Best American Crime Writing 2006 - Mark Bowden [100]
On the table there was a DNA sample kit that would take tissue scrapings from the ears of two of Ames’s best females and be mailed to a lab in Iowa for storage until the price of cloning comes down. Artificial insemination is commonplace in the cattle business. DNA sampling for future cloning, however, is not, and the kit identifies Ames as a serious player in the breeding game, as does the practice of treating genetically desirable cows with fertility drugs so they produce multiple, rather than single, embryos.
On the morning of my second visit, dozens of such embryos were to be “flushed” from four cows with the help of saline solution, plastic tubes, and a fertility specialist vet who was driving down from Pennsylvania. The embryos were to be stored briefly, until they could be implanted into recipient cows that would gestate them to birth. As he waited for the vet, Ames, his hair unbrushed, looked cheerful and relaxed. He was dressed in worn bluejeans, scuffed boots, and an old red sweater. Once the vet arrived, the two men, with the help of a farmhand, began herding the cows, one by one, into a metal squeeze chute. For the next several hours, as the vet worked, Ames kept up a stream of cheerful conversation about his visits with some of the cattle industry’s top scientists and his contacts with senior executives at the country’s largest meat-packing plants.
At one point, with the vet’s right arm buried up to the shoulder in a cow’s reproductive canal, and Ames’s own arms draped with plastic tubes attached to sacs of saline solution, Ames explained the packing industry’s plans for “vertical integration,” for expanding its business from the slaughter and packing to include cattle breeding. “We want to take ’em from squeal to meal!” Ames said approvingly, quoting an executive from Smithfield Foods.
Throughout the morning, he told stories about successful cattle shows, mentioning a man who, when I telephoned him later, painted a bleaker picture. “John had a couple of [cattle] sales in the past where nobody showed up,” said John Hausner, a herd manager who has worked for Ames in the past. “Obviously, he’s made somebody mad. I felt sorry for the man.”
As Ames and the vet worked, I looked across a green field and saw a large silo, a small ranch house, and some paddock fence. Is that where Brooks and Ames faced off? Or was it there, on the gravel drive outside this barn? Standing there, trying to get my bearings, I felt the full force of what had happened. It was everywhere and nowhere—the idea that right there on that ground, where a white cat perched on a stall post, where the cows shifted and clanked in their chutes with hypodermic needles planted in their backs, as the vet remarked on the unexpected difficulty of the morning’s work, Perry Brooks was shot dead at close range by his neighbor.
PAUL ORLETT BELIEVES HIS FRIEND was aiming to avoid confrontation on the morning he died. “[Ames] told Perry’s people to come over there before 9:00 A.M., with five hundred dollars to bail out the bull, but Perry said: ‘Hell no, we’ll wait ’til ten. He’ll be gone to Richmond by then.’”
This echoed an earlier episode, when Brooks, learning that his bull was over at Holly Hill Farm, called the farm manager in the middle of the night and suggested the two of them free the bull. “No need to tell the boss,” Brooks advised. When the manager refused the offer, Brooks hung up.
Brooks did not appear to regard this new expedition as risky, Orlett recalled. “Perry said he was going to go get the bull and then come back and work in his greenhouse.”
But the farmhand, Michael Beasley, had misgivings. “I didn’t want to go,” Beasley testified later. “But I didn’t try to talk him out of it, because it wasn’t any use.”
Ames’s wife may have been more vocal. The weekend before the shooting, when Matthew Coleman phoned Holly Hill Farm to arrange the bull’s pickup, Jeanne Ames said, “Don’t let [Brooks] come up here with you,” according to Ames attorney Benjamin Dick.
Brooks waited for Orlett under