Black Water mr-3

by T. Jefferson Parker

  But Michelle wasn't done: "I was wondering why you claimed recently that the weapon was stolen from Arizona, and that the fingerprinting was inconclusive. We have those statements on tape. Which of your stories is the true one, Detective?"

  "Those were preliminary findings, later disproven," she said calmly. "I did say those things, but I shouldn't have. It was too early for a statement. One of these days I'll learn to keep my mouth shut around you people."

  This, meant as a self-deprecating joke, drew a weak media chuckle.

  Then, Natalie Wildcraft, her voice cutting through the tension like a rusty ax: "Archie didn't kill her, you stupid women."

  Cameras swung toward her, shooters re-aiming at the far end of the seats, where the Wildcrafts and Kuerners sat in a sudden wash of bright light. A chair tipped over and landed with a metallic bang that was louder than it should have been.

  "She's right," said Earla Kuerner. "You people ought to be ashamed. All of you."

  The nonreporters-Merci's friends and enemies-stood simultaneously for a better look, which gave a sense of things unraveling.

  Natalie shielded her face from the lights with her small, bony hand, her big engagement ring flashing. "Good gracious, turn those damned things off."

  The shooters pressed in close and fast, not about to lose position to each other. The reporters fired questions at the same time, then fired them louder, then began shouting them as the marshal at the back door shook his head and hustled bulkily around the table to restore order.

  Natalie Wildcraft rasped furiously through the din, "Get away, you leeches, you gutless leeches!"

  Rayborn, thankful for something physical, rounded the podium help the marshal.

  "Be easy," said Zamorra, also stepping toward the little riot.

  Merci restrained Michelle Howland by the arm but Howland wheeled and hissed, " Take your hands off me or I'll sue you out the department, bitch. "

  "Cool it, Sergeant," snapped the marshal, moving toward her. Shocked and accelerating toward anger, Merci veered into Natalie Wildcraft, who had fought her way through the bristle of bodies and mikes to make for the door.

  Natalie Wildcraft slapped her hard in the face, left side. Rayborn saw it coming but couldn't pull herself away from the focused fury the mother's eyes.

  "Stupid women," Natalie barked again. "She acts like a judge and you act like a friend."

  She raised her hand again but Zamorra in one impossible motion caught the wrist and delivered it with something like grace into beckoning paw of her husband. George Wildcraft eased out of room, pulling her behind him.

  Rayborn looked over at the video shooter who, alone in his group had turned to watch her and catch the action.

  She shook her head and looked down to avoid the glare of video light.

  The slap and the words and the exit of Natalie Wildcraft left a sudden silence in the room.

  Earla and Lee Kuerner scuttled away like cold refugees.

  Rayborn got behind the podium, threw back her thick dark hair and took a deep breath. She wondered if her cheek was as red a felt.

  "Any more questions? Good. We'll talk again in, oh, how about.. never. Does never work for you?"

  At that moment the door opened and a sunny, overweight woman in a blue dress smiled at Merci. A legion of girls, all dressed in identical brown uniforms, swarmed in ahead of her.

  "Brownie Troop seven-eight-eight, Tustin," she said. "Courthouse tour?"

  "Please retreat to the information desk," said Merci. The Brownies had come to a communal stop when they saw Merci and the podium and the posters of Wildcraft and the video shooters and celebrity reporters.

  "Girls! Girls-this way, please!"

  Merci sat in the pen, waiting for Abelera to call or come over, fire her, take her badge and her gun, maybe whip her with his Sam Browne in the middle of the homicide pen.

  She stared down at the recent arrivals on her desk: a department-wide notice of a birthday party for Assistant Sheriff Collins, suggested gift donation, twenty dollars; this month's newsletter from the Deputy Association; the "FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin"; blank timecards for the coming week.

  She pushed them all aside for a look at Don Leitzel's neatly written note regarding the addresses in the navigational computer of the abandoned Cadillac STS.

  Sgt. Rayborn Addresses contained in Sand Canyon car, in order of entry into the navigation system, are 83 Osier Lane, La Jolla (University of San Diego School of Medicine); 212

  Saltair, Newport Beach; 4143 Agate, La Jolla.

  I took the liberty of hitting the Orange and San Diego counties assessor's offices to see who the owners of these places are-hope you don't mind. These addresses belong to 1) the University of California,

  2) Mr. Wyatt Wright, a single man, and

  3) Dr. Sean Moss, a single man.

  The Wright and Moss home purchases were both within the last year, 6.8 and 4.5 million dollars, respectively.

  Don L.

  "I'll be damned," she said out loud. Inside her the embarrassment of the press conference was whirling up against the excitement of this new evidence, and Merci felt a giddiness that went straight to her head "Cherbrenko and Vorapin used the Caddy."

  "Huh?"

  Sergeant Teague wheeled in his chair and looked at her.

  "Those creeps that Crowder and Dobbs saw coming down the hill from Wildcraft's in a Cadillac at the crack of dawn-the same creeps were dialed in with home addresses for two of the OrganiVen founder and the UCSD medical school, where another founder was working. The arrogant shitheads stole an STS for transportation and dumped out on Sand Canyon."

  "So?" Teague, large and only apparently sluggish, specialized dumb skepticism and Rayborn generally loved him for it.

  "Gwen worked for OrganiVen. It's a stock fraud," she said. She was thinking out loud now, and things were making sense. "Everybody got rich, but now something's going wrong. Archie didn't kill her. And he didn't shoot himself. I'm damned sure of it now."

  "What are you going to do with all his fingerprints on the gun?'

  "Wipe them off."

  "Good. I knew Arch didn't do it. He's a good kid."

  Teague wheeled back around and burped quietly. "But let me guess-they wiped the STS clean."

  "They sure did. Ike and Leitzel couldn't get a single print."

  "Pros."

  "But still dumb enough to leave the addresses on the navigatior system."

  "Geniuses don't go into crime."

  "A goddamned stock fraud," said Merci, still thinking out loud.

  Teague spun around again. "So Archie's got the proof in the back of his mind, you might say. But nobody can get to it. Because to take out the bullet, it would probably kill him."

  "The brain scans can't tell a thirty-eight from a thirty-two twenty-two or a twenty-five or a nine. They're not quite precise enough to show an exact diameter, with the mushrooming and fragging and all. But yeah, if you could get it out, you'd see it didn't come from his nine. It came from something one of those two guys in the car was packing. I'd bet my house on it.

  "Teague shrugged. "So, when Archie dies of natural causes at the age of ninety-six, they can autopsy him, get the bullet and button down this case once and for all."

  "Give me a break, Teague, I'm going to button this thing down by the time you quit burping."

  "Feels like that could be a month."

  "Give me a week." "Get 'em, Rayborn."

  "I'll get 'em cold."

  But Leitzel the Thorough wasn't the only good fairy to have visited Merci's desk while she was being slapped and cussed and pushed around by a marshal.

  A note from Ike Sumich lay just under Leitzel's:

  Sergeant R-After many long-distance phone minutes I was able to determine that the shoe imprints were left by a size 16 Foot Rite "Comfort Strider." Two tread patterns were marketed in this country. What we found at Wildcraft's is the "Versa-Terra" by Markham.

  NOTE: FOOT RITE ONLY SOLD THE COMFORT STRIDER IN
SIZE 16 THROUGH CATALOGUES. NOT EVEN SPECIALTY BIG AND TALL STORES CARRIED SUCH A LARGE SIZE IN STOCK.

  Here are the six most popular catalogues through which Foot Rite offered the shoe for sale in California.

  Sumich listed the catalogue companies, their addresses, phone and fax numbers and Web site addresses.

  "I love our crime lab guys," she said. "They're all cuties." Teague turned back to his desk. She got Sumich on the phone and thanked him for the good work. "This is what I need now," she said. "Get back to Foot Rite and find out if any of their catalogue retailers are specialty outfits."

  "The ones I gave you are all specialty outfits-big and tall."

  "Go a step further. Big and tall executives, because this guy might see himself as a businessman. Big and tall, ethnically targeted-look for European, Russian, Balkan, Slav. Try military surplus because alot of them have been selling Soviet stuff since the breakup. Try b and tall outdoorsmen, too-hunters and fishermen."

  "Got it. Why a European businessman who likes Soviet surplus catalogues and loves to hunt and fish?"

  "He's a Russian, Ike. A gangster, a fraudster and probably a killer. The hunting and fishing idea is pure hunch. Nothing more."

  "Do you have a weight on him, by any chance?"

  "I heard three-thirty, but that was as of a few years ago."

  "I estimated three-fifty from the soil and the print depth. I didn't want to say anything because it was so much. I figured my estimate was just flat-out wrong."

  "Vorapin. Zlatan Vorapin. Also known as Al Apin."

  "Al Apeman."

  "He's going to be hard to find."

  "Set a trap. Use bananas."

  "I'll think about it."

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  Merci 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?"

&nbs
p; "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.