About Face (18 page)

“How do I get out!” he demanded of a seamstress.

She pointed to an indistinct place behind some stacked wardrobe boxes. He raced in that direction. I grabbed a couple of shirts on my way after him and wound them around my forearm. When I got to the wardrobe boxes, I threw myself into them, toppling the stack, hoping they'd bring him down.

As I picked my way through the fallen boxes, I saw a metal door with an alarmed exit handle. There was movement near the door. Brendon's head emerged from under a pile of dresses that had dumped from a box. He had a stubborn jutting jaw and wide, piercing eyes. His blond hair had fallen across his forehead.

“Stay out of this!” he yelled, brandishing the shears.

He was struggling to get to his feet. I kept coming at him. He whipped his arms free and flung the shears at me like a knife. I raised my forearm. The shears rotated once and struck, point first, into the material wrapped around my arm.

I jumped for him as he got up and brought him back down among the dresses. His black boots kicked at me. I got hold of one, then the other, and raised them high in the air.

“Why are you here?” I demanded.

“Stay out of it!”

He writhed to escape my grip, his hands grasping for my ankles. I kicked him as hard as I could in the ribs, twice. The pain rocketed up through my foot, but the effect on him was greater. He coughed, gasped for breath, and stopped his struggle.

“Tell me what you want,” I said, gasping myself. “You're Alissa's boyfriend, aren't you?”

He glared at me, then a mocking smile crossed his face. “Yeah.” The words came out staccato, punctuated by hard breaths. “That's it. I'm in love with her. That's right.”

“Tell me!” I said, shaking his legs. “I know who you are. You came to Rod's house a few days before he was killed.”

Voices sounded behind me. Hands grabbed me by the shoulders and forced me to let go of Brendon. His feet hit the floor. “Watch out you're not next,” he said.

“Grab him,” I said to the security staff. “He attacked a customer.”

But I was in their way and so were the boxes. They must have assumed he wouldn't go out the alarmed door. Brendon got casually to his feet, appearing to have given up the chase. His smile still mocked me as he turned and, in one quick motion, pushed open the door. The alarm shrieked. He disappeared down the fire escape.

I had a strange moment
when I woke up the next morning, Monday. Images of the garments from the store—the cuts and colors, the racks and hangers—and Erika, her golden hair, the way her mouth playfully formed words, the light streaming through the Rotunda's glass dome, came back to me. And I thought to myself: Wait until Rod hears about this. He'll have some amusing observation to offer.

And then the memory of his death slammed back into me. So did the image of Brendon's sneer and the scissors catapulting toward me. He'd escaped, leaving Erika and me to make explanations to the store security people. They'd apologized, then awarded me the black pants I was still wearing as a consolation prize. Erika left quickly after that, promising to tell more about Brendon by phone today.

So I would have to relate the story instead to Mike Riley, my new boss. Algoplex had a brisk air this morning, the air of work to be done. I sensed a desperation under the briskness. When I found Mike in his office, I asked him how the sessions with Sylvain had gone over the weekend.

“We're in trouble, Bill,” he said. “It's just as I thought. They were nice about the key-man at first, but now they're lowering the boom.”

I sat myself down in a leather chair. “They want to pull out?”

“That's not how they put it. They claim Algoplex still has promise, but it lost 30 percent of its value when Rod died. Not only do they want that 30 percent, they want to push our peformance targets forward. They could end up with outright control. Plus, in addition to installing their own CFO, they're telling me we have to bring on a hotshot engineer they've found as CTO because we've got no one qualified to promote from within.”

“And the key-man clause gives them the power to do all of this.”

“The only surprise is they haven't walked already. This hotshot claims he's looked at our software and it's not powerful enough to do the simulations we promised. I don't see how he could have figured that out so fast.”

“Unless Sylvain had it for longer than we think,” I said. “If Alissa stole files from Rod, then Rupert could have passed them to Sylvain weeks ago.”

“Jesus. This is getting worse and worse. I'm not going to give in, Bill.”

“You're counting on Rod's insurance money to pull you through if Sylvain dissolves the deal?”

“I was.” Mike was marching back and forth in front of me. I wondered if he'd picked up the habit from Rod. But his pacing was springy and aggressive, while Rod's had been nervous and preoccupied. “Sylvain tried to shoot that down, too. They said the insurance company will take a good long look at the circumstances of Rod's death. Yeah, they've got me bent over, all right.”

“What are your choices now?”

Mike sat back down at his desk and bounced a pencil on its eraser. “I can accept their terms, which I won't. I can hope for
the insurance money, which may take too long. I can try to raise more from Rod's private investors, but one of them is already making noises about cashing out—to Sylvain, of course.” He stopped and stared at me. “So I don't know, Bill. My other option is to punt. The company goes bankrupt and Sylvain ends up with the lion's share of the assets, anyway. I need you to find out what happened to Rod. Soon.”

“They're taking full advantage of Rod's death. Almost like they knew it was coming.”

Mike stopped and gave me a curious look. “You're kidding, right?”

I didn't reply. I'd wanted to see how it sounded.

“I can't picture it. I know these guys, Bill, I know how they play. They're tough, they'll bite and kick in the scrum, but actual murder? No way.”

“What about Trisha Evans? She's in bed with Sylvain. In fact, it looked to me like she was the one holding the whip.”

“Maybe Trisha's got something on them. Something they'd rather their families not know about.”

“Maybe. But exactly how wide are they going to open their checkbooks to her? Never mind—that's for me to find out. Next time you meet with the Sylvain guys, I want you to bug them about SG. Tell me how they respond.”

Mike nodded. “Will do. Did you get a chance to talk to Detective Coharie?”

“No,” I said, and told him about my fruitless visit to the station on Saturday.

“I guess they don't want to have to answer every question and pursue every speculation from friends and relatives,” Mike said. “But hey, the detective told me something very strange this morning. He said that knife in Rod's hand might
not be the one that killed him. The blade didn't match with the wound.”

“That ought to take care of their suicide theory. Did you say that to Coharie?”

“Yes, but not exactly in that tone. Don't take this the wrong way, Bill, but it might not help for you to barge into places like you do. That Sylvain dinner Friday night, for instance. It may have contributed to their putting the screws to us. Keep your investigation low-key.”

“Sure, Mike. I'd hate to offend Rod's killers.”

Mike rearranged the objects on his desk, as if trying to solve some kind of Rubik's cube. “Come on, play fair. You know I want them as much as you do. Let's kick their butts if Trisha or Sylvain are the ones. That reminds me, I forgot to mention something else. Sylvain wants Algoplex's name changed. They want a more bio-oriented name. That kills me. Why not just spit on Rod's grave?”

“No need,” I answered. “They're the ones who dug it.”

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Upon further reflection, Mike had a point. As much as I wanted to throw an accusation in someone's face, I didn't know whose face to aim at. Nor did I have details to back up my conclusions. I'd have to go the polite route. It was usually a better way to get information if you lacked the leverage of search warrants and subpoenas.

I assumed I'd get nothing from Trisha and Rupert Evans, so I went to Plush Biologics. It was close to noon. The receptionist was a little nicer to me this time, but said Ellen Quong wasn't at her desk. I asked the receptionist to page her. Ellen was in the lab. I said it was urgent. A technician came to escort me inside.

The one-story building was a maze of partitions and corridors. The labs were in the back, on the opposite side from Connie's executive office. Ellen was in her lab coat and goggles. I was required to put on the same outfit before I could go in to the lab. She showed me some tissue in a shallow plastic container with wells. “It's looking fresh, don't you think?” she said.

“Is that skin?” It looked like a thin sheet of pinkish-beige Swiss cheese.

“Yes, we use it to test compounds we're developing.”

I wanted to ask her a lot of things, but right now the first question that came to mind was, “Where do you get skin like that?”

“A lot of it's harvested from cadavers. Nice thigh and back pieces, undamaged by sun or cosmetics.” She pointed at a gray device that looked like an oversize razor with a thick electric cord and a single large blade. “You use a dermatome to peel it off.”

I hefted it. It was heavy. “You get all your skin this way?”

“We use a lot of pig skin, of course. And new sources for dermal cells are popping up. Researchers in Wisconsin came upon an immortal cell line, a population of keratinocytes in a petri dish that just keeps stratifying and multiplying into normal skin. It's become quite a business for them. The line originated with a discarded foreskin. An especially happy one, I guess.”

A crawly feeling came over my own skin. “Before or after it was cut off?”

“I believe the mutation happened in the dish, so—after.”

“Sorry, Ellen, but that's weird.”

She let out one of her booming laughs. “Lots of things like this are going on in the dermal-replacement field. Skin is being grown for burn and wound victims, as I'm sure you know. One company is using cadaver skin, another is growing artificial skin
from bovine collagen. Growth factors are being engineered. Nipples are being made in the lab, too. They're constructed from pig ear ligaments. Whole breasts are next, using the woman's own fat cells. They can be grown right on site in the body.”

“For women who've had mastectomies?”

“Right. But of course, there's also the cosmetic market. The company thinks they can sell two hundred fifty thousand a year. Don't worry, you guys aren't being left behind: Scientists at Harvard are growing rabbit penises in the lab. The skin's the easy part, it's the corpus cavernosum that's hard. But they succeeded by growing the cells in a collagen matrix. Apparently the reconstructed thing's fairly functional.”

I watched her wrap the skin and put it back in the refrigerator. “It's easy to forget that skin is an organ like any other,” I said. “You identify with it so much.”

“We'd look kind of creepy without it. I suppose muscle tone would become even more important than it is now. You know, people are working on enhancements for IGF-1, the gene that regulates muscle growth. I don't know how the Olympics are going to test for that.” She put her hands on her hips and looked around the lab. It was similar to other biotech labs I'd seen, with spectrophotometers, a gas chromatograph, and a clutter of beakers, tubes, autoclaves, balances, mixers, viscometers, and Rotovapors spread across the benches. “I'd love to sit around and chat with you, Bill, but I suppose I should ask what you're here for.”

“I have some questions. Can we go to your office?”

We left our lab coats and goggles by the door and went into Ellen's office. It was a practical place, taken up mostly with books, journals, and a few family photographs. I closed the door, then sat across from her at her desk. “It's confidential.”

She looked at the door in mock alarm and said, “Don't tell me. You've got a crush on Mrs. Plush. Sorry, she's taken.”

I laughed. “Did she say anything about me to you?” When Ellen shook her head, I said, “I want to ask you about Sylvain Partners. What can you tell me?”

She spread her hands. “They've got the bags of money and they give some of them to us. That's the extent of my knowledge. Too much else on my plate.”

“Have you heard of an outfit called Silicon Glamour? Trisha and Rupert Evans run it. They provide dates for executives. Alissa worked for them.”

“Nope. I've got all the dates I need with my husband and daughter and dog.”

“They're connected to Sylvain somehow. You probably know that Rod had a key-man clause in the deal with Sylvain and Plush. With Rod gone, Sylvain is threatening to take the money-bags away.”

“I apologize, I shouldn't be joking around. I suppose you can't blame them for worrying about the future without Rod. But it would be a mistake for us to pull out of the deal. I need that technology right now to develop the next Eternaderm, the one that will work on collagen. It could blow tretinoin away.”

“Well, the whole deal with Sylvain may fall apart. They're trying to use Rod's death to take control of the company.”

“I'm going to speak to Ronald and Connie,” Ellen said. “If we lose the deal, we'll lose months in our development cycle. You know, it seems to me we had a similar battle with Sylvain here at Plush. During our last round of funding, come to think of it— a fight about equity ownership. I wish I could tell you the details. Like I said, I'm busy with my skin.”

“Who did they battle with, Dr. Plush?”

“Yes, Ronald was quite steamed, as I recall. His pate turned a brilliant red. Connie was the one on the front lines, though.”