Joe said, “He drew a Dall sheep permit in Alaska. He wants the trial over before the season ends.”
Rulon chortled.
“So I’ve got less than a week to figure out what’s going on, if anything,” Joe said sourly.
“This sounds like the whole wind energy rush,” Rulon said. “It’s out of control and moving so fast nobody can keep up with it. No one has stopped to look at what’s happened in other countries when they decided to artificially change their energy policy to feel-good crackpot schemes. Jobs have been lost and their economies tanked, and they’ve completely backed off. But not us, by God!”
Rulon practically leaped across the desk. He said, “Wind energy has created some strange bedfellows. The traditional fossil fuel guys hate it, and they’re partnering up with their traditional enemies, the greens. Some landowners love windmills, some hate them—it depends on who’s getting paid. The Feds are going over our heads because it’s new policy and they couldn’t care less if it makes economic sense or if the states are players. And there’s so much damned federal money involved . . . you just know things are going to get screwy.”
“Thank you for your time,” Joe said, standing. “I appreciate the background, but I know you’re busy.”
Rulon assessed Joe through heavy-lidded eyes. He said, “It’s good to see you, Joe. I still think you’re a man I can count on, despite everything.”
“Thank you.”
“You and me, we’re not through,” Rulon said. “I still have two years to go, and I may need to call on you again. I’ll work it out with the new director when he’s hired. Or she’s hired. Will you respond if I ask?”
Joe hesitated, and said, “Sure.”
“As long as it’s within your boundaries,” Rulon said sarcastically. “You ought to get a bumper sticker that says, ‘What Would Dudley Do-Right Do?’ Call it W-W-D-D-R-D. That has a ring to it.”
Joe nodded. “That’s the second time in two days I’ve been called that.”
“Maybe there’s something to it,” Rulon said. “But hell, that’s one reason I like you, Joe.”
Joe shrugged.
“But like I said, I need more yes-men in the future.”
“Sorry.”
“Have a good day, Joe,” Rulon said, “and my best to your lovely family.” He always signed off that way, Joe thought. As if they’d just had a conversation about the weather.
“Yours, too, sir.”
Rulon said, “Tell Coon to cooperate with you or he’ll be hearing from me. And he doesn’t like to hear from me.”
“Thank you, sir,” Joe said.
FBI Special Agent Chuck Coon said, “Yeah, we’ve got him. But why should I let you talk to Orin Smith?”
“I told you,” Joe said. “He may be able to shed some light on a case I’m working on. As far as I know, it’s unrelated to why you’ve got him here in the first place.”
They were sitting at a long empty conference table on the third floor of the Federal Center in Cheyenne. To get in, Joe had had to leave his weapons, phone, keys, and metal in a locker at the ground floor security entrance. He couldn’t help but contrast the difference between getting in to see Chuck Coon and his morning meeting with the governor.
“What happened to your face?” Coon asked.
“I tangled with a motivated slacker,” Joe said.
“I didn’t know there were such creatures.”
“Neither did I.”
“When was the last time you saw Nate Romanowski?”
Joe stifled a grin because of the way Coon had slipped that in.
“I haven’t seen him for over a year,” Joe said. “In fact, I wish I knew where he was right now.”
“Don’t tell me that,” Coon said. “Jeez, Joe. We’re still after him, you know.”
Joe nodded.
Coon had not lost his boyish features, although his close-cropped brown hair was beginning to sparkle with gray from running the Cheyenne bureau since his predecessor had been kicked up the ladder in the bureaucracy. Coon was incapable of not looking like a federal agent, Joe thought. He wore an ill-fitting sport coat over a white shirt and tie. Coon seemed like the kind of guy who would wear his credentials on a lanyard in the shower and while playing with his kids. In Joe’s own experience and from what he’d heard from other law enforcement throughout the state, Coon was an honorable man doing a professional job. There was no doubt that he served a distant federal master, but in the two years he’d spent as supervisor, he’d built bridges between the myriad conflicting city, county, state, and federal agencies that overlapped confusingly throughout Wyoming. Joe liked him, and when they weren’t butting heads, they discussed their families and Coon’s new interest in archery.
“So why is he in lockup?” Joe asked.
“Ponzi scheme,” Coon said. “I’m surprised you didn’t hear about it. He’s been running a good one for the last two years right here out of Cheyenne. Kind of a high-tech pyramid scheme, where he convinced investors who wanted to shelter their money from taxes to invest in his operation. He claimed he’d figured out a way to buy hard assets like gold and real estate through a legit offshore company. That way, he told them, they could shelter their cash so the government wouldn’t get it and at the same time hedge their wealth against declines in the dollar. It was pretty sophisticated.”
Joe nodded.
“There’s a lot more of these kinds of scams these days,” Coon said. “The rich are running scared. Some of them will do just about anything not to have to pay up to fifty percent of their income in taxes. So when they hear about an outfit like Orin Smith’s, they get reckless when they should know better.”
Joe said, “So he actually paid them dividends?”
“At first,” Coon said. “It was a classic Bernie Madoff-like Ponzi scheme, but with a twist. The first few rich folks who sent him cash to shelter did receive dividend checks based on the increase in the price of gold or whatever. And they told their friends for finder’s fees that Smith kicked back. But as more and more wealthy people sent him money, the dividend checks got smaller for the first investors and nonexistent for the later ones.”
“What was the twist?” Joe asked.
Coon shook his head in a gesture that was part disgust and part admiration. “Unlike Madoff, Smith never even pretended to be aboveboard. He bragged on his website and in his emails that he operated outside the system. That way, he claimed, he and his investors were performing kind of a noble act in defense of free enterprise. He called it a ‘capital strike.’ The people who sent him money knew he wasn’t going to report to the SEC or anybody else. The endgame was that when and if the tax rates ever went back down, the investors would ask him to sell off their assets and return the cash. For Orin Smith, it worked pretty well for a while.”
“So how’d you catch him?” Joe asked. “If no one was willing to turn him in because they would be admitting they’d done something criminal.”
Coon said, “Guess.”
Joe thought for a moment, then said, “A divorce.”
“Bingo. A trophy wife in Montana and her seventy-year-old husband split the sheets. They jointly owned a high-end ski resort where all the members were multi-millionaires, and she wanted half of everything. When she found out he’d invested most of what they had with Smith’s company, she went ballistic and reported it to the Bureau in Montana. It was child’s play for us to trace the IP addresses through all the firewalls right here to Cheyenne. And it didn’t take us long to guess who was responsible, since Orin Smith has been running scams here for years.”
Joe sat back. “I don’t get it,” he said. “This is the same guy who was the head honcho of a legitimate wind energy company worth millions? And he’s been on your radar for a while.”