“Let’s get them in the same room.” Cal said as he and Jarrod took the steps to the precinct two at a time and headed up to the third floor.
He knew what Cal was thinking. Warrick Staunton and Jonathan Simms were their best shot at figuring out what the hell William Tyvek was doing. They needed to get all the information out in the open. Jarrod instructed one of the patrol officers assisting major crimes that day to bring Simms and his lawyers to one of the less formal interview rooms, while he and Cal headed to get Staunton and his lawyers. The room was used when they wanted to set an interviewee at ease, and was typically reserved for either children, or someone coming in as a witness, not a suspect.
“Come with us,” Jarrod said, after he’d opened the door to the interrogation room. The lawyers were pacing the room, but stopped now and opened their mouths to protest his order. Warrick Staunton raised a hand at them.
“What is it? What’s happened?” He looked between Cal and Jarrod and there was genuine concern on his face. Jarrod’s opinion of the man went up a notch.
“We think Tyvek has Carrie Hastings,” Cal said and Jarrod felt the panic surge in his gut again. He shoved it aside. He didn’t have time for that shit.
Staunton’s face went slack with shock. “What? What do you mean has her?”
“We don’t know for sure. He’s not responding to any attempts to reach him,” Jarrod said as they walked down the hall, the lawyers attempting to keep up behind them. “And he was seen leaving the shelter with Carrie an hour ago.”
“Right in here,” Cal said, opening the door to the room Jonathan Simms had been shown to. They quickly recapped the situation for him.
“Tyvek seems focused on you, Warrick.” Jarrod wanted to get Staunton’s take on things without influencing his answers, if that was possible.
“I don’t understand it. I mean, I get why he would hate me, why he would blame me for Vicki’s death. I told you that before, but I don’t get why he would do this now, after three years. Or why he would do anything to hurt Carrie.”
“Do you think he’d really hurt her?” Jonathan asked, sinking into a chair. He shook his head at the men in disbelief, but Jarrod could also see plain shock there.
“We don’t know. There have certainly been enough deaths involved with this case. If he’s behind it, he hasn’t demonstrated a whole lot of mercy. Then again, he knows Carrie personally. So far, he’s had other people doing his dirty work.” Jarrod looked at Warrick.
“Can you think of anything that could have set him off? Anything that would have made him target you in the last year, instead of coming after you right after Victoria’s death?”
Warrick shook his head and looked to Jonathan. “I just don’t know.”
Jonathan looked miserable when he answered. “When I talked to him about the drug eight months ago, he only seemed interested in it for the money. He seemed to want to develop it for his company.”
Warrick sat up. “What? What the hell are you talking about? You talked to William about SP-1090?”
Jonathan nodded and had the decency to look ashamed. “I’m so sorry, Warrick. I only went to see him one time. He had approached me at a conference after we’d had some initial failures with the drug. Said he would take over the project if Simms cancelled it. He had connections with the FDA. They said he could bring the drug to market if he got it through the trials without the adverse effects. That they’d give Tyvek Technologies a shot at it if we could perfect the trials in the lab.”
“Christ, Jonathan! No way in hell they would have let that happen! People died during the trials. He told you what you wanted to hear and you bought into it.” The look on Warrick’s face said it all. This was an enormous betrayal by Jonathan. Simms Pharmaceutical was a family company. Going outside the company with something like this was disloyalty at its lowest.
Jonathan rushed to explain himself. “I only met with him once about it. We talked and came to an agreement where I’d transition to them and continue my work on the drug over a period of a couple of months. I changed my mind within hours and told him. He seemed to understand when I told him I couldn’t go through with it.”
Warrick was up and pacing the room now, hands raking through his hair as he alternated between shaking his head as he prowled the room and stopping to stare in horror at his uncle. “Did you bring him the data? The specs? Jesus, Jonathan, did you give him the formula?”
“No,” Jonathan waved his hands in front of him as if he could erase what had happened. “I swear, Warrick. I showed him the formula, talked a little about the data. I didn’t let him keep copies of anything. I just…” he let his hands drop to the table, where he laced his fingers together, almost as if in prayer. “I just wasn’t ready to give up on the drug. But then I realized I couldn’t do it that way. I couldn’t take the drug someplace else. I backed out, but he didn’t have any of the data, I swear.”
Warrick stopped and rubbed his hands over his face, before letting them fall to his sides. “If he saw the formula once, he wouldn’t have needed it in print.”
“Is that true?” Jarrod looked from one man to the other. “Would he have been able to recreate the drug after seeing the formula?”
Jonathan hung his head in answer, but Warrick voiced the information they needed. “Yes. Tyvek is a businessman, but he was a scientist first. He would have had that information etched in his brain.”
“I’m sorry, Warrick.” Jonathan turned to the detectives. “I’m so sorry. I had no idea he would…”
He didn’t finish the sentence. Who would have thought Tyvek would take this information and do what he’d done with it? It was inconceivable. Even if Jonathan had been wrong, and had likely violated confidentiality agreements with his company, he could hardly have seen something like this coming.
Jarrod turned to Warrick. “Let’s just focus for now on where he might take Carrie. Can you think of where he would go with her?”
“Would he go back to the cabin?” Cal asked.
Jarrod shook his head. “I doubt it. He wanted us to find Alan Sykes. He has to know that’s compromised now. We’ll have Sheriff Morris take a look or send someone out there, but I don’t think he would head there.”
“I have no idea where he’d take her,” Warrick said. The lawyers seemed to have given up trying to get their clients not to talk. They sat silently watching the scene unfold.
“We’re running a list of properties he owns, but there are a lot of them.” Cal looked at Jarrod and Jarrod knew what he was thinking. They had nothing to go on. No way of tracking Carrie. Her cell phone had been in her office and Tyvek’s seemed to be turned off. Stephanie was trying to tap into video feeds from around the shelter to see which direction he’d gone. So far, she had early images of him driving at several locations around town, and Carrie wasn’t spotted in the car with him.
“Warrick, can you think of any of his properties that are remote? Does he own a vacation home he might have brought her to?” Jarrod asked.
Now one of the lawyers spoke up. “No, that doesn’t make sense. He’s focused on Warrick. If he’s taken Carrie, it’s linked to Warrick in some way. The location would be linked to him as well.”
Jarrod nodded. The lawyer had a point. “Do you have other properties in this area?”
Warrick shook his head. “My home and the cabin. I have a place in Italy.”
“We have people watching the airports,” Jarrod said. “What about the drug? Would he need space to manufacture it?” Jarrod looked between both men, not know which one would be better able to answer the question.
“Yes,” Jonathan nodded. “A lab.”
“But he has access to plenty of those,” Warrick said.
“Would he be able to manufacture it at one of his labs without people knowing what it was?”
“Not really. He’d either need to have people in on it or he would have to have a hidden lab.” Warrick looked up and over at Jonathan as if something had dawned on him. “Or an abandoned lab.”
“What does that mean?” Cal cut in, asking exactly what Jarrod was thinking.
“We have a lab we no longer use. It’s twenty minutes outside of town,” Warrick began. “We outgrew the space two years ago, but have held on to the land. The lab and old office buildings are still there. We simply don’t have a use for it right now, but the property has value.”
“Is it secured in any way? Patrolled?” Jarrod asked.
“Not patrolled, no. We have a security gate.” Warrick crossed his arms. “Alarms on all of the buildings.”
“Is it possible Victoria gave Tyvek those codes?” Jarrod prompted, reminding Warrick of the conversation they’d had about Victoria sharing codes with her father earlier.
But Warrick shook his head. “No. The codes were changed routinely until the building closed. We changed them every month, at a minimum.”
“Until the closures?”
“Yes. And that was two years ago.” Warrick didn’t have to say it. Jarrod knew that was after Victoria’s death.
“Sykes was with the company then. He would have had them,” Jonathan said, quietly.