No, I hadn’t given him her number, I emailed back. I explained who he was and that he was offering a lot of money for our services. But I’d call him and tell him to lay off. I added that I’d stay another night at Jenny’s, then come up to San Francisco for the prep meeting Rita and I had scheduled tomorrow morning.
“Bill,” Jenny sang from the kitchen. “Come look!”
Laid out on the floor were primary-color plates, champagne glasses, diet milkshake powder, four kinds of granola, and what was perhaps Silicon Valley’s largest collection of animal-shaped salt and pepper shakers. The stove and counters and cabinets were spotless.
“Not a smidgen of shellfish,” Jenny announced. “Just some clam chowder, safely inside the can.”
Fay held up a small closed tin. “And Cajun seasoning, with authentic fake crawfish flavor.”
“And these.” Jenny had a pair of crab-claw crunchers hidden behind her back. She snapped them at my nose. I frowned at her. It didn’t seem like the time to play around.
“Plus, I talked to Simon,” Fay said. “Abe works for Médecins Sans Frontières. He’s based somewhere in Europe or Africa.”
“Thanks,” I said. “I’ll tell Perkins at the hospital.”
Fay gave a catlike smile. “I’ve got a quicker way to find Abe. Simon told me where Sheila keeps a set of keys to her apartment.”
Sheila’s apartment complex resembled a motel. We navigated down an alley of covered parking spaces behind the complex to the number that corresponded to Sheila’s unit. The space was empty, of course, and I put the Scout in. Fay looked under a filament-encrusted flowerpot in the corner. The keys were there.
We walked around to the complex’s back gate, unlocked it, and entered a long courtyard. A small, plain swimming pool with a concrete deck shimmered to our right on the other side of a low chain-link fence. An older woman was fishing debris out of the pool with a net. She stared at the three of us as we walked by. Jenny smiled at her and waved hello.
It didn’t work. The woman came to the fence. The manager, I figured. Her hair was falling out of its bun, her cheeks ruddy. She looked ready to use the net on us.
“Who are you?” she demanded.
“We’re friends of Sheila’s,” Jenny answered.
“Sheila’s dead,” the woman said bluntly.
Jenny recoiled. “We know that,” I said quietly. “The hospital asked us to come and look up a phone number for her family.” At least, I imagined Perkins might have, if I’d reached him instead of his voicemail before we had left Jenny’s place.
“Someone’s already been here.” The manager’s voice was flat.
“Who? The police?”
“No. Someone from her job. Guy with short dark hair. He was a high-up, showed me his card.”
I looked at Jenny and Fay. It seemed odd that LifeScience would come here but send no one to the hospital. I reminded myself that we needed to call Marion.
“Did you let him into her apartment?” I asked.
“He said there was some kind of work product they needed right away,” the manager said. “Some presentation. Even though it was a time of grief, et cetera, they had to have this info.”
“Well, we’re just here to locate her family,” I said. “As you can see, she gave us her keys.”
The manager nodded reluctantly. “Don’t be long. I had to chase that other fella out. I didn’t think it was right, him poking around for a whole hour.”
We proceeded down the courtyard, which was lined on either side by a double-deck row of apartments. The center was a strip of trampled lawn with some plastic furniture, charcoal grills, and a palm here and there. Jenny jiggled Sheila’s door open. The apartment consisted of three rooms plus a kitchen, basic boxes with low ceilings, but Sheila had fixed it up nicely. The living room furniture was low to the ground, which made the room seem bigger. There were two upholstered, semicircular chairs, a divan, and a collection of brocade pillows for lounging. She had hung fabric on the walls, intricate patterns in earth tones. A large rug, also intricately patterned, covered the worn carpeting. The biggest things in the room were the two bookcases, which were crammed with books on science as well as novels and biographies. A whole shelf was given to Sufi poetry.
“What a cozy place,” Jenny said. “I didn’t think she’d be one to put so much effort into decorating.”
“Feels like an opium den,” Fay whispered.
None of the lights was very bright. I meandered into the kitchen. There was something uncanny about knowing the occupant would never return, would never again brew tea in the blue-tendrilled pot on the stove, would never wash the cup in the sink, would never eat the dried lentils, beans, rice, bulgur, almonds, and mint rowed neatly in jars.
The bedroom was simple. A low bed platform faced a sliding door closet. Next to the bed was a little table, on which sat a lamp and a small book bound in black hardcover. A piece of sheer fabric billowed from the ceiling to soften an overhead light. Curtains of the same material covered a back window.
“This is beautiful,” Jenny gushed. She had picked up a scarf draped over a chair in front of a vanity. A handful of bottles of perfume, lotion, and almond oil sat on its shelf. She shook the scarf into a square to admire the pattern.
Then, as if it was crawling with bugs, she dropped it. “Let’s get what we came for. I don’t feel right being here.”
“Besides, we don’t want that manager giving us a hard time,” said Fay, sliding open a closet door. She did a double take. “So this is where Sheila threw all her clutter!”
We left Fay in the bedroom and went back through the living room to the small den. It was strewn with books, journals, and file folders. A computer desk was piled with documents. I sat down and turned on the computer. Nothing happened. It sat there dead for a minute before I wriggled under the desk to take a look at the CPU. The cover was loose and a hole in the tower gaped at me.
I called to Jenny, then dragged the tower out a little and turned it to show her. “Someone removed Sheila’s hard drive. The LifeScience guy. Had to be.”
“He said he needed a presentation. It must have been on her hard drive.”
“Maybe. But I’d like to have it explained.” I had a growing feeling that Sheila’s place had been raked over. But why?
“Don’t forget why we’re here, Bill.” Jenny opened a drawer in the desk. Almost immediately she plucked a red address book from the top drawer. She turned to H.
“Here we go.” She jotted down Sheila’s parents’ numbers. I looked through the rest of the H’s with her. No sign of Abe.
“I know,” Jenny said. She turned to A. There it was.
“Of course,” I said. “That was probably why Perkins didn’t find it in her organizer, either.”
Jenny wrote down Abe’s information. “He’s based in Cairo now.”
“Look for one more number,” I requested. “The name of Sheila’s doctor. Her allergist, in particular.”
Jenny sat in the rocker and leafed through the address book. In the meantime, I checked the drawers for disks. Either she didn’t have any or they’d been cleaned out. A zip drive sat on the desk, so the former seemed unlikely.
I sifted through the items strewn on the table and floor. A lot of them were professional journals with articles on transgenic animals, immunology, and bioinformatics. There were also a number of reprints about subjects like interleukins, apoptosis, and laboratory mice, with sections highlighted in yellow.
I got up and looked through the bookshelf. A knock came at the front door.
“The manager,” I said.
“I found Sheila’s allergist,” Jenny said. She took down a number, put the address book back in the desk, and went out. I told her I’d be right there.