The Body in the Parking Structure (Roger and Suzanne South American Mystery Series Book 4)

by Jerold Last

  Suddenly, someone (or more than one) had a strong motive to be looking for new drug candidates to develop really quickly. Was this a motive for murder? It certainly seemed to be a possibility worth checking out.

  Late that night Robert finally fell asleep. He obviously missed Bruce. Suzanne and I crawled into bed and I updated her on the case.

  “I have a hard and fast rule that everyone files reports in person or by e-mail on whatever they’ve done that day while everything is still fresh in their mind, so I can fill you in on what all three of us learned today. Bruce actually was able to get himself picked up by Jim Schantz in a West Hollywood gay bar. Schantz has an apartment in Westwood, so lives near the UCLA parking structure where Eugenio was shot. Bruce has a new phone number for his little black book and a tentative date for later this week.

  “Vincent has a female chauvinist pig as a boss and is probably a better biochemist than anyone else at Pharmacur, Ph.D. or M.S. When he asked about the peptide sequence so he could try purification by affinity chromatography with a commercial antibody, Jim Schantz refused to tell him the sequence of the peptide in their new drug, claiming that it's proprietary information. Given that Vincent’s pretty mediocre as a researcher compared to the typical faculty member at a big U.S. university, I think we can conclude that he isn’t working with the crème de la crème of Big Pharma. It looks like he’s already considered indispensable by the movers and shakers at Pharmacur.

  “I met a very co-operative and overworked homicide detective from the LAPD who is only too happy to have us investigate the murder on his behalf. He let me read the case folder. Eugenio was shot five times with a .32 from close range, which probably means he knew the killer. There are at least six members of the leadership team at Plantacur who’ve been colleagues for more than ten years in a succession of start-up companies. They just got some bad news. Their drug candidate is a toxic carcinogen and their funding angels don’t love them anymore. There’s plenty of motive there for someone in the know to have tried to steal Eugenio’s drug patents. I’ve got a lot more odds and ends, but that seems to be the important stuff.”

  Suzanne rolled over and spooned with me. “Can you handle a little inductive logic here rather than deductive?”

  “That’s like women’s intuition, right?”

  “Yep.”

  “OK, shoot, if you’ll pardon the expression this close to Eugenio’s murder.”

  “I think that the stars are aligned just right for this to be a big conspiracy, not just a single person who did a spontaneous murder to steal the rights to an untested new drug. The reluctance to tell Vincent the exact sequence of the new drug suggests to me that they are planning to switch drugs in mid-stream, probably using one of Eugenio's patented drugs, hoping that nobody ever catches on that they did this. The answers are probably there at Pharmacur, and the trick is going to be getting one of the conspirators to talk.”

  “I pretty much came to the same conclusion, even if we don’t have a shred of proof yet. I guess we have a working hypothesis for now.”

  Chapter 5. The last day

  Two very large would-be muggers jumped Vincent as he started to walk from his car towards the Pharmacur building. It was 9 o’clock in the morning in Los Angeles, broad daylight, but in an industrial area that wasn’t crowded with people. His assigned parking place was at the edge of the lot, so it was easy for the muggers to take him by surprise from a nearby alley and drag him back into the alley where they couldn’t be seen from the street. He liked the idea of the alley so didn’t really resist. Then, suddenly, things stopped going according to the plan. His CIA training kicked in and he did some karate moves with blinding speed that were totally unexpected. In less than five seconds both of the would-be muggers were down on the ground, broken in several places. One was unconscious while the other was moaning in pain but could still talk.

  “Who hired you?” Vincent asked mildly.

  That was answered with an obscenity.

  “I’ll ask one more time. It would be a good idea to answer politely this time.”

  No answer.

  Vincent picked up a hand and bent a finger back until it dislocated. The resulting scream was muffled by Vincent's left hand constricting over the mugger's throat. He moved on to the next finger, but had already made his point.

  “I don’t know who she was. It was a real good looking broad with red hair and lots of curves. She gave us $500 to rough you up and give you a good scare and promised us $500 more if we did a good job of it and scared you off. Honest, I don’t know her name, but I’ve seen her go into this place before and I think she works here.”

  “Thanks,” Vincent said politely. He did something to a nerve plexus in the exposed neck and there were now two battered, badly broken, and unconscious muggers lying in the alley. He took their wallets and cell phones, walked back to his car, and drove back to the detective agency. Along the way he used one of his new untraceable cell phones to call 911 and report an attempted mugging and direct the dispatcher to where the police and the ambulance should go to find the muggers.

  Vincent walked into my office and handed me two phones and two wallets. He filled me in on recent events. “What do you suggest I do next, Roger?”

  “Call your boss, Linda Poras, and tell her you decided to go directly to the UCLA library this morning so you didn’t have to fight traffic both ways to and from the airport to Westwood. You’ll come in after you’ve researched the whole antibody thing. You can do that from the composition, even if you don’t know the sequence, can’t you?”

  “You do remember that Linda is a redhead, don’t you?”

  “Yeah”

  “No, I can’t do that from the composition. I’d have to know the sequence.”

  “Is there any chance she’d think you’re dumb enough not to know that?”

  “There’s a pretty good chance that she’s dumb enough not to think of that, despite the doctoral degree.”

  “OK, then. Call her and stall her at least till after lunch while we figure out how to play this. Last night Suzanne and I tried to put this all together. Both of us think we have a conspiracy to steal Eugenio's patents here, with some or all of the leadership team at Plantacur involved. So how do we separate the ones in on the killing from the others?”

  "It looks like a slam dunk that Linda's one of the guilty ones"

  "I think we can add Jim Schantz to the probably guilty list. He denied knowing who Eugenio was, or ever having met him, but still knew he was from Santa Cruz de Bolivia."

  "Do you think we could beat the truth out of either of them?"

  "Probably, but that kind of confession wouldn't hold up in court. We need to trap them into naming names while confessing something admissible in a trial. The question is how we can set one or both of them up to do what we want before they succeed in killing you. What do you think tipped them off that you were a plant?"

  "Did anyone hack into their computer last night? They may have thought one new employee and one security leak added up to two and set the mugging up to get me out of there."

  "Sounds reasonable to me, and yes, someone did. They found that Plantacur's new drug is a toxic carcinogen at about the same time that their venture capital source dried up and told them they were on their own."

  Vincent let out a long, slow whistle. "Claro. That would explain why they don't like me anymore, and why they might take some risks to get a new drug they could substitute for the old one when nobody was looking."

  "Let's see what happens if you stir the pot a little bit. Call Linda with the UCLA library story and invite her to lunch with you some place in Westwood where you two can have some 'privacy'. I'll bet you she makes the date with you."

  So Vincent made the phone call and ended up with a hot date for lunch. "Here's what I want you to tell her at lunch, just this way," I explained to him. "Now it's time to stir that pot a little more."

  I called Bruce. "Hey, I bet you'd like an afternoon off? We're stirring
the pot to see if we can cook up a stew. Why don't you call Jim Schantz and tell him how you can't get him out of your mind and you have an afternoon of vacation time today. Invite him to lunch some place he likes near his apartment. I suspect he'll say yes. If he does, here's what I want you to tell him at lunch, just this way."

  My next phone call was to Detective Brown of the LAPD. "I think we may have your murder case solved, but I'm going to need your help with a bunch of arrests. Can I count on you to drop everything and join us when I call you this afternoon if things go as planned?"

  My last call was to Suzanne. "I'm sorry for the short notice but you'll have to stay home with Robert this afternoon. Things are coming to a boil at Plantacur and I need Bruce to try to seduce one of the killers over lunch and get him into some incriminating pillow talk. Can you handle it?"

  So that's how Vincent ended up at a restaurant in Westwood a few blocks from the UCLA parking structure where all of this began, wining and dining his boss Linda Poras. Just a block or two further into Westwood Bruce would be wining and dining her boss Jim Schantz in about half an hour. I was strategically between them as the reserve force if anything that seemed dangerous or threatening happened during their romantic lunch dates.

  Each of them had a throwaway cell phone preset to call me at the push of a button, with instructions to throw the phone with its SIM chip removed into the nearest dumpster after lunch if it turned out not to be needed. I had a quiet place to sit and a tape recorder attached to my cell phone by a high gain microphone to record any interesting conversation that might happen at either lunch. We were all set.

  Vincent had memorized his script. He started the prepared dialogue over drinks after they ordered their food while they waited for lunch to be served.

  "I'm sorry, Linda, but I lied to you on the telephone when I spoke to you. I did come in to work this morning. I had just parked my car when two muggers jumped me. They had no way of knowing it, but I've had military training to handle situations like that. I beat them up pretty badly and got the heck out of there.

  "The other time I lied to you was when I took the job at Plantacur. I said I met my wife in the States and we went to Chile afterwards. It was really the other way around. I was sent to Chile as a sort of military advisor during the cold war, and met my wife there.

  "Anyway, I was thinking that you might need someone with my particular skills as a friend, and I could use some extra cash and some fringe benefits, if you get my meaning."

  "Wow, that's a big adjustment you're asking me to make just out of the blue. Let me think about it for a minute or two."

  The timing was good as the waiter came over just then and served us our meals.

  Plates were placed on the table, water glasses were refilled, fresh drinks were refused, and the wait staff finally left us alone. Linda looked up at me. I pushed the button on my cell phone, which now lay out of sight beside me on the railing along the wall beneath the table.

  "Did you hack into the computer network at work last night using my user ID and password?"

  "I don't know. If I said yes I'd be admitting to a crime. Why are you asking me?"

  "To be honest, I'm trying to figure out how much you know."

  "I know a lot. I've guessed a whole lot more. And there's one more thing I should tell you. I met Eugenio Vasquez at a scientific meeting in Lima last year. We spent a whole day together visiting museums and drinking beer. I kind of liked him."

  Linda's whole demeanor changed. She stared at Vincent hard enough to see through him for a full minute. Then she slumped down in her chair.

  "What do you want from me?"

  "I already told you, money and fringe benefits. In return you get protection and access to my rather specialized expertise. But you'll have to be straight with me the same way I'm laying my cards on the table with you."

  "I don't have a whole lot of choice, do I?"

  "Sure you do. But the smart way to play it is to get me on your side."

  "OK. The Schantz brothers hatched out a scheme to steal some patents and switch drugs to keep Plantacur afloat until we could sell the company and get our money. They recruited Helena Fletcher, John Hardy, and me later on to cover up the bad toxicology data and the financing issues. It seemed so simple---but then the entire scheme started to unravel. Eugenio Vasquez was actually coming here to LA to make a deal for his patents and Plantacur didn't have any money to deal with." Her story came to an abrupt halt.

  "What happened then?"

  "I don't know. But Vasquez was murdered a quarter of a mile away from here and it almost had to be about those patents. I don't know who killed him."

  "How about those muggers who attacked me this morning? What do you know about them?"

  "Technically, I hired them. But I was just carrying the money. Robert Schantz gave me a $1,000 bonus in cash to set that up, and I needed the extra cash real badly. But I promise you, they were just supposed to scare you, not do any real damage. I'm in trouble, aren't I?"

  "Some, I don't know how much. But being honest now can get you leniency later."

  "I need somebody to look after my interests in this mess, and it sure isn't going to be the Schantz brothers. How much money will it actually take for you to volunteer to be my hero?"

  "That's hard to say. That $1,000 bonus you got for setting me up would be a good start. Let's see what happens next. I'm not planning on returning to work today. But you can assume I'll be on your side if you'll help me prove what's going on at Plantacur. I sense that there will be a meeting of the inner circle this afternoon, and you might try to get invited. I'm going to give you a little toy to take with you to the meeting, a voice-activated digital transmitter that you can turn on with this tiny switch here. I'll be somewhere nearby listening. If you can get somebody to say who killed Eugenio and why, I think I can promise you that you'll come out of this as the heroine rather than one of the villains."

  At just about that time Bruce connected with Jim Schantz and they sat down for lunch at a table less than a quarter of a mile away. Bruce had also memorized his script, and started right after lunch had been served.

  "Jim, there's some stuff you need to know. First, you didn't pick me up last night. I set things up so you'd meet me 'by chance' at the bar. Second, you're the prime suspect in Eugenio Vasquez's murder, and will probably be arrested for it tomorrow if we don't find someone else who looks better for the killer between now and then. Third, I'm a detective working on this case. Finally, we know all about what's going on at Plantacur, and all of the top scientists are looking at spending some time in jail unless they change sides and help us get the evidence we need to prosecute the top executives for fraud, and maybe worse."

  Schantz went pale and gulped some water.

  "I don't know what you're talking about and don't have to listen to this crap!"

  He stalked out of the restaurant without looking back.

  Bruce, Vincent, Detective Brown, and I were sitting in my car a couple of blocks east of Plantacur, well within the range of Linda's transmitter, hoping she'd turn it on and that we'd hear something incriminating. Suddenly, there was the noise of chairs being moved and people talking coming through the receiver, which was also a recorder.

  Somebody started organizing things. "I called this meeting because we've got problems and need to figure out the best way to deal with them. Jim, tell the others what you told me."

  "Thanks Robert." So the first voice was Robert Schantz and voice number two was his brother Jim. "Somebody I thought I had met casually turned out to be not so casual at all, and also turned out to be a detective. His name is Bruce, and he pretty much accused me of murder and talked about fraud here at the company."

  "Whose murder?" That was Linda's voice. Good for her. She was doing exactly what Vincent had asked her to, trying to get someone to say something incriminating.

  "The Bolivian scientist with the drug patents, Eugenio Vasquez."

  I glanced back at Detective Brown. Literally
and figuratively, his ears and his interest level had perked up at the mention of his case.

  Robert's voice came on again. "Linda, what about your hotshot new biochemist Vincent? Has he been officially discouraged from any more peeking into our computer files? And do you think he has anything to do with this Bruce character?"

  "I gave the money to the men just like you instructed me, Robert. I have no idea what happened after that. And I have no idea who Bruce is."

  "Helena, John, Emil, do you know anything about either Bruce or Vincent and who they're working for?"

  It was nice of Robert to let us know who else was there at the meeting. Now we knew who was in on the conspiracy. All we still needed was a spontaneous confession to the murder.