the most of the Deerdoc staff. Irma was wearing khaki pants, the sort with lots of unnecessary pockets everywhere, and Birkenstocks with striped socks. Her T-shirt proclaimed chickens rule over the picture of a cartoon chook. I didn't get the point at all and concluded it was some American thing.
Noticing my fascinated gaze, Irma laughed. 'As you can imagine, I'm not allowed where the public or the patients can see me. I work behind the scenes with Oscar, keeping all the office equipment humming along.'
Oscar had to be Oscar Sherwood, who'd left previous jobs under a cloud because of missing money, although he'd never been formally charged. He was Deerdoc's resident techo, who, as Irma said, kept everything electronic in the office, including the computer network, working smoothly. One of his duties was making sure each therapy session had an audiovisual record, so he was automatically a possible suspect for the theft of the disks.
Last night I'd argued to Ariana and Bob that he couldn't be the one, because with his knowledge he'd make a copy, not take the disks from the file. Or he could simply send the information to a distant computer using the Internet. While I'd been speaking, however, it had begun to dawn on me that maybe Sherwood intended for suspicion to fall on someone not technologically adept. And if the disks weren't missing from the files there would be no concrete proof blackmail material had been taken.
Irma introduced me to Sherwood in the manner of an indulgent mother showing off a talented child. Oscar Sherwood was young enough to make me feel like an older woman. His face made him look about fifteen, but a powerful fifteen. The muscles in his arms were truly impressive, and he wore an extremely tight sleeveless top to allow appreciation of his toned torso.
'Hi,' he said, preoccupied with the innards of a copying machine.
'G'day.'
'Filling in for Noreen?'
'That's right.'
'Good luck.'
Leaving him diving deeper into the mechanism, with Irma handing him tools when needed, I wandered off to explore further.
Deerdoc Enterprises was clearly a thriving corporation, leasing the entire three-floor building on Roxbury Drive. Dave Deer's Slap! Slap! Get On With It therapy room was on the middle floor, adjacent to his office. It had two entrances: one directly from his office, and one leading to a private corridor. The room was exactly as it had appeared in the demonstration disk and was, I discovered, one of three such black-and-white rooms. I peered closely at the white carpet, wondering if the hearty slaps delivered during treatment ever caused a nosebleed, but the thick pile was stain-free.
Next I checked out the walk-in safe where the theft had taken place. It had an electronic lock requiring a keycard to open it. I didn't have one, but that wasn't a problem, as the door wasn't shut. Inside were ranks of shallow drawers, all neatly labeled in alphabetical order. They had no locking mechanism, so I pulled one out to examine the contents. Patients had individual heavy plastic files, each with the name clearly shown. I pulled out another drawer. Stone the crows! Famous name after famous name jumped out at me. This was a blackmailer's heaven.
A bloke in a white coat came in, looking preoccupied. He paid absolutely no attention to me, going to one of the drawers and extracting a file. He was wearing a badge indicating he was Dr. Walter Yeats.
'G'day, Dr. Yeats.'
'Mmmm? Oh, hi.'
'I could be anyone, you know.'
He looked up from the file, focused on me, and said soothingly, 'I'm sure you can be. Ambition is a wonderful motor to power one's life.'
'I don't mean that. I mean I could be an intruder, deadset on stealing files.'
'Have you often felt this sense of alienation?'
'I'm not a patient.'
'Of course not.' He tucked the file he'd extracted under one arm, reached into the pocket of his white coat, extracted a business card, and pressed it into my hand. 'If you feel the necessity to talk, please don't hesitate to call. Anytime.'
A comforting pat on my shoulder and he was gone. Crikey! I knew the staff hadn't been told about the missing disks, so there was no security flap going on, but even so this was past a joke. If the fancy took me, there'd be nothing to stop me from helping myself to an armful of files and skedaddling with them.
I set off to run down the remaining three high-level suspects. Working on the principle that everyone eventually would end up in the staff dining area, if only for a cup of coffee, I staked it out around lunchtime-lurking, I hoped inconspicuously, by a staff notice board. It was a good move: In a few minutes I had a meeting with both Kristi Jane Russo of the PR department and Randy Romaine of Accounting.
Kristi Jane was one of those people who always talk too loudly, so I heard her long before I saw her. In her broad Aussie accent, she was yelling, 'Keith's got the bloody hide of a bloody elephant. He says to me, 'Now, listen, Kristi Jane,' and I say
I was betting this Randy would be Randy Romaine. I waited with keen interest for the pair to come around the corner. In a moment they did. Kristi Jane's voice proved to be much bigger than her body. She had the slight, flat- chested physique of a thin young girl, bizarrely topped by an exaggerated bouffant hairdo.
Randy Romaine looked like an accountant, which was what he was. Fittingly, perhaps, he was monochrome: brown hair, brown eyes, brown suit, brown shoes. He had a forgettable face and restrained body language. He certainly didn't fit my mental picture of a stalker. Perhaps he'd reformed and was leading a blameless life, with his stalking days behind him. Or perhaps he'd merely put his stalking on hold and was cultivating the new field of blackmail.
'G'day,' I said, practically leaping in front of them. I beamed at Kristi Jane. 'I couldn't help hearing your accent. I'm an Aussie too. I'm just filling in as Dr. Deer's assistant for the next few weeks.'
That broke the ice. 'Did you hear why Noreen resigned?' bellowed Kristi Jane. 'Terrorism! You've got to stand up to the bastards. Noreen's a lily-livered little twit!' In a moment she'd swept me up into her conversation and into the dining room, where she bullied a mousy bloke into giving up his spot at a table and installed Randy, herself, and me in his place.
Apart from the desire I had to pop earplugs into my ears to mute Kristi Jane's deafening voice, I quite enjoyed myself. She was a mine of information as far as company gossip was concerned, and better still she wasn't a bit reticent about it.
Randy Romaine turned out to have a very dry sense of humor, which went rather well with his quiet demeanor. I tried but couldn't find any real distinguishing feature. The bloke was pleasant but not memorable. I did notice, however, how thick his neck was. 'Do you work out?' I asked.
'Why, yes.'
So by mid afternoon I had three down and one to go- Reuben Kowalski. I found Kristi Jane in the PR department shouting into a phone. When she'd finished, I said, 'Dr. Deer told me to speak with Reuben Kowalski. He's supposed to be in the billing department, but I can't find him.'
'That's because the bastard will be outside the building, smoking. Bloody pathetic, don't you think? Not being able to give up an addiction that's going to kill you is pretty piss-weak.'
She added I couldn't miss him as he'd be the only one wearing a purple shirt. 'Always wears purple, and he's not even bloody gay,' she advised. I thanked her, wondering if Kristi Jane had defeated her own addiction to alcohol.
Reuben Kowalski was exactly where she said he'd be. Los Angeles, I'd been learning, had some of the strictest anti-smoking ordinances in the country, so smokers in office buildings were forced to go outside to avoid inflicting secondhand smoke on colleagues. There was a narrow alleyway running down one side of the building, and a small group of tobacco lepers had congregated there to puff furiously on cigarettes.
I stopped to examine the spot where the Hummer had been destroyed. The road was blackened, but every piece of the twisted remains had been removed, probably for forensic examination.
In the alleyway, Reuben was sucking on a cigarette and talking with great animation on a mobile phone. As
