Dead Heat by Dick Francis

Author:Dick Francis [Francis, Dick]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2010-06-29T22:00:00+00:00

THERE WERE nearly a million hits when I typed “Rolf Schumann” into the search engine on my computer. Most of the hits were in German. Rolf and Schumann were obviously very common names in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, and in Holland, too.

I added “Wisconsin” to my search criteria and was still surprised that the number of hits still exceeded twenty-eight thousand. It seemed that Rolf and Schumann were quite common names in Wisconsin as well.

I discovered that more Germans had emigrated to the United States than from any other nation, including Ireland and England, and that many of them had settled in the state of Wisconsin since the climate and agriculture were similar to those at home. So great was the influx that, according to one Web site I visited, a third of the total population of the state in 1900 had been born in Germany. Milwaukee, the largest city in Wisconsin, and less than thirty miles from Delafield, had even been known as the German Athens during the nineteenth century.

Adding “Delafield” narrowed my search down to just a few hundred, and there he was: Rolf Schumann, president of Delafield Industries, Inc., with his date of birth, education details, family tree, the lot. Good old Internet.

I spent the next hour or so discovering not a great deal useful about Mr. Schumann. He was sixty-one years old, and had been president of Delafield Industries for seven years, having been their finance director before that. It appeared that he was a pillar of society in Delafield and was involved either as a donor to or an administrator of various local charities. I learned that he was a leading light in the Delafield Chamber of Commerce and an elder at one of the local Lutheran churches. There was absolutely nothing I found to suggest that he would be the target of a bomber six thousand miles from his home.

Back in the 1840s, Delafield Industries, Inc., had been established at a local blacksmith’s forge, making hand tools for the new settlers of Wisconsin to work the land and grow their corn. With the coming of the internal combustion engine, the firm had diversified first into tractors and then into every type of agricultural machinery. According to their own Web site, the company was now the biggest supplier of combine harvesters to midwestern farmers, and even I knew there was an awful lot of corn in the American Midwest. Unless huge success and mammoth money-making were motives for murder from jealous competitors, I could glean no reason why Delafield Industries should be a target.

I didn’t seem to be doing very well in my new career as an investigator.

Carl came into the office and handed me a letter. “This came for you the day before yesterday,” he said.

It was the letter from Forest Heath District Council informing me that they intended to prosecute me. I remembered that I had been on my way to collect the other letter from Suzanne Miller when my brakes had failed. I called her office number.

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