I put my hand on the kid’s head. “She’s right, it is cooler inside. You stay here, okay, kiddo?” I took a few steps, then turned back. “You going to be all right? You want your book?”
“I’m all right,” he said.
Maybe some dormant paternal gene awakened then, because I kept stealing looks back at Tim as I followed Alex across the marble, through the glass doors.
“You’re babysitting?” she asked once we were outside. She wasn’t wearing a lab coat, just normal, meeting-type garb: thin, tight summer-wool pants, a blue button-down shirt open to just above the cleavage. Very put-together.
“You could say that.”
“Not only do you yank me out of my meetings, but you bring a child—”
“I didn’t have a choice. You can’t leave a kid in the car in this kind of heat. Anyway, he’s well behaved.”
Her face froze for a moment, a moment in which it seemed she was trying to read me. Then she broke the stare. “Okay, Nate. Why don’t you tell me what’s going on?”
“Why don’t you tell me, Alex?”
She cocked her head sideways, eyes slanted toward me, giving the sense she felt she was conversing with a nut. “I…I really don’t know what you’re talking about. You said this had to do with Paul. And Tetra.”
“The disease in the photos I showed you is dermatofibrosarcoma protuberans. You heard of it?”
“No. I’m not an MD—”
“It’s a cancer of fibroblasts.”
I searched her eyes for any flicker, but saw nothing. I continued, “One of the women in the photos I showed you is dead. Last name Ming. She was shot in the face along with her husband. Her tongue cut out.”
“I read about that—”
“Another man we found died in a hit-and-run.”
“You’re saying Paul knew about these people?”
“Yes. He had photos of both of them. And he had photos of eight others who are not coming forward because they’re terrified of ending up like Paul and the Mings. These people are in pain, Alex. The condition might be treatable if it’s dealt with early.”
“What do you expect me to do about it? Paul and I were just friends—”
“I found the substance that’s doing this, an injectable with a street name of Beautiful Essence. It was being used in an illegal clinic in the Richmond. Best I can figure, they’re taking Beautiful Essence, mixing it with fibroblast stem cells, and injecting the combination.” I tried again to read her face. Again, nothing. “The clinic was blown up today—”
“Oh, my God,” she murmured.
“You heard about this?”
“It’s all over the news.” Her face was ashen. “I thought it was a terrorist attack.”
“Why would terrorists blow up a nail salon?”
“The news said…You’re saying that Paul was involved with this?”
“Yes, Paul was up to his chin with this. He knew about it and I think he wanted to stop it, which is why he had those pictures. He was going to expose the whole thing, Alex.” I paused, deciding to withhold, for the moment, any mention of Murph’s financial windfalls.
“But that has nothing to do with me,” she said.
“Tetra’s involved. That’s how Paul got involved.”
A flagstone path led to a bench atop a small mulch-covered knoll. Alex walked up the path. “What are you talking about?” she asked.
“Regenetine.”
“Regenetine has nothing to do with this.”
“It’s recombinant fibroblast growth factor-1, right?”
“Yes…How did you know that? That’s confidential.”
“It’s all over the literature. Tom Bukowski and Peter Yee initially published on it at the University of Illinois. Jonathan Bly published on it here. You’re taking fibroblast stem cells and amping them with FGF. That’s the process, isn’t it? You make the fibroblast cells grow by adding the growth factor.”
She sat on the bench. I sat next to her, facing away from Tetra, toward a complex of squat buildings shimmering like polished steel between us and the Bay. Emblazoned in colors on the upper corners of the structures were the names of the inhabitant companies: Hieroglyph, Tenzer, BCI Communications. The buildings surrounded a three-sided courtyard, with gaps where the points of a triangle would be. Inside, I could see a fountain and well-watered ornamental vegetation. No animal life, though. No human trailing a hand through the rippling pool, no seagull hacking apart a french fry.
“What happened between Bukowski and Yee?” I asked Alex.
“They were killed in a boating accident about two years—”
“I know that. I want to know what happened between them. Why was Peter Yee never part of Tetra? If Regenetine was such a blockbuster, why would the guy who headed up the original research not want to take part in the bonanza?”
“I don’t know.”
“Come on, Alex. There had to be rumors.”
“There were rumors, sure. There’d been some kind of falling-out between Bukowski and Yee. Yee was a postdoc in Bukowski’s lab at UIC. Something happened. The boat trip was them trying to patch things up. That’s what the rumors say, anyway.”
“Why the falling-out?”
“I don’t know. I got here after they died.” She looked at me. “You really can’t believe Regenetine has something to do with these sick people.”
I took out the bill Tim had found. “This was in the clinic that was blown up, the one where Beautiful Essence was injected. It’s for a shipment of fibroblast stem cells. We also have samples of what we think is fibroblast growth factor. We’re analyzing them now.”
I handed her the paper, scrutinized her face for any reaction. There was none.
“Do I have to spell it out?” I asked. “Stem cells and FGF at the clinic? Stem cells and FGF at Tetra? Come on, Alex—”
“Regenetine is for wound healing. It’s not cosmetics.” She said it firmly.
“Spare me. You guys aren’t going to make billions from wound healing. You’re going to make it from cosmetics.”
“That’s true,” she answered evenly. “Wound healing would be first, and then we’d exploit the cosmetics treatments. The CEO wanted to extend the patent by first getting approval for wound healing. Tetra was going to push off-label use for cosmetics—get some traction there—and then apply for a patent on the cosmetic use.”
“How much work has been done on the cosmetic angle?”
“We’re setting up Phase 2 trials now.”
“Phase 2?” In the long road to FDA drug approval—sometimes upwards of ten years—Phase 2 was when efficacy was evaluated. Phase 1 was safety. Both involved tests on humans. “All the safety data is in?”
“Yes. It’s all been cleared. It’s very safe.”
“Has it always been very safe?”
“I don’t know. It’s not my project.”
“And no security breaches at the company? No possibility of an early batch of Regenetine sneaking off?”
“Of course not. Security is extremely tight.”
We sat in silence as sweat slid from my hairline down my cheeks. Only the faintest hint of perspiration glossed Alex’s forehead. I was a Pennsylvania boy, after all, and she from sweltering central California.
“This is too much, Nate. You come to me, tell me the company I work for is embroiled in this fibrosarcoma thing and with Paul’s murder? That’s impossible.”
I took back the bill of lading. “Look, the folks who ran that clinic were using the same process you’re developing here. If Beautiful Essence resembles anything like Regenetine—if it’s FGF—Tetra’s on the hook.”
“And you call that evidence? I mean, you’re not a cop or anything. This will just be your word against…I mean, aren’t there laws about evidence?”
“I don’t know about the laws of evidence. All I have is a piece of paper and the samples we’re analyzing. But you’re right, any good lawyer would tear this to shreds. I don’t even know if the police would be intereste
d.”
“So why are you doing this?”
I did not answer her. Instead, I gazed across the searing landscape to the sun-burnt hills separating us from San Francisco, looked over my shoulder to the futuristic structures encroaching on the old machine shops and light manufacturing. Apart from the signs that injected the occasional red or blue, the colors were muted and dead, as if life had been drained from here. As if both the past and the future of South San Francisco was not humanity’s, but machines’.
I wiped my arm across my forehead, and it came away wet. “Alex, I need your help here. I need to see the Phase 1 report. I need to talk to the man who did the research on Regenetine. I need to see Jonathan Bly.”
“Nate, I can’t do that.”
“Then, I may just need to go to the police.”
Without looking at me, she inhaled deeply, held the breath for a moment. Then she exhaled. “Do you always go for the scorched-earth tactics, Nate?”
102
FIFTEEN MINUTES LATER, ALEX WAS telling her administrative assistant to watch over Tim. The assistant—a tall, muscled white guy named Ty—was good-humored about it, actually more than good-humored. Perhaps it afforded him a little break from the drudgery of returning phone calls, sending faxes and e-mails, and otherwise being the paper and electron shuffler for his bosses.
Tim gripped The Hobbit, which we’d retrieved from the car, in both hands.
“You want some juice?” Ty asked the kid.
Tim looked at me.
“That’s a great idea,” I said, surprised he’d sought my okay. “Ty’s going to take good care of you. I’ll be back in a few minutes.”
“C’mon, Tim,” Ty coaxed. “We got a bunch of different kinds of juice. Grape, cranberry, orange. You look like a grape man to me.”
I decided Ty either had rug rats of his own or was the oldest in a family of fifteen.
“Sure,” Tim said.
As we broke from Ty and Tim, who were beelining toward the canteen, Alex said, “I can’t believe I’m doing this.”
“You’re doing the right thing.”
“I’m doing the right thing. But maybe for the wrong reasons.”
“The wrong reasons?”
“For that son-of-a-bitch Paul Murphy.” Her tone was too sharp—it was a little tell—and I decided to go fishing.
“Your son-of-a-bitch just-a-friend Paul? You were just work buddies, right?”
“That’s my business.”
“Once people started dying, it stopped being your business, Alex. He had kids, Alex. Five and two.”
She stopped. Her eyes blazed at me. “We had a fling, Nate. Is that what you want to hear?”
“I just—”
“Six weeks. That’s it. And one month after that, he was killed.”
Murph, I thought, Murph, Murph, Murph. Who the hell are you?
“Paul never said anything to you? Nothing about the sick people?”
The elevator doors opened, and we were nearly bowled over by Dan Missoula, he of Harvard and the monster handshake. He looked up from a sheaf of papers he was reading, met my eyes, then said to Alex, “What’s he doing here?”
“Not now, Dan.”
Missoula stuck his foot against the elevator door, keeping it open. “Alex, this is not appropriate—”
“Not now.” She pushed past him into the hallway. Though Dan Missoula was technically Alex’s boss, there was no hint of deference in her voice.
As we made a turn in the hallway, I looked back. Dan Missoula stood there, holding open the elevator doors, his eyes drilling into me.
We arrived at the Regenetine suite, and walked into the lab. There was a quiet hum of activity in the place: white-coated, goggled worker bees with pipettes in their hands hunched over multi-well plates, orbital shakers gyrating slowly with trays of liquid on top.
“I don’t need to see the lab, Alex. I need to see the report and to talk to Jonathan Bly.”
She kept her eyes on the people and equipment. “You can’t see Jon,” she answered.
“Why not?”
“He’s on vacation or something.”
“Or something?”
“I don’t know, Nate. I was told he was on vacation.”
“Great time for the lead scientist to take a vacation, huh? Right before you go to the FDA again? Did he go on a boating trip or something?”
“That’s not funny, Nate. Jonathan probably hasn’t had a break for over a year. People burn out.”
Right, I thought. There’s a time and a place for burning out. For Jonathan Bly, head of the Regenetine project, this was neither: the boss does not take a vacation during what had to be one of the most crucial times for the biological. Companies generally don’t fuck around with the drug approval process. “There’s nothing I need to see here.”
We entered a small conference room. There was a binder on the table. “I spoke with Dustin Alberts—”
“Your CEO?”
“The one and only. He okayed this.” She pointed to the binder. “The Phase 1 report,” Alex said. “Knock yourself out.”
Irritated, I said, “I am here, Alex, because I am trying to figure out who killed Paul and his family. I am here because there are at least nine people out there who are dying because they got some bullshit cocktail shot into their faces.”
“You have no idea the position you’re putting me in.”
“Whatever position you’re in isn’t nearly as bad as that of the people who got shot up with Beautiful Essence.” I took my seat at the table, reached for the binder. Alex left the room.
In the end, I needed less than five minutes. The report—what had been provided to the FDA to prove that Regenetine was safe—was crammed with table after table of data. But I wasn’t interested in that. I looked to the end, to the summary, then to the FDA response. As Alex said, Regenetine was safe. No fibrosarcoma. Nothing more than redness and erythema at the injection sites and one case of superficial infection.
I leaned back in the chair. Here I was, enjoying almost unprecedented access to the inner workings of a freaked-out biotech. I had no doubt Alex’s boss—Dustin Alberts, the Big Man himself—had done the calculus and figured letting me poke around would be preferable to the public relations shit storm that would occur if anyone even got a whiff of a connection to a strange form of fibrosarcoma.
Maybe everything was copacetic. Something stank, sure, but it was possible Tetra was an unwitting accomplice.
Alex appeared in the doorway. “Find anything?”
“No.”
“So you’re done now? Or you want to check the bathrooms to see if we stuffed any corpses into the toilets?”
“You’re going to be fine.”
“I don’t know if I’m going to be fine. I’m vouching for you, Nate. If you go screaming to the press about what we’re doing here, or go to our competitors, Tetra will sue me to the last stitch of clothing I have.”
Not that that would be the end of the world, I thought. I asked, “Do you have Phase 2 data for the cosmetic application of Regenetine?” Phase 2, the stage in clinical trials where the efficacy of a drug or biological is established.
“The clinical trial is blinded,” she replied. Blinded trials are those in which neither the participants nor the researchers administering the treatment know whether a placebo or the real drug is being injected. “The data’s still coming in,” she said.
“Do you have pictures?”
“Pretreatment and at two months.”
“I want to see them.”
“It’s blinded. We don’t know who got the treatment and who didn’t.”
“I still want to see them.”
Alex glared, then said, “I’ll be back in a minute.” She left the room and returned, well, about a minute later. “Follow me,” she ordered.
She led me out of the conference room and lab. On the same floor, we arrived at a small room so crowded with computers there was little room left for the humans. Inside, a man sat
hunkered behind broad flat-screened monitors. He looked up when we entered, mumbled hello.
“Jerry,” Alex said, “can you bring up the Regenetine images, the series 1 images from Phase 2 for the antiaging?”
Jerry, a Polynesian-looking guy with spiky hair and sharply angular glasses, stared at her. He didn’t move.
“Just do it,” she told him. “Mr. Alberts authorized it.”
“Who’s he?” Jerry asked, eyeballing me.
“It doesn’t matter,” Alex said.
“I’m not comfortable with this,” he said stubbornly.
Alex glowered at him, then picked up a phone. “This is Alex Rodriguez again. Is Dustin available?”
Dustin? My, my, we seem to be on super personal terms with the CEO. Then again, it was a relatively small company, and Alex had been with them for a while. Still, I got a hint of why Alex could give the brush-off to Dan Missoula. This woman knew where the power lay, she knew how to forge alliances. If she’d have been born a millennium earlier, she’d have been making treaties with the king, marrying off a daughter, running her own fiefdom.
She shoved the phone at Jerry, who took it as if he were being handed a live viper. “Uh, hi, Mr. Alberts, this is Jerry Tagaloa down in Bioinformatics and—Yes. Okay. Okay, sorry to bother you, I just wanted to make sure.”
He hung up and, not meeting Alex’s eyes, swiveled back to his computer.
On the big screen, an image popped up: a white woman, in her fifties, crow’s-feet around the eyes, furrows in the brow, fine wrinkles throughout. Her nasolabial folds looked like they’d been dug from the nose to the corners of the mouth with an awl.
“Before,” Alex told me. Jerry brought up another picture and placed the two side by side on the screen. “After.”
The difference was striking. The woman’s nasolabial folds had been smoothed out, the crow’s-feet nearly erased. The furrows looked like they’d been filled in with putty. Though the study was blinded, it was obvious this woman had been in the treatment group. And the damned treatment worked. Boy, did it work.
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