Lethal Dose (12 page)

25

The estate was invisible from the main road, obscured by a border of thirty-foot butternut and black birch, trees indigenous to the central Virginia area. Numerous flower and shrub beds ran parallel to the highway asphalt and offered a warm touch, almost inviting. But the wrought-iron gate and eight-foot fence told a different story. So did the guard dog signs posted every hundred feet on the fence. Bruce Andrews took the issue of home security very seriously.

Inside the gates was a true country estate. The drive was long and winding, through groves of trees, trimmed grass fields punctuated with equestrian hurdles and numerous ponds, some complete with ducks and geese lazing on the still, summer waters. The main house was set almost in the center of the forty-six-acre package. Its facade was two-story, Southern plantation style, with Ionic pillars on volutes. A wide second-floor balcony ran the length of the house with four separate sets of French doors opening to it. The mixture of Grecian columnar architecture and Palladian-style house worked beautifully, and off-white shutters framed all the windows.

Bruce Andrews was perusing a copy of the
Financial Times
on the rear deck. He often wondered if the land he viewed from where he sat was that which Grant and Beauregard had fought over during the siege of Petersburg in 1864. Many a brave man on both sides of the skirmish had died on this quiet tract of land south of the Appomattox. Occasionally, he wished that time would slip and he could see the historic battle firsthand: trench warfare in its infancy, breastworks shielding the soldiers as they reloaded their Springfield muskets. But the field remained quiet, and it appeared that he was destined to replay the siege in theory only.

He sipped on freshly squeezed Florida orange juice and scanned the article the
Financial Times
had written on his company. When he finished, he set the magazine on the table and smiled. They had taken the bait and swallowed it whole. And that was all he needed. With such a glowing review by one of the premier financial publications, it would be months before anyone took another serious look at Veritas's books. And by that time, the danger of his house of cards collapsing would be history. The smile just didn't want to leave his face. He had done it. He had taken a huge risk and succeeded.

Haldion, the FDA recall that had threatened to empty the company's coffers, was behind them. The lawsuits were finished, the cash flow stemmed. Triaxcion, Veritas's antibalding drug, could hurt them, but with the new projections, they could now weather a full-blown tort suit. That had yet to materialize, but the possibility was ever-present and real. The most active legal challenge they had to date on Triaxcion was from some irritating ambulance chaser in Butte, Montana. Christine Stevens kept threatening a substantial tort action unless Veritas admitted Triaxcion was responsible for altering blood chemistry in A-positive men and women. They hadn't mentioned anything financial yet, and when pushed to name a figure that would see them disappear quietly, she had insisted that this issue was not financial. Her client simply wanted them to admit that their drug was dangerous.

“Yeah,” Andrews said to himself as he finished his morning coffee. “Like you'd just let the whole thing go if we admit fault.

You bastards would be on us like hyenas on a rotting carcass if we publicly said we made a mistake.” Not a chance in hell that was happening.

He glanced again at the
Financial Times.
What a coup. He had manipulated the interviewer in such a way that she had seen exactly what he wanted her to see, and arrived at precisely the conclusions he had wanted arrived at. With the Enron scandal still a glaring reminder of where creative accounting can lead, he had chosen his words carefully. Veritas did not have the wide array of offshore subsidiaries Enron had when falsifying its economic performance, but they had other, more discreet methods of reporting higher-than-truth incomes for the year. There was nothing as simple as shifting day-to-day expenses into the investment column. Andrews had different methods that used government tax credits, very difficult to discern even with a forensic audit.

But he had an up-and-coming problem: Evan Ziegler. The man was going to discover that Veritas was shutting down its brain chip operations. The future of spinal cord injuries was now moving in a new direction, courtesy of the researchers at Duke University Medical Center. Fat cells, harvested through liposuction, were now being transformed into stem cells that could be used to repair spinal injuries. That cut through a lot of red tape—no ethical issues with using embryonic stem cells. And there were lots of available fat cells, which eliminated the painful procedure of cutting into bone to harvest them. This ability to create neurons from fat cells had essentially doomed the future of brain chips, which looked to generate new electrical synapses in the spinal cord.

And once Ziegler knew he had been used, he would become very dangerous very quickly. The man was a trained killer, an ex-SEAL who wouldn't think twice about coming after whoever set him up. Andrews knew that that someone was him.

No level of security would stop Ziegler. Armed bodyguards, the walled and gated estate with patrol dogs, a pistol under his pillow—everything would be useless once Ziegler was unleashed. So the trick was to take care of Evan Ziegler before he

found out. Too bad, Andrews thought. Evan was an excellent assassin. He was organized and efficient. His downside was a stubborn streak of human kindness the army had been unable to snuff out. The same goodness he showed to his wheelchair-bound son was the one weakness that would eventually be his downfall. Andrews had some ideas for removing Ziegler, but nothing was imperative yet. No need for panic. Wait for the right moment, the right opportunity.

Patience.

It had served him well over the years, and Bruce Andrews had a feeling that it was the key to dealing with Evan Ziegler. The cordless phone rang. He plucked it off the table and punched the talk button.

“Hello,” he said, knowing who it would be. This was a private line, and only one person dialed this number.

“How are things?” the voice asked.

“Okay. Just thinking about our potential problem in Denver.”

“Yes. That's going to be an interesting one when it arises.”

“Interesting for sure. Why did you call?”

“I've been monitoring a situation you have in Richmond.”

“What sort of situation?” Andrews asked. This man did not call on this secure and scrambled line unless the issue was serious.

“Kenga Bakcsi, the employee of yours who recently died while she was on vacation—someone signed onto the mainframe from her house while she was in St. Lucia.”

“When?” Andrews asked, his eyes narrowing.

“Wednesday, August twenty-fourth, just before midnight.”

“It's Tuesday morning. Why am I just finding out about this now?”

“I needed time to react, to see what files they'd accessed. Damage control, so to speak.”

“What were they looking for?” Andrews asked.

“Kenga Bakcsi had a secure file with a chemical formula on her home computer. Triaxcion. That was the file the person opened.”

“Anything else?” Andrews asked, his mind racing. Who had been in Kenga's house? And why?

“There was a text file with a name and address in it. Gordon Buchanan, Butte, Montana. You know him?”

“I've heard the name through our legal department. Buchanan's brother died of something-or-other and he's got a lawyer looking into a possible litigation. Nothing yet.”

“But why would Buchanan's name be on Kenga's computer?” the voice asked.

“I don't know. Unless Kenga was feeding Buchanan the information she was stealing from the company computers.”

“That would explain things.”

Like why we had to kill her
, Andrews thought. “This Buchanan guy—what have you got on him?”

“Not much yet. Some hick from Montana who runs a sawmill near Butte. I'll get more on him as fast as I can without raising any eyebrows.”

“You do that,” Andrews said. “And get back to Kenga's place and get that file off her computer.”

“Already done. The file was removed on Thursday and the computer's hard drive adjusted, so there's no history of that file ever existing.”

Andrews stared across the vast expanse of trimmed grass to the Blue Ridge Mountains in the distant west. He loved this view, especially in summer when the trees were in full foliage and the skies were lazy blue. He loved sitting on his deck enjoying the million-dollar view from his multimillion-dollar house. And he didn't want that to change. “What level of threat does Gordon Buchanan pose to us?”

“In my opinion, minimal to nonexistent. He's a two-bit ambulance chaser who talked one of your employees into getting him some classified information from the mainframe. He'll fuss around with things a bit, try to light a fire under his lawyer's ass, then go away. Buchanan is no threat.”

“All right. But keep tabs on him from your end. I'll have our legal department monitor things in Richmond.”

The line went dead. Bruce Andrews hit the talk button and dropped the phone on the table. Life was never simple, especially when you headed up a major firm like Veritas. It was even more complicated when you played outside the rules. Killing Kenga Bakcsi was not high on his to-do list, but it had become a necessity. They knew she was selling information to someone but were unable to ascertain who. He had begun to suspect the Justice Department or the Securities and Exchange Commission, so finding out it was some nobody from backwoods Montana was a good thing. Gordon Buchanan was a pest who would either quietly go away or quietly go missing somewhere in the woods.

The choice was his.

26

The Seattle-based offices of Connors and Company were small and poorly lit. Little sunshine filtered through the north-facing window, which opened onto a narrow alleyway that abutted the older brick building housing the investigative firm and a handful of other small businesses. There were two sconce lights, neither of which had a bulb, and a solitary overhead light with two sixty-watt bulbs. But the dim working environment suited Wes Connors perfectly. He seldom made it into the office in the morning without a hangover, but as long as his coffee machine and computer were working, he didn't care about anything else.

Connors drained his first coffee quickly and poured a second, sipping it as the Advil and caffeine kicked in. He hooked his laptop computer to the printer, opened a file, and hit the print button. Six pages rolled off the HP LaserJet 4P The printing was slightly faded and he made a quick memo on a Post-it note to pick up a new cartridge. One thing Connors had learned early in his tenure as a private investigator was that the reports handed to the clients were all they saw, and they had better be professional-looking. He never let his toner get to dangerously low levels.

Wes Connors was thirty-eight and totally disillusioned with life. He had never been a good-looking man, always on the outside looking in when attractive women were deciding who in the bar to go home with that night. His face was oblong, with droopy eyes and thick lips under a bulbous nose, now stained bright red with tiny capillaries. He tried to hide his features with ball caps and by growing his hair long, but the only way he really looked any better was after ten or fifteen beers. So he drank. He drank a lot. It didn't help; he still went home alone night after night.

But where he was unsuccessful with women, he did much better with his investigative business. There were always married men and women who wanted to know what their partners were up to when they were at work. Marital infidelity was a godsend. It paid the bills, kept him driving reasonably new vehicles, and even covered the cost of an occasional hooker. But this client was different. His work was interesting and it paid very well. Someone at Veritas Pharmaceutical had pissed his client off big-time. And Gordon Buchanan was not a man he would ever want to piss off. He was like a cornered wolverine, intelligent and dangerous.

Buchanan had come to him just after his brother Billy had died back in April, a referral from another satisfied customer. Buchanan was sure Billy's death had something to do with the medication Veritas had manufactured. He had hired Connors and Company to scratch the surface at Veritas and see what was underneath.

Connors had pulled the company's financials for the past ten years, concentrating on the long-term projections and goals. The bottom line looked good, but Veritas had not brought one new drug to market for some time now. And that hurt. Without revenues from a new patented formula and with patents expiring on two of their previous blockbusters, the company should be stretched tight. But it wasn't. They were flush with cash and tangible assets, including owning the facilities in White Oak Technology Park, where eleven different divisions had labs and offices. Connors was no financial whiz, but something wasn't adding up.

Then there was the premature death of Haldion, off the market for causing heart palpitations. The litigation against Veritas had stopped when Bruce Andrews had taken the corporate helm, but that didn't increase revenues. Three new drugs were in the pipeline, one for reducing blood pressure, one some sort of antiviral medication, and the other a cholesterol drug. But nothing concrete yet. They were touting the arrival of Dr. Jennifer Pearce, a Ph.D. with eight years of Alzheimer's experience at Marcon. According to Bruce Andrews, she was the woman with the answers to the Alzheimer's puzzle, although he was tempering his words with kid gloves, careful not to ruffle Marcon's feathers too much. The last thing Veritas needed right now was to give Marcon any excuse to tie up Pearce's hands in legal red tape by claiming proprietary information had shifted companies when she moved. So far, so good. Marcon was sitting on its hands and watching.

The one brilliant piece of maneuvering by Andrews since he took the reins was patenting the metabolite synthesized by the drugs inside the human patient. He was facing a legal challenge on that issue, but in the interim, if everything remained as it was, Veritas was looking to pocket almost seven hundred million over a three-year period. But a company that required a billion dollars a year just to keep its doors open needed more than that. It needed a new drug.

In addition to monitoring the company financially, Wes Connors had been watching its personnel. The company's medical provider was an easy target, and he had his solitary associate, Jack Ramy, a computer specialist who worked for him parttime, hack in and stash a few lines of code that relayed all new claims directly to Connors and Company's computer. The very computer that sat on his desk. There had been quite a few hits, but the one that Gordon Buchanan had been interested in was the death of Kenga Bakcsi in St. Lucia. He wondered why but didn't press. Buchanan was the kind of guy who held his cards close to his chest.

But now he had ferreted out another death. Back on April 30, Albert Rousseau, an employee working in the cholesterol division, had died in a natural-gas explosion. The file had been suspended pending cause of death assigned by the local coroner. Since there was very little left of Rousseau, the paperwork had been slow coming. The gas company had a vested interest in the findings and was pressing for the investigator to determine that Rousseau cut the gas line and then sparked the explosion himself. Suicide relieved them from a lot of legal responsibility. The insurance company was pressing for the same conclusion. They didn't get it. The final finding by the ME's office and the police and fire investigators was a faulty valve on the stove. That left the gas company open to a lawsuit, the insurance company was on the hook for the book value on his policy, and the municipality could finally assign a company to come in and clean up the mess left by the explosion.

Since the file had been in a pending state since he'd begun his investigation, it had been transparent to his computer program. But now, with a decision on the books, Albert Rousseau's death was visible. And that was news for Gordon Buchanan. That was a good thing. For the money Buchanan was paying him, Connors began to get jittery if he went a few days without finding something to report. He liked the steady income and he liked the work. It beat following a cheating husband to the local motel. He straightened the pages he had taken from the printer and lifted the phone. He dialed his client's cell, and when Gordon picked up, he introduced himself.

“Anything new?” Gordon asked.

“Maybe. There was an employee killed in a natural gas explosion back on April thirtieth.” He gave Gordon the details and explained the delay in relaying the information. “They determined the explosion to be an accident, a faulty valve on the stove.”

“A faulty valve on a gas stove,” Gordon said slowly. “Now, how often does that happen?”

“Not often,” Wes Connors replied.

“No, Wes, not often at all.” He was quiet for a minute. “Let's try something. Can you spend a few days in Richmond canvassing the local real estate offices and high-end car dealerships to see if Albert Rousseau was in the market to upgrade? Use your imagination—think of places where he might have gone if he thought a large payday was on the horizon.”

“Sure, Gordon,” Connors said. “There'll be travel costs and a per diem expense as well. You okay with that?”

“That will be fine, Wes.” There was a moment of silence, then Gordon added, “There are a lot of people who work for Veritas dying lately. I wonder why.”

“You think something's up?” Wes asked.

“I'm not sure what I'm thinking. Just continue to monitor the company through their health care provider and find out whatever you can on Albert Rousseau. I don't care how you get the information, just get it. Expense what you have to.”

“Not a problem. I'll be in Richmond sometime tomorrow.”

“Keep your cell phone on.”

“Of course.”

The line went dead and Wes Connors replaced the handset in its cradle very slowly. Gordon Buchanan was digging for something. His client was leaning toward his brother's death being far more than just an isolated incident. Buchanan was favoring some sort of conspiracy. And that was just fine with Wes Connors. Christ, how often did a small-time private investigator get to go up against a company like Veritas? Never. This was like Erin Brockovich and that PG&E thing. One in a million.

And to top it off, he was getting paid damn well for his time.