“Exactly.”
“So that makes her an accessory to murder,” Toni said.
“It does,” I agreed. “At least.”
“So now do we call Inez Johnson?”
“Yeah—right after we talk to Holly.”
* * * *
We walked into the ACS office at nine o’clock on the dot. The receptionist looked up as we walked in. I walked right past her.
“Wait a minute,” she said. “You can’t just go walking in like that.”
I ignored her. Doc glared at her, and she immediately sat back down in her chair. They followed me as I walked back to Holly’s office. She’d apparently heard the commotion because she was standing in her doorway when I approached.
“Care to join us in the conference room?” I said sweetly. I can be nice.
“What—what—?” she stammered, shocked.
“What—you’re surprised to see me here and still alive?” I asked.
She stared at me.
“Your friends at Madoc Secured Technologies messed up. They didn’t kill me.” I paused. “Oops!” I said suddenly as I grabbed her by the arm. I wasn’t rough. Then again, I wasn’t all that gentle, either. Call it firm.“Let’s go have a talk, shall we?” I led her to the conference room. She followed with no trouble.
As we walked through the bullpen in the middle of the office, I noticed the receptionist in the lobby looking at us. She reached for her phone, apparently to call the police. Fortunately, Stella Pace was also standing there. Seeing the receptionist start to make a call, Stella put her hand on the receptionist’s shoulder and leaned over and whispered something to her. The receptionist listened, and then nodded, got up, and walked straight out of the office. Stella looked at me and nodded. Problem solved.
We entered the conference room and sat down.
* * * *
“You can’t just barge in here like this and start throwing accusations around,” Holly said. “I intend to . . .”
I slammed my hand down hard on the conference table.
“Stop,” I said slowly, menacingly. I was pissed and in no mood for a runaround. “I just got out of the hospital after being almost killed by Nicholas Madoc’s boys—the same ones who you apparently sent over there. I’m in no mood to listen to any bullshit from you.” I stared at her. She stared back. “Here’s how this is going to work,” I continued. “First, you can forget about threatening to call the cops. We’ll call them for you—anytime you want. We came here to hear your side to make sure we weren’t missing something. Then, we’re going to call the cops.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Of course not,” I said.
“I don’t!” she insisted.
“So after I told you that we had the Starfire Protocol device and the key last week, you didn’t turn right around and tell Madoc?”
“That’s nonsense,” she said. “I don’t talk to Madoc.”
“That’s pretty interesting, then,” I said. I turned to Kenny. “Got ’em?”
Kenny reached into his case and pulled out a printout.
“Yesterday morning, I asked Mr. Hale here to have a look at your cell phone records. According to this report, someone used your cell phone to call MST two, three—four times yesterday. Did someone steal your phone, Holly? If we went into your office right now, would we find it?”
She looked at me without speaking.
“And last week when Toni and I spoke to the owner of Redmond Firearms, he distinctly remembers Thomas buying a gun for—how’d he put it, Toni?”
“He said it was for the cute little redhead who was with him.”
“That’s right,” I said. “For the cute little redhead.”
“There are lots of people with red hair,” Holly said. “It could have been anyone.”
“True,” I said. “But that’s easy enough to sort out. Suppose we just show him your picture and see if that jogs his memory. What do you think?”
She stared at me, again without speaking.
“Nothing to say?” I asked.
She continued to stare.
I nodded and turned to Kenny. “Kenny, put the call in to Detective Inez Johnson, will you? She’s at Seattle Homicide. Tell her we have the proof we need to show that Thomas Rasmussen was murdered and that we’re sitting here talking to the person who was right smack-dab in the middle of it.”
Kenny pulled out his cell phone. Just as he started to dial, Holly said, “Wait.”
Kenny paused. We all looked at Holly. Her lip started to tremble, and she started to cry.
“Wait,” she said again. “They’re going to kill my brother.”
“What?” I asked.
“My little brother. They’re going to kill him.”
PART 2
Chapter 15
I STARED AT her. “Who?” I said. “Who’s going to kill your brother?”
She grabbed a tissue and wiped the tears from her eyes, and then she blew her nose. She looked up at me.
“Madoc,” she said. “Nicholas Madoc and his guys. They said if I didn’t cooperate—if I didn’t do exactly what they asked—then they were going to kill my brother and me. I never wanted anyone to get hurt—me, or my brother, and especially not Thomas.”
“Where’s your brother now?”
“He lives in Boston,” she said.
“They’re not holding him?”
She shook her head. “No, not now. I talked to him this morning on the phone. But I know you’ve seen these Madoc guys. They can get to him anywhere. I think they’re watching him.” She tried to hold back a sob, but it slipped out anyway.
I stared at her hard for a few seconds, and then I looked over at Toni. Our eyes met; she shrugged her shoulders. I didn’t know what to make of this, and it looked like Toni didn’t either.
Finally, she took the lead. “Holly,” Toni said, “why don’t you tell us what’s happened—what’s going on here. Start from the beginning. Tell us the truth this time.”
Holly looked at her, and then at me, and then back at Toni. “Okay,” she said. She paused and glanced at the cabinet at the end of the room. “Do you mind if I get some water?”
“’Course not,” Toni said. While Holly grabbed a few bottles of water from the cabinet, Toni and I pulled out our notepads. My head still throbbed like a son of a bitch.
“We—that’s Thomas and I—had several meetings with Cameron Patel starting around the first of the year.”
“What type of things did you discuss?”
“He was very straightforward. He said that MST wanted to buy Starfire. He said they could do it one of two ways—either buy Starfire by itself, or buy the whole company. We spent hours going through the organizational structure of the company. John Ogden wrote up some documents about confidentiality. He also wrote what he called ‘Approved Sales Material.’ He said that under Department of Commerce rules, we weren’t permitted to discuss very much about Starfire with a foreign buyer. I think he figured that if he prepared the papers we gave MST, he could make sure that we didn’t violate the regs.”
“Did you guys know anything about MST at this point?” Toni asked.
She sniffed and dabbed at her nose with the tissue. “We thought they were English,” she said. “Based on their accents, I guess. Then, Cameron told us they were actually a local company, and we weren’t sure what to believe, so we had John check it out. John told us anyone can form a company in this state online in about ten minutes. John was worried that they were really foreign, despite what they said. This would make them subject to the Commerce Department regs.”
She paused and concentrated for a moment. “I guess it was the middle of January, after several meetings, that MST gave us a letter of intent. They said they’d be willing to buy Starfire for ten million dollars.”
“And what did you guys think of this?” I asked.
“Like I told you last week,” she said. “We were pretty excited. I mean, it wasn’t a huge sum
of money compared to, say, Google or Facebook. Then again, neither of us—Thomas nor I—had anything to speak of. We both came from middle-class families that didn’t have anywhere near that kind of money. Ten million dollars would have changed both of our lives.”
“But Katherine had money. Thomas was already living pretty nicely, right?” Toni asked.
“To an extent,” Holly said. “But Thomas was eager to stand on his own feet. He didn’t want to have to rely on Katherine. This would have given him that ability, for certain.”
I nodded. “So what happened when the Commerce Department put the kibosh on the sale?" I asked. "What did Madoc do?”
“At first, hedidn’t do anything. We didn’t hear from them. We were disappointed, that’s for sure,” she said. “Thomas, in particular. He went into a pretty good funk. I told him don’t sweat it. The Commerce Department didn’t actually ban the sale to Madoc—they just said it was going to take some time to approve him. Apparently, they didn’t know who MST was. They’d never heard of them. Besides, I told Thomas even if Madoc was banned, we’d still be able to sell Starfire domestically—the offer proved it. And, in any case, we could always use Starfire to drive customers to LILLYPAD, which was our original intent all along.”
“Was Thomas okay with that?” I asked.
“Yeah,” she said.“It seemed to help. He turned around, and things got back to normal. We went back to work.”
“Then what happened?” Toni asked.
She looked down at the table for a moment, and then she said,“Then a week or so later I got a phone call from Cameron Patel late one afternoon. He suggested we meet for drinks that evening. He made it sound like it was some kind of date or something.” She paused for a few seconds. “I don’t go out on all that many dates. I was flattered that a good-looking Englishman wanted to take me out. So I said yes.”
“When was this?” I asked.
She stared at the ceiling for a moment, and then said,“About a week after we found out that we couldn’t sell to them. Probably the middle to the end of January or so.”
I wrote this down in my notebook. “So you went out with him?” I asked.
“Yeah,” she said. “I did.”
“And. . .?”
“And it wasn’t what I expected. We met at the Cypress Lounge over at the Westin in Bellevue. He was a real charmer. Well, at least at first he was.”
“What’d he want?” I asked. “What did he want from you?”
“I had some notion that he was interested in me romantically.” She rolled her eyes. “Apparently not,” she said with disgust. “Instead, he told me that MST really wanted to buy Starfire—needed it, actually. He told me they’d pay me a two-million-dollar fee if I could convince Thomas to go ahead and sell to them now. He said they’d raise their offer to twenty million dollars. They wanted us to just keep it secret from the Department of Commerce. He said they’d be able to reverse-engineer Starfire, make a few changes, and then reintroduce it through a subsidiary of theirs in France like it was completely different. He said the Commerce Department would never know. Meanwhile, I’d get a two-million fee from them for helping to arrange the deal, plus 10 percent of the sale from my ownership interest—which would have been another two million.”
“Wow,” I said, “four million bucks for you. That’s a lot of money. What did you say?”
She squirmed in her chair, clearly uncomfortable. “I—I told them I’d talk to Thomas.” She looked up at me. “You’re right, four million dollars is a lot of money.”
“So you talked to Thomas,” Toni said. “What did he say?”
“Pretty much what I expected he’d say,” she said. “He thought about it for about three seconds, and then he said hell no.”
I nodded. Good for him. “No questions in his mind?”
“There didn’t seem to be any,” she said. “Like I said, his answer was almost immediate.”
“Then what happened?” Toni asked.
“I thought that was it,” she said. “I thought it was all over. I called Cameron and told him Thomas said no. He said that was too bad, but that he understood.”
I looked at her. “But clearly, that wasn’t the end of things.”
She shook her head. “No,” she said. “A few days later, Cameron calls up again, and he’s like, ‘I had such a nice time at the Cypress, maybe we can have dinner together.’ Call me a wishful thinker, or maybe just stupid, but I was flattered. I said sure.”
“What happened?” I asked.
“We never made it to dinner.”
I arched an eyebrow.
“It’s not what you think,” she said. “Cameron picked me up at my apartment and said he needed to swing past his office because he forgot something. We went inside, and he took me back to what I thought was going to be his office. Instead, he took me to a room that looked like a conference room. There was a man at the table in there.”
“Let me guess,” I said. “Nicholas Madoc.”
“That’s right,” she said. “I never saw a more evil, sinister-looking man in my whole life. One second, he can be all smiles, and the next, he looks just like a rattlesnake. He’s got these beady little eyes.”
I knew exactly what she was talking about. “What happened?” I asked.
“They had me sit down across from him. I didn’t know what was happening—or what was going to happen. Part of me thought Cameron was maybe just introducing his boss or something before we went to dinner.”
“What’d Madoc say?” I asked.
“He introduces himself, and he’s like all smooth and charming. He thanked me for trying to convince Thomas to sell Starfire to them. Then he said that it was too bad that Thomas said no. He said that MST really wanted Starfire and that I needed to help them. I told him that we had already talked about it, that I couldn’t help them, and that I was through helping them. I told them I wasn’t comfortable even talking about it behind Thomas’s back anymore.”
“What’d he say?” Toni asked.
“He laughed. I remember he said that it was a little late for second thoughts on my part. He said I was already guilty of conspiracy to circumvent Department of Commerce laws regarding the transfer of sensitive property. He said I could go to jail for ten years.”
Toni and I scribbled furiously in our pads, trying to keep up.
“I was a little scared, but I tried not to show it. I said ‘bullshit’ and I got up to leave. Cameron was standing behind me, and he reaches over and pushes me back down into my chair, hardlike. Then I started to get really scared.”
She took a drink from her water bottle, and then continued. “So Madoc pushes a button on a keyboard, and a picture of William—my little brother, William—pops up on the flat-screen they had mounted to the wall. I was shocked. The picture had a date on it from the day before our meeting! I looked at Madoc. I remember he smiled that crocodile smile of his and said that William looked like a fine young man. He said—” she started to cry, “—he said that it would be a shame if William were to get hurt. He said I needed to pay close attention, and he asked me if I understood what he was saying. I told him yes. I was scared; believe me. He said my decisions from that point on would affect not just me—they’d affect William as well.”
“What did he mean by that?” I asked.
She looked at the table and wiped her eyes.
“He said if I didn’t cooperate with them, they’d kill me. Then, they’d kill William, too. He said if I went to the police, they’d turn over tapes of me talking to Cameron about trying to get Thomas to sell. He said I’d go to jail—and that they’d still kill William.” She started crying again. “I didn’t know what to do.”
“What did they want you to do?” I asked. “What are they trying to accomplish?”
“I didn’t know at first,” she said, “but it’s pretty clear now.”
I looked at her, questions obvious in my eyes.
She stared at me for a few seconds, and then turned away. “Oh God,�
�� she cried. “I never thought they’d kill Thomas.” She sobbed and buried her face in her hands.
After a minute had passed and she’d regained her composure, I said, “Tell me what you think.”
“Okay,” she sniffed. “Cameron Patel told me that he wanted me to get Thomas to buy me a gun. He told me to tell him that I was scared because a former boyfriend was bothering me.”
“There was no former boyfriend?” I asked.
She flipped back a strand of hair that had fallen across her face, and then looked up at the ceiling. “No,” she said, her lip quivering. “At least no one who’d bother me. I told them this, but they said not to worry about it—that Thomas would believe whatever I said, and he’d want to help. So I went along. I did what they asked. They even told me what kind of gun to get Thomas to buy. And they were right—it never even crossed Thomas’s mind that I’d be lying. He took me to the gun shop, and he bought the gun I told him I wanted. I shot it on the firing range there at the gun shop, and then I took it home and put it away. I didn’t like it. I never touched it again.”
“How’d Thomas end up with it?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” she cried. “I put it in my desk at home—still in the box it came in. I never even looked at it again. When I saw on TV that they were saying Thomas was killed with his own gun, my heart just dropped—I guessedwhat had happened. I went home, and the gun was gone! Madoc’s guys had to have broken into my house and taken it. Then they killed Thomas with it and made it look like it was a suicide,”she said, crying again. “The only one other than Thomas with a link to the gun is me. You have to believe me: I’d never—never—have done anything to hurt Thomas. He was my mentor and my hero. I’d have done anything for him.”
I nodded. “I understand,” I said. “But I still don’t see why Madoc would want to kill Thomas. What do they gain with him out of the picture?”
She sniffed. “Cameron said they want to use the buy–sell agreement—the gunslinger’s put. With Thomas gone, they wanted me to convince everyone that there’s no value to the company.” She paused. “Aside from Starfire, they’re pretty much right. And besides, Starfire always had questionable value anyway. Their original offer was at least delayed, and there’s no assurance that we’d be able to get it approved or get another offer.”
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