Parker had clearly spent some time digging into Storax—background and financials. The number of zeros on the end of their annual profit figures had my eyes crossing.
“French parent company,” Sean muttered, scanning the highlights. “Subsidiaries in Germany, Switzerland and the Far East, as well as the U.S. government contracts for bird flu and anthrax vaccines. Fingers in lots of pies.”
“Well, Collingwood told us they had clout,” I said, “and he had no reason to lie about that.”
“Habit?” Sean suggested. He kept scrolling down. “Ah, here we are—Terry O’Loughlin. Bit sketchy, but I don’t suppose Parker wanted to raise any flags.”
The information Parker had uncovered simply said that Terry O’Loughlin had been listed as an employee of Storax Pharmaceutical for the past five years, and was registered as living alone at an address in an affluent suburb of Houston.
“Looks like they pay their legal people pretty well,” Sean murmured. O’Loughlin drives a two-year-old Porsche 911 GT3” To make identifying our subject easier, Parker had included the registration number of the car and the color—Guards red.
“If we’re going to try approaching this guy, we might be better confronting him at home,” I said. “We stand a better chance than trying to force our way into Storax’s headquarters, at any rate. My breaking and entering skills are somewhat limited.”
“Yeah,” Sean said with the ghost of a smile. “One day, when we’ve got time, I’ll show you how to do the job properly.”
“It’s a date.” I gave a wry smile of my own. “And they say romance is dead.”
He grinned at me then, if briefly, and I felt some of the tension go out of my shoulders, but when he opened the second e-mail from Parker, suddenly neither of us was smiling anymore.
Miranda Lee’s body had been discovered by local lawenforcement officers the previous evening. They’d called at her home in response to an anxious request from the friend in Vermont, who’d been expecting her that afternoon and had grown concerned when she didn’t show.
According to the reports Parker had accessed, Miranda had swallowed a large quantity of sleeping pills, washed down with an even larger quantity of vodka. She’d left a terse little note blaming loneliness and the involvement of one of Jeremy’s oldest friends in the events surrounding her husband’s death for her decision.
“Looks that way.”
“Bloody hell.” I stood for a moment, then let my breath out. “What do we tell my parents?”
Sean erased the e-mails, dumped the cache and logged off. “The truth,” he said. “As much as they can stand of it.”
“It makes me keener than ever to talk to O’Loughlin,” I said bitterly. “Did he know what they were planning —is that why the cryptic warning? And, if so, why not tell her straight?”
“I’ll make a point of asking that when we meet him,” he said, getting to his feet. “But we must still be nearly six hundred miles from Houston. I suggest we make a start as soon as your parents are awake. We can grab breakfast on the way.”
“So, how do we approach this guy?” I wondered aloud as we walked to the elevators and punched the call button. “Phone? E-mail?”
“I think we might be better just turning up unannounced. Less chance of him setting us up if he doesn’t know we’re coming. We’ll get a more honest reaction face-to-face.”
“Okay, as long as you’re not planning that we go sneaking in there in the middle of the night,” I said.
Sean raised his eyebrows. “We’ve done plenty of sneaking, in our time,” he pointed out mildly.
“Yeah, but this is Texas, Sean,” I pointed out. The elevator doors opened and we stepped in. “This is the state where you practically have to explain to the licensing authority if your vehicle
“Come on, Charlie. He’s a lawyer.”
“So?” I muttered. “That just means he knows how to shoot you and get away with it.”
By 7:30 A.M. we’d raided the hotel breakfast buffet and hit the road. We left Little Rock and drove to Texarkana, which straddles the border between Arkansas and Texas. It was purely my imagination, but I could have sworn the sky seemed bigger here.
We dropped off I-30 at Texarkana and took the smaller roads, a mix of dual and single carriageways that meant progress was slower than before. The alternative was a long detour to stick to the interstate, going via Dallas.
We’d broken the news about Miranda to my parents as soon as we were on the road.
“Oh, Richard,” my mother had murmured with a chokedoff sob.
My father’s face had taken longer to react. “We should never have left her on her own,” he said, remote.
I braced myself for condemnation for not providing her with protection, even though she’d rejected our offer of help, but he lapsed into silent brooding after that, refusing to be drawn into conversation.
East Texas was more thickly wooded than I’d been expecting. We drove past lakes and forests, through small towns with curiously old-fashioned signs outside the local businesses, like they hadn’t been updated for the past forty years. Getting into the urban sprawl of Houston was a shock after the seemingly slower pace. The journey had taken forever and now, suddenly, we were here.
Traffic was starting to build, but we were all anxious to take a look at our enemy. Storax had their base of operations on a twenty-three-acre site in an area called Pearland, just outside Beltway 8. The site was on a high- tech industrial park, and surrounded by a good deal of chain-link fencing.
Even on a cursory drive-by, we saw patrols with dogs and CCTV that had been positioned by someone who knew what they were doing, backed up by more sophisticated and much less obvious security.
The grounds were not as attractively landscaped as those surrounding the hospital in Boston, but they were much more carefully thought out from a defensive point of view. The building itself was mirror glass and pale gray concrete, giving nothing away. Apart from the name in letters a meter high along the front wall, it could have housed anything. It wasn’t even easy to identify the main entrance.
“We’d need an army to break into this place,” Sean muttered, eyes still on the image of the pharmaceutical giant in the rearview mirror as we drove away.
“Well, Sergeant, considering we are all the troops you have,” I said, glancing across at him, “let’s just hope we don’t
The light was starting to drop and when it went, it went fast, the blue end of the spectrum fading to leave a soft lingering red and orange cast. In under half an hour it seemed to go from squint-inducing sunlight to dark enough for the Camry’s headlights to make a difference. Night didn’t so much fall in Texas, it plummeted.
We headed back towards Houston Hobby airport, where there were any number of hotels and motels to choose from, and picked one almost at random. My parents weren’t keen on being left there, but the lure of a real bed quickly overpowered their protests. Sean and I grabbed a couple of hours’ rest ourselves to let the rush hour die. Then we had a hot shower and a change of clothes, used the business center to print out route maps, and headed out again.
“You do realize,” Sean said quietly, as we pulled back out onto the freeway, “that they should have caught us by now, don’t you?”
“Yes, I’ve been wondering about that,” I said. “If Collingwood sounded the alarm after Vondie’s ambush failed to net us, we never should have made it out of Massachusetts.”
“Mm, so does that make us good?” he asked. “Or just lucky?”
I flashed him a tired smile. “Can’t we be both?”
Terry O’Loughlin lived in a large house that showed both modern and Spanish influences, in the quiet, well-
