Silicon Solutions was a Palo Alto–based designer and manufacturer of routers and servers that formed the core of the Internet backbone.
“Net. Google. Silicon Solutions.”
A flat-screen monitor rose out of the credenza facing the bed. The screen came to life, showing the Google home page. The company name appeared in the search bar. A blink and a list of relevant pages appeared. He spent a few minutes reading articles about the company, then continued on to the next company in the pile. As he worked, he made notes, analyzing the companies by industry, revenue, country, and currency.
There was a large provider of IT services, including data storage and Internet service providers. There was a company that designed and built machines that fabricated microchips. To round out the high-tech sector, there was a manufacturer of microchips, too.
There was a French company that built and launched communications satellites and a Japanese multinational corporation that built high-speed rail systems and the trains that ran on them as well as elevators, electronic security systems, and home electronics. There was a renowned American engineering company that was the world leader in building power plants, both nuclear- and coal-fueled. There was an Australian mining corporation with operations in twenty countries around the world, from India to Iceland. And a large supermarket chain named Pecos active in the southwestern United States.
An hour later Astor had educated himself about all seven companies that had warranted Penelope Evans’s attention. The result was a picture-perfect risk-diversified portfolio. He could find nothing to link them to one another, nothing that suggested the slightest impropriety. Maybe he was wrong. Maybe Penelope Evans’s research into these diverse firms was simply part of her normal assignments. Maybe these companies had nothing to do with his father’s death.
Or maybe not.
Astor grabbed the report for Silicon Solutions and started rereading it. There had to be a connection between the firms, as disparate as they appeared. There was a reason Penelope Evans was studying the reports even after his father had been killed. Somewhere inside these pages was a clue, and he was determined to find it. He turned to the financial statements. A footnote to the balance sheet stated that the company had been owned by a private equity firm. Britium, the company mentioned in the ITT article, was also the object of attention from a private equity firm.
Astor scrambled to a sitting position and combed through the reports again. Each firm, he noted, had had dealings with a sponsor at some point in its corporate history. Either the company had been purchased by a sponsor and subsequently taken public, or it was currently a publicly traded company soon to be taken private.
“Memo,” he said aloud.
A blank page appeared on the screen. Astor read the names of the nine private equity firms involved. All were known and respected. He counted acquaintances at all of them. But the pattern he sought eluded him. Only one of the firms was listed in more than one transaction.
“Save. Send to office.”
Astor felt vexed. He knew that the presence of the private equity firms in all the companies’ histories was no coincidence, but the trail ended there.
He picked up the reports and articles and carried them to his desk. He stared out across the river. He was tired, overanxious, and frightened. He imagined the police technicians lifting an immaculate set of his fingerprints from Penelope Evans’s door. Sooner or later they would make a match and he would be called on the carpet and asked to explain what he had been doing at Evans’s house. He had no worries about being falsely accused. Not in the long run. He did not own a gun. He could prove he was not present at the time of death. (Sullivan was his alibi.) He had no motive. It was the short run that posed a problem. Today and tomorrow and the day after, days crucial to Comstock’s survival. Besides, as John Maynard Keynes had said, in the long run he’d be dead.
“Bloomberg. Foreign exchange cross rates. Yuan–dollar.”
Astor stepped in front of the screen. The rate was stable at 6.175. The position was still underwater. Snatching a notepad, he listed investors he might approach to shore up his fund if he received a margin call at the end of business the next day. He stopped after four names. It was not a promising beginning.
He threw the notepad onto his desk. It missed and landed in the trash can. Touchdown, Astor. As he bent to pick it up, he inadvertently knocked a few of the annual reports to the floor. Something fell from the pages and floated to the carpet. It was a piece of sky-blue stationery with a navy border. Two words printed in copperplate ran across the top: Cherry Hill.
Astor carefully replaced the annual reports before picking up the paper. Cherry Hill was the name of the family estate in Oyster Bay, his boyhood home. Someone had written on it—a woman’s feminine, looping script.