House Odds by Mike Lawson Read Free Book Online Page B

to Clyde’s to reward himself with a martini.
    He was just taking the first sip of his drink when his cell phone rang—the phone call distracted him and he inadvertently allowed ice-cold vodka to stream right over his tooth, the one he’d gone to see the dentist about. The tooth was cracked and every time it was exposed to something cold, the top of his head almost came off. Until he could get back to the dentist, he had to tilt his head to the right whenever he drank, which looked pretty stupid when drinking a martini.
    “Shit!” he yelled, reacting to the pain and forgetting he was speaking into the phone.
    “Joe? It’s Molly.”
    “Oh, sorry. I just . . . Never mind. What can I do for you?”
    * * *
    “It could be a manager named Douglas Campbell,” Molly said.
    They were sitting in a small restaurant five blocks from Molly’s apartment, and she was picking at a chicken salad, spending more time moving the food around on her plate than eating. The only calories provided by her dinner came from the white wine she was drinking. She was already on her second glass.
    “Why him?” DeMarco asked.
    Molly hesitated, as if she was reluctant to tell DeMarco what she knew.
    “Molly,” he prodded.
    “Doug is Reston’s HR guy. Head of human resources. A couple of years ago, I was standing outside his office, right by the door. I needed to talk to him about a consultant I wanted to hire, but he was on the phone. Anyway, he was using one of those prepaid phone cards to make a call. I could see him looking at the card, reading the PIN number off the card as he dialed. I thought that was odd because he makes long distance calls all over the place, and even if it was for something personal, it wouldn’t have raised any eyebrows. Plus, he’s pretty senior. It’s not like anybody would have questioned one of his calls.”
    “What’s the phone card have to do with . . .”
    “Whoever he was calling comes on the line and Doug says, all agitated, like he’s upset, ‘It failed the solubility test. You better sell.’”
    “I don’t understand. What’s that mean?” DeMarco said.
    “At the time, a Reston team was working on a biodegradable plastic bottle. You know how the environmentalists go nuts, saying plastic bottles will be around ten million years from now? Well, the team had come up with a bottle that would essentially dissolve six months after you broke the seal. It would have been a major breakthrough, and the company we were working with would have owned the bottle market for a while. But then, late in the development cycle, they found problems they hadn’t seen in earlier tests and abandoned the project.”
    Yeah, DeMarco could just see it: you’re drinking a bottle of pop and suddenly the bottom falls out and you end up with Coke all over your lap. But he didn’t say that. Instead, he said, “Are you saying that Campbell was warning somebody who’d bought stock in the bottle company to get out?”
    “I don’t know, but maybe.”
    “How long ago was this? What year?”
    “Uh, 2010. Maybe the first part of 2011. I just know it was a couple years ago.”
    “Do you remember the month?”
    “No.”
    “You said you went to see Campbell because you wanted to hire a consultant. Can you get the exact date of the phone call by looking at the consultant’s contract?”
    “I never hired him. It turned out we didn’t need him.”
    “Shit. Well, other than this one phone call, is there anything else that makes you suspect Campbell?”
    Molly took her time responding. She was driving DeMarco nuts the way she mulled over every answer.
    “You asked about who would have access to my personal information. The HR office has my Social Security number on file, and since my paycheck is direct-deposited, they know where I bank.”
    “That’s good, Molly. That helps. Anything else?”
    Again she hesitated. What the hell was her problem?
    “The other thing you asked was if I could think of anybody who seems to