The Last Trial

by Scott Turow

  “I heard that from Rex. Frankly, that’s why I decided to sit down with you. Apparently, the prosecutors wanted to trot out all the humiliating details.”

  That is not completely accurate. Moses is a grown-up and accepts the persistence of what he sees as sin, but sex generally makes him squirm. Although the prosecutors opposed the Sterns’ motion, Moses ultimately seemed more interested in getting assurances that Sandy would not paint Innis on cross-examination as the rage-filled reject. With Donatella sitting in the front row in court each day, Kiril’s extramarital activities are likely to damage him badly in the eyes of the jury, and Sandy was happy to agree.

  “If I knew what I know now,” says Innis, “I’m not sure I would have sat down with the prosecutors in the first place. I never imagined they’d try to send Kiril to prison for the rest of his life as a murderer. That strikes me as outrageous.”

  “I agree, of course, but I would like to hear your view.”

  “Sandy, there is not a medication without harmful side effects. People die of Tylenol overdoses. g-Livia is an extraordinary medicine. You are living proof. And the FDA is under intense pressure to agree that it can be marketed again, at least for some uses. They’ve dithered apparently because there was no consensus at first about what was causing these isolated deaths. But there is a broad view now that it is an allergic response, which is a problem that can be dealt with in a clinical setting. The FDA should have concurred by now about administering g-Livia in the most serious cases.”

  “Oh, I assume Moses and the Justice Department may have some role in that. It is much harder to make a fraud case if Kiril lied to win approval of a product that’s back on the market. It suggests that the supposed fraud was immaterial.”

  “That’s nice,” says Innis sarcastically. “Patients die so the government can get Kiril?”

  “I am sure they have their excuses. But there is a reason, Dr. McVie, that criminal litigation is described as a blood sport.”

  “Apparently. From what I’ve read, the whole case against Kiril is grossly exaggerated.”

  “How so?”

  “Frankly, these doctors who testified that they didn’t recognize their patients were in allergic shock? They were idiots. You’d treat for that, even if you weren’t sure.”

  “Would you say that on the stand?”

  “Of course not,” says Innis. She smiles a bit. “Look, Rex has told me from the start to stay in the middle. I’ve answered the prosecutors’ questions, simply and directly, and let the chips fall where they may. But I haven’t gone out of my way to stick it to Kiril, and I won’t.”

  Stern watches her in silence for a second, assessing.

  “Do I mark myself as an ungrateful guest if I challenge you a bit?”

  “Of course not.”

  “I would say, Dr. McVie—”

  “Innis.”

  “Innis, then. I find it hard to reconcile you saying that you mean Kiril no special harm with recording your phone conversation when he called you after speaking with Ms. Hartung.” Hartung is the Wall Street Journal reporter who contacted Kiril in August 2018.

  It is that recording that makes Innis such a valuable witness to the government, because it virtually convicts Kiril on the insider trading counts. She will also offer testimony pertaining to the fraud charges, but only a paler version of what Lep is going to say anyway. Having spent decades now listening to these taped conversations, it always amazes Stern how frequently people talk past and over each other. Conversation, it turns out, often might as well be occurring between people in two foxholes in the midst of battle.

  “Yes, but that was all about Kiril harming me.”

  “How so?”

  “Take a look at Kiril’s cell phone records.”

  Stern has done that and is puzzled. “As far as I recall, he hadn’t spoken to you in quite some time.”

  “Yes, but why? Look back eighteen months to when I left. He would not leave me alone. Every time he had two drinks, he was on the phone beseeching me to come back to the company, to come back to him. He kept saying, ‘I don’t understand why anything needs to be different.’ It was insulting, Sandy. And to be honest, very painful.” Kiril’s gall apparently was unbounded, especially when he was drunk. His hope seemed to be to get Innis to accept demotion from The Other Woman to Another Woman, with Olga now getting second billing behind Donatella. “Finally, I told him that if he kept calling, I would get a protective order.”

  “A protective order is a far cry from an audio recording.”

  “No.” She shakes her head. “I didn’t want him claiming that these calls were just business. And I thought telling him that I was using a recorder was the simplest way to get him off the phone immediately. I know you’ve listened to it. I told him at the start that we were being taped.”

  That was true. At the outset, she said, ‘Kiril, I am recording this. I have asked you to stop calling.’

  ‘Then turn it off,’ he answered. ‘I have something I must discuss with you.’ Kiril claims he heard a distinct sound, the chirp of a button pushed, and assumed the recording had ceased. And the beep is there. But Innis says Kiril mistook the sound of her putting the phone on speaker, since Kiril had caught her with wet hands at the sink. Kiril’s misimpression has no legal significance anyway.

  On the recording, Kiril said next he had just learned there are reports that persons treated with g-Livia were experiencing a sudden death syndrome, perhaps an allergic response, after a year on the medication. There followed a beat or two of silence, whose meaning was going to be the subject of fierce dispute at trial. Kiril did not say, ‘How is that possible?’ or ‘Do you know anything about that?’ or ‘I’m shocked to learn this,’ none of a dozen statements a defense lawyer would have scripted for him. But even a skeptic like Marta acknowledges that Kiril seemed surprised and befuddled as he related that information.

  On the recording, Innis responded, ‘I’m sorry to hear that. But why are you calling me?’

  Kiril stammered once or twice. ‘Well, what should I do?’ he finally asked her.

  ‘Sell your stock?’ There was a hiccup of laughter after Innis said this, while Kiril answered with the words destined to fry him, ‘Well, I can’t do that, can I?’

  ‘I don’t know, Kiril. Call a lawyer. None of this concerns me.’ She hung up.

  Stern asks Innis now, beside her pool, “Would you agree that he sounded surprised when he told you about what the Journal was going to print?”

  Dr. McVie sways her head to and fro to ponder.

  “He certainly sounded to me like he was in a state of shock. You can hear what’s there.”

  “But did he sound surprised by what Hartung, the reporter, was saying about the medication?”

  “I was surprised,” says Innis. “But my principal reaction, Sandy, was that this had nothing to do with me any longer.” She hunches forward on her chair again. Her agitated movements have caused her beach wrap to creep up her thighs, revealing her trim legs, unmarked by age. She passes a hand at the skirt but makes no serious effort to readjust it. “Look, you don’t need me to reinterpret what’s on that recording. You can listen to it for yourself.” This again is probably Rex’s advice: Don’t offer conjecture that will undermine the prosecutors and aggravate them. “I’m simply telling you that I didn’t make that recording to get even with Kiril.”

  “Although you were entitled?”

  “Hell yes, I was entitled. For thirty-some years, I spent more time with Kiril than anyone alive. I slept with him, I worked beside him, I listened to him and corrected him when I could. I provided him with ideas and let him take the credit for them. I did all the stupid things that women of my era did for the men they loved. Or thought they loved. Or who they thought loved them.” With the last remark, she studies the round wicker table between them and falls briefly into some kind of reverie from which she is slow to extract herself. “Where was I?” she asks finally.

  “‘Love,’ I believe,” sa
ys Stern simply.

  That earns a bitter smile.

  “Right,” she says. “Love. But really, what’s the point of those words? I was attached to Kiril. Was he the man in my life? Yes. But don’t mislead yourself. It was a very complicated relationship. For years, he hired young women in the lab whose looks were their first qualification. He slept with quite a few of them, I’m sure. And I contained my reaction because there were other men in my life, too. How could I do otherwise when he was going home each night to Donatella? Some of those men truly interested me, or excited me. Others I went with largely out of spite.” She puts her glass down and waggles her head, like a boxer shaking off a punch. “Let’s talk about something else, Sandy. What more can I tell you?”

  Stern moves on to his questions that concern the heart of the government’s case, Kiril’s alleged fraud near the end of the eighteen-month clinical trial that was supposed to pave the way for accelerated approval of g-Livia. PT, like most pharmaceutical manufacturers, had hired an outside concern, Global International, to conduct its testing. During the final months of the trial, a statistician at Global, Dr. Wendy Hoh, noticed there had recently been a spike in sudden fatalities and alerted the associate medical director at PT, who quickly brought the matter to Dr. Lep Pafko.

  As Lep told the story, he immediately informed his father. Lep and Kiril agreed that when Lep returned on Monday from a weekend conference in Seattle, these reports would be submitted to a panel of outside experts who served as safety monitors for the trial, and who could properly unmask the data to see if the deaths related to g-Livia. Instead, on Monday, Kiril told Lep he had used a set of codes PT had for emergencies and ‘unblinded’ the dataset himself, a clear violation of the rules set up when the trial began. But after calling Wendy Hoh, Kiril said they had determined that the supposed sudden deaths were merely a computer glitch, misrepresenting patients who had in fact withdrawn from the study. Dr. Hoh had corrected the database accordingly.

  Innis’s testimony was more innocuous than Lep’s, but she still corroborated Lep on important details. She told Stern that at one point, in September of 2016, Kiril mentioned to her that he was concerned about the dataset from the clinical trial of g-Livia. A few weeks later, when she asked him about it again, Kiril told her the problem had been solved. She never thought about those exchanges again, she says, until the prosecutors began questioning her.

  “Did he tell you that he had found that there had been a computer error?” Stern asks.

  “It was a few words, Sandy. Frankly, we were barely speaking at that point.” Because of Olga, undoubtedly. “It was a conversation in passing, and I asked, as I remember, only because we’d been left alone for a second and I was looking for something to talk about. It was like asking about the weather.”

  “But nothing he said was inconsistent with having found out that the whole problem was simply a coding error?”

  “I suppose. But I don’t know what he was referring to when he said the problem was solved.”

  “Well, Innis, let me ask this. In the years you worked beside Kiril, did you ever see him falsify data?”

  “No, I can’t say that. But you know, by the time I met Kiril, he was already a very big deal—and he enjoyed that role. A cast of thousands worked for him in the lab. He presided over meetings. But the real scientific work, the observing and recording, was generally being done by others.”

  “But you regard him as a great scientist, do you not?”

  “I regard Kiril as a great something,” she says. “As a scientist, he had vision. And God knows, he’s an operator. As a grant-getter, he’s without rival. But a great scientist? I’m not sure what that means. The man or woman who can theorize like Kiril is unusual, but nowhere near as unusual as a scientist who can both theorize and imagine how to prove his theory. That person knows how to think both big and small. Kiril is exceptional at the first part, but not the second. The proof, experimental design, tends to bore him. The best scientist I worked with in all those years was Lep.”

  “Lep?”

  “Lep is a great scientist. Not that Kiril will ever let him have the credit he deserves. g-Livia is really much more his work than Kiril’s.”

  In Stern’s limited understanding, Lep had short-circuited the usual process of drug development, which is more or less a well-informed version of trial and error. Instead, he used high-level computer modeling to identify the molecule that became g-Livia.

  “What Lep did,” says Innis, “is going to change pharmaceutical research forever.”

  “I’ve heard more than one person say that, Innis, but Lep refuses to accept the credit.”

  “One could say that Lep is a loyal son. Or that he’s learned his place. He’s always been very careful not to get between the sun and Kiril.”

  “You like Lep?”

  “Always. Very much. He’s very quiet. Wry. Not that the liking was mutual for years. We were proper with each other, but he loves his mother, and I knew that he resented me, which I understood. Over time he got used to me. The irony, of course, is that once Olga came on the scene we became friendlier.”

  “You speak now?”

  “Very rarely. Not in months. But we had a few heart-to-hearts right before I left the company. We came to terms, I would say. You know the saying: ‘My enemy’s enemy.’” She lifts a hand to signify the rest.

  “And Kiril was your common enemy with Lep?”

  “Our shared challenge.”

  She turns to look behind her, where the sun is already getting low.

  “May we suspend our conversation for the sunset? It’s a local form of worship. Really quite spectacular. You shouldn’t miss it. Can you climb stairs?”

  “Slowly.”

  There is a balcony here, offering an unobstructed view down to the shore one hundred yards away, where there is not a soul. The sand itself is extraordinary, soft, and the color of heavy cream.

  “How private,” says Stern.

  She explains that it’s high tide, which limits public access. As they look toward the sea, relatively flat today, the housekeeper brings Innis a glass of white wine. Stern asks for more lemonade. For him, this kind of natural glory occasionally produces a few wisps of sadness. The sun has risen and set for eons and soon would be doing so without him to appreciate it. Still, he savors the simple beauty of it, watching the great ball growing rosier and more brilliant as it declines through a few streaks of clouds, soon coloring to that hot fuchsia shade seen nowhere else in life. As Innis promised, the sight is remarkable—there is something pure about the sky. At the end, just as the sun is about to disappear, Stern suddenly sees a strobing flash of green, impossibly brief. He thinks it might be like seeing spots after staring too long into the sun, but Innis cries out, “Did you see it?”

  “The green flash?”

  “Yes, yes. Amazing.” They both gaze silently for a second at the place where the sun had been. “I don’t know what the science is—why that part of the spectrum seems to pop that way; I’m guessing it has to do with how the refracted light reflects off the water—but it’s very special, isn’t it? You’re lucky, Sandy. I’ve owned this place two years and only seen the flash a couple of other times.” They turn back to the house. “Are you one of those fellows who walks with luck?”

  He did not count his early years or Clara’s death as fortunate events. But overall, he’d been quite lucky.

  “I would say being alive right now—getting early treatment with g-Livia—that’s a piece of luck. I have had more than my share of good fortune. You?”

  “I suppose. I’m still trying to figure out if meeting Kiril was a blessing to me or my doom. Here I am, living in splendor. So, just like you, Kiril brought me good things. But on the other hand—” She pauses, just as they reenter the house through an oversize screen door. “I never totally minded being the Other Woman. I still had my independence, fewer responsibilities, but it never dawned on me that, after I had settled for far less than what most people want,
he’d take even that away.” She looks from Stern quickly, caught up in more visible emotion than she has permitted herself up to now.

  Stern decides it is a good time to bring their conversation to an end. He’s gotten enough, and he is looking forward to a late dinner with his sister. Eager to find another subject, as they move inside, he says, “I never asked about your tennis match. Did you triumph?”

  “Close but no cigar,” she says. “I ran into a great 6. Next month, I move up a division and I’ll be collecting trophies for years.” She smiles, but with evident competitive mettle. On the court, Stern can see, you would not be wise to look for mercy from Innis.

  He tells Innis he will go, and together they move toward her front door.

  “May I call you again, if I think of other things?” he asks.

  “Yes, of course.”

  He studies her then and the biggest question emerges unexpectedly, asked as much for his sake as his client’s.

  “I suppose I have one more. But it is no small matter. You knew this man on the closest terms for decades. Do you believe he did this?”

  “He denies all, I assume.”

  Stern never discloses his conversations with his clients. Confidentiality is their inviolable right. When the subject is the insider trading charges, Kiril never quite answers, claiming his mind was a muddle after the reporter called. But as to what had allegedly taken place three years earlier, in late September 2016—unblinding the dataset, calling Wendy Hoh to change the numbers—he continues to deny it all, notwithstanding phone records and computer forensics that corroborate what the government claims, not to mention the screenshot he sent Olga of the dataset before it had been changed.

  “Proceed on that assumption,” Stern says.

  “And are you going to ask me the same question on the witness stand?”

  “Would you rather I not?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then I promise I shall not.” This, he knows, is not much of a concession. Sonny would never allow the inquiry, not in that raw form.