The Manuscript by Russell Blake

have a client who was found dead this morning at his apartment. Heart attack, no suspicion of foul play. White male, late sixties-early seventies, lived alone with some dogs. Neighbor called it in. I was wondering if you could look into that a little closer and make sure it passes the sniff test.”
    Ken’s tone changed. “Why, Mike? Tell me what I need to know. Do you have some reason to believe it might be something else?”
    “We ran a sweep on his office this morning and his place had more bugs than a crack house kitchen. And Ken, it’s not like he was on Wall Street or trading in high value intel. He was a literary agent, which is about as exciting as manufacturing shoelaces,” Michael explained.
    He stopped there – Ken didn’t need to know anything more. There was no point in getting him involved beyond providing confirmation that Abe’s death had been a natural one.
    “So no reason for any listening devices…” Ken finished the thought.
    “Exactly. I suppose it could be a competitor trying to learn what he was working on or negotiating, but that’s unlikely, given the industry.” Michael let that sink it. “Which is why I figured it might be worth having someone check the body.”
    “What was the name and address?” Ken asked.
    Michael told him everything he knew.
    Ken would be able to do a quick system scan for bodies found in the last twenty-four hours and find Abe. Then he’d ask the coroner to do a suspicious death exam – unofficially at first, even though everyone was supposed to follow procedure. Nobody wanted to waste a ton of time on paperwork on a ‘favor bank’ call, so it was more expedient to do it casually at this stage.
    Ken committed to notifying Michael whenever he had the results of the autopsy back. He figure it would be at least a day, maybe more, especially if they had to wait for a pathology report and tox screens to come in.
    Michael hoped with all his heart that they would confirm he’d expired from a coronary.
    Abe’s death was now under investigation; there was nothing else he could do on that score but wait, so Michael turned to the research issue. He needed fast, dependable and discreet verification by someone who’d never been within a mile of Abe’s offices and couldn’t be tied into his sweep or the e-mail. Normally, he would have used Koshi, but in light of his suspicions, Michael didn’t want to expose him to any more risk.
    Instead, he called a woman he’d dated for a few weeks who was also in the security field. They’d remained friends and colleagues for years since then, even though the spark hadn’t quite been there. Samantha was very good at what she did; she worked for one of the large PI and corporate security firms as a research specialist, but he figured she’d moonlight for him and could be depended upon to keep things confidential.
    Michael called her using the IP phone and gave her his short list of terms, dates and institutions to investigate. They agreed she would report back to him as soon as she had something, one way or another.
    There wasn’t a lot more he could do until he knew what he was dealing with, so he unwrapped an energy bar he found in a drawer, yanked a bottle of water out of the fridge and returned his attention to reading the manuscript.
    He weighed the remaining pages in his hand. Probably about two thirds left to go. Michael silently prayed that whoever had contrived the documents was given to long-winded descriptions, or went off on lengthy tangents, and that the rest of the book was fluff or obvious malarkey and didn’t contain any more realistic-sounding explosive claims. He didn’t see how it could get much more pejorative than the first third.
    Unfortunately, the author wasn’t big on creative writing.
    It got worse.
    Far worse.
     
     
     

Chapter 6
     
     
    If there was a professional team working Abe’s office, Michael figured they’d go in after all the businesses had closed for the day and the employees