John Lescroart - The Oath

Andreotti pondered for a moment. "No, I doubt it. Why would we? He wasn't on staff here, so there'd be no personnel record. He just dropped in. Why?"

"No reason. Just curious." Hardy kept it deliberately vague, pushed the other pages across the desk. "If we could just take one more minute of your time, Mr. Andreotti, does anything else strike you about these?"

The administrator pulled them over and took time now, one by one. "I don't know Medras, but Biosynth is a drug manufacturer. Most of their stuff is low-rent, over-the-counter. They're not real players, but I've heard a rumor they've got something big with the FDA right now." He turned to the next page, looked up. "Foley is Patrick Foley. He's corporate counsel. I don't know who DA is."

Glitsky knew that one. "The district attorney."

A light was coming on in Andreotti's eyes, but he made no comment, turning to the last page. "See Coz. re: punitive layoffs-MR. Document all. Prep. rpt. to board. Severance?"

"Coz is Cozzie Eu. She's the personnel director." He labored over the rest of the note for a few seconds; then slowly he raised his head. "Tim was going to let Ross go, wasn't he?"

Glitsky's mouth was tight. "It's a little early to say, sir. But thanks very much for your time."

As they drove out to the Embarcadero Center and Parnassus Headquarters, the way they decided to phrase it to corporate counsel was that Hardy was an attorney working with the DA. That was true in all its parts if not quite literally. Pat Foley met them at the door, saw them through, then looked back along the hallway in both directions before he closed it. They didn't get a chance to try out their explanation before Foley started talking. "You caught me just as I was going out, but my appointment is just over in Chinatown. Maybe we could talk as we walk."

In five minutes, they were in Portsmouth Square, surrounded by pagodas and tai chi classes, some Asian porn shops, and a line of cars waiting for space in the garage below. High clouds had blown in over the night, and the morning air was chill with a brittle sunlight.

Foley's dome shone even in the faded day. The few hairs that were left were blond, as was the wispy mustache. Thin-shouldered and slightly paunched, he was the picture of what a life behind a desk with tremendous financial pressure could do to a young man-he didn't appear to be much over forty, if that. When he finally sat himself on the concrete lip of one of the park's gardens, he was breathing heavily from the walk.

"Sorry," he said, "I didn't want to talk about it in there. The walls have ears, sometimes."

"Talk about what?" Glitsky asked mildly.

"Well, Susan said you were with homicide. I assume this is about Mr. Markham, or the other Portola deaths. Although I have to say I work almost exclusively with corporate matters. I'm not aware of any information I possess that might be useful to your investigation. If I was, as an officer of the court, of course I would have come forward voluntarily."

Glitsky gave him a flat stare. "Do you talk that way at home?"

Before Foley could react, Hardy stepped in. "Do you really believe your offices are bugged?"

The one-two punch confused him. He couldn't decide which question to answer, so he asked one of his own. "Is this about Mr. Markham then?"

The truth was that neither Hardy nor Glitsky knew precisely what this meeting was going to be about. The telltale initials MR did not even appear in Markham's note. So though they both had their suspicions that Ross was somehow involved, they didn't want to give anything away. "Do you have any idea what the word 'Saratoga' might refer to, Mr. Foley?" Glitsky asked.

"You mean the city down the peninsula, out behind San Jose? I think there's another one in New York, as well, upstate somewhere, I believe. Is that it?"

Hardy and Glitsky fell into a more or less natural double team. Hardy followed up. "Have either of those cities turned up in your corporate work?"

Foley turned to his other inquisitor. He thought a while before he answered. "I can't think of when they would have," he said with a stab at sincere helpfulness. "We don't have any business either place. Maybe a few patients live in the city out here, but that would be about the extent of it."

Glitsky: "So the name hasn't come up recently? Saratoga? Something Mr. Markham might have discussed with you?"

Foley passed a hand over his dome and frowned.

"Maybe not plain Saratoga," Hardy guessed. "A Saratoga something?"

That flicked the switch. "Ah," Foley said. "It's an airplane. Sorry. I think Saratoga and I think Cupertino. I grew up down there, went to Bellarmine. But it's an airplane. It's the one John F. Kennedy Jr. was flying when he went down."

Hardy and Glitsky exchanged a glance, and the lieutenant spoke. "Was the company planning to buy a plane?"

"No, it was Mr. Ross. That's how it was brought to my attention."

"In what way?" Hardy asked.

At this turn in the questioning, Foley actually turned and looked behind him. Wiping some perhaps imaginary sweat from his broad forehead, he tried a smile without much success. "Well, it came to nothing, really."

Glitsky's voice brooked no resistance. "Let us be the judge of that. What happened?"

"One night rather late, I think it was toward the end of last summer, Mr. Markham called to see if I was still working, then asked me to come up to his office. This was a little unusual, not that I was working late, but that he was still there. I remember it was full dark by this time, so it must have been nine or nine thirty. Still, he told me to close the door, as though there might be other people working who could overhear us.

"When I got seated, he said he wanted our talk to be completely confidential, just between the two of us and no one else. He said it was a very difficult subject and he didn't know where he stood, even with his facts, but he wanted to document his actions in case he needed a record of them down the line."

"What did he want to do?" Hardy asked.

"He wasn't even sure of that. Eventually, he came to where he thought he ought to hire a private investigator to look into Mr. Ross's finances."

Glitsky kept up the press. "What made him get to there?"

"Several things, I think, but the immediate one was the Saratoga." Foley was warming to his story, as though relieved that he finally had an opportunity to get it off his chest. "It seems that Mr. Markham and Dr. Ross had been at a party together one night at a medical convention they were both attending in Las Vegas a week or so before. They'd been close friends for years, you know, and evidently they went out together afterward alone for a few drinks, just to catch up on personal stuff. Well, over the course of the next couple of hours, Dr. Ross maybe drank a little too much, but he evidently made quite a point of telling Mr. Markham about the condition of his finances, which wasn't good at all. His personal finances, I mean, exclusive of Parnassus, which was hurting badly enough as it was."

"So Ross cried on Markham's shoulder?" Glitsky asked.

"Essentially, yes. Told him he had no money left, no savings, his wife was spending it faster than he could earn it. Between the alimony for his first wife and the lifestyle of his second, he was broke. He didn't know what he was going to do."

Hardy had gotten some inkling of this from Bracco and Fisk's report on Nancy, but it was good to hear it from another source. "And what did Markham suggest?"

"The usual, I'd guess. Cutting back somewhere, living within a budget. It wasn't as though Dr. Ross was unemployed. He still had a substantial income and regular cash flow, but that wasn't the point, the point of our meeting that night."

"What was?" Glitsky asked.

Foley had sat on the hard, cold concrete long enough. He stood, brushed off his clothes, checked his watch. "Earlier that afternoon, Mr. Markham's wife had called him-this was between the…" Foley decided not to explain something; Hardy assumed it was about Ann Kensing. "Anyway, his wife called and asked if he'd heard the news. Dr. Ross had just traded in his old airplane and bought a brand-new one, a Saratoga. He and his family were taking it to the place at Tahoe that weekend and Markham's wife had called to ask if they wanted to fly up with them, bring the whole family.