No Way to Die (25 page)

“Danny,” she said, as I was about to hang up.

“Yeah?”

“I’m really glad you’re okay. I’m eager to see you.”

* * * *

Next morning at eight o’clock, they released me. My doctor was a guy not much older than me named Dr. Jivaj Malik. “Mr. Logan,” he said, “you’re free to go. Please be careful.I’d lay off the rugby scrums for a couple of days.”

“Thanks, Doctor M.,” I said. “No argument from me.”My head still hurt. Message received.

Toni’d taken a spare key from my desk drawer and stopped by my apartment. She’d brought me a clean set of clothes at seven that morning. It was a little weird having her bring me a set of underwear, but what the hell—what are friends for? I felt a lot better after I was showered and dressed. When all the papers were signed, she wheeled me down to the curb, where Doc and Kenny were waiting. Doc drives a big silver Ford Expedition that he manages to maneuver around the tight streets and parking spaces of Seattle. It’s plenty roomy, though, and that was nice for the four of us.

“Where to, boss?” he said, when we were all in. Kenny rode shotgun while Toni and I sat in back.

“I think I’d like to pay a visit to Holly Kenworth,” I said. “I’ve got some pretty serious questions for her.”

“Really?” Toni said.

“You bet,” I answered. We hadn’t talked about the case much yesterday—mostly I had just slept. But today was going to be busy, and we needed to get organized.

“What do you think those guys wanted?” Kenny asked.

“They were looking for the key,” I said.

“How do you know that?” he asked.

“Because I overhead them talking when I came in on them. One of them said ‘she said it would be in here,’ or something like that.”

“No shit,” Kenny said.

“No shit,” I answered. “When we talked to Holly last week—when was that? Wednesday?”

“It was Tuesday,” Toni said.

“When we talked to her last Tuesday, I specifically told her that we have the box and the key, on the off chance that she might be talking to Madoc. I wanted to draw heat away from Katherine or maybe from my dad.”

“How’s that working out for ya?” Toni asked.

“Worked pretty damn good, I’d say. Holly must have told Madoc that we have the device and the key, and he sent his goons to come get it. She’s apparently been working with Madoc—or Marlowe, or whatever the hell his name is—all along.”

“Damn,” Kenny said. “She was good-looking, too.”

“So that means she’s innocent?” Toni asked. “That’s how you form your judgments?”

“No,” he said. “I guess I just didn’t expect a good-looking math-PhD type to be involved in something like this.”

“Looks that way,” I said.

“And that would explain why she didn’t mention the gun,” Toni said. “It was part of the plan. She gets Thomas to buy it for her, she gives it to Madoc, and then he uses it to kill Thomas and claim it was a suicide. She was hoping no one would figure out that Thomas bought the gun for her.”

“Exactly.”

“So that makes her an accessory to murder,” Toni said.

“It does,” I agreed. “At least.”

“So now do we call Inez Johnson?”

“Yeah—right after we talk to Holly.”

* * * *

We walked into the ACS office at nine o’clock on the dot. The receptionist looked up as we walked in. I walked right past her.

“Wait a minute,” she said. “You can’t just go walking in like that.”

I ignored her. Doc glared at her, and she immediately sat back down in her chair. They followed me as I walked back to Holly’s office. She’d apparently heard the commotion because she was standing in her doorway when I approached.

“Care to join us in the conference room?” I said sweetly. I can be nice.

“What—what—?” she stammered, shocked.

“What—you’re surprised to see me here and still alive?” I asked.

She stared at me.

“Your friends at Madoc Secured Technologies messed up. They didn’t kill me.” I paused. “Oops!” I said suddenly as I grabbed her by the arm. I wasn’t rough. Then again, I wasn’t all that gentle, either. Call it firm. “Let’s go have a talk, shall we?” I led her to the conference room. She followed with no trouble.

As we walked through the bullpen in the middle of the office, I noticed the receptionist in the lobby looking at us. She reached for her phone, apparently to call the police. Fortunately, Stella Pace was also standing there. Seeing the receptionist start to make a call, Stella put her hand on the receptionist’s shoulder and leaned over and whispered something to her. The receptionist listened, and then nodded, got up, and walked straight out of the office. Stella looked at me and nodded. Problem solved.

We entered the conference room and sat down.

* * * *

“You can’t just barge in here like this and start throwing accusations around,” Holly said. “I intend to . . .”

I slammed my hand down hard on the conference table.

“Stop,” I said slowly, menacingly. I was pissed and in no mood for a runaround. “I just got out of the hospital after being almost killed by Nicholas Madoc’s boys—the same ones who you apparently sent over there. I’m in no mood to listen to any bullshit from you.” I stared at her. She stared back. “Here’s how this is going to work,” I continued. “First, you can forget about threatening to call the cops. We’ll call them for you—anytime you want. We came here to hear your side to make sure we weren’t missing something. Then, we’re going to call the cops.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Of course not,” I said.

“I don’t!” she insisted.

“So after I told you that we had the Starfire Protocol device and the key last week, you didn’t turn right around and tell Madoc?”

“That’s nonsense,” she said. “I don’t talk to Madoc.”

“That’s pretty interesting, then,” I said. I turned to Kenny. “Got ’em?”

Kenny reached into his case and pulled out a printout.

“Yesterday morning, I asked Mr. Hale here to have a look at your cell phone records. According to this report, someone used your cell phone to call MST two, three—four times yesterday. Did someone steal your phone, Holly? If we went into your office right now, would we find it?”

She looked at me without speaking.

“And last week when Toni and I spoke to the owner of Redmond Firearms, he distinctly remembers Thomas buying a gun for—how’d he put it, Toni?”

“He said it was for the cute little redhead who was with him.”

“That’s right,” I said. “For the cute little redhead.”

“There are lots of people with red hair,” Holly said. “It could have been anyone.”

“True,” I said. “But that’s easy enough to sort out. Suppose we just show him your picture and see if that jogs his memory. What do you think?”

She stared at me, again without speaking.

“Nothing to say?” I asked.

She continued to stare.

I nodded and turned to Kenny. “Kenny, put the call in to Detective Inez Johnson, will you? She’s at Seattle Homicide. Tell her we have the proof we need to show that Thomas Rasmussen was murdered and that we’re sitting here talking to the person who was right smack-dab in the middle of it.”

Kenny pulled out his cell phone. Just as he started to dial, Holly said, “Wait.”

Kenny paused. We all looked at Holly. Her lip started to tremble, and she started to cry.

“Wait,” she said again. “They’re going to kill my brother.”

“What?” I asked.

“My little brother. They’re going to kill him.”

I STARED AT her. “Who?” I said. “Who’s going to kill your brother?”

She grabbed a tissue and wiped the tears from her eyes, and then she blew her nose. She looked up at me.

“Madoc,” she said. “Nicholas Madoc and his guys. They said if I didn’t cooperate—if I didn’t do exactly what they asked—then they were going to kill my brother and me. I never wanted anyone to get hurt—me, or my brother, and especially not Thomas.”

“Where’s your brother now?”

“He lives in Boston,” she said.

“They’re not holding him?”

She shook her head. “No, not now. I talked to him this morning on the phone. But I know you’ve seen these Madoc guys. They can get to him anywhere. I think they’re watching him.” She tried to hold back a sob, but it slipped out anyway.

I stared at her hard for a few seconds, and then I looked over at Toni. Our eyes met; she shrugged her shoulders. I didn’t know what to make of this, and it looked like Toni didn’t either.

Finally, she took the lead. “Holly,” Toni said, “why don’t you tell us what’s happened—what’s going on here. Start from the beginning. Tell us the truth this time.”

Holly looked at her, and then at me, and then back at Toni. “Okay,” she said. She paused and glanced at the cabinet at the end of the room. “Do you mind if I get some water?”

“’Course not,” Toni said. While Holly grabbed a few bottles of water from the cabinet, Toni and I pulled out our notepads. My head still throbbed like a son of a bitch.

“We—that’s Thomas and I—had several meetings with Cameron Patel starting around the first of the year.”

“What type of things did you discuss?”

“He was very straightforward. He said that MST wanted to buy Starfire. He said they could do it one of two ways—either buy Starfire by itself, or buy the whole company. We spent hours going through the organizational structure of the company. John Ogden wrote up some documents about confidentiality. He also wrote what he called ‘Approved Sales Material.’ He said that under Department of Commerce rules, we weren’t permitted to discuss very much about Starfire with a foreign buyer. I think he figured that if he prepared the papers we gave MST, he could make sure that we didn’t violate the regs.”

“Did you guys know anything about MST at this point?” Toni asked.

She sniffed and dabbed at her nose with the tissue. “We thought they were English,” she said. “Based on their accents, I guess. Then, Cameron told us they were actually a local company, and we weren’t sure what to believe, so we had John check it out. John told us anyone can form a company in this state online in about ten minutes. John was worried that they were really foreign, despite what they said. This would make them subject to the Commerce Department regs.”

She paused and concentrated for a moment. “I guess it was the middle of January, after several meetings, that MST gave us a letter of intent. They said they’d be willing to buy Starfire for ten million dollars.”

“And what did you guys think of this?” I asked.

“Like I told you last week,” she said. “We were pretty excited. I mean, it wasn’t a huge sum of money compared to, say, Google or Facebook. Then again, neither of us—Thomas nor I—had anything to speak of. We both came from middle-class families that didn’t have anywhere near that kind of money. Ten million dollars would have changed both of our lives.”

“But Katherine had money. Thomas was already living pretty nicely, right?” Toni asked.

“To an extent,” Holly said. “But Thomas was eager to stand on his own feet. He didn’t want to have to rely on Katherine. This would have given him that ability, for certain.”

I nodded. “So what happened when the Commerce Department put the kibosh on the sale?" I asked. "What did Madoc do?”

“At first, he didn’t do anything. We didn’t hear from them. We were disappointed, that’s for sure,” she said. “Thomas, in particular. He went into a pretty good funk. I told him don’t sweat it. The Commerce Department didn’t actually ban the sale to Madoc—they just said it was going to take some time to approve him. Apparently, they didn’t know who MST was. They’d never heard of them. Besides, I told Thomas even if Madoc
was
banned, we’d still be able to sell Starfire domestically—the offer proved it. And, in any case, we could always use Starfire to drive customers to LILLYPAD, which was our original intent all along.”

“Was Thomas okay with that?” I asked.

“Yeah,” she said. “It seemed to help. He turned around, and things got back to normal. We went back to work.”

“Then what happened?” Toni asked.

She looked down at the table for a moment, and then she said, “Then a week or so later I got a phone call from Cameron Patel late one afternoon. He suggested we meet for drinks that evening. He made it sound like it was some kind of date or something.” She paused for a few seconds. “I don’t go out on all that many dates. I was flattered that a good-looking Englishman wanted to take me out. So I said yes.”

“When was this?” I asked.

She stared at the ceiling for a moment, and then said, “About a week after we found out that we couldn’t sell to them. Probably the middle to the end of January or so.”

I wrote this down in my notebook. “So you went out with him?” I asked.

“Yeah,” she said. “I did.”

“And. . .?”

“And it wasn’t what I expected. We met at the Cypress Lounge over at the Westin in Bellevue. He was a real charmer. Well, at least at first he was.”