Into the Inferno - Earl Emerson [134]
“Most of this is personal,” Stephanie said, slamming a desk drawer angrily. “Pictures from her trips to Hong Kong. A boyfriend in New York City. I didn’t know she was seeing anybody. Some married guy, works for Scientific American. What’d you find?”
“Nothing pertinent.”
It was a luxurious office, designed to display power and ease. It even had its own adjoining sitting room and spacious shower facility with sauna, both with separate exits leading to the corridor. I went to the window and gazed out at the parking area below. The trees directly in front of the building had been cut down so that from this office and the one on either side the view was unimpeded as far out as the dark guard kiosk by the street.
“Hey. Check this out,” Stephanie said. “There’s a folder on some guy named Armitage got fired for embezzlement. He wrote them a letter about my uncle’s death. Claims Phil DiMaggio got sick downstairs in the lab and died the next day.”
“Is that true?”
“They told me he was driving down I-405, got into a road rage thing with some other driver, had a heart attack, and drove himself to Overlake Hospital. Armitage claims he got sick from chemicals he was handling. Apparently, he’s been making this allegation for a while, because he says here: ‘Despite your assurances to the contrary, I cannot help but feel Dr. DiMaggio’s demise can’t be directly attributed to anything other than the materials he was working with on the twelfth of October. Nor can it anymore be deemed a coincidence or an accident that Ms. Janet Beechler, who had been in the room when Dr. DiMaggio was handling said materials, suffered a fatal automobile accident the night following his death.’ ”
“A fatal accident? You think they were killing witnesses two years ago right here in Redmond?”
“Could be sour grapes; they’d already fired Armitage when he wrote this letter.” Stephanie glanced back at the papers. “Here’s a letter from my aunt saying Beechler’s car accident happened because she was distraught over her boss’s death. She says they had the best physicians in the Northwest caring for her husband. That he had a bad heart. I don’t know if that’s true, but why bother to answer a crank letter from a man you’ve just fired for embezzlement? The next set of letters are copies of letters to Armitage from Canyon View’s attorneys. They’d apparently threatened to turn evidence of embezzlement over to the Redmond Police Department if he didn’t go away. I wonder if Armitage was talking about Uncle Phil’s death before he got fired.”
Stephanie handed me a newspaper clipping. “This would have been four weeks later.”
Puyallup Man Dies in Car Wreck
Last night at 2:20 a.m. witnesses saw a tan and gray Bronco leave the roadway on I-405 and roll down an embankment, where it burst into flame. By the time the fire department reached the Bronco, it was too late to rescue the occupant, who died at the scene. The driver was William Atherton Armitage, 42, of Puyallup. Police said the vehicle had a number of empty alcohol bottles inside. It was not immediately known whether Armitage had been drinking.
A spokesperson from Canyon View Systems, Armitage’s employer until last week, said Armitage had been distraught over the death of a coworker and had recently lost his position at the company amid a flurry of charges and countercharges involving the theft of $300,000 from the firm.
“There’s more. She’s got files on five former employees who are all either dead or in nursing homes. All . . . yeah . . . two are dead and three are in nursing homes. It doesn’t say what’s wrong with them, but I have their ages. Twenty-seven, thirty-three, and thirty-five.”
“Not your normal nursing home clientele.”
“Neither was my sister. Neither are you.”
“A nursing home