After the Golden Age (Golden Age 1)

“If the Destructor isn’t the mastermind, who is?” He watched her closely, like he was asking a test question and not making small talk.

“If I knew, I’d call the cops.” Anonymously, this time. “There’s got to be some connection between all these guys—the Baxter Gang, the Strad Brothers, the guys from the pool. Someone just has to figure out what the link is.”

“And that link’ll be the mastermind?”

“Or it’ll lead us to the mastermind. I don’t know, maybe it’s just wishful thinking, that the Destructor really is finished.”

Parks folded the paper away and smiled. Celia moved on to the elevators.

The records department—a climate-controlled, brightly lit cavern of a room with row after row of steel shelves, located in the skyscraper’s basement—was in the process of scanning all the records into digital format. The job was set to take years, because as Warren had said, the company never threw anything away. Only a dozen or so sets of shelves were empty. At a computer workstation, banker’s boxes sat on open tables near scanners and high-powered shredders. All was quiet now, but the equipment probably made a hell of a racket during the workweek.

They hadn’t yet gotten to the year she was looking for. She wouldn’t be able to use a nifty computerized search engine to help her find the file on the Leyden building. The old-fashioned way it was, then. Even with the high-tech air filtration system in a modern facility, the place still smelled like archival storage: old paper, stale manila folders, cardboard, and dust. Libraries and accountants’ basements all over the world smelled like this. It was the scent of information waiting to be discovered.

She wondered, if the West Corp people transferring all this paper to the computer had come across the Leyden file, would they have noticed if it mentioned a connection to Sito? Would it have tripped the recognition in their minds that it had in hers? If so, would they have said anything?

She was meant to be here, digging up this data. No one else knew the connections. No one else could find it.

It took her three hours of looking in banker’s boxes, scanning the neatly typed labels on hundreds of legal-size manila folders. Real estate deals, stock acquisitions, mergers, sales—every deal possible to make in business was represented. Jacob West had had his fingers in a lot of pies. Oil, telecommunications, entertainment, government contracts. He’d started out importing diamonds, but quickly diversified. Economic downturns had never affected him.

Finally, she found a surprisingly thin folder labeled Leyden Industrial Park.

She filled out the appropriate form needed to take information out of the archives and slipped a card into the folder’s place in the box. If she followed procedure, her father wouldn’t have any reason to reprimand her. Really, though, she wasn’t a West Corp employee. She wasn’t entitled to remove files from storage.

She really might break down and ask her father for a job, if no one else hired her.

Feeling a bit like Pandora, she sat at an austere desk in the archives room and opened the folder.

A cover memo addressed to Jacob West outlined experiments in bioengineering. Celia couldn’t find a more detailed description than that. These were accounting records, not lab reports. The file included a list of assets, which she hoped might give her some clue as to what the experiments involved. Most of the entries were for machines with complicated names that Celia couldn’t guess the purposes of. The ones she recognized—oscillators and autoclaves—were generic, used for all sorts of purposes in every kind of lab. They could be found in dentists’ offices.

She set aside that list and turned to the payroll data. Here, she made some progress. West Corp not only owned the building, it had signed the paychecks for the dozen or so people who worked there during that time. She looked for one particular name first, and found it: Dr. Simon Sito was on the West Corp payroll. She was going to have to show this to her father.

The name right above Sito’s was Anna Riley. Her position was listed as stenographer. Suzanne’s mother’s name was Anna Riley. It might have been a different Anna Riley, except her age at the time, twenty-five, was about right.

Celia called her mother’s cell. Suzanne didn’t answer, which didn’t surprise Celia, but she left a message so she wouldn’t forget to ask the question later. “Hi, Mom. I have a weird question for you. What did Grandma Riley do for a living? Thanks.”

The prickling on the back of her neck grew even stronger when she came across the last name Baker. Analise’s last name was Baker. George Baker was listed as a lab technician. But Baker was a common last name, surely no relation.

Celia didn’t know if Analise was talking to her or not, so she didn’t call.

The last entry in the expenses portion of the trial balance was for a benefits payoff to employees. This cleaned out the account for the Leyden Industrial Park lab project. West Corp abandoned the property to the city, washing its hands of the place utterly.

What had happened there that one of the city’s most powerful investment companies didn’t try to salvage anything from the aftermath?

This was like trying to identify astronomical bodies by their distant gravitational effects. Celia was circling around the real mystery with no way of seeing it directly. That was usually how her job went. She never caught the bad guys red-handed, and only ever knew they were bad at all by the unlikely amounts of money they shuffled around.

If she’d wanted it any other way, if she’d wanted to be at the center of things, she’d have become a cop.

Somebody somewhere had to have a real lab report, something detailing the actual experiment. Most of the employees on the list had been in their twenties and thirties. A few of them should still be alive. The older ones, maybe not. She copied out the list of employees and found a phone book.

She put a check mark by Sito’s name; she knew where he was, and knew the likelihood that he’d tell her anything of use. Anna Riley—if it was the same Anna Riley—had passed away twelve years ago. Celia put a question mark by her name. Then she started at the top of the list and made calls.

“Hi, I’m with the DA’s office—” This fib would get her in serious trouble if it got back to Bronson, but what did she have to lose? “This isn’t anything serious, but I’m trying to track down some information. I’m looking for a Harold Kleinbrenner who might have worked as a lab technician about fifty years ago? Is that you?”

No, that was Harold Kleinbrenner Jr.’s father. Harold Senior had died of prostate cancer twenty years ago.

Sorry, wrong Gerald Stowe.

Aaron Masters was dead. So was Lawrence Donaldson.