Chapter 40 Jo
Chapter 40
Jo
They were there, all five of them, positioned in front of her desk like an encircling army. Jo turned and glanced across the squad room at Mike, but he just gave a helpless shrug as he walked out the door to start his patrol, and what else could he do? When the Martini Club demanded your attention, you had no choice but to yield.
“There’s a reason these people all knew each other,” said Maggie. “The Conovers. The Greenes. Arthur Fox.”
“Of course they know each other. They’re neighbors. They spend every summer on the same pond.”
“But what brought them to Purity in the first place?”
“Probably the same reason other people come here. The same reason you all moved here. It’s quiet, it’s beautiful, and come on, it’s Maine.” Jo paused and added pointedly: “Where most people mind their own business.”
Ingrid smiled at her four colleagues. “She’s getting a bit warmer.”
“ What am I supposed to be getting?” Jo asked.
Ben said, “Consider all the advantages of our fair state. In particular, the advantages of a remote little village like Purity, far from prying eyes. A place where people are known to respect your privacy, where they don’t ask too many questions about why you’re here and what you do for a living.”
“There’s also the ready availability of lobster,” added Lloyd.
“Don’t you find it a bit coincidental how the Greenes, the Conovers, and Arthur Fox all showed up in Purity the same year, 1967?” said Ingrid.
“How do you know that?”
Declan Rose raised his hand. “That bit of intelligence would be my modest contribution, courtesy of our local Realtor, Miss Betty Jones. She keeps excellent records of every property transaction that’s gone through her office, whether it’s a sale or a rental agreement. She said all three parties signed rental agreements in 1967.”
“And using the county tax maps, I confirmed the dates they later purchased their properties on Maiden Pond,” said Ingrid. “It was all within two years of each other.”
“Maybe that was a good time to buy real estate.”
“1967 was also the year Vivian Stillwater moved here,” said Declan. “She never purchased any property, but she did rent a cottage. On Maiden Pond.”
“How did you get Betty Jones to tell you all this?”
He leaned over Jo’s desk and whispered: “Baked goods.”
“The point is,” said Maggie, “in 1972, all these people were living year round on the pond. The Greenes, the Conovers, Arthur Fox, and Vivian Stillwater. They knew each other very well. Then Vivian suddenly packs up and leaves, and no one knows where she went. No one asks any questions. It seems like no one wants to know what happened to her.”
“You told me she got hit by a car in New Hampshire. Died in a long-term care facility,” said Jo.
“And that’s where this gets interesting,” said Ingrid. “Why was her fate so hard to track down? It’s because everything about Vivian Stillwater’s death has been scrubbed from official documents. The accident report. Her hospitalization. Her death certificate. It’s as if someone tried to erase the evidence of what happened to her. And believe me, I looked .”
Yes, Jo certainly did believe her. She believed that if Ingrid Slocum put her mind to it, she could locate a missing cat in Timbuktu.
“Okay.” Jo sighed. “You’ve just told me why Vivian Stillwater is not our skeleton in the pond. So how is she relevant to this case? Why are we talking about her at all? About any of them?”
“Because there’s a reason why all these people came to Maine in the first place. And it has nothing to do with our fine summer weather.”
“Have you tried just asking them?”
“You can’t believe anything Elizabeth or Arthur tells you. They know how to conceal the truth, even under duress. They’ve been trained to do just that.” Ingrid glanced around at her friends. “Trust me, we should know.”
We should know. Jo knew what that meant. They were adept at concealing their emotions, and the five faces gazed back at her with impenetrable expressions. “I take it you’re now going to tell me all the things I’ve missed.”
“To be fair,” said Maggie, “we haven’t been at the top of our game either. We should have been quicker to learn who Vivian Stillwater worked for, and why she was headed to Washington, DC. These are things you couldn’t have found out.”
“Because I’m just a small-town cop.”
“A very good cop, Jo. But this involves a matter outside any normal police investigation, and it happened before you were even born. It’s a part of history we’re not proud of, even though the five of us were not personally involved. People were hurt because of it. People like the Tarkins.”
Jo was confused. A moment ago, they’d been talking about Vivian Stillwater. Now suddenly they’d swerved to a completely different topic. She eyed the five people facing her, all of them with backgrounds they’d kept hidden from her. They knew how to guard their secrets. They also knew how to ferret out the secrets of others, and they were about to bring Jo into their circle of trust.
“Have you ever heard of MKUltra?” said Declan.
“Isn’t that, like, some superhero’s name?”
Declan smiled. “No. Project MKUltra was a human experimentation program that our government conducted from the 1950s to the 1970s. It was during the Cold War, and we were in a weapons race against the Russians. By ‘weapons,’ I’m talking about more than just guns and bombs. We were also trying to master mind control. Was there a way to manipulate the human brain through drugs or hypnosis to make enemy spies give up their secrets? Or to help our own agents sharpen their extrasensory abilities?”
“What do you mean by ‘extrasensory’?”
“Exactly what it sounds like. ESP. Telekinesis. Clairvoyance. We knew the Russians were deep in such research, and we didn’t want to be left behind. It all sounds absurd now, but at the time, our government actually thought those things might be possible. They began testing a variety of mind-altering drugs and chemicals and observing their effects on people. Some of these test subjects were volunteers, paid to take part. But some people never knew they were being used as guinea pigs by our own government.”
“What kind of drugs are we talking about?”
“It ranged from LSD to barbiturates, mescaline, and psilocybin. A whole gamut of psychoactive chemicals, some of them not legal. Anything that might prove useful against the enemy.”
“And some of these people didn’t even know they were getting the drugs? That sounds pretty damn unethical.”
“It was unethical. But consider the era. Project MKUltra was launched at a time when paranoia about the Soviets was running rampant. We needed to stay ahead of the enemy. We needed new weapons to help us uncover their secrets. That’s how the program was justified, at the time.”
Jo’s eyes narrowed. “I’m going to take a wild guess. Your Agency was running the show?”
Declan winced. “This all happened before our time.”
“Still, it was the CIA?”
“And we’re not proud of it. Warfare’s never pretty. Ethical lines sometimes get blurred. But we try to learn from our mistakes, and after a few ... unfortunate events, Project MKUltra was halted.”
“‘Unfortunate events’? What does that mean?”
“People died.”
Jo stared at Declan. “How many people are we talking about?”
“We’ll never know the answer. CIA Director Helms ordered all the Project MKUltra records destroyed to protect the Agency.”
“How the hell did he get away with that?”
“It was a scandal, of course. Congress held hearings, trying to expose the truth, but they didn’t get very far. Still, some details leaked out. We know the drugs were tested in sites around the world, as well as in this country. On Americans.”
“Where?”
“San Francisco. New York . . .”
“And Purity,” said Maggie.
Jo stared at her. “ Here? ”
“Consider the advantages. It’s a place where people respect your privacy and don’t ask too many questions. A remote village, surrounded by woods, far from prying eyes.”
“It would have been just a small branch of the operation,” said Declan. “We believe that’s what brought the Conovers, Dr. Greene, Arthur Fox, and Vivian Stillwater to Maine. Vivian Stillwater had a master’s degree in neurochemistry. Dr. Greene, Hannah’s father, was a pharmacologist with US military connections. Arthur Fox was also military, attached to Army Intelligence, although he claimed he was merely an energy consultant.”
“You’d think he could come up with something more creative,” said Ingrid.
“And then there’s the Conovers,” said Maggie. “George Conover was supposedly in pharmaceutical sales, yet the company he worked for no longer exists. If in fact it ever did.”
“Okay,” said Jo. “So there were four old spooks. Three of them are now dead, leaving just Arthur Fox.”
“There’s one more,” said Maggie.
“Who else besides Arthur Fox?”
“Elizabeth Conover.”
“ She was CIA?”
“It’s not all that unusual for the Agency to employ married couples. It’s a convenient arrangement for everyone involved. They’re free to share classified information with each other. It helps cement their cover stories.”
“And I, for one, highly recommend it,” said Lloyd, winking at his wife.
“Whoa, back up,” said Jo. “You’ve overwhelmed me with all this stuff about MKUltra, but what does it have to do with the skeleton in the lake? We know it doesn’t belong to Vivian, because she died in a care facility.”
“But why did she end up in that care facility?” said Maggie. “What put her into a coma?”
“You said she ran into traffic. Got hit by a car.”
“Think about it, Jo. An intelligent, accomplished woman abandons her car in a ditch. Then she runs barefoot for several miles before dashing into traffic.”
“Maybe she was running from someone?”
“Someone who might have been only in her head.”
Jo could feel them watching her, patiently waiting for her to catch up. Why did it seem she was always a dozen steps behind these people?
“MKUltra,” Jo finally said. “Those drugs they were testing ...”
Maggie nodded. “They can lead to temporary psychosis. Hallucinations, delusions, memory loss. We don’t know how many test subjects this happened to, because those files were destroyed, but we do know the drugs led to the death of at least one man. His name became part of the public record, and you can look him up on Google. The man was Frank Olson, and he was a biological warfare expert who worked for the CIA. His family believes he became disillusioned with Project MKUltra, and he planned to resign. Someone—probably one of his colleagues—spiked his drink with LSD. Nine days later, Olson jumped—or was pushed—out of the tenth-floor window of the Hotel Statler in New York. The timing of his death was blatantly convenient. Was he given the drug to silence him? To stop him from turning whistleblower?”
Now Jo understood why Project MKUltra was relevant. Why Vivian Stillwater’s death might have been more than an accident.
“I think Vivian also had moral qualms about the project and wanted out,” said Maggie. “We know she planned to meet someone in DC. Her sister thought it was about a new job, but I think Vivian planned to expose the program, and she was on her way to do just that.”
“But her colleagues made sure she never got there,” said Jo.
“Maybe they didn’t intend to kill her. But whatever drug they gave her caused a mental breakdown. Even if she’d survived, how reliable would she be as a witness? Would Congress, would anyone, trust the testimony of a woman who’d gone briefly insane?” Maggie leaned over Jo’s desk, and her gaze was fierce enough to make Jo edge back in her chair. “The question is, why did Vivian suddenly turn against the project, against her colleagues, even against the Agency? What made her decide to expose MKUltra at that particular time? It had to be something that happened here, in Purity. Something that went very wrong.”
“The skeleton in the lake,” said Jo. “Was she what went wrong?”
“That’s one possibility. A death they had to cover up, a victim they had to dispose of. But there was something else that went wrong here, something so public, so catastrophic, it couldn’t be simply disposed of in a pond.”
Jo didn’t need any hints, any prompting, to know the answer. She thought about her visit to that ramshackle house on Maiden Pond. She thought about Reuben and his sister and how their future was destroyed by what their father did. Not because he was evil or insane, but because his brain was on fire from the chemicals that had been fed to him.
“Sam Tarkin,” said Jo.
Maggie nodded. “A man who’d never been in trouble before. Who had a wife and two kids to support, one of them in a wheelchair. A man who one day, without warning, went berserk and killed four people on Main Street.”
“And no one ever knew why he did it.”
“Because the Agency quietly made a deal with Tarkin’s wife. They promised her and her children a lifetime of financial support, enough money to pay for Abigail’s medical bills. But the family had to remain silent. That’s one of the ways Project MKUltra managed to keep its secrets. Payoffs. Settlements. We’ll never know how many people were harmed because the Agency made sure those secrets would never be revealed.”
“Unless they get dredged up from a pond in Maine,” said Ben.
The lady in the lake, thought Jo. She rose to her feet and went to the filing cabinet to retrieve a folder. “I just got the report from the ME’s office, about the skeleton’s dentition. The victim had a dental filling in one of her upper molars, and there’s a preliminary analysis of the amalgam. It’s called Dispersalloy, a product that was first introduced in 1962.” Jo handed the folder to Maggie. “So the timing would fit.”
Maggie nodded. “MKUltra was in operation.”
Jo paced over to the county map hanging on the wall and focused on Maiden Pond. Such a modest little body of water, just a tiny blue smudge on the map, yet tragedy kept finding its way to that pond, like light sucked into a black hole. Even the name itself was tragic, commemorating a girl’s drowning a century ago. A place where bad things happened. Where they kept happening.
“If this is all to cover up MKUltra,” said Jo, “there are only two people still alive who were part of it.”
“Elizabeth Conover and Arthur Fox,” said Maggie.
Jo turned to look at her. “Would Elizabeth really hurt her granddaughter to keep this secret?”
“If they put that body in the pond, this could send both Elizabeth and Arthur Fox to prison.”
“Yes, but to hurt her own granddaughter ?”
“ Step -granddaughter. You’ve met Elizabeth. You tell us.”
Jo thought about the first night she’d encountered Elizabeth Conover. Recalled the woman’s cool-eyed authority, her unquestioned command over her family. Zoe was not a blood relative but a recent addition through marriage. A girl Elizabeth would not have had the chance to bond with. A girl she might consider disposable, given the stakes.
“I’ll bring her in for questioning,” said Jo. “Arthur Fox too.”
“Good luck with that,” said Ingrid. “You know they’re going to deny everything. And you have no proof.”
“It might all come down to Zoe,” said Maggie. “And what she remembers when she wakes up.”
Zoe.
“They’ve just moved her out of the ICU,” said Jo. “The hospital’s keeping her room number strictly secret from the public, but the family knows it. Elizabeth knows it.” Jo picked up the phone. “Zoe’s a sitting duck.”
“She’s also an opportunity,” said Ben.
That made Jo pause. She put down the phone and looked at him. “I’m not sure I like where this is going.”
“You can try investigating them, but we can almost guarantee you won’t get anything useful out of Elizabeth or Arthur,” said Ben. “Which means we need a different strategy. It requires the hospital’s cooperation.”
“I take it you have a plan?”
Ben looked at his friends, and they all nodded. “We have a plan.”