Knockout Mouse Read online

  “Sheila may have ingested or somehow got the stuff that produced anaphylactic shock that night. That doesn’t mean she got it here. I’ll tell you what. Let’s review her last night step by step. Does anyone know what else Sheila did that day?”

  “She left work early,” Abe said. “Doug Englehart and others confirm she departed around 4:30.”

  “She arrived here at about seven. I also happen to know she was in a parking lot at Kumar Biotechnics around six.”

  Both Abe and George Harros looked at me in surprise. “Why didn’t you tell us?” Abe burst.

  I let a long stare sink in. “At what point did you give me the opportunity?”

  “The more I hear you talk, the less I like,” Harros rumbled. “But go on, take some more rope.”

  “Sheila was nervous about something in that parking lot. It’s shared by two companies that are bidding for a contract with LifeScience. She must have been there for work.”

  Abe shook his head. “No. Dugan and Englehart said nothing was on her agenda.”

  I remembered Sheila’s startled look when I turned the camera on her. I wondered if, when I looked at the tape, I’d find Neil Dugan lurking in the background. “Anyway, the next time I saw Sheila was when I let her in here around seven.”

  “So you were the last person to see her in the lot and the first when she got here?” Abe made it sound incriminating.

  “I’m sure someone saw her somewhere in between. I myself was talking to Gregory Alton, the CEO of BioVerge. You can check on it.”

  “We will,” Harros assured me. “Now, the dinner party. Fay has told us what was on the menu. But we’d like to hear your version, Jenny. Tell us precisely who provided what item.”

  Jenny was on the step between the dining room and living room, her chin cupped in her hand. She looked like a captured villager brought before an inquiring colonel.

  She listed, in a careful voice, what went into the dinner. She had bought the salmon at the Fish Market on El Camino. Potatoes, dill, and green beans had come from the Gilman Street farmers’ market. Fay had gotten the cheeses. Marion brought mozzarella and basil for the salad, and Sheila herself brought tomatoes. Another couple provided ice cream and berries for dessert. Various guests brought wine.

  “So you were allegedly throwing this party with Fay, yet you bought most of the ingredients yourself?” Harros asked.

  “Fay was supposed to share the cost with me. She did help cook.”

  Fay recrossed her legs. “During the party, Bill’s friend Wes tried to pick up Sheila. I guess she told him to get lost. Bill ended up talking to Sheila during the entire dinner. I don’t think Jenny liked that.”

  “Excuse me?” Jenny objected.

  Harros held up his hand. “Marion has confirmed this. Now let’s move on. What did Sheila eat and drink?”

  I repeated the list that Jenny had just recited. “She ate and drank the same things the rest of us did.”

  “But you noticed Sheila was unwell,” Harros said.

  “Her eyes became red and swollen. She said it was just hay fever. She excused herself and went into the bathroom. I went to help Jenny in the kitchen. When I came out, Sheila had left.”

  “So again, you were the last to talk to her.”

  “No. Fay and Sheila had an argument while Sheila was getting her coat. Marion saw it.”

  “Fay has assured us it was insignificant. Marion concurs.”

  Fay knitted her brows innocently at me.

  I said to Harros, “Are you aware that Fay and Sheila were both pursuing a guy named Simon? And that Simon was doing his best to win Sheila back?”

  Harros got a hard little twinkle in his eye. “And how is it that you know this?”

  He had me there. There was no point in denying the diary. We were the ones who’d given it to him, after all. “I’ve been trying to figure out what happened to Sheila, just like you.”

  Harros’s twinkle turned into a small, satisfied smile. “Let me get this straight. You had talked with my daughter all night about something you’ve yet to disclose. You saw she was feeling unwell, yet did nothing. Then, once you saw for yourself that she was dead in the morgue, you broke into her apartment and stole her diary. But first you cleaned your kitchen in order to remove incriminating foodstuffs.”

  “That was Fay’s idea!” Jenny objected. “If anyone had a reason to hurt Sheila, it was Fay!”

  Harros shook his head. “No, it’s your role in this, Mr. Damen, as well as Miss Ingersoll’s, that needs to be explained.”

  I began to see how it was with him. He was like a film director who already saw the whole picture in his head. It would not change, even if none of the actors fit their roles. “Fay and Jenny mutually decided to clean the kitchen,” I said. “It was a natural, and innocent, reaction. Fay was the one who knew where Sheila’s apartment keys were hidden. Fay was the one who stole the diary from Sheila’s bedside. We took it out of her bag.”

  Fay’s hands were folded like a perfect lady. “I wanted to make sure you got it, Mr. Harros. Bill said Sheila’s computer had been broken into. I was worried the diary might be taken, too.”

  “Someone had been in the apartment before us,” I said. “I’m certain the manager will identify the man as Neil Dugan of LifeScience. He took Sheila’s hard drive.”

  “Again. You said someone took the hard drive. Yet you did not allow Fay to see to confirm. That someone could have been you.”

  “Dugan as much as admitted it was him,” I said.

  “He did no such thing. Even so, he has a legitimate claim to her work. The company is at a crucial juncture.”

  “I’ll say it is.” I took a small leap of speculation. “Sheila had uncovered serious problems. Neil Dugan was trying to make sure she didn’t reveal them. If someone did—I mean, if Sheila’s death wasn’t accidental, Dugan is the man to look at.”

  Harros consulted his watch. “He’ll be here in ten minutes. You may elaborate at that time.”

  My brain did a little somersault. Dugan had gotten the inside track with the Harroses already. Dugan, Fay, and Marion had all thrown in with them. I could see why the first two did, but not Marion.

  “Until now, we had assumed Sheila’s death was an accident, albeit not without culpability,” Harros went on. “We assumed you and Jennifer were guilty of criminal negligence in the first place, and covering up in the second. But your own words lead me to suspect otherwise. Perhaps you didn’t mean to let slip that she did not die by chance. But here you clean up evidence. You violate her privacy. Then you point the finger at others. Fay. Miss Roos. Mr. Dugan.”

  A voice was reading me my rights in my head. Anything I said was being used against me. But so would silence. “I understand your grief, Mr. Harros. I understand the urge to blame someone. But you’re reaching far beyond reason. What possible motive could we have?”

  “We don’t know what you were doing in that parking lot before the dinner party,” he shot back. “We don’t know what you talked to my daughter about all night. We have only your word that you did not know her before. Perhaps you are involved in ways we have not discovered yet. Or perhaps the motive is not yours. Perhaps it is Jennifer’s, and the motive is jealousy.”

  “Read the diary,” I blurted. “You won’t see my name.”

  “Not on the pages that still exist. But you ripped out some pages, didn’t you?”

  I shook my head. It all felt like a dream. “No. This is ridiculous.” It was amazing how weak the truth sounded.

  The doorbell rang. Everyone looked at one another. I forgot, for a moment, whose house we were in. Then I went to get the door.

  Neil Dugan stood there, teeth exposed in a wolflike smile. My eyes did not leave his as I stood aside to let him in. He went directly to the kitchen.

  The two men were tying up their garbage bags. Dugan’s tone with them was cheerful and familiar. My stomach sank a little further. What if Dugan and Harros had hired the PIs together?

  “We’
re done here,” said the sand-freckled one. I assumed he was Pratt. “We’ll get you a report by the weekend, Mr. Dugan.”

  “Tomorrow, please,” Dugan said. He gave Pratt a little pat on the back as he and the second man went to the door. I locked it behind them, and we proceeded to the living room. Abe and George Harros had warm handshakes for Dugan. He gave Fay a little bow and a wink and took a seat next to her.

  “We were just discussing the diary,” Harros said. I was standing next to Jenny, who’d squished herself to the edge of the step. Harros fixed his stony eyes on me and commanded, “Give Mr. Dugan the missing diary pages.”

  “You’re letting him read your daughter’s diary?”

  “He has intellectual property concerns.” Harros’s voice was firm, as repeating a reprimand to a child. “He will have access to Sheila’s notebooks and any other potential LifeScience IP.”

  I couldn’t keep the desperation out of my voice. “That’s exactly the wrong thing to do. Anyway, I don’t have any diary pages, missing or otherwise.”

  Dugan tsked. “You expect us to believe that?”

  I nearly made a jump for him, and everyone could see it. My pulse raced. I unclenched my fists and forced myself to take a deep breath. Fighting to control my voice, I said, “You transferred her out of the MC124 program, Mr. Dugan. It’s not her work you want. It’s what she knew and you didn’t want her to know. What she was about to expose.”

  Dugan drew himself up. “You have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “Sheila was not the only one. There’s at least one other person who knows about it, isn’t there?” Saying so was a real risk. But I needed to know if such a person existed, and if Dugan knew she existed. If she did, I thought it had to be Karen Harper, the woman Sheila had an appointment with before the dinner party. Her name had also appeared in the diary.

  Dugan’s expression did not shift at all. But I could see his mind working. He didn’t know who I meant, but he’d be hunting right away. I wished even harder that Harros would not let him read the diary.

  Harros directed a little harrumph at me. His trust of Dugan appeared to know no bounds. But Abe had been tapping his finger against his nose as I’d spoken. “What about that, Mr. Dugan? There are some things in the diary—”

  “Employees can make mistakes with company IP. Inadvertently, I assure you, Abe. No serious wrongdoing on Sheila’s part. Nevertheless, in addition to finding any unreported research on the program, I also need to make certain security was not compromised.”

  Mr. Harros straightened. “Neil, I give you my assurance Sheila would have done nothing to harm your company deliberately. But she was not the most, let us say, practical woman in the world. It was ideas, knowledge that excited her. She loved to share it, but she never would have done so in an improper way—not on purpose.”

  “My thoughts exactly.” Dugan’s voice was practically a coo.

  Harros clapped his hands to his knees. “Let’s bring this to a close. We’ve learned a great deal here today. Now, Bill, there’s one more question I’d like to ask.”

  I leaned against the archway and folded my arms.

  “What else haven’t you told us? What else did you steal from my daughter’s apartment?”

  “Nothing.” My answer was quick and dismissive.

  “Then we’re done.” Mr. Harros exhaled loudly and pushed himself to his feet. Abe followed, then Dugan and Fay, like a row of ducklings. Jenny and I went to the entryway to show them out.

  “Wait a minute,” I said as they filed toward the door.

  They turned with a certain eagerness, as if to receive some kind of confession. “We never finished the timeline. What happened after Sheila got in her car? There’s a big hole there.”

  “That’s what we’d like to know, Bill,” Abe responded. “Of course, once Fay left, we don’t know what you and Jenny did. Sheila was found in her car on Page Mill Road.”

  The insinuation didn’t deserve a response. “Page Mill is between her apartment and the hospital.”

  “Yes. The pathologist put time of death after midnight. That leaves about enough time for her to have gone home, searched for epinephrine, and then driven part of the way to the hospital. That makes it a near certainty she received the toxin here. If something did happen after the party, we’ll soon have witnesses. The police are investigating. We ourselves have put up posters in the area asking people to come forward.”

  “The police were here, Bill,” Jenny said in a quiet voice. “They asked me questions for about twenty minutes.” She shot a look at Harros. “They were very nice to me.”

  “They’re not taking it seriously enough,” Harros declared. “But they will. Once they see the evidence we’ve collected today.”

  “Whatever you found in the kitchen will be useless,” I said. “The analysis will be biased. You should have let the police do it.”

  “Pratt’s reputation will be sufficient,” Harros sniffed.

  Dugan had already opened the door for Fay. Abe was about to follow them out. I wanted to take one last stab. The younger Harros had shown a small gleam of independence. “Abe, take a minute to think clearly about the facts. Don’t you see what’s happening? Dugan is using you.”

  Abe’s eyes flashed mock gratitude. “Do you really think a man in his position would harm Sheila, with all he has to lose? Just come clean with us, Bill. It’ll be better in the long run.”

  I stared a hole through the middle of his forehead. “I thought doctors waited until all the tests were in to make a diagnosis.”

  “By the way,” Abe added, as if playing a trump card, “the autopsy report showed needle puncture marks in Sheila’s arm. Injections.” His gaze shifted to Jenny. “You might want to think about that.”

  George Harros bent slightly at the waist and extended a hand to Jenny. “I thank you for your hospitality.” He turned to me. “And I suggest you follow some advice. Don’t take any trips.”

  I held the door open for him, but didn’t bother to respond. His words had no meaning to me anymore. Abe’s mention of the injections in Sheila’s arm were far more important. I wanted to know who’d administered them and what was in them.

  Jenny wouldn’t take Mr. Harros’s hand either. Instead, she stood with her arms folded across her chest, looked him in the eye, and said, “You have one very fucking weird way of mourning your daughter.”

  The venom in her voice took us all by surprise. But I felt some pleasure in watching the rage tremble and spread over Harros’s face. I slammed the door behind him.

  18

  I gave myself a minute at the door to cool off, then took a tour of the area around Jenny’s apartment to make sure all of our guests really had left. When I came back inside, Jenny was sitting on the couch, legs crossed, staring daggers of spite at her cream curtains.

  “Why are they like that?” she demanded.

  “I guess the landlord felt safe with a neutral color.”

  “No, those people! Why are they against us? What did we ever do to them?”

  I sat next to her. “Nothing, Jen. They’ve decided to see the situation in a certain way. They’re fixated on their own goals, and they see others as either helping them or getting in their way. If you don’t help them, you’re their enemy.”

  “That’s so unfair.”

  “Well, I intend to get in their way a little more.” I looked at my watch. “I’ve got a meeting with Marion at the Brentwood.”

  Jenny’s foot wiggled madly. “Great. Leave me here alone. Why didn’t you toss their self-righteous asses on the street?”

  “If we were guilty, that would have been a logical thing to do. But we need to stay in the game. Stay on some kind of speaking terms with Harros. Otherwise Dugan’s got free rein.”

  “It’s not a game. It’s my life. My reputation.”

  “You’re right. It’s not a game.”

  “So what am I supposed to do, sit around and wait for those two belly-floppers who ransacked my kit
chen to come back?”

  “You could come with me to see Marion. Or maybe you need a break from this business. You could go up to your mother’s house in Sacramento. You’d be safe up there.”

  Jenny lifted her chin. “I might do that.”

  It didn’t sound like a bad idea to me, either. The whole business was wearing on her. I got the feeling she’d prefer that I just drop it, which was not going to happen.

  She picked up the remote and switched on the TV, making a point of ignoring me. I said good-bye and took a slow walk to the Scout, wondering if her real peeve didn’t still come down to my continuing failure to move in with her.

  » » » » »

  The Brentwood Lodge, halfway between Palo Alto and the city, was a monument to the grand era of ersatz elegant American dining. The entryway and great hearth were built of flagstones laid atop one another. A dark oak counter made a big undulating sweep in front of the bar. A fire roared in the hearth. The bar had a small stage in one corner and plenty of room for dancing to the old tunes, now belted out on Saturday nights by a guy in a velvet jacket with a portable synthesizer. The restaurant served old favorites like beef burgundy and crab à la king. The bow-tied waiters and their shoe-polish hair were monuments in themselves.

  I put on a little double take when I came upon Wes and Marion at a table in the bar. Wes was rotating his beer glass in nervous circles. He pressed forward in his seat as if trying to get some difficult words out. Marion sipped a drink with an umbrella. Her head was erect, her neck and shoulders draped artfully with a checked scarf.

  Wes leaned back and stretched his arms with relief. “Bill! What are you doing here?”

  “Meeting Jenny. Wow, what a surprise!”

  I pulled an imitation leather chair right up to their table. Marion turned a briny eye on me. I sat down anyway. I signalled to the cocktail waitress, ordered a Manhattan, and beamed at Wes and Marion with a whaddya-know smile.

  Marion turned away from me and tightened the scarf on her shoulders. “Finish what you were telling me, Wes.”