Monahan 02 Artificial Intentions (29 page)

He took a long sip of his drink and placed the glass in front of him. The silence between us was deafening, and I could feel the blood pounding in my ears. I was waiting for a tongue-lashing even though I had no idea what this was all about. The man just had that type of persona. His presence alone made you sit up and pay attention. I wasn’t sure if he was expecting me to say anything, so as hard as it was, I stayed silent.

After what seemed like an eternity, he said, “This envelope contains some disturbing material. I’m hoping that you’ll be able to explain some of it.” His tone was icy.

I kept my hands wrapped around my Diet Coke to keep them from grabbing the envelope and ripping it open. Dr. Pritchard had called this meeting which meant he got to say how things would unwind. I waited while he took a few deep breaths through his nose. Finally, he slid the envelope across the table towards me but I resisted touching it for the moment. I glanced at it quickly and saw that there was nothing written on the outside of the envelope.

“Why do you think I would know anything about the contents of the envelope?” I asked him in an even tone. I reserved snarky and bitchy for other folks who didn’t make me feel eight years old.

“Open it,” he demanded. “Open it and then we’ll talk. I’ll be back.” He marched off towards the back of the tavern to the men’s room, I presumed.

The envelope was a large one. Probably measuring fourteen by sixteen inches. I used one finger to slide it in front of me and I stared at it, willing it to disappear. Knowing it wasn’t going away, and knowing that Dr. Pritchard would be back soon, I flipped the envelope over and tore at the flap, opening it. Inside was another large, brown envelope, with a white label pasted in the middle, addressed to Dr. Jordan Francis on West 97th Street in New York. There was no return address on the front of the envelope but in the upper right hand corner there was about three dollars worth of U.S. postal stamps. I couldn’t read the date on the U.S. postal service stamp which was inked over top of the stamps. The envelope was cleanly slit open along the top. The materials inside the envelope were neatly ordered and clipped at the top with a black fold-back clip. A sense of relief and deja vu washed over me when I pulled out the papers and saw what they were.

chapter forty

When I removed the large, black clip holding the stack of papers together, two distinct packages of papers were revealed. The smaller of the two was a copy of the “love letters” written by Nat Scott and the thicker pile was the same correspondence with the FDA that was in the file folder I found in Tommy’s safety deposit box. My stomach stopped flipping with fright and I willed myself to calm down. These documents were no surprise to me, although why they were in an envelope addressed to Dr. Francis was a big question.

Dr. Pritchard slid back into the booth and took a quick sip of his drink. “You’ll remember what we talked about yesterday,” he said. I nodded. Of course I remembered. Dr. Pritchard had laid out for me the sequence of events that led to his team discovering that test results had been falsified. By Phoenix people. I was still disgusted at the thought and couldn’t imagine how Tommy would be feeling.

Dr. Pritchard had some funny business going on at his place as well, because apparently work continued on the artificial kidney project for some time after the date of the letter from the FDA denying the pre-market application. Someone at Global had hidden or covered up this wee bit of news. That someone was obviously Dr. Jordan Francis, the head of the project. And that someone had stolen away into the night about four weeks ago. Dr. Pritchard had told me that he came to work one morning and found Dr. Francis’ resignation letter on his desk. The resignation was totally out of the blue and Dr. Pritchard was shocked at the time. Until he uncovered what had been going on. It took him a couple of weeks, but he eventually found out that the reason the FDA had denied their applications was because of the falsification of test records. By Phoenix people. Global had immediately cancelled all work with Phoenix.

“Like many in my profession,” Dr. Pritchard had told me yesterday, “I’m litigation adverse. Global Devices could have sued Phoenix over this, but I thought the most efficient way to deal with it was to cancel everything with Phoenix and to try and recoup our losses with another company.”

“After you left last evening,” he told me, “I found myself in Jordan’s office. Nothing has really been touched since he left. He hasn’t returned any phone calls and his resignation letter said that he was moving and that he didn’t have a forwarding address.” He sipped from his drink. “What’s the word to describe all of this?” He looked at me, but I wasn’t sure if he was expecting an answer, so I kept quiet. “We were such good work friends. We’d been together for so many years. This whole thing was out of the blue and so unexpected.” He swirled the liquid in his glass and appeared lost in his thoughts.

“Surreal. That’s it. Is that the right word?” he asked. I nodded my head, still silent.

“This whole thing is surreal,” he continued. “Really, to think that Jordan could be involved with falsifying records. What happened to him?” Another question which I didn’t believe I was expected to answer.

Dr. Pritchard hung his head and slowly shook it back and forth.

I felt horrible for Dr. Pritchard. “Had you known Dr. Francis long?” I asked him.

He raised his head and looked at me. “Known him? We had worked together for the last twenty-seven years. We were surgeons together and then moved to Global Devices together.” He sighed. “I thought I
knew
him. But really, how much do we really understand and know each other? When something like this happens, all notion of your understanding of another human being goes out the window.”

Dr. Pritchard looked around the tavern, held up his empty glass when he caught the waitress’ eye and motioned for another one. He shook the ice around in the bottom of his glass and looked at me.

“You know, when I got Jordan’s resignation letter I thought it was some sort of joke. When I realized it wasn’t a joke, I was confused. But when I found out later on the reason for his resignation, it felt like I had been hammered in the stomach by a battering ram. I literally felt faint and like I had the wind knocked out of me.”

The waitress arrived and exchanged his empty glass for a full one. He grabbed it and drank half of it, fortifying himself.

“I’m over the shock now. Meeting with you last night gave me renewed strength to get to the bottom of this.” He put his glass down sharply on the table.

“I found this,” he pointed at the envelope, “in Jordan’s office last night. Taped to the underside of one of the drawers in his desk.”

“It’s not the first time I’ve seen these documents,” I told him. “The exact same letters were in Tom Connaught’s safety deposit box. Except, the love letters,” I mimed quotes in the air when I said love, “were the originals.” Dr. Pritchard looked a little surprised at this news.

“You’ve described this as surreal,” I went on. “And I agree. I’ve known Tom Connaught for years and when I first arrived in New York two weeks ago after he was killed, someone told me that he and this Natalie Scott were a couple. I could hardly believe it, based on the few times I met her. She wasn’t his type. When I found the letters in the safety deposit box it got me thinking that maybe they weren’t meant for Tom. There is no way that Tom Connaught would be in a relationship with the person who wrote those letters. They’re not addressed to anyone. Do you think they were meant for Dr. Francis?”

“Perhaps,” he said. “Jordan has been a bachelor all these years. Never married, never had a serious girlfriend. Nothing makes sense to me anymore. The tone of the letters don’t sound like the Miss Scott I’ve met and worked with. But you should know that I carefully went through all the letters to and from the FDA. I matched them to our files. And I’m almost certain some of the ones supposedly originating from Global Devices are forged. Those ones do not appear in our files.”

My stomach sank at this news.

“Along with falsifying data, apparently your people felt it was okay to forge signatures on our letterhead.” Dr. Pritchard’s voice was slightly raised and I was surprised. Up until now he had been the picture-perfect gentleman.

My insides started boiling and I felt myself getting angrier by the minute. I gathered the papers sitting in front me, re-clipped them together, slid them back into the envelope and held the package in my hands.

“Dr. Pritchard, I
will
get to the bottom of this,” I promised him. “Whatever is going on is affecting both of our companies.” I pushed the envelope across the table towards him and stood up. “Thanks for the Diet Coke.” I left him staring into the bottom of his glass.

Kelly Northland answered his cell phone before the first ring finished.

“Northland,” he answered.

“It’s Kate. Where are you?”

“At the office. What do you need?”

“I need to punch someone but that won’t solve my problems. Can we meet? In an hour or so? At my apartment?”

“On my way,” he said.

I told Lou to take me home. It had been a long fucking day and I was sure the evening wasn’t going to be much better.

Dinner was on the stove, the fish were fed and there was a stack of clean laundry sitting on the end of the bed. Life on the home-front was blissful. Too bad I couldn’t say it was the same at the office.

Jay was coming out of the shower as I was stripping off my office clothes, my gut wrenching control top pantyhose and cross your heart bra. Jesus, Mary and Joseph it was fucking uncomfortable being dressed for work. It felt almost sinful to put on an oversized pair of Jay’s sweat socks, my sweat pants, and an extra large T-shirt. In fact, I felt practically naked with hardly a piece of polyester or cotton touching my skin.

I stuck my head in the open door of the ensuite bathroom and watched Jay towel dry his hair.

“We’re having company,” I told him. “Did you make enough dinner for an extra person?”

He dropped his towel and grabbed me in a tight bear hug. “Hello Kathleen,” he said. “How was your day?” I slapped his bare ass and pushed him away, laughing. “I’ll tell you all about my day as soon as you get dressed.”

In the kitchen I checked our stock of beer in the fridge. Kelly Northland struck me as a beer drinker. There were several bottles of Canadian beer on the top shelf and I smiled, thinking about Americans drinking Canadian beer, and commenting that it tasted ‘thick’. I remembered the old joke: what do making love in a canoe and American beer have in common? They’re both fucking close to water.

Canadians can be a little snobbish about our beer - not that I ever drank the stuff.

chapter forty-one

Kelly was a good sport and having Jay around while we talked business didn’t faze him in the least. Of course, as I suspected, the Canadian beer helped. Kelly allowed himself one while we ate dinner at the breakfast bar in the kitchen. I had the feeling that he was a very controlled person, which you probably had to be if you had been a tight-ass Marine for twenty years.

After we finished eating, I got right down to business.

“Are your staff working on the background checks?” I asked him.

“Yeah,” he said. “They’re still at the office, doing a lot of phone work and digging deep. I’ll have a report for you first thing in the morning on anything we might have dug up.”

“Okay, I’ve got something I need you to do.”

Kelly whipped out a pen and a small pad of paper from the inside breast pocket of his sports jacket. Ready to take notes like a good Staff Sergeant. I put my hand over the pad and pushed it away. “No notes,” I told him. He clicked his pen shut and laid it neatly on the counter beside the pad.

“I want you to find Dr. Jordan Francis. He’s the doctor who was involved with the artificial kidney project at Global. I think I told you that he had resigned his position and no one has heard from him since. I met with Dr. Pritchard today and he showed me an envelope full of documents that he found taped to the underside of a drawer in Dr. Francis’ office.”

I looked at Jay who was standing on the other side of the breakfast bar loading dirty dishes into the dishwasher.

“Guess what was in the envelope?” I challenged Jay.

“Oh that’s an easy one,” Jay said. He reached over the counter to take away my dirty plate and Kelly’s. “The same thing that was in Tom Connaught’s safety deposit box.”

“Right you are Mr. Harmon. The envelope had copies of the letters from Nat Scott, which by the way I am no longer referring to as love letters. From now on they will be called stalker letters.” Jay smiled at me. “The envelope also had copies of the letters from the FDA, denying Global Devices the pre-market applications. Dr. Pritchard told me that he had compared that stack of letters to his files and several appear to be forged. They don’t exist in his files. So now we’re not only accused of falsifying test data, we’re forgers too.” I turned to Kelly. “Dr. Francis resigned over four weeks ago and no one has heard from him. His apartment is over on West 97th Street.” I gave him the address. “Although in his resignation letter he said he was moving. I think we need to do a little checking on him. Do you have someone who can find him?”

“Let me make a call.” He walked out of the kitchen into the living area.

“I think I might like him,” I told Jay. “Although I wasn’t too sure this morning when I met him. I had my dad check him out.”

“Oh yeah? And what did he have to say?” Jay asked.

“Kelly checks out. Apparently a good guy. My dad said his sources gave him the thumbs up. I’m more comfortable with him now. Though he strikes me as a bit of a tight-ass.”

Kelly picked that moment to walk back in the kitchen and I wondered if he’d overheard us. Before I could find out though, his cell phone started ringing. Kelly quickly grabbed it from where it was clipped on his belt. Kind of like a little gun. He flipped it open and answered it in one movement. “Northland.” He listened for a moment and turned and walked back out of the kitchen into the living area.