David Dun: The Black Silent

"Are you all right?" Sam whispered.

She nodded. "He cuffed me, gagged me, and threw me in a room."

"Frick did that?"

She nodded.

"He must be desperate to take that kind of risk."

Another nod.

"He won't be in charge for long," Sam said. "Soon the undersheriff or the regular sergeant will probably show up and I have a hunch things will change. He let me in only because he thought he might get more information that way."

"Frick says Ben's dead," Haley said. "He said I was part of the murder. He's going to put me in jail for something, maybe murder, maybe some kind of unlawful entry pending a bail hearing. He even said he'd kill you. Unless I cooperated."

"Wait, now. What did he say you did?"

"Let in the killers. A lab tech is dead as well."

"And he threatened to kill me?"

She nodded. "And he was serious. So I signed the paper and he totally changed his tune."

"Yeah, he's playing his own version of good cop/bad cop. He's using Crew to get you to lead him to Ben's work. They're onto Ben's aging stuff?"

Another nod.

"Maybe he doesn't know any more about what Ben was doing than we do."

"Sam-I'm scared. Do you think Ben's really dead?"

"I don't know. It seems unlikely if Frick's got no body." Sam looked out the open window and studied the drop to the ground. "Does this building have balconies?"

Haley nodded and explained where it was located. They walked back over to Crew and his huge stack of papers.

"Crew… may I call you that?"

"Everybody else does."

"Did Officer Frick tell you to get Haley to tell you what Ben was doing?"

Crew nodded. "That obvious, huh?"

"Ben just disappeared, as far as you know?" Sam asked.

"He called the department. Said somebody tried to murder him. We found footprints below the balcony at the end of the building. We suspect they're Ben's."

"Does Frick know about them?"

"Oh yeah. They're pretty obvious. Deep in the mud. We do have a dead lab tech, though.

Found him in the bushes."

"So Frick says Ben's dead, when he's not," Sam said. "And he wants you to talk your old friend into getting him Ben's secrets, right?"

Crew didn't answer.

"Aggravating, isn't it?" Sam asked. "Makes you wonder what he's really doing."

Crew pretty much maintained a poker face, but he was an unhappy young officer.

"You may want to have someone make a plaster cast of Ben Anderson's footprints."

"If Frick says so."

Sam moved to Ben's desk and began looking over the papers.

Crew made another half-hearted stab at being Frick's errand boy. "Haley, what do you think Ben was actually doing in the lab?"

"If you mean the organics lab," she said, "probably growing bacteria, then breaking them down and separating out the critical proteins, pro hormones or whatever he was making."

"I mean, what was he trying to create?"

"I don't know."

"You're a scientist," Crew said. "You might be able to guess."

"Ben didn't tell anyone what was going on." Sam could hear the bite in her tone.

Crew didn't seem to have the heart to keep doing Frick's dirty work.

Sam moved away from the desk and looked around the office. In the large photo cabinet and on a few of the shelves, Ben Anderson had displayed something of his life. Sam looked it over to see if anything had changed since his last visit. A fairly recent picture of Haley, taken by Sarah, showed her at the Special Olympics with each arm around the shoulders of a kid. The way the kids gazed at her had touched him the first time he had seen the photo.

Aside from pictures of Haley, which were numerous, Sam saw pictures of Helen, Ben's deceased wife, and shots of various San Juan festivities, the sheriff and his family, and Ben with other friends. There were a number of more recent photos of Sarah in which she looked fond of whoever was taking the picture. Sam knew it was Ben.

The place was neat and tidy, if crammed, and Sam knew the orderliness was Sarah's doing.

Another photo showed a group of men and Haley standing in front of a house with the ocean in the background.

It was Ben's beach house on Lopez Island, where Sam had been a frequent visitor. In the photo older scientists were standing around and Sam suspected these were some of the fellows participating in all the private meetings.

Ben had also tacked a series of quotations on the wall. A couple of them were new.

It's not that I'm afraid to die, I just don't want to be there when it happens.

— Woody Allen

I can do anything now at age ninety that I could do when I was eighteen, which shows you how pathetic I was at eighteen.

— George Burns

The term Haley had mentioned-"youth retention"- came immediately to mind.

"Nothing. Nothing." Frick screamed at Rolf as he walked out the door to the IT room.

The escrow was full of meaningless documents that told them nothing of Ben Anderson's secrets. There was only the slightest consolation and that was the geek's assurance that he might figure what Ben was doing by studying the memory of Sanker Foundation's server computer.

Frick was always cautious and he had backup plans to the backup plans. He was supposed to have twenty men from Las Vegas in Friday Harbor waiting. It had cost $100,000 in Sanker money to have them on standby, but it was worth it. It took only seconds on his cell phone to make sure they were in place.

When he arrived at his office, he considered the unsavory next step: calling Sanker.

Sanker was in a tough spot. They had entered a merger agreement with American Bayou and, after signing, Sanker stock value had plunged because Haley Walther refused to tell a few white lies. They got rid of her, but that didn't help the stock. If Sanker stock did not rise, then old man Sanker and all his executives would be out in the street taken over by the American Bayou people. The way to save the old man's skinny ass was to make sure that Sanker got Ben Anderson's aging discovery and announced this new molecular magic to the world.

Frick's mission was simple: Ben Anderson had to die- after Sanker understood all the ramifications of his discovery. As long as Ben Anderson lived, he controlled the invention and chose the manufacturer, with Sanker controlling nothing and getting half the profits.

The phone call to his contact at the Sanker Corporation would have to be oblique because no one, least of all Sanker, would be willing to discuss the real issues.

"I've been negotiating with Ben Anderson," Frick began. "It's just a hunch, but I think he may not have been complying with the terms of the escrow. And now he seems to have disappeared. Of course, we're looking for the details of his work." Frick kept the wording as vague as his contact, a Mr. Nash, would likely want it.

"What?" That single word expressed Nash's shock.

What followed was a short conversation that went badly. Frick repeated to Nash the same general bad news, but in more detail, and with a few hints at his knowledge.

"That's your issue," Nash said. "It's your job. We need you to find Ben Anderson. Big-name scientists don't just disappear. If he did, you make sure you get the relevant details and make arrangements to acquire his discovery. And I tell you again: break no laws."

Nash was a pompous hypocrite, but he controlled the six-figure payments due Frick upon completion of his tasks.

"Understood."

Frick now realized how lucky he was that his inside man had failed to kill Ben Anderson. According to the plan, several days previous they were to have looted the escrow and obtained all the secrets.

Frick made one more call, this one to a man called Griffith, also on the Sanker payroll.

Frick had brought Griffith and one other man in much earlier than the rest. Griffith was already in place on the island, and he knew the plan.