Death Takes a Gander (20 page)

Of course, Radigan had been at the lake too. But Ian wasn’t investigating the shot, or was he? She needed to check his notes. Frakus and Ducharme were ruled out when she connected the poisonings at Elk Park to Barr Lake. Which left Nate. What if her first instincts were correct? What if he and Tauer were friends, and the IES story was merely a coverup? Had Ian suspected Nate of rubber-stamping commodities?

The thought gave her a chill, and she cranked the heat up a notch. If that were the case, why would Nate give her so much information on the GE crop situation? Unless…

What if Nate had orchestrated Ian’s death? Could he be trying to set her up too? The case hinged on the corn in Agriventures’s field. Before she started accusing anyone, she needed proof that the corn had poisoned the geese. Nate knew her well enough to know she wouldn’t drop the investigation, especially if the order came through him. Was he banking on her tenacity?

First things first
, whispered Ian’s voice.

Angela laid out a plan. First she’d check Ian’s notes and do her research. Then she’d gather the evidence. By then, she ought to have narrowed it down to one of the three suspects.

An hour later, she parked her car in front of the regional U.S. Fish and Wildlife offices in Denver. Avoiding Kramner, she picked her way through the maze of partitions and slipped into her cubicle near the back of the room. The space looked neglected, in the same sagging way a house did when no one lived there. An avalanche of memos spilled from her inbox onto the desk. A stack of manila folders begged to be filed. Two pictures were thumb-tacked into the wall—one a photograph of her parents in Italy, the other a computer printout of Samson, the elk, prior to his demise in Rocky Mountain National Park.

The desk chair canted slightly to the left, which she compensated for by curling her leg up under her bottom. Hunkering down, she booted up the computer and requested information on Agriventures, Inc.

Donald Tauer, CEO, owned fifty-one percent of the company. The other forty-nine percent was publicly traded. According to the prospectus, Agriventures, though new to the organic market, commanded a large slice of the nation’s organic sales. Based on the quarterly report, millions of dollars had been invested over the past five years, implementing organic farming techniques across vast holdings. Assets outweighed the debts, and Agriventures appeared to be on the verge of paying dividends to its stockholders for the first time.

So why risk it all by planting GE corn?

She typed in Donald Tauer’s name and it came up connected with a number of local and regional festivals like the Elk Park Ice Fishing Jamboree. A family man, an outdoorsman, his driving line was “we focus on raising food that’s safe for you and your families to eat.”

By now, her foot was asleep, so she eased it out from under her, tamping its dead weight on the floor.

Out of curiosity, she typed in “Radigan Enterprises” and pulled up some interesting stuff. Radigan’s company had diversified in the seventies, gobbling up a hodgepodge of pharmaceutical companies, defense contractors, book publishing businesses, and banking cooperatives. The principal shareholder, Charles Embry Radigan, III, better known as Chuck, specialized in making money. The self-made billionaire—chairman of the Radigan Enterprises board of directors, active member of the National Rifle Association, and regional director of Ducks Unlimited—lived in a four-million-dollar mansion in Cherry Hills Farms. None of it reason enough to hang him.

“Glad to see you’re working.”

Angela looked up to find Kramner standing in the doorway to her cubicle. She clicked on the screen saver. “Research.”

Without preamble, he said, “Bernie Crandall called this morning.”

“And? Did he have the results of the fingerprint testing on the sinker containers?”

“They pulled a partial.”

Angela sat up straighter in the chair, causing it to shift and nearly dump her onto the floor. It took her a moment to balance. “Whose?”

“They think it belongs to a kid.”

“As in little kid?”

Kramner bumped his glasses higher on his nose. “It’s hard to say. They checked with Operation Kidprint and came up empty-handed, but it looks like the lead on the ice was a prank.”

She wasn’t buying that assessment.

Coincidence
—the remarkable happening of similar events by chance. Hadn’t that been Kramner’s definition? There were far too many coincidences in this case for her to accept the randomness of the events.

“Thank you, sir.”

After Kramner left, her cell phone rang.

“Dimato.”

“Angela, it’s Lark. Covyduck just called.”

More good news?

“You were right about the corn.”

Angela Lark asked to
call an emergency meeting of the EPOCH members, then hung up the phone and hurried to Ian’s office. Locating the notebook on waterfowl, she opened it to the first page. The more current notes—at least as far as she could tell from where they’d been positioned on Ian’s desk—were near the front. Halfway down the first page, she found what she was looking for.

Waterfowl. Corn product. Meeting changed to six-thirty
.

That was an hour before dispatch had notified her that Ian wanted backup. A little more than two hours before she’d found him dead. He must have realized he was walking into a trap at Barr Lake. More important, it proved she was on the right track, that it was the corn, not the shot alternative, that had caused the die-off.

Her next stop was dispatch. The dispatch center, located in the Denver City and County Building off Colfax Avenue, had taken Ian’s emergency call.

Angela stopped in the doorway and took in the scene. There were five stations, each occupied by a dispatcher. Each station housed several different monitors. From what she could see, one monitor displayed the address and personal information of the caller, one showed the location of the various emergency response teams, and another maintained a list of the calls being handled. When the phone rang, someone would answer and assess the emergency. Calls were triaged, and often a dispatcher handled two or more calls at time.

One young man with a waist-length ponytail sat with his back to the door, working a possible heart attack. He held a flip card with assessment questions open in one hand and was trying hard to calm down the caller.

“Please, ma’am, I need you to remain calm. Is your mother breathing?”

“Yes.” The caller’s voice sounded high-pitched and stressed.

“Is she sitting up?”

“Yes.”

“That’s good.” The dispatcher kept his voice soothing and even. “Emergency personnel are on the scene. Can you go to the door?”

“I don’t want to leave her.”

“I need you to open the door.”

Angela watched the tape spin. All calls were recorded, and recordings were archived by date. The other dispatchers were also on calls, so Angela waited. Finally, the dispatcher convinced the woman whose mother was having a heart attack to open the door.

“Hey there,” he said, swiveling his chair around. “What can I do for you?”

Angela showed her credentials. “One of the dispatchers here relayed a message to me from my partner on the night he died.”

The young man’s face turned grim. “That would be me. My name’s Taylor. I was sorry to hear the outcome. He didn’t sound like he was in trouble.”

“If I could just listen to the dispatch tape… ”

The young man frowned. “Do you have authorization?”

“I’m a law enforcement officer. All I want to do is listen.”

“Sure, why not? Hey, guys,” he hollered to his coworkers, “I’m going on break.” He led Angela to a back room and started down a row of bookshelves crammed with small metal canisters. “That was New Year’s Eve, wasn’t it?”

“That’s right.”

He found the tape and threaded it onto a reel-to-reel player. “You have any idea what time the call was made?”

She told him, and he cued up the tape.

Hearing Ian’s voice brought a lump to her throat. The dispatcher had been right. Ian was hard to hear and the message sounded garbled. She could hear the swan in the background and what sounded like someone else’s voice.

“Do you hear that? There’s another person there. Can you focus in on that voice?”

“You mean like isolate the track? Bring down the other stuff, and bring up the voice?”

“Yes.”

“No.”

“Can you turn it up, then?”

The young man complied, and Angela tried using her brain as a filter.

Run, man, run
.

“I think he said ‘run,’” Taylor said.

“Play it again.” Angela’s blood turned cold at the sound of the voice. This time, it wasn’t just the command, it was the voice she recognized. Donald Tauer’s voice. It almost sounded like a warning.

“Hold on to this tape,” she ordered. She jotted down its number and Taylor’s name, then headed back to her car. She wondered why no one had ever mentioned the second voice on the tape. Surely Kramner had heard it. If not, she intended to play him a copy.

The day shift was over by the time she left dispatch, and Kramner was already gone. She tried catching him on his cell phone, but he didn’t pick up. Even if he had, as hard as he was working to refute the case, she doubted he’d place much stock in the tape without additional evidence.

That’s where the EPOCH members came in.

It took her an hour and a half to drive to Elk Park. By the time she arrived, the bird club members were convened around the table in Lark’s kitchen—Harry, Dorothy, Cecilia, Gertie, Andrew, Opal, and Lark.

“Good, let’s get started,” Andrew said, dipping his hand into a bag of corn tortilla chips. “What’s so all-fired important that you pulled us away from supper?”

“I need your help.” She told them about the toxicology reports on the geese and the guests at the Drummond. “I had Covyduck run the sample back through. It turns out the corn we found in the goose’s gizzard has been genetically engineered.”

Gertie’s mouth dropped open. Andrew set his corn chip back in the bag.

“What’s it being engineered for?” Harry asked.

“We don’t know—pharmaceuticals, pesticide resistance. All the lab can tell us at this point is that the genetic manipulation increased the levels of plant toxins, producing a poison that caused the geese to get sick.”

A moment of silence followed her pronouncement, then the EPOCH members erupted with questions.

“Does that mean Ducharme’s geese ate the same corn?” Gertie asked.

“Most likely,” Lark said. “I did some calling around this morning and discovered he’d contracted with Organics Unlimited for twenty-five geese.”

“How bad is the poison?” Cecilia asked.

“Bad,” Dorothy said. “It’s killed fifty birds.”

“You know what I mean, Dot. It’s also worked its way clear of the system of the others. What I’d like to hear about is long-term effects.”

Angela scanned the lab report. “It doesn’t mention those here.”

“Do we know who’s responsible?” asked Opal.

The question hung in the air. All eyes turned to Angela.

“My money’s on Agriventures,” she said.

“Oh my,” Cecilia said. “Are you saying that nice young man, Donald Tauer, is responsible for all of this?”

“I think it’s possible he’s responsible for everything—the geese die-off, the banquet guest poisoning, Ian’s death, Eric’s accident.”

“He’s not looking quite so nice anymore,” Dorothy said.

“Do you have any proof?” Harry asked.

Angela looked around the table. “That’s why I asked for this meeting. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has samples from the wetlands at the Barr Lake Hunt Club. If there’s corn vegetation present, I can have the lab run a genetics test to compare the results with the samples from the goose necropsy and from the blood work of the patients. That should prove the corn is what caused the poisonings.”

“What about the homeless guys?” Gertie asked.

“They ate the sick geese from the lake, so they fall in the same group. The problem is, the only real way to prove the corn is being grown by Agriventures is to collect samples from one of their fields.” Angela took a sip of hot tea and let the hot water bathe her throat.

“So collect them,” Andrew said. “Isn’t that your job?”

“I’m off the case, remember?” She pushed back her thick curls with both hands and pinned the hair in place behind her ears. “Besides, not even IES can go in.”

“Acronym?” Gertie said.

“Investigative and Enforcement Services, they’re attached to the USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, APHIS.”

Harry reached for the corn chip bag. “Why not?”

“They don’t have probable cause, and they’re bound by due process.”

“Meaning what?” Gertie asked.

“IES would have to file a request for samples, and be denied multiple times, before they can force Tauer into letting them collect specimens. If they handle it any other way, it becomes inadmissible in court.”

Lark pointed toward the lab report. “Doesn’t this constitute probable cause?”

“It might.” Angela tipped her head back, feeling the stretch in her neck. Then she rolled her shoulders and sat up straight in her chair. “I can ask Kramner to follow up, and he probably would… ”

“You couldn’t prove it by me,” muttered Lark.

“Unfortunately, it would take some time, and the longer we wait, the bigger the risk of having evidence destroyed.” She folded her hands together and rocked them against the table edge. “The bottom line is, there’s nothing in this report, or any report, that proves the corn came from the field next door to the Barr Lake Hunt Club. All Tauer has to do is argue that geese migrate.”

Lark wrinkled her nose. “That reasoning didn’t fly when we wanted U.S. Fish and Wildlife to pay for the necropsy.”

Gertie acted annoyed by the banter. “Do we have any other options?”

It was the opening Angela had been waiting for. “We could collect the samples ourselves.”

“Been there, done that,” Lark said. “Have you forgotten the trouble we ran into the last time we went collecting?”

“No.” It was even more dangerous now.

Harry stroked his chin. “What exactly does collecting samples entail? For all we know, it might be fun.”

Once planted, the seed germinated. The EPOCH members talked it over among themselves.

“Hold on. One at a time.” Lark rapped her knuckles on the table. “Do you have an idea, Angela?”

“As a matter of fact… ”

They hatched a plan and agreed to meet the next morning in the parking lot in front of the Visitors Center at Barr Lake.

Birders were common visitors at all times of the year, and it didn’t surprise Angela to find a few others gathered in the parking lot at seven a.m. The weather, typical of Colorado, was perfect. The sun shone brightly in a cornflower-blue sky devoid of clouds. The temperature hovered near freezing, but promised to reach into the upper forties by noon.

Right on schedule, the Drummond van pulled into the parking lot, and the seven EPOCH members spilled out. Everyone was dressed warmly, with hats or headbands, mittens, and boots, and sunscreen liberally applied. Angela followed suit. In addition, she carried her cell phone, two baggies, and her gun.

“Ready?” Lark asked.

Six people responded by raising binoculars draped around their necks. Angela joined them in their binocular toast.

“I’ll keep the checklist,” Cecilia said, bundled up to her neck in powder-blue Gore-Tex.

“I’ve already got one started.” Dorothy’s outfit matched her sister’s, only in pink, and she held a small, yellow notebook in her hand.

“It’s not fair to have listed a bird, Dot. We haven’t officially started.”

“Oh, please,” Gertie said. “Let’s go already.”

Lark struck out for the trail. Before even leaving the parking lot, she pointed to a black-billed magpie and an American crow fighting over a piece of bagel dropped by someone in one of the other groups. A quick stop at the Visitors Center to retrieve a checklist netted the group four house finches, seven house sparrows, and a European starling. LGBs played around a birdfeeder hanging on the south side of the trail. The starling darted in and out of an air vent on the side of the building.

Dorothy quickly checked off the birds they had seen.

“I don’t think we should count the starling, Dot.”

“For heaven’s sake, why not, Cecilia?”

“It’s not a native species.”

“The same can be said for the house sparrow.”

“Just count them both already,” Gertie said. “Jeesh!”

Lark waved her arm for the group to follow. “Let’s go. We’ll start along the trail to the banding station, then cut through the woods to the lake. After that, we’ll head toward the dam, and the cornfield beyond.”

Angela nodded approval. At least one person remembered what they were here for.

The group struck out, and, within minutes, Andrew lagged behind.

“Just go on without me,” he puffed. “I’m going to stop at the banding station anyway.”

Opal hung back with her husband.

They’d only gone another ten yards when Harry pointed to the sky. “Check it out.”

Above them a red-tailed hawk made lazy circles, it’s creamy breast, red-speckled belly band, and rusty-red tail clearly visible.

The group stopped and lifted their binoculars. Angela fidgeted, anxious to press on. Then she succumbed and raised her binoculars.
When in Rome…

The path to the bird-banding station was more of a road than a trail. Wide, graveled, and lightly covered with snow, it curved only once along the canal before reaching the platform. To the northwest, giant cottonwood trees and willows blotted out the view of Long’s Peak and the lake but housed a number of birds.

“Look, there’s a downy,” Gertie said. “Three-quarters up in the snag.”

She pointed to tall, dead-looking tree, and Angela tracked it toward the top. Sure enough, a checkered black-and-white bird clung to the edge of a small tree. It was a male, evidenced by the red spot on the back of its head and nape. Its short bill looked more suited to eating seeds than drilling wood.

“Black-capped chickadee,” Lark said, pointing right.

Two trees over, Angela found the bird. Gray with buff sides, its black throat and cap were unmistakable.

The bird watchers were on a roll. Before long they added the pine siskin, American goldfinch, and hairy woodpecker to the list. The hairy was elusive, hiding in the trees, and once Angela had her binoculars on him, he looked very much like the downy to her.

“He’s bigger, dear,” Dorothy patiently explained. “Plus, it has a much longer bill.”

“Wait!” Harry’s voice came in a stage whisper.

The EPOCH members stilled.

“There. Do you see him? Three trees back, halfway up, maybe two o’clock in the branches.”

Angela squinted in the direction he pointed. She could only see grayish bark.