boss, Erainya, and her son, Jem, were vacationing in the Greek Isles. Even my mom was gone—off fishing with her new beau at a mountain cabin in Colorado.
I spent Saturday alone in the offices of the Erainya Manos Detective Agency, eating Erainya's weekold dolmades and trying to gather information. I emailed a friend at the Bexar County ME, asked if he could finagle Jimmy Doebler's autopsy report from Travis County. I tried the Bexar County Sheriff's Department and SAPD, hoping somebody knew somebody in Austin who could give me an inside read on Vic Lopez's investigation. Nobody got back to me.
The Doebler family proved to be a brick wall.
Most of the clan lived in Austin. I'd even met some of them. But nobody wanted to talk to me on the phone. Yes, they remembered me—Garrett Navarre's brother, Jimmy's friend. Yes, they'd heard about Jimmy's death. Could I please refer all further questions to the family's law firm?
I couldn't tell which name they spoke with more coolness— Garrett's or Jimmy's.
W.B. Doebler, Jimmy's cousin and present chairman of the board of Doebler Oil, was in a meeting. Could I please call back? I
did, six times over the course of the day. W.B. Doebler was still in a meeting.
I almost thought I'd struck gold when I discovered that Jimmy had an aunt, Clara's younger sister, also living in Austin, but even Faye DoeblerIngram turned me down.
"Oh, Mr. Navarre." Her voice was small and plaintive, snagging on every word—a silk handkerchief brushed over bricks. "I'm very sorry, but there's nothing I can do."
"If you'd spoken to Jimmy recently, if you knew anyone the police should talk—"
"I'm afraid I couldn't help."
"This is your sister's son, ma'am. As the closest relative—"
"Oh, no. No." A new snag in her voice—fear? "You must realize how sad this is for my family. They felt so much pain over Clara's whole life, her death, and now Jimmy . . .
puts himself in a position like that."
"A position like what?"
"The family wants to put this behind them, move on as quickly as possible, you see."
"And you agree?"
Ninety miles of silence over the phone line. "Jimmy was a sweet boy. I'll miss him terribly."
"Will I see you at the memorial service, then?"
The softest sound I ever heard was Faye DoeblerIngram laying the receiver of her phone in the cradle.
I sat at my desk, staring out the Venetian blinds at the traffic on Blanco.
I turned to the computer, logged on to a news database, and started digging for dirt on the banker Garrett had mentioned— Matthew Pena.
According to Silicon News, Pena was a Texan by birth, Californian by choice. BS in computer science from UT Austin. MBA from Stanford. He'd spent the past few years as an investment banker, orchestrating buyouts and providing venture capital for hightech startups. His clientele read like a who's who list of Silicon Valley. Pena's only noted hobby was scuba diving, which he was so zealous about that his business adversaries had started calling him the Terror of the Deep.
He was, by all accounts, the most vicious set of freelance teeth a company could hire.
August 1998. Pena's first major conquest—a promising startup company in San Jose.
In the course of one month, Pena sabotaged their prospective deals with venture capitalists, hired their best talent away, and set the principals of the company at each other's throats. One of the principals filed a complaint with the San Jose police. She claimed Matthew Pena was harassing her with phone calls, visits, email. When asked for specifics, the woman backed away from her allegations. The complaint fizzled. A month later, the startup agreed to sell. Once Pena bought them out at a firesale price, their product became the backbone of Pena's client's virus protection software—a cash cow.
February 1999 Similar story. Pena strongarmed a Menlo Park startup into selling to a major tech company for six million in stock—little more than glass beads and trinkets compared to what other