Terminated (14 page)

She dropped to one knee and slowly returned the paperwork to the file while she listened in. She still couldn’t hear what was being said. It was a lost cause. She quickly gathered up her things.

All she could do was wait for them to leave. She crossed over to the water cooler halfway up the corridor with a view of the parking lot. She filled a Dixie cup and slowly drank while gazing at the jets climbing out of Oakland International
and keeping an eye on the locked room.

Gwen left the room first. Blinded by her thoughts, she didn’t notice Amanda. The mole checked her watch. Gwen had been in there a little over five minutes. Tarbell remained inside. She gave him five, then ten minutes, but he never emerged. Gwen had left the library door open. Amanda tossed the Dixie cup in the trash and walked past the room. Tarbell was working, but he instantly detected a stranger’s presence. He turned and looked straight at her.

“Hi, Steve,” Amanda tossed out on her way by.

“Amanda,” he replied, coldly.

She hurried back to her desk, dumped the files, and headed out to the parking lot. She was careful not to come over as frantic. She got into her car and called Ingram on her cell.

“Just a heads-up, Robert. It looks as if Gwen Farris confronted Tarbell.”

“Shit. When’d this happen?”

“Just now,” she said and filled him in.

“OK. Keep a close eye on them. If there are any other closed-door antics, I want to know about them, ASAP.”

“Will do. I’ll e-mail you my daily report tonight.”

“Thanks, Amanda.”

She hung up and headed back to Pace’s building. Behind her in the neighboring parking lot, Reggie Glover was getting a stiff back waiting for Tarbell to leave the building. He was probably tracking her progress across the parking lot. Knowing him, Reggie was checking out her butt, too. It was an old joke that had yet to wear out its welcome. Despite his fascination with her butt, he had her back. If anything happened, he’d come running. He’d be wondering about what she was doing out here. Casually, she put a hand behind her and made the OK sign for him. With his binoculars trained on her butt, he’d see the signal.

She smiled at the receptionist on her way in
and returned to work. She kept a visual on Gwen and Tarbell, occasionally taking detours through their department. She watched for interaction and sudden excursions from their desks. They seemed to be behaving themselves now. They were doing their work and being professional around each other. It was a nice bit of restraint on their parts, especially Gwen’s. If she was being terrorized as she claimed, God knew how the woman kept it all together day after day with the son of a bitch sitting outside her door. Amanda wasn’t sure she could.

“Amanda?”

She turned around and met Priscilla Hunt, her supervisor for the duration. “Yes.”

Priscilla held out a materials requisition form. “I need you to dispense these liquids and issue them to Manufacturing.”

Amanda looked over the list. She was looking at an hour at least in the ambient storage room. It meant taking her eye off her two targets, but that was OK. She got the feeling that the day’s hostilities were over. “Sure, I’ll get on it right now.”

She took the requisition and a cart into the storage room. If she wasn’t an investigator, she could get used to this job. The money was good for what the work entailed. Her role in Inventory Control dealt with measuring out chemicals and distributing them to whomever needed them. Her chemistry knowledge was pretty poor, but she knew enough to be wary of the acids and bases listed. From what she read on the requisition, it was a pretty fearsome list of chemicals. She didn’t have a clue what it all made. Half of it sounded like chemical warfare. Then again, sodium hydroxide was table salt. Who knew this stuff?

Pace’s ambient storage room was spotless. It was another thing she liked about working in the pharmaceutical world. It was clean. Clean wasn’t something that could be said of the majority of her assignments. The room was kept at a steady temperature. The bulk chemicals were stored
in large containers kept on rows of gleaming stainless steel racks.

She set the requisition down on the measuring table, pulled on gloves, and put on her safety goggles before removing a five-gallon jug of isopropanol off its rack. She measured out the quantity needed and re-racked the jug.

She worked her way through the list. Sadly, not everything was as accessible as the isopropanol. She needed two liters of toluene and that was kept on the top shelf in large, collapsible rubber bags. The bags were a pain in the ass. They were practical but damn awkward to maneuver. Having them on the top shelf didn’t help matters.

She wheeled a scissor lift over to the rack and raised it up. The lift didn’t quite reach the top shelf, which meant hefting the bag over the lip of the rack. The bag was about three-quarters full, and it looked like a deflated balloon with a spout. She lifted the bag. It deformed around her hands. Lifting it wasn’t the problem; hefting it over the steel rack’s wire lip was. She balanced the bag on the lip to catch her breath, then jerked it hard to get it onto the scissor lift.

She felt the bag snag on the lip, but only for a second. Her momentum wrenched it free, but it also tore the thick, rubberized material. The chemical poured from the tear and the open spout.

Reflexively, Amanda closed her eyes and mouth as the chemical cascaded over her. The burning was immediate. Her screams could be heard clear across the building.

T
arbell sat at his laptop at home sifting through
all the communications captured from Gwen’s computer. While the spy software was an ingenious piece of technology, it wasn’t an intelligent one. It caught everything entering and leaving Gwen’s computer, every one of her keystrokes and every piece of spam that hit her in-box. It was tedious work, not helped by Gwen’s phenomenal output. He’d hoped his tactics would have eaten away at her, affecting her concentration, but they hadn’t slowed her down. Fed up with sifting through Gwen’s crap, he shoved the computer away.

His agitation cooled when his thoughts turned to Amanda Norton.

He wished he could have been there when the toluene spilled all over her. He’d gotten there in time to see her being brought out of the storage room. The enormity of what had happened was etched into her face. It was like watching a porcelain sculpture dropped from a great height smash against the unforgiving sidewalk. The fall was graceful in its elegance and the destruction exquisite, considering the fragments of this unique construction could never be reassembled.

“That’s the risk you run in your line of work,” he said to himself.

To everyone involved, it appeared to be a
terrible accident, but it was nothing of the kind. He’d orchestrated it, of course. His position within the QA department afforded him a godlike view of Pace’s operations. He approved all requisitions coming out of Manufacturing before forwarding them on to Inventory Control. As the bottom rung in Inventory Control’s ladder, Amanda would be the one stuck with retrieving the chemicals. After that, it was easy. Last night after everyone left, he went into the storage room with a pair of pliers and bent a wire back to make a hook to snag the bag of toluene. The collapsible bags were tough, but not that tough. Just in case the bag proved tougher than expected, he also forced the spout open. The solvent was coming out one way or another. Workers for the state’s Occupational Safety and Health division would have questions and fingers would be pointed, but none of it would come his way.

It would have been fun to have infected Amanda with one of the many live viruses Pace had in inventory, but that would have raised too many questions and a full investigation. That would have been far too messy. No, he was content with what he’d done.

By all accounts, Amanda was in bad shape. She’d suffered chemical burns and some minor eye damage, but she was also looking at possible kidney and liver damage from the sizeable dose she’d been exposed to. She should be counting her blessings, though. It could have been a lot worse if she hadn’t been put through decontamination procedures so swiftly.

At the end of the day, the extent of Mandy’s injuries didn’t matter. The important thing was she was gone. Another branch of Private Security International had been chopped off, no longer there to interfere with his work. He doubted PSI would replace Amanda. The kind of people they employed only wanted slam dunks, not risk. They wouldn’t have any volunteers beating at the door to take Amanda’s place.

All in all, it was an elegant piece of work. It was a shame he had no one to share this triumph with. He’d have to make do with entertaining himself. This elegance was something
he needed to use on Gwen. Petersen was right. He needed to dispense with the intimidation stuff. It was incredibly satisfying, but it also maintained PSI’s focus on him. There was no way he was going to get to Gwen with them on his back every step of the way. He needed to remove PSI from the equation. That way he’d be free and clear to do what he liked.

He found himself smiling. His sour mood had turned sweet again. He liked it when his dark moods didn’t last.

He returned to his laptop and resumed combing through Gwen’s correspondence. It didn’t take long for him to fall upon something that caught his eye. Gwen’s deleted e-mails folder contained an e-mail from Blackwell Biotech. They were a direct competitor to Pace Pharmaceuticals. They’d invited her to send her résumé for a position there. It was a very informal letter and obvious from the tone that the sender, Judy Brent, was a friend. It wasn’t an unusual occurrence. Biotech was a pretty incestuous industry, and the Bay Area was a biotech haven with at least a dozen companies within a thirty-mile radius. She’d asked to meet Gwen for lunch, and Gwen had agreed in her reply.

Tarbell saw new possibilities as he read the brief e-mail. A plot was developing in his head. If he handled it right, he saw his way of ridding himself of PSI for good.

He went to the window and looked for Petersen. He didn’t see his familiar Audi, so he called him on his cell.

“Where are you?”

“Around,” Petersen answered.

“I’m going out. I need you to cover for me.”

“What are you doing?”

“That’s none of your concern.”

“Leave that woman alone.”

Tarbell hung up, then smiled. He admired Petersen’s misplaced chivalry.

He liked how things were
proceeding. The tide was turning. The grip PSI had on him was slipping. He just had to nudge it for them to fall away. He needed to strike again while events were in his favor, but for that he needed some inspiration. He knew just the place.

The drive to what he ironically termed his “ancestral home” was filled with bad memories. During the twenty minutes it took to get from El Cerrito to Vallejo, every turn of the odometer represented a new milestone in misery. He flinched at the sound of remembered slaps and punches. His mom had taken so many body blows that no doctor in the world could convince him that her decline in health in later years wasn’t attributable to the violence dealt by his father. He’d once pissed blood for three days after a beating handed down by the man he hated calling dad. That was light compared to the punishment his mother took. He wondered if his years in this world would be truncated like his mother’s. He had a lot of trouble with his guts these days. Some foods turned him inside out. Other times, he awoke with his kidneys screaming in pain. Yeah, he’d probably go the way of his mother, years before his time, while that son of a bitch sat in his chair sucking oxygen he didn’t deserve.

Tarbell got out of the car and wandered over to the house. He had a flashlight in hand, but it remained off. Moonlight gave him all the illumination he needed. He stood before the house. He’d taken a lot of beatings here. He’d been young and could bounce back. He guessed that was why his dad had never backed off. He healed without leaving a mark. Had his dad wanted a lasting reminder of his skills? Was that why once the bruises faded and the cuts healed he needed to refresh them? Tarbell didn’t know, and he doubted that son of a bitch knew either.

He climbed the steps, which were warped by time and exposure to the bay, and sat on the porch. He pictured Gwen at her desk telling him he didn’t meet the company’s expectations, and his disgust yielded a plan.

Petersen hoped he would be smarter the second
time around and not get caught out by a cockeyed headlight. He’d borrowed his brother-in-law’s Mazda. The car fit the bill. It was dark and anonymous. He parked on the cross street to Tarbell’s home and waited for him to do something that would give him an opening to use against him. He just needed the slightest leverage to swing the faith back in Gwen’s favor. Tarbell’s garage door rolled up, and Petersen straightened in his seat.

“C’mon, asshole. Give me some rope to tie around your neck.”

He let Tarbell get a little distance on him before pulling out after him. He expected Tarbell to go after Gwen, but instead of driving south to Alameda, Tarbell pointed the car north. The move ignited Petersen’s curiosity.

He followed Tarbell to the outskirts of Vallejo. He wasn’t sure what Tarbell had given him here. It was something, but it wasn’t rope. The house sat perched on a hillside overlooking San Pablo Bay. It was in an unincorporated portion of the county with big undeveloped lots and few homes. The house itself was a wreck, decayed from years of neglect.

The winding road gave him the perfect opportunity to stash the car and find a good spot to watch Tarbell. At first he thought the house was Tarbell’s base of operations, a retreat where he could hide incriminating evidence, but it didn’t look that way. Tarbell just sat on the porch in the dark.

His heart stopped when the shouting began. For a terrifying moment, he thought Tarbell had spotted him skulking in the tall grass, but the shouting wasn’t directed at him or anyone for that matter. Tarbell was nothing but a dog baying at the moon.

He moved in as far as his courage
would allow him. Past encounters kept him from getting too close, and he lay flat on the ground, pressing himself into the dirt.

Tarbell laughed a big ugly laugh. “Yeah. I thought so. That was why, wasn’t it? Just for kicks.” He laughed again. “And for punches.”

His laughs died and silence followed for the next ten minutes before he spoke again. There was no shouting this time. He kept his tone conversational.

Petersen strained to listen. He picked out chunks of the one-sided conversation. Tarbell bleated on about being screwed over and how he’d get back at the world for it. People would pay. The world would pay.

Petersen shook his head. It was easy to label Tarbell crazy, but he saw beyond the superficial label. He was listening to a middle-aged child unable to deal with his problems in an adult way. It was so weak for a man who prided himself on being the world’s smartest man. In that moment, Petersen lost respect for Tarbell. Someone as emotionally stunted as he was could be taken down, and Petersen was more than capable of doing it.

But the moment didn’t last. Tarbell’s next outburst scared Petersen.

“That’s what I’ll do. I’ll trap her.” Tarbell’s joyous laugh cut through the air. “She’ll get caught up in her own netting.”

Tarbell jumped up from the porch and ran back to his car. He turned it around and drove away.

Petersen scurried back to the Mazda. He didn’t have to ask who the focus of the trap was. Panic drove his legs. Tarbell would use him for his alibi. He couldn’t let that happen.

He followed Tarbell and picked him up on the freeway heading home. He wouldn’t try anything tonight. If Petersen had learned anything about Tarbell, nothing he did was spontaneous. Everything needed planning. It gave Petersen time to do something.

He waited until Tarbell had been home ten
minutes before calling him.

“What is it, Tom?”

“There’s been a shakeup. I’m being reassigned.”

“What?”

“PSI is putting me on Gwen’s surveillance team. Someone else will take over for me tomorrow night.”

“That doesn’t work for me, Tom,” he said in a singsong tone.

“I can’t help that.”

“I don’t care what PSI says. You are going to continue watching my back at nights. I don’t care how you do it, but do it. Do I have to push your wife down another set of stairs to get your cooperation?”

“No,” Petersen said through gritted teeth. “I’ll get back on this detail. You don’t have to hurt Lynette. OK? OK?”

“You do your part and nothing will happen to her.”

“I will.”

Petersen hung up on Tarbell. It was a down-and-dirty attempt to chop Tarbell off at the ankles. It hadn’t worked, but that was OK. He wasn’t out of ideas.

“You won’t hurt her, Tarbell,” he said within the confines of the borrowed car. “I’ll make sure of it. Not Gwen and not Lynette.”