Fair Warning (Jack McEvoy #3)(48)

“We are.”





21

Orange Nano was in a clean industrial park off MacArthur and not far from UCI. It was a single-level precast concrete building with no windows and no sign out front identifying it. The front door led to a small reception area where we found Edna Fortunato, the woman I had been told by Rexford PR would get us to William Orton.

She escorted us into an office where two men sat waiting, one directly behind a large desk and the other to his left side. The office was basic: a desk cluttered with files and paperwork, diplomas framed on one wall, shelves of medical-research books on another, and finally a six-foot-tall sculpture in a corner that was an abstract double helix made of polished brass.

The man behind the desk was obviously Orton. He was about fifty with a tall and slim build. He stood up and easily reached across the wide desk to shake our hands. Though ostensibly looking for the cure to baldness, he had a full head of brown hair slicked back and held in place with heavy product. His bushy, unkempt eyebrows gave him the inquisitive look of a researcher. He wore the requisite white lab coat—his name stitched above the breast pocket—and pale green scrubs.

The other man was the mystery. Dressed in a crisp suit, he remained seated. Orton quickly solved the mystery.

“I am Dr. Orton,” he said. “And this is my attorney, Giles Barnett.”

“Are we interrupting something you two need to finish?” I asked.

“No, I asked Giles to join us,” Orton said.

“Why is that?” I asked. “This is just a general interview.”

There was a nervousness about Orton that I had seen before in people unaccustomed to dealing directly with the media. And he had the added burden of worrying about his secret discharge from UCI. It seemed that he had brought his lawyer to make sure the interview didn’t stray into an area Emily and I surely intended to take it.

“I need to tell you at the outset that I don’t want this intrusion,” Orton said. “I rely on Rexford Corporation to sponsor my work and so I cooperate with their demands. This is one of them. But as I say, I don’t like it, and I am more comfortable with my attorney present.”

I looked over at Emily. It was clear our planning for the interview had been for naught. The scheme to slowly lead Orton down a path toward a discussion of his past troubles would now clearly be stopped by Giles Barnett. The attorney had a tight collar and the thick body of an offensive lineman. In my glance at Emily I tried to get a read on whether she thought we should abandon ship or press on. She spoke before I could make a determination.

“Could we start in the lab?” she said to Orton. “We wanted some photos of you in your element. We could get that out of the way and then do the interview.”

She was proceeding with the plan: get photos first because the interview was going to lead to a confrontation. It’s hard to get photos after you’ve been ordered to leave the premises.

“You can’t go into the lab,” Orton said. “There are contamination concerns and a strict protocol. There are, however, viewing windows in the hallway. You can take your photos from there.”

“That’ll work,” Emily said.

“Which lab?” Orton said.

“Uh, you tell us,” I said. “What labs are there?”

“We have an extraction lab,” he said. “We have a PCR lab, and we have an analysis lab.”

“PCR?” I asked.

“Polymerase Chain Reaction,” Orton said. “It is where samples are amplified. We can make millions of copies of a single DNA molecule in a matter of hours.”

“I like that,” Emily said. “Maybe some shots with you involved in that process.”

“Very well,” Orton said.

He stood up and signaled us through the door into a hallway that led to the far reaches of the building. Emily hung back so that Orton was several feet ahead of us, his lab coat flowing behind him like a cape. She took photos as we walked.

I walked next to Barnett and asked him for a card. He reached behind the pocket square in the breast pocket of his suit coat and handed me an embossed business card. I glanced at it before putting it in my pocket.

“I know what you’re going to ask,” Barnett said. “Why does he need a criminal defense attorney? The answer is that it’s only one of my specialties. I handle all Dr. Orton’s legal work. That’s why I’m here.”

“Got it,” I said.

We turned down a forty-foot hallway with several large windows running along both sides. Orton stopped at the first set of windows.

“Over here to my left is PCR,” he said. “To the right is the STR analysis lab.”

“STR?” I asked.

“Short Tandem Repeat analysis is the evaluation of specific loci,” he said. “This is where we hunt. Where we look for the commonalities in identity, behavior, hereditary attributes.”

“Like balding?” I asked.

“That is certainly one of them,” Orton said. “And one of our main points of study.”

He pointed through the window at a device that looked like a countertop dishwasher with a rack containing dozens of test tubes. Emily snapped another photo.

“Where does the DNA for your studies come from?” I asked.

“We buy it, of course,” Orton said.