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 amp;E thing. One in a million.
And to top it off, he was getting paid damn well for his time.
27
It was 10:24 A.M. on Wednesday, August 31, when Jim Allenby took the call. It was patched through directly from the Department of Homeland Security to his office in the J. Edgar Hoover FBI Building on Pennsylvania Avenue. It was not a pleasant call.
“We’ve got a real problem, Jim,” J. D. Rothery said tersely. “The virus has reappeared. And this time we’ve got more than one infected person.”
“How many and where?” Allenby asked, holding his pen over a small pad of paper on his desk.
“Miami. An entire family is sick. Mother, father, and two kids. Only one death so far, but we don’t think any of them are going to make it.”
