Show Me (Thomas Prescott 4), Nick Pirog [classic children's novels .TXT] 📗

“Worse!?” Mallory bellowed, wiping his eyes. “Things couldn’t get no worse.”

“When did the first cow die?” Wheeler asked.

Mallory kicked at the dirt and a small plume was whipped away by the light wind. “The day after your daddy came, I woke up to go check on the cows. Three of them were dead.” He let out a long exhale. “Then the next day, three more died. Then it seemed like one or two died every day for the next week.”

“Fifteen in all?” I asked.

He nodded.

“Out of the seventeen who were being treated with Recom 6?”

Again, he nodded.

“So what did you do? Did you call Ramsey?”

“Sure as shit. I called him the day the first few cows’ udders started to swell. He told me to just keep on with it, that it was one of the side effects and it would clear up.”

I glanced at Ramsey, waiting for him to react, but he stood resolute—a statue.

“When did you stop giving them the injections?” I asked.

“Oh, I stopped when Dr. Lanningham came to check on the first seven. He didn’t even give me a choice. I showed him the vials, and he up and took ‘em.”

Wheeler fought down a smile in my periphery.

“How did you guys keep it a secret? Fifteen dead cows in a small town. Surely, it would have gotten out.”

“I made Tom promise he wouldn’t tell. There was a good chance I might end up losing my farm if it got out.” He turned to Wheeler and said, “Your daddy was a noble man. One of the best. I’m just sorry I got him mixed up in it.”

She said, “Yeah, well, it was his decision to take money from Lunhill for twenty years.”

I said, “Just like every single one of you.”

The Mayor, Eccleston, and Mallory all traded glances.

“Money,” I said. “That’s how a couple bad decisions became a two-decade-long cover-up.”

I watched closely to see how the four would react. Ramsey again did nothing. Mallory gulped. The Mayor glanced at Ramsey. Eccleston snorted and spit on the ground.

“Let me guess,” I said. “After Ramsey found out about the fifteen dead cows, he rode in with his piggy bank and started throwing money around. Said that if you could somehow keep a lid on their Recom 6 testing, he would pay you a nice little chunk each and every month for the rest of your lives. That’s ten thousand a month for Mallory and ten thousand a month for Tom Lanningham. Meanwhile, Ramsey’s scientists have discovered what was wrong with Recom 6—why it was killing the cows—and for the most part, now have a safe product. Ramsey didn’t want to have to go back to the drawing board, to do all the rigorous testing the FDA requires, so he instructed the scientists to fudge the testing data.”

I pointed at Mayor Van Dixon. It had taken me awhile to realize she was up to her big broach in the cover-up. I hadn’t thought much about why David Ramsey would speak at her election luncheon. I just assumed she’d paid him to come speak. She mentioned they were friends, but it wasn’t until I had my Philly PD contact, Bolger, dig into her past, that I realized they were once colleagues.

I said to her, “You worked at Lunhill for seven years, then you took a job at the FDA. When Ramsey realized the problems with Recom 6, he bribed you to input the falsified data into the FDA records. You did, Recom 6 got the green light, and Lunhill was first to market four months later.”

Mayor Van Dixon wrinkled her nose at the mention of her involvement but said nothing.

I glared at her. “A year later, you leave the FDA in St. Louis and coincidentally enough, you end up in Tarrin. Two years later, with the aid of Lunhill’s checkbook, you win the Mayoral race. You stay mayor for the next eighteen years keeping a close eye on the town and making sure Lunhill’s dirty little secret stays buried. And of course, you get a nice little bonus check each month as well.”

I turned toward Ramsey and said, “You knew how much was riding on this all staying a secret, so you didn’t stop there. You had the Mayor in your pocket, but you also wanted boots on the ground. So you plucked a police officer from St. Louis that you’d crossed paths with, and with the help of Mayor Van Dixon, you installed him as the Tarrin Chief of Police.”

I whipped my head around and stared at Eccleston. The picture I’d found of him and David Ramsey from 1992 came from Bolger. While working for the St. Louis Police Department, Eccleston had padded his income as a part-time security advisor for the Ramsey Foundation, a non-profit started by David Ramsey’s wife, Jeanette. Turned out that Eccleston had attended high school with Jeanette Ramsey in the early seventies. The picture came from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. It was a picture of Eccleston standing with Ramsey while Ramsey’s wife cut a ribbon at a playground.

Eccleston spit on the ground, not two feet from where I stood, but remained quiet.

“How much were you paying out?” I asked Ramsey. “To these three and Tom Lanningham?”

“Odell too,” Mallory said.

“I told you to shut the fuck up!” Eccleston yelled, picking up a rock and throwing it at Mallory. It missed by a foot, but sent Mallory diving to the ground.

Wheeler and I traded glances. She mouthed, “Odell?”

As Mallory pushed himself up, I asked, “Odell? The Save-More owner? He was on the take?”

Mallory nodded. “Before the cows got sick, I convinced Odell to sell the milk at the Save-More. He did, but a bunch of people ended up getting sick. A little boy almost died. Odell blamed it on the refrigerators—that the milk must have gone bad without his knowing—but we all knew it was from the milk I sold him.”

My brain was whirring, trying to synthesize the new information. I made a few adjustments to my