Part 37 (2/2)
”There's a number pad here. If we could only figure it out.”
Just below the k.n.o.b was a numerical code pad with ten b.u.t.tons lined up vertically. ”Try seven, five, four, zero.”
She punched the numbers, pushed the door open, and gave me an astonished look. ”How did you know that?”
”Isn't that your aunt's birthday?”
”Oh, you're a genius.” I stepped inside in front of her. ”Wait a minute. She wasn't born in July. She wasn't even born in 1940.”
”She wasn't?”
”No.”
”You have your cell phone?”
”Yes.”
”We get separated, go straight to the car and get out of Dodge. I'll call you later, and you can pick me up.”
”I'm going to stick with you.”
”No dice. We've already been over this. First sign of trouble: run.”
”Why don't we just both go to the car?”
”I'm telling you the way it's going to be.”
”Okay.”
”One more thing. When I'm gone-” She touched her fingers to my lips in an attempt to stop me. ”However it happens with me, I want you to open yourself up to the world. Marry if you find someone who you can love and who'll be a good father to the girls. I want you happy. I want the girls to have a family. They deserve it. You deserve it.”
”Oh, Jim.”
”Maybe after a couple of years you could shoot some air into my veins. You don't have to promise or anything, but it would be nice if I knew I wasn't going to spend four decades staring at a lightbulb thinking it was G.o.d.”
On that cheerful note, we tugged on our latex gloves and commenced burgling.
57. A STACK OF LETTERS FROM A DEAD MAN.
In the atrium by the reception desk a smattering of red, yellow, and violet floor lights shone from the bottom of the shallow fish pool, but most of the light in the building came from street lamps outside in the parking area.
We checked Margery DiMaggio's offices upstairs, her old office, which was unlocked and filled with cardboard boxes, and then her new office, which was locked but which had gla.s.s in the door, an unlikely amenity for such a security-conscious company.
Knocking out the gla.s.s with the pry bar, I reached inside, unlocked and opened the door to the smell of fresh paint. The s.p.a.cious office suite had oak furniture and a tall oak cabinet at one end of the room.
The cabinet turned out to be a bar. Cognac seemed to be the drink of choice here. I took a sip of soda water and looked around while Stephanie riffled through the papers in her aunt's desk. The file cabinets were unlocked. Switching on a small lamp, I pawed through them and found routine business mail, records of meetings, financial statements, copies of letters concerning various research grants, letters to vendors, bids for work on the campus, contracts for janitorial service, letters to universities asking about various metallurgy projects and research.
”Most of this is personal,” Stephanie said, slamming a desk drawer angrily. ”Pictures from her trips to Hong Kong. A boyfriend in New York City. I didn't know she was seeing anybody. Some married guy, works for Scientific American Scientific American. What'd you find?”
”Nothing pertinent.”
It was a luxurious office, designed to display power and ease. It even had its own adjoining sitting room and s.p.a.cious shower facility with sauna, both with separate exits leading to the corridor. I went to the window and gazed out at the parking area below. The trees directly in front of the building had been cut down so that from this office and the one on either side the view was unimpeded as far out as the dark guard kiosk by the street.
”Hey. Check this out,” Stephanie said. ”There's a folder on some guy named Armitage got fired for embezzlement. He wrote them a letter about my uncle's death. Claims Phil DiMaggio got sick downstairs in the lab and died the next day.”
”Is that true?”
”They told me he was driving down I-405, got into a road rage thing with some other driver, had a heart attack, and drove himself to Overlake Hospital. Armitage claims he got sick from chemicals he was handling. Apparently, he's been making this allegation for a while, because he says here: 'Despite your a.s.surances to the contrary, I cannot help but feel Dr. DiMaggio's demise can't be directly attributed to anything other than the materials he was working with on the twelfth of October. Nor can it anymore be deemed a coincidence or an accident that Ms. Janet Beechler, who had been in the room when Dr. DiMaggio was handling said materials, suffered a fatal automobile accident the night following his death.' ”
”A fatal accident? You think they were killing witnesses two years ago right here in Redmond?”
”Could be sour grapes; they'd already fired Armitage when he wrote this letter.” Stephanie glanced back at the papers. ”Here's a letter from my aunt saying Beechler's car accident happened because she was distraught over her boss's death. She says they had the best physicians in the Northwest caring for her husband. That he had a bad heart. I don't know if that's true, but why bother to answer a crank letter from a man you've just fired for embezzlement? The next set of letters are copies of letters to Armitage from Canyon View's attorneys. They'd apparently threatened to turn evidence of embezzlement over to the Redmond Police Department if he didn't go away. I wonder if Armitage was talking about Uncle Phil's death before before he got fired.” he got fired.”
Stephanie handed me a newspaper clipping. ”This would have been four weeks later.”
Puyallup Man Dies in Car WreckLast night at 2:20 a.m. witnesses saw a tan and gray Bronco leave the roadway on I-405 and roll down an embankment, where it burst into flame. By the time the fire department reached the Bronco, it was too late to rescue the occupant, who died at the scene. The driver was William Atherton Armitage, 42, of Puyallup. Police said the vehicle had a number of empty alcohol bottles inside. It was not immediately known whether Armitage had been drinking.A spokesperson from Canyon View Systems, Armitage's employer until last week, said Armitage had been distraught over the death of a coworker and had recently lost his position at the company amid a flurry of charges and countercharges involving the theft of $300,000 from the firm.
”There's more. She's got files on five former employees who are all either dead or in nursing homes. All . . . yeah . . . two are dead and three are in nursing homes. It doesn't say what's wrong with them, but I have their ages. Twenty-seven, thirty-three, and thirty-five.”
”Not your normal nursing home clientele.”
”Neither was my sister. Neither are you.”
”A nursing home's not a bad way to go. Especially if they serve you pudding every day.” I made an idiot face. I was getting pretty good at it.
”Stop it.”
I'd noticed industrial eyewash stations in the hallways. Also, Marge DiMaggio's shower was no ordinary shower facility. There were three stalls, each separated by a berm and a wall, so that an individual could step from one to the next, working his or her way down the line. At the end of the row there was a stack of operating-room blues, face masks, and a box of latex gloves. It was the same type of wash-down arrangement the fire department would construct to run people through after a hazardous materials exposure.
”Check this out,” Stephanie said, calling me into the main room. Near the office door, she switched on an ultraviolet lamp. The room lit up, but not by much. ”Remember black lights? What do you think this is for?”
”So they can paint each other with phosph.o.r.escent finger paints and run around in the dark nude?”
Stephanie was not amused. I was getting goosey. My time was running out, and instead of becoming more and more nervous, I was looser than I'd ever been. Almost slap-happy. It was as if I were inebriated.
Downstairs, we found enough eyewash fountains and shower facilities to clean up a rugby team. We broke into three more offices and found work areas-labs, chemicals, machinery, spectrographs, a miniature smelter in a room with concrete walls. All of it was tidy. All of it was ready for a white-glove inspection by a prospective buyer.
Stephanie found the labs fascinating, flipping through notebooks she found and examining the high-tech equipment. We broke into several locked cabinets, but they contained nothing but standard lab supplies.
If we were right, these b.a.s.t.a.r.ds had infected innocent people from Tennessee to Was.h.i.+ngton State and now were covering their tracks like a blind cat burying s.h.i.+t. Ironically, there were SAFETY FIRST SAFETY FIRST signs in every corridor. signs in every corridor.
Stephanie had turned on the lights and was peering into a microscope. I could tell by the way she gripped the dustcover, she was nervous as h.e.l.l.
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