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."