Black Water (32 page)

"He's going to be hard to find."

"Set a trap. Use bananas."

"I'll think about it."

_M
erci opened the French doors of Gwen Wildcraft's music room to let out the afternoon heat. She smelled hay and horses as she stood on the patio and looked out at the houses and the hills. This is what two million dollars gets you, she thought, and then it gets you dead.

Zamorra booted up the computer and Merci went to one of the tall oak file cabinets.

Something, she thought:

Sistel says OrganiVen cheated them and its investors. SunCo was there. Gwen worked there. Gwen was murdered. . . .

The files were clearly labeled and hung in alphabetical order. She found four thick red folders for OrganiVen—labeled I through IV in roman numerals. And one yellow folder for each of the four principal founders, Wyatt Wright, Cody Carlson, Sean Moss and Stephen Monford. There were separate blue folders for the venture capitalists who had come aboard, CEIDNA, Trident Capital, and Brown Brothers. No folder for SunCo. Too small? Or did she keep the toxic dirt somewhere safer?

Merci rolled the chair to put her back to the window and opened the red OrganiVen I folder. Taped to the inside of the folder was a three-by-five-inch sheet of notepaper, lined, the top edge raggedly torn from its binder, one corner left behind.

Quaint, thought Merci, to begin all this fancy stock stuff with a handwritten note:

OrganiVen great potential

tip of decade

555-5839/Trent Gentry

The tip that changed their lives, she thought. Temptation. Serpent coming through, courtesy of Trent Gentry. The writing was probably Gentry's also, because Merci had seen samples of both Wildcrafts' and they looked nothing like this.

She recognized the name immediately—from one of Archie's arrest records. Drunken driving, wasn't it? Something uninteresting. The only reason she'd noted it in the first place was because Trent Gent worked in the Newport Beach office of Ritter-Dunne-Davis Financial. She looked at the simple sheet, wondering at the grand damage few words can cause.

It was an outside shot, but she went to the car, unlocked the trunk and brought the Wildcraft case file back into the music room. She found Archie's inexpensive green notebook, the one where he'd looked for the plate numbers of the car driven by two Russian gangsters to meeting with his beautiful, worried young wife.

She set the open OrganiVen folder on one of Gwen Wildcraft keyboard instruments, a Yamaha. Looking down, she then flipped slowly through Archie's notebook, looking for the small missing right corner of the page in the folder. She found it between the fourth and fifth pages. Holding up the notebook to the inside of the folder cove she eyeballed the pieces. They looked good, very good. Ike or Leitzel could nail it, but for now she'd call it a match. So, what had happened?

Archie had pulled over a drunk stockbroker. Hoping for a break the broker offered the arresting officer a hot stock pick, even wrote down the name and his own number on the officer's notebook. The officer arrested him anyway. The officer then did what? Checked out the tip with his brother-in-law? Asked his wife to check it out? At some point, the Wildcrafts must have liked what they heard because they kept going. Moving forward. Gentry to Archie to Gwen to Charlie to OrganiVen. . . .Did it piss off Trent Gentry to give a two-million-dollar stock tip and still get a DUI? Served him right for trying to bribe a deputy.

She called Gentry's number and got a receptionist. The receptionist said that Mr. Gentry was on vacation now and would not be back until mid-September. Mr. Carnahan was handling Mr. Gentry's clients in his absence. Could Mr. Carnahan be of help?

"No, thanks," said Merci. "But where can I reach Trent?"

"I'm sorry, Mr. Gentry is not reachable until he returns."

Merci knew that he was reachable but the battle it would take her to get the number wasn't worth it. Yet. She ran one finger across the silent white keys of Gwen's synthesizer, thanked the lady and hung up.

She looked at Zamorra. "It looks like Archie did get the original stock tip from Trent Gentry. Gentry tried to grease his way out of a DUI with it. Archie told Gwen. Gwen took it to her brother-in-law, Charlie Brock."

"So Brock was telling us the truth."

"Must have killed him."

She knelt down and opened one of the black guitar cases, five spring-loaded latches snapping open at her touch. The case was lined in thick red velvet. The instrument inside was shiny wood and bright chrome. It smelled good to her. It had old-fashioned looking toggles and dials, and F-holes cut into the body. At the top it said "Guild."

"I like people who can make up something out of nothing," she said.

Zamorra looked at her, then at the instrument. "It's a gift."

"I don't have a gift," she said, "so I joined the system. I'm better off in a system. I need one. But people like Gwen, they don't need all that. She could make music."

"She should have paid closer attention to what was going on around her."

"It looks that way, doesn't it?"

She ran her fingernail over the strings. The sound was metallic but whole, and almost beautiful. The lid closed with a velvet harmonic whisper. Latches back in their plates with a heavy click.

Sitting down again with her back to the sunlight, she continued leafing through the OrganiVen I folder, then quickly through folders II, ]II and IV. She saw that Gwen had organized them in chronological order except for OrganiVen IV, which was dedicated to research.

In the beginning—nearly two years ago—the company was called VenFriendly. Two months later it was SeruCure. She dug further down to get her first look at the company as OrganiVen: January of last year nearly twenty months ago. So, she thought, they kept changing the name.

She set down the folder and went to the Wyatt Wright file. Scanning through, she found what she was looking for, a later interview with biz-whiz Wyatt.

"It took us a while to come up with a name that seemed right. We kept trying to blend a biomedical flavor with something descriptive our product. It's hard to put a positive spin on snake poison. "

She agreed with Wyatt on that one. She heard Zamorra's lazy tapping on the keyboard and looked over.

"What do you know, Paul?"

"Gwen was representing OrganiVen. I don't know for how Iong or how much, but she was selling start-up shares. And I've got two years of e-mail here, coming and going."

"Anything good?"

"Lots of correspondence with Sean Moss. He was one of the four founders. Their talks seem to relate to one or two topics, but the language is vague. Like they're worried about privacy."

"Read a couple."

" 'Hello Gwen: No problem at all on the
cerastes
rum. We've got some ideas on how to keep plenty around. Don't worry. Be happy Later, Sean.'

" 'Hello Sean: I'm sure there's a way to get more. I'll leave it you guys and do my job. Brought in another eight K today—some good friends from high school. Thanks for being cool.
You
be happy Best, GW.' "

Merci asked Zamorra to spell
cerastes
and he did. She pictured the word, knew she'd never seen it, frowned. "What's
cerastes
rum?"

"No idea. I've got a friend who's a bartender at the Ritz-Carlton, though. He'd know. It comes up a lot in these e-mails. I think they liked each other, Gwen and Sean."

"Is he married?"

"The company bios said he was single. Here—Gwen refers to getting twenty dollars an hour to 'rep a treatment I've come to believe in.' Then Sean, he says she's worth fifty and he'll see about getting her a raise. Then she makes a joke about bringing in one hundred and eighty thousand dollars for OrganiVen 'so far.' "

Merci looked up at the four remaining photographic portraits of Gwen and Archie through the years. "She brought in eight thousand dollars for OrganiVen in one day, and didn't make that big a deal about it. I wonder how much she got for them, total. I wonder how much she got for herself."

"I'll let you know. But at twenty bucks an hour it wasn't a fortune."

"Unless she took the payment in stock."

Zamorra looked at her. "Then it's a different story."

Ten minutes later Merci's cell phone rang.

"Hello, Sergeant, this is Bill Jones. Archie's gardener just pulled up in front of his house. Is that your unmarked in his driveway?"

"Yes, Bill, it is."

"I haven't seen that big ugly guy or his ugly little partner since they were at the park."

"Meet me in the driveway in one minute."

"Consider it done."

Merci held back the file cover to show Jones the FBI photographs of Sonny Charles and Al Apin. Jones angled them to catch the sun better. He moved to one side, then the other. He never took his eyes off them.

"That's them. The ones I saw at the park."

"Any doubt?"

"None. They're older now."

"Thank you, Mr. Jones."

"I'm here to help. If I see them again, I think I know what to do. I've got your numbers in my wallet."

"Keep me posted."

"I will. I don't have anything better to do. By the way, when you ask the gardener about Archie and Gwen yelling at each other day the day she died, remember that he wears ear protection when he's blow leaves and a tape player when he's pulling weeds."

"Thank you, Mr. Jones."

"Bring you coffee, a soft drink, anything?"

"No again. But thanks."

"Doughnut? Heh, heh, just kidding. Ten-four."

The gardener was small and stout, tan jeans and a white T-shirt, no size sixteen. He was looking around like he wasn't sure what to do. He's heard, she thought. He's heard what happened and doesn't know if he's still got a job.

"Over here," she called, waving.

He came her way, stopped six feet away. Black hair and eyes nice smile, two silver-capped teeth front and top.

Merci told him who she was. He nodded and said he was Jesus and that he spoke English.

"Let me show you something."

She led him down the walk to the Chinese flame tree where Size Sixteen had stood. "Did you rake in here last Tuesday?"

"Yes."

"Did you stand under this tree—right here, like this—and face this direction?"

She stooped under the foliage and arranged herself where the man had stood.

"Here, like this?"

"No."

"You're sure?"

"I don't stand. I rake."

Merci considered. "What shoes were you wearing?"

He looked down at his worn brown boots. "This boots."

"Did you wear some other boots over them? Mud boots, maybe, or boots to repel water?"

"No. I wear this boots. I don't stand there."

"Did you hear Archie and a woman arguing that day?"

"No. Did not hear argue."

"Did you see a woman here?"

"Gwen sister. I don't know her name."

Jesus said that he first saw the sister around three. He heard no argument, no conversation. He said he had a cassette player he listened to when he worked.

Merci led him around the walkway, past the pool and into the rear yard. She pointed to the hole in the window, now blocked by a piece of plywood held in place by duct tape.

"Was this glass broken when you were here last week?"

Jesus stared mournfully. "I don't see. I don't look at this."

"You don't know."

"I don't know. Mrs. Gwen is dead?"

"Yes."

"Oh. Bad. Mr. Archie get shot, too?"

"He's alive. That's about all I can tell you, Jesus."

"I like. Archie and Gwen is good family."

"Yeah. I know."

She asked him about people looking onto the property, very big men in specific, but Jesus had not noticed any. No unfamiliar vehicles, nothing out of the ordinary with Archie or Gwen. He had worked for Archie for six months, and for the previous owners for six years.

She got his full name, address and phone number, and thanked him.

Rayborn closed by saying
Vaya con Dios
because she thought the expression was elegant and meaningful, but Jesus himself looked at her as if the words were pointless.

Two hours later, midway through OrganiVen I, Merci picked up the trail she was looking for. In yellow highlighter, Gwen had begun to mark certain passages in the promotional literature, then keyed those passages to the research stats found in the research folder.

From the OrganiVen Company Overview brochure, dated March 2001:
OrganiVen researchers have found the extracted pure-form venoms of many vipers to be effective in the animal trials, especially the from animals indigenous to the deserts of the American southwest.

Gwen's handwritten note referenced the SeruCure research date from October of the previous year:
The results of double-blind test series 12-C and 12-D strongly suggest that the serum obtained from C. cerastes is the only serum with toxicity levels necessary to destroy carcinoma cells at an acceptable rate with acceptable damage to surrounding tissue. Venom compounds using C. ruber, C. viridis and atrox resulted in significantly lower anaerobic reactions but high healthy cell destruction. See charts for comparative venom strengths and collateral tissue damage.

"Paul," she said. "
Cerastes
rum isn't liquor, it's a kind of venom
Serum."