Cold Wind - C. J. Box [110]
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