"Mr. Brock," said Merci, "I just thought of something. Did you buy a few shares of OrganiVen for yourself?"
Brock took a deep, honest breath, then exhaled. "Yes, I did. I purchased twenty thousand shares for five thousand dollars."
"So you did okay when Sistel stepped in?"
"I did just fine."
"Mr. Brock, did you ever have any reason to think that OrganiVen, or the people who ran it, were not honest?"
"None at all."
"Did you know any of them?"
"None of them."
"Did Archie and Gwen know you bought in?" asked Zamorra.
"No."
"And Priscilla?"
"Of course she did."
"Eventually she did," said Zamorra.
"Exactly."
"Because you and Priscilla weren't getting along," he said.
"Right. That's all I'm going to say about that."
"Thanks again for your help. We're going to have more questions."
"How about by phone? I don't need any office gossip. The other guy from your office doesn't mind just using the phone for this thing."
It took Merci just a second to figure it.
"Al Madden."
"Yeah," said Brock.
"The phone's fine until it isn't," said Zamorra.
"Whatever." Brock nodded but didn't offer his hand, then hustled back toward the RDD building, staying on the shady side of the street.
"Very broken up about his sister-in-law," said Zamorra.
"So broken up he wasn't even curious about who might have killed her. And so broken up about Priscilla that he's sneaking an investment or two he can hide from the divorce lawyer. He's already taken off his wedding ring."
Merci watched Charlie Brock round the corner at Market Street. "He was sweating kind of a lot, Paul."
"Not the heat."
"No, the bank thermometer says it's only a hundred and two."
They walked back to the car, keeping to the shady sides of the streets. Merci could feel the heat from the sidewalk coming through her shoes. "Ready to go see what Dr. Stebbins has to say about Archie's brain?" she asked.
"Yes. If we're expected to arrest him, we at least should know how his mind works. What's left of it."
Zamorra drove. When they hit the freeway it was backed up to standstill so he got into the toll lane. Zamorra hit eighty and Merci watched the chrome of the door handles flashing by beside them. She thought Brock was untrustworthy and Wildcraft was trying to tell the truth. She remembered how he'd described the "monstrous" head one of the men who had met with Gwen.
"Paul, Wildcraft thought his wife's meeting had something to with OrganiVen. He said there was the blond businessman and the big guy, in a car with livery plates. Archie thought the big guy might have been a chauffeur. But chauffeurs don't sit in on meetings. So, say both of those guys were tied in with OrganiVen. They could have been part of the company, right? And if so, then a lot of other people would know who they are."
"It's worth a try."
She found Wyatt Wright's number in her notebook, dialed, and got a forwarding number from the operator. A receptionist answered "BioLucid, Mr. Wright's office," then put Merci through when Merci said she was law enforcement.
Wright sounded young and unhappy to be talking to a cop. He said his former company, OrganiVen, never used a limousine service. They had to borrow money just to pay the rent back in those days, he said. He said this with pride.
"You ever do business with a huge man with a beard?"
"Never."
"What about a blond man, mid-forties, possibly foreign-born looked like a… well, like a businessman."
"No. My business was research, pure and simple. I didn't deal with anybody else but the other scientists. That was among the terms of my employment."
"Were a very large bearded man and a blond man, mid-forties, employed there also? Whether you dealt with them or not?"
"Not that I know. I had my head in a test tube the whole time. Really."
"Thanks."
Click.
"Never trust a businessman under thirty," she said.
Next, she tried OrganiVen cofounder Cody Carlson, but his secretary said Dr. Carlson was out of the country and could not be reached.
Cofounder Sean Moss had no office number so she called his home phone and got a machine.
She tried Dr. Stephen Monford-the voice of authority on the MiraVen promotional video-but he was on sabbatical in Norway.
She sat back and thought about the big man and the blond, perhaps tied to OrganiVen but perhaps not, meeting with a nervous Gwen Wildcraft, spied upon by Archie. A new black town car with livery plates. The big guy maybe a chauffeur but maybe not. She couldn't get a baseline, couldn't come up with one fact to build on. The whole thing seemed hazy and dreamlike, which she figured was exactly how it seemed to Wildcraft. But it wasn't in Rayborn's nature to let things go. Zamorra had once compared her to the Gila monster, fabled to hold its prey until the sun goes down.
"If the big guy and the blond were connected to OrganiVen but weren't founders, maybe we could trace them through the incorporation papers filed with the state," she said.
"Well, okay."
"But we've got the limo angle, so I'm going to burn some more department cell minutes."
Merci made eight more calls to limo services that might cover Newport Beach. She asked again about a very, very large chauffeur. And whether the car company had done regular work for a biomed outfit called OrganiVen. The calls were on the department cell phone but Merci didn't think you could catch bad guys on a budget. None of the companies employed or had ever employed such huge, bearded, bespectacled chauffeur. None had ever done business with OrganiVen as a regular client, so far as they remembered.
When she was done she wondered what the charges would be for those nine calls, for learning absolutely nothing except that Wyatt Wright was a smart ass and Red Carpet Limo had a late-summer special where you got the first hour free, three-hour minimum.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Dr. John Stebbins welcomed them into a small office in an old building behind the UCI Medical Center. A floor fan worked diligently from one corner but it couldn't break the heat. The floors were old and wooden and Merci could hear footsteps and voices from the hallway outside.
Stebbins wore a white doctor's coat like the last time Merci had seen him, but a considerably more relaxed expression.
"I apologize for last time," he said. "I… when you have a bad day in my profession, it's, ah…"
"People die," said Merci.
"Yes. Thank you. Same as yours, in some ways."
"I haven't cured anybody recently," Merci said. "And we're sorry that Deputy Wildcraft decided to check himself out. He didn't consult us and we can't keep him here or anywhere else for more than forty-eight hours unless we arrest him."
"I'm concerned. The edema could easily increase. Infection is possible. If a cranial vein leaks or breaks, the resulting hematoma would be fatal. And besides this organic damage he's sustained, well, I'm not sure if he's capable of taking care of himself. Whether he can remember to take care of himself."
"I'm not either," said Merci.
"Have you seen him?"
"Three hours ago. He seemed a little slower, mentally. Said he was tired, not thinking straight. He said he'd check himself back in this afternoon."
"He hasn't."
"What's going on inside that mind of his, Doctor?"
Stebbins shook his head and sighed. He leaned back from a desk cluttered with papers. The fan oscillated his way and the corners lifted like spectators watching a home run.
"It's easiest to show you."
He rolled back on his chair and stood. Behind his desk was a wall mounted x-ray screen that he flicked on with a toggle. Archie Wildcraft's x rays were already in. Dr. Stebbins darted a red laser pointer across the image, stopping it suddenly on the outside of the skull.