Black Water

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

Dr. Sean Moss lived in a bashful mansion overlooking the Pacific at La Jolla. It was redwood and smoked glass, horizontal layers hugging the hillside, trying to look inconspicuous. The winding driveway was concrete, lined with Torrey pines and breeze-swayed grasses.

The voice from the gate speaker was youthful and high-pitched: "Yeah?"

"Detectives Rayborn and Zamorra, OCSD. We want to ask some questions about Gwen."

"You didn't make an appointment."

"You didn't answer your phone. Open the gate, Doctor, we don't have all day."

"This is not cool."

But the gate shuddered and began its slow roll across the concrete.

Beyond the gate the lot was level. Merci saw the tennis court, the helipad, the rock-climbing arena, the swimming pool with a ten-meter board, the sand volleyball court complete with a sunning beach with bright yellow umbrellas. These playing areas were connected to each other by lawns of thick green grass. Merci thought Ryan Dawes would probably wet his extreme shorts just seeing Sean Moss's setup. She wondered why men were slow to give up boyhood while girls raced to be women. The house was bigger than it looked from down the drive, segmented into three stories that rose and dipped with the hill face. There were decks and more yellow umbrellas, clay pots of tropical plants the rails. Merci parked near the volleyball court and they walked up gravel trail bordered by the dense damp grass.

The front door was enormous and slotted with windows of tinted glass. One side of it opened and a skinny young man in shorts, a bright shirt and clunky sandals with ankle straps came to the front of the porch. He looked down at them. His hair was thick and straight, hanging down from the top of his head, then cut straight across his forehead and ears, as if the barber had used a mixing bowl as a template. His legs were dark and bony.

"I'm Sergeant Rayborn and this is Sergeant Zamorra. Are you Dr. Moss?"

"Yes. I only have like ten minutes."

"You young hotshots are always in a hurry," said Rayborn. "What are you a doctor of, anyway?"

"Organic chemistry." Moss smiled either boyishly or nervously and let them into his house.

The entryway was towering, three stories to the skylights, Rayborn guessed. Lacquered redwood floors, huge redwood stanchions rising to the distant ceiling. Moss lifted the lid of what looked like an old steamer trunk.

"Shoes, please."

They sat on a redwood bench along the entryway wall and took off their shoes. Moss kept his sandals on. Merci looked to the opposite wall, where shining, colorful surfboards rose in ranks of six across. She padded across to look closer at the writing on them: Wardy, Greg Noll, Hobie, Velzy, Dewey Weber.

"Surf up today?" she asked.

"It's a weak south. Trestles was okay."

Sean Moss, bowlegged as a bull rider, led them through to the kitchen that was done up in new stainless appliances and white everything else. Shiny blond wood floor. An island work table with a checkerboard hardwood top. He opened a wooden slider that led outside a deck, offering them chairs at a long redwood table under a yellow umbrella..

Moss sat with his back to the sea, giving them the ocean view. He slipped on a pair of thin silver sunglasses that, with the bowl haircut, gave him a mushroom-from-outer-space look. He had a neat goatee.

"We think Gwen Wildcraft might have gotten herself into some hot water at OrganiVen," said Merci.

Moss looked at her and said nothing.

"Any thoughts on that?" Zamorra asked.

"Gwen and her husband bought some shares during our friends-and-family offering, then she became involved in the company. Really liked the idea of fighting cancer. She brought in over a quarter of a million in start-up money. We offered her hourly compensation, but she took her pay in stock. You don't think her work with OrganiVen had anything to do with her murder, do you?"

"It had everything to do with it," said Merci. "Who was the friend who got them in?"

"A stockbroker named Trent Gentry. I mean, the 'friends' definition was loose. I went to school with Trent, and he was vouching for the Wildcrafts."

Rayborn wrote. "Tell us about SunCo."

Moss had a tight mouth and a hard jaw. With the sunglasses he was hard to read. "Well," he said, "we graduated from friends and family to small venture capital companies, and SunCo was one of the first to come to us."

Moss sat back, crossed his arms over his bright yellow Hawaiian shirt.

"Did you deal with Sonny Charles and Al Apin?"

He nodded.

"How much did they come in for?"

"They put up roughly one million dollars."

"Friends-and-family rates?"

"Slightly higher. I think we were up to a dollar a share by then."

"What did you think when Sistel dumped the OrganiVen division yesterday?"

"It surprised me."

"They'd talked to you about the venom supply, though, the cerastes serum?"

Moss gulped. "Yeah."

"Dr. Moss," said Zamorra, "take off your glasses and talk to us. We're trying to find out who murdered your friend Gwen. We don’t really care if you were short of sidewinders, except in how that relates to Mrs. Wildcraft."

He gave a small nod and took off the glasses. Glanced at Rayborn with truculent sun-bleached blue eyes. He looked about eighteen but Merci knew he was twenty-eight.

"Yeah. Okay. It's been almost a year since we said adios to SunCo," he said. "When Sistel bought us out, that was the end of those dudes. I mean, I didn't have to deal with them anymore."

"You may have parted ways with Sonny and AI, but you saw them last week, right? That's our information, anyway."

"Why would you think that?" he asked faintly.

"Look, Moss," said Zamorra, "we can go back to Santa Ana and sit you down in an interview room with a fake mirror, a videotape running and a cup of really bad coffee. You want to do it that way, fine. We're going back there anyway, so we'd be happy to give you a ride."

"No, no. Not really."

"Then cut the bullshit and talk."

Dr. Moss looked at them resentfully, then sighed and looked down at the table. "Yeah. I saw Sonny and AI on Monday. The day before Gwen was killed."

"Tell us about that."

"They just showed up here. Parked on the grass. They wanted to remind me that they had nothing to do with reorganizing our research statistics to… minimize the cerastes problem. That was if there was any reorganizing done at all. They wanted me to know that if Sistel or the FTC started asking questions about SunCo's part in the R and D of MiraVen, to leave them out of that discussion."

"Or what?" asked Merci.

"Or they'd cut out my tongue and replace it with my balls."

"Direct quote?"

"Word for word, minus the Russian accent."

"Who said that?"

"AI. That was pure AI, once you got to know him."

Rayborn made sure she had the words right in her blue notebook. She underlined them, but there was no reason to write CK next to a quote like that.

"Dr. Moss, describe the cerastes problem," she said.

"Fairly simple. Viper venom is mainly hemotoxic, it destroys blood and tissue. But it also has neurotoxic components, which means it also attacks the nervous system. The key to MiraVen wasn't so much the way it attacked cancerous cells, but the process that allowed us to use sufficient levels to destroy the cells almost instantly. That's important in surgery, for obvious reasons. The riddle was, how do you kill the malignancy quickly but spare the healthy cells? The solution was actually my idea. I'd read about the human antivenin process, where horses are injected with low doses-then increasingly higher doses- of venom. Then, when their immune systems had reached a certain strength, their blood was then taken and used to create antivenin for humans. When a human is envenomed by snakebite, then administered the horse blood serum, the venom is very quickly neutralized. Our key was developing a strong immunity in the test subjects before introducing the venom to the lesion. That way, the collateral damage was minimized, the side effects were small and the tumorous cells were destroyed, like, extremely quickly. But here's the deal-you don't want to immunize mammals with high levels of neurotoxic venom because it's too dangerous. And you don't want neuro levels too low, or the overall effect on the lesion-for reasons I still don't understand-isn't sufficient. So the right neuro-hemo mix, that was the goal.

Crotalus cerastes had the right proportions. But it's hard to get. We tried to collect it, breed it, replicate it and synthesize it. I just couldn't get the results. I thought a cloning program might work. Millions of dollars, to do that. We left that to Sistel."

"Without really spelling out the problem ahead of time."

"Right."

"Sonny and Al made you rewrite the promotional literature and revamp the research to hide that problem."

"Well… no, not exactly. We just omitted the species cerastes from the genus

Crotalus.

Sistel never thought to get down to that level of taxonomy."

"Until a couple of months ago."

"I guess."

"Why did you do what SunCo asked? You knew it was at least misleading, possibly illegal."

"Exactly."

"Then why? The tongue thing again?"

"They were more subtle back then. They said it had to do with hundreds of millions of dollars."

"And they were right about that, weren't they?"

Moss nodded. "The thing is, I really believed that our harvesters would come through on a breeding program. We tried collecting enough sidewinders. We tried breeding them. We tried buying them. We tried every viper venom we could get our hands on to equal the cerastes reactions. We bought two hundred hand-collected eyelash vipers from Costa Rica to see how their serum would work. Too weak in terms of anaerobic capacity. We tried water moccasins from a snake farm in Florida. But the neurotoxins were high. I went out to the desert with our harvesters myself, to see if I'd have any luck finding the sidewinders. I stepped on a cholla cactus and had a minor heatstroke. What I'm saying is, the harder SunCo pushed us to adjust the test results the faster I tried to find a solution. I always thought I'd find that solution."

"But you agreed to keep quiet about the problem."

He sighed and nodded. "I can still make a legitimate case for the research, the way it was presented. I mean, it's kind of complicated but you can organize trials to emphasize or minimize-even exclude-certain variables. It's like… if you change the angles a little, you get the same amount of square footage, but in a different shape. I also think I could make a case for SunCo coercion. They threatened to report us for defrauding them unless we downplayed the serum problem enough to bring in the big, big money. They made physical threat, too."

"Such as?"

"Al dropped a tooth in one of my beakers in the lab one day. Rolled it out of a handkerchief. A silver amalgam filling. Meat and blood o: the root."

"What did he say?"

"Nothing."

Moss looked down at the backs of his hands.

"Then came CEIDNA, Trident, Brown Brothers," said Zamorra. "Around fifty-six million in venture capital."

"Yes."

"Bringing OrganiVen to the auction block at a cool four hundred million."

"Four ten, actually."

"What was your take?"

He looked at the table. "Twenty-eight."

"Twenty-eight at twenty-eight," said Zamorra. "Set for life."

"Exactly."

Zamorra, leaning forward: "Gwen didn't like the research redrafts, or the changes in the promo lit. She loved the idea of curing cancer. And she loved the idea of making some money at it. But she was wise to what Sonny and Al were doing."

"Yes," Moss said quietly.

"Dr. Moss," said Merci, "listen very carefully to this: we've got her e-mails to you. We've got your e-mails back to her. To us, she sounded ready to talk. She sounded capable of blowing the whistle on SunCo. To your knowledge, did she do that, or threaten to do that?"

Moss looked at her, then at Zamorra, then back at Rayborn. "I don't know."

"You must have seen that she was thinking about it."

"Yes. We became good friends."

"What did you tell her about SunCo? Did you encourage her, discourage her, what?"

"I told her that Charles and Apin were definitely not to be messed with. That we'd work out the problem. That she should be happy with the thousand percent return she made for herself and her husband and their friends and family. And pray the FTC doesn't open a probe. And if it did, to just say she didn't know there was any problem at all. Let them come to the founders. We were the ones who brought in SunCo. We were the ones who… fuckin' haired out when they got tough on us."

"I don't understand," said Rayborn. "Gwen knew early last that there was a supply problem. She e-mailed you about it in April. She knew SunCo was pushing for the cover-up. But she didn’t do anything. She played along, collected her money. Bought a nice house. A couple of nice new cars. Then, months after the deal, Sistel finds the problem, Sonny and Al hit the campaign trail. They threat you on Monday and kill Gwen on Tuesday. What did she do, Sean?

What did Gwen do?"

"Sonny and Al were afraid of an investigation. I don't know what their information was, or how they got it. But what did Gwen do?

I can't answer that. I don't know."

"When was the last time you talked to her?"

"Monday evening. I called to tell her about the visit."

"What did she say?"

"They'd talked to her that day, too. Told her to forget any irregularities she might have seen if anyone asked her about the cerastes problem. She laughed and badmouthed them."

"After they threatened you with a tongue-dick transplant, laughed?"

"I didn't tell her they said that."

And Rayborn began to understand. It came over her just fleetingly at first, like a cool draft in an old room. Then she understood it all at once as the truth broke over her in a cold wave.

"You didn't tell her much of anything, did you?"

"She never took them seriously. Not seriously enough, anyway. Funny Sonny and Al the Apeman, she called them. I… the total worst thing I've done in my life is I didn't impress upon her how dangerous those men were. I… believed that if Gwen knew that OrganiVen being eaten alive by Russian gangsters she'd head straight for the cops. She'd probably start with her own husband. So I… never came right out with what I thought of SunCo. I actually, maybe sort of covered for them a little. Told her they came from a different culture, to different way of doing things."

"So you let her discover it just a little at a time, figuring she'd in too deep financially to back out."

Moss was nodding again. "That's how they got me. It wasn't they came in and announced they were animals. They were actually quite knowledgeable and occasionally funny and charming. They put up more money than we'd ever seen. And I knew Gwen was going to get rich. I wanted the best for her."

"And you wanted her to see you as an honorable research scientist on the verge of a cancer treatment."

Dr. Sean Moss looked at Merci. She saw a look of painful nostalgia in his eyes. "I actually was that, once. I can almost remember it. I was relatively poor and honest and proud of myself and what I was doing."

He reached an accommodation with himself. "Yeah," he said. "In the beginning, that's what I was. Proud to be me, and in the same room as Gwen. I loved her. I don't mind admitting it. Never told her. Never told anyone. Never did anything about it, that way. I just loved her."

"But not enough to tell her she was working with gangsters."

"I couldn't admit I'd become a greedy coward."

"Oh, man," said Rayborn.

"Exactly," said Sean Moss.

Zamorra tapped the tabletop with his fingers and sat back. Moss looked at him then away, shaking his head.

"I was trying to warn her when I called," said Moss. "Not trying to get her killed."

"She was your warning, Moss."

"Exactly."

"Have you talked to Wright, Carlson and Monford?"

"Well, two of them. Sonny and Al looked them up, too. Told them what they told me. Cody's surfing down in Fiji. Man, I wish I was, too."

Merci looked out at the glistening ocean, at Sean Moss's private playground, at the gnarled Torrey pines winding their way down his drive.

"Tough it out right here, Sean," she said. "Be ready to take a stand, tell what you know. Show everybody you're not the gutless little dweeb you seem to be."