Black Water Read online

  "So you weren't in favor of them investing?"

  "Not really. I didn't think OrganiVen was for them. I'm in favor of good investments. I'm in favor of blue chips and that's mainly what I sell. I look at people trying to get rich overnight and it makes me nervous. Especially family."

  "How did Gwen find out about OrganiVen?"

  Brock shrugged. "One of our guys."

  "Which of your guys?"

  "Trent Gentry, Newport office. He knew one of the OrganiVen founders from school. If I remember right, Trent met Wildcraft in bar or something. I think that was it."

  Brock looked at them from behind his shades. He checked watch and pursed his lips. "I'm sorry, but I really got to go."

  Merci tried to get a look at his eyes behind the dark lenses. "Do what you have to do, Mr. Brock. Thanks for taking five minutes help to solve the murder of your sister-in-law."

  "You bet, not a problem."

  "Did you know Gwen well, Mr. Brock?"

  "Not really. I only knew her for three years. I didn't see that much of her."

  "I guess you weren't invited to her birthday party, the night she was killed."

  "No. Just Priscilla."

  "Mr. Brock," said Merci, "I just thought of something. Did you buy a few shares of OrganiVen for yourself?"

  Brock took a deep, honest breath, then exhaled. "Yes, I did. I purchased twenty thousand shares for five thousand dollars."

  "So you did okay when Sistel stepped in?"

  "I did just fine."

  "Mr. Brock, did you ever have any reason to think that OrganiVen, or the people who ran it, were not honest?"

  "None at all."

  "Did you know any of them?"

  "None of them."

  "Did Archie and Gwen know you bought in?" asked Zamorra.

  "No."

  "And Priscilla?"

  "Of course she did."

  "Eventually she did," said Zamorra.

  "Exactly."

  "Because you and Priscilla weren't getting along," he said.

  "Right. That's all I'm going to say about that."

  "Thanks again for your help. We're going to have more questions."

  "How about by phone? I don't need any office gossip. The other guy from your office doesn't mind just using the phone for this thing."

  It took Merci just a second to figure it.

  "Al Madden."

  "Yeah," said Brock.

  "The phone's fine until it isn't," said Zamorra.

  "Whatever." Brock nodded but didn't offer his hand, then hustled back toward the RDD building, staying on the shady side of the street.

  "Very broken up about his sister-in-law," said Zamorra.

  "So broken up he wasn't even curious about who might have killed her. And so broken up about Priscilla that he's sneaking an investment or two he can hide from the divorce lawyer. He's already taken off his wedding ring."

  Merci watched Charlie Brock round the corner at Market Street. "He was sweating kind of a lot, Paul."

  "Not the heat."

  "No, the bank thermometer says it's only a hundred and two."

  They walked back to the car, keeping to the shady sides of the streets. Merci could feel the heat from the sidewalk coming through her shoes. "Ready to go see what Dr. Stebbins has to say about Archie's brain?" she asked.

  "Yes. If we're expected to arrest him, we at least should know how his mind works. What's left of it."

  Zamorra drove. When they hit the freeway it was backed up to standstill so he got into the toll lane. Zamorra hit eighty and Merci watched the chrome of the door handles flashing by beside them. She thought Brock was untrustworthy and Wildcraft was trying to tell the truth. She remembered how he'd described the "monstrous" head one of the men who had met with Gwen.

  "Paul, Wildcraft thought his wife's meeting had something to with OrganiVen. He said there was the blond businessman and the big guy, in a car with livery plates. Archie thought the big guy might have been a chauffeur. But chauffeurs don't sit in on meetings. So, say both of those guys were tied in with OrganiVen. They could have been part of the company, right? And if so, then a lot of other people would know who they are."

  "It's worth a try."

  She found Wyatt Wright's number in her notebook, dialed, and got a forwarding number from the operator. A receptionist answered "BioLucid, Mr. Wright's office," then put Merci through when Merci said she was law enforcement.

  Wright sounded young and unhappy to be talking to a cop. He said his former company, OrganiVen, never used a limousine service. They had to borrow money just to pay the rent back in those days, he said. He said this with pride.

  "You ever do business with a huge man with a beard?"

  "Never."

  "What about a blond man, mid-forties, possibly foreign-born looked like a . . . well, like a businessman."

  "No. My business was research, pure and simple. I didn't deal with anybody else but the other scientists. That was among the terms of my employment."

  "Were a very large bearded man and a blond man, mid-forties, employed there also? Whether you dealt with them or not?"

  "Not that I know. I had my head in a test tube the whole time. Really."

  "Thanks."

  Click.

  "Never trust a businessman under thirty," she said.

  Next, she tried OrganiVen cofounder Cody Carlson, but his secretary said Dr. Carlson was out of the country and could not be reached.

  Cofounder Sean Moss had no office number so she called his home phone and got a machine.

  She tried Dr. Stephen Monford—the voice of authority on the MiraVen promotional video—but he was on sabbatical in Norway.

  She sat back and thought about the big man and the blond, perhaps tied to OrganiVen but perhaps not, meeting with a nervous Gwen Wildcraft, spied upon by Archie. A new black town car with livery plates. The big guy maybe a chauffeur but maybe not. She couldn't get a baseline, couldn't come up with one fact to build on. The whole thing seemed hazy and dreamlike, which she figured was exactly how it seemed to Wildcraft. But it wasn't in Rayborn's nature to let things go. Zamorra had once compared her to the Gila monster, fabled to hold its prey until the sun goes down.

  "If the big guy and the blond were connected to OrganiVen but weren't founders, maybe we could trace them through the incorporation papers filed with the state," she said.

  "Well, okay."

  "But we've got the limo angle, so I'm going to burn some more department cell minutes."

  Merci made eight more calls to limo services that might cover Newport Beach. She asked again about a very, very large chauffeur. And whether the car company had done regular work for a biomed outfit called OrganiVen. The calls were on the department cell phone but Merci didn't think you could catch bad guys on a budget. None of the companies employed or had ever employed such huge, bearded, bespectacled chauffeur. None had ever done business with OrganiVen as a regular client, so far as they remembered.

  When she was done she wondered what the charges would be for those nine calls, for learning absolutely nothing except that Wyatt Wright was a smart ass and Red Carpet Limo had a late-summer special where you got the first hour free, three-hour minimum.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Dr. John Stebbins welcomed them into a small office in an old building behind the UCI Medical Center. A floor fan worked diligently from one corner but it couldn't break the heat. The floors were old and wooden and Merci could hear footsteps and voices from the hallway outside.

  Stebbins wore a white doctor's coat like the last time Merci had seen him, but a considerably more relaxed expression.

  "I apologize for last time," he said. "I. . . when you have a bad day in my profession, it's, ah. . ."

  "People die," said Merci.

  "Yes. Thank you. Same as yours, in some ways."

  "I haven't cured anybody recently," Merci said. "And we're sorry that Deputy Wildcraft decided to check himself out. He didn't consult us and we can't keep him here or
anywhere else for more than forty-eight hours unless we arrest him."

  "I'm concerned. The edema could easily increase. Infection is possible. If a cranial vein leaks or breaks, the resulting hematoma would be fatal. And besides this organic damage he's sustained, well, I'm not sure if he's capable of taking care of himself. Whether he can remember to take care of himself."

  "I'm not either," said Merci.

  "Have you seen him?"

  "Three hours ago. He seemed a little slower, mentally. Said he was tired, not thinking straight. He said he'd check himself back in this afternoon."

  "He hasn't."

  "What's going on inside that mind of his, Doctor?"

  Stebbins shook his head and sighed. He leaned back from a desk cluttered with papers. The fan oscillated his way and the corners lifted like spectators watching a home run.

  "It's easiest to show you."

  He rolled back on his chair and stood. Behind his desk was a wall mounted x-ray screen that he flicked on with a toggle. Archie Wildcraft's x rays were already in. Dr. Stebbins darted a red laser pointer across the image, stopping it suddenly on the outside of the skull.

  Merci was startled by the dark chaos that the bullet had brought to Archie's brain. A shadow the shape of a tornado issued from high on the right side, with the narrow funnel touching ground near the bottom of the skull. Around the tornado was a border of pale gray.

  "This is Archie's right hemisphere. The bullet entered here, resulting in the darker hematoma you see. You can see the bone fissure, and the way the blood vessels of the pia mater have hemorrhaged. It's hard to say whether the bullet's path was altered by the skull, or if it was fired from the corresponding angle, but you can see that it traveled downward and lodged here, beside the foramen magnum—that's the opening in the skull where the spinal cord exits. It missed the vein of Galen, which lie in this large triangular fold in the pia mater known as the velum interpositum. It missed the major cranial nerves—the vagas, optic, trigeminal, etcetera. It missed the internal capsule of the brain itself, which controls motor function."

  Dr. Stebbins frowned at the x ray. Then he looked at Merci and Zamorra. "Unfortunately, it did not miss the right amygdala. You can see the largest part of the bullet right here, about two inches in from the ear."

  "What's it do?" asked Merci.

  "In a male, the right amygdala processes the emotion of memory. Not the memory itself, but the feeling surrounding the memory. In women, it's the left."

  "He has no emotions attached to his memories?"

  "His recent memories. And to memories that he's now attempting to construct—every waking moment—with the fragment lodged in his amygdala. His long-term memories will begin to lose their emotional content, also. They're stored elsewhere in the brain, but when the links connecting present and past emotion are destroyed, recognition fails along with reproduction and retrieval."

  "Meaning what?" asked Merci.

  "His recent memories will be fragmented and incomplete, and he'll have little emotion attached. His long-term memory will weaken, in terms of clarity and emotional content."

  Stebbins circled his red dot, then it vanished.

  "So, if he can't form emotions as he experiences things, he'll be detached from what those things mean to him," said Zamorra.

  "Yes."

  "Like a zombie?" asked Merci.

  Stebbins smiled.

  Rayborn smiled back, lifting her eyebrows. "Look, I'm a cop, not a brain surgeon."

  "No, your idea was workable. Just the language was amusing. But to answer your question, he's going to be detached from the emotional components of his recent past. Confused, too, because the emotional weight of memory is what we use to form our ideas of right and wrong, good and bad. Of what is threatening or loving. Dangerous or benign."

  "He's got no emotional rudder," said Zamorra.

  "No recent emotional rudder," said Stebbins, circling the x ray of Archie's amygdala once again. "He's only got his past to go on."

  "But that's going away, too," said Rayborn. "Because there's nothing new for it to connect with, to keep it. . . living."

  Stebbins nodded. "Of course, a certain amount of healing is possible. If the edema subsides and the pressure is lowered, we can expect some of his short-term memory to return. Whether or not the damaged amygdala will still be able to supply him with appropriate emotions again, I can't say."

  "Will some parts of his brain be ruined forever?" asked Merci.

  "Changed forever," said Stebbins. "He's lucky to be alive."

  Merci wondered at the angle, the way the bullet went down through Wildcraft's brain, rather than across it. She wondered how tall Size Sixteen was, and thought about the light that Archie had remember just that morning, and how he said it came from above him.

  "That's just the amygdala," said Merci. "What other physical damage does he have?"

  "Impossible to say without more tests and observation. Certain the swelling here, near the optic nerve, might give him focus and depth-perception problems. Maybe his colors are dulled or transposed or exaggerated. Seizures are possible—mostly the smaller, focal seizures, but also some general convulsions. Seizures are caused by pressure and pressure is caused by swelling. The skull has very little give in it. There's also a chance that he won't feel crude pain or light touch as quickly and specifically as before, because of a small fragment against his thalamus."

  "He seems to have forgotten a lot of what happened that night said Zamorra. "Not just emotions, but whole . .. scenes, segments."

  "That's traumatic amnesia and it's common. Even a mild concussion can leave someone with no memory of the injury. Full retrograde amnesia, where he loses large portions of older memory, is certain possible here. It would take a great deal of observation to even diagnose him. Personally, I'd very much like to have that time to spend with him."

  He looked at them with disappointment and an air of blame,

  "There's also the difficult area of psychogenesis memory disorders."

  "Psychogenic memory disorders," said Merci.

  "Yes. That means disorders of the memory that are not tied organic damage or disease."

  "Psychological."

  "Basically, yes. See, Mr. Wildcraft knows what happened. He remembers some of it. And the more time goes by, if the edema and bleeding subside, he will remember more. But the more he remembered the better chance he has of developing various forms of hysterical amnesia. Hysterical amnesia is brought about by psychological stress and trauma, as opposed to strictly organic damage. Its range is wide and unpredictable."

  Merci thought about this. "So, the part of his brain that forgot will start to remember. And the part that remembered will start to forget."

  He smiled. "That's roughly true."

  "Sounds tiring," she said.

  "My patients undergoing that kind of retention-loss pattern tell me it's exhausting."

  Stebbins sat back down and swiveled his chair around to face them. Merci watched the fan lift the paper corners, heard the quiet hiss of moving air, saw the collar of Dr. Stebbins's lab coat flutter briefly.

  She tried to imagine what it would be like to be remembering and forgetting at the same time. Remembering and forgetting the same event at the same time. What, she wondered: you remembered the coat collar fluttering but you forgot there was a fan in the room? How did you explain things?

  "Dr. Stebbins," she asked, "will he make things up?"

  Stebbins started to answer, then caught himself. He looked at Merci, then Zamorra, then back to Merci again. "I'd hate to find myself on a witness stand against a patient. I'm not sure I would do that."

  "You would if the court ordered you to."

  "Is that how it works?"

  "That's how it works. But we're not asking you to," she said. "We're trying to understand this man. We don't think he killed his wife, but some people do. What you tell me here might keep you off the stand, Doctor. And keep Archie out of jail."

  Stebbins sighed qui
etly and shifted some papers. "We call it confabulation," he said. "Invention, exaggeration, chronological transposition. Some amnesic patients can invent perfectly logical and believable events that never took place. Some, when you ask them what they did the day before, will tell you in great detail—but it was what they did on a day twelve years ago. Some get fanciful and the inventions are very easy to identify as spurious."

  "So which is Archie?"

  "I didn't have time to find out," he said quietly. "And it may change—as the edema comes and goes, and as the psychological trauma runs its course. Confabulation is unpredictable. Generally, we see that patients with damage to the right temporal lobe are prone to feelings of deja vu, which we consider a form of confabulation. Generally, we find that the more a patient is aware of his own amnesia, the less he will confabulate. Those who most strongly deny having amnesia are most likely to invent. But these are generalizations, they won't turn out to be true in every case."

  "Archie recognizes that he's lost memory," said Zamorra. "He ADmits it. He seems to remember things a little at a time, like he's retrieving the pieces of a puzzle."

  "That's exactly what he's doing."

  "Is it selective?"

  "He's not consciously controlling the amount and quality of his recall, no. But Archie's memory is being filtered through, and certainly guided by, his general emotional state. Absolutely. He's gone through a profoundly traumatic experience. It's possible that he'll never fully recall some of what happened, that he'll remember in painful detail other aspects of that night. When all is said and done, we have difficulty differentiating organic from psychogenic amnesia. When you factor in the damage to the amygdala, it gets almost impossibly complex to make a sound prognosis."

  "When will he be healed?" asked Merci. "I mean, physically? If nothing more goes wrong?"