Pia struggled with the capsules, finally managing to break them in half. When she did so, she poured the white powder into the drink.
“Oh, for God’s sake,” she shouted out.
“What is it?” yelled Berman over the music.
“I spilled some more of your whiskey, I’m sorry.” Pia found a long glass stirrer in the cabinet and started frantically trying to get the powder, which was now floating on the surface, to dissolve. She cursed herself for not having tried a dry run.
“How about something else,” she suggested. Finally the powder seemed to start to dissolve.
“Okay, but you’re not being much help.” Berman found a radio station playing some kind of electronic music, slow and languid.
“There,” said Pia, “I like that.”
“Really? Sounds god-awful to me,” said Berman.
Pia looked into the bottom of Berman’s glass. There was a small piece of blue capsular material. She tried to get it with her finger, but it agonizingly kept moving away from her fingertip. Instead, she poured most of the spiked drink into a second tumbler, leaving the pill debris where it was. She then carried the glass over to the cocktail table and rescued hers. Making sure Berman could not see what she was doing, she filled hers with bottled water and some whiskey for color. With her heart racing, she returned to the cocktail table and put her glass down.
“Come on!” she said in a lively tone, reaching out to Berman. “Dance with me!”
Pia moved her body to the rhythm of the hypnotic music, swaying, holding an arm over her head, apparently lost in the moment. Berman sat back and drank his whiskey. What a woman!
“I’d prefer to watch you,” said Berman. As he watched, he drank. Pia snatched glances at Berman, afraid that the medication might have a bitter taste that would alert Berman to its presence. She knew one capsule was the recommended dose for someone with anxiety or insomnia, but she wasn’t sure how much of the two capsules actually got into the drink.
Pia had absolutely no experience of dancing, let alone exotic dancing, but she could move in sync with the music, which thankfully retained the same tempo from one song to the next, if song was the right word. She took the whiskey bottle and refilled Berman’s glass. He had already drunk about a quarter of it. Apparently the taste wasn’t bad.
“Hey, no fair,” he said, and it looked to Pia as if he were having trouble focusing on her. Pia grabbed her own glass and made a point to knock back most of it. This was enough for Berman to slip into a binge mode himself, taking healthy gulps of whiskey as Pia went back to her provocative dancing.
As Berman kept up his drinking, Pia was encouraged to be progressively more creative. After a number of songs and several more additions to Berman’s glass, she began to wonder what was keeping the guy awake. She wondered if maybe Berman popped benzodiazepines every night and had a tolerance for the drugs. But then, while she was refilling his drink, Berman’s eyes seemed to disappear up inside his head, and his glass slipped from his grasp. Pia lunged forward and caught the glass before it rolled off his lap. His head sank back, and he began snoring gently.
“Thank God,” said Pia. She took the iPhone and found the control that switched off the radio. Suddenly the house was plunged into absolute silence. Quickly she ran back to the kitchen with Berman’s tumbler and the other two glasses and rinsed them all out in the unlikely scenario that a Mickey Finn was suspected the following day. She even made certain the pesky blue capsule material was properly disposed of before she put the glasses back in the den and poured a little whiskey into two of them.
“Okay,” she said to no one in particular when all was ready, “let’s see what we can find.”
CHAPTER 22
Pia reckoned she had four or five hours to search Berman’s home. The fact that her host was drunk and drugged up didn’t stop Pia from going back and checking on him twice in the hours since he’d finally succumbed. Pia had arranged Berman in a kind of a recovery position on his large couch with his head a little over the side in case he became nauseous. She was confident that to the world, he appeared to be sleeping like a baby. Pia spent ten minutes in the kitchen, drinking several glasses of water until she felt slightly more human herself. She wanted all her faculties.
Pia had no notion of what she was looking for in Berman’s house. She walked through the whole place, making a mental note of the location and function of each room. The property was on three levels, with guest rooms, a workout room, a wine cellar, and access to the garage downstairs. She had seen the whole of the first floor, but nothing of the second. The two main rooms up there could be reached by a main staircase from the living room, and by a back stair from the kitchen.
Berman’s giant master bedroom, with two huge baths, occupied most of the space. But there was another room as well, and it was the one Pia was most interested in. It was clearly a home office.
Wearing a pair of latex examination gloves she’d picked up in the ER when Paul Caldwell was off getting her Temazepam capsules, Pia sat at Berman’s desk in his chair and looked around. The table was glass and on it sat a large Mac, the latest model with retina display. To the right was a six-inch-high stack of papers; to the left, a flat-panel charger for Berman’s iPhone and Android. To the side, below the table, was a cherrywood filing cabinet that was locked. Pia swiveled around and took in the room. Unlike the rest of the house, there was a smooth finish to the walls, wood paneling that lent the room a more businesslike air than the rest of the timbered home.
There were a couple of low cabinets against one wall and Pia tried the door handles on both. Each was locked. Bookcases lined the other wall, filled with what Pia saw as a standard guy’s collection of business books, sports biographies, and thrillers, with a few coffee table books on the Rockies thrown in. She pulled a few of the books back but the wall behind was solid. There was no drawer in the glass desk, and Pia ran her hand along the flat surfaces in the room, looking for keys. Nothing.
All Pia had ready access to was the pile of papers on the desk.
Pia read through the pile meticulously. Most of the papers turned out to be printed-out copies of intra-company emails. Many were anotated in pencil in Berman’s hand. The majority were status reports of tests and experiments going on throughout Nano, and Pia recognized a few of them as her own. Her unfamiliarity with some aspects of other applications of nanotechnology hindered her ability to decode some of the more technical language. Scattered among the emails were copies of requisition forms that Berman had signed, including hers for the additional biocompatibility experiments.
One paper was a form for a new office chair for someone named Al Clift that Berman had turned down. He drew vigorous circles around the price—$359—and wrote “request denied” next to it. All Berman could be accused of from the evidence in this pile of paperwork was being a micromanager, and a cheap one at that.
Pia slumped down in the seat and stared at the Mac. It was powered down and she thought if she turned it on, Berman most likely would know someone had been in his office, and she’d be the prime suspect. She was frustrated and extremely tired. It was now a quarter of four. She decided to take one more tour around the house, come back to the office and look at the papers again, and then leave before Berman woke up.
The lower level yielded nothing. She could see into the wine vault but couldn’t open the door, which had a separate lock. Through the window she saw row after row of bottles but no safe or cabinet or any other out-of-place piece of furniture. The climate-control system hummed along, keeping the room at a steady temperature and humidity. Pia hesitated to go into the garage in case Berman considered it part of the outside and her visit would be recorded. She had a moment of panic when she wondered if Berman had been lying about cameras inside the house being off, but it was much too late to be concerned about that.