Page 19 of Fury In Death

She did a quick run on the daughters-in-law, found no buzz on either.

So moved on to Banner-Wyst.

Chapter Three

When Roarke came back in, she was deep into it.

“These guys have their thumbs in a lot of pies.”

“It’s usually fingers in pies.”

Looking up, she frowned. “I thought you stick in your thumb.”

“If you’re Little Jack Horner, but otherwise, fingers.”

“Little Jack Horner is not, at this time, a suspect. Anyway, Calvin Banner, age seventy-nine, is still basically running the show as far as I can see. Jacob Wyst, age seventy-six, seems more like the public face. The one who does the hyping, the digging up federal grants for research, touting whatever that research comes up with. You know, those bigger tomatoes, reducing cow farts, space exploration and colonization, medical innovations.

“They send people to third world countries, or areas suffering from floods, droughts, disease, and work to rebuild, rehabilitate.”

“Mmm-hmm.”

She knew that tone. “Okay, what did I miss?”

“You’d need to look a bit deeper to see they often—in the name of rebuilding, rehabilitating, teaching such things as regenerative farming, water purifying—acquire land. And in acquiring, often displace the local population, or transfer them to areas they already own, have already rebuilt.”

“Okay. And?”

“There’s a school of thought that this relocating, displacement result in a kind of serfdom. Farmers, for instance, don’t own the land they farm. They have housing, food, schools, and so on, but own nothing. They work for Banner-Wyst, are educated by Banner-Wyst, they see the company doctors, and so on.”

“Are they paid?”

“They are, and a portion of that payment goes into the communal pool to pay for the schools, medical centers, roads, the infrastructure. Some, of course, are satisfied to have all of that. But if they want something else, they leave with, basically, nothing.”

“Is it legal?”

“They’re careful to stay on this side of the line.” He picked up her cooling coffee, drank some. “And their marketing, their messaging is first-rate. They are, no doubt, helping people in desperate need of assistance. But in exchange for that help, they sacrifice their home, their culture, and in a very real way, their freedom to choose.”

“You don’t like them, not even a little.”

He shrugged. “I admire some of their work, some of the progress made in medicine, in environmental strides, and in other areas. At the base of things, Eve, I’m still an Irishman. You take the land, you take the heart.”

She sat back. “So maybe Chu found something at work that fell on the other side of the line, threatened to blow the whistle. But. You saw the scene, Roarke.”

“I did, yes.”

“Overkill, brutal, messy. Personal, in my mind. A big organization wants to take down a whistleblower? Lots of ways to do it that aren’t any of those. If there’s no paying off or discrediting—”

“You dispose of the problem, quietly, or in a way that looks like tragedy. We can toss in the victim’s finances, and the fact that roughly thirteen years ago he opened an account in the Caymans under the name Lawrence Pope—his mother’s maiden name. He opened it with a deposit of two-point-five million.”

And that gave her a nice buzz. “That’s a tidy sum to anyone who’s not you.”

“At the same time he received a five-hundred-thousand-dollar bonus from Banner-Wyst.”

“Which rounds up to the even tidier three million. Even I can do that math.”

“Within the year he was given a promotion and a five percent salary bump. Twice a year he deposits a hundred thousand in the Caymans account, which doesn’t come from his annual bonus of two hundred and fifty thousand.”

“Rachel Chu said they’d lived at that location for over twelve years.”