The Final Twist, Jeffery Deaver [philippa perry book TXT] 📗

enlisting a subsidiary to dredge up toxic waste. Operatives then use unmarked vehicles to transport it to a competitor’s facility, where it is dumped, as if the competitor were guilty of the pollution. This has resulted in the competitors being sued and fined, often going out of business, or losing so much money they are no longer players in the market. The plan is smart. Banyan’s subsidiary analyzes each competitor’s operation and determines what sort of dangerous materials those companies generate. Engineers then extract only those chemicals from the waste they dredge up. That is what is planted on the competitor’s property, giving credence to their ‘guilt.’”

As of now SP is still compiling information and trying to develop proof of our program. It’s anticipated that he will probably have enough facts to go public within the next few weeks.

You’ll be receiving further instructions.

“So that’s what it’s about,” Russell said.

Shaw recalled what La Fleur had told them: about the CEO of one of Devereux’s competitors committing suicide after going bankrupt—following Devereux’s reporting him to the feds. La Fleur hadn’t told them what regulations or laws had been broken, but it was now clear that they would have been environmental.

They dug through the rest of the documents and searched Hogan’s clothes, looking for anything that might give them more information about SP.

Nothing.

Shaw: “Whistleblower. Means he’s got some connection to the subsidiary, maybe he’s a contractor, maybe an employee.”

Russell went online and searched for Banyan Tree. It had been much in the news over the years and hundreds of employees were mentioned but there was no fast search filter that let him find workers with the potential victim’s initials.

And because the company was privately owned, no employee records were available.

“Karin?” Shaw proposed.

“If we had a week or two, we could probably get somebody inside. Not on this time frame.”

Shaw was musing, “Dredge. Waste.”

The thought struck him almost like a slap on the back. He barked a quick laugh.

Russell looked toward him.

Shaw said, “We got it wrong.”

72

Hunters Point yet again.

The vile smells, the trash, the dilapidated buildings, the lots where the skeletons of enterprises were all that remained of capitalist dreams from so many years ago. Seagulls quarreled over the slimmest remnants of garbage. Rats prowled silently but without caution.

The place was as tired as a car abandoned in the woods, not even worth scavenging for parts.

One structure here, though, shone. A white and green one-story building, recently painted. It sat on the water’s edge and was surrounded by a parking lot in which a variety of modest vehicles sat.

BayPoint Enviro-Sure Solutions, Inc.

A Banyan Tree Company

As the brothers sped into the lot in Russell’s SUV, Shaw could see the thirty-foot transport boats they’d seen earlier: the ones leaving the island that had been part of the Hunters Point shipyard, filled with fifty-five-gallon drums, riding low. They would slog their way to the wide pier behind the building, where workers would offload the drums and use forklifts to load them onto long flatbed trucks.

The empty boats, with high drafts, would then return to the dismantled ship works for another load. Shaw wondered where the waste he was looking at was bound for: What competitor did Devereux have in his sights? How many employees and residents living nearby would be poisoned? How many animals? How much land would be tainted for decades to come? He wondered too if the idea of using waste as a weapon had come from the CEO of Banyan Tree himself? Or, like the Urban Improvement Plan, had it been the brainchild of Ian Helms?

Russell braked to a stop near the office and the men climbed out.

They had come back to the waterfront because of Shaw’s thought after reading about “dredging” up waste, which is usually performed by a boat. That meant that the word crew in the text authorizing the killing of SP probably did not mean crew as in gang, despite the fact that there were plenty of those in Hunters Point. The word was meant in its original sense: those operating vessels.

Confirmation from Hunters Point crew.

6/26, 7:00 p.m. SP and family. All ↓

They walked over the parking lot of inky, newly laid asphalt to the office. Shaw noted on the side of one of the trucks was the name of the company, along with the tagline:

Making the World a Better Place to Be . . .

Shaw wondered about the ellipses at the end. That form of punctuation sometimes was meant to suggest forward motion: Now get out there and live that clean life! But ellipses also were used to indicate that something had been omitted from the sentence. Like: “Making the world a better place to be . . . for our company, our shareholders and our illustrious CEO.”

They looked through the window into the office, where a woman sat at a desk and several men in gray uniforms and orange vests stood in a cluster, sipping from coffee cups. The pier itself held a dozen workers.

“There,” Russell said. He was glancing toward a man in a navy-blue windbreaker, matching slacks with a stripe up the side and headgear you rarely saw: a real captain’s hat, the sort sometimes sitting atop lean and fake-tanned women in short blue skirts and tight white blouses, on the arms of rich businessmen.

The man was out of sight of the office and the pier, on the other side of a large rust-scarred fuel tank, where four empty flatbeds sat. He was scanning their license plates with a tablet, then tapping in notes. On his chest was a BayPoint Enviro-Sure Solutions ID badge.

They bypassed the office and, when no one was looking their way, stepped over a gray-painted chain and walked along the stone wall at waterside toward the man. The smell was of white gas—kerosene—and diesel fumes, generic ocean, and some truly foul chemical. The rocking water beside the dock was coated in concentric blue and purple and red circles of oil.

The grizzled man in the captain’s hat