“On top of that, senior management and the major investors were getting antsy. Investing in a bio-tech company is a bit like dropping cash into a black hole. It sucks it up and then tries to drag you in after it. The investors were talking about forcing management to cut back staff to a very minimum until the government approvals came through. They were hinting that they thought it was Kevin’s fault, that he hadn’t handled the submission properly, or that he’d made enemies of some bureaucrats who were now paying him back.”
Sandi worries her bottom lip with her perfect teeth. She is coming to the punch line. I catch a merest hint of her perfume. It is the same one Sam always wears and I can feel myself reacting to it.
“So… three months ago—”
Without any knock, the door bursts open.
“You coming to the meeting San—?”
Sandi, whose face is inches from mine, straightens up with a look of guilt.
The intruder smiles. He is an overweight guy in a black suit with a slicked down comb over. He looks back and forth between Sandi and me, a salacious expression growing on his face.
“Oh, Chet. This is Cal Rogan. He’s a friend of Kevin’s. He brought me some papers that Kevin left at his house.” Sandi delivers the lie without hesitation. I’m impressed. It is as though she anticipated the possibility of being interrupted and had a prepared excuse for my presence. “Give me a minute. I’ll join you in the meeting.”
But Chet is not about to be fobbed off so easily. “What papers would those be?” Salacity has given way to slyness.
I look at Sandi and can see that she has not prepared for being questioned on her lie.
“Kevin forgot this; left it in my kitchen,” I say, picking up the notebook which I used to check on his handwriting. “I thought I’d better bring it in, in case it was something important.”
Without asking, he takes it from my hand and flicks through the pages as though looking for something specific.
“I see,” he says. “OK.” His tone indicates it’s anything but OK. “Nice to meet you, Cal.” He cannot come close to faking sincerity.
He takes a too-long look at me before tucking the notebook under his arm and leaving, closing the door behind him.
Sandi lets out a loud breath. She is spooked, no doubt about it.
“You’d better go,” she says. “That was the CEO. If he knew I was discussing company business with you, I’d be in big trouble. I’m sorry, Cal. I can’t.” She gets up and walks to the door.
Screw Chet. Now I’m never going to discover what she was working up to tell me: what it was that happened three months ago.
16
Cal
I know, deep down, that if I don’t get the story now, I am never going to get it. “Sandi, wait.” Her hand is on the door handle. She turns to me. “I can’t.” She shakes her head.
I have about two seconds to persuade her.
“Look, Sandi, if you don’t tell me what this is all about, I am going to have to speculate on what it was you were going to tell me. Either way, I’m going to put all my efforts into investigating Kevin’s death and I’m going to be asking all sorts of questions about QX4, Kevin’s drug and anything else I can unearth.”
She opens the door and signals me to leave. I’m flying by the seat of my pants here. I drop my voice. “And I will certainly have to tell the police what you have told me so far.”
This gets to her. I can see that she is frightened by what I am saying. I need one thing to tip the balance.
“I’ll also have to contact the feds, Health Canada I think you said, and ask them what they know about all this.”
She closes the door fast and leans back against it. Now she is terrified, which seems like a huge overreaction to me.
“You bastard, Cal! You said that you would keep this confidential.”
“I will. I will.” I force a smile. “If you tell me what happened three months ago.”
She knows she is beaten and my elation at getting her to continue talking is dirtied by my feelings of guilt that I have blackmailed her like this. She walks away from the door and sits back on the edge of her desk. I stay standing. The first few tendrils of pain have started. I am on a new descent into the pit of withdrawal.
“Three months ago, Kevin got so frustrated by the government’s stalling that he did the unthinkable. He started clinical human trials without waiting for the approvals to come through. He kept it secret, he didn’t even tell me and I was his deputy director and the woman he was sleeping with.” The hurt of betrayal sits in her eyes.
“Anyway, with the help of someone he knew, someone outside the company, he went out on to the streets and started administering the drug to alcoholics and heroin addicts. He recruited thirty of them. He paid them money, cash out of his own pocket, to keep them in the program and he conducted his tests. He was very thorough. He observed all the correct protocols, except that he didn’t date the results he was documenting. He was planning to fill in the dates later, after he had the government approval for the trial.
“Things were going well, unbelievably well. Addicts and alcoholics were reporting that both the physical and psychological cravings were disappearing. They were sure they’d be cured. It was like a miracle.
“Three weeks before he died, Kevin took an evening off and cooked dinner for me at his place and he told me what he was doing. He was so excited; he was like a kid. He said he’d made a major breakthrough. He even said that he was thinking of putting you on the drug; more than anything else, he wanted to see you cured.
“I was stunned. I couldn’t believe what he was saying. What he was doing was completely unethical and totally illegal. If he were found out, the government would step in and shut down the company. Everyone would lose out: staff, management and the investors. His career would have been ruined. He could have gone to prison for God’s sake.
“I pleaded with him to stop but he was gripped by a kind of madness. He kept insisting it was the only way. He was obsessed with finishing the trials; obsessed with the thought of curing addiction. He made me promise to keep his secret and even though every fibre in me was screaming to tell company management what he was doing, I couldn’t betray him. The consequences for him were too dire. If only I’d known what was about to happen…”
I hardly hear her last few sentences. My whole world is spinning. No junkie wants to be a junkie. A drug that can cure addiction is our holy grail. The fact that Kevin developed it is a miracle. I have got to persuade her to get me into the trials for this drug when they get government approval. Before even, if she—
My reverie is broken by the choking sound coming from Sandi. She is still sitting on the edge of the desk and she is sobbing. I walk over to her and tentatively put an arm around her shoulder. Although it is awkward, I feel a strong need to comfort her—perhaps it is an attempt to assuage my guilt at forcing her to tell me this story—but she shakes off my touch and I draw away. To hide the embarrassment, I cross the room and stare out the window at the parking lot below, savouring the idea of a drug to cure addiction. This is the answer to my prayers. As if in agreement, a sudden pain makes my bowels clench and I sniff, twice. If I can get on this drug and kick heroin, I can start to reestablish my life and be a proper father to Ellie.
The thought of Ellie restarts the tape I keep playing and replaying in my head: my meeting with Sam yesterday afternoon. The shame sits in my stomach like lead. My actions and my choices have once again forced themselves into Ellie’s life. A junkie’s a good thing right Daddy? My inadequacy in answering that innocent question has resulted in her being separated from the school and the teacher whom she loved. For each hurt a junkie causes himself, he visits a dozen hurts on the people who love him. I have to break out of the cycle of addiction.
My train of thought is broken by a sigh from Sandi and then the sound of tissues being drawn from a box. As I turn back, I look at her desk. Kevin would have a fit. He was excessively neat. In the few days that Sandi has
been in this office, she has turned the desktop into a war zone.
There are papers, open text books, computer printouts, hand written notes on squared paper. White Post-it notes are everywhere, on books, on papers and on the small percentage of the desk’s surface which is still visible. The writing on them is in a tiny script written in black pen. Everything is black and white except, sticking out from under the box of tissues, is a business card with only the logo visible. It comprises three bright slashes of colour: yellow, green and purple. It stands out in contrast to the monochrome background.
Sandi blows her nose. She sits up straight and I can see she is steeling herself for the next part of her story.
“A few days after he first told me, Kevin confided that one of the addicts he was treating had died. He didn’t believe that Addi-Ban, our drug, was a contributing factor, but he was sad at losing a patient. Then, within a week, one more addict and two of the alcoholics died. Of course, he stopped the trials straight away but in the following few days there were another three deaths. Seven of the thirty subjects had died.”
I am stunned at the contents of the Pandora’s box which I’ve forced Sandi to open. The junkie part of me wants to run away, back to the familiarity of the downtown east side, where heroin can wash away the pain that is taking hold of me and erase the memory of what I have just learned. In the search for Kevin’s killer, I have found that he was one himself.
“Kevin was beside himself,” she continues. “On top of the guilt, he knew that it would all come out, that he’d be ruined and that the company would be too. He became very depressed. He took time off work, which was unheard of for Kevin, and he pretty well cut me out of his life. That hurt… a lot.
“The next thing I knew, there was a phone call from his mother telling me he’d committed suicide.” She breaks down into tears again.
A million thoughts tumble through the cop part of my brain.
This is the problem Mrs. Wallace claims was the cause of Kevin’s suicide. Of course, a man like Kevin would be devastated to find out he’d killed people but he was also the type of man to stand up and face the music, to accept his responsibility regardless of the consequences. Despite what Sandi has told me, my gut refuses to accept that suicide was the cause of death.
One mystery may be solved: the thousand dollars in his wallet has been bugging me. Kevin was a great user of plastic; I have seen him use his credit card to pay for a two dollar cup of coffee. Maybe the cash was there to pay the addicts for their cooperation. There was enough to pay each addict about thirty bucks. A junkie will do almost anything for thirty bucks.
No, wait. The increasing pain of withdrawal is stopping me from thinking straight.
Kevin had stopped testing the drug right after the second round of deaths, so the cash wouldn’t be for his test subjects.
Regardless of the money issue, something doesn’t add up but I can’t put my finger on it. I don’t believe every part of Sandi’s story. I have a strong sense she’s not telling me everything.
“Doing illegal trials just doesn’t sound like Kevin. You mentioned that the investors and your management people were getting antsy. Is there any possibility they were coercing him to push ahead with the trials, without waiting for government approval?”
“Not the investors. They were very much in the background, I don’t even know their names. But maybe someone in management. The delays in approvals were a real problem. R&D companies eat cash like ravenous wolves. If the investors were unhappy with progress, some senior people, including Chet, who you just met, might get fired and in the process lose some juicy share options.”
One of the rules of criminal investigation is ‘follow the money’. She seems to be pointing the finger too quickly at the management group, the slimy CEO in particular. It makes me interested in the investors whom she dismissed too easily.
“How much money have the investors put into QX4?”
“Over fifteen million in all. More than half of it from one person, I understand.”
“What’s his name?” I ask.
I cannot read the look that passes across her face. “I told you I don’t know. They keep it pretty tight around here.”
They may do, but the look tells me I need to shake that bit of information loose later.
“Who helped him?” I ask.
“What?” She doesn’t understand the question.
“You said he had the help of a guy he knew, someone outside the company, when he went out to administer the drug to his guinea pigs. Who was he?”
“I don’t know. Kevin never told me.”
“How did Kevin know him?”
“I don’t know. Why would I know that and what does it matter anyway?”
She is getting irritated at my questions. A fair sign she has not been completely forthcoming.
“Sandi, do you have a list of the names of the people who were taking the drug?”
“No, why?”
“Kevin didn’t leave any notes or computer files or anything?”
“No.” She is getting irritated with my questioning. She looks at her watch.
Maybe Roy can help confirm my strong suspicion that I have solved the mystery of Tommy’s death.
I need to keep her cooperative, for a while at least, until I have had all my questions answered. “I know that these questions may seem irrelevant and a bit upsetting but if you could just hang in there and answer a couple more. OK?”
She relents a little. “Sure.”
“On the Saturday Kevin died, I was at his house in the morning. Were you there too?”
She looks at me with not the ghost of a tell on her face. For no apparent reason, I think of the red haired young cop that accompanied Sarge to Kevin’s house that afternoon. The kid would be talking his head off right now, asking and re-asking the question. I know to keep quiet. Seconds pass in complete silence until she says, “No.”
It’s a lie. I go with my intuition. “What were you arguing about?”
“Who said we were arguing?” Worded like that, her question confirms they were. Again I just keep quiet, leaving my question hanging in the air.
She is flustered now. “I wasn’t there and I’m not prepared to talk to you about it, Cal.” She looks at her watch again and glances towards the door. “You had better go now.”
If I were still a cop, there would be all sorts of things I could do to pressure her into an answer. Now all I can do is ask, “Was it something to do with that engagement ring I saw on the floor?”
“I told you, I’m not going to talk to you about my relationship with Kevin.”
Time to tack onto another course. “So when did you take over Kevin’s job?”
Her eyes cut away from me and back. She pauses for a moment too long. “Why?”
“When did you?”
“On Monday.”
“What? The first working day after he was killed? That was pretty clinical wasn’t it?”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake, Cal. Do you have any idea what Kevin’s death could do to the company? When we announced Kevin’s death we had to show that we had a contingency plan. The Company needed to appoint a new Director of Research straight away. I was the logical choice. For what it’s worth, I didn’t even want the damn job. I’m a scientist, not a manager. I took it to save the company. Even so, our stock took a dive of almost sixty percent.”
“So, are you telling me that Kevin’s desk got that messy in just one week?”
“Go to hell, Cal. Now it’s really time for you to go.” She gets up and opens the office door.
Sometimes, I just cannot keep my big mouth shut.
She leads me in silence out of the office and back down to the lobby. At the front desk, she pulls off my visitor’s badge, throws it into the box from which it came and stands motionless, disdain etched on her face. “Not a word of this, Cal,” she says.
I shake my head; there is no way I would let this information become public after my encounter in the library
with Mrs. Wallace when she showed me her wrist; I would never run the risk that she might succeed where previously she failed.
Sandi’s story has backfired on her. She told it to me to convince me Kevin committed suicide but it has had the reverse effect. And I wonder how much of it is true? Or more to the point, what might she have left out? As I think back, I get the feeling that in some way she has been trying to manipulate me but I can’t work out how or why.
I have nine days before I can check into rehab. Nine days to get to the truth.
But right now my one need, my only need, is to shoot up and staunch the pain coursing through me.
17
Brad
Before I can say anything, Cal preempts me, “Brad, one of the reasons I wanted to see you was that I need to talk to you about how Kevin died.”
I glance around and drop my voice to a whisper. “Keep your voice down, Cal.” I shouldn’t have brought him here. Sciué is way too up-market. It’s packed full of businesspeople—eating gourmet pizza, sipping Chardonnay or expensive Italian bottled water and dabbing cappuccino foam from their upper lips—and if one of them should overhear this conversation…
“You mean your theory that he was murdered?” I whisper.
“Yes and it’s more than just a theory, Brad.” His voice is showing his irritation and is still too loud for my liking.
I have to steer him away from this. He was a good cop, a great cop in fact, and, despite the drugs and being on the streets, I’m betting his mind is a sharp as it ever was. If he starts digging into Kev’s death, he may uncover—
He breaks my chain of thought. “First thing,” he says, “is that Kevin wasn’t the type to kill himself. We both know that. We both knew him since we were kids. No matter what his mother says now, he was never that depressed. Plus he idolized his father and even if something drove him to think about ending it all, he would never have done it while his father was still alive.”
Cal Rogan Mysteries, Books 1, 2 & 3 (Box Set) Page 9
