farmers were convinced the land was poison, and no one wanted to build a house in this town for fear of getting sick, he’d buy it all. Beat Hubert Purcell and the rest of the vultures at their own game.” She stopped.

“Don’t quit now, Pam.”

She turned back to the window. “But people started dying. He hadn’t expected that. Hadn’t
wanted
that. He…he completely freaked out. Decided to change tactics. Figured we’d move on to other towns with the poison milk, and later he could ride in as the hero, dispensing medicine and wisdom. Took his cue from the anthrax scare, thought he could become a local legend.”

I struggled to my feet, but she put out her hand.

“I knew it wouldn’t work. He’s going to go down, and I’m going with him. But no one else is going to die.” She gestured at the papers. “You have what you need to stop it.”

My arms trembled from supporting my weight. “How could you
do
this? How could you
possibly
say yes?”

Fire flashed in her eyes. “How could I possibly say no? If it hadn’t been for Sonny, I’d be in your shoes, or worse. Trying to save a farm that was doomed for failure.”

I lunged across the desk and grabbed her shirt, pulling her across the desk toward me. “So help me, if you killed Howie—”

The office door slapped open. I threw Pam away from me and dropped behind the desk, the pain in my ribs so intense I could hardly breathe. Sonny stood there, smiling his charismatic smile, holding a shotgun.

“Of course Pam didn’t kill Howie,” he said. “She doesn’t have the guts for that.”

“
You
—”

“Of course, me.” His wild, red-rimmed eyes betrayed his smile, and his gaze flicked from Pam to me and back again.

I glanced out the window, wondering where Belle was, and what I had to do to get her to call 911.

“Oh,” Sonny said. “Don’t bother looking for that darling dog of yours.”

“Oh, God. You didn’t—”

He waved his hand. “Of course not. A good kick to the head knocked her right out. It’s not like she can ID me later. After you’re dead.”

So he didn’t know about Belle.

I spoke through my rage, my voice sounding strangled. “Why didn’t you just finish me off when I was lying in the ditch yesterday?”

“Incompetent fools.” The gun jerked in his hands, and I ducked my head behind the desk. “Should’ve just done it myself. They saw all the blood on your head and didn’t know enough to remember head wounds bleed like crazy, but aren’t necessarily fatal. ‘
But there was so much of it, Mr. Turner
.’ Idiots assumed you were bleeding to death and left you to die.”

“Instead of putting a bullet in my head.”

“No. They should’ve just bashed your head a little more. Made it look like part of the accident.” His eyes bored into mine. “Instead, you got to live an extra day.” He shook his head sadly. “When your friends find you here tomorrow they’ll feel so bad. What a shame you had to shoot yourself. You just couldn’t take the fact that Howie was dead.”

I couldn’t. But I wasn’t about to kill myself. I jerked my chin toward his gun. “They’ll know I didn’t shoot myself with
that
.”

He licked his lips, having apparently forgotten that part of the equation. I wondered how quickly I could get to my rifle, but knew it wouldn’t be quick enough. I had to play for time and hope Belle was on the phone with the police. Hope she saw Queenie lying in the yard, and was smart enough not to come storming out here.

“Howie figured out what you were doing, didn’t he?” I said.

Sonny licked his lips and gripped the shotgun tighter. “He’d made too many connections. When Wayne told Pam Howie had been asking about milk distribution, I knew he was onto us. I sent Pam to find out how much he’d discovered, but I followed her, knowing she wouldn’t be able to kill him if she needed to. We found nothing when we searched his apartment, but it seems something was missed.…” He looked at me.

“He hid it here in the office. An envelope with everything he’d discovered.”

“Ah. A pity we didn’t have more time to search.”

I swallowed. “So, if I had been at home that evening, as usual?”

“Pam would’ve simply done her charm routine and wormed things out on her own.”

My heart plummeted. So Howie would still be alive if I hadn’t been out chasing down Hubert and Marianne. Damn them.

“But don’t feel guilty,” Sonny said. “We would’ve come back later to get him.”

I edged my way around the desk, putting on more of a show of injury than I actually felt. Those painkillers were really kicking in.

“Not too close, Stella,” Sonny said. His voice wavered.

Pam caught my eye and subtly shook her head.

I leaned my hip on the corner of the desk. “I want to know about Wayne. What was in this for him?”

“Oh, he didn’t have much of a choice,” Sonny said. “His wife Flo is home alone all day while he’s working. She’d never have the ability to protect herself from an intruder.”

I digested that. “So Flo’s MS didn’t really take a turn for the worse?”

Sonny gave a high-pitched giggle. “God, no. Is that the story he gave you? No. We promised him a lot of money. More than enough to get Flo the treatment she needs. I had to have someone inside the hauling company, and Wayne was the logical choice, since he collects your milk. It wasn’t hard to convince him. He simply emptied his tank at the storage facility after his morning run and came to get your milk over his lunch hour.”

I shifted position so my weight was on my good leg.

Sonny waved the gun at me, and his voice went flat. “No more moving.”

I rested my butt against the desk, wondering if the cops were coming, or if Belle was oblivious to what was happening out here.
Stall, stall
, I told myself. “One more thing. How come I was still getting money from the co-op, when they have no record of getting my milk since last summer?”

Sonny showed me a good portion of his dentures. “You
are
smarter than we thought, aren’t you?”

I glanced at Pam, and she flushed bright red. She spoke softly. “It was Billy.”

My mouth dropped. “Billy? Marty and Rochelle’s
nephew
?”

She nodded miserably.

Sonny giggled again. “William’s the accountant at Rockefeller, you know. Been on board from the beginning. He had a couple—shall we say,
laundry
, problems—that could be overlooked if he helped out. Besides being an old school chum of Pam’s, of course. Oh, and yours.” He smiled a wolfish smile. “William retrieved your banking numbers from the co-op, and after stopping your account on their computers, he paid you from an untraceable source we set up.”