The Finder: A Novel

by Colin Harrison

His father waved a disgusted hand. "He'll figure it out sooner or later. Plus, you don't know much, anyway."

  "I know the shit probably came from pipes or septic tanks cleaned by this Victorious operation."

  "You go there tomorrow, ask questions, find this Richie guy."

  "Just walk in?"

  "Yeah, just walk in, Ray. Find him, follow him. Exactly what I would have done."

  Ray studied his father. This was the face my mother kissed as a nineteen-year-old, he thought, this was the face that had walked the beat, voted for Nixon in '72, with most of America, then been glad when he resigned, who had questioned hundreds of suspects, heard every line of bullshit and weaseling, was an awkward dancer and a moderate drinker, a man who often visited his wife's grave, took a little fold-out chair and battery radio with him, sat there an hour listening to the Yankees game, his hand on the tombstone.

  "Dad, you need a shave."

  His father grunted. "You drinking coffee?"

  "Yes."

  "Gimme some of that. Haven't had coffee in—"

  "Is it all right?"

  "What's it going to do, kill me?"

  He handed his father the cup. He drank slowly. "Mmn."

  "What'll it be, electric razor or a blade?"

  "Blade. Who is the barber?"

  "Me."

  He got a basin of hot water and a towel and shaving cream and a safety razor. He wet half the towel and softened up his father's face. His father closed his eyes and sank back into his pillow. "Feels good," he muttered.

  Ray lathered up his father's neck and cheeks. It had been many years since he'd touched his father's face so much, maybe since he'd been a boy.

  "You know, I worked a lot of missing persons cases," his father began, as if he'd been thinking of Jin Li since the morning. "Maybe forty or fifty. And what you see with them is that the people who are missing because they are hiding don't stay hidden for very long. They start moving around, they get restless. Folks get—"

  "Hold still." Ray went under the chin with the safety razor.

  "—lonely. I used to map out who a person knew, who the family was, the best friends, the old girlfriends."

  The coffee was making his father talkative. "So how does this apply to Jin Li?"

  "There's no family in the city?"

  "No. She's from China."

  "Friends?"

  "I didn't know her very long before she broke it off."

  "Boyfriends?"

  "I have no idea."

  "How long from the moment you met her until the first event in the bedroom Olympics?"

  Ray remembered. "Two days."

  "Don't think you get any credit for that, either." His father rolled his eyes toward the window. "Has orgasms easily?"

  He nodded, feeling too embarrassed to say this to his father. "Do I get any credit for that?"

  "No, of course not. It's the woman, always. How long was she in the country before meeting you?"

  "Three, four years, maybe."

  "Pretty girl, new in town, lonely. There've been plenty of guys, is my guess. She might have gone looking for an old boyfriend."

  The idea made him wary. "Maybe."

  "Easy on the cheek there. You see her apartment?"

  "Little place way up in the nineties on the East Side. Very small."

  "Not in Chinatown."

  "Hated Chinatown. Too Chinese."

  "Anything in her apartment?"

  "Usual stuff. Dresses. She spent most of her money on clothes."

  "No car?"

  "No."

  "Did you ever stay in her apartment?"

  "Lots of times. Ate breakfast out."

  "What did she read?"

  He patted his father's cheek. Smooth. "Everything. She reads English perfectly."

  "But spoken not so good."

  "Spoken very good. It's the pronunciation that is hard."

  "The palate hardens at some young age."

  "She can understand any spoken English, except perhaps any really hard accents, like a deep Southern accent."

  "So really she could go anywhere in the States easily enough." His father lifted the coffee cup again.

  "That's what I'm saying."

  "Did she have a secretive nature? Don't think, just answer."

  "Well—"

  "Just answer yes or no."

  But before he could, Wendy came in, her long shift about to end. "Coffee!" She turned on Ray. "He can't be drinking coffee!"

  "I asked for it," said his father.

  "I am sorry!" the nurse said to Ray. "I think you just don't understand here. I think you need to be a little more sensitive to the situation. I realize that you have not spent much time with people who are"—she glanced at Ray's father—"who are sick and dying, yes, we can say that, but—"

  "What was that?" croaked Ray's father suddenly. "What did you say about my son?"

  The pretty young nurse turned to him and spoke more gently. "I said, I know he has not spent much time around people who are—"

  "That's exactly what I thought you said." His father lifted both arms in excitement, pulling on his tubes, turning his fevered eyes directly upon her. "Let me tell you something, lady, my son Ray there has spent years around the dead and dying, he has seen fields of the dead, laid out in rows by the hundreds, burnt, crushed, drowned, he has seen the dead buried by the thousands, he has held the tiniest little babies that were—"

  "Dad, Dad, that's enough!"

  His father glared at the young nurse, who, for her part, looked at Ray in stunned wonder, at last realizing—as had another woman a few nights earlier—that she had no idea who he was.

  9

  They'd been happy once. And this was just the kind of rainy spring Manhattan evening he used to like. "Your wife is in the car downstairs," his secretary would say. Then came a quick brush of the hair in his private washroom. Adjust the silk tie in the mirror, shoot a look at Tom Reilly, guy on his way up. Then, downstairs, the company car would be idling by the curb, Ann waiting expectantly, and soon they'd head to yet another swanky dinner party. He'd let his hand slide along Ann's long firm thigh, eager to show her off, eager to hit the evening hard, plunge unabashedly into all the falsely earnest conversation, the self-congratulatory mannerisms, the grinning and groping, the money ogling and power sniffing, drinking neither too little nor too much, all on the happy glide path of intimacy with people who made things happen. He still remembered the night when Bill Gates was in the room—the richest man in the world is in this room, Ann, right now, the richest man who ever lived—and the time Jack Welch dropped by to pay his respects . . . but now, tonight it was different, now both of them were lost in their thoughts as the wet night slid by the windows outside, Ann next to him but with zero idea what he was walking into, that he was feeling weird spiders of pain crawl over his chest and left shoulder. Should he tell her, his doctor wife? She'd ask him what was wrong, why he was so stressed out. Nothing, sweetie, just a dinner party at Martz's mansion in the sky, twenty rooms thirty stories up in the air. Martz, the man who is stalking me. Tom had to go, no matter what, pretend nothing was wrong. The invitation had come yesterday. A straight-up test to see if Tom was avoiding Martz. Well, fine. He'd just swallowed a couple of beta-blockers at the office to zap out his anxiety. Martz would find the opportunity to take Tom aside and say, six months ago you were begging me to buy your stock and I do and so now what? Sniffing him for the anxiety that had been zapped out. There was something diseased and awful about Martz. Predatory, vulturish, his many hundreds of millions made by buying and selling the work of others, never had created or produced or invented anything himself, just slithered in when companies were weak or underfunded or down on their luck and sunk in his money-sucking fangs. And that was when Tom was going to look him in the eye and say, Bill, you know as well as I do that the market is irrational sometimes, and the best we can see somebody has been driving down the price, maybe selling on the way down in order to buy back everything at a lower pric
e later. Now you must stop hounding me . . . Well, he'd say something like that, flat-out lie, just knock it back at Martz in a moment of high-stakes poker . . .

  But Tom was unconvinced by his own line of bullshit and so felt around in his head wondering if he could feel the absence of anxiety. How long did beta-blockers take to kick in? He should know the answer, given all the drug efficacy reports he'd read. He could ask his wife, but she'd want to know why he was taking them, how he'd gotten them. Why was he so worried? It was not just Martz, no sir. There was more, much more, bad more. His fate, Tom understood all too well now, teetered upon a mere four words, words that were vague and deeply unimaginative: send them a message. Yes, he had said something like that, send them a message, send CorpServe, the office-cleaning and paper-shredding service, a message that he did not want them snooping around in his executive suite or anywhere else at Good Pharma. They were very thorough and got their cleaning done between the hours of seven and four every night as per the contract, but over the last few months several of his people had reported that they wondered if their papers had been pushed around a bit on their desks. The service's workers seemed unresponsive to a few casual questions. Like they were trained to be that way. Were they stealing? Looking for inside information? Hired by a Good Pharma competitor? It was all subtle, unprovable stuff, unless you installed hidden cameras, hired corporate espionage experts, the whole nine yards, a paper trail that eventually could be subpoenaed by a disgruntled, big-shoes investor like Martz or the neat freaks at the Securities and Exchange Commission. He had ordered that the IT department actually enforce the mandatory shutdown of all network workstations after six-thirty p.m., as well as upgrade the instant encryption of intracorporate and outgoing e-mail. Did this give him a margin of security? Not necessarily. So when a new report came that there was a particular question—just a question, mind you—about the service, something about some of the bags of paper for shredding maybe not quite all getting into the big mobile shredder parked at street level, he told his building services chief the words he had repeated to himself nearly every hour since he had vomited under his seat at the Yankees game: "I don't want people screwing around with our information! Send them a message that we want cleaning and paper waste removal and if we have to worry about them, we will tear up the contract and not pay them a dime. But frankly, I don't want to have to go find another service at this time of year. This outfit is cheap. So have a talk with them. Send them a fucking message they won't forget."

  How he wished he had a recording of this comment. It would prove that Tom Reilly was innocent of anything. A bit nasty, perhaps, but innocent. Send them a fucking message they won't forget. He'd said it to James Tonelli, his facilities and operations manager, an eager, overly aggressive forty-year-old who prowled the building constantly checking on heating, cooling, plumbing, fire alarms, you name it. James, who was from Brooklyn, had simply said, "Don't worry, I'll take care of it," nodding as he did so, maybe some idea half hidden in his eyes, and so Tom had done just that, he had not worried, because James had said he'd take care of it.

  They had not discussed how that might be accomplished, which Tom suspected would probably mean that James would have a ferocious little chat with the representative of the service company, a good-looking Chinese woman, he thought he remembered, having maybe met her once, and question the company's procedures and on-site supervision practices. The usual stuff. But then, a few days ago, he reads in the tabloid newspaper that two Mexican girls working for that same company have been found murdered out by the beach in Brooklyn? Still wearing the company uniforms? That sounded like a fucking message they won't forget. The girls had been recognized by some Good Pharma staffers, and the corporate relations office had confirmed they had worked in Good Pharma's offices that very night. Tom had simply nodded when told this and said, "If there's any inquiry, just please refer it to legal." At least the company name hadn't made it into the news. So far, anyway. And the next day James Tonelli calls in sick, and the day after that. Was this something to worry about? Was that a message Tom wouldn't forget? He wasn't sure. Well, yes, he was sure. He could construct rational reasons that might prop up his hopes, but his gut told him the two things were connected. There had always been a bit of talk about whom James knew in Brooklyn, whom his family was connected to. The Lucchese family, the Gambinos. These were just names, right? Did they really mean anything anymore? What was Tom, an expert in the Mafia? Wasn't the Mafia finished in New York, wiped out by RICO prosecutions? Just a joke that you enjoyed while watching reruns of The Sopranos? We actually kill people, ha-ha. Everybody thinks we are gone, ha-ha-ha. He realized that the Metro section of the paper sometimes had stories on organized crime. He should pay more attention to these things! The speculation about James had actually added a positive aura to his presence, and in general he got things done quickly—solved union issues, city inspector issues, anything that came up. He seemed to know whom to call and how to talk to them when he did. A very valuable skill set.

  So Tom could worry about James. But Martz, the man who would be his host in ten minutes, didn't care about James or two dead Mexican girls. He cared about Good Pharma's stock price. In the last two weeks it had taken another dive, dropped another 17 percent. Why? Anyone's guess. Too many sellers! Usually companies knew why their stock was going up or down. Analysts issued reports, made recommendations, knowledgeable people commented in the newspaper, and companies themselves were required to make forward-looking comments about their projected earnings. It was a strange thing when a company didn't understand its own stock price, and by strange he meant very bad.

  Why would so many people be selling Good Pharma's stock? Maybe they had a good reason to think his company was not as valuable as others thought it was. Maybe they had a good reason or maybe they had an excellent reason. And what could that be? Good Pharma had six major drugs in final development. Of these six, one was a major hit, three were minor duds, one was unknown as yet, and the sixth was a major wipeout. It had been Tom's intention to sequence the news of these developments very carefully. Unfortunately, the rate of progress of each drug in development did not match the optimal order of the announcement of its success or failure. So he had started to mess around with their progress, trying to speed up the big success, slow the duds a bit, and put the catastrophic wipeout into deep freeze: to be announced in fragments, even as the company also announced new initiatives, the ongoing successes of its major hit, and so on. He'd intended to play by the rules but certainly bend every opportunity to the company's advantage. There were things you could do—

  —if you controlled your information! If you assumed that the data and reports in your office, lying around on people's desks, in their computers, and of course in their heads, were protected.

  If not, hell's bells.

  But what was he to do? If he started a formal internal investigation into how certain critical drug trial information had been stolen or released, then he might accidentally draw attention to the problem itself. He'd be creating more problematic information. That could be stolen, too, or leaked. All you needed was one Good Pharma exec chatting to an outsider at the wrong moment and you could have a hundred news stories inside a day, virally proliferating to the bloggers and investment websites. The stock price would crater. You would also draw attention to the company's information control processes—how faulty they were. How faulty the oversight was. Tom Reilly's oversight, that is.

  Martz, of course, was already on to him, seemed to have sensed the problem, started to harass Tom. That's what this evening was all about, getting a chance to get close to Tom and make his threat even clearer. Tom saw that. Oh, yeah. But Martz would not be the last. Tom knew that the major shareholders—the mutual funds, the banks, the hedge fund operators—were not going to give him that opportunity. They had started to call, pressing for appointments. Lots of folks owned part of the company: German banks, French banks, English banks, their German pharmaceutical competitors, the Japanes
e conglomerates, South Korean real estate magnates, the Hong Kong shipping and manufacturing magnates. Lots of tough, unsentimental bastards. Cared not a whit for Tom Reilly and how many beta-blockers he was popping. Or anyone else at the company. Lose a quick 17 percent on $100 million, that's $17 million. Need to then get a 20 percent return to make yourself whole again. And Good Pharma didn't have a nice fat dividend protecting the stock price.

  He felt the beta-blockers kicking in. He felt . . . well, calm. Cool, clear. His heart beating more slowly. Wow. Wow. He was calm enough to return to the unhappy topic of James Tonelli. Pretend for a moment that the cleaning service had in fact stolen some valuable information, such as the early rotten results on the synthetic skin trials. Pretend you can prove that. Now pretend that James spoke to somebody else who told somebody else to scare those two Mexican girls out of their minds—self-importantly intensifying the meaning of "send a message"—and they did something stupid, or something worse—like go and kill them. Then pretend you are the New York Times or Wall Street Journal reporter and you find out that some kind of important secret research information leaked out of a company and the stock price cratered and then the company—a company in the health field—apparently somehow caused the murder of the people working for the company that took the information. What might be the outcome of that? Tom felt calm! The outcome? A blizzard of bad press, shareholder outcries, God knew what else. His career would be shit-canned. And no severance or golden parachute, if he was found to have broken federal laws or company policies. Prison, even, if people testified a certain way. Once there was a problem, companies cut people out of their ranks within hours, like a bad spot on an apple. Under questioning, James would report that he had done exactly what he had been told to do. Mr. Thomas Reilly, let me see if I got this right: You are the vice-president of a company doing cutting-edge research into how to save people's lives, your father was a doctor, your wife is a doctor, and you ordered or condoned or intimated that two helpless Mexican girls who cleaned your offices be asphyxiated by a tankload of human excrement?