Chapter 6 - THE LOCKED FREEZER
I didn't wait for the Highway Patrol bureaucracy to clear jurisdiction lines.
I borrowed my neighbor Tom's Jeep, leaving my wrecked pickup wedged against the deputy's dually, and tore south toward Route 55.
Ten minutes down the dark two-lane blacktop, my phone lit up with an incoming call from Arthur Pendelton.
"David, the SBI duty agent is on his way with two agricultural inspectors," Arthur said rapidly. "And I finally finished cross-referencing the veterinary quarantine numbers from that photo you texted me."
"Tell me," I said, taking a curve on two wheels.
"The meat didn't come from the prison kitchen," Arthur said, his voice shaking. "The prison system operates a commercial hog farm in Caledonia. In August, an illegal batch of feed contaminated with heavy-metal fungicide got mixed into the troughs. Four hundred hogs had to be euthanized. Under state law, the carcasses had to be rendered into industrial lime pits."
"And Sterling's company got the disposal contract," I said, the pieces clicking together with sickening clarity.
"Yes. Only instead of paying fifty thousand dollars in hazardous waste tipping fees, Richard Collins had the hogs butchered at an unlicensed plant, mixed the meat fifty-fifty with cheap soy filler, and packaged it as 'institutional turkey and beef loaf.' Every time a child eats that food, they're ingesting cumulative doses of mercury-based fungicide."
Ahead through the pines, I spotted the rusted tin roof of the old Sterling tobacco barn. Behind it stood a massive, windowless corrugated steel building—the cold-storage facility.
A black Lincoln Navigator was parked near the sliding barn doors. Next to it was a rusted 2004 Honda Civic with a pink princess sticker on the back bumper.
Maria Morales's car.
I killed the Jeep's engine a hundred yards back and sprinted through the wet broomstraw along the fence line.
As I reached the side of the corrugated warehouse, I smelled smoke.
Not wood smoke—the thick, acrid stench of burning diesel and polyurethane insulation.
Around the back corner, flames were already licking out from underneath the external compressor unit of the main walk-in freezer. Someone had dumped five-gallon jerrycans of tractor diesel over the electrical junction box and lit it to destroy the inventory before the state inspectors arrived on Friday.
And standing ten feet from the heavy steel freezer door was Richard Collins—a tall, silver-haired man in a tailored wool overcoat—alongside Principal Margaret Collins.
Richard was shoving a heavy iron crowbar through the exterior latch handle of the walk-in door, wedging it against the frame so it couldn't be opened from the inside.
From behind the four-inch insulated steel door came a muffled, frantic pounding.
Bang! Bang! Bang!
"Please! My little boy is at home with my sister! Let me out!" a woman's voice screamed, barely audible over the roar of the diesel fire eating through the outside wall.
"Richard, stop!" Margaret's voice was shrill, terrified, her neat blonde hair coming undone in the hot wind from the fire. "You said we were just going to scare her into giving us the phone and burn the shipping pallets! You can't leave her in the box!"
"Shut up and get in the Navigator, Margaret!" Richard snarled, hammering the crowbar deeper into the steel hasp with a concrete block. "The compressor lines are already ruptured! In four minutes the smoke goes through the air intake. When the fire department gets here, it's an electrical short during a night cleaning shift. If she walks out of here, your brother goes to federal prison for thirty years, and we go with him!"
"She's Benjamin's mother!" Margaret sobbed, grabbing his coat sleeve. "I just wanted the school budget deficit covered after Tom lost our money in the real estate crash! I never signed up for murder!"
Richard shoved his wife backward into the mud and raised the concrete block to jam the latch one final time.
"Hey, Rich!" I roared, stepping out from the corner of the barn with a four-foot length of galvanized fence pipe in my hands.
Richard spun around, his eyes wide in the orange firelight.
Before he could drop the block, I swung the pipe with everything I had left in my shoulders, catching him squarely across the forearms. The bone snapped with a sound like a dry pine branch. He dropped to his knees, screaming, cradling his shattered wrist against his chest.
Margaret scrambled backward on her hands and knees, staring at me in horror.
I didn't look at either of them. The black smoke was billowing straight into the freezer's top ventilation intake now. Inside, Maria's pounding had stopped, replaced by ragged, choking coughs.
I grabbed the red-hot iron crowbar wedged in the door latch. The metal seared the skin of my palms through my light gloves, smelling of burnt leather and flesh, but I planted my boot against the steel wall and wrenched backward with every muscle in my back.
With a screech of bent steel, the crowbar popped free.
I yanked the heavy handle. The vacuum seal hissed, and the door swung open, belching a cloud of freezing white vapor mixed with toxic black diesel soot.
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Collapsed just inside the threshold, huddled underneath a plastic pallet cover to shield herself from the falling soot, was a tiny woman in a blue janitor's smock.
Clutched tightly against her chest was a battered smartphone—and a small, laminated paper bookmark decorated with yellow crayon stars.
