Crash – Part Four is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons or their likeness is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2015 Miranda Dawson
All Rights Reserved.
Cover design by Cover Shot Creations (covershotcreations.com)
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Table of Contents
Table of Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Author’s Note
Mailing List
About the Author
Chapter One
“I can explain, I promise,” Carter pleaded as he stood just a few feet in front of me.
I glanced down at Marissa, who was sat looking relaxed on the sofa. Even to my jealous eyes, it didn’t look like there was anything going on between the two of them, and Marissa certainly didn’t look concerned about being caught in the act. That either meant she had covered her tracks well and we wouldn’t stand a chance in any lawsuit against her, or there was some other explanation to all this. I desperately wanted to believe it was the latter—both for the sake of my business and my relationship with Carter—but wanting something rarely made it so.
“Sit down, Carter,” I said, finding a source of strength inside me I hadn’t known existed.
He paused at first and didn’t move, but I stared at him until he retreated to take a seat on an armchair. He didn’t sit next to Marissa. That has to be a good sign, right?
“John is downstairs in the lobby,” I continued. “You must have walked right past him. Whatever your supposed explanation is for all this, it is as much John’s business as it is mine, so I’m going to get him. I’ll be right back.”
I forced myself to walk slowly and deliberately to the elevator. I stepped inside and waited for the doors to close before I let the situation overcome me. My legs felt weak, like all the blood had been drained from my muscles. Even the artificial part of me felt drained and I only remained standing by leaning on the handrail. The elevator doors would open in a few seconds, and by that point I had to be composed and ready to talk to John.
This was a business issue that affected both of us. It wasn’t the time nor the place to deal with my love life. From a business perspective, nothing much had changed. We knew the investor was screwing us over and that was still the case, even with the knowledge that the investor was Carter. It was a fine distinction, but I tried to keep focused on it.
“John,” I said as I approached him. He had taken a seat on one of the sofas and was flicking through a trashy magazine to keep himself up-to-date with celebrity gossip.
“Oh, hey,” he replied, standing up and chucking the magazine back on the table. “Are you ready to… Where’s your jacket?”
“You need to come back upstairs with me.”
“Uh, okay. Why?”
I took a deep breath and blurted out the words. “Because Carter is the investor. Our investor. He’s up there now with Marissa. Come on. Apparently, they have an explanation, and I don’t know about you, but I’m dying to hear it.”
Carter at least had the decency to make some coffee while I was gone. Stimulants might not have been a good idea just then, but I picked up the cup anyway so I would have something to hold in my hands while we talked.
“Emily said that you are the investor?” John asked. Carter nodded. “And you’re Marissa? If that is your real name.”
“I am, but it’s not,” ‘Marissa’ said. “My real name’s Kerry, for what it’s worth. Kerry Woodson. I signed the investment documents with my real name so you might recognize it.”
“I have a few choice names for you, as well,” John said.
I’d never known John to be one to keep his emotions hidden—especially anger—but he was doing a decent job of that now. Did that mean he was feeling something else? Fear? Anxiety? I knew I had all those emotions going on, and they were playing havoc with my stomach.
“I’m going to save you the trouble of coming up with any more lies,” I said, my eyes fixed on Carter. “Not only do we know you are the investor, but we also know you and her,” I shoved a thumb in the direction of Kerry, “were passing our information along to PharmaTech.”
“That’s correct,” Carter said. “But—”
I held up a hand to stop him mid-sentence. “There’ll be time for your excuses later. First, I want to know how far back this goes, because there’s one thing that has me confused.”
“Just the one?” John whispered to me. Now I knew why he was so quiet—he was as confused as I was.
“You never had to have any contact with me,” I continued. “You could have invested in our company and taken the information without having a relationship with me. I never gave you any secrets about the business, and you never persuaded me to give them to Marissa. I mean Kerry. Why manipulate me romantically, too?”
I had a double motive for asking that question. I obviously wanted the answer, but it was also my way of letting John know that I hadn’t been spilling secrets during pillow talk. A million and one things must have been going through his mind, and I couldn’t blame him if he held me partly responsible. This way, I could let him know that we were both in it together and always would be.
“It wasn’t like that,” Carter said. “Not at all. When I went to that conference I knew you were going to be there, and I knew you were going to be presenting about your company. I went there to see you and find out how you had been doing since the accident.”
“And when you saw me, you thought, ‘there’s a girl I can screw over—literally?’ ”
“No,” Carter said, shaking his head. “I just went to see you. I swear.”
“It’s my fault,” Kerry said, suddenly butting into the conversation. “Carter invited me to the conference, as well. When I saw your presentation, I knew immediately that LimbAnalytics was the perfect company to invest in on behalf of PharmaTech.”
Something about Kerry’s version of events wasn’t ringing true, but I couldn’t put a finger on it. “You gave him your business card,” I said, thinking back to when I first saw Carter from the stage. He had been talking to a woman and she handed him a business card. “Why would you do that if you already knew him?” That wasn’t all that was bugging me, but maybe the answer to that question would lead me down the right path.
“That was a new one,” Kerry replied. “Carter didn’t believe I worked for PharmaTech until I showed him the card.”
She wasn’t lying. I wasn’t sure how I knew she was telling the truth, but I was confident. Strangely, when she lied, she had more conviction in her voice. Now she just sounded a little fatigued, as if being found out had taken all the fun away and she was just going through the motions.
“Why?” John asked.
“Why what?” Kerry answered.
“Why did Carter invite you to the conference? He said he was there to see Emily,
and that kind of makes sense, but what about you? Why were you there?”
That was it. That was the thing that had been bugging me about Kerry’s explanation. I could understand why Carter would want to see me; he would have felt guilty about the crash and had probably spent five years in prison thinking about it. But why would he invite Kerry to see me too?
She let out a long, deep sigh. “Carter invited me because he knew I wanted to meet you, as well.”
“But why?” I said through gritted teeth.
“Because Bella is my sister.”
Chapter Two
I stared into the overly milky coffee that Carter had made, unable to look up and meet Kerry’s gaze. “I think I’m going to need something a little stronger.”
“Me too,” John said, putting his coffee down on the table. “Where do you keep the good stuff?”
“There’s whiskey over there on the bookcase,” Carter said. “Although even that may not be strong enough for this conversation.”
“Sounds like I’ll be pouring four glasses, then,” John said.
I grabbed some glasses from the kitchen while John brought over the decanter. I didn’t consider myself an expert on whiskey, but even I could tell this was a good one just by looking at the smooth texture fill the glass. John and I took the drinks over to Kerry and Carter and sat back down. Judging by the tense look on Carter’s face, I felt like the biggest revelations were still to come.
“So, you’re the sister?” I asked. Carter had mentioned Bella’s sister a few times in passing, but John probably hadn’t heard of her. “You were the one who encouraged Carter to marry Bella?”
“Yes,” she replied. “At the time, I honestly believed that would make a difference. I was desperate. I would have done anything it took to save my sister, but I regret what I made Carter do. I shouldn’t have asked that of him.”
“Maybe I’m just being a little slow,” John said, “but let me just see if I understand this: even though you two were not the ones responsible for the accident, you both felt some guilt for how things worked out. Once Carter was released from prison, you both decided to go and see Emily to see how she was getting on?”
“That’s about the gist of it,” Carter said.
“So, where the hell does PharmaTech come in to all of this?” John asked. “And more specifically, why did you bring our company into your weird machinations?”
Kerry and Carter shared a look as if debating just how much they should say.
“I hope you’re not considering withholding anything from us right now,” I said. “You owe us both the truth after what you did to our business. And you,” I looked at Carter. “You owe me for other reasons.”
“We decided—” Carter began.
“Let me explain,” Kerry said. “It was my idea. The whole thing. I want you to know that, despite how this may look, I hate PharmaTech. More than you. Trust me, no one hates that company as much as I do.”
Now it was mine and John’s turn to share a confused look. “Then why did you give them our secrets? Why go work for them?”
“To take them down.” Kerry went silent as if that would be a sufficient explanation for the whole thing. When John and I simply stared back at her, she finally continued. “They killed her. PharmaTech killed my sister. Yes, she made mistakes, but they are responsible for her death.”
“This next bit may be a little awkward for you to hear,” Carter said.
He was only looking at me, not John, so I knew it must be about his relationship with Bella.
“Bella was on birth control at the time of the accident,” Kerry said. “I won’t go into all the details, but suffice it to say that she had tried a number of different pills, but they all had side effects. Finally, her doctor prescribed a new one produced by PharmaTech.”
At some point, perhaps later today, perhaps next week, the thought of Carter and Bella sleeping together would enter my mind and torture me. I knew they had, of course, but I could have done without such a direct confirmation. For now, my mind was allowing me to focus on what was really important.
“Oh, God. You’re not one of those extremist nut jobs, are you?” John asked. “You can’t hate every company that produces birth control pills?”
Kerry sighed, frustrated. “No, I’m not. It wasn’t that she was on birth control. The problem was that the pill was faulty. It messed her up pretty bad.”
Oh, God. Bella was pregnant. Carter had a child.
“Not in that way,” Carter quickly said, reading my mind.
“We later found out that the pill had not gone through all the required testing. PharmaTech had bribed and leaned on a few people at the FDA to get approval. Once they had that, they shoved the drug out to market.”
“I’m sure I’m going to sound like a jerk now,” John said, “but this doesn’t explain why you would give them our information. If you hate them, why help them?”
“We didn’t help them.”
“You gave them information on our patent,” I said. “And you messed up a big contract for us. That was plenty of help, by my standards.”
“Not really,” Kerry said with a shrug. “I altered the patent design enough so that PharmaTech thinks it has something useful, but it doesn’t. I admit we blew the contract with the military for you, but trust me, that is going to work in your favor when the time comes.”
I looked at John but he just shrugged, none the wiser than I was. Kerry was speaking more cryptically than I liked, so I turned to Carter for better answers. “I assume you were doing it out of some sense of loyalty to Bella, but what was the point of the whole scheme?”
Carter sat forward in his seat and interlaced his fingers. “Yes. I formed the company to be the official investor. Kerry needed to be separate so that there was no doubt she did what she did on behalf of PharmaTech. We’re going to take them down, Emily. But we’ll need your help.”
“Everything I did, legally speaking, I did on behalf of PharmaTech, and that means they are responsible. They stole your patent, interfered with a military contract, and generally screwed you over in other ways you don’t even know about yet.”
“So, your big plan is for us to sue them and get damages? How is that going to punish them? They can afford it. And by the time we’ve paid the legal fees, that will hardly benefit us.”
“Damages aren’t the main goal,” Carter said. “We just needed a strong case that can get us into federal court—that’s why we made sure there were lots of different issues at play. Patent law, contract law, interference with a military contract. We could take this case into any court in the country because of that.”
“But we don’t want to end up in court, anyway,” Kerry said. “Once the case gets started, we can start asking all sorts of questions about their business affairs. With a bit of luck, we can get information about their bribery in the drug trials and then leak that to the public.”
“The only way you can hurt people like this is through their wallets,” Carter said. “This will make their stock price crash and burn like you wouldn’t believe.”
“In other words,” John said, “Emily and I are just the unlucky ones stuck in the middle of your little vendetta?”
Carter nodded. “Sorry.”
“Well,” John said, standing up. “This has been fun and all, but I don’t want anything to do with this. What about you, Emily?”
“I agree with John,” I said. “I’m still trying to process all this, but what I can comprehend is that you have used our business to suit your own ends.” I kept the topic of conversation on business while John was present, but I knew this would affect my relationship with Carter too. It had to. This wasn’t a typical romantic betrayal with another woman, but it was still a lie, and our fledgling relationship had seen its fair share of them already.
“We still need you,” Kerry said. “Your company has to be the one to sue them.”
“Why the hell should we do that?” I asked. “This isn’t our fight.”
“She’s right, Kerry,” Carter said, taking a long sip of his drink. “We have to leave it now and let them move on with their business.”
Kerry threw a look at Carter that even made me lean back in my seat. “Carter, we have to—”
“Drop it Kerry.”
“Uh, hell no,” John said. “Whatever it is, you are going to tell us, or we will be suing someone and it won’t be PharmaTech.”
“You want to do this as much as we do,” Kerry said. “Well, Emily—you do, at least.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“The problem with the birth control pill is that it could mess up the body’s nervous system,” Kerry explained. “You can probably understand it better than me, but basically, certain triggers could react with the drug and you would lose all control of your body.”
“What type of triggers?” I asked.
“Certain alcoholic drinks. Not mainstream drinks, for the most part—that’s how PharmaTech managed to keep this secret. They didn’t tell doctors about this, so Bella had no idea that drinking would cause so many problems.”
“What does this have to do with me?” I asked, trying to remain calm. I was ready to storm out, and Kerry’s sob story was dragging on far too long.
“That’s what caused the accident, Emily,” she said. “The drugs produced by PharmaTech wreaked havoc on Bella’s nerves that night and sent her off the road. She shouldn’t have been drinking of course—and the drug doesn’t excuse her behavior after the accident—but that doesn’t change the fact that it was a reaction to the drug that caused the crash. You need to help us get back at PharmaTech because that company is responsible for your brother’s death.”
Chapter Three
“Do you have any idea what you want to do?” John asked the next morning.
After the conversation with Carter and Kerry, I had insisted we both go our separate ways to give us some time to think. I knew I needed time alone, and John probably needed it even more. This was his company too, and the problem with PharmaTech was much more my issue than his. I reminded him that we didn’t have to make every decision together—we weren’t a married couple—and that he needed time to dwell on it as much as I did.
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