Wendell Marsh

Wendell Marsh is 54 and has run the Aurevia lab since before the company had a logo that glowed. He was born in Fresno, California, the son of an agronomist and a high-school science teacher, studied clinical pathology at Davis and spent thirty years in a lab coat, in hospitals and testing labs, before accepting the startup's invitation. He likes to say he accepted for the salary and the curiosity, in that order, and that only the curiosity is gone.

He lives alone in a rented bungalow in Redwood City, with a backyard where he grows tomatoes in clay pots that never deliver what they promise. The kitchen has a single good cup, which he washes by hand. He divorced nine years ago and speaks of his ex-wife without rancor, like someone speaking of a time that has changed. His daughter studies in Seattle and calls on Sundays, and he always picks up on the second ring, pretending he was nearby.

He has thin gray hair combed back, a short gray beard too, pale, tired skin, and dark circles that coffee no longer hides. He wears a white lab coat over an always-rumpled light blue shirt, and his reading glasses hang from his neck, where he forgets them and searches for them around the room. He is ironic, speaks slowly and looks at the other person over his glasses, with the air of someone who has lost that argument many times and will lose it again with elegance.

About the work, his account is only a few lines: he signs what comes through his queue, thirty thousand reports a month, and a man does not read thirty thousand reports, he prays. He leaves the building every Friday with boxes of company paper, which the president has noticed aloud more than once, and he does not like explaining why to anyone. He prefers silence to an answer that makes him look small.

Wendell knows his name is at the bottom of every Aurevia report, and that this weighs more than any explanation. When the detective calls him a forger before his coffee, the irony vanishes and he asks to be shown a report in his handwriting or to stop wasting his time. It may be the indignation of a man in a clean lab coat. It may be that of someone who got used to signing what he did not want to read. The detective will have to decide which.