Rick Riordan: The Devil went down to Austin

"You don't want my help," I said, "at least get a lawyer. You want some names?"

He gave me an uneasy look. "I told you, man. I'll handle it."

"Fine," I said. "Just primo."

I was halfway out the front door when he called, "Tres."

The sun through the skylights made his beard glow almost blond.

"You're right about cooperating for Jimmy's sake," he told me. "But you've got to trust me, little bro. I've got to handle this without you. I just can't-"

He looked at me as if he was trying to explain a smashed vase. "Do you understand?"

"I'm trying, Garrett. I am."

He held my eyes, searching for some stronger commitment. When he didn't find it, he turned and wheeled himself into the bedroom.

I pulled his front door locked behind me.

The afternoon sun was heating the walls of The Friends into a cooking surface. I walked toward the stairwell, listening to industrial rock and the neighbours arguing behind every door.

I managed to stay home a whole twentyfour hours, but San Antonio felt like a ghost town.

My colleague George Berton was in L.A., spending his life savings on the Spurs playoff games. My boss, Erainya, and her son, Jem, were vacationing in the Greek Isles. Even my mom was gone-off fishing with her new beau at a mountain cabin in Colorado.

I spent Saturday alone in the offices of the Erainya Manos Detective Agency, eating Erainya's weekold dolmades and trying to gather information. I emailed a friend at the Bexar County ME, asked if he could finagle Jimmy Doebler's autopsy report from Travis County. I tried the Bexar County Sheriff's Department and SAPD, hoping somebody knew somebody in Austin who could give me an inside read on Vic Lopez's investigation. Nobody got back to me.

The Doebler family proved to be a brick wall.

Most of the clan lived in Austin. I'd even met some of them. But nobody wanted to talk to me on the phone. Yes, they remembered me-Garrett Navarre's brother, Jimmy's friend. Yes, they'd heard about Jimmy's death. Could I please refer all further questions to the family's law firm?

I couldn't tell which name they spoke with more coolnessGarrett's or Jimmy's.

W.B. Doebler, Jimmy's cousin and present chairman of the board of Doebler Oil, was in a meeting. Could I please call back? I did, six times over the course of the day. W.B. Doebler was still in a meeting.

I almost thought I'd struck gold when I discovered that Jimmy had an aunt, Clara's younger sister, also living in Austin, but even Faye DoeblerIngram turned me down.

"Oh, Mr. Navarre." Her voice was small and plaintive, snagging on every word-a silk handkerchief brushed over bricks. "I'm very sorry, but there's nothing I can do."

"If you'd spoken to Jimmy recently, if you knew anyone the police should talk-"

"I'm afraid I couldn't help."

"This is your sister's son, ma'am. As the closest relative-"

"Oh, no. No." A new snag in her voice-fear? "You must realize how sad this is for my family. They felt so much pain over Clara's whole life, her death, and now Jimmy… puts himself in a position like that."

"A position like what?"

"The family wants to put this behind them, move on as quickly as possible, you see."

"And you agree?"

Ninety miles of silence over the phone line. "Jimmy was a sweet boy. I'll miss him terribly."

"Will I see you at the memorial service, then?"

The softest sound I ever heard was Faye DoeblerIngram laying the receiver of her phone in the cradle.

I sat at my desk, staring out the Venetian blinds at the traffic on Blanco.

I turned to the computer, logged on to a news database, and started digging for dirt on the banker Garrett had mentioned- Matthew Pena.

According to Silicon News, Pena was a Texan by birth, Californian by choice. BS in computer science from UT Austin. MBA from Stanford. He'd spent the past few years as an investment banker, orchestrating buyouts and providing venture capital for hightech startups. His clientele read like a who's who list of Silicon Valley. Pena's only noted hobby was scuba diving, which he was so zealous about that his business adversaries had started calling him the Terror of the Deep.

He was, by all accounts, the most vicious set of freelance teeth a company could hire.

August 1998. Pena's first major conquest-a promising startup company in San Jose.

In the course of one month, Pena sabotaged their prospective deals with venture capitalists, hired their best talent away, and set the principals of the company at each other's throats. One of the principals filed a complaint with the San Jose police. She claimed Matthew Pena was harassing her with phone calls, visits, email. When asked for specifics, the woman backed away from her allegations. The complaint fizzled. A month later, the startup agreed to sell. Once Pena bought them out at a firesale price, their product became the backbone of Pena's client's virus protection software-a cash cow.

February 1999 Similar story. Pena strongarmed a Menlo Park startup into selling to a major tech company for six million in stock-little more than glass beads and trinkets compared to what other computer businesses were trading for then. Opposition to the sale collapsed when the most vocal of the principals was found dead in his garage-apparently a suicide, shotgun to the mouth. The other principals turned the police investigation toward Matthew Pena-claimed Pena had been calling them up, emailing them, threatening their lives. Police investigated Pena, but he came away clean. Pena's quote on the matter to the press: "If the guy killed himself because I was about to make him a millionaire, he's so stupid he deserves to die." Mr. Pena: big warm fuzzy.

January of this year. A glimpse into Pena's private life. His girlfriend of six months, Adrienne Selak, disappeared off a privately chartered dinner cruise boat in San Francisco Bay. Selak had been seen arguing with Pena earlier in the evening. The couple had gone off alone toward the back of the ship. Thirty minutes later, Pena called for help, claiming that Ms. Selak had fallen into the Bay. A search was launched, but her body was never recovered. Selak had been a competent swimmer. In fact, she and Pena had met because of their shared interest in scuba. After her disappearance, one of Selak's girlfriends informed the police that Selak had complained about Matthew "getting creepy" on several occasions, threatening to kill her.

One of Pena's employees, Dwight Hayes, gave a witness statement supporting Pena's assertion that the fall had been accidental.

Pena hired the best legal counsel money could buy. As near as I could tell from followup articles, the investigation was still open, but no formal charges had been filed against Pena.

In March of this year, Matthew Pena's services had been contracted by AccuShield, Inc., a Cupertinobased company that made security software-virus protection, encryption, network firewalls. Pena had apparently sold AccuShield on the idea of expanding into the Austin market, and one of Pena's first buyout targets was Tech san Security Software: Garrett, Ruby, and Jimmy's startup.

The AmericanStatesman chronicled Techsan's betatest problems, which began shortly after Techsan rejected Pena's first buyout offer of twenty million. I tried to get my mind around the kind of optimism, hubris, stubbornness, whatever, that had made my brother and his two partners turn down twenty million dollars. What were they thinking?

Then I thought about the guy from Menlo Park who had been offered millions by Matthew Pena, then went into his garage and ate his shotgun.

The latest article I could find, dated last week, talked about Pena's second offer-a rescue buyout proposal to the nowbeleaguered Techsan for four million in stock of the client company, AccuShield. Techsan had been wavering on whether or not to accept it.