Tahoe Heat

by Todd Borg

  Jimbo called timeouts a couple of times, went over adjustments in the ritual. The students gradually got more successful.

  Through it all, the woman at the left front became more and more focused. Her intensity permeated the big room. It seemed as if she were having some kind of religious experience, exorcising her demons with each whip-crack. Or maybe she was doing what the man in the office spoke about, going through imagined revenge against someone who repeatedly abused her. Either way, she telegraphed anger.

  I watched through the entire class. At the end, I left and got into the Jeep. I was pulling out when my headlights swept over the woman as she walked out, almost stomping as she headed to her car. The recognition came as a shock.

  It was Holly Hughes, the big, super-fit woman that Ryan introduced me to at his party, the mother of Ryan’s friend William, the video gamer. I remembered her lashing out at Ryan when he gushed over Carol/Champagne’s beauty.

  I slowed, pulled over and thought about turning back into the parking lot. But she was already in her car. She raced out of the lot, tires squealing. I had no desire to interrupt her anger, so I let her go.

  When I got back to Ryan’s house, I suggested we all go on a night walk. Carol said she was too tired. I gave her a hard look.

  “What, you think you can’t trust me to leave me here alone?”

  “Think, Carol,” I said, irritated. “It’s Preston who can’t be trusted to not come after you if he sees you here by yourself.”

  She looked alarmed. “Let me get my jacket,” she said.

  We took a long walk. Lily rode on Spot’s back, then Ryan’s shoulders. After he tired, she asked to ride on my shoulders.

  “Don’t you think you should get some exercise?” I said.

  “It’s exercise just hanging on,” she said.

  So I boosted her up, and she rode the rest of the way on my shoulders.

  “Your name is HeeHaw,” she said. “You are both the horse and the clown.”

  “I’m Owen,” I said.

  “HeeHaw!” she giggled. Then she periodically shouted out, “Giddyup, HeeHaw, giddyup!” and, “Do a clown trick, HeeHaw,” and, “Faster, HeeHaw.” And once when her enthusiasm made her lose her balance, “Whoa, HeeHaw!” as she grabbed my head to keep from falling over.

  When we got back to the house, I lifted her down and said, “You didn’t have to walk a single step.”

  “I told you I have good ideas!” she said, laughing.

  I reached to grab her, but she shrieked and ran from me, giggling uproariously.

  Later, I sat up with Ryan.

  “Got a question about your friend William,” I said.

  “William Hughes?”

  “The gamer, yeah. Any problems there?”

  “What do you mean?” Ryan looked and sounded nervous, worried. He seemed like a rabbit, unable to move as a gang of coyotes circled.

  “Is everything in your friendship with him comfortable? Any animosities? Any past dustups? Arguments? Disagreements?”

  “Not really. Why?”

  “Just saw his mother at a martial arts class. Made me curious.”

  “Oh. Well, William and I have always been good friends. It’s not like we’re soul mates or anything. More like we share social dysfunction. Our common ground is that we don’t fit in.”

  “Was he ever uncomfortable with your business success?”

  “Hardly. He’s made tens of millions with his games. He’s one of the elite. Stanford B-School pressed him to come and run seminars. Of course, he’s way too shy to do that. But he’s at the top. Not like he would be jealous of me.”

  “What about his mother? Was she ever upset with how you and William got along?”

  “Mrs. Hughes and I have always gotten along great.”

  “That’s not what I asked,” I said.

  He paused. “The only time she got upset was when we formed CBT. I asked him to be a partner. After all, he did some really great computer modeling that helped us with our first genetic experiments. But he said no. He was a gamer. He didn’t want to have anything to do with bio-tech. Even so, his input was important. So when Preston came in for his forty percent, and we got our big chunk of money, I sent William one hundred thousand dollars as a thank you. Eli and Jeanie agreed with me that he deserved it and more. William didn’t even want to cash the check. But I insisted. Of course, William was already rich by that time. Even so, I think his mother thought that he should be part of the company even if he didn’t want to be. I could see why she’d be a little upset. If he’d been part of the CBT team, his salary and stock proceeds would have been considerable. And if we go really big, there would be that much more that he could have split. I think his mother was blinded by that knowledge. She probably thought that William said no to us because of some subtle pressure from us, like a sense that our offer wasn’t sincere.”

  “Was your offer sincere?” I asked.

  “Of course. But his mother might not have thought so.”

  “Tell me about his business.”

  “His game designing? Basically, William was and always will be a classic programmer. He has a magical ability to take any part of the world, real or imagined, or any kind of experiential phenomenon, and render it in binary code. When he played video games as a young kid, he really got into the concept that you could create a world with ones and zeros. He inhaled programming like it was eating jelly sandwiches. He even went to the video game summer camp at Stanford when he was in middle school. By the time he got to high school he’d single-handedly written a good game. It was as if the game design, the script and the storyboards were fully formed in his mind, and all he had to do was write out the code.

  “Of course, any game written and coded by an individual is necessarily very limited. A typical game can take fifty people over a year to produce. A game can involve some of the most complicated software there is, with millions of lines of code to create an entire three-D world.

  “But William’s game got him a full scholarship at Stanford, and he was a star there before he dropped out. That’s where I met him. He and I talked about our ideas, and, frankly, he helped me more than I helped him. He figured out that parts of my premise of how to do recombinant gene splicing could be modeled with software. We could run scenarios on the computer and prejudge which approaches would be most likely to work. So he wrote a cool program for us. But that’s where his involvement with us ended. And even if he wanted to be part of our company, there’s no way he’d have the time. I even asked him if he would just serve on our board, but he said no to that, too. His game studio has been buried. All of his employees work seventy, eighty hours a week.”

  “Another question about Holly,” I said.

  “Sure.”

  “What’s her background?”

  “I don’t know. To me she was just William’s mom. Very supportive of him. Very protective. If you were one of William’s school teachers, you wouldn’t want to see her show up after school. She’s so big and strong. It makes sense that she would be taking martial arts. I used to be a little envious of William. My dad was nice but distant, more interested in the world of education than in the world of his son or his daughter. William didn’t have a dad, but he had a mom who would do anything for him, protect him from the world. Although, I have to admit that when I was younger, she scared me a little.”

  “How?”

  “Just her intensity. It was like she had an on/off switch, and it was always on all the way. There was no part-way, softer setting. And she did things that left me with a frightening image that I’d think about in the night.”

  “Any you remember?”

  “Yeah. Out in their backyard, she used to chop wood for exercise. But she was so intense about it, it was like she was attacking the wood. She had an axe, and she spent a lot of time sharpening it by hand. The axe was shiny from her polishing. That bothered me as a kid.”

  “I can see why,” I said.

  We sat in silence a moment.<
br />
  “I called Sergeant Martinez,” Ryan said.

  “You can call him Diamond.”

  “I asked him if Jeanie’s parents knew about the DNA test. He said that the Colusa County Sheriff’s department had already informed them. So I called them to express my sympathy.”

  “Good move,” I said.

  “I talked to her father. He seemed pretty cold, but also resigned to the news as if he expected it after all the time since she disappeared. Then I told him that Jeanie and Eli and I had an agreement about each other’s stock, and that if they didn’t want to hang onto the CBT stock, I’d be happy to buy it from him.”

  “Where do they live?”

  “The Central Valley.”

  “I’ll see if I can visit them tomorrow. Maybe I can learn something.”

  FORTY-SEVEN

  Ryan had an address for Ron and Silvia Samples, but he’d never been there. He thought the closest town was Colusa. I printed out a map, and asked Ryan to give me a letter of introduction on his CBT stationary.

  Then next morning, I left Spot with Ryan, Lily and Carol, drove down the mountain to Sacramento, and headed up I-5. An hour north, I turned off on a county road, drove seven miles, during which I passed six tractors hauling large pieces of farm equipment, and came to a lonely intersection in the middle of a landscape that was flatter than your average basketball court. If you took away the mountain ranges on the west and east sides of the valley, you might think you were driving through eastern North Dakota. Five turns later, I found the long drive to the Samples farm. The farm buildings were big, the house small. I parked, walked up to the door and knocked.

  The man who answered had red hair and a face of red-brown leather. Despite the Central Valley heat, he wore overalls of such heavy fabric that they could stand up without a person inside of them.

  But his overalls were clean, his shoes had no mud on them, and there was no dirt in the cracks of his hands. It didn’t appear that he’d been doing much farming lately.

  The reason was in his eyes.

  They showed a deep sadness, a broken sadness, the kind that makes you think he will never regain his spirit.

  I introduced myself, and he nodded and turned without saying a word. He walked into a small living room and pointed at a chair near the door.

  I sat.

  He went around a corner into the kitchen, said something in a low voice, then came back with his wife.

  I stood, made a little hand-out greeting motion, and introduced myself again.

  She also nodded, but didn’t speak. They sat down together on one end of a long couch, their knees touching, her hand on his thigh. They waited for me to speak first.

  “I’m very sorry about your daughter Jeanie.”

  The man nodded. The woman just looked at me.

  “I know Ryan Lear called you, but he asked me to bring you his deepest regrets. He was very close to her.”

  Neither of them spoke.

  “Ryan lost one of his closest friends,” I said. “He said Jeanie was a math wizard. He told me that she was critical to the formation of CalBioTechnica.” Their faces were wooden.

  “She’d be alive today if it weren’t for him,” the woman finally said, her voice monotone.

  The man nodded.

  “She never even cared about Tahoe until she met him,” the woman said. “Next thing we knew, she was going up there on vacations, and taking stock in that boy’s company in exchange for pay. We lost her to that boy’s world.”

  “The company paid her very well,” I said. “I understand that her pay was the same as what Eli Nathan and Ryan Lear were paid.

  “They could have paid her even better if they hadn’t made part of her compensation stock.”

  “Everything was done by mutual agreement,” I said. “Ryan and Jeanie and Eli. Friends all the way.”

  “And now our baby’s dead, and that other boy’s dead, and the Indian boy is sitting pretty.”

  “I know you’re devastated by what happened,” I said. “But others are too. Ryan can barely function.”

  They stared at me.

  “Anyway, I don’t mean to take up too much of your time. I understand that Jeanie left her CalBioTechnica stock to you. Her wish may be for you to keep the stock as an investment. However, if you’d like to sell your stock in CBT, I want to reiterate that Ryan’s offer to buy it is genuine.”

  They looked at me for a long time. The man glanced at the woman, then looked back at me.

  “Too late,” he said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “We’re selling the stock to Preston Laurence.”

  “You can’t,” I said, amazed.

  “Yes, we can. We checked with our lawyer. He drew up the papers.”

  “But Jeanie and Eli and Ryan had an agreement never to let an outside party acquire majority interest in the company. You are Jeanie’s proxy in this. It isn’t right that you go against her wishes.”

  “Mister, we don’t care what you say. We had three daughters. Two are no good. One was perfect. Because of her involvement in Ryan Lear’s life, the perfect one is gone. So nothing matters anymore. We’ve got nothing except this farm, which we mortgaged to the limit to put the perfect daughter through Stanford. Now we have nothing in our future except back-breaking farm work until we drop. So when Mr. Laurence came and offered us two million dollars for our stock in the boy’s company, we said yes.”

  “Is the stock sale finalized?” I asked.

  The man looked at a miniature grandfather clock on the fireplace mantle. “If not now, in the next little bit.”

  I got out my phone and dialed Ryan. “It’s Owen,” I said when he answered. “I’m in the living room of Mr. and Mrs. Samples. They are selling their CBT stock to Preston.”

  “What?! They can’t do that! I told them that I’d buy it if they wanted to sell!”

  “He offered them two million.”

  “It’s worth much more than that!”

  “You talk to them.” I reached out with the phone.

  Mr. Samples took it. “Hello?” he said. After a moment, he said, “I know, but I didn’t think you would have that kind of money.” Another silence, this time longer. “Okay,” he said. “We’ll let you know.” He shut my phone and handed it back to me. He looked at his wife, then back at me.

  “The boy says the stock is worth much more, but if we want cash, he’ll pay us ten million for it. Does he have that much money?”

  “As far as I can tell,” I said.

  “Is his word good?”

  “I believe so,” I said.

  “Then I’ll call my lawyer and see if he hasn’t finished our deal with Mr. Preston.”

  “Thank you,” I said, and left.

  FORTY-EIGHT

  When I got back from visiting Jeanie Sample’s parents, I said hello to Smithy who was sitting on the folding chair in the shade of the entryway dormer. Inside, I found Spot lying on the rug near the entrance to the family room. He glanced at me, thumped his tail on the floor, then turned back to Lily, who sat in front of him. Between Spot and Lily was a little china tea set. She’d tied a red scarf around Spot’s neck. He was propped on his elbows, holding his head forward with great attention to her, a posture that I knew meant food.

  Lily saw me. “Spot and I are having coffee and coffee cake.” She lifted up an empty cup and took a pretend sip. Then she lifted a little piece of bread out of her lap, and tossed it.

  Spot snatched it out of the air.

  Ryan was pacing, and talking on a portable phone. Carol was sitting at the dining table with a mug of tea, the little paper square at the end of the string hanging over the rim. She looked up from her magazine, made a little wave with her hand.

  Ryan hung up, came over. “How did it go?”

  “You got the gist of it when I called you. I left shortly after you made Mr. Samples an offer to buy their stock. Let’s hope they got to their lawyer in time to call off the deal with Preston.”

  �
��I would have offered more - it’s worth more - but I don’t have more cash. They won’t want to wait while I shuffle investments.”

  Ryan looked at Carol.

  “Oh, sorry,” Carol said. “I can leave.”

  “No, you can stay,” Ryan said. “Maybe you will have some insight. I’m not getting anywhere by myself.”

  Carol looked at me. “Are you sure?”

  “Unless you want to read uninterrupted,” Ryan said.

  She shook her head, shut her magazine.

  Ryan and I pulled out chairs. I briefly explained that I had no evidence that Preston had anything to do with tormenting Ryan.

  “You think Preston didn’t kill Eli or Jeanie?” Ryan asked.

  “I don’t know. I’ve learned that he’s capable of ordering a murder, but it’s usually easier to buy someone off if you have endless funds. My guess is that the murderer is someone we haven’t yet found. Maybe it’s a person who works for Preston. Or a person with a deep hatred for you. I want you to revisit your past and try again to think of anyone you have crossed.”

  Ryan was already shaking his head. “I’ve been over this. We’ve discussed Preston and William and William’s mother. JJ at the lab. I’ve thought of my employees, the ones I know, anyway. There are many I haven’t even met, so how can I consider them? I’ve thought about the kids at Stanford, and no one seems like they would have a reason to come after me. I even went back through my old email records, looking for anyone who might have been mad at me. But I’ve found nothing.”

  “What about further back? High school? Was there anyone there who saw you as a problem, or an obstacle to their desires?”

  Ryan did the sad grin with the snort and a shake of his head. “You mean like someone who thinks that I stole his girl or something? That’s a joke, Owen. I told you about how I was the miserable little geek, picked on by everyone except the few students who were equally dysfunctional.”

  “Think about it anyway,” I said.