The rocks tinkled into the glasses. The sound was music to my ears — like Beethoven, only easier to play.
“So, what can I do for you today, Special Agent?” she asked, handing me the tumbler.
“You can tell me about the moment you decided to make a killing on something other than the stock market.”
“What?”
“You know, Doc, you're a smart businesswoman. No doubt about that. But, like a lot of smart businesspeople who go off the rails, you believe that the rules the rest of us follow don't apply to you.”
“I'm sorry?”
“Gotta hand it to you, you were convincing. When I first met you at Moreton Genetics, you had me believing you were concerned about your great friend Tanaka, the same Tanaka who got nauseous in your company unless you had gills.”
Spears's mouth was open again like a fish sucking air.
“And you were concerned about him, but not in the sense I thought you meant at the time. What you were concerned about was that he might actually make it back from that expedition — other than in a box with the lid screwed down.”
She swallowed. “I beg your pardon?”
“At first I thought perhaps you were just shaken up when you found out how Tanaka died. The whole shark thing — you weren't expecting it. Perhaps you were hoping for a simple drowning.”
“I don't know what you're talking about.” Spears put her drink on a side table and flopped on the couch beside it. She tucked her feet up beneath her, all relaxed like I was a friend about to spill some interesting society gossip, or maybe to give her my thoughts on interior decorating. She was getting good at this, more confident — practice makes perfect.
“Does the name Al Cooke ring any bells?”
“Cooke … Cooke …” She stroked her chin and glanced at the ceiling. The gesture looked self-conscious. I wondered if she'd practiced it in the mirror.
“He was a crew member of the Natusima.”
“Why would I know the—”
“He was the ship's cook. You knew him well enough to have thirty-six thousand dollars transferred into his bank account.”
“I don't think so.”
“I know so, Doc. Because of 9/11, banks these days are pretty cooperative when it comes to the transfer of large sums of money.” I silently thanked Arlen for his persistence on my behalf. “It's the sort of activity indulged in by drug dealers and terrorists. You live well, Doc. Large five-and six-figure sums like that appear and disappear in your accounts sometimes on a weekly basis. Your record of spending and saving is consistently extravagant, so you don't look like a drug dealer or a terrorist to the system, and the computers that monitor these things skip over you. Only this particular thirty-six thousand dollars went to an account registered in the Caymans to one Sean Boyle. From there it was transferred to Al Cooke's account, an account that has rarely, if ever, been out of the red. It arrived in two chunks — eighteen thousand dollars one month, eighteen thousand dollars the next. To me, that makes it look like a half-now-and-half-after-the-job-is-done kinda transfer, especially when the arrival of those deposits book-ended the day Dr. Tanaka got turned into fish food.”
Doc Spears was frowning like she wasn't following my logic. More acting. “Are you saying Professor Boyle used money I loaned him to have Dr. Tanaka murdered?”
“Nice try, Doc,” I said. “I don't believe you loaned Sean Boyle anything. I believe you conspired with him in the murder of Hideo Tanaka.”
Spears picked up her drink and took a delicate sip. The glass wasn't shaking. “This is ridiculous,” she said.
My turn to shrug. “When I first met you, you told me that you got on well with Tanaka, but not with Boyle. I've been doing a little fishing of my own, Doc. You'd been at MG sixteen months. Tanaka was twenty thousand feet under the water for much of that time, collecting specimens. You barely knew the guy. And while you did your best to keep it quiet, you got on real well with Sean Boyle — lovers first and then business partners. And you both wanted Tanaka a little closer to the surface, like only six feet under.”
The doctor sucked in her top lip, and tapped her chin with her index finger like she was considering her next move.
“We've had a team going over your expenses,” I said. This wasn't accurate. What I should have said was, we will have a team of experts going over your finances, shift it from the perfect tense to the certain future. But under the circumstances — the circumstances being that I wanted her rattled — I was sure even Chip Schaeffer back at the DoD would have approved of my grammatical license. “The bellhop at the Sofitel knew you by name. I could have believed the front desk or even the concierge might know the names of the hotel's paying guests, but the guy in the monkey suit who picks up the luggage? Unlikely. Unless of course you'd stayed there many times before. And that was certainly possible. On a hunch I had him shown photos of the professor. Seems I'm not the only one who never forgets a bad haircut. The bellhop figured Boyle was your husband. You always registered as Mr. and Mrs., didn't you? Except Boyle never signed the register, which meant he never had to show ID.”
I waited for an answer, a reaction, but Spears's face remained a mask. She said, “Is that all you've got, Special Agent?”
A challenge like that is the cop equivalent of smelling blood in the water. I suddenly knew how the shark that ate Tanaka felt. I said, “Do you want to know what I think, or what I can prove?”
“I think you should leave,” she replied, her plucked, arched eyebrows knitted in a scowl, the corners of her mouth pulled in the general direction of her manicured toenails.
“OK, if you insist, I'll go with what I know: Tanaka and Boyle's research came up with something interesting. Tanaka wanted to take it in one direction, perhaps as a sewage treatment; Boyle in another. Boyle came to you; you agreed with his point of view. You secured more funding from MG's old friend the DoD to develop the biotechnology for purely military purposes. Tanaka wasn't thrilled.
“I don't know yet where you and Boyle started banging each other's doors — the Sofitel was one of your favorite fuck pads. Maybe the close proximity to power, the White House being within spitting distance, turned you on. Somewhere along the way — perhaps right from the beginning — you both decided Tanaka had to be removed from the scene permanently. And then Boyle double-crossed you. You weren't a hundred percent sure about that until I showed up and started asking questions after the Transamerica/Four Winds explosions. At the time, I thought your distress was the normal concern one human being shows for another — the unfortunate and violent deaths of not just one but two of your employees, and so close together. But I read it wrong. At some point during our little chat at Moreton Genetics that day, you realized Boyle's death had been staged so that he could take his nasty little secrets to a new buyer — Pakistan — without having to split the profits with you. With scandal inevitable, and in order to protect the value of your stock, you resigned, but not before passing me a copy of the security-camera footage that showed Boyle stealing the technology — technology you helped him steal. That envelope the disk came in had your DNA all over it. By slipping me that disk, you were behaving just like the seemingly innocent who goes on television to beg the public for leads to a crime she herself has committed.”
Spears's nostrils flared as she breathed.
“But then you got a break. The DoD called you in to consult on the mission to snatch Boyle. That's when you met Staff Sergeant Chris Butler.”