Final Option

an arrest.”
    “That’s great,” said Jane. “The sooner they catch the guy who did it, the better. I just want this whole thing to be over.”
    “It’s not going to be over for us,” replied Barton glumly. “Before you came, Jane and I discussed it, and I think I’m going to go to the dean and ask for a leave of absence until September. It’s not what I want, what either of us wants, but I’ve been through the options over and over, and I don’t see how Hexter Commodities is going to survive the next couple of months without someone committed to running it full-time.”
    “Barton is convinced that he’s the only one who can do it,” said Jane in a resigned voice.
    “Even if we decide to sell the company, or liquidate its assets,” continued Barton, as if trying to convince himself, “we have to prove it’s a viable company without my father. If I don’t step in, it’ll all have been a waste.”
    “There are worse things to waste,” said his wife.
    “He worked his whole life to build it, Jane. No matter what you or I thought about him, I just can’t let it go down the drain.”
     
    I arrived home exhausted, confused, and vaguely depressed. I found that I liked Jane and Barton so much. I envied them their life together, their casual intimacy, their clever banter, and their two little boys, for all the noise and the spilled milk. I found also that I was angry at Bart Hexter for having gotten himself killed. Even though I had not the slightest notion who had killed him or why, I was convinced that Hexter himself had contributed in some way to the circumstances of his death. This was not the case of some lunatic creeping out of the woods to commit a senseless act of violence. Bart Hexter had been shot for a reason. But no matter the motive, the people who were really paying the price were Barton and his wife Jane.
    I looked at my watch. It wasn’t even ten o’clock. My briefcase was full of work to be done. The light on my answering machine blinked, indicating calls to be answered.
    I threw the mail down on the coffee table unread, took off my clothes, and crawled into bed.
     

CHAPTER 15
     
    I got up early and was at the office before eight. By next Friday I was going to have to come up with something pretty convincing to say to the CFTC. The time had come to stop worrying about who had shot Bart Hexter and start worrying about how I was going to avoid having Herman Geiss mount my head on his wall.
    I pulled Sherman Whitehead out of the morass of trading tickets in the conference room after he assured me that he had two paralegals who would finish the job by the weekend. I set him to work in the library hunting down cases that involved the subject of a government investigation dying before charges could be brought. There couldn’t be very many, but there was a slim chance that he’d unearth some sort of favorable precedent. To Cheryl I gave the task of tracking down Deodar Commodities.
    That done, I had the file room bring up the boxes upon boxes of files that I’d inherited from the law firm that had represented Hexter Commodities before me. In response to the subpoena for my Hexter Commodities files I’d been able to send copies only of recent documents. Most of the material that was now heaped in my office, I'd never before had occasion to consult. It made for interesting reading.
    If I was looking for clues to the source of the CFTC enforcement chief’s vendetta, I found them peppered throughout the documents before me. Herman Geiss’s name cropped up like a recurring infection.
    Geiss, I knew, was of the opinion that when it comes to futures traders, big is bad. But I’d never understood the extent to which he applied the resources of the agency to keep tabs on traders like Hexter. With monotonous regularity Geiss had investigated Hexter traders, questioned the speed and integrity with which Hexter cleared trades for others, and generally kept the agency’s hand in Hexter’s pocket. While most of the actions had been dropped or settled for relatively small fines, I could imagine that the overall effect on someone of Hexter’s temperament must have been like a continual tapping on the same spot.
    Not that Hexter hadn’t taken his shots when the opportunity came his way. During the years he’d been chairman of the CBOT he’d done his best to thwart Geiss and his team of government regulators at every turn. When I came to a correspondence file dated from four years before, I