2024
“Mister Wilder! Orlando Wilder!”
San Jose’s Innovation District, smack-dab in Silicon Valley, was only slightly more than an hour away from San Francisco by BART. Melinda had been staked out here all afternoon, waiting for the camera-shy CEO to emerge from Amaranth’s headquarters in a modern glass-and-steel complex. It was past seven, and most of the district’s office workers had already cleared out, so all she’d learned so far was that Wilder worked late. She’d started to wonder just how long she was willing to camp out on the sidewalk, and whether she had possibly missed him somehow, when a limo pulled up to the curb. Moments later, the man himself emerged, wearing a Burberry coat and toting a briefcase. He was shorter than she expected. About her size, actually.
Adrenaline surging, she darted forward to intercept him. “Excuse me, Mister Wilder! We need to talk!”
He turned toward her, scowling. His eyes widened beneath those bushy brows. Recognition flashed briefly across his face, quick but unmistakable.
He knows who I am, she thought. Good.
Dennis was back at their apartment, monitoring the scene via drone while maintaining a lookout for any Discreet shadows. On the bright side, he had yet to spot any sign of her being tailed, leading her to think that possibly Discreet had backed off after being called out on Cetacean. Certainly, nobody seemed to have alerted Wilder that she was lying in wait outside his headquarters.
All the better to ambush him.
“No comment,” he said brusquely. His deep, basso-profundo voice was likely to record well, even over the phone she held out to capture it. Stakeout conditions precluded a more elaborate setup.
“C’mon, don’t be like that.” She inserted herself between him and the waiting limo, grateful and relieved that he was not such a public figure that he required bodyguards to escort him to the car. He glared at her, their eyes level with each other. It was a pleasant change to face off against somebody who didn’t have a height advantage on her. “I’ve been waiting out here for hours.”
“Your mistake. I don’t do interviews.”
“So your publicity department keeps telling me.” She didn’t bother introducing herself, since that would obviously be superfluous. “I’ve already gone through channels and gotten nowhere.”
“Which should have told you something.” He tried to scoot past her, but she was quicker on her feet, blocking his path to the limo. His expression darkened further. “No comment.”
“Not even about Milly Coates? And her magic kidney pill?”
He faltered, thrown off-balance for a moment, but quickly recovered.
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
She snickered. “We both know that’s not true, so maybe we should skip the playacting and cut to the part where we compare notes on what we each do and don’t know about Miracle Milly… and whatever happened to Gillian Taylor? Seems to me that might be more productive, for both of us, than having my apartment broken into and bugging my devices.”
His fierce gaze bored into hers like he was lasering into her skull. “Listen to me, Ms. Silver—”
He caught himself too late.
“Gotcha!” she crowed, sticking the phone in his face. “You do know exactly who I am and what—”
“That will be enough, miss.” Strong hands, wearing leather gloves, seized her shoulders from behind and physically moved her out of Wilder’s way. “Whenever you’re ready, sir.”
Rats, she thought. The limo driver.
Who could apparently moonlight as a bouncer if so inclined. She squirmed in his grip, unable to pull free.
“Goodbye, Melinda.” Wilder slipped past her into the back seat of the limo, closing the door behind him. He lowered the tinted window long enough to offer a parting piece of advice. “Please don’t attempt this again.”
Apparently he didn’t really know her at all.
“So what’s Wilder like, anyway?”
Dennis had outdone himself with some delicious lemon-glazed salmon, which Melinda dug into since she’d been surviving on food-truck fare and granola bars during her stakeout. They were having dinner at the kitchen table, reasonably confident that they were not being spied on. Or at least working on the assumption for their own peace of mind.
“You heard the recording,” she said between mouthfuls. “Such as it is.”
“Yeah, but it’s hard to get much of an impression from a sky-high view.”
“I suppose.” She tried to paint a picture of the uncooperative tycoon. “Short, brusque, our age. Clearly used to getting his way and not shy about staring you down if you get in his way. Real laser eyes, if you know what I mean. The deep voice probably helps intimidate people too. Gives him a certain gravitas that makes up for how short and young he is.”
Dennis listened, nodding. “Sounds kinda… intense.”
“That’s one way to put it,” she agreed, then froze in mid-bite. “Hang on. Listen to ourselves. This description sound familiar to you? Short, intense, deep voice, not inclined to take no for an answer? Deep interest in miracle cures like Milly’s kidney pill?”
He got where she was going. “Wilmer Offutt?”
Dropping her fork, she pulled out her phone and studied Wilder’s official portrait again.
Bushy eyebrows, check. Intense gaze, check. All about biotech, check. The photo failed to convey his short stature and abysmally deep voice, which is why she hadn’t made the connection immediately, but now that it hit her, she felt like slapping her forehead. She turned the photo toward Dennis. “Tell me this doesn’t match the description of that guy who was so dead set on finding out about the kidney pill back in ’87. The guy whose number I left a message on not long before we were burgled?”
Dennis squinted at the image. “I guess. Although wasn’t Offutt supposed to be bald?”
“True,” she admitted. “Still, now that I think about it, even the initials are the same, just reversed. Wilmer Offutt. Orlando Wilder.”
Oh God, she thought. I sound just like one of the crazy YouTube nuts I usually roll my eyes at, seeing hidden patterns and connections everywhere, building conspiracies on random connections. Who’s losing perspective now?
“Offutt died in 2002 supposedly,” Dennis reminded her, “but even if he faked it, he’d be, what, in his sixties now?” He stroked his scruffy whiskers. “You think he’s Offutt’s grandson or great-nephew or something, carrying on a family tradition? Right down to monitoring that old answering machine?”
“Only one way to find out.”
The salmon forgotten, she called up her phone contacts. The eight-hour time difference between California and Scotland made it way too late to reach out to Jane Temple, at least until morning, but thankfully, Todd Coates was in the same time zone. Calling immediately, she caught him just as he was putting his kids to bed. A few minutes later, they were FaceTiming.
“Sorry to bother you, but would you mind looking at a photo for me? I want to know if a certain individual looks at all familiar to you?”
Todd looked intrigued, not annoyed. “What individual?”
“Let me keep mum on that for now. I don’t want to prejudice the results by putting ideas in your head.”
“Understood. Hit me.”
Dennis had put Wilder’s portrait on their big screen while Todd was coming to the phone. She aimed her phone at it and flipped its camera lens so that Todd could see the photo.
His reaction was instantaneous. “Holy shit! That’s him. The guy who bought Grandma Milly’s body!”
She and Dennis exchanged looks. “You mean, you see a resemblance, right?”
“No, that’s the guy. Sure, he was bald as an egg the last time I saw him, umpteen years ago, but I guess he got a wig or stopped shaving his scalp for some reason. I’d know that face, that expression, those intense eyes and bushy eyebrows anywhere. That’s him, the guy whose business card I gave you. Wilmer Offutt.”
“And you’re absolutely certain about this?” she asked.
“I just said so, didn’t I? What’s up? What did you find out about him?”
“That’s… a developing situation. To be honest, I don’t think I was really expecting quite this definitive a response. We were playing a hunch,” she said, not wanting to go too far out on a limb until they figured out exactly what this meant. “And now we’ve got a lot more digging to do, but thanks so much! This is huge. You have no idea.”
“Really?” he protested. “You’re just going to leave me hanging here?”
Understandably full of questions, Todd required some effort to get off the phone, but she finally succeeded in ending the call after promising him the full scoop farther down the road, even before it hit Cetacean. “You’ll be the first to know.”
She put down the phone, still processing this latest bombshell. She and Dennis stared at each other for a few moments before diving into it.
“So, we have to be talking about a family resemblance, right?” she said. “Heredity at work.”
“Maybe, but… Amaranth symbolizes immortality, remember? And the company is all about finding radical new ways to stimulate health and longevity.”
She balked at where this was going. “What are you suggesting? That Wilmer Offutt and Orlando Wilder are one and the same?” She pointed at the portrait on the screen. “You tell me. Does that guy look like he was pestering Mildred Coates and her family back in the eighties? He looks like he’s only a few years out of college.”
“Hey, you’re the one who twigged onto the resemblance in the first place. And Todd seemed pretty sure.”
“I know, I know, but we can’t completely ignore common sense. This has to be one of those freak things you see on social media sometimes, like when some old Civil War soldier is a dead ringer for Nicholas Cage or whoever. I’ve seen family photos of older relatives that look a lot like folks from our generation. My uncle Rich, for instance, looks uncannily like my cousin Zack in his old wedding photos. Doesn’t that seem less insane than jumping to the conclusion that Orlando Wilder is a vampire or something?”
“Not a vampire,” Dennis said, missing the point, “but maybe… not of this Earth? Remember what Valdez saw in the park? The door from nowhere? Maybe Wilder is from another time or plane of existence?”
“So we’re just tossing Occam’s razor out completely now?” she asked, as much to herself as to Dennis. “Anything is possible?”
“Maybe. You gotta admit: that razor hasn’t been cutting it for a while now.”
Could he be right this time? Was she refusing to follow the leads wherever they led, even if they were pointing somewhere impossible to believe? She picked up her phone again, sorely tempted to call Jane Temple right away, never mind the time difference, and see if she recognized Wilder’s portrait too. Despite everything, though, she still couldn’t bring herself to wake up the retired nurse in the middle of the night.
First thing in the morning, she promised herself, and in the meantime…
She turned to Dennis, feeling just as obsessed with solving this puzzle as Wilmer Offutt, whoever he was, had been about finding that kidney pill.
“Listen up. I need you to find out everything there is to know about Orlando Wilder. And I mean everything!”