Kane by Steve Gannon Page B

blood-red letters.  Carns turned up the sound.
    “… similar to the murder of a family last month in the Orange County community of Mission Viejo.  Although members of the Los Angeles police have not yet officially linked the two crimes, Channel Two Action News has learned that authorities fear a serial killer may be at large in the Southern California area.  Here with more from Pacific Palisades is Lauren Van Owen.”
    The scene switched to a police-choked residential street.  Carns listened as a self-assured female reporter embarked on a somber description of Saturday night’s murders.  Partway through her report, she stopped.  The camera lurched, then followed as she hurried after a large man who had exited the house.  Despite Van Owen’s prodding, the man, later identified as Detective Daniel Kane, refused to comment.  Initially Carns dismissed the rough-looking investigator as another muscle bound Irish cop.  But something about him—a flinty gleam of intelligence in his pale-blue eyes, the unforgiving lines around his mouth—prompted Carns to take a closer look.
    The clip ended with the detective promising, “Sooner or later, we’ll get this maggot.”
    Carns flipped to CNBC, then ran through the other channels, searching without success for further coverage on the killings.  As he was about to switch back to CNN, a call came in on his trading line.
    “Carns,” he said, lifting the receiver.
    “Good morning, Victor,” a male voice replied.
    Carns recognized the clipped diction of John Hall, the CEO of United Western Packers, an Omaha meat packing conglomerate that routinely purchased over thirty-five percent of all cattle sold in the United States.  As Carns started to respond, he heard a telltale beep on the line.  He checked the recorder switch on his phone terminal.
    Off.
    Without a word, he hung up.
    The phone rang thirty seconds later.  Hall again.  “Victor?”
    Carns waited before replying, making sure that this time Hall had called on an unrecorded line.  At last he spoke.  “Don’t ever do that again,” he said softly.
    “Of course not.”  Though Hall replied pleasantly, Carns detected something in his tone that sounded as hard as steel.  An alarm went off in Carns’s mind.  In his day-to-day transactions, Hall had no reason to be using a recorded trading line.  So why had he called on one?
    An accident?
    Unlikely .
    In the event of any suspected impropriety, the National Futures Association and the USDA routinely scrutinized recorded transactions.  Carns knew that if brought to light, his association with Hall and their ingenious but extremely illegal market manipulation involving cattle futures would, at minimum, garner them both speedy trials, gigantic fines, and adjoining cells in the nearest federal prison.  Hall knew it, too.
    “Victor?  Are you still there?”
    “Yes.  Why are you calling?”
    “Two things,” Hall answered, his voice brusque and businesslike.  “First, United Western Packers has been out of the market for five weeks now, and our captive supply is running short.  In order to keep our plants running efficiently, UWP will need to start buying soon.”
    “I anticipated that,” snapped Carns.  An understatement.  In truth, he had thought of almost nothing else over the past weeks.  In futures trading, especially with a position as heavily leveraged as Carns’s, the specter of financial collapse always loomed on the horizon.  Of course, if that happened Hall would lose his share of the profits as well, but it was Carns’s money at risk.  And more than anything, Carns hated being in someone else’s power.
    “How much time do you need?” Hall demanded.
    Carns glanced at the cattle chart.  All red for the past five weeks and still falling.  “Two or three days,” he answered, deciding not to reveal that he’d already begun closing out his contracts.  The more time he had to scale out, the less probability of causing a price