Monahan 02 Artificial Intentions (20 page)

“The letters in that file all relate to an artificial kidney that a company called Global Devices is developing.” I nodded my head because I knew that.

Jay continued. “If I understand the process from quickly looking on the internet, this department of the government authorizes clinical trials to be conducted of unapproved medical devices and they evaluate the pre-market submissions from the medical device industry. There are various classes of devices that they evaluate and if I read the file right, the artificial kidney would be a class three device - those are the ones that have the most stringent regulatory requirements.”

I was quickly becoming confused, but that wasn’t anything new - whenever someone talked to me about government departments my mind wandered. I tried to keep up with Jay who amazingly had made his way through the myriad of pages on the internet and already had a basic understanding of this department.

“Class three devices are those that support or sustain life,” he read from the computer screen. He looked over his shoulder at me, “I would suppose that an artificial kidney would fall into that category, huh?” I nodded in agreement.

Jay started shutting down the computer. “What else was in that file?” I asked him. The file was more than an inch thick, and more than an inch of paper equals a couple hundred of pieces of paper.

“It’s basically the history of Global Device’s correspondence with the Office of Device Evaluation from when they first notified them of their work on the artificial kidney. The final letter in the file, the one on top, is from the head honcho herself, denying, for the final time, their applications. In other words, Global Devices had not proven to the Director and her staff that their device was safe and ready to be tried on humans.”

The date on the letter from Dr. Edwards was about three months prior. Ben Tucker at Phoenix had told me that our project was cancelled about two months ago.
And
he told me that it was cancelled due to a lack of research funds. Things were getting more confusing by the moment.

chapter twenty-eight

The next morning I got to the office well before the earliest arrivals and fired up the big Xerox machine down the hall from my office. The behemoth copy machine might have scared off lesser beings, but I was quite intimate with this model, having spent the better part of my last job in front of one. There was one time in my illustrious career as a legal secretary that I had stood in front of a copy machine for days, making copies of documents for the closing of a huge transaction involving over eighty different interested parties. Myself and a few articling students figured out that if we stacked the equivalent amount of paper passed around on that deal, the stack would be almost as tall as One First Canadian Place, a seventy-two storey skyscraper in downtown Toronto. The mechanical sound of the automatic document feeder on the copier haunted my sleep for weeks after that deal was done.

I made two copies of the correspondence file and two copies of the love letters. I planned on returning the originals to the safety deposit box later that day.

Next on my agenda and top of my mind was doing my civic duty. I called the detectives who were investigating Tommy’s death. Neither of them were available so I left a message with the clerk at the Precinct. I was certain that the contents of the safety deposit box were relevant to Tommy’s murder and I was also certain that the cops would want to know.

When Carrie arrived I asked her if she had a phone number for Dr. Jordan Francis at Global Devices.

“I do,” she told me. “Mr. Connaught and he talked on a daily basis for a long time, but I don’t think they’d been in touch for a while. I don’t remember him calling lately. Shall I get him on the line for you?”

“No, it’s okay. I can dial,” I told her. “Just write the number down.” She looked a little hurt and I remembered that a lot of executives had their secretaries place calls for them, announcing that they were on the line. “I’m not sure when I’m going to call him, so I just need to have the number.” She handed me a slip of paper with the number on it.

“Anything else?” she wanted to know.

“There is actually. Can you get me the most recent file on the Global Devices project.”

Carrie was busily writing this request down on the ubiquitous steno pad. She looked up at me.

“Which project? We have several contracts with them.”

“Oh. I hadn’t thought of that. The one where we were working with them on the artificial kidney. I think the project was cancelled a couple of months ago. Nat Scott was leading the team.”

Carrie stood up from her desk. “I’ll go right now and ask for the files.”

“Let’s not make a big deal about this. I really don’t want everyone and their dog knowing I’ve asked for the files. Okay?”

“No one will be the wiser,” she told me. “If the project is done, the files will be in the central storage area under lock and key, and I have access.” She opened a door to a closet behind her desk and pulled out a large, four wheeled cart, with a wire tray on the top and one underneath. “Be back in a little bit,” she said and headed down the hall.

Yikes! I was naive enough to think that “the file” would be a couple of folders. Carrie obviously knew better and I readied myself for some tough slogging through technical jargon and medical research data. Neither of which were my strong suit.

My stomach sank when Carrie arrived back with the cart full of file folders. The top and bottom trays of her cart were jammed with files, and several more were perched precariously on the top.

“Where do you want these?” she cheerily asked me.

“Why don’t you just leave the cart over there beside the meeting table, and I can spread out.”

“Is there anything I can help you with, Miss Monahan?” she offered.

“There is,” I told her. She eagerly stood in front of the desk and waited for my instructions. “You need to call me Kate. That’s a start.”

She nodded her head in agreement. “But, I won’t call you Kate in front of other people. Okay?”

“Okay,” I agreed with her. I knew that Carrie was trained as an executive secretary and stood on formalities. “Secondly, sit down for a minute.” I motioned to one of the chairs in front of my desk.

Carrie sat and smoothed her skirt. She was wearing another beautiful outfit and I was jealous as all get out that she looked so good. “Tell me about Mr. Connaught and Natalie Scott.”

“Tell you what?” she asked tentatively.

“Tell me what you knew about the two of them, their relationship. What they did together.” I was half-way convinced that Tommy and Natalie’s relationship was no more than a figment of someone’s imagination.

“Well, I never actually saw them together. And like I told you before, Mr. Connaught never came out and talked to me about the relationship. I only heard about it through the rumour mill. One of the secretaries who works with the project teams told me that Miss Scott actually told one of the team members that she was going out with Mr. Connaught. And then when the project ended, and she had her famous hissy fit, they broke up. Everyone knew that.”

I still wasn’t convinced but didn’t let on to Carrie.

“Great, thanks for the info. So, what’s on the plate for today?”

“You have no meetings booked, so far,” Carrie said.

“Well, let’s leave it like that, okay? Unless it’s urgent, I want to keep the day clear.” I looked over at the mass of files piled in the cart and felt more than a little sick at the thought of plowing through them.

The files were organized by subject matter and each subject matter had several files. The subject matters included RFP (request for proposal), Correspondence - General, Project Schedule, Client Sign-off, LED Research, FDA Approvals, PISTON Trials, etc., etc. Each of these file categories had several file folders of material and they were stuffed into what we in the legal field called bellows files. Heavy cardboard, expandable file containers. In all, there were probably close to one hundred file folders. I took a deep breath and plunged in, starting with the original request for proposal.

Global Devices had put out the RFP several years prior, and they had been looking for a technical partner to assist them in developing the interface between the implantable artificial kidney and the external energy source. The RFP had some details in the information section about how many artificial organs had failed because of high infection rates. Apparently, earlier artificial organs had to be physically connected to external energy sources and this was done through tubes connected to the device, through the patient’s skin and hooked up to the energy source. There was an incredibly high rate of infection for those patients, many of whom died because of this. Other manufacturers started covering these tubes with a type of polyester fiber which the patient’s skin would intertwine with, reducing the rate of infection and the germs that could get into the body.

Global Devices had come up with the bright idea of finding a company to help them develop an artificial kidney that could work with radio waves, specifically electro-magnetic waves. The external device would give power and computer commands to the internal device, without any physical hook up to the patient’s body. The RFP was being sent to companies that Global Devices thought could develop this external device. The artificial kidney was being built in-house at Global Devices.

About seventeen months after the original RFP was sent out, Phoenix Technologies was awarded the contract to partner with Global Devices. The total value of the contract was over $20 million and if the device was successful, Phoenix would be required to sign over all intellectual property rights and the source code to Global Devices. Phoenix would have no further rights to the device. Period. End of sentence.

So far, so good. I was understanding the basics of what I was reading. I spent the next four hours going through technical files, the contents of which were pretty much Greek to me. The only thing I understood was that it was four hours out of my life I would never get back.

My back was aching from sitting for so long and I was so hungry I swore I could eat the back end of a Buick. I grabbed my purse and headed out to find some food. The streets were teeming with tourists and I had no idea where to go to get some lunch. Every day I had spent at the office, Carrie had made sure my lunch was delivered. Today I felt like a kid out of school, so I wandered down East 46th towards U.N. Headquarters.

You could easily differentiate the tourists from the natives, because the New Yorkers were dressed for success, and all were carrying take out bags with their lunch. The men were wearing open necked dress shirts with no jackets, and the women looked summery in their sun dresses and lightweight suits. And apparently native New Yorkers did not sweat. Both women and men looked cool and collected whereas the tourists (yours truly included), were dripping from the humidity. I had thought Toronto summer days were brutal with humidity, but Toronto had nothing on Manhattan. The heat generated by thousands of taxis and buses, the asphalt on the roadways, the smelly, hot air coming out of the subway grates, the exhaust from the buildings and wall to wall people made it feel like a little bit of hell. Sweat was running freely down my back and chest.

I stopped to get some lunch at a sandwich shop that had a line up out the door. I marched out of the shop with my take-out lunch bag swinging, just like all the other business people in front of me.

Surprisingly there were several empty benches outside the U.N. Headquarters building so I claimed a spot and sat back to do some people watching. I smiled at the very large sculpture of a revolver with its barrel tied in a knot. Very clever. Nine busloads of tourists unloaded in front of the plaza in the time it took me to eat half my sandwich.

In spite of the throngs of people, I found it very peaceful and quiet, and my thoughts turned to Tommy and Phoenix Technologies. Was my life ever going to be as simple as it was last month? I knew that no matter what I turned up, if I kept digging to find out what happened to Tommy, it wouldn’t be pleasant. If the path I was going down didn’t give me any answers, I was stubborn enough that I’d find another path. Somehow, I would find the answers. At this point though, I was so confused with all the different details, I didn’t even know what questions needed asking. Except of course, the big one:
who killed Tom Connaught
?

chapter twenty-nine

I spent the rest of the afternoon reviewing the files and dealing with mundane issues that didn’t require any thinking on my part. My brain was in overload, and although I have never been nominated for membership in Mensa, I proud that I was keeping up with some pretty technical stuff.

For the first year the development staff at Phoenix had worked on the “guts” of the device, and early on in the development work, the team had baptized it the PISTON system. PISTON stood for
P
ercutaneous
I
ntelligence
S
ystem
T
ransfer
N
ephrology. Needless to say, I had to look up the definitions of percutaneous and nephrology. Percutaneous is a medical term for “through the skin” or “through unbroken skin” and nephrology is the branch of internal medicine dealing with kidneys. Which makes sense (of course) because this was a device to be used outside the body, not hooked up to anything inside the body, namely, the artificial kidney. I was not just another pretty face.

At 5:00 p.m. Carrie knocked on the door and came in to ask me if I needed anything else before she headed out. I had lost complete track of time and was surprised that it was the end of the business day.

“Wow.” I got up from my chair and stretched. “I can’t believe it’s the end of the day already. I still have to call Sara Williston at the bank to see if I can drop over and I haven’t called Dr. Francis.” While I was rummaging around my desk looking for their numbers, Carrie quietly picked up my phone, dialed, spoke a few words, hit the red hold button and held the receiver out to me.