Inspired by real DOJ and court records, retold through fictional characters, scenes and dialogue.
The building sat behind a strip of young olive trees that hadn't yet earned their shade, and I remember thinking Bellwether Sample Systems had spent money on landscaping before it had spent money on anything that mattered to a buyer like me.
Amos Dacre stood beside me in the parking lot straightening his jacket the way he always did before a sale, though this time he wasn't selling anything. He was sixty-one that September, same as he'd been forty years into moving irrigation pumps and harvesters out of our yard in Ternhaven, and he still trusted his eyes over anyone's brochure.
"You've looked at a thousand machines for me, Lenora," he said. "Tell me this one actually does what the paper says."
I had looked at a thousand machines. Diesel engines, hydraulic lines, grain sorters, things with moving parts I could put my hand on and feel whether they were lying to me. I told him I'd find out, because that was the kind of thing I said to Amos, and had been saying since 1974.
Inside, the lobby smelled like fresh carpet glue. Gideon Vale met us himself, a trim man with a salesman's handshake, warm and brief. He'd started the company back in 2003, he told us, out of a conviction that a few drops of blood could replace a vial, and that conviction hadn't dimmed in ten years of refining it.
"We're past the hard part," Gideon said, walking us toward a glass-walled room where a technician in a white coat waited with a tray. "What you're about to see is the easy part now."
The technician pricked a volunteer's finger, caught a bead of blood in a small plastic cartridge, and carried it toward a steel door at the back of the room. Gideon kept talking the whole time, about broad panels, about hundreds of tests from that single drop, about retail partnerships already signed.
The door closed behind the cartridge. We never saw what happened on the other side of it. A few minutes later a printed slip came back through a slot, numbers in neat columns, and Gideon held it up like a magician showing us the card we'd picked.
"That's processing," Amos said, not quite a question.
"That's the result of processing," Gideon said, which I noticed was a different sentence, though I didn't say so.
On the drive back, Amos was quiet in the way he got when he was doing arithmetic on his future. He had a daughter getting married the next spring and a knee he doubted would last another decade on a tractor seat, and he'd been counting on this to be the thing that let him stop.
"I'm not putting my retirement into a locked room, Lenora," he finally said. "I need somebody who knows machines to tell me the machine works. I need you to see it. Actually see it."
I told him I would. I said it the way I'd always said things to Amos, certain, final, a closed transaction. I didn't tell him that I had no idea how I was going to get past that steel door, or what I'd be looking at if I did.
What I knew about centrifuges and reagent lines could have fit on the back of a business card. What I knew about Amos was that he had never once asked me to verify something and then failed to believe what I told him. That was the whole of our forty years in one habit, and I was about to spend it.