Dead Float (20 page)
Authors: Warren C Easley
Forty-five minutes later Hiram Pritchard pulled up in his Saab. He had agreed to house-sit while I ran a “late night errand.” If Claire woke up I wanted someone she knew there, someone I trusted. I met him on the front porch and thanked him again for coming. He said, “This must be damned important, Cal. I know you're not anxious to leave Claire at night.”
I nodded. “Look, Hiram, trust me on this.”
He raised an eyebrow. “No risk of disbarment?”
I had to chuckle. “I hope not.”
He let it drop there and followed Archie into the house. He was a good friend, and, frankly, nothing I did surprised him much anymore.
I blinked my lights when I saw Daina's VW on the side of the road down the hill from my place. She pulled out and I followed her to NanoTech's headquarters in Wilsonville. She was horrified at my plan, but she reluctantly agreed. A quick look in the execs' offices, I told her. That's all I was after. Whoever was on the inside in the Bruckner murder didn't know that I knew about the use of the trains. Maybe they were careless. Maybe I'd find a link. It was low risk and worth a shot, I told her. And it beat sitting around waiting to be framed.
Daina parked in a far corner of the employee lot, away from the lights. I parked a couple of blocks down on the street in an unlighted spot. When I joined her in the lot, she gave me a resigned look. “It looks clear, no cars, no office lights. The cleaning crew has come and gone. When we go in, I'll go to my office. You'll take the fire stairs to the fourth floor. The doors are marked. Rememberâthirty minutes, and
nothing
gets taken away.”
“Right. I'm not after the company secrets here.”
She frowned. “This is a high-tech company, so people pop in at weird hours. I'll keep an eye on the lot. If someone comes, I'll call you. Take the back stairs and wait for me.”
“Got it.”
She exhaled a long breath and surveyed the lot and the building once more. “Okay, let's get this over with. Don't disturb a thing.”
When we got to the gate, Daina said over her shoulder, “You're lucky the security cams I ordered haven't arrived yet. She swiped her master key against the lighted security pad. A loud metallic click reverberated in the still night, like a pistol shot. I winced, feeling like everyone in Wilsonville had heard it, and hesitated for a moment before following her in.
You're not breaking any laws here, I reminded myself. Just accompanying a friend while she picks up something at her office.
Daina repeated the process to gain entrance to the building. She pointed to the fire door at the back of the lobby leading to the staircase. “Thirty minutes, Cal.” She glanced at her watch. “I'll meet you back here at 12:35.”
I took the stairs fast and was breathing hard by the time I reached the fourth floor, which contained the executive offices. I started down the hall and stopped at the sixth office on my left. An engraved brass plate read, Dr. Duane F. Pitman, Ph.D., Director of Technology.
I didn't even need Daina's master. The door was unlocked.
Pitman's office was pitch dark. I paused to put on a pair of latex gloves and take out a pen light. I felt my way to the window, closed the blinds, and switched on the light. The place was a mess. There were stacks of scientific journals and books and papers on virtually every flat surface. Equations, sketches, and diagrams covered a white board spanning one wall. It reminded me of the office of one of my favorite law professors at Boalt. I knew that, like my professor, Pitman could quickly find anything he'd stashed away, and would know instantly if I left anything out of place.
I tried his computer, but it was password blocked. A drawer in one of his file cabinets had been left open, with a couple of files pulled halfway out as if they were being actively consulted. I checked those first and found schematics of laboratory equipment. The rest of the cabinet was similarly uninteresting. A second cabinet contained reprints of scientific papers and a dozen or so of Pitman's old laboratory notebooks. Nothing caught my eye.
I was sweating, and my stomach had turned sour. I started to have second thoughts about my snap decision to wring this favor out of Daina. I scanned through several files jammed with letters he'd written and received and didn't see anything remotely interesting. As I closed the drawer I noticed a gap between the last file and the back of the drawer. I reached over the files into the gap and pulled out a large, half-inch thick envelope. It was sealed, taped shut, and unmarked. My pulse ticked up a beat. Pack rats, I thought to myself. They can't help themselves.
A quick search turned up a stack of matching envelopes on a shelf below his computer. I slit the sealed envelope open and began to rapidly scan the contents, which consisted of correspondence between Pitman and Jean Claude Clivas, the U.S. sales director for the French firm Daina had told me about, Technologie Micro-Electronique.
The letters detailed a rather lengthy negotiation between Pitman and TM-E, which culminated in Clivas proposing “a salary of $350,000 per annum, a $750,000 signing bonus, 50,000 stock options, a group of ten degreed professionals, and a fully equipped lab, if you should decide to accept our offer of employment.”
I whistled, shook my head, and said out loud, “Who said lawyers make all the money?” This confirmed what Bruckner was worried aboutâPitman intended to bolt, taking his knowledge of the Diamond Wire technology with him.
But there was a caveat. Toward the bottom of the letter, Clivas, most likely at the insistence of their lawyers, had inserted the following: “It is our understanding that you are free to accept this offer and that you are not bound to your current employer by prior legal agreement. This offer is contingent upon this.”
I tried to sort this out in my mind. It sounded like Pitman had told TM-E that he was free to leave NanoTech, so he must have known the security document was missing. Quite a gamble on his part. If Bruckner's copy of the agreement was found, Pitman and TM-E would become legal sitting ducks in any court of law.
I used my phone to photograph the offer letter from TM-E, then slid the whole packet into a new envelope, sealed and taped it, and put it back where I'd found it.
I searched the rest of the room with increased enthusiasm. Give me something,
anything,
that ties Pitman to Cuchillo or shows he had a sudden interest in train schedules.
I found nothing else.
I had to use the master key to gain entrance to Andrew Streeter's office. It was 12:16. In contrast to Pitman's office, it was neat to the point of sterility.
I took a quick look at his executive bragging wall first. A formal portrait of Streeter's father, State Senator Paxton K. Streeter, scowled out at me, two sets of tiny South Carolina and U.S. flags adorning the bottom of the frame. A much younger and slimmer Andrew stood proudly in a photograph between Strom Thurmond and Lindsey Graham , and in another, with George W. Bush's arm draped around him. There was also a graduation diploma and a shot of Andrew in a football uniform to attest to his glory days at The Citadel.
Streeter's filing cabinets were a bust. His desk drawers were equally disappointingâa couple of thick working files, some Harvard Business Review reprints, and an Accelerated Management Development manual. The manual looked untouched.
The desktop was clean except for a massive brass pen holder with Streeter's name engraved on the base and a flip-page calendar with daily words of inspiration for the aspiring business leader. That day's message was “A leader isn't born; he's forged on the anvil of challenge
.”
I rifled through the calendar but found nothing of interest.
As I moved around the desk, my foot bumped something under it. I fished out a black nylon gym bag that spewed a cloud of sweat and mildew odors when I unzipped it. Streeter's unimpressive workout routine, a combination lock, and a tattered business card were zipped in a side pocket. The card belonged to a masseuse named Zina at the Mystic Hands Whole Body Massage Center.
The center was up on Mississippi in northeast Portland, a tough neighborhood that was rapidly gentrifying and, I guessed, a lengthy drive for Streeter.
Zina's hands must be truly mystic, I thought to myself. On the back of the card the name, Rey, and a local phone number were written in a flowery script. I jotted down the information in a notebook I'd brought and put the gym bag back under the desk.
A plaque on the counter behind his desk read
FAC UT GAUDEAM
. I had no idea what the Latin meant. Next to his computer sat something completely out of character for a high-tech executive's officeâan old-fashioned Rolodex. Some habits die hard. I spun through it and saw nothing that caught my eye until I got to the Zs. There on a blank card, written by hand, were the following wordsâ
Nemo Me Impune Lacessit.
More Latin. I didn't have a clue what the phrase meant, but I jotted it down out of curiosity. After all, it wasn't filed alphabetically.
It was 12:29 when I hurried down to the hand-carved, double doors marking the corner office. No brass plate on the door, just four screw holes marking where the plate had been. The office was twice as big as Streeter's with a desk made from a small forest's worth of old growth hardwoods. The bookcase on the south wall was only half stocked, books sat in boxes on the floor, and there were stacks of file folders on the counter behind the desk. Mitch Hannon, the new CEO of NanoTech, was apparently moving into the late Hal Bruckner's office.
I was working my way carefully through the file folders when a light flickered on the blinds I'd drawn upon entering. It was gone in an instant. A passing car, I decided.
I went back to the search, kicking myself for not demanding more time from Daina. After all, I held the leverage. But I was trying to strike some kind of crazy balance. This was, after all, an enormous risk for her business. On the bottom of the shortest stack of files I found a thin manila folder with Deschutes Trip written in what I assumed was Hannon's handwriting. I opened it hurriedly. A map of the Deschutes River was on top, a circle drawn around the Whiskey Dick campground and the Kaskela switching station. A chill worked its way down my spine.
As I started to rifle through the file, my phone vibrated.
“Cal, it's me. Get the hell out of there. Someone's coming in the building.”
I turned to put the file back and brushed one of the stacks of folders with my hip. It avalanched into the next stack, and they both cascaded off the counter, taking an expensive windup clock with them.
“Shit!” I hissed at the sound of breaking glass. I shone my light on the floor. The face of the clock was shattered into a dozen pieces. I was frozen for a moment, not believing what had just happened. The clock was hopeless, but I tried to put the files back the way I'd found them. I quickly realized this was hopeless, too.
I was halfway to the office door when I heard the ping of the elevator being summoned. I dashed out the door and headed down the hallway, which now seemed much longer. Just as I closed the door to the stairwell, the elevator pinged again. Someone was entering the fourth-floor hallway.
I careened down the stairwell, berating myself with every step. Daina met me at the bottom. We collected ourselves and walked calmly out of the building to the parking lot without saying a word, hoping all the while no one was watching us from the fourth floor. Ten minutes later I pulled in behind Daina's VW in her driveway, turned off the ignition and lights, and sat there letting my heart rate recover. I went over my escape again. Nothing left behind. No way to trace me.
Daina got out of her car and waved me into the house. Dylan eyed me with suspicion and barked his displeasure as we entered. She scooped him up, hugged him, and put him back down. Her eyes grew to saucers as she raised her hand to her mouth and let out a burst of nervous laughter. “
Oh, shit, that was so close.
I forgot all about that little parking lot in the back of the building. Whoever it was must've parked back there.”
I nodded and tried to smile. “I saw the headlights flash but figured it was a passing car.”
She eyed me more carefully. “You got out clean, right?”
“Not exactly.”
The smile died, and her face lost some color. “What does that mean?”
“I was in Hannon's office when you called. I, uh, knocked some files over in my haste to get out of there.”
“You put them back, right?”
“Sort of. But his clock got broken, too.”
Her eyes narrowed. “You mean, they'll know someone was in the office?”
“Afraid so. But they won't know who. I didn't leave anything behind.”
Her eyes flashed anger mixed with fear. “Oh, that's great. Just great. A chip shot. Isn't that what you called it? In and out. No problems.” She laughed bitterly.
“Shit happens, Daina. Does anyone know Bruckner gave you a master?”
“No. I don't think so. He told me not to tell anyone.”
“Then you're probably okay.”
She didn't say anything, but anger, like the latent energy in a thunderhead, still shone in her eyes. Dylan rubbed at her leg, begging to be picked back up, but she ignored him. Finally she said, “Well, did you find anything?”
“No. I hate to admit it, but it was a complete bust.” I'd decided, at least for the present, not to tell her about the Pitman document I'd photographed or the map I'd seen in Hannon's office. I needed time to think it through.
“You mean you're not any closer?”
“You could say that.” I shook my head and sighed. “God, I'm tired. I'm tired of this whole mess.” It was a true statement.
Daina shook her head, sighed, and motioned toward a chair. “Sit down for a minute.” When I complied she began to gently massage my neck.
I closed my eyes and exhaled slowly. “I'll give you exactly an hour to stop that,” I said in a near whisper.
“I'm still pissed off at you, but try to relax, damn it. Your neck muscles are like a box of rocks.”
After a couple of minutes I stood up, and the next thing I knew she was in my arms. I could feel the contours of her body firm against me. She looked up, showing a hint of a smile. Her eyes were calm, like shadowed pools, and I could smell a hint of lilac in her hair, soap on her skin. I released her and stepped back. “I've got to go. I'm anxious to get back to Claire.”
“I know,” she answered. “Go.”
