“Relative youth is not what I was seeking,” he said.
Kruglova came to the US to study medicine, but couldn’t afford university tuition. She started out working the front desk at San Francisco’s Pan Pacific Hotel. She’d brought her father with her from Russia. They set up informal housekeeping in a one-bed-room rent-controlled apartment that fronted directly on California Street.
“Mattress on the floor, Korean grocery on one side and a coin laundromat on the other,” said Pickard.
Soon, Leonard began staying over whenever he happened to be in San Francisco, which was often. Natalya8 accepted Leonard’s cloak and dagger ways as if they were second nature because they were. She’d grown up in the USSR in a family grounded in intrigue. A retired trauma surgeon from Odessa, her father, Grigory Vorobee, had been assigned to Cuba during the 1962 missile crisis. When Pickard introduced her at receptions or cocktail parties as Selene or Martina or Natasha Vorobee, she went right along with the pointless ruse.
“I introduced Natasha as she was,” he said. “People were fortunate, and delighted, to meet a woman of her quality and bright spirit.”
Todd took notice, inventing the perception of the Vorobees as KGB. Following his pattern of lusting after all Pickard’s women, Skinner schemed after Natalya just as he had Trais. He offered her jewels and jet rides. Like Trais, Natalya wouldn’t give Skinner the time of day.
1. In addition to LSD, the chemical is also the basic ingredient for several migraine headache medications.
2. Llave got caught at the border Feb. 22, 1997, with thirteen tablets and was fined $500.
3. Pickard put $33,915.09 on credit cards in 1998.
4. Weeks before his death, Hulebak had been assisting the DEA in its investigation of a Tulsa pill-mill doctor.
5 “The title derived from the Dean’s wife at afternoon tea among the mathematicians at the Graduate College at Princeton,” said Pickard. “She asked him if he wanted cream or lemon and Feynman said, ‘Both.’”
6. San Francisco porn pioneers, Jim and Artie Mitchell opened the O’Farrell in 1969, evolving from topless to bottomless to full frontal over the next twenty years. Leonard befriended several of the dancers, inviting one them along on a two-week “research” trip to Bangkok in February 1999.
7. Located twenty-six miles southeast of Carlsbad, the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant is the nation’s only deep (2,150 feet underground in an ancient salt formation) geologic long-lived radioactive waste repository.
8. Natasha and Natochka were nicknames.
XIV.
ON MAY 21, 1999, US Customs traced thirty gallons of Brazilian ayahuasca tea to the Santa Fe home of Seagram’s liquor heir Jeffrey Bronfman. No arrests were made, but the DEA seized the tea. In his role as president of the North American União do Vegetal Church, Bronfman demanded its return. He sued the Department of Justice, setting the stage for an eventual showdown before the US Supreme Court.
Though newspapers completely missed the raid, Pickard circuitously got wind.
Skinner told Pickard he’d recently given Santa Fe entrepreneur Andrew Ungerleider1 three grams of swimming pool Viagra, but according to Todd, the most recent batch had major volatility problems. One vial actually exploded. They didn’t need any more accidents.
Skinner said that when he showed up at Ungerleider’s door to retrieve the Viagra, his wife Gay showed him in. She didn’t have the Viagra, but she did have a delicious rumor. It seemed that her brother worked for the New Mexico Attorney General and the scuttlebutt was that the DEA had just raided Jeffrey Bronfman’s place.
When Skinner relayed the rumor to Pickard, he imagined agents crawling all over Santa Fe. It didn’t help that the lease on the Vuelta Herradura house was coming up for renewal. In anticipation, the landlords were already demanding a routine property inspection, David Haley told Pickard. His panic hiked another notch. He ordered Haley to keep inspectors out at all costs.
How? asked Haley. It was their property.
Pickard thought a minute. How about dressing in drag and passing himself off as John Connor’s sick mother? Haley could cough and wheeze like Anthony Perkins in Psycho. Literally bar the door.
Skinner was more sanguine. Perhaps the Bronfman bust was just a sign that the time had come to move on. Had it not been for the Hulebak case, he would have suggested transporting the swimming pool project to his missile silo. Unfortunately, the Pottawatomie District Attorney had Skinner in his sites as a person of interest. It seemed only a matter of time before Todd graduated to full-fledged murder suspect. The Wamego silo had to remain squeaky clean. Relocating there was not an option.
But there was more than one silo in Kansas. In fact, Skinner acquired his from a Wichita broker who happened to own one.
Tim Schwartz and partner Ed Peden made a business of buying and selling decommissioned silos. They called them “20th Century Castles.” Schwartz invested in a castle of his own near Wichita.
“It was an actual silo,” said Pickard. “A vertical cylinder surrounded by military fencing with an eighty-foot disc that blew off when the missile launched.”
An Atlas F missile silo sunk into the earth in 1960 at a cost of $3 million, the former Air Force installation consisted of 15,000 square feet buried beneath the prairie next to the tiny settlement of Carneiro, Kansas. The vertical launch tube was separated by tunnel from its control center—a perfect venue for the swimming pool project, far from the prying eyes, ears, and noses of the DEA. Unlike Skinner’s Wamego circus, the Carneiro site was a virtual morgue. It attracted zero attention from surrounding farmers.
During the summer of 1999, Skinner claimed that Pickard gave him $650,000 and told him to find another lab location, preferably in Santa Fe. Skinner pocketed the cash and began lobbying for Carneiro. While Skinner secretly negotiated with Schwartz, Pickard called on a trusty sidekick to begin breaking down the Santa Fe lab.
Clyde Apperson was a machinist from San Jose whom Leonard had known since the seventies. They’d worked together on the Mountain View warehouse lab where
