Dead File (22 page)

“Of course not. I told you, I want to buy the company cheap.”

Corporate sleaze, she noted silently, wrinkling up her nose a little as if to ward off a foul odor. Cutting back to the chase, she said, “All right, we’re back on the record. The AP reports that one of the guards at Rose International saw the two of you in the building that night.”

“Yes. After dinner we spent a couple of hours in my suite going over the research that Gillian brought. She didn’t show me the actual formulations her lab work had come up with, but as her prospective partner in this venture, she outlined the steps that had been taken so far in the science and explained to me what each tier had accomplished. She was very excited about the progress to date. They were much farther along than she’d expected at that stage, she said.”

“So you went to the Rose building that late because … ?” Maxi prodded.

“Because Gillian was so enthusiastic about it she decided she wanted to show me the product itself, and what it could do. She had vials of it in her office.”

“So you
were
in her office at two in the morning.”

“For about a half hour. We had a drink to celebrate the work while she did a little demonstration for me. Then we left.”

“Demonstration of what?” Maxi tried again.

He gave an exasperated you-
know
-I’m-not-going-to-tell-you sigh.

“But if it doesn’t matter now,” she pressed.

Penthe ignored that and continued with his story. “After the guard learned the next day that Gillian was found dead, he reported to the police that she’d been in the building with a man, and what time. They checked the surveillance tapes and identified me.”

“Surveillance tapes?”

“Turns out Carter Rose has an elaborate monitoring system that covers the entire nine floors of the company, including Gillian’s office. The cops found it the day Gillian turned up dead. Hidden cameras everywhere. She’d never mentioned that to me. I’m sure she didn’t even know about it, or she’d never have taken me into the building to show me the product. Carter always was a sneaky bastard—”

“Why are we just now hearing that you and Gillian were in the building together at that hour on the night before she died?”

“Who knows?” Penthe said. “Whatever their reasons, the police didn’t make that information public, but they questioned me, of course.”

“And today it leaked.”

“Must have.”

“So where did the detectives leave it with you, Mr. Penthe?”

“They asked me to stay in town. But as I told them, that only works in the movies. Old movies, at that. I have a business to run. They had no basis to hold me—in custody, in town, or anywhere. Just because I was
with
the lady doesn’t mean I killed her.”

Penthe was either an innocent man, Maxi reasoned, or this was the story he wanted out there before today’s police revelation pointed a big, bony finger at him all over the press, not a good thing for the Penthe Group stock. She would report his story on the Six, a straightforward “as told to,” and let the viewers be the judge. And the LAPD.

43

C
arter Rose walked briskly into his office suite, tossed a perfunctory “Hello, hold my calls, please” to Kendyl as he passed her desk, and disappeared into his inner sanctum. He’d noticed that she was wearing his huge diamond earrings. Now she wanted a huge diamond
ring,
he reminded himself sourly as he locked his door from the inside. Diamond earrings were easy. Diamond rings were hard, loaded with baggage as they were. Hell, he’d give her a fucking diamond tiara if she’d get off his back about marriage.
And
if he could be sure that she’d keep her mouth shut.

He strode over to the far wall of his inner office, which was completely lined with oak paneling in keeping with the 1920s decor. He pressed both palms on separate areas of the polished oak, then took a step backward as the entire expanse of wall slid open to reveal a bank of dozens of small monitors, each one with an identifying label above it, and each one alive with a picture of some strategic location in the Rose building, including the ground-floor conference rooms and the parking structure.

He smiled, as he always did when he “opened” this dazzling present he’d given himself years ago—better than electric trains. Incongruous, he knew, this hidden high-tech virtual citadel within the walls of his early-twentieth-century-styled space. And that’s the way he liked it—no one would guess that in his low-tech surroundings he had this big, beautiful, empowering, state-of-the-art toy.

The two men who installed the system knew about it, of course; that was back when the building was being completely remodeled from the ground up for the fledgling Rose company, along with seventeen floors of outside office space to lease. The techs never questioned it—an electronic overlook of this magnitude was not uncommon for a company as big as Rose International. Gillian didn’t concern herself with the nuts and bolts of framing up the space back then; her province was choosing and overseeing the interior decor, a massive job. She never knew about the wiring that snaked throughout the several floors of company space for his elaborate system of hidden video cameras, nor about the wall of hardware that was ultimately installed in his personal inner office in an afternoon. He smiled, remembering his intent back then: He could surreptitiously keep tabs on everyone. Including his wife.

Kendyl knew about the elaborate system. She was the only other person who knew it was there, and in fact he’d been able to keep it from her, too, until the day the crime-scene tape came down outside Gillian’s office suite and Sandie Schaeffer did her portentous search.

Carter went over the timeline in his mind. Gillian’s body was found two weeks ago yesterday. He arrived at LAX from Taiwan the next morning, and was taken directly to Parker Center for questioning. The detectives had specifically ordered him, and everyone else, to stay out of Gillian’s office while the investigation was ongoing.

But he didn’t stay out of her most private area at home: the built-in jewelry cabinet in her personal dressing room. It was a locked bank of eight custom-designed, felt-lined, divided drawers, locked all of a piece by a steel bolt that shot down through the entire cabinet at the turn of a key. Gillian kept the cabinet bolted down to prevent theft; a burglar would have to get into it with an ax. But that had made it physically off limits to her husband as well, and many times he’d wondered idly what secrets she might have kept in there. She didn’t have
that
much jewelry. Did she? Now, with Gillian dead, whatever she owned belonged to him, and he’d wanted to know exactly what was in that cabinet in case the cops came with a warrant and searched his house just as they’d searched his building.

They never did, which he found surprising. But he’d called in a locksmith, who made a replacement key to the steel-bolted unit for him. And he was astounded at what he found inside.

The several pieces of jewelry he’d never seen before didn’t surprise him. Nor did the packet of love letters, from different men. He always knew that his attractive wife must have had lovers. Sexual passion had long since seeped out of their marriage and certainly he’d had more than his own share of affairs, but that was a subject the two never broached. It was a tacit understanding between them.

And always, he’d been proud that Gillian was his wife. Proud of her accomplishments with the company. Proud to be with the dazzling Gillian Rose at business and social functions. Proud of her when she handled the media. She was his trophy, a brilliant partner in every way.

Sex had become irrelevant to their union. They’d had plenty of it, from way back when they first groped each other in his old Chevy El Camino in college, and for years later. At some point their sex life got tired, and he found sex elsewhere. And he was sure that she must have too. That was fine with him. She’d been discreet. He was totally content with the relationship they had, and he thought that she was too.

Until he found out that she was planning to leave him. That changed everything. That meant the end of his perfect world. It meant that, to split their assets, she would tear down the company they’d created and built together. It meant the end of their upscale social status, of their prominent position as a power couple in the bicoastal community of the affluent. And it meant the diminishment of their combined wealth.

Most important, it threatened to strike a fatal blow to his personal wealth: He couldn’t depend on Swiss bankers to keep those hefty funds he’d accumulated under wraps. The company was run with smoke and mirrors—only he knew that. But in today’s business climate, with its microscopically powered scrutiny, the odds were high that his personal empire would be exposed in an assets search and come crashing down. And along with many of his CEO colleagues, he’d be looking at jail time. No, he couldn’t let Gillian divorce him. And now that wouldn’t happen.

He had been thinking about all this while browsing through her locked cabinet, her trove of secrets, and then he saw it. The small brass key in one of the slots in the bottom drawer. He’d picked it up and examined it closely—it was the key to a safety-deposit box.

It didn’t take him long to discover what it opened—that was easy. He’d called several banks in the city, asked to speak to their managers, and explained that in the course of settling the affairs of his deceased wife, his lawyers had come upon a key to a box that she’d rented, and he couldn’t remember at which bank it was.

The manager at one of Citibank’s downtown branches confirmed that they did in fact have a box in the name of Gillian Rose. Mr. Rose was to come in with identification, and a copy of his wife’s will if she’d had one, and they would open it for him. Just a formality, of course. Most of the city knew what Carter Rose looked like, that he had just lost his wife, and that he would certainly be her legal beneficiary.

This time he was amazed by what he found. The box contained research, business memos, and contracts involving something called BriteEyes. What the hell was BriteEyes, and why didn’t he know about it? When the bank official presented him with the log to sign, he saw that Gillian’s box had had constant activity; she’d been in and out of it several times a week right up until her death. And scanning the documents, he noted that their dates were recent. This was an ongoing project that Gillian had been working on behind his back. He’d dumped the contents of the safety-deposit box into a gym bag and closed out the account.

The papers it yielded told him that BriteEyes was a substance in product-development stage, based on an original formulation created by William Schaeffer, Sandie Schaeffer’s pharmacist father. And there was a letter of intent signed jointly by Schaeffer and Gillian, intent for Gillian to purchase the formula at a later date, at a given price. A very generous price. There was no actual formulation with the papers. Could Gillian not have had a formula? That wasn’t likely, given her elaborate efforts to hide this research from him. Knowing his savvy wife, his guess was that she had the formula, had done work on it, and had found it to be valuable. Very valuable. You don’t keep run-of-the-mill product-development info in a safety-deposit box. She’d kept it separate from Rose International, and specifically hidden it from her husband and business partner. This told him something. Whatever the hell it was, this was Gillian’s brass ring.

The formula had to be somewhere. So where would she keep it? Not at their home, and risk that he’d find it. Not with the files in the company lab, which were open to anybody. Not even in her secret safety-deposit box. He would search her office suite, but he couldn’t do that until the investigation into her death was terminated and the cops and their adjuncts had cleared out of his building. Gillian’s area was overrun with police personnel at any and all times of the day and night. They badged their way in, with no prior notice. So Carter had wisely stayed out of the area as he’d been ordered. Oh, he’d thought about going in when no one was there, was sorely tempted to go in. It was his damn building, wasn’t it? But he knew better. Yes, he would find this formula, find out what it was all about, but were he caught looking, he’d be questioned again. What exactly had he been doing in there? they’d want to know. What was he looking for? And why clandestinely, in defiance of police orders? What was so important that he had to find immediately, while avoiding the scrutiny of authorities? Was it something he would kill for?

There was no need to risk bringing such suspicion upon himself when everything seemed to be so nicely contained. Even if the detectives turned Gillian’s office upside down and confiscated this mystery formula, it would be meaningless to them. Just some document pertaining to Rose company business. And eventually it would be returned to him, along with everything else. He could wait.

Patience paid off. On the afternoon when they announced there was no evidence of foul play in Gillian’s death and removed the crime-scene tape from her office door, Carter made his plan to go in. But he would wait until after business hours, after all the employees had left the building.

He’d asked Kendyl to help him search. She was better at deciphering files than he was. They were looking for papers pertaining to a formula developed by Sandie’s father, pharmacist William Schaeffer, he’d told her. It was a favor, really, that Gillian had wanted to do for her assistant’s dad. A small formulation that probably wouldn’t prove worth developing, but the company didn’t want to just drop the ball on it, because they were already halfway through the tests. It could be labeled BriteEyes.

Since it was Gillian’s baby, she’d been shepherding the project, he explained to Kendyl. She had kept him posted on the research all along, he’d lied, and now that her office space was no longer off limits, he wanted to retrieve that work in progress and hand it off to one of his managers to continue the testing. He’d explained that he wanted to look for the files after hours because staffers were still leery about going into Gillian’s office. Best to do it himself, with Kendyl’s help, he told her, when workers in that area wouldn’t be unnerved by activity in the suite where Gillian died.