Fair Warning (Jack McEvoy #3)(45)

“Any theories on the DNA and where it came from?” I asked.

“Nope,” Ruiz said. “I just know it killed the case. It didn’t matter how credible our victim seemed. DNA from another man on her body killed the case.”

“What about the possibility of tampering?”

“I don’t see where. I took the sample from Orton with a court order. I delivered it to the lab. You accusing me of something?”

“Not at all. Just asking. There’s also the second sample Orton’s was compared to. Was there any kind of internal investigation of that?”

“Not beyond doing the test over and getting the same result. You are talking about a very sensitive subject. You know what the criminal defense lawyers in this courthouse would do with something like that? We’d get buried with appeals of every conviction that ever came out of that lab.”

I nodded. It was a case of looking into the matter but not looking too hard.

“How did the victim take it when you told her?” I asked.

“She was more surprised than me, I’ll tell you that,” Ruiz said. “She insisted then and still does that there was no other man. Just Orton.”

“Did you ever talk to him? Interview him, I mean. Maybe when you took his swab?”

“Not really. We started to get into it but then he lawyered up and that was it. You know, you were right about this one. What you said.”

“What did I say?”

“About him being the one who got away. The motherfucker’s a rapist. I know it. And the DNA doesn’t change that. That’s off the record, too.”

Ruiz stood up.

“I need to go back in,” he said.

“Two more quick questions,” I said.

He gestured for me to go ahead. I stood up.

“Jane Doe’s lawyer, who was that?”

“Hervé Gaspar—I recommended him to her.”

“What is Jane Doe’s real name?”

“You should be able to get that from your source at the school.”

“Okay, then what about the lab report on the DNA? Where can I get that?”

“You can’t. All that got destroyed when the case wasn’t filed. The lab report, the records. His arrest was expunged after his lawyer got a court order.”

“Shit.”

“You’re telling me.”

Ruiz turned toward the courtroom door and took a few steps, but then stopped and came back to me.

“Do you have a card or something? In case.”

“Sure.”

I opened a zipper on my backpack, dug out a business card, and handed it to him.

“Call anytime,” I said. “And good luck with this one.”

“Thanks,” he said. “But with this one we don’t need luck. He’s going down.”

I watched him go back into the courtroom to take care of business.





20

When I turned my phone on after leaving the courthouse, I had a message from Randall Sachs, head of public relations for the Rexford Corporation. With the two-hour time difference in Indianapolis working in my favor, I had called him on my drive down. It was early my time but he was well into his day and I told him that I needed to get into Orange Nano and interview William Orton. I made it clear that if he turned down my request, I would wonder what they were hiding at Rexford, a publicly traded company, when I could not speak to a board member and top researcher. I told him that I would be in the vicinity of Orange Nano later in the day and would love to make the visit then.

The message was that my photographer and I had a two-o’clock interview with Orton that came with a hard stop at three. I immediately called Sachs back to confirm and he gave me the lowdown on who I should ask for on arrival and reminded me that the interview would last no more than an hour. He implied that Orton was against the interview but he, Sachs, had been able to make him see the light.

“We are a transparent company,” Sachs assured me.

I thanked him, disconnected, and immediately called Emily Atwater.

“How fast can you get down here?” I asked. “We have a two o’clock with Orton.”

“I’ll leave right now and should make it in time for us to work out a script,” she said.

“Okay, good. Don’t forget the camera. You’re the photographer and I’m the interviewer.”

“Don’t be a dick. I know what I’m supposed to be.”

“Sorry. You get anything out of the feds?”

“The FTC was good. I’ll tell you about it when I’m down there.”

“Now who’s being a dick?”

“Touché. Leaving now.”

She disconnected.

I had time to kill so I went for an early lunch at Taco María in Costa Mesa. While I ate arrachera tacos I thought about the best approach to Orton. I knew that it might be the one and only time to get an audience with him. Would Emily and I maintain the cover of the story we had told Rexford PR we were doing, or would we confront him?

Based on what I had heard from Detective Ruiz, I was pretty sure that Orton would not bend if confronted. It was likely that a direct approach would only get us shown the door. Still, it might be useful to see how he would react and possibly defend himself against the accusations leveled against him while he was a professor at UCI. Or what he would say if we asked if the DNA from the four dead women at the center of our story had ended up in the lab at Orange Nano.