The Perennial Killer: A Gardening Mystery Read online

  “Louise, this time, I had no choice in the matter.” He looked at her, waiting for his words to sink in.

  “My God, Bill, I thought we could get out of this…”

  Then they heard Janie push aside the sliding screen doors and burst into the room, her eyes bright with excitement. “Guys, come outside! We have a real farmer for a neighbor. Horses. Sheep. Even a llama—it spit right in my face! What a curie! It makes me not want to go off to a wilderness camp in Estes Park. Why, it’s wild right here in our backyard.”

  Then she noticed her parents, huddled together, and she self-consciously brushed her long blond hair back from her face. “What is it, Dad, are you proposing to Ma one more time?”

  By the time they went to bed, Louise’s headache was gone, and Bill pulled her into his arms. They made love, rapturously, as lovers do when they have had a quarrel and then reconciled—at least for the moment. Afterwards, they lay together in quiet repose in the dark room. Then he turned and talked close to her ear, telling her a little more about his assignment as a peace offering. “We’ve received information that someone is planning to hijack nuclear materials coming out of the Stony Flats nuclear plant.”

  “The one near Boulder.”

  “Yes. It’s always been dangerous. It’s upwind from Denver, and there’s been a release of plutonium at least once, if not more than once, over the years. You know that plutonium is the deadliest substance known to man. A fire they had at the plant in 1969 nearly caused a nuclear criticality situation that could have contaminated the entire population of Denver. Now it’s a hot potato, a useless plant with tons of hot material that needs to be dealt with.” His arm around her tightened a little.

  “How could someone steal materials from it?”

  “Right now, stuff from the plant rides its way west to California, to be turned into a less lethal form. We think a high-level person on the inside plans a switch before it gets on the road. What we’ll do is open a window of opportunity for the two parties—buyer and seller—so they think they’re getting away with it. And then…”

  “You’ll spring the trap?”

  “Yes. And that’s all you need to know now. Be careful, darling. And while you’re remembering poems, recall that old story about Psyche.” He hoped she wouldn’t take offense at his words. “She was what you might call a prying woman—”

  “Are you calling me a prying woman?”

  “Now, wait—not really. I was just trying to make a little joke about the trouble Psyche got into from prying.…” He was silent for a moment. “On second thought, a little prying on your part might not be amiss.…”

  “What kind of prying?”

  “Just keep your eyes and ears open around Boulder, but don’t act. You already realize it’s a pretty sophisticated place—”

  She couldn’t resist being flip. “You mean it’s not Hicksville?”

  It was lost on him. “Not by a long shot,” he answered. “Boulder has lots of scientists, experts on rockets, weather, time, archaeology. It has high-tech industries, cutting-edge biological labs, that kind of thing, in a corridor between Boulder and Longmont. So there’s NIST, NOAA, NCAR, IBM, Ball Aerospace, StorageTek—and the university, of course. People—especially scientists-come here from all over the world. But if you see anything abnormal around here, anyone doing anything that seems out of the ordinary…”

  “Let’s see: I should not be suspicious of people who act normal, only those who skulk around in a suspicious manner.”

  “Louise, you’re making jokes—and I like that. It means you’re back to normal. But this is not exactly fun and games.”

  “I know that. And I’ll be happy to help. I’ll keep my eyes open, and I’ll give you a report when I get home each day.”

  “Oh.” He paused. Her defenses went up again, and she pulled to her side of the bed. “I’m not going to be here, because the action isn’t only here. It’s … well, never mind the details. I leave early tomorrow. But I’ll call you from my next destination, which I can’t tell you about.”

  She lay quietly in the bed. He leaned over and brushed her lips with a soft kiss. “I guess that’s as close as you’re coming right now.” Generally, they slept spoon-style, both facing the same way.

  “That’s as close as I’m coming right now,” she said in a muffled voice, her head practically buried in her travel pillow.

  “I’m sorry if all this is upsetting, Louise. I’ve probably told you more than I should. Maybe we’d just better go to sleep.” He turned on his side. “And one more important thing. Please don’t go overboard—you know what I mean? It wouldn’t do at all for you to, say, visit the Stony Flats plant, which does allow the public in for tours. You see what I mean?”

  “Yes, I see,” she said, and there was a sad tone in her voice. He knew she was frustrated: his sidekick again, asked to do simple favors, hut told very little about what was going on. She tossed and turned beside him for what seemed like hours. Nor could he relax and sleep, with the thoughts tumbling around in his head.

  The terrible irony was that Louise had valuable skills—and a peculiar talent for ferreting out criminals. And yet he had no authorization to enlist her help, especially into this current dangerous assignment.

  It had felt good to have her back in his arms and to be able to talk about the things that were driving a wedge between them. Too bad there would be little opportunity for romance on this trip. Instead, there was danger ahead for him—but, fortunately, none for Louise.

  Open Space For Plants, Humans … and Prairie Dogs

  IN VARIOUS PARTS OF THE world, it is called open space, open land, nature preserve, greenbelt, wilderness area, greensward, community garden, or park. It’s undeveloped land set aside for people’s enjoyment. As numbers of the world’s least-endangered species—mankind—continue to multiply, open space vanishes. The consequences are great, affecting the psychic and spiritual well-being of people, as well as the very existence of animal and plant species.

  Here in the United States, more than 1,200 land trusts make gigantic efforts to preserve land from development. In some communities, voters are asked to foot the bill for open space. (An example: a twenty-five-million-dollar program to save land and farms in Pennsylvania’s Pocono Mountains, just ninety miles from New York City and Philadelphia.) Unfortunately, such tax proposals sometimes fail.

  Meantime, people fight over existing open space. It may be a pocket park in New York City; a five-acre chunk of space in a fancy Denver suburb that residents thought would remain their private enclave; or historic garden allotments that are being plowed up for housing in a British city. In the booming American West, gargantuan struggles have erupted among municipal officials with different agendas: Some want to buy up all the land they can to keep it out of “development,” while others argue that development helps keep the lid on taxes.

  The people concerned about this include both the big guns, such as the international group that helped fight a plan to mine gold at the edge of Yellowstone Park, to single individuals with a mission. Environmentalists climb redwoods and make their homes there to keep the woodcutters away. Environmental terrorists destroy parts of a plush ski resort, allegedly to save the endangered lynx. The U.S. president earns both praise and blame for touting open space, and setting up projects such as the Grand Escalante National Monument, which take vast acreages out of private use.

  Is there enough room for animals and plants? Even with these conservation efforts, what is to become of us and our environment as people’s need for housing space continues to grow? And what of the plants and animals that must try to exist in skimpier habitats? In the world, one of every eight plant species, ten percent of bird species, and more than twenty-five percent of mammals are threatened with extinction. Speaking for preservation of species and conservation of resources are organizations such as the National Park Service, the Forest Service, the Bureau of Land Management, and the Fish and Wildlife Service; plus the many land trusts, The Na
ture Conservancy, the National Wildlife Federation, the Sierra Club, and The John Muir Society. Congress, on the one hand, may limit the scope of the Endangered Species and Clean Water acts; and yet it is highly sensitive to public concern for the environmental. In the 104th Congress, it voted more money for the 514 parks in the national wildlife refuge system. Each has a specific mandate to preserve an endangered species or a critical habitat for waterfowl or animals, including certain songbirds, swans, panthers, white-tailed deer, and crocodiles.

  The conservator: The Nature Conservancy adds its efforts by purchasing tracts of land in all the fifty states, and certain foreign countries as well, carefully going about its work while avoiding confrontation with private landowners. The Conservancy, with more than 800,000 members, holds three million acres of land, the largest private conservation holding in the U.S. It claims to have protected 9.3 million acres since its foundation in 1951.

  In the end, the using up of open space will be at the price of more plant and animal species. Protection has brought some, such as the bald eagle, back from near-extinction. Unprotected, so far, is the prairie dog, and debate over this tan rodent has become a metaphor for the clash between rural and urban value systems. It even made the cover of an issue of National Geographic. The animal gives headaches to wildlife experts in western states, as they try to preserve it in the face of growing public objections.

  A nice meal for a raptor. The prairie dog is called a “keystone” species, that is, a prey base for many other animals and birds, including the raptor. Some people keep them as pets. Tan, with an unprepossessing countenance, the “dog” has a fetching habit of standing on its hind legs, reaching its tiny paws heavenward, and barking like a puppy. It sends twenty distinct calls to its companions in neighboring burrows. But most astoundingly, scientists have shown that it can recognize people by their clothing. That must be why this rodent has fan clubs of people willing to carry them bodily from the harm of others to new safe havens. (Sometimes they even gently vacuum the little fellows out of their holes.)

  Once, prairie dogs proliferated widely in North America, companions to the vanished buffalo. They beat down and smoothed the ground, a good thing for herds of buffalo—though not so good for domestic animals. They now occupy only two percent of their former range, and their numbers and habitat continue to shrink, as they are routinely poisoned, shot, and driven from their homes. Enemies are not only the bulldozers that come through the fields plowing up their underground homes, but also farmers and ranchers who consider them a pest. Though they enrich the soil, they also eat the ground bare, and are competition for cattle and sheep for grazing grass. Another admitted downside is their penchant for picking up the plague. The disease will rush through a colony, quickly obliterating it, but the idea of “plague-ridden prairie dogs” makes some people think of these innocent creatures as dangerous to the environment.

  The prairie dog’s place in nature’s plan. The people willing to go out with cages and move whole populations of prairie dogs are environmentally aware folks who know this verbose creature is part of nature’s plan. Ironically, one of the animals that depends on prairie dogs for food is the endangered black-footed ferret, which is the object of a multimillion-dollar recovery program of the Fish and Wildlife Service. Others besides ferrets and raptors that feed on prairie dogs are coyotes, burrowing owls, and mountain lions. As long as there are these other wild beasts still among us, surely the prairie dog has its place, too.

  Chapter 2

  LOUISE STARED OUT OF THE window of the covered pickup, praying the man and woman who were her companions on this trip did not expect too much of her until she’d had time to adjust. She’d just packed off her family, Bill in his rental car to parts unknown, Janie off in a van to go to the wilderness camp in Estes Park. As she had watched her beloved husband disappearing down the driveway of their rental house, all she could think about, unfortunately, was the remote possibility of nuclear disaster—and the much more likely prospect of continued marital discord.

  Then she was picked up in this giant vehicle, and she had no more time for fretting. The pickup was designed for important male activities such as work, sports—or just showing off. But she wasn’t sure it had shocks. They were jouncing up a nightmarish road, a steep washboard of a road that shook her innards, and she wasn’t sure what she would do first—throw up, faint from vertigo, or die from lack of oxygen. Then she made the mistake of looking out the side window, and was terrified to see blue sky where there should have been road. Before she had time to scream, the driver saved them from the washout by swerving the vehicle to the left, then violently to the right to avoid colliding with a sandstone cliff on the other side.

  “Whoa, there, baby!” he chortled, as if this were just part of the fun of traveling the miserable mountain thoroughfare. “Don’t worry, we’ll soon be pullin’ in t’ Porter Ranch.”

  “Oh, God.” She felt like Odysseus, with Scylla on one side and Charybdis on the other. She closed her eyes, swallowed hard, and clamped a protective hand over her knotted stomach.

  “What’s the matter,” said the man, “never driven in mountains before?” His blue eyes stared blandly at her.

  “Of course I have,” Louise said. Her voice trembled with each bump. “The Alps. The Pennines. The Pyrenees…”

  “Then why do you look like you’re gonna blow chunks?”

  She sat up straight, and gave him a disgusted look. “That must be your crude way of saying—”

  “—you’re gonna toss your cookies.”

  “Well, I don’t think so,” she said coldly.

  He shoved his disreputable hat back on his brown, curly hair and grinned, his eyes disappearing amid the sunburned wrinkles under his shaggy eyebrows. The only shaggier eyebrows she’d seen were on her neighbor’s schnauzer. He said, “You sure look like a little gal who’s gonna toss her cookies.”

  She would rather have died than give the man that satisfaction. He was driving this truck like a madman. The only trouble was that she needed him, badly. He was her video cameraman for the Colorado shoots of Gardening with Nature. But what rock had her producer found him under? An odd-looking, tall creature, he had folded his lanky legs in their decrepit jeans like an accordion to move his seat forward to make room for the blond young woman in the back seat. Louise’s so-called “resource person” for the shoot at Porter Ranch, she was the county’s senior land officer and the one who had suggested this reconnaisance trip to see the place. So far, the “resource person” had been useless, not even clever enough to slow down this crazy driver. She just kept her nose buried in paperwork. How she could read anything, Louise couldn’t imagine.

  Pete Fitzsimmons and Ann Evans. Pete, a joker. Ann, serious as a judge.

  “I’m not going to be sick,” insisted Louise. “I wouldn’t dream of redecorating your upholstery with partially digested strawberries and shredded wheat.”

  “Aw, no problem,” Pete said breezily. “My pickup’s seen lots worse than that.” The wheels screeched again as the truck went into a tight curve.

  “Unnh!” Louise groaned. Her breathing continued to come in irregular bursts. “You could slow down, damn it!”

  “Oh.” He grinned, reducing the pickup’s speed. “Sure, I’ll slow’er down. S’pose that li’l bite outta the road back there did scare ya a little.”

  “It’s like a bloody Outward Bound experience.”

  He threw his head back and laughed. But Louise was not finding this trip funny. It was time for her mantra. She relaxed, leaning back in the seat, and her lips began to move.

  “Whatcha mumblin’?” asked her lunatic driver.

  “Nothing,” she said shortly. She wasn’t about to share her mantra. He would only laugh. Instead she kept mumbling: You are a piece of raw liver, you are a piece of raw liver…

  After a few minutes, it seemed to work. She cast a careful look at Pete Fitzsimmons. She had to remember to be nice to him, for it was never good for the talent to fight wi
th the cameraman. In fact, what all talent wanted was for the cameraman to love them. “The truth is,” she said in a sincere voice, “I have two problems.” Was that too obvious a play for sympathy?

  “Yeah—I’m Ustenin’.”

  “One’s a certain, uh, aversion to steep bumpy roads like this one. And then there’s my altitude sickness—I’ve had it for days, so I should be getting over it.” She swallowed carefully. “Give me a while and I’ll be just fine.”

  “Heights, huh?” he said skeptically. “We’re not very high—not more ’n seventy-five hundred feet. This whole road we’ve been ridin’ on is part of Porter Ranch. You’re on the crest of a low little mountain ridge, because the Porter who originally laid out the roads had a thing for privacy and insisted on makin’ it hard for people to get up here.” He gave her another look. “Sure it’s heights that ail you? I read it different. Your mind’s a million miles away. You’re in the dumps.”

  Great! A complete stranger could tell that she was unhappy. She made an attempt at humor. “If I am, it’s because of what’s happening to my face.” She gave him a fake little smile. “See, each time I smile, the laugh lines cut into my cheeks like a knife, and my lips feel as if they’re cracking apart. I arrived Wednesday and in three days I’ve turned into a wizened old crone.” And I feel like one, she thought miserably, now that I’ll be hanging out alone again in a rented house and fretting about my husband.

  “Try Bag Balm.”

  “Never heard of it.” But her mind gratefully latched onto this distraction from her dark thoughts. She laughed again. “Bag balm—funny name.”

  “It’s a funny product. It’s for cows. If you use it, you’ll smell strange, but your skin will love it. Dairy farmers use it to heal sore udders.”