Monahan 02 Artificial Intentions (19 page)

I was nervous and anxious. Going into the safety deposit box could be the point of no return, so to speak. Searches of Tommy’s computers, files, organizers, drawers, cupboards, and file cabinets had so far turned up nothing. Nothing that could be construed or interpreted as having any relevance at all to Tommy’s murder.

Tommy had something hidden somewhere. The fact that he had layers of passwords protecting his electronic files and keys hidden in picture frames to protect his paper files, told me that there were secrets somewhere. I was desperate to find that something that could help me understand why my life was no longer my own. My mother always says that there is a reason for everything, and I was bound and determined to find that reason. In for a penny, in for a pound.

“Sure,” I told Sara. “Let’s open up the safety deposit box.”

Did I have any inkling about what I was going to find? Not really. Because as street-smart as I like to think I am, the levels of human depravity that I encountered because of what was in that box, were beyond my imagination. The key to the safety deposit box ended up being the key that unlocked the end of my innocence and naivete.

The bank manager led me into the vault at the back of the bank on the main floor. The back left-hand corner of the vault held floor-to-ceiling safety deposit boxes, each identified with a number engraved on a brass plaque on the front. Number 330 was about halfway up the wall and was one of the larger boxes. Sara removed a key chain from the pocket of her suit, chose a key, and inserted it into the top lock on the box. She held out her hand and I passed her my key which she inserted into the bottom lock. She turned both keys, removed them, and then slid the box out of its slot and handed it to me. Its weight and size surprised me.

Sara led the way and I followed her to a private booth that contained a waist-high counter and one chair.

“Ms. Watson will help you put the box back when you’re finished,” she told me and pointed to a woman sitting at a nearby desk. “Take your time, and please be assured of complete privacy. You can lock this door when I leave. And please let me know if you need anything else today.” She shook my hand and closed the door when she left. I quietly pushed the thumb lock on the door, took a huge cleansing breath, sat down in front of the box, and reluctantly lifted the lid.

chapter twenty-seven

Jay was cooking and I was watching him move effortlessly around the kitchen. He was barefoot, wearing his ragged jeans and a white T-shirt. The view from where I was sitting at the kitchen island was yummy and I was very appreciative. Jay placed an ice-filled glass of Diet Coke in front of me and leaned his elbows on the counter.

“Anything else, ma’am?” he teased.

“At this very moment, no, but thanks for asking.”

Jay returned to the stainless steel gas stove and grabbed the handle of the large skillet that was sizzling with ambrosia-scented ingredients. He tossed the ingredients in the air and amazingly they all landed back in the skillet. Apparently he was making my favourite dinner. Call me kookie but I thought my favourite dinner, bar none, was pizza, and this sure didn’t look like the makings of a meat-lover’s special. However, I was not going to look a gift horse in the mouth and decided that whatever Jay was cooking was going to
become
my favourite dinner. It is possible that he had made this dish for me before and I had forgotten. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is not something I was about to own up to.

Jay was an enthusiastic cook. He had grown up in a houseful of women, the youngest child of a single mother who had five children, four of them daughters. Jay’s sisters had babied him until he stopped putting up with that nonsense at age five. After that, all of the kids were treated equally, all having to share the responsibilities of the house with their mother, who worked two jobs. Each of them was expected to know how to cook, clean, do laundry, cut the grass, take out the garbage, shovel snow, wash the car, and change the linens on a bed. We had the same type of rules in our two-parent house, but I never became skilled at any of those chores because I hated doing them. To this day, I remain a reluctant housekeeper, laundress and cook. Don’t get me wrong, I clean, do laundry and can make all the basic foods. But do I like it? Not really. I rush efficiently through those tasks, always knowing there is something more worthwhile that I could to be doing. Like relaxing with a good romance novel.

“Where shall we eat,” Jay asked, “in here, or in the big room?”

I stopped my daydreaming and looked at Jay who was standing in front of the counter where I sat, with his hands full of cutlery, napkins and two placemats.

“Let’s eat at the big dining room table. I want some room to spread out some documents.”

“Okay. Let me put this stuff on the table and dinner should be ready in a few minutes. Are you going to share with me what you found out today?”

I had been holding my breath when I gently lifted the lid of the safety deposit box. As if the box contained a bomb or something. Scared to see what could be in there. Knowing that there had to be something, if Tommy had gone to all the effort he had to hide the key to the file cabinet that contained the key to the safety deposit box.

Was I a little disappointed when I found only two items in the safety deposit box? Relieved, yes, but not disappointed. In fact, I was naive enough to think that the large, legal size, buff-coloured file folder, and the large, brown envelope had to be harmless. Paper couldn’t hurt you, right?

“I’m not sure what I found today,” I said, finally answering Jay. “I emptied the safety deposit box into my briefcase, put the box back in the vault, and had Lou bring me straight home. I’m doing my denial thing.”

Jay looked at me questioningly.

“Okay,” I told him reluctantly. “I’m sure you’ve noted one of my personality quirks. It’s called denial mode. If I think something bad is going to happen, or if I know something is going to make me sad or upset, I ignore it. Deny that it exists. I think I’m doing that with the things I found in the safety deposit box.”

“Alright,” he said. He put the cutlery and placemats down on the counter and came around to where I was sitting. I swiveled around on my stool and looked up at him. “I’ll help you with your denial thing.” He mimed quotes in the air with his fingers when he said denial thing, and then picked up both my hands. He put my right hand to his lips and kissed it lightly on the palm. “Now get off this stool and go set the table.” Jay pulled me down from the stool and kissed the top of my head. “We’ll figure this out together.”

Jay was right. My favourite meal was now the pasta dish he prepared. Large pasta shells stuffed with mushrooms and cheese, covered in a fresh tomato sauce.

Stuffed and satisfied, we tackled the treasures from the safety deposit box together. I placed the file folder and the envelope in front of me on the large dining room table.

“Here.” I shoved the envelope at him. “You go through this. I’ll tackle the file folder.”

Inside the file there was a stack of papers about an inch thick, all neatly punched with two holes at the top of each page, and arranged on foldable metal spikes. The sheet of paper on top was on the letterhead of the U.S. Food & Drug Administration. It was a copy of a letter from Dr. Victoria Edwards, Director of the Center for Devices & Radiological Health and was dated about three months ago. The letter was addressed to Dr. Jordan Francis, the Vice-President of Research at Global Devices. In the letter the Director denied “for a final time” Global Devices’ 501(k) pre-market application for its totally implanted artificial kidney. The Director went on to say that she fully endorsed the decision of the Office of Device Evaluation (which she emphasized was part of
her
organization and which she emphasized reported to
her
) not to allow clinical trials of the artificial kidney. The Director finished the letter by advising Global Devices that
she
was the final adjudicator of this matter and that there were no other avenues of appeal available to Global Devices at this time. So there!

Several letters along the same vein but not quite as abrupt were filed behind the top letter. These letters were dated over a six month period earlier this year.

I glanced up from my file to see what Jay was doing with his envelope. He was sitting still, looking at me, waiting for me to finish. The contents of the envelope were stacked in front of him.

“What?” I said.

“Guess. Just guess what was in this envelope.” He held up his hand. “No. Forget it. No guessing. You’ll never get it. Are you ready for this? Your friend Miss Natalie Scott is a stalker.”

“What?” I said, again.

“You heard me. This envelope is full of love letters. Really
sloppy
love letters.”

Although I thought I knew the answer, I asked it anyway. “Love letters addressed to who?”

“There’s no name. They all start with ‘my love’.”

“Are there dates on the letters?”

Jay flipped through the pile of paper in front of him.

“Some have dates and others don’t. The earliest letter is dated about six months ago.”

“I don’t know if I want to read those.”

“Hey, none of that. No ‘denial mode’ allowed. You’ve been so eager to figure this whole mess out, so here,” Jay shoved the pile of letters across the table to me. “Give me your file folder and let me go through it.”

There were about fifteen or twenty letters in the pile. Without reading them, I flipped through the pieces of paper to get some sense of the letters and their timing. They were written over a two month period and the last one was dated almost four months ago.

The first letter was casual, breezy, non-threatening. Natalie bearing her soul. “
I’m so shy and so scared to approach you. Can we get together for coffee? I’d love to talk to you, outside the office. I would love to be your friend. Call me on my cell or send me an email. Yours, Natalie
”

By the fifth letter, though, the letters were from a whining, desperate woman. “
Why won’t you acknowledge me? Why can’t we meet, have coffee, maybe dinner? Please, I only want to talk with you, be your friend.
”

The tone changed from whining and clingy, to romantic and lovesick, in the next couple of letters. They were embarrassing to read and I wondered why Tom kept them. “
I can’t think of anything but you my darling. Every night my dreams are filled with the wonder of you. Our life together would be heaven on earth.
” Yuck.

Why oh why did this woman continue to work at Phoenix, and why
oh why did Tommy have these creepy letters in his safety deposit box?

“
To be with you for the rest of my life is all I ask. Let me take care of you and be with you. Together we will be one.
”

I ask you, who writes like that? Even the romance novels I had been known to read once in a while did not have such lovesick dialogue in them. Did Tommy give her any encouragement? One wonders if she was getting encouragement because the letters kept coming.

The last letter sounded more like the first letter. Whining, insecure and pleading. “
I will never forget you. My love for you does not diminish, even though you won’t meet me, you won’t look at me. Can we ever be together?
”

Okay, I was thoroughly disgusted and totally unsympathetic. What type of woman (or man for that matter) would throw themselves so pathetically at another individual? And what type of woman couldn’t take a hint? It was clear that she wasn’t getting any encouragement but she kept at it.

Jay was still busily reading the file so I got up and wandered around the apartment. Something wasn’t right but I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. I stepped out on the balcony and lit a cigarette and leaned my elbows on the cement railing. I couldn’t marry-up the image of Natalie Scott and Tommy together, and I had been having trouble with the concept of the two of them ever since I first heard mention of it at the office. Tom Connaught was a strong man, physically and mentally.

Strong men like Tommy didn’t take the whining type of crap that Natalie Scott was dishing out in those letters. That’s why guys like Tommy were physically strong too - so they could run, as fast as possible, away from someone like Nat. On the one hand, Tommy wouldn’t give someone like that encouragement if he wasn’t interested in her, and she sure didn’t help herself by letter number five when she was pleading for some companionship. On the other hand, he would have put a stop to the letters after letter number two if he wasn’t interested in her. He would have made short-shrift of her. There’s no way he would have allowed that to go on for four or five months. I was more and more convinced that those letters weren’t addressed to Tommy even though everyone at the office thought they had been a couple.

Jay was at the computer in the hidey-hole behind the aquarium when I went back inside.

“What are you up to?” I asked him.

“I’m on-line trying to figure out the Food & Drug Administration. I’m not that familiar with American government organizations.”

“Well, if they’re anything like the Canadian government, they are one massive pile of bureaucracy. What have you found out?” I pulled a chair up and tried not to crowd him in the little space.

“The Center for Devices and Radiological Health is one of the branches of the Food and Drug Administration, which is part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. The head of this unit is a Director and the Director is a Medical Doctor. There are about six or seven departments which all report to the Director.” Jay was staring at the computer screen reading this information to me.

The letters in the file from the safety deposit box that I had seen were from the Director of this branch, Dr. Victoria Edwards.

“One of the departments reporting to Dr. Edwards is the Office of Device Evaluation. Hang on,” he said as he scrolled through pages on the internet. “Oh,” he finally said. “Now I get it. I think.” He turned to me.