by Neil Mcmahon
“If you want, then, I’ll take it on,” Larrabee said. She nodded.
“Carroll? Are you in?”
Monks had gotten pretty good at ignoring things. Stephanie was right: Too good. But children bred and destroyed like laboratory animals. Possible murder. This was no longer a matter of the abstract wrong that REGIS might do to the world, but individual people who had been harmed, and more who might be. Including Martine Rostanov. It was like a giant python of circumstances which Monks had hoped would go away, but which kept tightening around him.
She was watching him anxiously. He nodded, and was rewarded by her look of relief and perhaps even happiness.
“No guarantees,” Larrabee said. “If we don’t get something real soon—I think you’re going to have to go to the authorities and take your chances. You should be thinking in terms of getting out of sight.”
“Oh, I have been,” she said, with unconcealed irony. “Most of last night.”
Monks had thought about that contingency too. Some form of witness protection or guarded house arrest. Saying good-bye to the life you had built. Spending every minute after that wondering how long you had before a computer hacker pierced your disguise, or somebody on your own side slipped up or sold out.
“My guess is that Lex is okay, he just bolted,” Larrabee said. “Wasn’t ready to give up the drugs, or he got scared. But if he told somebody, you might be at risk.”
She looked away unhappily. “I can’t believe he wouldn’t contact me if he was okay.”
“Why don’t you call in sick?”
“With all that’s going on? I’d have to be dying.”
“Fake it.”
“They’d check up on me, believe me. If I left the area, or they couldn’t find me, that would cause a stir.”
“I’d prefer to operate without red-flagging them,” Larrabee admitted. “But we’re talking about your safety.”
“I think—I need to be there. Something might come along about Lex. Some way I can help.” She looked from one to the other of the two men, stubborn now. “Nobody’s going to hurt me in the Bank of America Building.”
“Then take a couple of precautions.” Larrabee walked to his office safe, an antique black steel box the size of a refrigerator, and started turning the dial. “Stay around groups of people. Spend the nights at a hotel, don’t tell anybody where. No parking garages, and check your car before you get in. Keep this in the glove box or your purse.”
He took out a .38 caliber Smith & Wesson Airweight, a pistol not much bigger than a pack of cards, along with a handful of short thick bullets.
“It’s got a shrouded hammer so it won’t get caught,” he said. “There’s no safety and you don’t need to cock it. If you have to use it, forget everything you ever heard or saw on TV. Just leave it in your purse. Point it at the middle of the other person’s body as close range as you can get, and pull the trigger five times.”
Aghast, Monks decided, was the correct word for her expression.
“I don’t think I could,” she said in a subdued voice.
“Then it’s better not to have it.”
“This is so unreal. I keep thinking I can just go on as if nothing’s happened.”
“You need to act that way, Dr. Rostanov,” Larrabee said. “But think like a target.” He offered Martine the pistol. She shook her head.
“Okay,” he said, and returned it to the safe. “Give me a little while on the computer. I’ll start a background check on Dr. Ostrand.”
“Come on, Martine,” Monks said. “I’ll walk you to your car.” She glanced at him swiftly, perhaps realizing that it was the first time he had called her by her given name.
They walked down the wide, silent old hallway. Its musty smell and worn tiled floor touched Monks with the memory of the Chicago apartment building where his maiden Irish aunt had lived.
“I didn’t realize you were close, you and Lex,” Monks said.
“I was the good girl, the straight big sister. I’d come visit him in Berkeley after he dropped out of college. He and a couple of his computer buddies were living in this sort of burrow, a big old garage they’d rented. A few mattresses on the floor, full of junk-food wrappers and electronic gear. They didn’t know if it was day or night and they didn’t care. Computers were their whole universe.
“It was wonderful at first. We were the good guys—the cutting edge of this huge great development. But it changed, and he changed. Drugs and a wild life. That sweet boy’s still in there, but I’ve seen him less and less.”
They reached the silver Volvo. Monks took her keys from her hand and opened the car door. She surprised him by touching his face with her fingers, the way she had done with Stephanie last night.
“I haven’t told you how much it means to me, your doing this,” she said. Her breath was warm and pleasantly scented. “You could have just told me to go away, on the phone.”
“There’s nothing hard about what I’m doing,” Monks said. “You’re the one looking at consequences.”
“When I came into the emergency room last night—realized who you were—I thought, this was meant. He’s going to help.” She tried to laugh. “I don’t even believe in things like that.”
Driving away, she raised a hand. Monks waved awkwardly back, and watched the Volvo disappear into traffic.
9
Monks had discovered that his best way to correlate information in a situation like this was to sit down and write out what he knew. He listed the major points as brief notes on index cards—
Lex Rittenour comes into ER with OD
Walker Ostrand mails computer disk to
Martine Rostanov
Walker Ostrand found dead
Lex Rittenour disappears
—then began arranging them in a sort of tarot reading, shifting them and pondering different combinations in an attempt to read the past. Questions, contradictions, and lapses would stand out, and a part of his brain below the surface of consciousness would worry at them until the knots started to dissolve.
Monks did this and made several phone calls, while Larrabee ran an initial computer scan on Walker Ostrand. When Larrabee was done, they got in the Bronco and drove north on Highway 101, crossing the Golden Gate Bridge into Marin County. Here, the fog began to clear and the road took on the air of a festive caravan, crowded with expensive SUVs and pretty women in sleek foreign-made convertibles, their hair blowing in the wind and gold glimmering at wrists, throats, and ears. The Bronco drove stolidly just at the speed limit, like a great rock in the slithering stream of nimbler vehicles that edged up behind and slipped around, but rarely came close. It was 11:42 A.M.
“The hard part,” Larrabee said, “is going to be making this slimer look good.”
The need to make Ostrand look good involved what they were about to try: getting information out of his family. Blood ties were strong, even—especially—with slimers, and it usually paid to start off friendly.
Monks did not care for deception, but in investigation work it went with the turf. It was easier for him to stomach when the target was an unpleasant individual. He had dealt with quite a few of those—usually physicians whose negligence tended to go hand in hand with arrogance, and, occasionally, outright criminals—but someone capable of doing what Ostrand had apparently done was unprecedented on his scale.
What they had put together so far was this.
Walker Ostrand had graduated from University of Illinois medical school in 1974, joined the army in 1975, and served until 1993. He had been in Special Operations, which meant that details were classified. His discharge was honorable, but it struck Monks as odd that a lifer would quit just two years short of putting in his twenty for retirement. In 1995, Ostrand had acquired a California medical license. This was about the time when he had hooked up with Aesir Corporation, and had come to Martine Rostanov for help.
Ostrand came to her again five years later, and this time hinted at the truth of why he had been hired: to con
duct the illegal research. Now he wanted money from Aesir. He intended to threaten or blackmail the company with the report, and he tried to intimidate Martine into joining forces with him.
Two days later, Ostrand had been found “accidentally” dead.
Three months after that—five days ago—Martine had confided the story to Lex Rittenour. Outraged, Lex vowed to publicly denounce his own brainchild, REGIS, and undermine the IPO.
Now Lex was missing.
Ostrand was a physician and had probably done the fieldwork for the research: drawn the blood samples—perhaps performed the abortions. The blood analysis would have required sophisticated equipment; he had probably farmed that out to a laboratory, with a pretext for the intended use.
But someone at Aesir Corporation had to have been in on it too—to have commissioned and funded it. This was the person or people whom Ostrand had threatened—and who faced ruin and prison if discovered.
It was a strong guess that they had killed Ostrand to shut him up, and it was possible that they had killed Lex Rittenour too. They had covered tracks carefully and successfully. But a clandestine investigation just might turn up some piece of information that would give the research report an undeniable reality. Then it could be handed over to the media and authorities.
Larrabee’s preferred method in a situation like this was to find someone who had a grudge: an ex-husband or wife, a jilted lover, a cheated business partner.
Or a stepchild.
Walker Ostrand’s marital history showed a first marriage ending in divorce, back in Maryland in 1984—too long ago to be of help now.
But he had married a new Mrs. Ostrand just five years ago, about the same time he had been hired by Aesir. She had been married before too and had a teenage daughter.
Ostrand might have been one of those who could carry out a years-long intimate deception: ruthless and even criminal in his work, and a loving father at home. But there were not many who could sustain that kind of thing without at least occasional slips, and children were perceptive—particularly in a situation where they felt protective toward a natural parent, and disliked the new spouse.
But they had not been able to find an address for the daughter. So the second Mrs. Ostrand, the widow, was the first stop on the list.
Monks exited the freeway at Mill Valley and followed the directions to Mrs. Ostrand’s house, into the foothills to the west. The streets and shops of the town gave way to ranch-type houses cut into the slopes, spaced well apart. It was an affluent area—but the driveway into the Ostrand residence was crowded with neglected vegetation. The only visible car was several years old, American-made, nondescript. It could have used washing.
The swimming pool’s deep end was puddled from rain and matted with leaves and duff. Here was where Walker Ostrand had fallen, bashed his head, and drowned. It did not look like the pool was going to see more use any time soon.
They rang the bell, waited a full minute, rang again. The second minute was almost up, with the unhappy feeling coming that they had wasted the trip, when a curtain moved.
A disheveled woman who might have been fifty, but looked older, peered out. Larrabee gave her his best apologetic smile.
“Mrs. Ostrand?” he said, loudly enough to be heard through the glass. “We’re sorry to disturb you.”
He held up a business card that identified him, under a false name, as a claims adjuster for the Commonwealth Insurance Group. This was also a false name, which Larrabee had chosen because it was nonspecific and yet had a certain grandeur, with a hint of a British connection. If anyone decided to check it out, the number would ring a machine in his office which informed callers that they had reached the Commonwealth Insurance Group and invited them to leave a message.
The door opened. Clara Ostrand was wearing a housecoat over a nightgown, and slippers. It was past noon. Her reddish hair was permed but tousled, and her thick makeup, flaked and streaked. The pupils of her eyes were somewhat dilated. Painkillers, Monks decided, Percodan or codeine.
“We know you recently lost your husband,” Larrabee said, handing her the card. “We’d like to offer our condolences.”
“Is this about the settlement?” she said anxiously.
“Ah, no, ma’am. That’s another company.”
Her relief was evident. Presumably, she was satisfied at what she had received. Whether she was suffering any grief was harder to read.
“We represent a medical group that’s in a very unusual situation,” Larrabee said. “They have a cancer patient who was part of a study. He says your husband recommended treatment, but his advice was ignored. That was several years ago. Now the patient’s dying, and there aren’t any records.”
Her expression segued into bewilderment. “I don’t—know about anything like that.” Then, abruptly, it went to fear. “My god, are we going to be sued?”
“We’re working for you, Mrs. Ostrand,” Larrabee said, soothingly. “Your husband did the right thing—but the records are gone.” He leaned confidentially closer. “Anything you could do to help us would be to all of our benefit.”
Monks stoically maintained his concerned look, aware of guilt at beating up on a befuddled, recently widowed woman.
She pressed her palms to the sides of her head. “Let me think.”
“It was a research study, ma’am,” Larrabee emphasized. “Did he talk about anything like that? Any group or institution he visited regularly?”
“Walker was gone a lot,” she said. “He worked for himself. I don’t really know much about it.”
“Did he talk about working for Aesir Corporation?”
“No?” she said, drawing it out into a question. “I don’t think I ever heard of them.”
“How about anybody else in your family, Mrs. Ostrand? Am I right, you have a daughter?”
“Yes. I don’t know if she’d be any help. She and Walker—didn’t get along very well.”
Larrabee’s teeth just showed at the corners of his mouth. “I’m sorry to hear that. Could we talk to her?”
“She’s living in San Francisco,” Clara Ostrand said, doubtfully.
That was where matters stood, when another car swung into the drive—a small, canary yellow, projectile-shaped Mustang GT—moving fast and pulsing with the heavy beat of rap music. It was new and very clean. A young man got out. He was in his twenties, wearing a baseball cap, a T-shirt that came down well past his waist, and baggy shorts. His mouth was ringed by a smudgelike goatee.
“What’s going on?” the young man said. Monks interpreted it as a greeting rather than a literal question, but there was a definite tone of challenge.
“We’re working on an insurance case involving Dr. Ostrand,” Larrabee said.
“Talk to our lawyer, dude.”
“We’ve already talked to a lot of lawyers,” Larrabee said. “That’s why we’re here. Trying to keep you folks from having to do the same.”
“It’s not about the death, Billy,” Mrs. Ostrand said. “It’s about research Walker was doing.”
Billy’s gaze shifted quickly from Larrabee to Monks and back, clearly not liking what he saw. “Yeah, well, we don’t know anything about that. Why don’t you go on inside, Clara.”
“About what?” Larrabee said.
“Whatever you said, man. Now if you don’t mind, we’d like to be left in private.”
“Sure,” Larrabee said. “Sorry for the trouble. But hey, could I take a look at your car? I was thinking about buying one just about like that for my daughter.” He moved toward it, gazing at it admiringly. Larrabee did not have any children. “I’m a little worried it might be too much for her to handle,” he said.
“Are you kidding?” Billy said. “A chick? I can hardly handle it. I pop the clutch, the front wheels want to come off the ground.”
“Wow. What’d you pay for it?”
“Fourteen five.”
Larrabee whistled in affected surprise. “Sweet deal.”
“It’s only thre
e-forty a month, man.” Billy was walking with him toward the car now.
“Stereo come with it?”
“I had it customized. Quad twenty-watt speakers and surround sound.”
They drifted away: Larrabee plying his trade.
Monks turned to Mrs. Ostrand. “I understand your husband was in the military. I was too, probably about the same time.”
“Walker was very proud of his service.”
“Rightly so,” Monks said. “Did he leave any records of any kind? Files, computer disks?”
She shook her head doubtfully. “He kept all that at his office.”
“No storage space, safety deposit box, anything like that?”
“There was a deposit box with some valuables,” Mrs. Ostrand said. “Jewelry and such. Besides that, just his personal things. I have a scrapbook I made when we were married. Would you like to see it?”
“Please.”
The inside of the house was depressingly disheveled, as Monks had expected. Ashtrays overflowed, and it smelled of stale smoke. A glimpse into the kitchen showed a sink crammed with gummy dishes. A new-looking wide-screen TV was playing a daytime talk show and the couch in front of it had several pillows and a couple of bunched-up blankets. It looked like she spent a lot of time here.
“I’m sorry,” she said, flustered, as if just now realizing the state of the place. “I just haven’t had time to clean.”
“Not at all,” Monks said soothingly. “You should see my place.”
She went down a hallway and came back with an old-fashioned scrapbook. There were several wedding photos of Clara Ostrand with a large, bland-faced man in his fifties. They had the slick, perfunctory look of having been taken as part of a wedding chapel package deal. She looked quite pretty and much more than five years younger.
It was quickly clear that the scrapbook was not going to reveal anything. Monks paged on, trying to look appreciative, through various family tableaux. Most featured Mrs. Ostrand, many with a girl at various ages—presumably her daughter. Walker Ostrand showed up in a few of the later ones, and in a couple of formal military portraits taken when he was younger. His face was always the same bland mask.
