umbrellas. These playing areas were connected to each other by lawns of thick green grass. Merci thought Ryan Dawes would probably wet his extreme shorts just seeing Sean Moss's setup. She wondered why men were slow to give up boyhood while girls raced to be women. The house was bigger than it looked from down the drive, segmented into three stories that rose and dipped with the hill face. There were decks and more yellow umbrellas, clay pots of tropical plants the rails. Merci parked near the volleyball court and they walked up gravel trail bordered by the dense damp grass.
The front door was enormous and slotted with windows of tinted glass. One side of it opened and a skinny young man in shorts, a bright shirt and clunky sandals with ankle straps came to the front of the porch. He looked down at them. His hair was thick and straight, hanging down from the top of his head, then cut straight across his forehead and ears, as if the barber had used a mixing bowl as a template. His legs were dark and bony.
'I'm Sergeant Rayborn and this is Sergeant Zamorra. Are you Dr. Moss?'
'Yes. I only have like ten minutes.'
'You young hotshots are always in a hurry,' said Rayborn. 'What are you a doctor of, anyway?'
'Organic chemistry.' Moss smiled either boyishly or nervously and let them into his house.
The entryway was towering, three stories to the skylights, Rayborn guessed. Lacquered redwood floors, huge redwood stanchions rising to the distant ceiling. Moss lifted the lid of what looked like an old steamer trunk.
'Shoes, please.'
They sat on a redwood bench along the entryway wall and took off their shoes. Moss kept his sandals on. Merci looked to the opposite wall, where shining, colorful surfboards rose in ranks of six across. She padded across to look closer at the writing on them: Wardy, Greg Noll, Hobie, Velzy, Dewey Weber.
'Surf up today?' she asked.
'It's a weak south. Trestles was okay.'
Sean Moss, bowlegged as a bull rider, led them through to the kitchen that was done up in new stainless appliances and white everything else. Shiny blond wood floor. An island work table with a checkerboard hardwood top. He opened a wooden slider that led outside a deck, offering them chairs at a long redwood table under a yellow umbrella..
Moss sat with his back to the sea, giving them the ocean view. He slipped on a pair of thin silver sunglasses that, with the bowl haircut, gave him a mushroom-from-outer-space look. He had a neat goatee.
'We think Gwen Wildcraft might have gotten herself into some hot water at OrganiVen,' said Merci.
Moss looked at her and said nothing.
'Any thoughts on that?' Zamorra asked.
'Gwen and her husband bought some shares during our friends-and-family offering, then she became involved in the company. Really liked the idea of fighting cancer. She brought in over a quarter of a million in start-up money. We offered her hourly compensation, but she took her pay in stock. You don't think her work with OrganiVen had anything to do with her murder, do you?'
'It had everything to do with it,' said Merci. 'Who was the friend who got them in?'
'A stockbroker named Trent Gentry. I mean, the 'friends' definition was loose. I went to school with Trent, and he was vouching for the Wildcrafts.'
Rayborn wrote. 'Tell us about SunCo.'
Moss had a tight mouth and a hard jaw. With the sunglasses he was hard to read. 'Well,' he said, 'we graduated from friends and family to small venture capital companies, and SunCo was one of the first to come to us.'
Moss sat back, crossed his arms over his bright yellow Hawaiian shirt.
'Did you deal with Sonny Charles and Al Apin?'
He nodded.
'How much did they come in for?'
'They put up roughly one million dollars.'
'Friends-and-family rates?'
'Slightly higher. I think we were up to a dollar a share by then.'
'What did you think when Sistel dumped the OrganiVen division yesterday?'
'It surprised me.'
'They'd talked to you about the venom supply, though, the cerastes serum?'
Moss gulped. 'Yeah.'
'Dr. Moss,' said Zamorra, 'take off your glasses and talk to us. We're trying to find out who murdered your friend Gwen. We don’t really care if you were short of sidewinders, except in how that relates to Mrs. Wildcraft.'
He gave a small nod and took off the glasses. Glanced at Rayborn with truculent sun-bleached blue eyes. He looked about eighteen but Merci knew he was twenty-eight.
'Yeah. Okay. It's been almost a year since we said adios to SunCo,' he said. 'When Sistel bought us out, that was the end of those dudes. I mean, I didn't have to deal with them anymore.'
'You may have parted ways with Sonny and AI, but you saw them last week, right? That's our information, anyway.'
'Why would you think that?' he asked faintly.
'Look, Moss,' said Zamorra, 'we can go back to Santa Ana and sit you down in an interview room with a fake mirror, a videotape running and a cup of really bad coffee. You want to do it that way, fine. We're going back there anyway, so we'd be happy to give you a ride.'
'No, no. Not really.'
'Then cut the bullshit and talk.'
Dr. Moss looked at them resentfully, then sighed and looked down at the table. 'Yeah. I saw Sonny and AI on Monday. The day before Gwen was killed.'
'Tell us about that.'
'They just showed up here. Parked on the grass. They wanted to remind me that they had nothing to do with reorganizing our research statistics to… minimize the cerastes problem. That was if there was any reorganizing done at all. They wanted me to know that if Sistel or the FTC started asking questions about SunCo's part in the R and D of MiraVen, to leave them out of that discussion.'
'Or what?' asked Merci.
'Or they'd cut out my tongue and replace it with my balls.'
'Direct quote?'
'Word for word, minus the Russian accent.'
'Who said that?'
'AI. That was pure AI, once you got to know him.'
Rayborn made sure she had the words right in her blue notebook. She underlined them, but there was no reason to write CK next to a quote like that.
'Dr. Moss, describe the cerastes problem,' she said.
'Fairly simple. Viper venom is mainly hemotoxic, it destroys blood and tissue. But it also has neurotoxic components, which means it also attacks the nervous system. The key to MiraVen wasn't so much the way it attacked cancerous cells, but the process that allowed us to use sufficient levels to destroy the cells almost instantly. That's important in surgery, for obvious reasons. The riddle was, how do you kill the malignancy quickly but spare the healthy cells? The solution was actually my idea. I'd read about the human antivenin process, where horses are injected with low doses-then increasingly higher doses- of venom. Then, when their immune systems had reached a certain strength, their blood was then taken and used to create antivenin for humans. When a human is envenomed by snakebite, then administered the horse blood serum, the venom is very quickly neutralized. Our key was developing a strong immunity in the test subjects before introducing the venom to the lesion. That way, the collateral damage was minimized, the side effects were small and the tumorous cells were destroyed, like, extremely quickly. But here's the deal-you don't want to immunize mammals with high levels of neurotoxic venom because it's too dangerous. And you don't want neuro levels too low, or the overall effect on the lesion-for reasons I still don't understand-isn't sufficient. So the right neuro-hemo mix, that was the goal.
Crotalus cerastes had the right proportions. But it's hard to get. We tried to collect it, breed it, replicate it and synthesize it. I just couldn't get the results. I thought a cloning program might work. Millions of dollars, to do
