Season Of The Harvest (Harvest Trilogy, Book 1) (5 page)

Jack blinked his eyes, clearing the
last horrible image from his mind just before the tears came. Tears
of loss, tears of rage for his murdered friend.

Alexander, still purring, rubbed his
big head against Jack. Jack gathered the big cat up in his arms and
held him close, burying his face in Alexander’s soft fur as he
wept.

After the tears stopped, he looked
down again at the photographs and spread them out so he could see
the one that clearly showed Sheldon’s butchered body. Beside that
he put the photo showing the meticulously torn clothing.

It makes sense
now
, he thought grimly. He hadn’t been far
from the mark when he had thought Sheldon’s wounds looked like
someone had performed an autopsy on him. But autopsy wasn’t quite
the right word: his friend had been vivisected, cut to pieces while
still alive, and not simply as an act of cruelty. His murderer had
been looking for something.

“Jesus, Sheldon,” Jack rasped as
warm tears continued to trickle down his cheeks. “What could have
been so important that they’d rip you apart to get it
back?”

But the real question now was where
had Sheldon hidden the rest of the sample he had stolen, if Jack’s
analytic insights were right?

Sensing that Jack no longer needed
his feline therapy services, Alexander uncoiled and hopped down to
the floor to investigate his food bowl as Jack pulled out his smart
phone. The step he was about to take would likely land him in
extremely hot water with Clement, but Jack couldn’t stay away,
couldn’t sit on the sidelines. Not on this one.

He was going to call the SAC in
Lincoln, but wasn’t sure of his prospects for getting additional
information. Jack had worked with Special Agent Carl Richards on a
case two years ago, and knew him as an incredibly competent agent
who was an equally monumental asshole. He punched in the number for
Richards that he’d pulled up from the FBI contact
database.

The phone rang twice before a
clipped nasal voice answered, “Special Agent Richards.” In the
background, Jack could hear a dull roar of people
talking.

“This is Special Agent Jack Dawson,”
Jack said.

“What the hell do you want, Dawson?”
Richards snapped. “You’re not on this case and I don’t have any
time to waste on idle conversation.”

Jack bit back a
sharp reply.
Stay cool
, he told himself. “Listen, Richards, I think I know why
Crane was there and what he was looking for.”

“That’s classified, Dawson,”
Richards growled. “I wasn’t given access to that information, and I
know you weren’t, either.

“I don’t know the details of what he
was investigating,” Jack said, “but I don’t think he was there as
part of his assigned investigation. He didn’t have a warrant to
conduct a search, did he?”

“No, he didn’t,” Richards grudgingly
admitted. Then, after a pause, he said, “Dawson, when was the last
time you saw or spoke to Crane?”

Jack hadn’t really thought about
that. He and Sheldon were close, but it wasn’t like they were in
contact every day. Their schedules were hectic and work took them
off to different places around the country, sometimes for weeks at
a time. It wasn’t unusual for them to go a week or more without
even exchanging emails. Now that he thought about it, it had been a
fairly long time since he’d heard from his friend. Not so long that
it was terribly unusual, but longer than normal. “Three weeks ago,”
Jack said. He remembered that Sheldon had held a party before
leaving town and, as always, insisted that Jack come.

“That would track,” Richards told
him. “Dawson, Crane started working undercover three weeks ago. He
was filing updates until last week, when he just dropped off the
face of the planet. We’ve been trying to track him down since
then.”

Jack sat back,
stunned.
What could have caused Sheldon to
break contact with the Bureau? Had he gone rogue?
“What did he find before he...bugged out?” Jack
asked.

“It’s all classified, dammit!”
Richards cursed. “But I’ve read the reporting he sent in, and most
of it was pretty limp. If there’s a tie-in to what he was doing
after he dropped out of sight, I don’t see it.” There was a sudden
increase in the volume of the voices in the background, and
Richards said, “Listen, Dawson, I’ve got special agents
interrogating half the population of Lincoln. If you’ve got
something for me, spill it. Otherwise, stop wasting my
time.”

“All right,” Jack said, fortifying
himself for Richards’ reaction to what Jack was about to tell him.
“Here’s what I think went down...” He briefly described what he
thought had happened, based on the information from the file he’d
taken from Clement and the subsequent reporting on FIDS from the
field teams in Lincoln.

When Jack finished, there was a long
pause on the far end of the line, and all he could hear was the
hubbub in the background. He thought for a moment that Richards had
given up on his tale and had just forgotten to hit the end call
button on his phone.

Finally, Richards spoke.
“Shit.”

“And here I thought you were going
to either hang up on me, or tell me that was the most ridiculous
thing you’d ever heard,” Jack said drily.

“The only thing I wish right now,
Dawson,” Richards told him, “was that Clement hadn’t been such a
sentimental idiot and had sent you out here instead of sending you
home to cry over Crane buying the farm. We’d figured out some of
what you’ve come up with, but your story makes sense, just like it
did on the Bronsky case. You’re sharp, Dawson.”

Jack nearly fell out of his chair.
Richards never complimented anybody on anything. But he wasn’t a
fool: Jack had helped him solve the Bronsky case, a multiple murder
spree that had spanned four states and had completely stumped the
investigators. Richards hadn’t bought in to how Jack had done his
part in putting the pieces of the puzzle together, but to him it
didn’t matter: all Richards wanted was to sort out what happened
and nail bad guys. For him, the only thing that mattered was
results. With Jack’s help, Joseph Bronsky and his brother Cain were
finally stopped, killed in a shootout after refusing to surrender.
“Can I make a suggestion or two?” Jack asked him, deciding to try
and press his advantage.

“I’m listening.”

“First, pull any hard drives or
other data storage devices for any of the computers in the lab and
get them to forensics to see if they can recover anything from
them. I’ll bet at least one of them was a standalone machine, not
connected to any networks.”

“That’s going to be a bit
difficult,” Richards said slowly.

“Why?” Jack asked.

“Somebody already beat us to it. You
must have seen in the photos that those machines were smashed to
bits. The hard drives were literally ripped out of every single one
of them. Didn’t bother with screwdrivers. You sure your buddy Crane
didn’t yank them out?”

“No,” Jack told him, silently
cursing that bit of bad luck. “That wasn’t his style. If he had
tampered with hardware, it would’ve been subtle, precise. Most of
what he did was with software. Unless his assailant took it, you
should find a USB flash drive...somewhere.”

“We’ll look again, but so far we
didn’t find one, either in the lab or on his body or
clothing.”

“The next thing is an accomplice,”
Jack said. “He had help getting into the lab, and I’ll bet it was
the same person who erased the security camera recordings and data
logs.”

“We had that
figured out,” Richards said, his voice tinged with annoyance as if
to say,
We’re not complete idiots, you
know
. “And we actually have a likely
suspect: Ellen Bienkowski. We’ve found all of the university’s
security people who had the necessary access, except her. She
wasn’t scheduled to go on leave, but she hasn’t returned any calls
and her house is empty. We’re trying to track her
down.”

Frowning, Jack told him, “The other
thing to find is the samples Sheldon must have taken. I’m convinced
that was really what he’d come for. Hacking into the computers was
just a means to an end.”

“But why the hell would he want to
steal some stupid corn or whatever?” Richards asked, exasperated.
“Industrial espionage?”

“Could be,” Jack admitted. “New
Horizons is pulling in nearly six billion dollars a year in
profits, and I’m sure whatever they were working on in that lab
would probably be worth a fortune to a competitor. But I can’t see
Sheldon as a player in something like that. And the MO of his
murder seems a tad extreme if he was double-dealing.”

“Don’t be naïve, Dawson,” Richards
said flatly. “People have sold out their country for peanuts, and
almost everybody has a price, if someone makes the right offer. You
know that nobody joins the Bureau to get rich on our government
salaries. As for the MO, I’ll grant that it’s definitely out of the
ordinary, more like a ritual killing than something that even a
pissed off mafia hit man would come up with.”

Jack suppressed
his anger at Richards’ remark about almost everyone having a
price.
Sheldon would never have sold
out
, he told himself.
No way
. “It doesn’t matter,” he told
Richards. “I don’t know why he wanted the corn samples, only that
he did. They have to be there somewhere.”

“Yeah, right,” Richards said sourly,
and Jack could picture him standing in the lab, looking around at
the sea of sample containers spread across the floor, each and
every one of which could potentially be evidence. “Well, there are
plenty here, that’s for sure.” He paused. “We’ll look. But the
forensics guys went over every inch of the service tunnel where we
found Crane and there was nothing. We’re still going over the lab,
but–”

“No,” Jack interrupted. “He wouldn’t
have had time to hide it in the lab. If I’m right, he would’ve
hidden them in the service tunnel, or maybe somewhere along the way
from the lab. But I’m betting on them being near where his body was
found.”

“Okay, we’ll look again, but I’m not
holding out much hope.”

“Is there anything else you’ve found
that hasn’t been reported yet?” Jack asked him, hoping for some
additional clues.

“We found his cell phone, smashed in
the lab. That’s being written up now. What was left of it was under
one of the pieces of lab equipment that was knocked over during the
fight that went on in here. We also found a stun baton with Crane’s
fingerprints on it. Is that something he normally
carried?”

Jack shook his head as he answered.
“No. He only carried his regular service weapon and a Glock 27 in a
leg holster for backup. He never carried a stun gun or a Taser that
I know of.”

Richards was silent, and Jack got
the feeling there was something else. “What is it?” he asked. “What
else did you find?”

“The coroner found it a little while
ago before they took Crane’s body away for the autopsy,” Richards
said quietly, and Jack knew they were both thinking the same thing:
the coroner’s work had already been done for him. “There was a
piece of paper, rolled up and shoved down Crane’s
throat.”

“What did it say?” Jack asked,
wondering at this last insult that his friend had
suffered.

“It’s a banner for something called
the ‘Earth Defense Society.’ Ever heard of it?”

“No,” Jack told him, shaking his
head, “but it sounds like some sort of eco-preservation group or
something. Any idea who they are?”

“Not yet,” Richards said grimly.
“But I intend to find out, because I don’t need your fancy
intuition to tell me that they’re probably the ones who killed your
buddy Crane.”

CHAPTER THREE

After Jack hung up with Richards, he
did a search for “Earth Defense Society” on the web and came up
with over eight hundred hits. The first one, amazingly enough,
appeared to be a very professionally maintained web site for an
organization that bore the name. Jack felt a chill run down his
spine when he saw the logo on the site’s header: it was the same as
on the paper found in Sheldon’s throat. Richards had just emailed
him a photo of it. The other hits appeared to be links from other
sites back to this one, and he got a sinking feeling as he took a
quick scan through. Almost all of them were about UFOs or alien
abductions and the like.

As he began to read the EDS “about”
page, he felt his face flush with anger. “You’ve got to be fucking
kidding me,” he cursed, shaking his head in disbelief.

The Earth Defense Society is
dedicated to defending the Earth and all its life forms from a
long-term program undertaken by a non-human intelligence to
transform the planet’s biosphere into one capable of supporting
their form of life. This enemy has secretly occupied key positions
in the government, military, and industries, such as pharmacology
and genetics research. We – all of us, humans and every other
creature on our planet – are in danger of becoming nothing more
than a food source for these invaders...