Show Me (Thomas Prescott 4) by Nick Pirog (best ereader for textbooks .TXT) 📗

was it? A dioxin spill? GMOs causing cancer? Fraud?”

She took a sip of lemonade.

“I can protect you,” I said.

“They will sue me for everything I’m worth. Take the house. Take everything.”

I guessed her name was all over the non-disclosures as well. If she broke her silence, they could do exactly what she was talking about.

“These people killed your husband.”

“What do you mean?”

“It wasn’t just strange timing, your husband resigning and dying three weeks later. Lunhill had him killed.”

She looked at me questioningly, but said nothing.

I scooted my seat a couple inches closer to her. “Your husband found something out. Threatened to blow the whistle on Lunhill. They made him sign a bunch of NDAs, but they didn’t trust he would keep his mouth shut. They couldn’t risk killing him outright, even an accident would have looked suspicious so close to his resigning, so they paid Lowry Barnes to do it.”

“That’s absurd.”

“Is it?” I asked. “Where is the only place in a town everyone is bound to go at some point?”

She glanced upward for a moment, then back down.

“The grocery store,” I said for her. “It wouldn’t have been hard for them to find out that an ex-felon had recently been fired from the Save-More and was in desperate need of money. They paid Lowry to kill Neil and make it look like he was going after his ex-manager.”

“But Lowry committed suicide.”

“It could easily have been made to look that way.”

I could see her running the logic over in her head, see it slowly going from impossible, to plausible, to probable.

“There is just one question,” I said. “Was what Neil knew worth killing over?”

She took a long breath, then said, “It would have ruined them.”

We moved inside. Darcy joined me at the kitchen table. “They searched the house,” she said, “a couple weeks after Neil died.”

“Lunhill guys?”

“Yeah, it was actually written into one of the NDAs. If Neil died, they would get to search the house.”

“No shit.”

“So they put me and the kids up in a hotel for a week and went through everything.”

“Did they find anything?”

“They never said. But the money kept coming, so I guess not.”

I looked up at the ceiling, the walls. “You ever check the place for bugs? Wiretaps, I mean?”

She shook her head. Then she leaned forward and whispered, “You think they bugged the place?”

“I wouldn’t doubt it.”

Part of me wondered if someone was listening to our words this very second.

“Why don’t we go to my car?” I offered.

She followed me out the front door and into the Range Rover. Once inside, I could see the manila envelope on her lap.

“Is that it?” I asked.

“Yeah.”

“Why didn’t they find it when they searched the house?”

“It wasn’t in the house. I found it in our safety deposit box at the bank six months later.”

She stared at the envelope for a beat, then handed it to me.

I slowly unclasped the brass fastener and pulled out the contents. There were several documents and a handful of pictures.

After a couple seconds, I said, “Wow.”

I glanced at Darcy.

She shifted in her seat.

I looked back down at the picture in my lap. It was a picture of more than a dozen cows. All on their sides. All dead. Another picture was a close-up of a single cow. It’s udders were swollen and red. A man stood over the cow.

The first thing that popped into my head was dioxin. Brian had said how a bunch of animals died after they sprayed the waste oil at Simon Beach.

There must have been another dioxin spill.

I moved to the documents. It was a bunch of numbers and graphs. I was sure Darcy had studied the documents at length and I asked, “What am I looking at here?”

“Those are the data sheets Lunhill sent to the FDA from the testing of their recombinant Bovine Growth Hormone.”

“Recombinant what?”

“You ever hear of rBGH?”

“Maybe. I think I’ve heard my sister talk about it. Something in milk.”

“It’s a hormone that makes dairy cows produce up to twenty percent more milk.”

I said, “But according to these photos, it also kills them.”

She nodded. “Twenty years ago, Lunhill was testing their recombinant Bovine Growth Hormone, what they were calling Recom 6. They treated seventeen cows with it. Fifteen of them died.”

So it wasn’t dioxin after all.

I looked down at one of the documents. “But it says right here that the only side effect was one cow getting something called mastitis.”

“They fudged the data.”

“They can do that?”

“The FDA only looks at the data the company sends them. They don’t do any outside testing themselves.”

“But that’s ridiculous.”

“Yes it is. But it would be impossible for the FDA to run experiments and tests on all the new products that come out each year. It would take a hundred thousand employees. It’s a government agency, they only have so much in the budget.”

“So they rely on these companies to send them accurate data from their experiments?”

“Yes. They set rigorous guidelines that have to be met over the course of months, sometimes years. And most companies send the real data.”

“But if Lunhill had sent the real data, it never would have passed.”

She smirked. “Exactly.”

“It passed?”

“Twenty years ago.”

“And is it still being used?”

“Lunhill sold the rights a decade ago for something like four hundred million dollars, but it’s still in production.”

I thought about the repercussions of this. If this information leaked, sure it would hurt Lunhill, but it wouldn’t ruin them. They didn’t even produce the hormone anymore.

“If farmers have been using Recom 6 for the past twenty years, then where are all the dead cows? It would be impossible to cover up. They must have tweaked it and made it safe.”

“Lunhill did,” she said, “before it went to market.”

I took a breath, then said, “I’m not so sure if this went public it would ruin them.”

“You’re looking at it wrong. It isn’t about the cows. It’s about the fudging of the data. If they sent the FDA falsified testing data for Recom 6, what’s to say every product