Third Strike: A Charlie Fox Mystery

by Zoe Sharp

  We need him to trust us, don’t we?

  Yeah, but not that much.

  The Glock stayed firmly in his hand.

  The Porshe’s engine had already shut off and we heard the plip of a car alarm being set. O’Loughlin might leave his house alarm deactivated, but he wasn’t too careless with his toys, then.

  Footsteps. A key fumbling into the lock, rattling the handle a little. The door opened, bringing a rush of warmer air with it into the coolness of the house interior.

  Even as the figure stepped into range between me and Sean, I registered something was off. O’Loughlin was shorter than I was expecting, slightly built, shoulder-length hair, curves, soft voice.

  “Hey, guys—mama’s home!”

  Terry O’Loughlin’s a woman. This stupidly obvious fact hit me at just about the same time that something warned Terry she had more than cats in her house. The briefcase and papers she’d been carrying spilled from her suddenly nerveless hands, hit the floor and scattered. The woman’s automatic flight reflex had her wheeling back for the door to the garage, for the safety of her car, but Sean had already moved behind her and shouldered it shut.

  The noise the door made as it slammed seemed to jolt her out of stasis. Realizing she couldn’t go back, she gave a strangled cry and tried to bolt for the kitchen instead.

  I grabbed her arms as she scrambled to get past me. She couldn’t break my grip but she fought anyway, panic lending her strength. It was a short-term loan and the payments were steep. She struggled on for a few moments, exhausting herself in the process, then went limp. I relaxed my hold on her just a little, enough so we could talk to her.

  “That’s better,” Sean said soothingly. The Glock was out of sight. “We’re not here to hurt you, Terry. We just want to—”

  “The hell you’re not!” Terry said fiercely, surging forwards to lash out with her right foot, aiming for his groin.

  Sean had the fastest reactions of anyone I’ve ever known. He managed to twist slightly and took the bulk of the blow on his hip, but it was still enough to make him stagger back, doubled over.

  I yanked Terry round and shoved her up against the wall by the garage door, and I admit I wasn’t too gentle about it. She cursed the pair of us with colorful defiance.

  “Sean!” I said, over my shoulder. “Are you all right?”

  For a moment there was no reply. Then he said in a thickened voice, “Yeah, give me a minute. Christ Jesus, she’s got a kick like a bloody mule.”

  Terry gave a slightly hysterical laugh and I shook her roughly.

  “For God’s sake, Terry, we didn’t come for this!” I snapped. “Don’t make me finish what you’ve started.”

  There must have been something in my voice that got through, because she stopped struggling and went quiet under my hands apart from a slight tremble, almost a vibration. It could have been anger, or fear, or a mix of the two.

  I realized I’d been holding on to her hard enough for the pain to stop her breath, and I relaxed my grip on her arms a little. The release made her gulp in air like a surfacing swimmer.

  “I’m going to let go of you now and step back,” I said. “But you make any sudden moves, Terry, and I swear I’ll put you on the deck and you’ll stay there. Do you understand me?”

  She swallowed and nodded, as much as she was able to with her face against the wall.

  I let go and moved back quickly enough to put me out of range, skimming a quick glance across at Sean as I did so. He was propped against the door frame to the kitchen, bent forwards with one hand braced on his thigh.

  Terry straightened and turned carefully, a little jerky, like she wasn’t sure she wanted to get a good look at us, although I certainly wanted to get a good look at her. She stood taut as wire, still with that slight quiver, as though her brain was trying to override her body’s natural instinct to run and was having to fight to do so. There were two of us, we’d invaded her home and, in her eyes at least, had attacked her, but she was holding. I felt a sneaking admiration for her guts, if nothing else.

  “What do you want?” she asked in a small voice.

  “We’re here because of Miranda Lee,” I said. “You sent her an e-mail a couple of days ago, warning her to be careful, but you were too late. She’s dead.”

  “I know. I just heard today,” Terry said, and there was no disguising the wobble in her voice. “What do you want with me?”

  “It wasn’t suicide,” I said bluntly. “We think she was killed and we think you might know why.”

  She stiffened. “Killed? But—” She broke off, bit her lip. “That makes no sense. She OD’ed.”

  “But you must have thought Miranda was in danger, or why send her a warning?” I said.

  She swallowed, took a moment to smooth down the jacket of her suit. I was no expert, but it looked like a very expensive suit. Dark cloth that draped well and hadn’t creased even after a long day at the office and a minor fracas with intruders. Good cut and it … suited her.

  “How—” she began, and stopped. Started again, her eyebrow coolly raised this time. “How do you know I sent her anything?”

  “Because she told me—a few hours before she was killed,” I said. “Were you just trying to scare her? Because, if so, it worked.”

  Terry flushed. “Of course I wasn’t.” She flicked her gaze towards Sean, who was watching her with a brooding stare. Her head came up and she met my eyes steadily. “I’d heard she was relying on a guy—some Brit doctor she’d called in—to be an expert witness. But reports were coming in that he was unreliable. It was my opinion that using him would ruin the chances of her lawsuit being successful … .”

  Her voice trailed away and her gaze sharpened on me. “You’re his daughter, aren’t you?’ she said, almost accusing, like I’d tried to trick her. “I read about you. They said you’d—”

  “Stick to the point, Terry,” I cut in.

  She swallowed. “I didn’t know Mrs. Lee—at all, really. We never met. Never even spoke on the phone. Just e-mails. But I … liked her. I felt sorry for her.”

  “You’re a lawyer,” Sean said flatly.

  Sensing insult, a hint of color lit her cheeks. “So?”

  “I thought corporate lawyers had their emotions surgically removed during training.”

  She pulled a face that contained a rueful anger. “Not all of us,” she said. Now it wasn’t under strain, her voice had a gentle Texas drawl with a wisp of smoke going on underneath it. If she’d been less smart she would have been called pretty, but there was an intense intelligence clear behind her eyes that dared you to demean what she’d made of herself by reducing her worth to such terms.

  Into this silent standoff, the white cat that had confronted us in the kitchen appeared, twining through her legs and looking up at her face imploringly. When she glanced down, the cat made an openmouthed mute plea, whiskers quivering with the effort it put into making no noise whatsoever.

  Terry stared down at it for a moment, unseeingly. Then she bent and swept the animal up into her arms, heedless of stray hairs. The cat squirmed until it had both front paws draped over her shoulder and began to purr loudly. She kissed the top of its head, which made it drop a gear and purr even harder.

  “I need to feed my guys,” she said roughly, hefting the cat. “You going to stop me from doing that?”

  Sean merely straightened and invited her towards the kitchen with the inclined head and regal bow of a maître d’. Terry, aware of being mocked, glared at him and marched past with her head high and her spine very straight. I saw her glance at the back door, just once, as we passed, but she didn’t try to run. I think she probably realized that she’d taken Sean by surprise once and that wasn’t going to happen again.

  As soon as she switched on the kitchen lights and dropped the white cat onto the floor, another three of its furry friends appeared, muttering at Terry and bickering among themselves.

  “So,” Sean prompted, “you felt sorry for Miranda and yo
u decided to help her. Why?”

  “Her husband was dying,” Terry said, but she was hedging. “Isn’t that reason enough?”

  “You work for a drug company,” Sean said. “The chances are that, even with the best will in the world, lots of your customers are either dying themselves, or they have friends or relatives who are. What was special about her?”

  Terry was spooning some foul-smelling, gelatinous, vaguely meaty product out of a can into two double bowls.

  “Because it shouldn’t have happened,” she said at last, banging the last of the cat food off the spoon more fiercely than she needed to. “He should never have died.”

  “So why did he?”

  She lifted the bowls off the counter and turned to face us, pausing a moment. The feline tangle around her ankles became a frantic melee at the delay. The fourth cat, a black-and-white, stood up on its hind feet and dug its claws into Terry’s leg at the knee by way of retribution, pulling a thread in her trousers. She shook the cat loose absently, without annoyance, and put the bowls down. Four heads dived in.

  “I could be fired for discussing any of this with you,” she said at last, almost with a sigh. “I signed a confidentiality agreement.”

  “You could be killed if you don’t,” Sean said bluntly. “Storax don’t seem to like loose ends.”

  “Jeremy Lee died because he medicated himself with a drug for osteoporosis, produced by my company—the company I work for,” she amended. “The technical side of it is not my area, but from what I understand, the treatment’s still being tested on a very carefully controlled group of patients. Dr. Lee fell outside that group and he suffered certain … side effects.”

  “You make it sound like headache and nausea,” Sean said, acidic. “His bones crumbled away to nothing and he died in agony. Yeah, I’ll say he suffered ‘certain side effects.’ What was different about him?”

  She flicked her eyes between the two of us. “Basically, he wasn’t Caucasian,” she said. “Dr. Lee was a second-generation American, but his grandparents were Korean.”

  I felt my eyebrows arch. “Storax developed a drug that will work only on white people?” I said, not bothering to hide my disgust. “I’m not surprised they’ve been going to all this trouble to cover it up.”

  Terry flushed. “It wasn’t intentional!” she said through clenched teeth. “It’s a genetic thing—I don’t understand all the technical details. But I do know that our research scientists are working round the clock to come up with a solution. In the meantime, it’s not something we want to shout about.”

  “Yes, but it’s something your company will do almost anything to deny,” I said. “No wonder they didn’t want a top orthopedic surgeon sticking his nose in.”

  “Top surgeon, huh?” Terry threw back at me with a toss of her head. “From what I hear, he’s a drunk who can’t keep his hands off underage girls.”

  “So they didn’t tell you about the dirty tricks campaign they’ve been running against my father?” I said, keeping my voice mild even though I could feel the rage building like a low-level background hum. “They didn’t tell you about the threats they made to my mother—what they’d do to her—if he didn’t cooperate?”

  Terry glared back at me, but wisely held her tongue. She had more self-control than I did.

  “So, you knew that Jeremy Lee’s premature death was as a direct result of the Storax treatment,” Sean said, stepping in, “but still Storax didn’t suspend the drug or wait to put it out until the scientists had come up with the answer?”

  She had the grace to look a little ashamed. “There are millions of dollars at stake,” she muttered. “Hundreds of millions. Osteoporosis is a major problem and it’s only going to get worse. The drug works brilliantly—”

  “Yeah, on some patients. But it kills others,” I put in. She wouldn’t meet my eyes.

  “Do you think I don’t know that?” she said quietly. “Why do you think I got in touch with Mrs. Lee? I told her she should sue—that the company could afford it. I couldn’t bring myself to tell her outright what had happened, but I dropped hints that she should look closely at what was happening to his bones. I don’t know if she followed that advice or not.”

  “She did—she got in touch with my father,” I said stonily. “He answered a cry for help from an old friend and, because he might have been getting close to the truth, your people administered a fatal dose of morphine to Jeremy, doctored his hospital records, and pushed all the blame firmly onto my father—whose reputation they then started to systematically trash.”

  “That can’t possibly be true,” Terry said, but there was a shaken note to her voice that hadn’t been there before. “The people I work for are not murderers!”

  She turned away, hands to her face, brow creased.

  “Miranda Lee didn’t kill herself,” I said softly, certain of it. “They fed her with pills and booze and stood over her until she was unconscious, so she couldn’t make any attempt to save herself.”

  “You don’t know that,” Terry said, her voice a shocked whisper. “She missed her husband. She was lonely, depressed. I could tell that from her e-mails—”

  “We went to see her the day before she died,” Sean said, cutting her off. “She wasn’t suicidal then.”

  Terry had no response for that. Sean regarded her with a calm stare. “If you’ve got such a social conscience, Terry, why are you working for an organization that only cares about the bottom line, and to hell with who gets hurt, or dies, in the process?”

  She pulled a face. “You make them sound like they’re selling to junkies on street corners,” she said. “The products Storax manufacture save countless lives.”

  “And that counterbalances the odd ‘mistake’ like Jeremy Lee?” he said, his cynicism uppermost. “Enough that you sleep at night?”

  “Yes, I sleep at night,” Terry said firmly, meeting his gaze. “Do you?”

  CHAPTER 29

  “So, Terry O’Loughlin has agreed to help you,” Parker said, his voice scratchy over the long-distance mobile phone line. Even so, the skeptical note in his voice came over loud and clear. “What makes you think you can trust her?”

  “Basically,” I said quietly, “because we don’t have a choice.” I was standing on the open-plan landing overlooking Terry O’Loughlin’s living room, keeping an eye on her as she sat on the huge leather sofa below me. She had her feet curled up underneath her, watching a football game with the fixed concentration of someone who’s not taking in what’s happening on the screen. I couldn’t really blame her for that.

  It was nearly 7:00 P.M. Central, which made it an hour later in New York—well outside office hours. Parker had still answered his mobile phone almost on the first ring.

  “All we have at the moment is my father’s word against the Boston hospital on what was in Jeremy Lee’s original medical records,” I went on. “We need proof of what the Storax treatment does to people of his ethnicity—and the fact that they knew that and didn’t put out any general warnings, or withdraw the treatment. And for that we have to get inside Storax ourselves. We can’t rely on outsiders—or insiders, for that matter. We need firsthand knowledge.”

  “And she’s agreed to take you in,” Parker said flatly. “Just like that.”

  I sighed and passed a weary hand across my eyes. “The place is a fortress, Parker,” I said. “Short of aerial bombardment and a small army, how else are we going to get in there?”

  His silence spoke louder than his words. Eventually, he said, “I’d be happier if you’d wait and let me tackle it from this end. I’m working my way up the chain of command and the FBI are trying to locate Collingwood and Vonda Blaylock. The more they look into what Collingwood’s been up to, the more they find.”

  “But they haven’t arrested them?”

  “Not yet,” Parker said, adding quickly, “but they will, Charlie. You can take that to the bank. And when they do, they can’t help but follow the trail right back to Storax. T
his whole thing will be blown wide open.”

  “Yeah, by which time Storax will have shredded any evidence that they had a hand in Jeremy Lee’s death—or Miranda’s supposed suicide—or that they knew about the side effects of the treatment. My father will never clear his name.”

  “But you’ll be able to come out of hiding.”

  “It’s not enough,” I said. “Not nearly enough.”

  Down in the living room, the TV announcers went into a frenzy as something exciting happened in the game, which promptly broke for ads. The black-and-white cat jumped up onto the sofa and tried to climb onto Terry’s lap. She stroked its head absently.

  “Where are you now?” Parker asked in my ear.

  “Still at the house,” I said, being careful not to use Terry’s name to alert her. The last thing I wanted was Terry taking undue interest in who I was talking to, or what I was saying. As long as she didn’t try to make any calls herself while she thought I wasn’t looking. “Sean’s gone to retrieve my parents from the hotel and bring them back here.”

  “Is that wise?”

  “Probably not,” I said, “but we don’t particularly want to leave her to her own devices, and it’s easier to keep an eye on everybody if we’re all together.”

  “Yeah, it’s a tough one,” Parker said. “Just trust me when I say I’m doing everything I can to work it out at this end.”

  “I know,” I said. “But if you can’t come up with anything by tomorrow night, it looks like we’re going in.”

  “Why the big hurry?”

  “Well, for one thing, it’s a weekend, so half the staff won’t be there,” I said. “And, for another, I don’t know how much longer my father’s going to hold together. This is putting a hell of a strain on him—more than we realized.” More than I realized, that’s for sure.

  Parker was quiet again and I didn’t hurry him. We’d drawn the curtains, but they were more for decoration than effect, made of thin material, so I saw the lights sweep across the front window. I heard the sound of an engine pulling into the driveway, the Camry’s motor sounding a lot more mundane than Terry’s Porsche. The garage door clanked upwards again.