by Jerold Last
The photos looked like the crime scene had looked in real life. There wasn't anything noteworthy in the forensic evidence except that the bullets and the recovered cartridge casings were in good shape. If we ever found the gun, it would be easy to get a ballistics match that would hold up in court.
We shook hands and said polite good-byes. I promised to keep him in the loop if we found anything he should know about.
I did more credit checks and criminal record searches for the rest of the day, with occasional breaks to do billable work for real clients. My background, criminal record, and credit checks on the Plantacur staff turned up the usual miscellaneous parking and traffic tickets, missed payments on credit card due dates, and education and professional careers you might expect in a group of more than a dozen randomly chosen professionals.
However, the boring research also turned up some potentially useful information. Robert and Jim Schantz had been CEO and Scientific Director of two previous start-up biotechnology companies, both of which had failed and gone bankrupt. Plantacur might well represent their final opportunity to get rich as venture capital-funded small business owners. Several of the key staff at Plantacur had been associated with the Schantz brothers at the two prior companies, including Drs. Linda Poras and Emil Proctor and the current COO John Hardy and CFO Helena Fletcher. All four of these key personnel owned large amounts of stock options and received relatively low salaries, as was typical for start-up companies. They had a share of ownership and stood to make a large sum of money if Plantacur succeeded. However, they were all in a very high-risk situation with regard to their future professional careers.
The only serious crimes showing on anyone’s record were a few DUI arrests with large fines paid and an arrest for spousal battery that never went to trial for Emil Proctor about a dozen years ago. He seemed to get his drinking under control after the arrest and had no recent records of any further encounters with the legal process. And an arrest for solicitation for prostitution of Helena Fletcher during her first year in college 20-odd years ago that also never seemed to have come to trial. That was a weird one and probably had an interesting story to go with it, but there weren’t any details in the material I could access in the on-line database we used.
Like most Californians, all of the people I looked up came from somewhere else and presumably met here after finishing their educations except for the Schantz brothers, who presumably knew each other before moving to California as adults.
In the meantime, Vincent had slipped out at lunchtime to call Bruce.
“I don’t know how you knew it, but you hit the bulls eye on Jim Schantz. He generally goes home by way of one of two gay bars in West Hollywood, The Abbey Food & Bar or The Gold Coast Bar. Do you know either of them?”
“Of course I do. The Abbey is the best-known gay and lesbian bar in LA. I guess I’ll drop in for a drink or two tonight. Can you sneak a photo of Schantz and email it to me?”
The photo showed up on Bruce’s iPhone at 2:15. He was at the bar drinking something with a parasol in it when Jim Schantz walked in at 5:30 and sat on a fortuitously empty stool next to him.
Schantz had a very unoriginal but time tested pickup line. “Do you come here often?”
“Off and on. Mostly only when I’m between lovers. Lately, no, I’ve been drinking at the Gold Coast. A couple of months ago, I used to come here all the time.”
Small talk sufficed until Schantz asked him whether he’d like to go to dinner together. They ended up at a steakhouse in Westwood mostly catering to the upscale UCLA crowd. Over dinner the discussion turned to the usual topics among people who are just meeting one another for the first time.
“What do you do for a living, Bruce?”
“I just got out of the navy. I’m a nanny now, working for a family in Beverly Hills with a baby boy. How about you?”
“I’m a scientist. I work for a local biotech company that’s trying to cure cancer.”
“Hey, that sounds a lot more interesting than changing diapers. Tell me more.”
“We’re trying to get a new drug that we isolate from a tropical plant ready for clinical trials in patients with lung cancer. That’s a huge market without any really good alternatives after the patients become resistant to the first line drugs.”
Bruce’s mind raced. Should he push Schantz for something incriminating or keep him interested so there would be another date? He decided to do a little of each.
“How’d you pick this restaurant, Jim? Did you go to UCLA?”
“No, I got my degrees at Wisconsin and Minnesota. I couldn’t wait to move here where the winter isn’t 8 months long.”
“Really? I grew up in Fort Atkinson, Wisconsin, just south of Madison where you probably went to school. I moved to LA as soon as I got out of the navy for the same reason you did. So how did you hear about this place if you didn’t go to UCLA?”
“I live in Westwood. I have a nice apartment just a few blocks walk from the restaurant. Would you like to see it?”
“I think I will want to see it some other time, but we need to slow down a bit. If you don’t mind, I do better with a few dates before things get more serious. Is that OK?”
Schantz nodded. “I prefer it that way myself. Are you free for a dinner and movie Friday night?”
“That sounds really good to me. How about I pick the restaurant next time? I know a great Thai place in Century City. Give me your number and I’ll call with directions.”
Vincent, when he wasn’t calling Bruce, was busy at his first day on a new job. He began work at 9 AM, the nominal starting time for all of the scientists, with Dr. Poras giving him instructions for the day. The expectation for the senior scientists was that the end of the workday was when the experiment was finished, however late that might be. He was supposed to run an ion exchange column chromatography procedure according to an established gradient elution protocol, test the purity of several fractions eluting between two concentrations of salt, and calculate the total yield of the drug in the expected fractions and in the fractions preceding and following the expected peak. By the end of the day they’d know his skills level in chromatography and analysis, which in turn would give them an idea of what he could do on his own without direct supervision.
He had the results by 3 PM.
“That’s awfully quick, probably too quick” observed Dr. Poras. "We need careful workers not people who watch the clock here. Let me see your data. Hmmm. Your fractions are about 15% cleaner than we usually get and your yield is about that much higher. It looks like you’ve done this kind of experiment before, and done it very carefully and well.”
“Claro. One of the things we learned in Northern Chile is that we didn’t have the resources to waste time or chemicals. I’ve been well trained as a technician as well as a scientist.”
“OK, it looks like you’re ready for your own project. We need a next step in the purification protocol that will give us a yield of at least 90% and a four-fold or better purification. Do you think you could make that happen?”
“I could try. Has anyone done any pilot experiments?”
“Yes, but none of them have worked. Mostly they’ve involved repeating ion-exchange chromatography under different conditions of pH and different salt gradients.”
"Is it OK if I try a completely different principle? I've had some good luck in the past with affinity chromatography. Can I do a literature search for a commercially available antibody that sees an epitope that looks like our peptide?"
"That's an interesting idea. You should be able to do that from here on-line. If not, we have library privileges over at UCLA and you can plan to spend a few hours there at the medical school library. I'll tell you what. I have a meeting in 5 minutes that I have to go to. A lot of us stop off after work to decompress at that bar across the Street, Joe's, for a glass of wine or beer. Why don't you join us there at about 5:30 and we can kick the idea around with the others? They may have some suggestions to make."
/> And that's how Vincent ended his workday a couple of hours later drinking beer at a table with three Ph.D.s and the CEO, CFO, and COO of Plantacur. After chewing over Vincent's suggestion about a new chromatographic method everyone agreed that it was worth researching, but that such a radical change of direction from the proven protocol needed more discussion if any new equipment or expensive supplies would need to be purchased to test it out.
Jim Schantz carefully pointed out that the sequence of the active peptide in the new drug was proprietary information, so they couldn't reveal it to Vincent and he wouldn't be able to look up a specific epitope for an antibody. All he could reveal to Vincent was the amino acid composition of the peptide they were studying. The conversation moved on to people's interests and background as the group welcomed its newest member. Everyone wanted to know how Vincent had gotten from small-town Wisconsin to a career teaching at an obscure Chilean university. He used a convenient cover story: He had married a Chilean girl he met while he was working on his Master's degree in Wisconsin. It seemed natural to move back to Chile where her family lived when they both finished their educations in the USA.
"Are you still married?" Linda Poras asked.
"Yes, I am. The kids are almost fully grown up by now."
His boss obviously hadn't learned about political correctness in the workplace, or perhaps she thought it ended at the door of the local bar. "Too bad. We could use a few more available studs around here."
The conversation continued for a while on safe topics like the Dodgers and the local beaches. Eventually someone said it was late enough that rush hour should be mildly less intense and the group broke up to go home.
On the way home Vincent called Roger from an anonymous pay phone. "Hey boss, do you know anyone who can do a little mildly illegal computer hacking for a worthy cause?"
"Probably. What do you have in mind?"
"I thought about trying to access the company financial and regulatory testing records from my computer at work and decided not to leave any IP address type footprints around in case there was something there to find. I did scarf my boss' user name and password from the usual hiding place under a desk drawer. Security sucks at Plantacur; they leave their computers on overnight. Grab a pen and write this stuff down."
"Good job Vincent. I'll let you know what we learn from these records."
An anonymous hacker used my computer and a cute little piece of free software called Tor that made it impossible to trace my IP address. Half an hour on the Plantacur site was enough to find out that the company was in deep doo-doo, as they say in venture capital, baby nanny, and dog breeding circles. The company had just taken a double hit. The last round of toxicity testing data had come in from the contract research firm doing the studies, and the results were obviously not what they wanted to see. Their miracle drug was an animal carcinogen, causing tumors in rats and mice, as well as causing obvious damage in the liver and lungs, probably indicating metabolism to a toxic substance in these enzyme-rich tissues. And the sugar daddy venture capitalists that had been supporting drug development had indicated that there would not be any infusion of new money into Plantacur until they could demonstrate successful chronic pre-clinical toxicity testing results on their new compound.
Suddenly, someone (or more than one) had a strong motive to be looking for new drug candidates to develop really quickly. Was this a motive for murder? It certainly seemed to be a possibility worth checking out.
Late that night Robert finally fell asleep. He obviously missed Bruce. Suzanne and I crawled into bed and I updated her on the case.
“I have a hard and fast rule that everyone files reports in person or by e-mail on whatever they’ve done that day while everything is still fresh in their mind, so I can fill you in on what all three of us learned today. Bruce actually was able to get himself picked up by Jim Schantz in a West Hollywood gay bar. Schantz has an apartment in Westwood, so lives near the UCLA parking structure where Eugenio was shot. Bruce has a new phone number for his little black book and a tentative date for later this week.
“Vincent has a female chauvinist pig as a boss and is probably a better biochemist than anyone else at Pharmacur, Ph.D. or M.S. When he asked about the peptide sequence so he could try purification by affinity chromatography with a commercial antibody, Jim Schantz refused to tell him the sequence of the peptide in their new drug, claiming that it's proprietary information. Given that Vincent’s pretty mediocre as a researcher compared to the typical faculty member at a big U.S. university, I think we can conclude that he isn’t working with the crème de la crème of Big Pharma. It looks like he’s already considered indispensable by the movers and shakers at Pharmacur.
“I met a very co-operative and overworked homicide detective from the LAPD who is only too happy to have us investigate the murder on his behalf. He let me read the case folder. Eugenio was shot five times with a .32 from close range, which probably means he knew the killer. There are at least six members of the leadership team at Plantacur who’ve been colleagues for more than ten years in a succession of start-up companies. They just got some bad news. Their drug candidate is a toxic carcinogen and their funding angels don’t love them anymore. There’s plenty of motive there for someone in the know to have tried to steal Eugenio’s drug patents. I’ve got a lot more odds and ends, but that seems to be the important stuff.”
Suzanne rolled over and spooned with me. “Can you handle a little inductive logic here rather than deductive?”
“That’s like women’s intuition, right?”
“Yep.”
“OK, shoot, if you’ll pardon the expression this close to Eugenio’s murder.”
“I think that the stars are aligned just right for this to be a big conspiracy, not just a single person who did a spontaneous murder to steal the rights to an untested new drug. The reluctance to tell Vincent the exact sequence of the new drug suggests to me that they are planning to switch drugs in mid-stream, probably using one of Eugenio's patented drugs, hoping that nobody ever catches on that they did this. The answers are probably there at Pharmacur, and the trick is going to be getting one of the conspirators to talk.”
“I pretty much came to the same conclusion, even if we don’t have a shred of proof yet. I guess we have a working hypothesis for now.”
Chapter 5. The last day
Two very large would-be muggers jumped Vincent as he started to walk from his car towards the Pharmacur building. It was 9 o’clock in the morning in Los Angeles, broad daylight, but in an industrial area that wasn’t crowded with people. His assigned parking place was at the edge of the lot, so it was easy for the muggers to take him by surprise from a nearby alley and drag him back into the alley where they couldn’t be seen from the street. He liked the idea of the alley so didn’t really resist. Then, suddenly, things stopped going according to the plan. His CIA training kicked in and he did some karate moves with blinding speed that were totally unexpected. In less than five seconds both of the would-be muggers were down on the ground, broken in several places. One was unconscious while the other was moaning in pain but could still talk.
“Who hired you?” Vincent asked mildly.
That was answered with an obscenity.
“I’ll ask one more time. It would be a good idea to answer politely this time.”
No answer.
Vincent picked up a hand and bent a finger back until it dislocated. The resulting scream was muffled by Vincent's left hand constricting over the mugger's throat. He moved on to the next finger, but had already made his point.
“I don’t know who she was. It was a real good looking broad with red hair and lots of curves. She gave us $500 to rough you up and give you a good scare and promised us $500 more if we did a good job of it and scared you off. Honest, I don’t know her name, but I’ve seen her go into this place before and I think she works here.”
“Thanks,” Vincent said politely. He did something to a nerve plexus in the exposed neck and
there were now two battered, badly broken, and unconscious muggers lying in the alley. He took their wallets and cell phones, walked back to his car, and drove back to the detective agency. Along the way he used one of his new untraceable cell phones to call 911 and report an attempted mugging and direct the dispatcher to where the police and the ambulance should go to find the muggers.
Vincent walked into my office and handed me two phones and two wallets. He filled me in on recent events. “What do you suggest I do next, Roger?”
