Cold Wind

33

Driving north on I-25 approaching Chugwater, Joe scrolled down through the call records on his cell phone, looking for a number from several weeks before when Dulcie Schalk had called him from her cell to ask questions about a poaching case. He highlighted the number and pushed SEND. She picked up on the third ring.

“Joe?” she asked, her surprise obvious.

“Since it’s after hours I didn’t know whether to call the office, and I couldn’t wait until tomorrow,” he said.

“We’re neck deep in work, Joe,” she said. “Getting ready for opening arguments next week. I really don’t have much time right now, I’m afraid.”

“I’m sure,” he said, “but there’s some new information you need to know. I’d never call otherwise.”

“So this is about the Alden case.” It was a statement, not a question, and she sounded disappointed in him.

“Yup.”

There was a heavy sigh. “Joe, you know the situation. You’re personally involved in this whole thing, and it’s inappropriate to contact me after hours to lobby for your side.”

Joe eased his pickup over to the shoulder of the highway and parked. The few lights of Chugwater were in his rearview mirror. To the west, three heavy-bodied clouds sat suspended over the bluffs of the horizon, their rose-colored bellies lit by the setting sun. When he turned the key off in the ignition, the sweet smell of desert sage filled the cab. “I’m not calling to lobby,” he said evenly, “and I don’t have a side.”

The tone of his voice seemed to jar her. She said, “But I thought. ”

“I need you to listen to me for five minutes. If you think I’m lobbying you after that, I’ll hang up and wait for you to lose the trial. Is that the way you want to go here?”

“No,” she said, with a slight hesitation. “Okay, I’ve got five minutes.”

He filled her in on his conversation with Bob Lee and what Marybeth had found online about Rope the Wind, which had led him to Orin Smith.

“He’s in federal custody,” Joe said. “I interviewed him at the Federal Building in Cheyenne.”

“Under whose authority?” she bristled.

“Under mine,” he said. “But for the record, both the governor and the federal agent in charge knew I was there and what I was doing. In fact, the FBI listened in to the interview.”

He could tell by her silence that she had no foreknowledge of Orin Smith or his connection to Rope the Wind, and therefore Smith’s previous efforts to get a wind energy company started in Twelve Sleep County among the landowners. He wasn’t surprised, since the sheriff’s investigation had taken them no further than Missy. He hoped she wouldn’t get defensive and territorial and shut him down before he heard him out. Joe knew Schalk didn’t like surprises, and he’d seen how she bristled when others offered speculation with nothing to back them up. And like every county attorney Joe had ever worked with, she hated it when investigators struck out on their own.

She said, “This man, Orin Smith, he’s in federal custody? And I assume this testimony might help him out at sentencing? Why should I think he’s a credible witness?”

“Good point,” Joe said. “You have no reason to believe anything he says right now. He’s up for eleven counts of fraud, after all. I’m not sure I believe everything he told me. But please jot down what I relate to you and check him out on your own and make your own decision. And keep in mind Sheriff McLanahan wants a big simple win over a rich woman nobody likes. He’s never wanted to look any further than her, and he’s never focused on anybody else. Dulcie, neither have you.”

“Continue,” she said. Her tone was ice cold.

Joe said, “The other night, I heard Earl Alden described as a skimmer. I wasn’t exactly sure what that meant at the time or why it would matter. But now I have a better idea.

“Alden was connected politically and professionally,” Joe said. “And that seems to be the way it works these days. Success has nothing to do with ideas or inventions or hard work. It’s about who you know and which politician may pick you to succeed. The Earl was a skimmer with no personal ideology. He gave big money to folks in both parties and made sure they knew it. That way he was always covered no matter who won. For The Earl it was like investing in research and development: He was never sure who would pay off. If there was an opportunity, he was right there with his hand out. And when it came to this big push for wind energy development, The Earl was right there ready to rock with the new administration in Washington and all their green initiatives.”

She said, “Are you getting to the point soon?”

Joe said, “Believe me, I don’t like to talk this much, either. But you need to know Alden’s background before you can understand what he did and who was affected by it.”

“Okay,” she said, unconvinced.

“Anyway,” Joe said, “with this wind energy deal, he saw a way he could cash in. The money was phenomenal, and he figured out a way to keep it coming from all sides.

“First,” Joe said, “he heard about Orin Smith and Rope the Wind. I don’t know who told him, or if Earl figured it out on his own. You know how fast word spreads in the county, and no doubt some of the ranchers Smith approached talked to each other over coffee or at the feed store. He might have even heard something from Missy or Bud Sr., for all we know. However he found out, The Earl met with Smith after every other rancher in the county had turned Smith down. Earl saw the value in a three-year-old wind energy company even if the three years was nothing more than incorporation records sitting in a file at the secretary of state’s office. So Earl offered not to buy Rope the Wind for cash, but to make Smith a partner in the effort. In effect, Earl told Smith he’d get forty percent of the profits once the wind farm was built and producing electricity. Since Smith had struck out everywhere else and he knew Earl Alden was this legendary cashgenerating machine, he agreed to the deal.”

“I don’t get it,” Schalk said. “Why would Earl want to cut Smith in on the profits? Couldn’t he have just bought the name on the cheap and done it all himself? Or just started his own company without this Smith guy?”

“He could have,” Joe said, “but he was ten steps ahead of Smith and everybody else. See, Smith also had contact with a firm down in Texas he’d help incorporate several years before. The Texas company wasn’t all that big, but they specialized in buying old or malfunctioning wind turbines and remanufacturing them into working units. There’s been a market for legitimate wind turbines for years, I guess. These guys down there were sort of scrap dealers who fixed the turbines and put them back on the market. But because of the big money suddenly available for new wind farms, the new companies that went into the business didn’t care about buying old turbines at a discount. You’ve got to forget about things like supply and demand, and free markets, when it comes to wind energy. All the incentives were designed for new companies building new turbines and putting people to work so the politicians could crow about what they’d done for the economy and the planet. So this Texas company was floundering and sitting on over a hundred pieces of junk they couldn’t unload.”

“O-kay,” she said, drawing the word out, making Joe feel like a crank.

“Listen,” he said, “you don’t know all the pieces to this yet.”

“Go on. So when do we get to the Cubans on the grassy knoll?”

Joe ignored her. “With the information Smith had given him about that big ridge where the wind blew all the time that bordered Earl’s ranch, Earl bought the acreage from the Lees. Those poor Lees got the short end of the stick in every regard. So Earl owned the windiest place in the county and the one perfect spot for a big wind energy project. That was the first piece to fall into place.

“Once he had that ridge secured, Earl locked in the agreement with Orin Smith for the company, and suddenly Earl Alden had a three-year-old wind energy operation and land with almost constant Class V to Class VII winds. The reason that was important was because those two things were essential to start working the system-to kick-start a skimming operation on a big scale.”

Schalk said, “Skimming whom?”

“You, me, all the other taxpayers,” Joe said. “Here’s how it worked, according to Smith. Like I said, The Earl was connected. He knew which banks across the country were going to receive federal bailouts because certain politicians didn’t want them to fail. Earl approached those banks with the package for financing a massive wind farm called Rope the Wind. He knew at least one of them would go for it because the banks were being encouraged to lend to renewable energy schemes with bailout dollars, and they knew that even if the deals went bust, they’d be taken care of by the federal government. So no need for caution for these bankers-just open the floodgates to federal money, take their fees, and funnel it right back out the door to the right kind of company. In particular, and you may want to write this down, Smith said Earl got almost all of his financing through First Great Lakes Bank in Chicago. Heard of it?”

“You’re kidding,” she said. “Everybody’s heard of it. This is the one they call the Mob Bank? The one with all the questionable loans that just disappeared? Haven’t they been shut down?”

“They have now. But not before everybody got paid off in fees,” Joe said. “They were connected, too.”

“But that’s not The Earl’s fault,” she said.

“No, it isn’t. But that’s how he financed his company. And he was just getting started.”

He heard her take a long breath on the other end. He said, “Earl took the loan-which was backed by the Feds-and bought a hundred old wind turbines from the Texas remanufacturing company. He paid a million dollars each, Smith said, but applied for tax credits and incentives for new turbines, which run four to five million apiece.”

“Jesus!” Schalk said. “That’s outright fraud. That’s what, three or four million per turbine? Or four hundred million dollars in the clear?”

“You bet,” Joe said. “But who is checking on these things these days? There’s so much of it going on, and so much bureaucracy in the process, no one knows what’s what. I mean, how likely is it the Feds would send out an inspector to make sure the wind turbines were brand-new? And keep in mind, the profits are all paper profits at this point. They’re on a balance sheet, but that’s all. That’s how a guy like the Earl skims. Everything is under the surface.”

“I see your point.”

Joe consulted his notes and said, “So The Earl doesn’t stop there. He’s like a junkie when it comes to skimming. He got a fifty-million-dollar grant in federal stimulus funds from the Department of Energy because his project was about wind. That’s why he bought Rope the Wind, because it had been around for three years on paper and that was one of the criteria for receiving the grant-that the company have a track record. Then he has his people go out and secure power contracts with a bunch of cities and states who have passed laws that mandate that certain percentages of their power must come from renewable energy. With the farm going up and the contracts in place, Earl now owns a genuine electric utility, which gives him the right to condemn the private land owned by the Lees to create a corridor for transmission lines. Even though these places are buying power at a loss and there wasn’t any way of getting the power to them yet, it makes them feel good. So The Earl takes advantage of that.”

“I’m getting lost,” she said.

“Here’s how Smith explained it to me,” Joe said, looking at his scribbles. “It’s like Earl figured out a way to have someone dig a gold mine for him using their money and mining equipment, but he gets to sell all the gold he produces to others at an inflated cost that’s guaranteed by the government. Then he uses grants and new federal programs to guarantee that the mine will always make money or at least never lose it. Then he signs deals with people to buy his gold at a preset price, because they’re do-gooders and market prices don’t matter to them. He used all the grants, subsidies, incentives, and tax credits to bail out the losses of all of his other interests.”

“Joe. ” she said, objecting, he thought, to the enormity and complexity of what he was telling her.

“I know,” he said. “But in order to understand this, you’ve got to throw out everything you know about how real capitalism works. That’s how The Earl thought. It was all a big poker game where the chips were free to him because he was one of the favored players. And with all those chips, he was able to create a multi-layered corporate entity that was completely cushioned against any kind of risk or loss. He could now protect all of his other assets like big ranches or homes all over the world, because the contracts, tax credits, and guarantees tied to Rope the Wind to offset all his losses and limited his liability.”

Joe paused to review his notes and let her take it all in, and to see if he had left anything out.

She asked, “But why would Orin Smith dump on his partner like that if he stood to make a killing? Why tell you all this?”

Joe said, “I wondered the same thing, but the fact is all these transactions and technicalities benefitted Earl personally, but the wind farm won’t show any real profit for years on its own. It’s designed to suck up subsidies and provide tax credits, not to create power in the real world for real people. It’ll take years to get transmission lines to that ridge to actually move the power to the electrical grid. And remember-there are no true profits until all the overhead is paid for, and that will take decades. Building those things is expensive, even with used turbines they got on the cheap.”

“So Smith is cut out,” she said.

“That’s what he claims,” Joe said. “He says he’ll never live long enough to see a penny. And I have to believe him, because the guy got so desperate for cash that he created the Ponzi scheme that landed him in federal custody.”

“Do you think he had something to do with Alden’s death?” she asked. “Is that what you’re driving at?”

“No,” Joe said. “I don’t think he was involved, even though I’m sure he wouldn’t have stopped it if he’d known about it. But what you should consider, now that we know all this, is how many people would benefit from Earl Alden’s death. I mean, besides Missy.”

“Who do you mean?” she asked cautiously.

“Think about it,” Joe said. “If this scheme was made public-which it might now be-the whole house of cards would fall and dozens of people would be implicated in the fraud. You want me to name them all?”

“No need,” she said sullenly. “You’ve got the owners of the Texas company, who likely knew what Alden was up to because no one had ever bought their entire inventory before. You’ve got the officers, shareholders, and regulators of Great Lakes, who all benefitted from the financing of a crackpot company. You’ve got the mob in Chicago, who’s suddenly lost their own personal bank that doesn’t ask questions. You’ve got the cities and states that signed contracts without investigating whether or not Rope the Wind could actually produce the power they claimed it could produce. You’ve got other wind farm companies-legitimate ones-who didn’t get all that stimulus money because Earl was there first. You’ve got the Lees, who were cheated out of their land. And you’ve got the politicians in Washington, who designed the mechanism to allow for and encourage fraud at this level.”

Joe said, “That’s a start.”

“But you don’t have a specific villain, do you?” she said. “You don’t know who in that cast of characters was desperate enough to shut him up that they took action?”

“No,” Joe said. “It’s like a big locked-room mystery. There are maybe forty, fifty, sixty people out there who were taken advantage of, but who wouldn’t want the scheme exposed because it would hurt them. So the only way to prevent the thing from blowing up would be to kill the king.”

She paused for a long time. He could only imagine what she was thinking.

He said, “I really don’t know who could have done it. And it will take time and a lot of investigation to find out. I’m not thinking it’s the city, state, or government people involved. They wouldn’t solve it this way. I’m thinking either the mob, or an angry shareholder out there. Maybe even someone local who realized how The Earl had taken advantage of them, or someone crazy with rage because they’d been cut out. We should definitely get the Feds involved, and Chuck Coon heard this stuff and may be starting to make some calls as we speak. But given the stakes and the suspects, I don’t think it’s out of the realm of possibility to think that someone figured out a way to off Earl and frame Missy.”

She said, “This is so far-fetched.”

He sighed. “I know it sounds that way. But what about the method of death? Why would anyone go to all that trouble of shooting him and hanging the body from a wind turbine blade except to send a message of some kind? If it was Missy on her own, why didn’t she just cut the gas line on his car or poison him or something? Why didn’t she smother him in his sleep?”

She said, “Unless she wanted to steer us away from her.”

Joe thought about it. “She is pretty crafty, all right. But I don’t know if she’s capable of that kind of premeditation.” As he said it, he thought about how Missy, over the years, had lined up the next rich husband well before the soon-to-be-discarded one had a hint of dissatisfaction. And how she’d mastered the fine art of hidden but definitive language in her prenuptial agreement with Bud Sr., which had gained her his third-generation ranch.

Joe sat back in his seat. The rose-colored clouds had lost their light and now looked like heavy clumps of dark steel wool set against a graying sky.

“Well,” Schalk said, “this is all very interesting.”

“This stuff I just told you,” Joe said, “it’s new information, right?”

“Most of it,” she said.

“So it may be worth looking into?”

“Except for one thing,” she said.

“Bud Longbrake,” Joe said.

“And as far as that aspect of the case goes, it’s still solid,” she said. “You can throw all these conspiracies at me and watch the implications of what Alden did fly all over the country, but the fact still remains that we’ve got a man who claims your mother-in-law tried to hire him to kill her husband and he’s willing to testify to that fact. We’ve got phone records to prove that they were talking, even though Missy claims she hadn’t seen Bud or heard from him since she filed a restraining order against him. And, Joe, we have the motive. I’ve got people who will testify to the fact that Earl Alden was seeking a divorce.”

Joe winced. “But still. ”

“Facts are stubborn things, Joe,” she said. “And I can promise you a jury will be able to understand Missy wanting to kill her husband much easier than a wild-eyed conspiracy involving wind energy, tax credits, the mob, and so on.”

He said, “You’re probably right about that. But is it worth it? Would you do your best to convict a woman who may be innocent because it’s easier than expanding the investigation?”

Her voice had a sharp edge to it when she said, “Don’t you ever question my integrity again. If I didn’t believe she did it, we wouldn’t have brought the charges against her.”

“I apologize,” Joe said, flushing. “I went over the line.”

“Yes, you did.”

No words were spoken for a full minute. Then Joe said, “But you’ve got to be thinking of what Marcus Hand will do with this.”

“I’m thinking about that, Joe,” she said. “No doubt he will use it to muddy up the case and confuse the jury.”

“He’ll find a juror or two-maybe more-to buy his theory,” Joe said. “We both know that. So given what he’ll do with this information, you might want to consider delaying the trial until you can make sure you can counter it.”

She said, “So, when did you get your law degree? When was it you were elected by the voters in Twelve Sleep County to enforce the law?”

Joe said, “I’ve seen Marcus Hand in action. I’ve seen him win with less than this.”

“Besides,” she said, her voice lightening in tone, “who says he needs to know all this ahead of time?”

Joe looked suspiciously at his cell phone before raising it back up. “Dulcie, you didn’t just say that.”

She was silent.

“Dulcie, now I’m questioning your integrity.”

“I was just speculating,” she said, a hint of desperation in her voice.

“He knows,” Joe said. “Marybeth is talking to him.”

“Joe, you’re a son-of-a-bitch.”

He was speechless.

“And the same goes for your wife,” she said.

Joe took a deep breath. He said, “Dulcie, this isn’t you. This is somebody who wants to beat Marcus Hand so badly they’ve lost their judgment. Dulcie, I need to talk to Bud.”

Silence.

“You still don’t know where he is, do you?”

She said, “See you in court, Joe.”

“Dulcie, please-”

She hung up on him.

“You may not know where he is,” he said to the dead phone, “but I think I do.”

As he pulled back on the highway, he tried to call Marybeth, but his call went straight to voice mail. No doubt, she was speaking to Marcus Hand or her mother, or both. Telling them what he’d told the county prosecutor.

He said, “I’m headed back, but I’ll keep my phone on. I’ve got a stop to make on the way.”

Then: “I’m really disappointed in Dulcie. But she’s probably going to put your mother away. The women’s prison is in Lusk, by the way, if you ever want to visit her.”

Glendo Reservoir shimmered in the moonlight to the north and east of the highway. There were a couple of boats out there in the dark, walleye fisherman Joe guessed, and a few lights across the lake from a campground.

After his conversation with Schalk, he got angrier with each mile traveled. He was angry with Dulcie Schalk, Sheriff McLanahan, Bud Sr., Bud Jr., Orin Smith-the whole lot of them. But he traced most of his anger to his own frustration with himself. He couldn’t crack this thing, he might never be able to crack it, and he wasn’t sure, deep down, he wanted to.

What Smith had told him about The Earl and the way business was done in the country these days had instilled a deep and hopeless strain of melancholy. There was no right and no wrong anymore.