The Housewife Assassin's Garden of Deadly Delights (11 page)

“Then that crop should be ready for harvest right about now,” Jack reasons, “if it hasn’t been, already.”

There’s a knock on the door. Hearing Ryan’s bark, Emma enters, pushing a stroller where her infant son, Nicky, sleeps peacefully. Rocking it side to side, she murmurs, “I combed through Jilly McIntosh’s personnel file, and did a background check as well. She’s clean as a whistle: raised in Lodi, basketball star for her high school team, and earned her degree in Genetics from UC-Davis. Unfortunately, she graduated during the Great Recession. She was surviving on minimum wage jobs before she got hired at SeedPlenish. She was certainly overqualified to be a file clerk, but it paid better than anything she had before it, and at least it put her in a field where she could use her training.”

“She must have thought working under Wellborne would be a dream come true. But from the correspondence I saw, it was more like a nightmare.” I shudder. “So, where is she now?”

“Nowhere, from what I can tell. It’s almost as if she’s dropped off the grid.”

“If I’d learned what she had about the Exodus seeds, I would too,” I declare. “Still, she’s going to surface for some reason. And it may be close by, since she’s only been gone a couple of days.”

Emma frowns. “Um…no. She left over a month ago.”

“Are you saying Jilly wasn’t his last file clerk?” I ask. “Odd. But Wellborne did mention two clerks before me. He said one had been there six months, and another just a little under a month.”

“Then Jilly would have been the former,” Emma assures me. “She quit over a month ago. From what the SeedPlenish employee roster shows, another woman—Serena Lee—was hired to replace her.”

Jack shakes his head. “Jeez, I wonder what happened to her?”
 

“Emma, what can you pull up on this Serena person?” I ask.

“Let me see.” She pulls an iPad from the stroller bag.

A moment later, she exclaims, “Bingo! I started with her SeedPlenish personnel file. Take a look at this!”

Her screen is open to Serena Lee’s employee badge picture: Only it’s Liang Xia.

“Well, I’ll be damned,” Jack declares.
 

“If she showed up the same time Jilly disappeared, maybe she had something to do with it,” I declare.

“Obviously, Jilly was on to Wellborne’s shenanigans,” Jack reasons. “If Xia was his MSS contact, he may have called her in to clean up his mess.”

“Sadly, you’re right,” Abu says. “And here’s the proof.”

We turn to find him standing in the doorway. He holds a picture in his hand. In it, a woman’s head can be seen in a SeedPlenish seed bag. Her eyes are wide open. There is a bullet wound through her forehead. The bag is large enough to hold the rest of her.

“What a shame,” I murmur. “Who is it?”

“She’s the woman you replaced in Wellborne’s office: Jilly McIntosh.” There’s an edge to Jack’s voice.

I know what he’s thinking: I might have met the same fate, if he hadn’t gotten to Wellborne and me.

There’s a good chance that he’s right about that.

But who killed her: Wellborne or Xia? I guess we’ll never know.

“The one link that will uncategorically tie Wellborne to MSS is the money that came into the Caymans bank account,” Jack reminds us. “We should retrieve it.”

“I’ve got operatives pulling Wellborne from the silo as we speak. We’ll copy his prints. Once we get them, I’m sending Dominic to the Caymans to claim the funds and close it down.” Ryan nods toward Jack and me. “In the meantime, you should hit the road for Dixon. And take some matches and butane. The sooner Exodus is annihilated, the better.”

Chapter 7

Crop Circles

Crop circles are large patterns created by people who think it’s fun to flatten the stalks of a farm’s crop, be it corn, oats, grass, or rapeseed.

Typically, these formations are quite intricate.

That being said, if you’re a farmer whose livelihood depends on what you raise and sell, you may not exactly appreciate a bunch of drunken bozos wandering through your field and ruining your crops, let alone be awestruck at the beauty of their handiwork.

The paths they make zigging and zagging through your crops as you spray them with buckshot may not be half as pretty, but you’ll certainly find it a lot more satisfying.

Clover Hill Farms runs east along Interstate 580, just below the Northern California town of Dixon. Arnie has been able to access the SeedPlenish sales file on the farm’s owners, Kerri and Kurt Clement. They not only purchase corn seed from SeedPlenish, but soy as well.
 

Like most of SeedPlenish’s accounts, the Clements have enjoyed quantity discounts based on how much seed they order. However, one order in particular stands out like a sore thumb because the discount makes it a negligible purchase: it is listed on their billing account as EX-0001.

“For Exodus, perhaps?” Jack asks.

“We’ll find out when we get there,” I reason.

Also in the Clements’ dossier is intel gathered from social media. The Clements’ Facebook and Instagram accounts show their pride in their fifteen-hundred-acre farm, which Kurt’s family has owned for five generations. In one photo, Kurt, jacked and blond, stands tall beside a row of corn, his arms crossed proudly at his chest. Another photo shows Kerri, slim-bodied but round-faced with strawberry-blond plaited pigtails, cradling a large watermelon under each arm. Both are in their mid-thirties.
 

They have no children. Their social media postings aren’t personal, but specifically about the farm’s prosperity: things like harvesting yields of their crops, or photos of their fields. In other words, their farm is not just their livelihood, but their life as well.

Acme’s pilot, George Taylor, lands our helicopter in a meadow close to Clover Hill Farms’ field of corn, but outside of the fence that surrounds the property. It’s not yet sunrise, but there is a light on downstairs, in the kitchen of the two-story clapboard house beside the barn.
 

Jack and I make our way to the back door. His knock gets Kerri’s attention. She stops her pot-scrubbing in order to dry her hands before coming to the door to see who’s there at this ungodly hour.
 

When she gets to it, she doesn’t open it, but stares out at us through the door’s four-pane window. Her face is a mix of confusion and concern. “Can I help you?” she asks.

“Federal agents,” Jack tells her. He holds up an official badge to prove it.
 

Perplexed, her eyes shift from his face to mine. She hesitates for a moment, then opens the door. “Why are you here? We only use documented workers on this farm, and we won’t even hire for another month or so.”

“Hasn’t harvest started for you?” I ask.
 

She blinks twice before answering—a sure sign that what she’s about to say won’t necessarily be the truth. “Next week sometime.”

“We’re not here about undocumented workers,” Jack explains. “Is Mr. Clement home? He’ll also want to hear what we have to say.”

“He’s…ah, checking on something in one of the back fields. It’s at least two miles down the road. I don’t expect him back until lunchtime.”
 

Again, the two blinks. I’d love to play poker with this woman. I’d clean up.

Jack raises a brow, so I know he catches it too. “Unfortunately, we have some bad news, and I’m sure he’ll want to hear it. You see, we have reason to believe that a particular corn seed purchased by you—perhaps already planted for the upcoming harvest—includes a strain of toxins that are deadly for human consumption. It goes by the name of Exodus.”

Hearing this, Kerri takes a step back. Her face loses all color. “But—you must be mistaken! I mean, sure, we were told that it’s experimental, but Dr. Wellborne said that what makes it so wonderful, beyond its extraordinary yield capacity, is its ability to repel pests.”

Perhaps pests have an innate ability to avoid plants that are toxic to them, but this is not something I need to share with Kerri Clement while she’s having a meltdown.

“Dr. Wellborne talked to you directly about it, as opposed to your SeedPlenish sales rep?” Jack asks.

“Yes. I thought it was strange that he made the trip here, to the farm. But he told us that he wanted to personally invite us to be the test farm for Exodus, since we have an ideal growing situation. You see, we use only natural pesticides, but at the same time, we aren’t opposed to using GMO strains. Dr. Wellborne also guaranteed that our full crop would be purchased upon harvest by a specific broker who distributes to a variety of food manufacturers. That way, SeedPlenish would get specific feedback regarding the end-use quality.”

“So, you’ve received the check,” I say, matter-of-factly.

“Um…no. Not yet.” Again, two blinks.

Jack smiles, hoping to put her at ease. “I think I should find Mr. Clement and fill him in on the situation. Mrs. Stone will finish up with a few more questions. How can I reach him in the back field?”

“Follow the path by the house. At the fork, between the two corn fields, turn left, which will take you north. He’s running the harvester, so he may not be able to hear you. You can use this flashlight to get his attention.”
 
She hands him one of several portable lights lined up on one of the kitchen’s counters.

Jack nods in appreciation and heads out.
 

She waits until Jack leaves before turning to me. “What if we just return the seeds?”

“You can’t. You’ve already planted them.” I point to the acres of corn out the window, where the aqua-hued stalks catch the first rays of morning sun.

She frowns. She realizes that it’s a gotcha moment. “But we’ll get to keep the money, right? We didn’t know they were tainted, and he promised us!”

“From what we know so far, Dr. Wellborne wasn’t authorized by SeedPlenish to create the seed strain, let alone deliver it on the company’s behalf. It may be an issue for the courts to sort out.”

Her face turns to stone. “In the meantime, we lose our farm because we trusted SeedPlenish’s top scientist that it was a sure thing? Why, you’re—you’re going to bankrupt us!”

I pat her arm. “I’m sorry. I truly hope it isn’t the case. But I think you’d have a rock-solid case against SeedPlenish.”
 

She throws off my hand.

I take the hint—time to change the subject. “Mrs. Clement, what is the name of the broker who came for the corn?” I ask.

She shrugs. “I don’t know off the top of my head.”
 
She points to the desk in the corner of the kitchen. “I’d have to look it up in Kurt’s ledger.”

She waits for my nod before heading to the desk.
 

What she pulls out isn’t a ledger. It’s a gun.
 

“Put your hands over your head,” she commands.

“Kerri, you don’t realize the importance of this. People’s lives are at stake!”

“Including ours. If we lose the farm, we have nowhere else to go! Kurt will never get over it!”

“Just how do you think he’d feel knowing that he’s responsible for the death of a staggering number of people? If that corn gets out, we’re talking about a body count that could climb into the tens of thousands! The Exodus strain carries a deadly virus!”

She wavers, but only for a second. “It’s already out—and…I…I can’t be responsible for that! It wasn’t our fault!”

“No one said it is. But we have to call the broker, to stop it from leaving his warehouse.”

“How do you know he wasn’t in cahoots with Dr. Wellborne?”

“I don’t,” I admit. “But if you let it go any further, you’re just as guilty as anyone else who knows about it but does nothing to stop it.”

“Kurt and I will be blamed anyway! Do you think anyone else will buy corn from us, once they hear about our role in this thing? And what about the seeds? Don’t you know birds pick it up and move it—not to mention the wind? Our land will always be tainted. Hell, we won’t even be able to sell the farm”—she pauses, as the full extent of her situation hits her—“unless—unless no one finds out where the seeds came from. So, just shut up”—she cocks the pistol—“or I’ll do something you’ll regret, because believe me, I have nothing to lose.”

I do as I’m told—for now.

She frisks me for a gun and finds one in the holster strapped to my back. With her free hand, she hides it in a kitchen drawer, then reaches for the wall phone, where she presses autodial and hits the speaker button.

A man’s voice exclaims, “Yep, what’s up, hon?”

Kerri picks up the receiver so that I can’t hear Kurt’s responses to what she has to say. “We have visitors…
Feds.
They came to confiscate the crop….I know, Kurt! Calm down! Listen—I agree! One is coming your way. Don’t worry, it’s—
manageable.
Trust me!
 
Don’t…just do it—I don’t know, an
accident.
I’m covering the other one, here. But be careful! He’s got a gun…The drone? Great idea. You have it in the cab, right?” A look of relief sweeps over her face. “Kurt, I—I love you.”

Touching, what we do for love.

She clicks off. She takes a step closer. “I’m sorry, but this is the end of the road for you.”