The Devil's Analyst (23 page)

“No, that’s fine,” Danny replied. He didn’t have the slightest idea what he could possibly discuss with this industry guru. “Kenosha, why don’t you stay?”

He intended his words to be a friendly command, but Kenosha squirmed away. “I’m on a tight deadline,” she said and the door closed behind her.

“Don’t worry,” Linsky said. “I’m not here to grill you. But, as I’m sure Josh told you, he’s asked me to join the board of directors for Premios. He needs someone to replace the opening left by the unfortunate death of your friend Chip Grant.”

In fact, Josh had not mentioned that to Danny, and he wondered if Kenosha knew. Maybe that explained why she was so eager to avoid joining this conversation.

Linsky pretended not to notice any confusion on Danny’s part. “I haven’t said yes yet. As I told your partner, I don’t enter into such relationships easily. I asked Josh for a lot of background on what you guys are doing. It’s impressive stuff. I was hoping to catch Josh and learn a bit more.”

“Josh will be back tomorrow, and I’m sure he’ll regret missing you.”

Barbara reached over to take the coffee pot and she poured herself a cup. “Refill?” she asked pointing to Danny’s foam cup. He shook his head no. He hoped it would signal Linsky to leave but she settled in.

“It doesn’t really matter. If it had been essential to talk to Josh, I would have called ahead. There’s something refreshing in the unexpected visit. You get a real sense of the spirit of an enterprise when there’s no opportunity to build up the false front.

“As I said, I haven’t decided yet whether or not I will accept Josh’s invitation. Without a doubt this firm offers a lot that’s interesting, and I can see its potential. I always have—otherwise I would never have extended my conference speaking invitation to Josh. But I find your choice to partner with a venture capital firm like Endicott-Meyers disturbing. Frankly, the company is a lightweight and has little to offer. You’d be better off without them.”

On that point, Danny certainly agreed . . . although he suspected Barbara and he didn’t share the same rationale. “So when will you decide?” he asked. It seemed the polite thing to ask.

“Probably on the flight home. There’s plenty of time to run through the strengths and weaknesses. Josh has provided me with a great deal of company private data, even made me sign a non-disclosure agreement. One would almost think he didn’t trust me. That’s a joke, Danny, I know your lawyers would have insisted upon it.”

Danny smiled weakly. He wondered why she was hanging around. He couldn’t imagine what she could learn from him.

“I am very impressed by some of the firm’s underlying technologies. Josh is very clever to focus development in his little scrum teams. It speaks to his unique long-term vision, and is likely to result in a core basket of valuable patents. Particularly interesting to me is the work one of your teams is doing around the concept of a personal online advisor. Of course, places like Amazon already track a user’s browsing and purchase history to suggest new book titles, but this vision is so much more encompassing about both lifestyles and life choices. I can see how it could be the backbone of an entire new class of services. Assuming the patent is granted, licensing fees to other tech firms alone could be a major source of revenue. Quite intriguing.”

Danny didn’t have the slightest idea what the woman was talking about. Despite constantly restating his desire to become more involved, he never dove into any of the firm’s strategies. He vaguely recalled some presentation from Orleans about projects with weird code names like Dakota and Rough Rider. He had no idea what any of those names represented.

“On the other hand, some of the other developments underway seem quite off-mission, and I don’t understand why your company funds them. For example, take this project to speed up the mass transmission of big sets of data. Great concept with a well thought out approach, and if successful, highly valuable. Easily patentable. But really . . . it’s the foundation for a totally different company. Frankly, if I do become one of your directors, I will likely encourage Josh to cancel the project. Perhaps he wouldn’t want me on the board after all.

“Oh, how I have rambled on, and it does appear little of this is of interest to you.” Linsky set her coffee cup down, but it seemed she had found out what she sought. Danny wondered what it might be.

Danny took advantage of her motion to stand up. “Thank you for coming, and I’ll be sure to tell Josh how interested you are in the company’s projects.”

That was likely to be another of Danny’s failed promises, because he doubted he would recall the conversation well enough to report it.

Linsky stood as well. “Do tell Josh one thing for me. Let him know that after reading his brief, I totally agree that in this unsettled financial climate, a sensible next step could be to sell or merge this company. It could be so much more stable than going public. I like people who think in a contrarian way.”

Danny quickly looked away. He couldn’t let her see how startled he was.

He walked with her through the office, to the front door of the suite, and stayed by her side until the elevator arrived. He watched as the doors closed, not because he was being polite, but because he needed the time to process her bombshell. Josh never once mentioned selling the company.

Cynthia lounged
in the hot desert sun, idly watching a hummingbird as it darted about the large century plant in her father’s garden. Typical of the homes in this Scottsdale subdivision, the backyard was a mixture of desert plants and lacy-leafed mesquite trees, which filtered the sunlight but never completely provided shade. On a March morning, the air felt a bit nippy, but pleasant. Her parents bought this sprawling adobe-style home as their winter getaway. What she would never comprehend is why her father decided to live in the desert year-round, since it seemed almost torturous that someone like Red Trueheart, lover of ice fishing and raised in the cool winds of northern Wisconsin, would subject himself to the stifling dry heat of an Arizonan summer.

Her mother no longer put up with it. Even in the temperate spring, she found excuses to spend time in their small condo on Chicago’s lakeshore. While she claimed her decorating business demanded it, Cynthia and her father both knew there were no real clients for her mother. For Barbara Trueheart, being an interior decorator was at best a money-eating hobby and at worst a self-delusion.

But Cynthia engaged in her own evasions. Reclining in a lounge chair, gazing over the Sonoran desert just beyond the house’s back wall, and staring at the mountains to the north was Cynthia’s route to avoiding reality. Retreating to her parents’ home as a spoiled child let her escape the demands of the real world.

These days she was always fleeing. She raced from Los Angeles, Danny, and Josh because they were too painful a reminder of Chip’s murder. For a few days after Chip’s funeral and memorial service, she forced herself to appear steady in Lattigo. She felt she owed that to the tribe, and to his sister Jackie who had flown home from Paris. The service had been heartfelt but far too long. The community’s grief was real and too palpable for her to bear, so she moved on. She told no one about her pregnancy, not even Jackie. Whatever they might say in response would just seem wrong. And she didn’t know where she could go next.

She bore Wisconsin as long as she could but the days were too cold and the nights too long. Each moment was too silent and too filled with memories. The house, the town, the business, and every tree and snow bank only reflected her grief. So she sought escape in Arizona with her father.

Certainly she was a miserable companion but her father loved her too much to say so. He was an active guy. He wanted to be on the golf courses, hitting balls with his pals, or taking trips into the mountains to go fishing or hunting or whatever he did to keep his retired days active. But since he loved her, he stayed at home and puttered while she sat in the sun and tried to read or at least to avoid thinking.

In the darkened interior she could hear the phone ringing. Her father appeared at the sliding glass doors, opened them, and handed her the cordless phone. “It’s your detective,” he said before heading back into the cool of the living room.

She should have stopped Denkey’s investigation. No one, including the police, expected to make any progress in Chip’s case. Allowing Denkey and his team to continue the pursuit was simply throwing money to the wind.

“Hello, Samuel,” she said.

“You didn’t call yesterday as planned,” Denkey remonstrated. He was a stickler for detail, but there was no reason to talk when the man never reported anything new.

“Something has turned up,” he said. “It probably means nothing, but I wanted you to know. You need to decide if we should take it further.”

She felt a flutter of hope, and tried to pull the emotion back. Two months ago, she held her final conversation with Chip, and a month ago the police appeared in Los Feliz to report his body’s discovery. Among all those days, weeks, and months, her hopes and fears cascaded atop one another in waves of emotions. Now at last she found a quiet place, as though she were on a gentle stream slowly flowing down a deep valley. She just wanted to lay back, let her face turn toward the distant sky, and float between the featureless walls that defined her despair. What she didn’t want to do was drop her feet into the muck of the stream below. She wasn’t about to fight for the strength to stand upright, and there was no way to fathom the energy required to scale those walls. Yet, maybe . . .

Denkey, knowing none of this, continued to talk. “One of the new people on the team, Patricia, came up with this. When we didn’t find many calls on Chip’s cell phone records during his last two days, she wondered if he suspected his phone was bugged. She postulated that he might have picked up a cheap cell phone. There seemed no way to track that avenue, especially if he bought it with cash. But Patricia’s a detail person and she wanted to canvass the cellular phone places near the Bonaventure Hotel. She hoped to hit on someone who remembered him.”

“Did she find someone?” Cynthia asked, knowing the answer had to be yes, otherwise why was he calling?

“Not really,” Denkey replied, “but when she was in the Bonaventure, she checked out every level in that massive lobby and noticed a bank of pay phones by the elevators closest to Chip’s room. She checked to see if they were still working. Most places these days have had the pay phones torn out or they’ve fallen out of service. Everyone’s using their cell phones, especially in an expensive business hotel like the Bonaventure.

“That’s when she noticed some graffiti by one of the phones . . . she recognized it as the logo for American Seasons, and she thought, ‘What if Chip used a pay phone to reach people? What if he was here doodling as he talked?’

“To make a long story short, we secured the records for the calls made and received by that phone for the days just before Chip’s disappearance. Pay phones don’t get used a lot, so it wasn’t hard to identify if any of the calls might have been Chip’s.”

Cynthia felt as though her feet were beginning to drop down into the mud, and even though she wanted to remain floating aimlessly, she knew she couldn’t.

“And were they?” she asked.

“We think so, at least two of them. One was to Arnold Twin Feathers. He heads the Tringush tribe here in Southern California. They’re the biggest Native American casino operators on the West Coast—certainly someone that Chip would know, given that both the Lattigo and the Tringush are leaders in Indian gaming.”

“And the other?” she asked.

“He called your father.”

The float was over and Cynthia was standing upright, already scanning the walls for an escape path. She needed to scramble out and understand this.

Denkey was quiet for a moment as he waited for a reaction. Finally he asked, “We haven’t followed up with either person. Do you want us to?”

“No,” she replied. “I’ll talk to Daddy myself.”

Red Trueheart looked
at his daughter with dismay. “Cynthia,” he started, “I wasn’t trying to keep anything from you. Chip and I talked all the time. If he had said anything out of the ordinary that day, I would have told you. But it was just our usual talk.”

“Daddy, you probably were one of the last people who spoke to Chip. When exactly was this call and what did he say?”

“It was nothing, baby. The kind of call he and I had all the time. I didn’t bring it up because frankly it never occurred to me that it was important. Besides once he was gone, I didn’t want to remind you of what you lost.”

“Daddy, can’t you see that I would need to know?”

Red went to the sofa and motioned his daughter to sit next to him. “Listen, I loved your husband. I know I was a prejudiced fool back when you two first started dating. I thought he was too old for you, and I didn’t want my little girl having anything to do with Indians.

“Well, I was wrong . . . on every account. That whole mess with the start of American Seasons. Everyone knows that Chip saved the day. He did, you know, and I figured out how he did it for all the right reasons. Just like I realized he truly loved you.”

Cynthia was still. Even in death her husband amazed her. She never realized there had been any bond between her dad and her husband. For the first time, she wondered guiltily how her father was dealing with Chip’s murder. Maybe he hurt as much as she did. She reached out to take his hand. “Daddy, I never knew you two even talked. But was there a reason that he called that morning?”