House of Stone

by T. K. Thorne

As we walk down the hall to the elevator, I’m trying to think of what to say to him. This is where he goes during his lunch hour. How do you tell someone you’ve seen his death in the future? How do you tell them not to walk down the alley they walk every day?

  “Segal, when is the database going to be locked?” I ask.

  “Soon as the last data is entered. Then I start combing through it for errors.”

  “And when do you think the last data will come in?”

  “Not sure. Should just be a few days. If the last participants show and the info gets in, I’ll start working on it. It’ll take a couple of days to go through everything.”

  I hand him my card. “Can you call me when you know that the data is coming in for the last patient?”

  He looks puzzled. “Why?”

  “I can’t explain right now, but it’s important. Can you do that?”

  He shrugs. “I guess. Sure.”

  Back in Tracey’s car, he starts the engine but doesn’t take it out of park.

  “What is it?” he asks. “Did you see something in the alley?”

  I tell him.

  “A robbery?”

  “No, it was too professional, too quick. Normal people don’t think about slashing someone’s femoral artery. I think he took the wallet to make it look like a robbery. Paramedics are quick downtown, but Segal would have bled out before they could have gotten to him.”

  He whistles through his teeth. “Crompton, Stokes, and Segal.”

  “And maybe others we don’t know about.”

  “The only thing they have in common is this diabetes drug,” he says. “That’s all that makes sense.”

  I close my eyes. My body is screaming “lack of sleep.”

  “Lohan, we can’t let Segal die.”

  “I know. That little girl needs him.”

  “Yes, she does. And no superhero window washer could fix that.”

  “We could watch the alley,” he says. “Do you have any idea when it’s going to happen?”

  “Not from the vision, but I have an idea when.”

  He looks at me.

  “I think this is about making sure that the study of zahablan fails. I’m not sure why Crompton was critical in that, but clearly Laurie Stokes was killed to cover up Crompton’s murder.”

  “I’m with you.”

  “But the critical person is the one with access to the data. A few less positive results and/or a few more placebo positive results and that equal a failed drug. If I understood Segal right, he will be that person.”

  “You think Segal is going to screw up the data? He seemed pretty jazzed about the study.”

  “So was Laurie Stokes.” My head is okay, but my stomach is still churning.

  “Point, but it doesn’t make sense.”

  “What if someone gets to Segal?” I glance toward Children’s. “I’m betting, even with insurance, that Kaleshia’s medical bills are way more than he can handle.”

  “You think someone will try to get to him to tweak the data?”

  “I do. And then that someone will kill him.”

  Chapter Forty-One

  By the time we walk into the office, my stomach has calmed. I stuff aside all the turmoil that doesn’t have to do with our murder case. I don’t have time for it.

  And Finkman should not have time for anything other than his own homicide cases, a series of gang shootings on the city’s West side. But he can’t resist taking a shot at me. Maybe, if I hadn’t been through everything I’d been through—the Ordeal, being a target for rifle practice, Nora’s death, and the possibility of losing Daniel—I would have let it slide. But this time, when he cracks on me, insinuating Tracey and I have been out of the office screwing around instead of working, I’ve had enough.

  As he walks by, returning to his desk with a cup of fresh coffee in his hand, I call on the martial arts training, especially the part Sensei Mark has been driving us about—that timing and creating off-balance are everything. I’m just a white belt, a beginner, but I’ve been training for two hours twice a week for the past month. As Finkman walks by, I extend my foot, just as he starts to move his left leg forward. Walking, I’ve learned is really a process of falling and catching yourself and propelling to the next cycle. And you need both legs to do it.

  My foot in front of his ankle interferes with that process. I’m only retarding the reflexive forward movement of his leg . . . at just the right moment.

  I may not be skilled enough to ever do this again, but Finkman does an ugly sprawl to the floor. I don’t realize what happened to the hot coffee until he slowly gets to his feet, mumbling about tripping, and I see the wet stain on his groin.

  Tracey looks up at me from the pile of assault cases he is going through. His face is expressionless, but I know he knows what I did. For a moment, I think he’s going to chastise me for using my training outside of the bounds of defense, but he only says, “Let’s get out of here.”

  He snatches up the pile of reports, and we escape to the nearby coffee shop.

  Tracey orders a large coffee and an egg-bacon croissant, even though it’s lunchtime. I’m drawn to a cinnamon and raisin bear claw. That should straighten out the too-little-sleep taste in my mouth. Despite my need for caffeine, I go with a lemon and ginger tea. The general buzz insulates our conversation.

  Tracey opens his mouth.

  “Don’t,” I say. “I know it was wrong.”

  “That isn’t what I was going to say.”

  “What were you going to say?”

  “How are you doing?” Concern deepens the fine lines around his clear gray eyes, and I realize despite the superficial words, he is really asking. He’s a kind person, I decide. It’s almost as if his size and strength have given him a responsibility to be careful with people. I, on the other hand, am prickly and defensive, guarding the territory of my personal privacy.

  “I’m doing as well as can be expected. That is to say, like shit.”

  “Getting shot at is not fun, and neither is it easy to come home and find a dead woman in your bathtub.”

  “I’m more worried about how it affected Daniel and Becca. It was a double whammy to Becca—seeing that and having Daniel taken away from her.”

  “How is she handling it?”

  “She’s not. She’s gone back to a zombie state. Won’t speak, can’t focus. It’s a good thing we have some jars of baby food left over from after the Ordeal. That’s all we can get her to eat when she’s like that.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  I take a bite of the bear claw and lick the sugar flakes from my lips. Tracey shifts his gaze to the depths of his coffee, which he drinks black. Yuck.

  “We should talk about the case,” he says.

  I nod.

  “At this point,” he says, “the things we know are: Dr. Crompton was killed by an overdose of insulin; his assistant administered it; said assistant was shot and killed by what appears to be an assassin; the young man in charge of managing the database for a diabetes human trial is also in danger of being killed; and the window for his time of death is unknown, but only days from now.”

  I take another bite and a tentative sip of the tea.

  “Lohan, we have to solve this before Segal starts to edit the data. If we don’t and he locks it down for analysis and messes with it, it will ruin any chance of having that drug available for the millions of people who need it.”

  Tracey rakes his fingers through the top of his head. “Not to mention that Segal will be a witness taken off the table.”

  “Yeah, not to mention that.”

  “I think we have to tell him his life is in danger.”

  “I’m not sure he knows he’s going to mess with the data yet,” I say.

  Tracey gives me a sideways glance.

  “You’ve talked t
o him as much as I have,” I say. “Do you think he’s planning to warp the data?”

  “No, but I’ve learned that you can’t always trust your instincts about what people will or won’t do. If it’s between adjusting some numbers and his little sister’s well-being, he might not think twice about it.”

  “Point taken,” I say.

  “Give me his phone number,” Tracey says. “I’ll call him and warn him. I’ll tell him that I can’t share how I know he’s in danger, just something we’ve uncovered in the investigation.”

  “Better than telling him I saw a vision of him getting stabbed. But—” I tap my pen against my teeth. “We can’t count on it helping anything. I don’t think he would stop walking down that alley.”

  Tracey makes the call and then lays his cell phone on the table. “Let’s go back to recapping what we know,” he says.

  “What about physical evidence?”

  “There’s the syringe you found under Crompton’s desk and not much more from that scene. I called the Vestavia detective and got an update on Laurie Stokes’ case. Other than confirming a close contact wound by a .22 caliber weapon, they came up with zero. No prints, no disturbance in the apartment, no defense wounds on the victim. Nothing taken. Nobody saw him coming or going.”

  “Or her coming and going,” I say. “We don’t know if the killer is male or female.”

  “You’re right. We can’t assume anything without evidence. Unless you have details about the person you saw in your vision stabbing Segal?”

  I think back to the blur of motion emerging from between parked cars. “I couldn’t tell. He or she was powerful and quick and wearing dark clothes, including a ski mask, and the vision was at a distance and wavering, but my impression was a man.”

  “Not much, although it tends to confirm that whoever this is, he knows what he’s doing and may have known his victims intimately. He knew, for example, that Crompton’s assistant prepared his insulin. Who would know that?”

  “Laurie Stokes, of course.”

  “Yes, but we know for a fact she didn’t kill herself. There was no weapon in her house. We also know she isn’t the person who will kill Segal.”

  “The future,” I say, “is not set like the past. I’ve changed the future I saw.”

  “So you said. How do you know you can change it?”

  “I wouldn’t be sitting here now having this conversation otherwise.”

  He waits.

  I clear my throat. “It was the first time anything like that had happened to me. You know I was taken off the streets and put in Burglary as a detective because I shot a suspect in the back.”

  “Of course. You saved your partner’s life is what I heard.”

  “What you don’t know is that as I was chasing that suspect, I had a vision. Everything turned into a world of shadows, and I was stuck in it, stuck in time, I think. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t breathe. The man I was chasing split in two.”

  “What do you mean?”

  I struggle to explain it. “A shadow duplicate of him just peeled off while the ‘real’ man seemed frozen in place, apparently stuck in time as I was.”

  “And?”

  “Then Paul pulled the patrol car around the corner in front of him.”

  “Paul wasn’t stuck like you were?”

  “It wasn’t the real Paul. It was the shadow-world Paul, a future Paul.”

  “Go on.”

  “The shadow-Paul bailed out of the patrol car, and the shadow-suspect shot him.” The words are simple, but my breaths are shallow and rapid as I relive it. I make an effort to slow them, putting my knotting hands in my lap.

  “The suspect shot your partner?” Tracey asks with a frown.

  “Yes. In the vision, I saw Paul crumple. Then everything snapped back to reality. Paul, the my-time Paul, squealed around the corner, just as he had in my vision. He jumped out of the patrol car, and the suspect raised his arm. It was what I had just seen replaying itself in real time. It happened fast.”

  “You shot the suspect.”

  “Yes.”

  “You did save Paul’s life.”

  I realize what a relief it is to tell the whole truth to a fellow police officer. Under the table, my hands are damp.

  “I couldn’t tell Internal Affairs the whole thing, of course.”

  He looks thoughtful. “Then the future can be changed. And we have a chance of saving Segal.”

  I nod, not trusting myself to speak.

  “Who does that leave us as a suspect?” Tracey asks.

  “Nobody yet. I think the only option we have is to follow the money.”

  “Who benefits from killing Crompton, Stokes, and Segal?”

  “Actually, everyone who makes money off diabetes supplies or drugs.”

  “That is a lot of people.”

  “I know. Closer to home, I’ve checked the life insurance angle on Crompton.” I say.

  “I did too.”

  “Really, when?”

  His mouth curves in a succinct smile. “The day you told me you thought it might be a homicide.”

  “But you disagreed. You closed the case.”

  He shrugged. “I checked it out anyway.”

  Somehow, it feels good that he took me seriously, even when he thought I was wrong.

  “I think,” I say, “we need a bigger picture of who gains from stopping zahablan from becoming a successful treatment.”

  “Agreed. The first place to look, as you say, is who stands to profit from the new research on a different drug.”

  “The private lab for one or any pharmaceutical company underwriting the research.”

  “Right.” He polishes off the croissant. “Seems UAB would also gain if they have an agreement for profit sharing with the private lab, or if they’ve been promised a big donation.”

  “True.”

  He frowns. “If the private lab makes a ‘better’ drug, can they patent it regardless of what happens with the zahablan tests?”

  “They could. They can continue to do research and patent anything new they come up with, whether zahablan proves to be effective or ineffective. But if these trials on zahablan are successful and the results are published, even if nobody tries to get it approved as a treatment for diabetes, doctors can write prescriptions off-label for zahablan, and that might significantly cut profits for anything new.”

  “How can they do that?”

  “Doctors don’t need permission from anyone to write a script for a drug for another purpose than what it’s supposed to be for. Also, sometimes a drug company will buy out the right to sell a drug or its generic, but that would cost them, and it would be bad PR if they upped the price for zahablan.”

  “But PR or not, it’s been done.” He nods at the waitress who refills his coffee.

  When she moves to the next table, he says, “I’ve read about pharmacies using other pressure tactics to push their products, like granting big discounts to middle men, and paying doctors, although I’m not sure how that works.”

  “They don’t do it directly. They pay doctors’ way to conferences or pay them for presenting at workshops.”

  “Where do you get all this?”

  “There’s a website that tracks it.”

  He downs the rest of his coffee. “You and that computer are pretty close, aren’t you?”

  “I haven’t slept very well the past few nights.”

  “We need to find out who the drug company is that’s supporting the alternative research and who their major players are.” He leans back and his chair groans in protest. He’s too big to be comfortable in booths, and he weighs a lot more than he appears to.

  I pull out a couple of sheets of paper from my purse.

  “These are the people and companies who own majority stock in the drug com
pany ZQ Pharmaceuticals. ZQ is paying some of the bill on the new research.”

  “Where’d you get this?” he asks, sitting upright.

  I shrug. “Yahoo.com.”

  This time his smile is wide and remains on his face while he looks at the list. “Good work, Rose.”

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Tracey and I spend the rest of the morning doing background checks on the individuals listed as major stockholders of ZQ Pharmaceuticals, the drug company that has invested in finding an alternative to zahablan. Tracey is continuing to work on the individual owners through the national criminal databases, but I can check companies on my laptop. Once I have the name, a web search locates their home state. A call to the secretary of state’s office yields info on the incorporators, which I learn may or may not be owners. To make it more complicated, a company can create subsidiary companies, thus hiding their ownership in layers. Frustrating.

  Yesterday, I trained at the dojo, but today, instead of heading home, I go work out at the Y, taking out my frustration swimming laps or maybe just avoiding having to look at Becca. Sometimes I’m lucky enough to have the pool to myself, but today two men and a woman are swimming in the other lanes, their splashes echoing off the high ceiling. The sharp scent of chlorine and the smooth embrace of the water usually take my focus off myself, but I have a lot going on in my brain. I swim ten laps and push on, trying to reach a point of exhaustion where it won’t feel like someone is playing a hot game of Ping-Pong inside my temples. When I finally stop, I half expect Angola to be standing at the shallow end of the pool’s edge, or maybe Jason himself. But no one is there.

  Tired, I go straight home, that being Alice’s house, and eat dinner, a sad affair with just me and Alice and a non-responsive Becca. We break out the baby food for her. I concentrate on feeding her.

  Segal has given me his mobile phone number and after dinner, I give him a call.

  “How’s Kaleshia?”

  “She’s doing good. A brave kid, my Cheerios,” he says.

  “Good. Any word on when the zahablan test results will be in?”

  “Yeah, as a matter of fact. I asked about that, and the clinic said the last patient comes in Friday, three days from now.”