Cold to the Bone

by Emery Hayes

  “King paid for it?”

  “He came across with the goods,” she confirmed.

  “Such as?”

  “Equipment, gifts, financial support. In our business, it’s called wooing.” She grimaced, recognizing that the term was less than attractive. “Michael was cultivating a relationship with Esparza.”

  “With the expectation that Esparza would sell to him?”

  “No, Michael would get an insider’s look at the process. He would be given a few of the pieces but not the whole puzzle. Not enough to figure it out on his own. But it’s understood by both parties that a sale isn’t eminent. Michael knew there were several interested parties.”

  “Did you come to Blue Mesa for the auction?”

  “Yes. Attendance wasn’t mandatory, but we wanted a front-row seat for this. It could make or break many of us. We knew that. And by we, I mean pharmaceuticals collectively. From the Big Six down to the small little fish.”

  “Did Callon have something to worry about?”

  “We all did,” she said. “But we’re better off than most. Unless you have a niche pharma, something this big would blow you out of the water.”

  “Does Callon have a niche pharma?”

  “Yes. We hold the market on beta blockers. There are other companies that offer similar drugs, but none with the effectiveness of ours.”

  “So you didn’t need Nueva Vida?”

  “We wanted Nueva Vida,” she said. “Without it we would stay afloat. With it we would prosper. But we didn’t want it at the cost of our reputation and possible sanctions by the FDA.”

  “And that was possible?”

  “Probable.”

  “And that’s why you passed on Nueva Vida?”

  She nodded.

  “What changed?” Because she had come for the auction.

  Her lips pursed. “Nothing, I think. We worried Esparza was using his daughter as a test subject for his nano-cell. He presented her as a cancer patient, but we had serious doubts about that.”

  “Because you never knew Beatrice to have cancer?”

  “Oh no. The girl had cancer. In August. And again in October.”

  “How was that established?” Nicole asked.

  “A blood panel, drawn by a neutral party. The sample was taken to a lab under watch, the results impartial. That’s how these things are carried out.” She sat forward, sipped from her latte, and paused over her next words. “So we knew Beatrice had cancer. We knew stage, had growth rate, and were present for the insertion of the super cell in December.”

  “Then what was troubling about Beatrice Esparza’s cancer?”

  “There were no records of other interventions. No chemo or radiation. Not even a round of Herceptin. In fact, no drug therapy at all. Esparza had the paperwork from the FDA, allowing a small clinical trial, but I doubted its veracity.”

  “Because he couldn’t provide proof of other, failed options?”

  “Exactly. And the FDA doesn’t hand out invitations without evidence. If Beatrice had been treated at a hospital, by doctors other than her father, if there had been record of any such outside medical involvement, then we’d be a pack of rabid dogs after Esparza’s super cell. But none of that exists.”

  “Are documents from the FDA easy to forge?”

  “Easier to buy, I think,” she said. “But who knows?” She shrugged. “The internet makes so many things possible.”

  “When was the last time you saw Beatrice?”

  “Christmas night.” She sat back, crossed her legs. “Did Enrique tell you about the proofing? It was our final step. A blood draw and biopsy. Proven clear at two months. We call it a double-sure. With the kind of money at stake, we need at least that much.” She didn’t wait for them to question, but sat back and confided, “Fifty-five million dollars. So the double-check was mandatory. It was to be done at King’s place, out on the lake. Cocktails, hors d’oeuvres, and revelation.”

  “A biopsy completed not in a hospital?” Lars asked.

  “You’d be surprised or aghast at the many places such procedures are done. In this case, sterile equipment and environment were all that was needed. Well, and an electron microscope.”

  “And you had all that?”

  “King had a good setup.”

  “You saw it?”

  “We all did.”

  Nicole and her deputies had been through the home. So far, they’d recovered medical supplies in the trash and a microscope on a bureau in an upstairs bedroom. A prepared slide was taken into evidence, specially packaged and delivered to Arty and company. No word yet on the type of microscope. Or on what the slide held, if anything.

  “Was Beatrice a willing participant?”

  “Definitely. She was proud of her involvement but resented the intrusion.” Sanders shrugged. “Teen angst in the mix.”

  “Was she happy to be at King’s?”

  “She was happy with King,” Sanders clarified. “She was happy to be a part of her father’s great success—that’s what she called it. But on Christmas, Beatrice seemed agitated. She refused to speak to her father, wanted nothing to do with the brokers hired to conduct the auction. And then her mother showed up—” Sanders’s voice trailed off, and her mouth became grim. “A little late, if you ask me. I think if you’d asked Beatrice too.”

  “Explain that, please,” Nicole asked.

  Sanders paused to compose her thoughts. “I don’t know Alma Esparza very well, so this is strictly as an observer. Enrique, he’s the dreamer. Alma is supportive. She’s loyal. But she also seems to have her feet firmly on the ground. She wants her husband to succeed, her children to obey, and her life to flow smoothly, from one pleasant shore to the next. She doesn’t like turbulence, and so I felt she had very little patience with Beatrice’s newfound independence and importance.”

  “Because it caused trouble?”

  “Enrique spent more time with Beatrice than he did his wife or other children. To develop something like Nueva Vida, one must be obsessive. I imagine Alma was missing her husband, sparring with her daughter and distraught over the possibility that both were involved in a process that could harm Beatrice and shatter her family.”

  “Who bid highest?” Nicole asked.

  “We did,” she said. “We worried about Enrique’s ethics, but this super cell, it has great promise.”

  “You purchased the rights to Nueva Vida?”

  “The rights to Esparza’s super cell and to him, as an intellectual property, until Nueva Vida is saving lives, and not on a small scale. Esparza will work with us for the next ten to twenty years.”

  Nicole thought about that. “It will take that long to effect the kind of change you’re hoping for?”

  “Medicine is a slow business,” she said.

  “Were you surprised when you heard Beatrice was murdered?”

  “Shocked but not surprised,” she said. “She was a beautiful girl, loved life, and so for that reason her death was shocking. But I was not surprised. Many people would gain from her death.”

  “Callon included?”

  “Especially Callon.”

  30

  A low, keystone garden wall separated the patio, with its bistro and fire pit, from the rolling grounds and trails. Alma Esparza sat with her back to the resort, watching her children play in the snow. The girls didn’t show a lot of enthusiasm, and Nicole knew that they had been told about Beatrice’s death. Children this young stood at the chasm of loss, trembling with fear. Nicole had read the articles, attended the conferences, watched it unfold in real time. Children needed to be surrounded by family, to be immersed in routine, to talk about their feelings. It was good to see Joaquin trying, reaching out to them in the ways he knew. He rolled snow into a large ball and carried it to where his sisters knelt and made it into the foundation of a snowman. Sofia and Isla patted and smoothed the ball to greater roundness. Their breath plumed in the air, and above them the halogen lamps caught swirling flurries in their light and
held off the night. And Joaquin stood behind them, a steady presence.

  Nicole’s breath condensed against the glass, and she stepped back.

  “A little bit of normal thrown into the blender,” Lars said.

  Nicole nodded. She didn’t doubt that Alma and Joaquin and the little girls were feeling the sharp cut of a day without Beatrice. “I wonder where Esparza is?”

  “Peddling his wares?” he guessed.

  “Maybe.”

  She pushed through the door and stepped onto the resort’s patio. A fire burned in the stone pit and several people were roasting marshmallows over it. A young woman was making coffee drinks and hot cocoa at the barista bar. Heat lamps sizzled in the moist air.

  “You getting soft on Esparza?”

  She thought about that. The man had been driven by greed, by the poverty of his youth and the desire to be someone who mattered. Human qualities, shared on some level by all.

  “He didn’t kill her,” she said. Not with his own hands. “But his weaknesses did.”

  “What do you think about Sanders?”

  “She was very cooperative, wasn’t she?” Nicole said.

  “You think too much?”

  “I think everything she told us was the truth, but that she didn’t tell us everything.”

  “What did she leave out?”

  “Her own complicity.”

  Nicole let that drop and started across the patio. Lars was good at picking through shell fragments and formulating cause and effect.

  Joaquin noticed her approach and raised his chin, indicating that his mother should turn and see what was going down. Nicole stopped behind her, close enough that she would have burst her personal space bubble, and waited for her attention, but she raised a hand to keep Joaquin in his place.

  Alma Esparza wore her red, fur-lined parka and a wool hat and gloves. She turned, and her gaze found Nicole’s. The woman had been crying. Salty tracks marked her smooth skin, and her lips trembled.

  “Sheriff,” she said. “Are you here to talk to me again?”

  Alma Esparza shifted, preparing to stand.

  “Don’t get up, Mrs. Esparza.” Nicole swung her legs over the wall and sat down beside her. She was quiet a moment as she took in the scene. Snow had an ambience, a hushed quality even beneath the current of laughter and conversation on the patio. “The girls look good.”

  Sofia and Isla had noticed the tension in Joaquin and stopped playing in the snow. They followed his gaze to where Nicole sat with their mother. She smiled, and they raised their hands and waved.

  “Yes. It is better for them outside, with the fresh air and the snow. The room is too heavy with Beatrice’s absence.”

  “She was close to her sisters.” Hotel staff and family had commented on it.

  “She preferred their company,” Alma Esparza said. “Beatrice had a lot of friends, but she always made time for family.”

  Nicole turned so that Joaquin and his sisters were in her periphery and Mrs. Esparza was her focal point. She noticed that Lars had returned indoors. He had his phone in hand, was probably paging through his notes as he tried to form a path of logic to Nicole’s theory—that Geneva Sanders was involved in the murder of Beatrice Esparza.

  “Why are you here?” Mrs. Esparza asked. There was a river of desperation running under her words. “What could we possibly have now that you need?”

  “Answers,” Nicole said. “From the beginning, you’ve known more than you’re saying.”

  “Because King had my daughters,” Alma said. “And I thought they would all come home. I told Enrique that. Give him what he wants or at least make him think he’s getting it. Then they can all come home.”

  “So what happened?”

  Alma shook her head. “Enrique said it was too late for that. Even if they had gone through with the proofing, if King had solid proof of life, it would be too late because Nueva Vida would not work for King’s daughter as it had worked for ours.”

  “Then your husband was testing his super cell on your daughter?”

  “I believe that,” Alma said. “But Enrique never said one way or the other. He never gave me a straight answer about his work. His family would know when the world did. It was safer for us that way.”

  “But you knew because Beatrice was sick.”

  Alma nodded. “I knew. I saw the incisions. He was slicing into our daughter and he would not tell me why, but I knew. I asked him to stop. Things had gone too far. But he said they were too close to stop now. And he was right; his discovery was working. Beatrice would get sick and then she was better. Better than ever before.”

  “Did you get the Augmentin for Beatrice?”

  “Enrique would not allow any medications. Nothing that would compromise the validity of his trials. But one of the incisions was infected. Puffy and red and starting to ooze. Beatrice came to me. She showed me because Enrique would do nothing to help her. Nothing beyond a topical, and it wasn’t working.”

  “Why Augmentin when you knew she was allergic to it?”

  “Do you know what happens when an infection of the skin enters the bloodstream?”

  Nicole knew basic first aid. “It’s poison.”

  “Yes. And if that is not treated, if it gets to the heart—” She sniffed loudly. “She would die. Augmentin gave Beatrice a rash. She could deal with that.”

  Nicole caught a flash of movement in the corner of her eye and turned slightly toward it. Behind the glass doors, Daisy had approached Lars. She was talking, and he looked up from his notes to give her his full attention. His eyebrows peaked, and Nicole spent a moment wondering what the older woman was imparting. Would there be details that changed the direction of their investigation? That gave them greater insight into suspect or victim? She hoped so. She was always mindful of the clock and the diminishing odds of solving a murder. They needed a break that would propel them forward.

  She turned back to Alma Esparza. Her eyes were focused on her son and daughters, but they were liquid and her loss was obvious.

  “You went to King’s house Christmas night.” Nicole recalled her attention. “You went for Beatrice but not Sofia and Isla.”

  “They were playing and they were happy. Big girls at a big-girl sleepover.”

  “What did King say to you?”

  “He would not let me see Beatrice. He thought I would upset her and the evening was too important for that. He kept me at the door and told Isla and Sofia to go back to Violet. There were still gifts and candies to pass out, he told them.”

  “And King asked you to leave?”

  “Yes. He said he’d return my daughters after the proofing.”

  “But you didn’t trust him.”

  “I knew what he wanted from Beatrice. I knew that he would stop at nothing to get it. It was the only way for him.”

  “And still you left?”

  “Enrique was there. I trusted him.” A flush crept up her neck and settled in her cheeks. “And Enrique told me to leave.”

  “Did you speak to Beatrice?”

  She held Nicole’s gaze and shook her head. “She wouldn’t come with me.” The confession fell from trembling lips.

  “But you said she called. She begged you to come for her.”

  “Yes,” she said. “But she had calmed down. She didn’t want me there and she didn’t want to leave.”

  “And your story, of following the Lake Road for hours and never finding Beatrice?”

  “Was not true. I went to King’s when I should have been on the slopes with Enrique. I didn’t know he had lied about that until I saw my husband there, mingling.”

  “And what did your husband say, Mrs. Esparza?”

  “He was not happy. He met me at the door and told me to go back to the hotel. To wait. It would only be a few more hours. At midnight it would be over and we would be back to our normal, together and enjoying our vacation. Business settled.”

  “So you left?”

  She caught Nicole’s gaze, he
rs steady and beseeching. “I beckoned to Beatrice again, but she would not come. She was mad at her father and mad at me too.”

  “Why was Beatrice mad at you, Mrs. Esparza?”

  She looked away, at her children in the snow, at the trees and beyond, toward the lake. Her fingers worked the hem of her coat, pleating it, then smoothing it out. A repetitive motion she was aware of only at the edges of conscious thought, probably.

  “There’s something more you’re not telling me,” Nicole persisted.

  “What?” Alma Esparza tried to deflect the question.

  “‘Good girls don’t do this.’ Does that sound familiar?”

  She held Nicole’s gaze and nodded. “I know you have Beatrice’s cell phone. You know I wrote that to her.”

  “More than once. But I don’t know why.”

  “And that’s your question?”

  “I think it’s a pretty good one,” Nicole said.

  “I told you—”

  “Yes,” Nicole agreed. “You told me Beatrice was pushing back, rebelling as teens do, but there’s more to it.”

  “Some things between a mother and her daughter are private.”

  “Nothing in a murder investigation is off-limits,” Nicole reminded her. “You know my job is to look everywhere, shake the sheets, turn out the pockets. We find out a lot that way. Some of it connected to the crime, some not. I think your words to Beatrice are important, but more important is the reason you used them. That’s what I want to know about.”

  “I am not happy about this,” she began, “about my own behavior. Beatrice and my husband were spending so much time together, away from home, away from the family. And when they were present, they talked around us. It was like we had disappeared. We were pieces that no longer fit together.”

  “And you wanted your husband back?”

  “Yes. And my life, the way it was before. That’s what I wanted.”

  “It was enough for you,” Nicole said. “To be the wife of a doctor.”

  “Yes. I had never dared to dream my life would turn out so good.”

  “When you were Beatrice’s age and looking into the future?”