Warning: one of the minor characters talks and behaves in an extremely bigoted fashion. This does not reflect the attitudes of the author, anyone I know, or any sane human being, but it does advance the story and that is the sole justification for creating such a despicable character. Feel free to despise the character. Just remember, this is fiction!
"Just like that," Rufus grumbled, only half under his breath. "'Find out', the man says, and we all jump." He chanced a look at the other man in the room, David Sinclair, seeing how the older agent would take his comment. "He really that good, that Eppes just takes his word for it? It's not just a brother thing?"
"He's really that good," David assured him. "When Don first brought Charlie in I was as skeptical as you, maybe more. But those numbers of his have solved some pretty tough cases for us, and I'm not ashamed to admit I like having the help. But you're the guy with the degree in math. Don't you know this stuff? Man, with a degree in math you could have written your ticket to anywhere and have them thank you for the privilege. What made you choose law enforcement?"
"I don't know. The thrill of the chase, maybe." Rufus's face lit up. "I mean, I suppose you get some of that when you solve a really hard equation; you finally figure out which formula you're supposed to use. But when you go busting in through that door and your suspect starts yammering like a hummingbird on speed? Dude, that totally rocks!"
"Uh-oh," David grinned. "Adrenaline junky, on the loose. Watch out, L.A." Then he interrupted himself. "Oops, forgot. Area Director Thomas has plans for you. Minneapolis?"
"St. Louis," Rufus said. "Not real thrilled with the cold, but…" He trailed off. "You know, there is no 'but'."
"Not into skiing? Snowboarding?"
"I do my snowboarding with a surf board and a rip tide. Wouldn't mind being assigned to L.A. I grew up in Florida. This weather here is better; just as hot but with no humidity like back home. And, for variety, this is just a couple of hours' drive away." Rufus waved his hand to encompass the outdoors filled with trees and the occasional mountain. "This is good stuff out here. I like it. I could learn to like it a whole lot more. Think there's a chance I could get assigned here instead? Think you could put in a good word for me?"
"Do a good job and put in for a transfer," David advised. "That's what Don did."
"For real?"
"Yeah. He grew up here, worked in New Mexico for a while, then moved back home. FBI didn't want to lose him, so they hustled the transfer through. Good move for everyone." David left it at that, and moved back to the case. "You finding anything with that process stuff?"
Rufus groaned. "I swore when I passed Organic Chemistry that I'd never look at another chemical equation again. This stuff is harder than math. I can pronounce it, but I can't tell you anything more about it."
"What was is that Charlie wanted you to find out? How many steps in the process?"
"Oh, that's the easy part." Rufus pointed to the last page. "Sixteen different steps to arrive at the final product. You put the initial chemicals in, distill it sixteen times in sixteen different ways with sixteen different solutions, and you come out with the miracle formula that will revolutionize the world."
"Now I know why I majored in law enforcement," David groaned. "That sounds worse than Charlie at his best. Charlie at least makes things sound comprehensible."
The next conference was held in a private room. At Don's signal, the group did a quick once over to check for any listening devices.
Colby reacted. "Don?"
"Can't be too careful," was the reply. "Corporate espionage may not be up to international levels but that doesn't mean that they're incompetent. Okay, we need to coordinate. Where are we on everything? Colby?"
"Ran background checks on more of the key players," he reported. "Bostwick you've heard about, but I came up with an additional piece of information. Dr. Bostwick has a nice chunk of Caldwell stock in his portfolio. Caldwell goes down, his private fortune goes down with it."
"Of course, if he gets killed, the fortune won't mean much," Rufus put in.
"True," Colby agreed. "The same goes for our chief exec, Mr. Stewart. He too has a hefty sum invested in his own company, and listen to this: word on the street is that he has some debts. An expensive house, an expensive vacation home, not to mention the yacht. And he made some bad business deals. Word on the street is that he's hurting."
"Okay, Stewart too is living way beyond his means. How does that lead to trying to kill off his lead researcher?" Don asked reasonably. "Let's look at this rationally. Bostwick gets offed, this miracle K-19 formula goes down, and Caldwell's stock plunges. Exit one fortune. If anything, that would tend to exonerate Stewart as the prime mover behind an assassin. David?"
"Checked on the competition." David added in his contribution. "There are only a few corporations large enough to be of consideration, and none have a history of playing this dirty. Sure, there are some trade secrets that get shifted around under shady circumstances and at least two of them have made unsuccessful plays to hire Bostwick—and Halligan—away from Caldwell, but there hasn't been any talk of something of this magnitude. If anything, there's shock and dismay that Halligan was killed. Most seem to think that it was a shame, that Bostwick was the more deserving candidate for an assassin's bullet. Bostwick hasn't made himself very popular, but the bean-counters appreciate him. He makes lots of money for the company."
"Hm." That too required thought for the team. "Any suggestion that maybe this didn't have anything to do with Caldwell? That maybe Bostwick annoyed the wrong people?"
The team looked at each other.
"Yet another angle to pursue. We'll leave that one alone for the moment until we finish running down what's on our plate. Keep your ears open, people, and let me know if we need to give that concept a higher priority," Don murmured. "Rufus, you get anywhere on your end?"
"Not very far," Rufus admitted. "Chemistry is not my strong suit. As far as I can figure, this process works by encouraging the target crop to produce more: grow larger, faster, and taller. It's organic based, with a name that I might be able to pronounce if I worked at it for the next month or so. They wouldn't let me see the actual process, not that I could understand it—"
"How many steps to the process?" Charlie interrupted.
Rufus blinked. "Sixteen, near as I can figure."
"And the yield?"
"Yield?"
"Yes, the yield. How much matter did they start with, and how much did they end up with? How much was lost during processing?"
"Charlie?" Don raised his eyebrows. It sounded like his brother was onto something, but whether or not it was pertinent to the investigation would be another story. It wouldn't be the first time that Charlie had darted off onto a tangent.
"Bear with me, Don. Did you find out the final yield?"
Rufus consulted his notes. "Ninety three percent, according to Dr. Bostwick."
Charlie nodded, satisfied. Some internal statistic had just been proven. "That's highly unlikely."
"Give," Don demanded. "What do you know that we don't? Why is it unlikely, and how is it important to what we're doing here? Emphasis on the last phrase, brother."
Charlie settled into lecture mode. "I don't know chemistry, but I don't need to know chemistry. Numbers tell the story. The process we're looking at is highly unlikely to produce a ninety three percent yield."
"And you know that because…?"
It was a good thing that someone had left an oversized tablet of paper on an easel for an eager underling to draw on. Charlie seized on it, scribbling numbers as fast as he could, in lieu of his usual white board.
"We have just learned that this process has sixteen steps, and that's one of the keys to determining the final yield. Let me start from the beginning: theoretically, if you were to put one gram of Chemical A in plus one gram of Chemical B you would have two grams of Product C. But chemistry doesn't work like that in real life. A certain amount is lost through the heat of the chemical reaction, through simple waste, through the inability to completely remove the Product from the container; any number of straightforward things. Result: instead of getting two grams of Product C, we have only 1.9 grams of Product C. At most, we get a 99 percent yield."
"Okay…" Don drawled. It was not okay. Charlie was still light years beyond him and everyone else in the room.
Professor Eppes hadn't spent years in front of seas of glazed eyes for nothing. He pushed ahead. "Now consider that we have sixteen steps to this process of Caldwell's. Let's assume that each time, each step, there is a yield of 99 percent. After step one, we have 99 percent of our starting material. After step two, with another optimum yield of 99 percent, we have a 98 percent yield for the total process. Ninety nine percent of ninety nine is approximately ninety eight," he translated for those who chose not to grab paper to do the calculation, jotting the figures on a spare corner of his tablet. "Step three: 99 percent of 98 is 97. Continue that down for sixteen steps, and you arrive at an approximate yield of 85 percent. Not ninety three, as Dr. Bostwick reports. In order to obtain a ninety three percent yield, he would need to have several steps with 100 recovery of all material, and that simply doesn't happen in the real world."
"So Bostwick isn't good at math," Colby said. "How does that help us?"
Rufus put his own math degree into practice. "It means that his process isn't nearly efficient as he would have everyone believe. And that the company won't make as much money as they're projecting, because they won't be able to churn out as much of their miracle chemical as they think they can."
Charlie beamed. "Right."
"Okay, Bostwick is padding the numbers to make himself look good. I repeat, how does that help us?" Colby asked. "Are you trying to say that Bostwick is somehow trying to arrange his own murder? That doesn't make sense."
"You're right; it doesn't." Don rubbed at his chin, thinking. "Let's take a step back. We're all assuming that Bostwick was the target."
"Right. Halligan got in the way."
"That was the initial assumption. What if we were wrong?"
"Don?"
"Let's do a little more digging on Dr. Alyse Halligan," Don decided. "Charlie, Rufus, you two keep looking at the process, see what you can come up with. Refine your calculations; see if you can find out what Bostwick's yield ought to be. Rufus, I want you talking to some of the techs, getting their perspective on things. They sometimes see more than anyone thinks they do. David, have L.A. do a full dossier on Halligan. Colby, talk a little more to the locals. I'd like a better take on what they have to offer."
"And you?"
Don allowed one corner of his mouth to quirk upward. "Me and a horse have a date."
Colby Granger was received with suspicion at the local police station. Not a new sensation; Colby had been many places where upper authority figures were not appreciated. Local police headquarters were only one of many. Gang headquarters were another. Some of the Afghani tribal tents had been the interesting ones: the head man would welcome soldiers with open arms and then try to stab them once they turned their backs. The others would offer their daughters, try to marry them off to rich Americans.
Colby had learned never to turn his back, both literally and figuratively.
Police Chief Mueller, a skinny beanpole of a man who had never been taught how to smile, regarded Colby with all the enthusiasm of a man facing a rattlesnake. "Why don't you ask that Nogales chick?"
Colby adjusted his position in the far from comfortable chair, going for Don Eppes-like aplomb. "Where I come from, Chief, we kind of wonder why people have their own security people and what those security people are told not to see. I just assumed that you ran your office the same way."
Mueller grunted; clearly his estimation of Agent Granger had gone up a notch. Unfortunately for his, Colby's own estimation had also moved, but in the opposite direction. Colby's instincts were born out by Mueller's next words.
"You got that right. The little bitch would barely let us in to investigate the murder, kept telling us that we couldn't have access to trade secrets. Said that my department would leak all their little secrets." Mueller snorted. "We haven't had a murder around here for forty years. Not till those idiots on the hill showed up and built a factory. Think they're too good for the rest of us. Keep wanting us to foot the bill for more roads and the like."
"I'd appreciate a look at your case files." Colby tried to ooze sincerity. "You were the first people on the scene that we can trust. Trained eyes, and all of that."
"Yeah, well, we can do that," Mueller grudgingly allowed. "I was about to go after a warrant to investigate the place."
Colby let the man have his little fib. The police weren't about to do any such thing. If Colby was any judge of things, this department was going to bluster a bit, blame Caldwell International for their lack of progress, and generally let the whole case slide into quiet obscurity.
That didn't mean that the locals wanted it that way. Colby caught the little gleam in Mueller's eye that suggested that he'd like to see all of the people up at Caldwell get pushed around by Uncle Sam in the persons of the FBI agents. Colby grinned to himself. Not the right way to go about business, this pitting of one group against another, but if it solved this case a little faster then Colby wasn't above using the tools that were given to him.
"I tell you what." Colby leaned forward, going for a we're in this together posture. "Let's keep you in the loop. We haven't got much, but the top guy at Caldwell—"
"Stewart. That's his name."
"—Stewart." Colby nodded at the correction as if he appreciated the help, "that Stewart fellow actually called us in, has told us that he wants everyone up on the hill—" picking up Mueller's own phrase—"to give us full cooperation. He thinks he can steer us around for his own purposes. Haven't quite figured out what those purposes are, but between the two of us, I think we should be able to come up with a pretty good guess."
"Yeah," Mueller nodded. "I think we can. Let me see about getting you the case files. What have you got on your end?"
Colby was prepared. "Found the bullet casings," he offered, knowing that the information was circulating anyway. "Custom job. We sent the stuff back to the lab in L.A. Got some pretty fancy tech stuff back there, and some over-educated types who know how to use it. Might as well get the taxpayers' money out of it."
"Yeah. Better than anything we got on this end," Mueller agreed bitterly, as if a small town needed that sort of forensic support. A secretary type handed him the case files, and Mueller handed it over to Colby. "Here. Take a gander at that. Statements from the principles, from that Bostwick feller, from the security bitch, from the lab tech that walked in right after it happened and found her on the floor."
"What do they say happened?"
"Mostly from the lab tech, and he's a young kid that grew up not too far from here." Implying that that fact alone gave the witness additional credibility. "Said he heard a crash, then a thump, then a screech from Bostwick. Door was closed; he knocked, but neither Bostwick or Halligan answered. Halligan couldn't; she was dead by that time and Bostwick, he was cowering in the corner so that the next bullet didn't get him. The tech—just a kid, really—pushed his way in and hit the panic button. Kid was covered in blood when we found him, had tried to see if there was any pulse. Said the stuff was still oozing out of the hole in her chest when he found her."
"So we have a secure time line," Colby mused. "Your pathologist verify the time of death as consistent with his story?"
"Sure did. Warm body, the whole thing. The kid's clean, just shaken up. Started heavin' his lunch just talking about it. Besides, we got the window broken with glass shards on the inside. No doubt that it came from those hills."
Colby agreed. "That part's straightforward. We found the sniper's nest, and we've got that angle covered. I know this would be too easy, but any of your people noticed any strangers hanging around? We found a few tracks up there, probably belong to some guy around six foot or so, close to two hundred pounds. Not saying that's our man, but maybe somebody hanging around up there saw something." Like maybe a little bit of a thing named Nogales hefting a gun with an expensive scope, perhaps?
"Anyone totin' a bag big enough for a rifle?" Mueller added. "Nope. Not gonna get that lucky." He thought for a moment. "How about if I call up some of the other police chiefs in the other towns around here? See if they got any two hundred pounders just come in on the bus?"
Yes! "That'd be a help," Colby told him. "Listen, what do you think of their Security Chief up at Caldwell? She any good?"
A sneer. "She thinks she is. Me, I like my women in bed, not patrolling the street. Females gotta know their place. That Nogales bitch belongs back on her own side of the border along with the other illegals."
Colby swallowed hard. Don't let your jaw hit the floor, Colby, he told himself. Play along. Just think of all the women you know who could wipe the floor with this piece of chauvinistic trash.
"Times are tough," he finally managed to choke out, promising himself that he wouldn't laugh, or cry, or do anything else to jeopardize the fragile relationship he had just built with the local constabulary. They needed the locals' cooperation, and maybe some staffing back up. But Don would get a full report on how open-minded this department wasn't. Maybe a little state government oversight in the near future would be a good thing to clean this place up. Colby hoped so.
