Hummingbird Salamander(15)
Psychology was criminology’s cousin, and perhaps something in me also wanted to find a way to understand our grandfather’s situation. The way I despised him, and yet there were moments I wanted to conjure the pure, blunt, uncomplicated menace of the man.
But, over time, the passion I’d had for being the one to solve cases had dulled, the anger and the sadness behind it.
The verdict in my brother’s death was drowning.
I never believed it.
[21]
The only obituary Allie could find ran in a niche leftist Buenos Aires newspaper with an online presence. Just a few sentences with no photograph. The feeling of a cover-up or data wipe persisted.
Autotranslated from Spanish and cleaned up by Allie, the obituary noted that she’d died a week before, but didn’t list cause of death. “No mention of embezzlement online,” Allie wrote in the margin.
An ardent defender of the environment and animal rights, Vilcapampa, 54, was the daughter of a notable industrialist and businessman. Born in Buenos Aires, she grew up Florida but moved to the Pacific Northwest for college. In the 1990s, Vilcapampa was arrested on charges of conspiracy to commit murder in the disappearance of five alleged wildlife traffickers but was released due to insufficient evidence. She moved back to the United States soon after to manage several of her father’s companies. She was suspected in further crimes in the early 2000s, including embezzlement from one of her father’s companies, but nothing was ever proven. Recently, Vilcapampa had been under investigation for alleged ties to bioterrorism groups.
The mention of “bioterrorism” earned a raised eyebrow from me. I knew how activism became terrorism—in part, the shifting goalposts of changed laws. But how had Silvina’s ecoterrorism morphed into bioterrorism? Banned from her country of birth after the latest round of amorphous accusations. But the U.S. had let her stay. Why?
Somehow, the father had managed to have his name kept out of even this brief mention. Fear on the part of the outlet or pressure applied?
Allie had also found a local traffic report that named “Silvina Vilcapampa” as a “hit-and-run” victim seven days before. Police were looking for an SUV or minivan. “Nothing else local,” Allie wrote. “No funeral I can find.” No idea whether she had been buried or cremated. No follow-up to the initial mention. I found that suspicious. Normally, the paper would have run some kind of follow-up, under traffic reports or the police roundup. More meddling by the father?
I tried not to imagine the violence of a vehicle hitting a human body, turned the page.
Six or seven years ago, Silvina had begun a kind of community outreach, through an arts nonprofit created by Vilcapampa Enterprises. Trying to reconcile with Vilcapampa senior? She’d briefly funded “eco-artists” who’d formed their own community called “Unitopia” on an island made with recycled plastics, out in a lake in the wilderness. This struck me, after having seen the video, as ludicrous. The kinds of things that the Silvina in the video would label “bourgeois.” But a big deal to whoever Silvina thought she was at the time.
Then that came to a halt as quickly as it had begun.
Her whereabouts unknown the past four or five years. Activities unknown. Purpose unknown.
I could feel my blood pressure spike. The message and storage unit key took on a heightened intensity.
Surely no one cared about Unitopia these days? Still, at lunch I went to a shitty little internet café, put on protections, checked to see if their website was active. Rather than upset Larry again.
Static, but still there. Mostly just a gallery of shots of the space. It had the slick, seamless feel of something put together by a branding company. Because it had been.
A floor plan that almost looked more like the schematic of a spaceship, or cathedral, with a long, wide space with circles and half circles for rooms branching off to both sides and leading eventually to the crux of it all: a huge dome in the back that housed the visitor center and a presentation about the environment billed as “planetarium-worthy.” But the sneak peek video didn’t exist anymore. Just some text about how Unitopia had been inspired by a diagram by Humboldt, the naturalist. A symbolic peak, showing the richness of the world’s habitats, altitude by altitude. From valleys to the oxygen-starved summit. The idea of wilderness integrating humans into it. The holistic view. “Unitopia.” Silvina’s word for it, not Humboldt’s. Her contribution to a lost canon.
Then I noticed in a photograph of the center a peculiar presence: taxidermy. Very ordinary, bear heads and more benign plastic models of sea life.
Did it mean anything?
Screw it. The more I dug, on a public computer, the worse things could get. But I was curious. Since the project had received city money, I wondered if there were line items for the budget or a proposal with vendors. Like, who had provided the taxidermy.
Sure enough, “assorted animal models” appeared in an old PDF proposal, with a company name, “Animal Magic,” that was easy enough to find online, although now bankrupt.
Animal Magic was a blanket company that provided a number of services, even animal mascots for birthday parties. They had a list of third-party vendors, if you looked hard enough.
Only one was a taxidermist: Carlton Fusk, based in Brooklyn.
I leaned back in my chair, in that humid, claustrophobic space, surrounded by the pecking and clicking of people searching for god-knows-what.